Everything is 'Broken', By Dinah Cardin
Friday, May 7, 2004
Boston Globe,
North Shore Sunday section
A social worker draws on Gloucester's most troubled citizens for 'Broken Trip,' a wrenching portrayal of a city's frustration
For 30 years, Peter Anastas listened to stories of poverty and abuse from his Gloucester neighbors. He absorbed their tales and tried to help, because that's what social workers do. As director of advocacy and housing at Gloucester's Action Inc., it was the open-minded social worker's job to listen without judgment and to put at ease those who suffered.
Now, Anastas has taken all he has seen and learned about those who live with poverty in Gloucester and included it in a new novel ... because that's what writers do.
"Broken Trip," a local term for a failed fishing voyage, is the first published novel for the 66-year-old former North Shore Community College writing instructor and former Gloucester Daily Times columnist, whose enthusiasm gushed as he recently spoke about the book over a muffin at Magnolia's on Main Street.
Visit as a tourist and Gloucester appears to be about pristine beaches, circling downtown seagulls and a fascinating maritime history. But Anastas and other writers have zeroed in on the town - with its pull of polar economic opposites - as they look deeper, into the darkened dingy bars filled with locals on a sunny afternoon, as tourists roam the streets in search of a harbor-side lobster dinner.
The Crow's Nest, the bar made famous in Sebastian Junger's best selling book "The Perfect Storm" and subsequent 2000 movie, is the perfect example of the gritty lives of the locals overlapping with those of the tourists, as fans of the book and movie - backpack- and sandal-wearing summer day-trippers - stroll into the stale bar where locals pass the day swilling pints of liquor and playing Keno. The establishment's walls tell the story. Regulars, whose lists of drinks are carefully tabulated on pieces of paper in the cash register, can keep track of each other's birthdays, posted on a monthly list near the "In Cod We Trust" sticker.
Just like New York City, New Orleans or Oxford, Miss., Gloucester too has a vast literary collection surrounding it and its unique culture. Anastas joins internationally acclaimed playwright Israel Horovitz, Junger, and poets Vincent Ferrini and Charles Olson (see adjacent story) in defining Gloucester through this ever-growing body of work.
"I'm just a part of this whole tradition," he says. "I don't see myself as working as a loner. I had Olson and Ferrini growing up."
Finally found a home
A native of Gloucester, Anastas says he felt a responsibility to take action from his days in social work and tell the heartbreaking truths behind the town's physical beauty.
"I'm sitting there," Anastas says of his days at Action, "and I'm thinking to myself, somebody has got to dramatize the negative impact of this economy on working people and poor people. I had a feeling that right here in my hometown was an opportunity to really live my politics."
His politics are one of the first things the writer will tell you about himself. "The '60s made me a social worker," he says. He was involved in many anti-war demonstrations during Vietnam and has since been working on a different kind of war - theone against poverty.
Action, which started in 1965, was one of the first agencies to be funded under the country's war on poverty. Glad Day Books, which published "Broken Trip," is run by what Anastas proudly calls a "radical" couple in their 80s who moved from New York City to Vermont to publish works highlighting their social and political concerns. They carried the writer's manuscript in a backpack with them to a demonstration at our nation's capitol against the war in Iraq. Anastas knew then his book had found a home.
His book about the city's misfortune came from Anastas' argument that the tech boom of the '90s for the most part bypassed Gloucester, a city filled with people who were mostly unskilled for the computer world anyway. People weren't living any better than they were in the 1980s, he says, as house prices soared and rents doubled and tripled. Combine that with depleted fishing stocks and the government's strongly imposed environmental restrictions and you have people living in a desperate situation.
"People are living in Third World conditions here in Gloucester and they're not from the Third World," he says. "They have been here for generations."
The characters in his book are descendents of fishing families who are struggling in a way their grandparents never would have believed. But many who live in isolated enclaves in more scenic parts of town wouldn't have a context for this, says Anastas. "People can't believe that in a place of so much physical beauty there is so much economic and personal suffering," he says. "They refuse to believe it."
Yet, many tried to believe and understand last month when a crowd packed The Book Store on Main Street to hear Anastas read from "Broken Trip."
It wasn't just the boats and fishermen who have struggled, says Anastas. It is also the closing of the processing plants where he had worked as a teenager, and the tradesmen and boat yards and all the industries that were supported by the fishing industry, who have also suffered a great loss.
"I felt that it was my responsibility to write this book," says Anastas. "I had seen first hand the effects of poverty, drugs, incest, diseases, domestic violence. I had seen it all."
And he wants to tell it all with a sense of true compassion."You don't say you're poor because it's your own fault," he says, sharing his politics again. "That's what the conservatives say."
The sacred and the profane
It's against this backdrop that "Broken Trip" was written. Though most of the characters are composites of people Anastas came across over the years, a character named Tony works for the local welfare office and is unmistakably penned as his alter ego, says Anastas. In the end, Tony's marriage falls apart and he loses his job when the community's welfare office closes. Even the one who tried to help was not immune to the devastating economic times.
