The Rock 'n' Roll Element

On, poetry...

2011-08-03T00:28:00.000-04:00

This is a haiku that I wrote several years ago, which I can't get out of my mind:

Pity the drowned moth.
So often do our desires
Become our demise.

...A Poem for You

2011-07-07T20:45:00.000-04:00

I asked a dear person in my life, recently, "Who is your favorite poet?"

It was a life-changing experience, when, with no hesitation, she said, "You."

With love to her, with love to my readers, here is a poem for you.

It is not very nice.

Bohemia

My name is Herschel Heinz.

I was a soldier.

I was a soldier in what

I believed was

A Great War.

I believed it a Great Action.

I believed.

I joined the army in 1938.

I traveled to Czechoslovakia

When I truly became a soldier.

I believed

That I would make

My father proud,

My family proud,

That I would someday make a family.

I believed that I

Would make my

Nation proud.

I believed,

As I departed on the train.

I began to disbelieve

In my Rifle.

I began to disbelieve

In my officers

On the train to Czechoslovakia.

We arrived and we had food and barracks.

We had prostitutes.

We had wonderful beer.

Again and again,

We had wonderful prostitutes and beer.

We had what was called

A Line-Up.

The men and boys

Were taken from the towns

And executed.

This, in front of their wives

And mothers, big and little sisters,

Grandmothers, grandfathers,

Aunts, uncles,

Burgermeisters.

I did not so much mind

The executions.

Continuing lives of the men and the boys

Would create future soldiers

Who would want to kill me.

Of a morning,

My men found

A cowering dozen

Men and boys in a cellar

By the railway station.

There were men,

And there were their sons,

And there were the men’s fathers,

And we had them all,

And we would execute them all.

For hiding, were they.

How dare they

Try to escape

What was

Certain.

My officers laughed

At the foible of the men and boys.

There was to be

No question

Of their fate.

The February air was frigid.

My officers

Raised their pistols

And demanded that

The men and the boys strip naked.

Pistols drawn, the officers,

Still drunk on prostitues and beer,

Demanded that the men

Drop to their knees

And fellate their own sons.

I had been,

Proudly, issued a Luger handgun

Upon my induction

Into the German army.

I drew my pistol.

The fathers

And the grandfathers

Were naked on their knees.

They and the boys were shivering

With cold and with fear.

I boldly overstepped

My officers.

I strode forward

To the shivering

Men and boys.

You have only

Two choices, I declared.

You may die

With dignity

Or you will die on your knees.

Each man

And boy

Stood,

Avoided my gaze,

And drew back his shoulders.

It is a hero

Who declares

His Independence

From Life

Itself.

I emptied my clip

Twice,

A shot behind the ear

Of each

Of those men and boys.

Led to a truck, was I.

Put on a train

To Russia

For the military crime

Of insubordination.

The following Bloodbath

Held no Mercy

For me or for any other.

I walked from the Russian battlefield home to Germany,

To my home, no longer.

I became a soldier

To be of a Nation,

To be of a Family,

To make my nation and my family

Proud.

Pee Wee

2011-07-03T01:49:00.003-04:00

Despite the fact that I often portray my parents as neglectful, they really did try to do right by me. In a way, I believe that they had their figurative hands as full of me as they did their literal hands with the seemingly constant flow of their new babies in my youth. I was five years old when my first brother was born, another brother two years after that, and a sister two years, then again, after that. For six years there was a baby around the house, and I was, at least, needy and uncooperative. I was at most, hyperactive, needy, and somewhere along the border of tyrannical.

This is not to say that I was always a badly behaved little boy; although, often enough, I was. This is also not to say that my adults were deferential to the babies, because both my mom and my dad really did go out of their way to attend to my upbringing and its financial and temporal needs.

