COUNTRYMANOR

Written + Illustrated by Daniel Fishel

A Memoir

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel FishelIllustrations Copyright © 2011 by Daniel FishelEdited by Danielle Diendorf and Daniel Fishel

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication maybe reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First Edition: May 2011

Self Published on a small scale and printed by Mimeo.

http://www.o-fishel.com/

INTRO / 7

A LIFEGUARDS OBSERVATIONS / 8

SOMETHING OF OUR OWN / 10

LACK OF MOTIVATION / 12

LOSING MY LOVE FOR BASKETBALL / 16

WINNERS + LOSERS / 18

GENERATIONS / 20

LOCUST POINT ROAD / 24

PAYCHECK TO PINKSLIP / 26

AMONGST NEIGHBORS / 28

SERENITY THROUGH OF PUNK ROCK / 32

A MESS IN TEXAS / 34

MILES AWAY / 36

OUTRO / 38

BIOGRAPHY/ 39

CONTENTS

7

As I exit my youth, and the growing pains of adulthood start to creep in, I have found myself wanting to make an account of sev-eral personal short stories and illustrate conceptual images to go along with them. These stories are a documentation of my time spent in Country Manor, a trailer park outside of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The process to develop this book’s content over the past eight months has been difficult and at times, overwhelming. Out of twenty stories I have written and illustrated, I have chosen to in-clude only twelve of the origials within this edition. The reasons for the editing vary, but my hope is that you see the connection between the written word and the painted image all while gaining something from the content I present.

INTRO

A LIFEGUARDS OBSERVATIONS

9

When I worked at the pool in Country Manor, every summer was the same. The lifeguards would gather to show their recertifica-tions, sign their W2’s and then later make their bets on who in the trailer park was going to show up pregnant or with a baby stroller. Making a joke out of the recurring problem of teen pregnancy was our twisted way of dealing with it.

Year after year I bet on the same girl thinking that she would be the one that would wattle through the gates shamelessly. The evi-dence I gathered was simply from observing her date a different guy every month, and hanging out with the same group of friends who often would smoke weed and drink beer in the woods. A year after quitting my job at the pool I would end up bumping into that same girls mom while grocery shopping. She ended up going to college in an attempt to make something of herself. I knew to never take things at face value after hearing this news.

11

Even against our parent’s wishes, Kevin and I rode our bikes into the neighborhoods next to ours. Next to Country Manor was a neighborhood called the Meadows and next to that was the Rid-ings. We’d ride into the Meadows and would stop from time to time to gaze upon the two story houses and try to guess how much they paid for them. Kevin and I would then travel into the Ridings where mini mansions were spread out and we would do the same.

In a spark of inspiration, we wanted to build a tree house. We went through Kevin’s fathers spare scraps of wood and nails from failed projects, as well as parts left from empty trailer lots before getting to work. When we finished our tree house, it turned out to be more of a platform with holes in it with a tire swing. It was something that was ours, something that we could be proud of, and show off. We built something that money couldn’t buy.

SOMETHING OF OUR OWN

14

15

Growing up, I’ve always been a pseudo father figure for my sister. If something went wrong, I would sit down and talk through to her about things. When I went to college, my sister felt a little lost. Her father left, and I went to school, leaving her with my mom. It was often hard to talk to my sister on the phone about what was go-ing on. Her grades went up and down, she’d became quiet, intro-verted, and she always looked tired. After my third year in college, I came back that summer and I noticed that my sister was com-pletely apathetic. She didn’t really care how she looked, she was gaining weight and didn’t want to do anything. I tried to motivate her by asking her to go to the pool with me, go bike riding, and all sorts of things. She complained that it was too hot out and that she preferred the winter or that she was chafted. I was talking to my mom about it and she said that when the winter weather comes in, she complains that it’s to cold. All she does is sit in the house, eat, watch tv, and plays on the internet. I felt like a failed brother who couldn’t motivate his sister to do anything.

LACK OF MOTIVATION

17

Every summer when I was in middle school, I would play basket-ball almost everyday. I did it partly because I loved the game, but I mostly did it because the older teenagers in the trailer park did it. After many games we’d go up the road to the neighborhood store and buy Sprites, and things to snack on. The older teens would also buy cigarettes, and often had a lit one hanging from their mouth as that swooshed three pointers, and alley ooped balls that are air born.

