Townie Final Response

Andre Dubus III’s “Townie” chronicles a life defined by violence, it paints a picture of a boy who grew up alone and helpless in a world where violence was often the only answer people understood to all of their problems.  He grows up wanting to be violent, spends much of his life expressing himself through violence, and then spends the rest of the novel trying to overcome his own violent nature.  This overcoming of man’s own violent tendencies is central to both the novel and the film “the fighter”.    

Some of the earliest memories that Dubus recalls in “Townie” are conflict related.  The conflict between his father and mother had a profound impact on Andre.  The moment when his two parents finally end their marriage for good is only reflected on twice in the memoir, once when it happens and another time at the death of Andre’s beloved father.  The closeness in which he holds the end of his family and the end of his fathers life is indicative of powerful emotional distress indeed.  The tone of the memoir also abruptly changes after this initial conflict is introduced.  What was once a nostalgic look back at setting fires in the woods and building snow forts becomes a dark reflective piece on the nature of manhood.   Of course his urge to harm others is not solely a product of his parents estranged relationship, as his mother struggles to feed him, Andre is left to his own devices, and for the first several years after his parents separation he chooses to spend his days shut in his house with his two sisters.  He does this not because he is lazy but because his environment is so hostile,  he speaks of witnessing brutal beatings at school, as well as being threatened and beat himself by neighboring children.  In this environment and without a strong male figure in his life Dubus’s view of what a man should be becomes deeply skewed. He idolizes action movie heroes like Buford Pusser and Billy Jack, fictional men who carry out  swift black and white justice with fists and the odd 2x4. Thusly he sets about trying to conquer his own fears and become one of these action heroes, ultimately becoming one of those feared men he saw as a child.   

It is an interesting and upsetting reality that socioeconomic hardship often turn men to violence, along with Dubus, Mickey Ward of “The Fighter” is another example of a man turned to violence in the lower class mill towns of the Merrimack Valley. Although his early life is not touched upon in the film, it is implied through his nature and the nature of his family, that he too was exposed to violence growing up.  Ward remains calm and collected throughout his families multiple brawls, including the plate throwing scene and the scene in which his sisters attack his girlfriend, and as a result it seems obvious that he is no stranger to such violence especially amidst his family.  

Both express their violence in different ways.  Andre chooses to take out his aggression physically on those whom he sees as aggressors, bullies and oppressors.  The racist fraternity brothers in texas, the raucous air travelers at the airport and the man he saw beating a woman in broad daylight were all people who were abusing others weaker than them and for a time Dubus justifies these beatings.  In the fighter Ward also fights for the perceived good of others, in the scene where the audience to Ward’s love interest, Charlene.  When  she is seen being harassed by local bar stiffs Ward starts a brawl downing the men responsible.  However Ward’s violence comes more into play in the boxing ring, while Andre Dubus uses boxing as a way to pass time and stay in shape, Ward must be violent in order to make a living, and ultimately, to gain the approval of his family.

In both pieces the men ultimately seek to escape violence.  Over time Dubus realises that the beatings he justifies as “helping others” are more for himself than those he helps.  After the Airport incident he recalls being fascinated by action stars in his earlier childhood, all of the sudden he can relate to those men, and instead of feeling accomplished he feels upset, summing his feelings up perfectly,  

“That boy who Clay Whelan  had chased through the streets of the south end felt proud and vindicated and accomplished and brave. But the young man I was, the one who wrote daily and tried to capture the many conflicting layers of living a life, knew better.” (Dubus, 332)

He realises that all of his violence is just a manifestation of his younger selves emotions, his fear, the weakness, in his own words he feels “proud and vindicated and accomplished and brave”.  Yet even when he realizes the root of his violence he still struggles to avoid it.  He tries all different methods to escape the violence around him early on in his life, before he begins his violent streak, he turns to drugs, as an escape from the world around him.  Much like Andre, Mickey’s brother Dickey also turns to drugs as a means to escape unfavorable situations in Lowell.  However the negative side effects make drugs neither a safe nor favorable option, luckily enough for Andre he does not develop any addictions and rids himself of said false remedies, the same cannot be said for Dickey however.  Later on in life Andre turns to boxing, in the hopes that it will be an outlet for some of his rage, however he remains violent, eventually he abandons this pastime.  Ironically enough, in “The Fighter” Ward struggles with the violence of boxing , at one point locking himself in his house after a particularly bloody match, only coming out at the behest of his girlfriend.  In the end however Ward finds harmony in balancing the needs of his family/career with a love for his girlfriend and daughter.

Dubus’s relationship with violence often relates to his relationship with his father.  

Andre repeatedly struggles for a way to tell his father that he does not want to be violent.  

