The Odd, The Perverse, And The Unthinkable - The Real Diversity Of America

On the surface New Brighton was like any other small town in America, much like Grovers' Corners, the fictional town described by Thornton Wilder in his play Our Town.  There was a pleasant downtown with a City Hall building, Zackin's pharmacy, Dot's Kitchen, a barber shop, a nail salon, one clothier, a furrier, doctors' offices, and Jimmy's Smoke Shop. 

  

People went to church on Sundays, joined Rotary and the Lions Club, volunteered, supported the local police, and lived a quiet, peaceful, and uninterrupted life. 

To the casual observer New Brighton was a model town - one of rectitude, propriety, and community. People greeted each other on Main Street, men tipped their hats to ladies, children behaved, and the downtown was festooned with wreaths at Christmastime. The clothing store always had a display in the window - an electric train with a real whistle and smoke, a Nativity scene, and Christmas music. 

Bread, milk, and breakfast cakes were delivered weekly and newspapers brought to the doorstep.  Mowers and trimmers kept front yards neat and presentable in the summer, children built snowmen and snow forts in winter, and the smell of burning leaves filled the air every October. 

Mrs. Fender's next door neighbor, Mrs. Helander noticed that she was getting milk delivered three times a week instead of the usual one, but never asked why.  Mrs. Fender did have two growing boys and it would not be unusual for them to drink more milk than usual, so Mrs. Helander went back to her baking and never gave it a second thought. 

Until she realized that the milk truck was parked for over a half-hour each delivery.  Again, New Brighton being a small community where everyone knew each other and where class distinctions never prevented friendship, it was quite likely that Mr. Benson, the milkman, had been a client of Mrs. Fender's husband and had gotten to know the family. 

Again, Mrs. Helander went back to her baking and did not give it a second thought.  The community's well-deserved reputation for respect and understanding kept gossip, rumor, and innuendo at a minimum. 

The truth of the matter was, of course, what anyone but the good citizens of New Brighton might well have expected.  Anita Fender entertained the milkman every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it was only when Bobby Fitch walked into the kitchen looking for the baseball he had thrown through the window and saw Aldo Benson coming down the stairs with his trousers at half mast and shirt unbuttoned, was Mrs. Fender's secret out. 

Bobby Fitch was a blabbermouth, and before long word had spread through the community about the goings-on at 71 Lincoln Street. 

For some time Mrs. Fender's milk deliveries returned to once a week, so the rumors died down and eventually were largely forgotten. 

Only much later did it turn out that Anita Fender was what was then called 'a nymphomaniac'.  Since most women in those days in proper middle-class, middle-American towns were settled, untroubled homemakers, such aberrant behavior was assumed to be a psychological disturbance. 

Nothing could have been farther from the truth.  Anita Fender was as hot and bothered as a bitch in heat, and if it wasn't with the milkman it was with the roofer, the gardener, and the mailman. 

'Where was ol' Harry Fender when all this was going on?', wondered the town.  No man in his right mind would put up with such things; but little did they know about Fender's own 'preoccupation', a seedy, trashy, day-closeted gay man who cruised the back alleys of Arch Street every night buggering, sucking, and cornholing his way through the week. 

In fact the couple was the model for Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell, ahead of their time for smarmy promiscuity and illegal pandering.  The Arch Street cruising and afternoon quickies with the milkman were only the tip of the iceberg.  The sex ring (prostitution, pornography, underage sex) organized by the Fenders was remarkable not for its range and profit, but that it existed in such a tightly-buttoned, conservative time and place. 

This was nothing compared to the Rabinowitz scandal - a scam of Bernie Madoff proportions, although far less spectacular in scale. Ira Rabinowitz was the town furrier who sold mink, ermine, fox, and Persian lamb, but whose real income was from 'investments', unsecured, high risk, high profit financial commodities brokered through a network of shysters in New York.  The furrier's store was the perfect venue for the operation.  The business was clean, Rabinowitz was a model citizen, and New Brighton was just a stone's throw from New York. 

From the basement of this modest establishment was run one of the most successful financial scams of the Fifties extending far beyond New Brighton and even New York.  When finally uncovered by the SEC and FBI, the operation was worth several hundred million dollars, a king's ransom for those days. 

As surprising as this level of corruption seems, it was par for the course for New Brighton whose cheating was endemic.  There was not one public works project without a line of contractors, judges, police, and public service employees with their hands out.  Toxic landfills were plowed under and buried and housing developments built on 'reclaimed land'.  Drugs flowed through the hands of white middlemen to the black dealers of Corbin Avenue.  The Catholic Church was a gay jamboree, and their boys' summer camps a pedophilia paradise. 

All this is by way of preamble - today's diversity is way off the mark.  The real diversity of America has nothing to do with race, gender, and ethnicity but a spider's web of untoward illicit complexity. The American ethos of the good guy, the patriot, the volunteer, the church goer, the family man is the perfect cover for a vast underworld of bad behavior which has no limits to sexual ingenuity, financial tricks, and political corruption. 

Ivan's devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he, the devil, is a vaudevillian, a comedian, a player of tricks and games.  Without me, says the devil, life would be a bloody bore, an eternity of Sunday Mass, a lifetime of doing good.  You need me, he says, to stay awake. 

A future cultural historian will look at New Brighton and the thousands of other likeminded American communities and see the real America, the savvy, canny, ingenious Americans who so successfully used the gabardine cloak of polite respectability to cover outrageously uncivil behavior and had a good time doing it. 

No one really cares about the black man, the lettuce picker, the lesbian, or the transgender; and even less about raising them to epic status.  Diversity is not this charade, this cavalcade of color and sexual identity; nor is it even the richness of artistic, scientific, or entrepreneurial talent.  It is in the underbelly of America, the adulterers, philanderers, cheats, tarts, deviants, and seductive predators.  Any country can produce robber barons, financial wizards, and garage geniuses; but nowhere is the real diversity of human behavior more clearly seen that just under the surface. 

Shakespeare knew this and was fascinated not with the predictable scope of history but in the stories of the greedy, malicious, ambitious, murderous characters who populate it.  It is Richard III who holds our attention, not the lives of saints. 

Kurtz, the main character in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness says on his deathbed, 'The horror...the horror' as he understands that the savage barbarity of the cannibalistic tribes among which he lived and profited was universal.  We are they. 

Conrad saw the horror, Shakespeare saw the inimitable irony and humor.  However you look at it, the goings on in New Brighton are well worth the price of admission.