by Sarah Vowell
I got sucked in by The Godfather’s moral certainty, never quite recognizing that the other side of moral certainty is staying at home and keeping your mouth shut. Given the choice, I prefer chaos and confusion. Why live by those old-world rules? I was enamored of the movie’s family ethos without realizing that in order to make a life for myself, I needed to go off on my own. Why not tell people outside the family what you’re thinking? As I would later find out, it’s a living.
Vindictively American
Personally, I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away.
—RALPH ELLISON
MY FRIEND ESTHER BLAAUW AND I were watching the Acht Uur Journaal—Holland’s eight o’clock television news. Emphasis on “watching.” After three months at the University of Leiden, in April 1992, my Dutch vocabulary hadn’t progressed much past koffie, bier, and “My name is Sarah how are you,” words and phrases which didn’t get much broadcast journalism airplay. The screen flashed pictures of buildings on fire. The newscaster said, “Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Los Angeles Dutch Dutch.” I absentmindedly sighed, “Fires in southern California, what else is new?” But Esther turned her gaze from the TV set to stare at me. “What?” I asked, just as the newscaster said, “Dutch Dutch Dutch Rodney King.”
Esther explained that a jury in Los Angeles had acquitted the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King. That surprised me, having seen the video. “Now,” she said, “the whole city is on fire.” That did not surprise me, having seen the video. Four people were dead from the mayhem. I stared at the smoky pictures. But Esther watched me, glaring at my hands accusingly, as if I could throw a brick through a shop window ten thousand miles away. She told me, only half joking, “Of course you’re not going back there.”
“Back where?” I asked.
“America.” It sounded like a dirty word.
“I don’t live in America,” I said. “I live in Montana.” I smirked a little, thinking of my hometown, in which the police report tends to consist of cute items like somebody walking past The Paint Pot on Main Street called in to say they noticed through the window that a coffeemaker had been left on. Not exactly Florence and Normandie.
Still, Esther wouldn’t drop it. “Why would you ever want to go back there?” she scowled, waving at the TV, where a palm tree was in flames.
“Because it’s huge” was the only thing I could come up with.
I wished that I could describe the hugeness. That it wasn’t just a huge mess. I wanted to tell Esther about the Montana sky and how it’s so gigantic that Montana is called Big Sky Country and how I missed it so much I pretended that behind the constant Dutch ceiling of clouds there was a big range of mountains with snow way up top. I wanted to tell her that even though I liked being twenty minutes away from Amsterdam, I was the kind of person who will sit in a car for the thirteen-hour drive to Seattle—for Esther the equivalent of driving to Greece—just to see a band I like. I wanted to tell her that every time I meet her for some dinky thimbleful of coffee in the student union I daydream about big steaming diner cups and so many free refills you can’t help but talk real fast.
I wanted to tell her that looking at those riots on TV was digging a hole inside me and could she try and understand. But I ran out of there. I didn’t have the heart to try and explain why my lunatic home-land was going up in smoke to a resident of that sane little country whose craziest cultural brouhaha had been the great tulip mania of 1636. I jumped on my little bike and rode through the little town past a couple of little windmills. I went up to my little room and fell to pieces.
I finally fell asleep after listening to a Beach Boys song about twenty-nine times on my Walkman—“Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Wouldn’t it be nice if four people weren’t dead because four other people mauled their fellow citizen with billy clubs, over and over and over again? Wouldn’t it be nice if all those men and women weren’t running onto freeways and shooting guns in the air and shooting guns at each other and looting TV sets out of stores and being teargassed and terrorized and slain? Wouldn’t it be nice if that truck driver wasn’t lying in some hospital bed barely hanging on because a mob tore him out of his truck and attacked him en masse? Justice, wouldn’t that be nice? I guess I needed to hear towheaded California boys singing something so beautiful and so sappy as “Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true.” The song ends “Sleep tight my baby.” I kept rewinding that part.