“You need to tell him how it was. He still thinks this was just a sport for you.  He’ll listen now. Tell him how it was... to tell him how my boyhood was was to tell him how it was not, and I did not want to hurt this man who’d been run over and crippled for stopping on the highway to help someone. I did not want to hurt this man in black sitting in his wheelchair.”(Dubus, 372)

He feels that telling this to his father would crush his father and destroy the relationship they had built up.  He even admitted at the presentation he gave us that not telling his father how he felt about him is one of his biggest regrets and one of the only things about his life that he would go back and change if he could.  

By the end of “Townie” however Dubus had basically conquered his violent streak, several things contributed to this. First off is his writing, his writing helped him in innumerable ways. In one way it gave him empathy, to write about so many different people from different backgrounds, he had to put himself in their shoes, “I was finding again and again in my daily writing that I had to become these other people, a practice that also seemed to put me more readily in another’s shoes even when I wasn’t writing.” he writes, by putting himself in others shoes he becomes less inclined to want to cause hurt to another.  His rage at the world was still however present, but his writing gave him solace once more,  “The hurt and rage that forever seemed to lie just beneath the surface of my skin was not gone but had been consistently directed to my notebooks Jabs had become single words, a combination had become sentences and rounds had become paragraphs.”  Dubus uses this memoir to describe how he uses his writing as a channel for all rage and drive towards physical aggression.  He was just as enthusiastic about writing during his presentation, he said that the writing of this very memoir proved to be very cathartic,  almost treating it as a final piece of closure.   

If you had to pick a moment in Townie where he turns his life around for good it would be the train scene. Andre encounters a group of drug dealers on a train packed with small school girls.  He feels it necessary to intervene in some way but he had an ominous premonition of his demise,  “I didn’t want to die, I was 31 years old. I was in love with my wife. We wanted all those things people want before they, too, are cut down. If I’d felt terror before this I was wrong.” (Dubus, 343) , for the first time in the story since he was a boy he was generally afraid for his own life.  Now that he had found someone else to love he had a reason to live.  Because of this fear and this love for his wife he did not fight back when the drug dealer threatened him, instead he solved the encounter by talking instead of fighting .  After this encounter he feels as though that bad part of himself has been taken away, “A part of me seemed to have died anyway, and what remained watched myself walk behind the dealer through both doors, through the outer and then inner, into the warm and quiet car of safe and sleeping girls”(358)

Here he truly abandons his old ways, in fact in his presentation he confirmed that since his last incident over 2 decades ago he has not been violent once.  

As a recap, both the lives of Andre Dubus in Townie and Mickey Ward in “The Fighter” were both violent men. Through no fault of their own, via family situation, economic situation and general exposure to said violence, they were shaped in to violent men.  After being exposed to said violence they developed measures to justify acting in such ways.  It is only after they learn about their own passions, their own love, their own reasons to live, that they learn to cope with their violent   

A Foodie Tour Around the Globe

You can tell a lot about a culture and it’s history by experiencing it’s food,  Lowell has a rich history of immigration and as such we have a rich culinary tradition.  Over the past few weeks I have been lucky enough to visit several culinary establishments within lowell who represent three different nations.

The first place I visited was Rancho Tipico, a Guatemalan joint.  The store is on the corner of Salem and Cabot street, a rough neighborhood. It’s patinad facade looked like  something out of Breaking Bad. Think “Pollos Hermanos” crossed with a small town deli and you have Rancho Tipico.  The inside of Tipico is chaos, locals crowd the tiny ordering area shouting over each other in spanish.  When I got in everyone sort of turned and looked at me funny before getting back to shouting.  As I scanned the menu I realized this was not your typical burrito and taco affair, this place wasn’t  Americanized, there was no orange cheese,  hard shell tacos, or “gringo” burgers to be found.  Quickly realising that I could turn this experience into a FYSH paper I decided to be as adventurous as possible and order things I had never tried before.  When it came my time to order I started only to realise that the cashier did not speak much english.  After an awkward few moments she fetched the manager, I got the oxtail soup “a local favorite” the manager told me.  Along with this I got an order of fried plantains and a pupusa.  I assumed the oxtail would be tough and gamey but instead it was tender and mostly beefy, the fried plantains were sweet, starchy and delicious. Finally was the pupusa which was soft, warm, cheesy, and a couple hundred more positive adjectives.  

I chose these items partly because I wanted to try new things and partly because I felt they represent Central American culture, a culture that is heavily represented in Lowell. For much of their history the people of central America have faced poverty. The expense of meat means that all of an animal must be used, fputting non choice cuts of meat such as tongue and tail into soups also stretches out food to feed more people.  Plantains also play a large part role in the Latin American diet, which makes sense because they are pretty delicious.  Finally my favorite part of my meal, the pupusa.  Pupusa’s are fresh baked corn  tortillas stuffed with cheese, beans and beef.  They are easy to make, filling, cheap, and can be eaten quickly, in other words the perfect food for workers who need some good tasting energy. The life of many hispanic immigrants is hard, working long hours for little pay, and the hardy pupusa provides them fuel in their quest for the American dream

(added side note: much to the shagrin of Rancho Tipico employees, pupusa is slang for vagina).  

