Barton’s life

 

July 20, 1983

 

Barton lives like a troll in my kitchen, someone I stumble over in the middle of the night when I’m making my way to the toilet for a three a.m. pee.

Even by daylight, I hardly see him he seeks so much to remain invisible, putting on his headphones to listen to his Scientology propaganda tapes any time me or Pauly says anything remotely threatening to his world view.

And between me and Pauly we have a lot to say on that subject, which means we can’t tell where Barton’s ears end and the headphones begin.

Barton likes to think he has an imagination and claims it is through this that he survives. But imagination is one thing and deluded dreamer is quite another, and he is the most deluded dreamer I know.

I keep kicking myself and trying not to believe that I am becoming more conservative when I clearly am not. I keep blaming people like Barton for why the 1960s failed and why the world is saddled with monsters like Ronald Reagan now. Yet we’re as much at fault as Barton is, clinging to our tiny little sub societies instead of taking control of the larger society.

The painful part of watching Barton is that I see myself in him and my own frustrated dreams.

Barton still lives the life of a hippie, wandering from place to place, allowing other people to support him – and I’m jealous.

He puts down roots like a weed, knowing that the next wind might blow him back to the insane state of Texas or to the remote self-reliant and thus self-deluded state of Vermont.

While society chains the rest of us to jobs, rents and responsibility, people like Barton wander freely – and it’s not fair.

Pauly tried to be that way, living up in the hills of Mountainside in his ex-lover’s attic until he got driven out by a witch hunt and currently shares the third room in this three room apartment in Passaic, apparently hating Barton more than I do because Pauly came close enough to taste Barton’s way of life before having it yanked away.

Now Pauly works a job, pays his share of the rent, and faces the next forty years of hard labor society has imposed on us ordinary people.

Yet as much as a lust for the life Barton leads, I fear its uncertainty. I like knowing where I stand, even I am part of capitalism’s latest batch of wage slaves.

If Barton has his way, he would keep moving until some place strikes his fancy. He moved from Texas to Vermont on a whim only to find he could not survive when he got there.

Now – still penniless – he talks about buying a piece of land he calls his “dreamland,” and makes plans to live there all alone.

He hates civilization, even if he enjoys its luxuries by sponging off people like us. He sees himself as a new Lewis or Clark, and frequently quotes “Walden” as if his family owned a pencil factory.

But Barton rarely pays for the blunders his dreams inspire. He does not look ahead to see the possible consequence of anything, floating around in a dream state from which he refuses to awaken.

I want to take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him, want to teach him the meaning of “reality,” which he clearly seeks to avoid.

Barton wanted to go back north, even after his lack of provisions drove him to us in the first place, but his sister, Fran – my sometimes lover – pleaded with him not to go, using her need to be near him as an excuse rather than any practicality he might face when he reached his destination.

This appeared to work temporarily. So now he simply talks about a future exodus rather than something imminent.

The real problem is not Barton, but in the fact that Barton’s dream comes very close to one that me, Pauly and Hank once had, and gave up, and still regret giving up. We once hoped to purchase 100 acres of land on the Canadian border, and Pauly – being a much more practical version of Barton – figured to use Hank’s insurance settlement money for the down payment. The rest of us (Pauly meaning me, Hank and who ever else chose to get in on the scheme but not himself) could find work to help pay off the mortgage. Pauly said he would act as caretaker while we worked down here and he lived off the land (and us) up there.

Barton – when he is not talking about Vermont – talks about going to Canada where he can get away from greedy American capitalists who make slaves of people like us. He senses a time coming when he will run out of people like us to exploit and sees the socialized society of the north as his best hope.

The worst part in all this is that I want to go with him when he goes.