The finding way

My parents went bananas at Christmas, but it was something of a drought the rest of the year.  So we convinced Gary’s mom to spring for the rubber raft at Caldor, our local rendition of your Wal-Mart.

Mastic 1916

I’ve always had some sort of a fetish for maps.  When I was a kid, the fold out map of our three towns; Mastic, Mastic Beach, and Shirley, that came in the yearly yellow pages was as good as the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue.  As long back as I can remember I would pour myself into this chart and plot out the most remote places I might be able to make on my bike. I wanted to find the places that weren’t like the pseudo suburbia that I was growing up in.  We lived a stones throw from the Atlantic and I was convinced that all of our geography couldn’t be littered with rotting bungalows, shoddily converted into full time residences, planted with rusting cars and slowly composting trash. There were places on that map where the roads ended.  I found those ends after all the copies of New York Newsday were thrown from the milk crate that was tied to the handlebars of my sister’s hand me down ten speed.  You know, the girls pink “Huffy” that every soon to be cheerleader had in the 80’s, the kind with the center bar at an angle rather than the “ball buster” straight bar, the bike that made the kid living on President Ave cackle at me from his new Mongoose BMX.  I heard a few years back that he had contracted some horrible illness, terminal if my memory’s right, but as you know my memory isn’t what my wife’s is.  The shit that comes around goes around, but it might be a harsher sentence then that fucker deserved.

Gary was often my wingman on these excursions, which was great because he had no qualms about me being the leader.  What’s funny though is that he was far more fearless than I ever was. He grew up with younger twin brothers that had mastered the double teamed fishhook and were working on a two-man pile driver.  His house was a constant steel cage match.  I might have been stronger or tougher than him, but he was the crazy reckless one.  I was the boss and he was kind of my “Paulie Walnuts”; and we were both fine with this. 

As we got further off the beaten path we would arm ourselves with our bb guns in case we drew any heat.  I remember the first time we rode to the end of Jefferson drive, a place that I would know later as “Jefferson”, where all the high school kids would hang at night, light bon fires, drink themselves silly and fuck around.  I remember hearing my mom one night on one of her Irish lunatic tears, when she found my older sister had not been sleeping at Rita’s house after all, but instead had been dragged out of that high school basketball star’s car at “Jefferson” by my dad.  Jefferson was the perfect spot for a daytime attack, and nighttime bacchanalias.  The road dead-ended at the bay, and rarely would you see another person while the sun was high, and if it had set, you quickly knew weather or not you could be there. 

The pavement, potholed and crumbling, literally disappeared into the Great South Bay.  As little kids, we’d drop our fishing lines here and come back with a five gallon bucket of red snapper that my folks would make me give to our Italian neighbor, because even though they lived their whole lives on an island, they didn’t know what the fuck to do with an actual fish.

“Jefferson” had (what seemed like) miles of trails and creeks weaving through the cattails littered with rusting cars and shit that made for great BB gun target practice.  You were in luck if you found one that still had a window intact that you could blast with your red rider.  Though our final storming of Jefferson taught us a lesson that was better learned as punk kids with BB guns, rather than the more mature alternative.  We had grown tired of the rusty targets and had the bright idea of aiming for a swan swimming up creek.  We thought it was awesome when the first shot hit and the swan jumped and flapped the hell out of its wings, splashing like a fucking fish on the dock.  We were scared and excited by our guts and out of our guts.  However, as we continued to hunt the bird, what we had gotten ourselves into was slowly becoming apparent. Sailing up stream a once shimmery pure white non-confrontational water foul, was now a speckle of red and white like a bad Pollack painting or the splatter from a gunshot exit wound on the white shag carpet.  Overtaken with nausea, guilt and fear we realized that we had to kill this bird.  We cried our eyes out as we unloaded on it with all we had and never spoke of it again.  Our Later missions were more Lewis and Clarke and less United States Marine Corps in nature.  Although I did heard that later on in High School Gary ran with a crew that would drive around town hanging out their car windows LA style, blowing out the windows of parked cars with my old BB gun boosting radios. 