Wasn’t that why I was in Holland anyway, to get some rest, to take a break from the chaos? It just so happened I decided to leave the country during the Gulf War, an action I didn’t understand then and don’t understand much better now called for by a president I did not vote for once and would not vote for again. Studying abroad required a lengthy application process. I remember the exchange program office organized a seminar on anti-American sentiment a few weeks after smart bombs were dropping into Iraq. We had to sit in a circle and they asked each one of us, “What would you do if you were abroad and some foreigners came up to you and expressed anti-American sentiment?”
“Agree with them,” I said.
I think I wrote on my exchange program application that I wanted to study in the Netherlands to do research on the paintings of Piet Mondrian, but I didn’t say why the paintings of Piet Mondrian appealed to me. Those paintings were clean little grids, immaculate white rectangles and perfect black lines brightened by cheerful, childlike squares of red, yellow, and blue. They symbolized a real kinder, gentler country—Holland—a place of universal health care, efficient public transportation, a well-educated citizenry, and merry villages crammed with bicycles and flowers and canals. I wanted out of the huge Jackson Pollock canvas that is the U.S.A., vast, murky, splotched, and slapped together by a drunk.
I got to do my Mondrian research all right, but when I showed up in Leiden I was told the art history courses I came to take “happened last semester.” Not speaking Dutch, in order to stay—and keep my financial aid—I had to sign up for some random classes in the languages I do speak, English and French. The low point was registering for a literature course called Vision on America During the ’80s. Great. Like I crossed the Atlantic to pay nineteen dollars for a Jay McInerney paperback. I came all this way to the land of bread-for-breakfast for the grand purpose of explaining to my classmates that this thing called Count Chocula in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is a chocolate-flavored cereal with a vampire theme. Luckily, I loved the teacher, Professor d’Haen, who glowed a little when recalling his student days in some—to him—romantic place like Ohio or Pennsylvania.
Just before the riots we’d read Don DeLillo’s White Noise from 1985, a book I had liked mainly because a character in it had a thing for Elvis. But the morning after I heard about Los Angeles, I dove into that book as a talisman of truth, rereading it in a single sitting, eerily noticing the claim that “we need catastrophe” and that “this is where California comes in.” I relived its “airborne toxic event,” its insistence that “all plots tend to move deathward,” its fixation on a thousand cheap American details—the supermarket shelves and the cars we drive and the food we eat in the cars we drive.
And I wept. I tossed all my Mondrian books on the floor and hugged that apocalyptic American novel to my chest and rocked back and forth, missing all of it, death and Elvis and California and catastrophe. I wanted Jackson Pollock. And I wanted to go home. I got on my bike and rode to McDonald’s and read the book again, smearing its pages with fries.
These Little Town Blues
People used to tell me that to be a success I should say I was from New York City.
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
AN ACQUAINTANCE OF MINE HAS convinced himself that American popular music ends with Frank Sinatra. To him, Sinatra is the apogee of adult cool, and all the pop stars après Frank are kid stuff—scraggly, talentless, unformed. I don’t agree, but I can see his point.
No one, not even Beck, ever looked that good in a suit.
Apart from Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra is the most towering musical figure this century, and this country, have produced. His complicated, love-him/hate-him persona and his twisting, turning road map of a voice are nearly as large as America itself. Which is why one Sinatra fan can decide he’s the end of an era and another can argue he’s where it all begins. And so in my bible, Frank Sinatra is not Revelation; he’s Genesis, where pop starts. Frank Sinatra is the first punk.
Punk is rhythm, style, poetry, comedy, defiance, and, above all, ambition. Punk is wounded. It’s what happened to Frank Sinatra’s voice after Ava Gardner broke his heart. Punk means moral indignation. It’s the way Frank Sinatra, tired of getting screwed by Capitol Records, told its president, “Fuck you, and fuck your building.” Punk means the self-determination required to start your own record company, Reprise, as in reprisal, so that you can do what you want. Punk means getting all worked up. It’s being able to make the shockingly simple line in “Angel Eyes” about how “the laugh’s on me” into the world’s most devastating portrait of sadness. Punk is female, which is why the bravest punks are either women or womanly men. Would there have been a Kurt Cobain wearing his ball gown on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball if there had been no Sinatra, who, Steve Erickson wrote, “made America accept the idea of a man singing like a woman without sounding like one”? Best of all, punk comes out of nowhere. Punk is a torch that’s passed around, a rumor that spreads from one nowhere to another that guts and perseverance mean more than anything else.