The next stop on my culinary world tour brought me a few blocks down the street to Vietnam, or rather a Vietnamese sub shop and grocery.  The shop can be found in the most nondescript corner of an already nondescript stripmall. Above it’s door stands the sign that initially led me to it “Hong Cuc sandwich” naturally after seeing this I mentally switched the “O” and the “u” and then it was love at first sight.   The inside of the shop was culture shock, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t recognize a single item offered in the entire grocery section of the bodega. The snack section offered huge freeze dried and pressed frozen squid snacks,salted papaya and mango chips, and all manner of assorted fruits.  I made my way  through the candy section like an awestruck Augustus Gloop, there were colorful “my first jello shot” candy cup things, bags of neon sugary liquid, and every form of pokki under the sun.  The main draw of the shop however was the sandwiches, which contained various and assundry meats and vegetables, piled on to crispy baguette style bread.  I ordered “the combo” a complex mix of pad thai, head cheese, pickled carrots and onions and a mayo spread.  Despite the head cheeses general bizarre nature,  I found that the sandwich was suited to my western taste, the mix of onions and mayo gave me the impression that I was eating cheese on the sandwich.  Yet it left a strange aftertaste that I couldn’t quite pin, all in all I found the experience quite rewarding and tasty.

It turns out that subs such as this have there own name in vietnam, “Banh Mi”, the popular Sandwich tells the story of Vietnam’s colonial past.  By pairing together traditional Vietnamese ingredients such as pickled carrots, onions, and Pad Thai with french Baguettes and baking techniques we see the clash of two cultures, a mix of both old and new.  The other cultural tidbit I gleaned at Hong Cuc was the importance of such local markets,  the sense of community I got when I walked in.  It was obvious this place was cherished amongst the Vietnamese community, people were gossiping with the grocers and men were sitting watching a soap opera on an old tv, the area in front seemed to be a gathering place for locals.  It just goes to show that where ever good familiar food is made, people will flock.

My final destination on my food tour was Cambodia, to the upscale restaurant Tepthida Khmer.  Tepthida Khmer differed from my other stop because it was not a casual gathering space, visiting Tepthida felt more like visiting a temple than it did a restaurant.  The ambience

In closing, my local culinary tour showed me quite a bit about the different ethnicities of Lowell, their histories, and their traditions.  After exploring each of these places I feel like I am both wiser and more of a member in the Lowell community, and it didn’t hurt that I got to eat a bunch of good food either.  

The Spot

by John Scudder

In every suburban town there are spots, the secluded places where teenagers from all walks of life congregate.  Once you happen across one you know it instantly; leafy brush covered ground strewn with used condoms, cigarette butts, Coors light cans and all the other debris of adolescent exploration. Our spot was little more than a cement wall overlooking the Merrimack river, a place we would come to live out our adolescent fantasies; isolated from disproving adults and prying eyes. You have to know what you are looking for to get to the spot.  The entrance is across the street from Jeff Merrill’s house, the small break in the ferns and ivy looks more like a hunting path than a trail, a dense line of oak trees forms a tunnel leading into the woods. If you follow the trail about fifty feet into the woods you will reach a well worn fallen tree, past that the world drops off.  It’s a forty five foot drop to the rapids below. During the moonlit nights we spent there, we were wary to look over, fearful that some phantom push might send us careening into black tumults below.

Fifty years of graffiti lined the wall. It chronicled a rich varied history of sluts, dicks, and assholes.  Tagging the wall was something of a right of passage, for the bored youth of Methuen scrawling your name was almost a requisite for graduation.  You aren’t an accepted member of the senior class until you’re name is scrawled on the wall.  Pat Riordan and my names are up there, we had stolen a pair of climbing harnesses and some rope from the Methuen High School gym at the end of our freshmen year.  That summer was the last night things were good between Pat and I.  The next morning he left for a week long vacation, 2 weeks later at the start of the school year Jennifer Bertrand moved in and changed our lives.  

Pat and I have always done everything together, we’d been through all the six seasons of lost, the star wars prequels, and the separate yet equally nasty divorces of our parents together.  We’ve been called stuck up, freakish, gay, we never really cared though we knew everyone else were assholes, in all of the Merrimack valley there were only two real people, that is until Jen came. She found us at our lunch table on the third day of our Sophomore year. unceremoniously plopping herself down next to me at our almost empty table, she didn’t even ask if the seat was taken, of course it wasn’t and we weren’t about to tell her to get up.  She had long straight black hair that she let down below her shoulders,  she wasn’t wearing any makeup nor did she need to. She was wearing a maroon hoodie with a black “Cannibal Corpse” tshirt, and some skinny jeans. For a moment Pat and I sat dumbfounded, we had no precedent for such encounters.  This was the stuff of Emma Stone movies or porn, and yet it was happening before us.  By this point she looked visibly concerned, we had been staring mouths ajar for about five seconds, she broke the silence with a “hey”.  From that moment on Pat and my dynamic changed.