Late one night I would awake to fire trucks racing to the top of my street. In curiosity I went outside with my parents to see what was going on. The store in our park was on fire. When the fire was put out, a report was released that the igniter of the fire was a lit cigarette. I started to connect the dots in my mind. The rule of my house was that I had to be inside when the streetlights came on. Often times many afternoons, the older teenagers would play late into the night. I concluded that the guys I had looked up to for so long were the ones who started the fire, and from then on never played basketball ever again.

LOSING MY LOVE FOR BASKETBALL

19

I was obsesied with the World Wrestling Federation growing up. Every monday night I would watch Raw, and every thursday I would watch Smack down. I even convinced my parents to buy a few pay per views to find out who won certain events. I had two fa-vorite wrestlers growing up. One of my favorite wrestlers was Ray Mysterio Jr., who was a lucia libre wrestler from Mexico. The other was X-Pac of Degeneration X, who was a motor cycle jacket wear-ing guy who was as thin as a board. I liked Ray for his aestics and I loved X-Pac for his attitude. What I loved about him the most was how comfortable he was to tell people to “suck it!”, and how he always took on guys bigger than him no matter if he won or lost.

To fill the void I wanted to start my own back yard wrestling federation. With the help of my best friends, I started a stable of wrestlers and met three times a month to wrestle in the baseball field on the far end of the trailer park. We even made masks, wore make up and had wrestling belts made out of posterboard and glue. One day, Jeff, the neighborhood bully, found out about our group and chal-lenged me for my title. I didn’t really know what to say other than “Just Bring It!”.

The last day I would ever wrestle came and everyone was there. After Josh, the ref, said fight, we went at it. I was lucky enought to get some head locks in, but Jeff closed lined me and chocked slamed me twice before pinning me for the win. After I came too and Jeff was still taunting with my belt in the air, I punched him in the dick and ran like hell. If it wasn’t for creating a fake wrestling federation I would have never really stood up to Jeff.

WINNERS + LOSERS

22

23

When I was fifteen years old, I started working at the pool in the trailer park as the pool cleaner. I would do this every year for seven years even when I was head lifeguard at the pool. I just enjoyed cleaning the pool early in the morning. Often times I would have the pleasure of meeting the ‘trailer parks mayor’ as he walked by to get his mail. Jim, the mayor, has been a resident of the park since the park was created over forty years ago. He is also the guy you go to if you want to know the dirt on anyone who lives in the park. Even at the age of sevenity something, he still rode a Harley, and wore all black in the hottiest of summers. Jim is the most bad ass guy I know over forty, and often talked to me when I was tak-ing a break from cleaning the pool.

He is also the kinda guy that most people would call old school. Jim refered to African American’s as ‘coloured folk’, and called the older teens who played basketball, spit, curse, and dropped out of school, ‘white niggers’. He was the kind of guy who would talk to me about whatever was on his mind and I often shared what was on mine. Even with his racist over tones, he was one of the only adult who would treat me like an adult. My parents thought even when I was seventeen, that I was still a child ment to be saved from what was going on in the world. After having a long conversation about current events and what was going on at home, he told me “Dan-ny, your not like those filthy animals and porch monkeys down the street. Your gonna end being something. I don’t know what, but you are.” Growing up that ment a lot because Jim hated everything and saw everything in a negative lens. Our conversations acted as a motivational support for me much later in life.

GENERATIONS

25

I never really knew if my step father was being serious or if he was joking around. There were severial incidents when I didn’t catch the bus on time when I was in school. I was always missing the bus because I forgot to grab my homework from my locker. At the time my grades were terrible, but I still wanted to go to a dance that was happening later in the week. My parents collectively told me that I wasn’t allowed to go. That friday, like clockwork, I had forgot to grab my homework and told the bus driver I would only be a few minutes. Sure enough, by the time I got outside the buses were already down the hill from the middle school, past the high school, and onto the Carlisle Pike.