My American punk top ten in no particular order: Jerry Lee Lewis from Nowhere, Louisiana; Richard Hell from Nowhere, Kentucky; Bob Dylan from Nowhere, Minnesota; the Fastbacks, Nirvana, and Sleater-Kinney from Nowhere, Washington; Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank Sinatra from Nowhere, New Jersey. Perhaps it’s coincidence that forty percent of my list are Garden State flowers, but I don’t think so. Punk comes out of nowhere and where’s more no than there? This is the state Paterson native Ginsberg called “nowhere Zen New Jersey”; the place Freehold homeboy Springsteen referred to as a “dump”; the place South Jerseyan Smith described in her song “Piss Factory”; the place, it is said, that even Sinatra has called a “sewer.” Or, as my guidebook puts it, the state “has a superb interstate highway system for a reason.”
Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra’s hometown, doesn’t feel like a place. It feels like a symbol. To be in Hoboken is to experience in three-dimensional form America’s admiration of and alienation from New York. If you grow up in any other Nowhere, U.S.A., you might be aware that New Yorkers look down their noses at you, but at least out there in the dark fields of the republic you don’t have to stare straight up their nostrils every time you walk outside. Because the first thing you notice about Hoboken is Manhattan. If you look across the Hudson from downtown Hoboken, New York City’s sharp-toothed skyline bites you in the neck. To your immediate New Jersey right is a humble little old joint called the Clam Broth House. To your left is the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, and all the other big-shot towers of babble assembled in a united front of taunting: What are YOU looking at?
Facing Manhattan from Hoboken is reminiscent of one other American vantage point: the view from Alcatraz. As on the Rock, you stand and gaze across the water at a glittering city-on-a-hill and feel like trash, like they’re good and you’re not, like if you had any guts at all you’d risk death and swim across that river right now.
“I want to be a part of it,” proclaims Hoboken’s most famous son in the theme from New York New York. “Those little town blues are melting away,” he swaggers. It’s not Frank’s best song, but it’s a very old, very satisfying story. He made it there. He made it everywhere.
You would like to think that Hoboken, New Jersey, brags about Frank Sinatra at sickening length. You would like to imagine that every last site where the forming Frank spit his gum out would be marked with a plaque. You would like walking tours and history. You would like to stand before the nondescript brown row house at 841 Garden Street, where Frank lived between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, and read some sort of fanciful marker with a speculative text gushing, “This is the place where our beloved Frank Sinatra spent his late adolescence and young-adult years. And since this period is the incubator of desire, this is the stoop where the young man must have plotted his escape. Push the button to hear ‘Street of Dreams.’ “You want the drama of Graceland, but you don’t even get the tragedy of Tupelo. Just a normal, unmarked house with a baby stroller in the entry and recycling bins downstairs in a regular middle-class enclave.
From this oversight, you get the feeling that Hoboken is having a hard time celebrating itself—and having a harder time fitting its most famous son into its story. This has something to do with the fact that its most famous son left. “Frank turned his back on Hoboken,” third-generation Hobokenite Robin Shamburg tells me. And who could blame him? At his first big public homecoming, during the town’s Italian American Day in 1948, his former paisanos threw rocks at the stage. “They shat on him,” Shamburg continues. Still, some Hobokenites hardly mind that their prodigal son has largely avoided the town through the years. “There are certain diehard fans who gloss over that fact,” she says. “They idolize him.”