Jenny had moved to Methuen from Tewksbury with her mother.  She liked the Velvet Underground, zombie movies, swearing and doing nothing, it was like God himself had designed an Okcupid profile, tailor made to drive a socially awkward teenager wild. The only problem was Pat and I both had our sights set on her.  Hangouts with Jen were vicious competitions, but she only had so much attention to give. Pat and I were like her piglets, boisterously vying for a spot at their mothers teet.  Almost every night we would call up “Ice Man”(Jenny coined the name one night after noticing a startling resemblance to a character in “Crazy Taxi”) our dealer. “Ice man” was a twenty five year old Mcdonald's employee who drove around in his dad’s beat up Pontiac Fiero peddling 1 gram bags of low quality weed.  After coughing down a joint or two we would walk for miles.  From the gas station to the other gas station, to the other other gas station,  our walks may have seemed mundane but we made them special. We were not alone either, by night the town came alive.  The alien and dark roads were filled with raucous gangs of leathermen clad inebriates.  They would make their way through the town whooping and hollering paying little heed to us peons as they went who knows where.   When the spot wasn’t occupied we would be there, spending hours looking out over the water and the cars on 495.  As we chain smoked Marlboro blacks, we had two hour long bull sessions on whoever had irked us that day,  from Bill O'Reilly to whichever member of the football team we found to have been the most egregious asshole that day.  When we grew shrill from laughter Jen would pull out her ipod speaker.  She would look off at nothing in particular and gently rock to the “Talking Heads”.  During these times Pat and I would inch closer to her, fabricating our own sexual tension where none existed.  Eventually she would yawn and we would walk her home.   Leaving bitter and disappointed, Pat and I were silent on the walks back home.  

Finally one day things took a turn for the worst,  one night Pat brought a bottle of whiskey to the spot.  When I saw it sitting on the log between him and Jen I knew something was wrong.  Pat only drinks when his dad drinks.  Pat’s father was a monster when he drank, the kind of monster sons spend the first half of their adult lives trying to forget and the second half of their lives becoming.  When Pat drank he too was different. He would down full bottles of whiskey and it wouldn’t show, instead of stumbling and laughing he would spit poison at any unlucky soul who happened to cross him.  That night Jenny and I were on the chopping block. By the time I got there Jenny was almost in tears.  I sat down next to her and put my arm around her, she pushed me off and ran back into the woods with her face in her hands.  “What the fuck?” I said, “You” he said, his voice deep with malice, I stood there “What are you looking at puss boy? you gonna help your girlfriend?”  he rasped.  I continued staring him down, “pussy ass bitch” he muttered to himself before plopping down on the log.  He stared out towards the lights of Lowell and Lawrence.  Slowly I sat down next to him, taking the bottle.  He didn’t seem to notice or care until I chucked it with all my might far out into the Merrimack.  “The fuck!?” he yelled “that was thirty fucking dollars!” Of course he had nabbed it from his father's liquor cabinet, while his dad was passed out.  I didn’t say anything, I knew better than to talk to him when he was like this.  The air was thick with mosquitoes and a crescent moon rose over the hills of the valley, the bushes shook with the cold autumn breeze,  the valley was bleak, 495 desolate.  “I love her” he finally said, I looked quizzically at him. “Fuck you dude” he said, not directed at me, more as just a statement. “You always get what you want, why?” he paused “why can’t I just get something?” … “I mean it’s not like I don’t have enough shit to deal with, fuck this town, I wish I never fucking moved here”  He slammed his fists down on the log, shot up. and loped off into the woods kicking ineffectively at the ferns and underbrush as he moved.

I sat there for some time, only after 15 minutes passed did I realize where I was,  this was the first time I’d been alone at the spot.  I realized how filthy the ground was, and how cold it was, for the first time I felt afraid the woods felt vast and dense and the drop to the water below looked endless and terrifying.  

The next day at school neither Pat nor Jenny showed up to the lunch table.  The next day Jen was there but she didn’t say much, no matter how much I prodded she wouldn't tell me what he had said.  After a while she was back to herself, if not a little more reserved, Pat on the other hand didn’t show up to school for a month.  We didn’t see him until he was lead in by the truancy officer,  he wouldn’t acknowledge me or Jenny.  On the days after that he did come in he was always high or drunk or both.  Outside of school I saw him hanging out with the Lawrence kids, his "Facebook" filled up with cloudy pictures of him at Lowell house parties, eventually he dropped out.  

