Thank you, readers, subscribers, old and new. I am a historian creating a primary document of what was MIC Cold War coastal defense system HR development, no expense spared, now long gone and obsolete. Note that I am not now or ever have I been, to the best of my knowledge, an employee of the federal government in any capacity.
Before repatriation, back to Jungleland I was shipwrecked in Winnipeg, with no refund, and no cash. I found my way to a travel agent, who kept my 007 American Express Card, which was not delinquent. Who made that decision?
I found my way to the Salvation Army, somehow. They put me up and gave me a chit for chow. The Sally was all over Jungleland, we all knew Guys and Dolls, but I did not know how that Retired Officers’ Home got so close to the ocean, then.
No, it was no Grenada, it was only Asbury Park, which, like the rest of Monmouth County had become the British “Plan B” long before Cold War R&D blew tourism out of the water entirely. Who wants day trippers when you have fifty billion a year of MIC money flowing into the community?
In Winnipeg, I got a plate of thick spaghetti, and a bus ride through the city. I was my father’s son, a few months earlier I had bailed him out of jail in New Mexico, and I knew he was working for a carnival out of Florida, heading also for Canada. I did not miss him by much as I recall. The son and grandson of those quarrymen, on the run in 1984. My father had grown up summers in Jungleland; before he enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 in 1945, he had been a bellhop at the Berkley Carteret across the park and one block east of Sally’s Retired Officers’ Home. He wrote bellhop as his profession on his discharge papers, even.
Sometime later, I recall getting a front-page photo clipped by a friend in Texas of my father ladling soup at the Sally for the destitute of San Antonio, under an alias or they just spelled his name wrong by accident. A father serving soup in San Antoino, and just months later, his son eating spaghetti in Winnipeg. Follow the fold. Go figure. Was I confused? Was I bewildered? Of course, and I wound up wounded, not even dead, again, down in Jungleland. *
* …And the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all
They just stand back and let it all be” Jungleland, Springsteen
Great read! Thanks 😊
But I am too obtuse to discern which, of several possibilities, is “Jungleland?”