That idolatry is on display, albeit in understated Hoboken fashion, at Sinatra’s birthplace at 415 Monroe Street. The blocks leading up to it are meaner, shabby. You get there, and it’s not there. The building where the newborn Frankie belted his very first song of life burned down. In its place is a monument, the saddest possible brick arch, with wooden doors below it to block the view of an empty lot. No triumphal arch for this Jersey Justinian, no ornate relief carvings of his Oscar triumphs, his gold records, his pals or his gals. Just a plain stack of unadorned bricks. A comparatively snazzy blue-and-gold star marks the sidewalk in front of it. “Francis Albert Sinatra,” it reads. “The Voice, Born Here at 415 Monroe Street, December 12, 1915.” You’d step on it if you weren’t looking down.
Tell it to the town planners: All the birthplace site really needs to spiff up its ambience is a loudspeaker. Frank’s voice can make any old shack feel luxurious. Witness the scene at the architecturally modest Piccolo’s, a delightful all-Sinatra, all-the-time cheesesteak dive on Clinton Street, established in 1955. The joint blares a constant Sinatra sound track, inside and out. As I walk up to it for lunch one Friday, the first thing I hear from down the street is “Although I may not be the man some girls think of as handsome.” This line from “Someone to Watch Over Me” is completely ironic given Frank’s angel eyes, but the voice singing it is a slow, warm kiss.
It helps if you’re hungry more for myth than for food at Piccolo’s. The fare is midcentury American, greasy but handmade. The grill is manned by a bunch of good-humored guys in white hats chopping at cheesesteaks and cooking up french fries hot enough to burn your tongue. I slip into the back room. The walls are crammed with framed photos, most of which are of Sinatra. The highlight is a proud photograph from the November 6, 1986, issue of The Jersey Journal that shows the exterior of Piccolo’s plastered with a giant sign reading, “It’s All Right Mr. Sinatra, We Love You, That Book Lies!”, a reference to local disdain for Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography His Way.
To refute “that book” is the reason Hoboken’s Ed Shirak Jr. wrote Our Way: In Honor of Frank Sinatra, which you can pick up at Lepore’s Home Made Chocolates, the Garden Street candy store Shirak owns with partner Mario Lepore. Shirak writes that his fellow citizens “were incensed by ‘that book’ as if it had disgraced the town.” If Hoboken deplores hubbub—disdaining Kelley’s book while at the same time not exactly going out of its way to honor Sinatra either—Ed Shirak is a one-man band, embarking on his story (which lists some of Shirak’s Sinatra tourism dreams and schemes) after reading “the first forty-four pages of Kitty Kelley’s book” and vowing to “simply tell the truth.” The self-published Our Way
reads like a book-length fanzine, which is to say that the joy of it lies in the author’s personal account of Sinatra’s life as seen through the prism of fandom and hometown pride. Shirak twice ran for mayor of Hoboken and lost. How can you not vote for a guy who, when he worked in New York in his twenties, would tell people, “I’m from Hoboken, home of Frank Sinatra”?
Shirak’s narrative swerves from his family’s history in Hoboken to that of the Sinatras, from Shirak’s political campaigns to his desperate attempts to present Frank Sinatra with the tribute song he wrote with his friends. The song, “A Time That Was,” tells the story of Frank’s Hoboken youth. A tape comes free when you purchase Our Way at Lepore’s Home Made Chocolates.
A time that was? Was what? According to the saccharine lyrics, the past was simpler, full of flags, parades, and familial love. Once upon a time, an ambitious lad walked among them. The remarkable thing about “A Time That Was” isn’t so much the lyrics (“He walked the streets in a young boy’s dream, trying to make it on his own”) or the old-fashioned melody, which begs for string accompaniment. What’s striking is Shirak’s need for Sinatra to hear it. Shirak’s mantra is a phrase he overheard once: “Nobody gets to Sinatra, nobody.” There have been a few touching near misses, duly recorded in the book. Shirak and Lepore go to a Sinatra concert at the Sands in Atlantic City, serendipitously finding themselves in the restaurant where Frank is having his preshow meal. Of course, when Shirak approaches his idol, bodyguards whisk Sinatra away. The two Hobokenites still love the show, but it must hurt a little when their hometown hero closes with—what else?—“New York, New York.”