    One night during the summer before senior year at the spot we got drunk on a sickly sweet mixture of Rubinoff and Coconut Malibu Jen had made.  I had started to hit on her rather forwardly, “Hey what if we made out?” I asked, she gave me the quizzical stink eye,  “No seriously” I said, “We’re both like cool right? and I think like I like you”, I was sweating at this point and she obviously wasn’t taking me to seriously but I kept pushing.  “You’re drunk” she said, “nope you are” she laughed “you know you’re retarded sometimes” I laughed too, it felt good, laughing,  I hadn’t laughed in a while.  We shifted towards each other and she began to shiver, awkwardly I put my arm around her and she leaned her head into my chest.  My heart was beating fast.  I noticed an awkward bulge in my shorts, shifting hoping she wouldn't notice but she giggled, I laughed again, harder this time. Suddenly the world began spinning and within seconds  was rising up from inside of me, after a few wretched gagging noises it was all over my pants.  Jenny didn’t look surprised or disgusted, just sort of annoyed, I whispered my apologies but she just said, “alright partner time to get up”.  She helped me up and led me out of the woods down the few blocks to my house.  With the patience of an elementary school remedial math teacher, she helped me fumble through my keys to open the door. Luckily my dad wasn’t home, not that it mattered, he had stopped caring a while ago,  but he always gets curious whenever girls are even mentioned in our household.  She helped me take off my vomit soaked pants and laid me into my bed, after propping me up on my side and giving me a bucket she put her hand on my forehead like my mom used to do when I was sick.  She rubbed my bangs with her index finger and I moaned something along the lines of “mommy” before passing out.   

    The next morning I awoke to a suitable roar of a hangover and a shitty taste in my mouth.  Predictably Jenny was gone, I couldn’t expect her to stick around and babysit me all night.  I found my phone next to my puke stained shorts and texted her “bout last night…”.  I sat around the house all day doing nothing in particular but anxiously awaiting a text or phone call.  Finally at eleven o’clock just before I was about to give up and go to bed she texted me,  “the spot? ;)...”.  My heart just about leaped out of my chest. I grabbed a condom from the box my uncle had bought me for my 17th birthday and practically skipped out the door.  I jogged the two blocks to Jeff Merrills house before turning onto the path.  The pitch black path was alive and bright with masculine excitement, imagine my surprise when it was Patrick Riordan sitting on the log.  He wasn’t smoking nor did I see any empty booze bottles, “Hello” he said, “where’s Jenny?” I asked him I sounded confused and scared.  It was then I noticed his hands were shaking, I yelled now “WHERE’S JENNY!?”  He was rocking back and forth now, tightly running his boney hands through his streaky blond hair.  It was then I saw her, at his feet obscured by the log was the crumpled figure of the girl I had fallen in love with.  It’s not  true what they say about dead people, that they look like they are sleeping,  her corpse was grotesque,  a four inch deep gash running from her forehead through her eye and down onto her shattered jaw.  A pool of blood had collected the leaves on the ground, and her lace camisole was soaked in crimson streaks of blood.  I felt the bile once again surge up from inside of me.  Both Patrick and I were crying now, he kept saying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” in a disgusting raspy voice and I was on all fours.  Finally after what seemed like an eternity I lunged at him, knocking him off the log and inches away from the ledge.  We rolled in the leaves and the blood.  I kneed him, bit him, pummeled him in his kidneys over and over,  he moaned as I lay into him time and time again. Finally he wretched a thick concoction of blood and bile into my eye,  with a gasp I rolled off of him and lay on my back to catch my breath.  When I turned over to look at him he was on his side with a crazed grin on his face, with a push of his legs he rolled himself over the wall.  I don’t remember if I heard the splash, or checking down to see if he was still alive down there.  Of course for the first few days I was the number one suspect.  It wasn’t until Patricks fingerprints were found all over the rock he had used to bludgeon her that I was acquitted of murdering Jenny. As for Patricks death I got off on a cocktail of insanity and self defence, at least the insanity part was true, that night had taken away any sanity I had left. It had ripped me from my stable reality and thrown me into a world of questions that had no logical answers.  In truth there was no reason why Patrick Riordan had done what he did,  no cause for destroying that place which had harboured most of our youth.  Perhaps it was just been loneliness and boredom that did us in, left to our own devices we had proven that we were no better than animals.  