I went back into the middle school and tried to get ahold of my mom on a pay phone with my last two quarters and I couldn’t get a hold of her. My options were slim. I didn’t have enough money to go to the dance I was forbidden to go to, and I couldn’t try call-ing the house again. So I started to walk. I figured it would take a half hour since it takes fifteen minutes to drive to the middle school. Sure enough it would actully take an hour and a half to get back home. After walking through a newly built neighborhood and walking on back roads I started to walk down Locust Point road to connect to Bernheisel Bridge road. When I started to walk down Locust Point, I realized at that moment that I was doing this on my own, independent from adults telling me what to do. I was taking on a sitution on my own terms, by my own rules to get to a destina-tion, which is something I hadn’t done before. Before I made my way down Bernheisel, a neighbor who was driving by stopped and told me to get into the car before someone ran me over.

LOCUST POINT ROAD

27

After a good hour or two of playing Nerf gun war with my friends, I went home to lunch from my place. My mom didn’t like making lunch and often would just throw together sandwiches. That day, when I got home my mom was looking toward the other street from our back yard. There were police cars, ambelances and people all around. So both my mom and I went through our yard to see what the deal was. People were standing around shaking there heads, some people were crying and others were praying.

I was eleven when a neighbor told my mom what they heard from the police. Inside the trailer lived a family of four. The husband who lived there had worked as a mechanic for over a decade and was recently laid off. What the police found was a note that said that he couldn’t take seeing his family without as he struggled to find new work. What resulted was a broken husband and father, murdering his family and then killing himself. It didn’t hit me that all of this was real until I shot a few rounds in the air from my gun with a noise maker inside. My mom slapped it out of my hand and said “Do you have some kind of problem? Try and be more respectful.” Everything seemed to become more silent afterwords.

PAYCHECK TO PINKSLIP

30

31

My family moved into Country Manor around the summer of 1994. At the time, Country Manor was a great place to live. Everyone talked to one another, invited people over for dinner, and helped one another out from time to time. When we moved in, there was an empty lot next door for a good year or two. A family drove up late in the spring time to check out the lot. My mom was planting flowers as a women approached my mom and asked her about the neighborhood. Two weeks later they moved into the empty lot next door with a double wide trailer put into a single wide lot.

Many nights, my mom and I would drink iced tea and enjoy the echoes of nature before retiring. When our neighbors moved in, for severial weeks, we would hear the wife yelling at her husband about who knows what. One afternoon my mom caught our neigh-bors wife meassuring out the distance from their trailer into our yard to build a back porch. Her reason was that their double wide took up to much room and thought that she had the right to some of our yard to build a porch that we weren’t using.

My mom would get into a huge heated arguement which lead to a meeting between the park manager and our neighbors. The park was in favor of us because it was our yard, and our neighbors knew that their trailer was to large to fit into the space before moving in. So many years to this day, our neighbors are in a one sided battle with my mom. When my mom planted small ferns in the front of her lawn, our neighbor planted huge bushes. When we put up a few string of Christmas lights up, our neighbors trailer would glow like a Chrismas tree. My mom often joked about taking a shit in the middle of the yard to see if our neighbors would follow suit. I am still waiting for my mom to challenge our neighbors to it.

AMONGST NEIGHBORS

33

Growing up, and still to this day I don’t know what it means to be an Ethiopian American. I never really associated with the term until recently. Before that and even still I associate with being a punk rocker. My introduction came when I was invited to go see a few bands at Monroe Fire Hall in 2000. I remember seeing Union Strike and Eden Park because I still own their CD’s and t-shirts. Seeing Eden Park play live was one of the craziest experiences of my life that completely changed who I am.

After they set up on this two foot stage, their lead singer ‘Big Black’ told the sound guy to keep the lights on because they were a goth band. The entire show, their bass player strummed while jumping up and down on a mini trampoline, and the band handed out silly string, as well as cop’s and robbers stuff you would buy from a dol-lar store. People were chasing each other around and firing cap guns while the band played. I remember seeing a guy wearing a chicken suit as well. To me this was the kind of experiences I needed outside of the blight neighborhood I grew up in. I would meet a lot of incredible people in these type of circles and learned a lot about myself by associating with other punks.