Anastas grew up in Gloucester the son of a Greek immigrant father, who before opening a luncheonette on Rocky Neck owned a store near the cut. His mother warned her young son about going into unsavory establishments in town. As immigrants the family lived more conservatively, trying not to draw negative attention.
The rough language he heard while working behind the counter at his father's store was also off limits to his tongue. But he was careful to include this "street language" in the book, to get the authenticity of Gloucester. In fact, the first words of the novel are a string of slurs. This was his attempt to tell the story from the point of view of the characters themselves and not from an intrusive narrator.
It's easy for the well-spoken author not to judge others for their vulgar speech. For one, he is from Gloucester and this is what he heard all his life. But also, his years as a social worker trained his ear to listen to the heartfelt subtext, just beneath a storyteller's limited vocabulary.
Examining their language and behavior almost as an anthropologist, Anastas says the profanity reveals something about the people themselves - mostly about their level of frustration. A typical expression, he says, heard on the largely Catholic streets of Gloucester, with its St. Peter's Fiesta, is ironically "Oh my f-ing Jesus," where the religious and the sexual are intertwined. "This is a profane town," he says. "Israel (Horovitz) got it down perfectly in his plays."
Since his days growing up in Gloucester, Anastas has acquired an English degree from Bowdoin College and has worked toward a Ph.D. at Tufts. For three years, he studied medieval literature in Florence and lived a fulfilling intellectual and helpful life of teaching, writing and social work on the North Shore. These days, the writer doesn't see any reason to live elsewhere. "People have asked, what is it that holds you in Gloucester? My feeling is that this is a very cosmopolitan town," he says. "It's like living in Europe. I can still speak Italian here. I can buy ethnic products. I've never regretted my decision to stay here. It's also given me something to write about."
Bringing poverty home
While pursuing his commitment as a social worker, it took Anastas 10 years to write this book -perhaps the time required to mentally and emotionally process the thousands of gut wrenching stories he had heard.
Among his four other published works, written between 1972 and 1992, is a book Boston's Beacon Press commissioned him to write during the civil rights movement about living among the Penobscot Indians of Maine, when the country was truly thinking about poverty as an epidemic for the first time, yet wasn't thinking about those native to the land.
"People think of reservations in the Midwest," he says, "but this brought poverty of our native people home."
After his time spent living and writing among them, Anastas wanted to stay on and help, but a Native American friend told him that his job was with his own people. That's when he came home and became a social worker.
For Gloucester, the good news of this decade is that some of the government's measures have succeeded in recouping the fishing stocks - but too little, too late, says Anastas. The fishing industry has already been "decimated," he says, with fishermen leaving town, trying to find other work or succumbing to a life on public benefits.
The very thing the often-aggravating tourists come for is fading. Outdoor dining offers tourists a glimpse of the rusty boats of a working harbor, yet they often don't seem to know or care about the plight of those boats. You can't see the inner city from the waterfront, says Anastas, since so many poor residents were picked up and moved from the seaport during urban renewal. The wave of gentrification that seems to be sweeping through blue-collar communities across the state will eventually kill the very gritty seaport that people come to see, says Anastas. And that is the paradox that continues to fuel so many frustrated and utterly profane words.
A Literary Pedigree, By Dinah Cardin
Friday, May 7, 2004, North Shore Sunday
Peter Anastas is actually among the first Gloucester natives to write about Gloucester. The others, like playwright Israel Horovitz, have come from elsewhere to tell their tales, yet many of the same issues are being explored.
Horovitz premiered a short play called "Sins of the Mother" last summer at his Gloucester Stage Company theater that focused on an early-morning encounter among three out-of-work Gloucester stevedores waiting to have their unemployment cards stamped. Their colloquial dialogue - "wicked" and "I'm just sayin'" - and discussion of local families and their secrets turns to an ugly brawl, when more than local expressions are thrown down.
Unafraid to expose the ugly underbelly of Gloucester, many of the issues raised in his plays are often issues "hidden undertownspeople's collective carpet," Horovitz has said.
Another author to nail the feeling of the town, says Anastas, was Sebastian Junger. Anastas was lucky enough to read the galleys of Junger's "The Perfect Storm" and provide accurate local facts.
"He opened the door to looking at the real Gloucester," says Anastas. "A lot of Gloucester people were shocked by it. But they needed to see how difficult the life at sea was. We tend to mythologize it in many ways. They needed to see it, trip to trip, site to site, pay to pay to paycheck."
For Anastas' part, it was the great local poet Charles Olson - who knew the Anastas family and Anastas himself when he was a small boy - who encouraged his writing. When Anastas was just back from Italy in the summer of 1962 and headed to Berkeley on a fellowship, Olson, friend to the country's beat poets, encouraged Anastas to stay in Gloucester, where the aspiring writer could attend "graduate school" right at Olson's kitchen table. It was seated at that table that Anastas was to meet poets Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and LeRoi Jones.
Anastas has since gone on to edit a collection of Olson's poems and personal letters and form the American chapter of the Charles Olson Society, a group dedicated to educate Gloucester and the world about the colossal poet, who died in 1970. "American literature was Olson's expertise," says Anastas. "I never regretted not going to Berkeley. From then on, I was committed to Gloucester."