Brief Response:

For this story I decided to go with Fionna Maazel “Interpreters of Men Get it On”,  I felt it was in the pieces best interest if I shyed away from an all out orgy and instead focused on shocking readers through other human emotions and fluids.  Throughout her short story Maazel  includes the idea of boredom, by setting my story in the sleepy suburb of Lowell that is Methuen.  I also felt that for the story to include both the sexual tension and the violence I needed to shock the reader as Maazel did I would need to make the characters believable,  this would make the murder at the end even more of a shock and surprise.  The narrator in “Interpreters of Men get it On” also lends much of their own tone to the narration, so I wanted the somewhat snarky protagonists attitude to shine through.  The location of the piece and focus of this assignment was “the spot”,  to the best of my knowledge I don’t think there is quite a spot like the one I described.  

The reason I picked Methuen is that I have driven through it,  it always seems like a snapshot  of bored youth in small town America. The wandering teens seemed like they were totally free in fact strangely I saw very few grown adults on my journey through the town.  I tried to make “the spot” and surrounding areas to be something of a teenage wasteland,  It may be unrealistic to have had so many late night occurrences on school nights,  but I felt it added some style to the story.  Confusion is another common thread in “Interpreters of Men Get it On”,  confusion is created not so much by the graphic descriptions, but by the spontaneous nature of events.  I tried to capture that, the senseless nature of the killing and subsequent events gave extra weight to the scene before hand and the location itself.  Another interesting aspect pf Maazel’s essay I tried to mimic was the inclusion of foreshadowing,  in the first half of her story she included off putting and strange sexual references,  these only gained meaning after you have read the story,  I tried to incorporate foreshadowing by mentioning “phantom pushes” and the drop of the wall.

    Having been to several varied cultural excursions I have chosen what I have found to be the most interesting.  The trip to the Boott cotton museum, The Kerouac pub crawl, and a concert at a local art gallery.  

    I will start my response journey at the Boott cotton museum, by far the most tame of my excursions into Lowell.  I have always loved museums, especially ones devoted to a single topic,  in focussing on a small piece of history niche museums are able to suck museum goers into that point in time much better than large art and history museums whose collections span centuries.  We started our museum tour with the mill room,  a simulated mill room with period accurate looms chugging out spools of cotton textile.  I could barely hear myself think as I walked down the isles of antique machinery. The deafening roar produced by just a few active machines was enough to make me physically uncomfortable, imagining what it must have been like to work in worse conditions for hours really gave the building a sense of pain and drudgery that still lingers.  On an interesting side note I enjoyed the miniature loom they had for guests to use, the confusion I had at the operation of the mechanical looms was alleviated when I got a hands on look at the machinery, and I felt in touch with my engineering ancestors.  

When on the cotton museum tour we were told we would be in character as laborers I was truly excited.  I have always loved when someone get’s to play a role, be it drill sergeant at an exercise camp, or civil war reenactors.  They represent an opportunity to forcefully pull others into your land of pretend and make them extremely uncomfortable in the process.  So I played along with our tour guide/factory foremans little game, conjuring up a bit of Cool Hand Luke, I proceeded to act as civilly disobedient as I could.  Writing rebellious unionist messages on the paper napkins we produced.  Sadly my line mates weren’t as immersed as I and just wanted the monotony to end,  happy with the measly one Boott buck they had earned from their struggles they punched out and continued with their  lives.  Still riding my Molly Maguire high I proceeded to the worker housing.  The lack of interactivity here upset me, but the fact that a good 30 of us were confined into such a small space did a good job immersing me in the cramped living spaces the working girls endured.  The voice section gave the room a personal albeit disembodied and ghostly, touch.  By the end of the latter half of the tour I had become restless and claustrophobic.  I passed the shrine that was Kerouac’s typewriter without so much as a passing glance nor did I closely examine the wall of nations.  

For that trip at least my attention had been dissipated.  

    Moving on from Lowell’s mill town era to the 40’s and 50’s the next stop on my tripple excursion outing was the Kerouac pub tour.  I went into it sceptically, a pub tour without alcohol, the mere thought  brought me back to dreary family vacations and school dances.  Once I got there however I realised I didn’t need alcohol to enjoy myself, first off there was no ever present warning about the dangers of the devils drink,  no parents to protect me from the drunk and the drinking.  

    The real experience of the pub crawl wasn’t so much the pubs as it was the people.  They ranged in age and level of disheveledness but all were some form of retired bohemian.  