We dragged the raft to the end of Gary’s road, through the woods and dropped it in the Forge River, a tributary of the Great South Bay that separated us from the Atlantic and ultimately Europe and the rest of the world.  I wanted to go that direction, but we weren’t sure that our makeshift vessel was up for it, so instead we paddled up river.  According to my telephone book map, Poosepatuck Creek trickled into the Forge river not too far from our point of departure, so we made our way for it and eventually found ourselves on the shores of the Poosepatuck Indian Reservation; only a few miles from the house I’d grown up in, but a place I’d never known existed.  Back in the 70’s, my town, which had once been a beachside summer escape from the boroughs, was invaded by Guido’s permanently fleeing Brooklyn and Queens, wearing thick gold chain necklaces with Italian peppers rather than feather headdresses. Who knew Sitting Bull had a summer place here too?

Long Island had been home to 13 Indian tribes, clearly not as infamous as the Sioux or Cherokee out west, but never the less there were Indians all over the damn place back in the day.  (I know, I’m supposed to refer to these guys as Native Americans, and I do, however we’re in the 80’s now when they were still Indians.) 

If ever you heard reference to our local Indians, you heard them called the Poosepatuck Indians, followed by countless jibes about none of them really being Native American at all. Gary’s dad who was a transplant from the proud southern state of Arkansas would refer to the reservation as if it was our very own little South Bronx.  The history of the tribe is blurry, and the little information I could turn up with my recent Google searches is at times contradictory; depending on weather you were hearing the voice of a descendent, Mayor Bloomberg, or some other historian.  What seems to be agreed on is that they were really the Unkechaug tribe, who after selling off their land to William Tangier Smith, the namesake of my elementary school, were deeded 175 acres along the Forge River and thus was born the Poosepatuck Indian Reservation.  I’m not sure who was craftier, Chief Tobaccus or Tangier, but the Unkechaug managed to sell Tangier the same piece of land between the Forge River and the Carmens River twice, first for a few rifles and supplies and then for some short sum of money.  We talk now of how we took the land from the Native Americans and killed their culture and so on and so fourth, but this was a legit sale recorded in the Brookhaven Town office of deeds; Right?  Although I’m sure Tangier, Floyd, and later Bill Dana slept well knowing that they purchased their land, which afforded Dana no qualms about suing the Unkechaug in ‘35 in order to secure a bit more.  I Imagine it never crossed their minds that the Natives may not have even understood the concept of selling the dirt that they were born to and inhabited, It’s doubtful they even realized that it was theirs to sell.  I can imagine Tobaccus hanging in the wigwam with his boys and their peace pipes laughing their ass’s off about the dumb ass white dude who gave them a bunch of guns and stuff for land.  The deed to the 175-acre Poosepatuck reservation that Tangier so generously gave the Unkechaug’s as part of the second sale stated that it was to be “reserved forever, not to be sold or leased to anyone”.  The reservation today consists of 52 acres.

Chief Harry Wallace

Ironically, nowadays old Chief Tobaccus’s reservation isn’t much more than a strip mall of smoke shops selling tax-free smokes and trinkets to the white man.  It’s earning so much in revenue (over 11 Million last year) that New York’s Mayor Bloomberg launched a massive campaign and lawsuit against the Unkechaug, being the formidable tobacco cartel that they are, looking for back taxes with the finale of his attack being a jab at their questionable heritage as Native Americans all together.  The Unkechaug’s current Sachem, Chief Harry Wallace’s comment was “The goal here is not to stop us from selling cigarettes but to destroy us as a people”.

We hid in the coastline and slowly paddled through the reeds like Little Hiawatha, careful not to be spotted by the scouts.  As the coastline expanded, surprised, we didn’t find the tee-pees and campfires we had expected.  There were rusting mobile homes and trailers, broken down cars on blocks and more of the same trash that landscaped my own neighborhood.  The alarming difference was that the Indian Braves we spotted weren’t white like us, and they weren’t red like the movies, they were black.  The black kids we went to school with had moved east from Queens and the Bronx.  They we’re up on the new Hip-Hop and Graffiti scene.  They taught us how to hit hard on the football field, and that Dougie Fresh and Slick Rick were where it’s at, not the Fat Boys; and that the verdict was still out on the yarmulke sporting Beastie Boys.  So where the hell were these “black” Indian kids hanging out?  Did they go to school, or did they have there own school on the reservation?  How could, according to the census, 270 Indians be living in my neighborhood and I didn’t know one of them?

Excited, disappointed, Sunburned and waterlogged, we beached the raft at the end of the creek and hoofed it home.  It was my first real off the map adventure, meaning, off the paved road.  I’ve had many since then, and not surprisingly, even when I was sitting on the roof of a cargo boat sailing up the Mekong river from Vietnam into Cambodia I thought of our raft on Poosepatuck creek.