I always played in a punk band when I was in high school. When I was a senior my last band broke up, and I was left with the dece-sion to try and play in another punk rock band or go to art school. I choose the second because I wanted to get as far away as possible from where I was from. Being in art school molded me more to be an adult, though I keep the edge and ‘I do what I want/make my own rules’ attitude. Many of my friends who I cared about would continue living the lifestyle end of being punk. Some living in squats, jumping trains and some even dying of drug overdoses. I always talk about how punk rock saved my life growing up, but of-ten times I wish it did the same for all of the friends I grew up with.

SERENITY THROUGH PUNK ROCK

35

My father got off the phone before coming to the dinner table and announced that we were going to Amerillo, Texas to pick up his mom. I faught tooth and nail to try and stay with a neighbor but it was a family emergency so the family had to go pick her up. Af-ter traveling thosands of miles and eating at plenty of seedy truck stops along the way, we reached Amerillo. When I stepped in the door it was a blast from the past, but much more hollow then I re-membered. I hadn’t been there since my parents and I lived here in 1992-1993. Nine years later, we would find my grandmother on a bad tripp on multiple narcotic drugs. My parents sorted through all of her medications that she shopped around from hosipital to hosipital for to get the ones she absolutely needed and flushed the rest away. We then journeyed back to the Keystone State.

My high school health education told me that, someone who was withdrawling from drugs usually took about six days and a years of therpy to fully recover. My grandmother wouldn’t be fully with-drawn from the drugs she was on until six months after we picked her up and she probably never really recovered from it’s affects on her mind. She had developed nervous ticks where she would click her finger nails for hours without ever noticing that she was doing it. What I always found odd was how she never really went out anywhere but still dressed up like she was getting ready to go to church. Every morning she would do her hair, put on make up and dressed up. She would sit on the porch for hours to smoke and did it with a hollow smile.

A MESS IN TEXAS

37

I was walking toward the lunch table in my high schools cafeteria when a clean shaved skin head wearing a bomber jacket and a goofy smile approached me. “Hey, weren’t you at the show at the lower paxton youth center last night?” and I replied “Who the fuck are you?”. This is how I met my best friend, Zakkai Stolley. He and I would have longest and best conversations about religion, punk rock and women. We were the champions of getting women naked in our car playing piditle, and we were the ones who heckled the most people at punk rock shows. I mostly liked Stolley because I had never met anyone who was as deeply liguistical as I was when talking about anything.

A few years ago, I would get a phone call from Stolley saying that he wanted to move to Israel. When I asked him why, he told me that his cousin died in a car bombing, and he felt that he needed to be with his people. I felt torn because I would lose one of the closest friends I’ve ever had who was traveling thosands of miles for a cause, but knew better to be selfish. I had to let go, and it was the first time in a long time that I would cry over something as an adult. Luckly we stayed in touch, and he’s even mailed me things over the years. Everything from Turkish Coffee to a hamesh keychain. Once and a while I would receive a phone call from him where he would tell me about what’s going on in Israel, and then procede to tell me about all the girl’s he had been with. The thing I love about Stolley is that his situtation may change but he will never really change.

MILES AWAY

38

I want to first and foremost thank my mom and my sister for their endless support of what I do, and for helping me remember some of the content written for this book. I would have struggled a lot more if it was not for them. I want to thank Rachel Salomon, Mar-shall Arisman, David Sandlin, my studiomates and School of Vi-sual Arts for their words of advice in helping me with my craft and giving me a space to create the images you see in this book.

I want to thank Regina Roff, Pete Ryan, Daniel Hertzberg, Kyle T. Webster, Tim O’Brien, Scott Bakal, Martha Rich, Matt + Gina, and Jessica Hische for their guidance and/or motivation. A special thanks to Doug Achtert, who let me bring the Zen to Philadelphia Insight. Lastly I want to thank all the friends who have come and gone over the years. I have met hundreds of amazing people over the years, and for that I want to thank everyone for every moment I have spent making things and doing stuff with everyone.

Thanks for reading the book.

OUTRO

39

Daniel Fishel received his bachelors of fine art from the University of the Arts, and his masters of fine art from School of Visual Arts. He has done work for such publications as Nylon, The Stranger, Grid Magazine, and No Sleep Records. Daniel’s work has been recognized by competitions such as The Society of Illustrators, American Illustration and 3x3 Magazine. He was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and is currently working as an illustrator/designer in Queens, NY.

www.o-fishel.com

BIOGRAPHY