Everyone had a story to tell of how they had gotten caught hopping trains, or how they woke up naked on a park bench.  Needless to say, as far as drinking company goes these were the guys you wanted to be with.   There was the alcoholic divorcee whose floppy hair hungover his sweaty face making him look like the living embodiment of alcoholism,  I spent some time listening to his life story before I realised he was just describing Carla from “Cheers”.  Next was a man, who from head to toe every article of clothing was denim.   Eerily enough he was the spitting image of David Carradine and I have no doubt if he were still alive David and the denim clad man would have similar stories to tell.  The denim clad man whom I will refer to as David (as that is quite a bit easier than saying “denim clad man”)  was one of two makeshift tour guides. The other tour guide looked and spoke like Jimbo from Southpark.  If you were to encounter him on anything other than the Kerouac pub tour you would see a proud republican with a subscription to both the NRA and John Deere newsletters, on the tour however he shared his rich travelling history, of bus stop girls, and a host of experimental hallucinogens in various cities.  There was an old lady who carried herself like a nun, between pints she would press us sober youngsters for spare change to fund next years pub crawl.  Also among the group was a professor reliving his glory days, a vacationing family complete with completely disinterested teenage daughter,  and a host of other inebriated oddities.
    We ended up going to several bars.  The first was a dive called “The Old Worthen” which looked like most dive bars, with various sentimental scraps of paper tacked to the wall and ornate seating packing the floors.  Other than our motley crew the bar was packed with hipsters and dreary locals angrily eying their hip young millennial counterparts.  Here we got to see the Kerouac tour turn from average adults, to over enthusiastic teeter totters.

Following that we went to an upscale Italian bar called “Ricardo’s Cafe Trattoria”  where Kerouac doubtlessly took the girls he had just met, or discussed his next rushed out book with publishers.  The white walls were marked with Tuscan arches,  the ornately tiled ceiling was chalked full of overactive black ceiling fans.  It was the kind of place your grandparents go, where vest clad old men serve G&T’s to aging couples.  David and Jimbo knew the keepers and shared stories as the party became more incoherent they left after only a few minutes.  

On the way to “Ward Eight” a pub, we entered an art gallery, we watched our company shamble through various local artists works as they impatiently pined for the next bar.  

Ward Eight was a new age pub built on top of an older bar, trendy records lined the wall and the menu was stocked with craft microbrews.  Nothing here really stood out, the tour had mellowed out by this point and I had heard their stories.

I left the last bar “Cappy’s Copper Kettle” early,  It was like any other dive bar it’s only claim to fame being that Kerouac had drank himself to death there.  The tour was almost asleep by that time so I beat a hasty retreat back to reality.  If I was to derive a lesson for this it would be,  “Drinking with old people is weird”.

My final excursion I didn’t really end up planning,  one friday night my roommate asked me if I wanted to go to a hardcore concert in downtown Lowell.  Never having been to one I decided to carpe nocte and seized the night.  The show was at the unchARTed art gallery,  a small loft on Merrimack, the walls were lined with moody pictures of the boxing club across the street.  The crowd at the show was a mix of rugged punks with their 40’s of Colt 45 and beanie festooned hipsters with their 40’s of PBR.  The headliners were the Fake Boy’s a local band of 4, if asked to describe their sound I would liken it to sex in the back of a greyhound bus,  loud enough to make the neighbors uncomfortable, rough enough to hurt in the morning, and almost certainly drug fueled.  The crowd ate it up, my room mate even started a mini mosh pit.  I found the whole show interesting not only because I’d never seen a hardcore show but also because it felt like I was a part of Lowell,  I was dancing with the people of Lowell, to music from Lowell, surrounded by art from Lowell.  

After I had been through these three experiences I struggled to connect them,  then I realised that my three adventures all featured some kind of counter culture,  weather it was my unionist adventure in the Boott cotton museum, walking in the footsteps of Kerouac or jamming out to the Lowell punk scene,  I had been living like a revolutionary.  

A Stroll Down Merrimack Street
John Scudder

    I’ve now spent a month here in the mill city for over a month, and experienced a small amount of what the city has to offer.  When we were assigned this essay I scrambled for streets,  I thought of Kerouac’s birth street, downtown Lowell, Pawtucket street but these all felt uninspired.  Then I remembered the vibrant and interesting pathway that is the 5 or 6 blocks of Merrimack Street stretching from university crossing to Cabot street.  I’ve walked down that street numerous times getting to downtown Lowell and the many bizarre and interesting encounters I’d had there.  So I loaded up Google and did some research about the area.   

    This section of Merrimack street lies on the edge of the neighborhood known as the Acre.  The Acre started off as  a small acre sized plot of land set aside by the canal company.  The traditionally poor irish initially settled in this area as it was close to the mills and near the newly built Saint Patricks church.   After the great depression the government started building cheap housing to help house those whose lives had been uprooted by the financial panic, those are now the dilapidated wooden townhouses that pack the U crossing side of Merrimack street.  Since then the Acre has welcomed people from all over the world,  becoming one of the most diverse areas in the city, housing sizeable Latin, Asian, Irish, and Greek populations.  

    As you walk down this section of Merrimack street towards downtown you may not notice a large yellow house on your right.  This is the local House of Hope inc. a homeless shelter that caters to families.  As you continue down on your left you will find another charitable organization,  the Old Colony YMCA.  Focusing on helping young men who face disciplinary trouble and homelessness the Old Colony provides vocational and athletic programs to help reintegrate young men back into society.  A little past this is the old St. Jean Baptiste church.  Finished in 1896 the church served the large french immigrant population of Lowell up until it’s closing in 1993.  It now stands as rental space for new apartments, a

statue of Father Andre Marie Garin, an influential clergyman, still stands out in front of the abandoned building.  A little on down is a commercial center,  it houses a Salvadoran market, greek pizza kitchen, Vietnamese restaurant, Irish pub, and a thrift shop.  This commercial diversity represents  only a small body of different ethnicity's that make up the acre.  Next to the small commercial center stands a three story brick building with a large tower that is now the “Coalition for a Better Acre” . After looking in to the Franco American society I found that those interesting buildings used to be the St. Josephs school for boys.  The school opened was opened in 1907 by the Marist brotherhood in conjunction with the aforementioned Fr. Andre Marie Garin.  It taught small classes of high school boys a mixing of Quebec and New York curriculum, up until it closed in 2003. The school as well as the church played important roles in the Franco American community  acting as meeting places, and as hope for poor young men hoping to get out into the world and make money.   

    I started my walk up by U crossing.  I always listen to Superstition by Stevie Wonder when I’m out and about. Why walk when driving a tiger print el Camino is just a Spotify playlist away?  None the less to truly experience the street I had to step out of my weird comfort zone, the headphones went in my pockets and Mr. Wonder got a break from making things fly.  I passed a stern old women who stood in her front yard staring at a malnourished black chihuahua.  The only reason I note this is the soul crushingly bleak look she gave the dog. It was the look a young child gives an invading soldier, of awe and unbridled disdain.  This encounter unsettled me, it was surreal and I hoped it wouldn’t foreshadow the rest of my walk.  

The next stop on my magical mystery tour down Merrimack was the House of Hope homeless shelter.  I had never been to a homeless shelter before,  privileged me expected crazy old men wearing coats made out of soup labels, what I got was children and mothers playing on a well manicured lawn in yellow “ House of Hope” t shirts.  An upcoming event, marathon for hope was advertised around the premises,  I avoided photography because people don’t like when you candidly film children.  After my uplifting visit to the homeless shelter I came to St Joseph’s school for boy’s half of it was for lease. TMI properties signs popped up all over my walk through the acre,  on former landmarks and old businesses that were no longer profitable, recycling the cities history. 

The next stop was the church,  a large stone cathedral, it’s french origins clearly visible.  It took the two tower design of Notre Dame cathedral only far less large and ornate.  

A TMI banner hung over the Saint Jean Baptiste parish sign.  To the left was a 7 foot tall rusted green statue of Father Andre Marie Garin,  and a message about how helpful a gent he was in making Lowell a great sparkly place for everyone, moss and ivy grew across the placard and I could tell that in a few years he would be completely obscured. 

    I continued on down the road passing a park that was in the process of growing grass.  On my way to the commercial area I passed several interesting characters, two disheveled men doing circles on motorized scooters around a third who calmly sat smoking a joint.  

    I passed rows of dilapidated town houses,  some of the more rotting condemned buildings had open doors, with graffiti scrawled over the interior walls and boarded up windows.  Others more seemed to have an unholy stench wafted out from within with the sounds of breaking glass echoing from within.  Amidst the shambles of some houses others still were filled with life, the sound of a trumpet practice blared out a second story window, and people sat on porches calling out to familiar passersby.  In the alleys groups of men stood in circles laughing while their wives and mothers yelled down from the windows above, it was all very happy until they saw me snapping pictures and they gave me dirty looks so I stopped and loped off.  

    Finally I got to the commercial area,  I went to the salvadoran store, Hei Elvis records is an interesting place to say the least the front is a tiny package store with cigarettes and cigars behind the counter, a snack shelf and a freezer full of unfamiliar Hispanic sodas.   The back however was lined with foreign and local records, also known as FYSH gold. After culturally enriching myself with the headphones provided I went up to the counter got a bottle of “Jaritos” a Mexican orange soda that looks sort of like liquid that might collect at the bottom of the Large hadron collier.  I go up to the counter and ask for a pack of red’s, it is then I notice that the man at the counter doesn’t speak a bit of English.  For about 5 minutes before I say something along the lines of “please I can smoke red now” he understood this laughed and gave me my cancer sticks.  The soda tasted like someone had put skittles in a centrifuge and separated their essence into a drinkable carbonated liquid, I am now incapable of drinking regular old American orange soda. As I left the store I passed a man and what I can only guess was his significant other loudly arguing as they left Charlies pub.  The two alternated between coming to blows and locking lips as they stumbled away from me.   

    I feel this short walk through the acre is at least in part representative of the experience of the neighborhood and Lowell in general.  Sure there is the occasional ugly spec, but there is also a beautiful melting pot of cultures and people, built atop over a century of rich and vibrant history.