Who brought me to the doctor and the dentist? Surely not the insurance company. Who bought the mail-order books so that I could learn on my own and keep my damn mouth shut for an hour a day? Who put people-food on the table, instead of baby food, for me? Who got me “big boy” clothes, in spite of the real deal that most of the clothing would not be around in five years for hand-me-downs for my siblings? Who else would have thought of those things? Nobody but Mom and Dad, that’s who. Yes, they had their hands full, and because of all of us kids, not their wallets full. Hands and money aside, imagine the expenditure of their time. In my youthful exuberance, there seemed to be always a sleeping or feeding baby or one whose diaper needed changing or one who needed bathing, or dad needed a couple hours to catch up on work at home, or mom needed fifteen damn minutes of peace and quiet to talk to one of her sisters on the telephone.

“Michael, go out and play.”

Honestly, I tried.

Sometimes there were kids in the neighborhood to play with. Sometimes there were enough around for a sandlot baseball game. Sometimes, if there weren’t enough to play pick-up football, you could just take what you had and, with boys and girls alike, play “cream-the-guy-with-the-ball.” With only one or two, you could play “army fort.” You could see who was at home and maybe play a board game indoors or watch some TV. All alone, you could slide down a snowy or muddy hill, climb a tree or up onto a garage roof. You could explore that garage without anyone knowing. You could piss in the bushes.

All alone, you could let your imagination glide like the shadow of a cloud over everything to which you were drawn, over everything with which you were tempted. Like the shadow of a cloud, there was nobody there to stop you.

All alone, I don’t know if I’ve ever known a kid who hasn’t dreamed of winning “The Big One.” And what could that be? The homer that wins the World Series? The winning touchdown? The girl playing house embracing the man of her dreams? A bloodied and beaten knockout in the twelfth round? The twenty-fifth service ace for the match? An Olympic gold medal? The shot that drops the Nazi sniper from his perch? The Easy-Bake cake that makes mom and dad proud?

All alone, one dreams. One wins. That is just that.

I am a lefty, and I am not much of a hitter or a fielder, so I did not pester my folks about getting into Little League baseball. I had killed many Nazis, and I had won several Olympic gold medals for the luge and in Track & Field, when my dad suggested I start playing Pee-Wee football. I was small for my ten years, but I loved the game and team sports. I was fast, and I had been brought down several times, uninjured, by as many as seven guys twice my size, in “cream-the-guy-with-the-ball.”

Hell, all alone, I had run back many a kickoff for the winning NFL touchdown.

Pointing back to my parents’ availability and responsibility toward me, they really did this one right. It was required that I sign up and have a regulation helmet, shoulder pads, and a mouthpiece. Dad took me out to the sporting goods store and spent his hard-earned money to get the equipment; mom helped me boil the mouthpiece, so that I could chomp down on it, and it would fit my teeth. Dad took me to Lincoln Junior High to register. He signed the paperwork. I was to be on the Dolphins. I was thrilled. On the ride back home, dad told me that there was one piece of equipment that hadn’t been previously mentioned, which was required for me to play. It was a jockstrap. My dad being my dad, he left it fairly to my imagination as to just what a jockstrap is and what it does.

He was working hard and late that week, so it was up to my mom and me to go and pick one up. A few nights before the first practice, mom and I went together to the sporting goods store. By this time, of course, I had asked a few friends, exactly what was a jockstrap, and what was it for, so I was loaded with youthful information. My mom and I looked around for one among the various sports equipment and athletic shoes, and we didn’t see any, so we went to the counter, and she asked the kid at the register where we might find one.

“Who is it for?” the kid asked.

“It’s for my son,” she answered, “He’s going to play football.”

She indicated me, and the kid looked me up and down.

“Oh, you playing Pee-Wee? You’ll need a ‘small,’” and he pulled one down from a rack behind him.

She paid him, and he smirked at me. “Do you want to wear it home?”

I didn’t think that was very funny.

Come Saturday morning, dad stayed at home working, and mom drove me to the practice field. She dropped me off, and I was on my own to find, among several groups of boys who were just about all far bigger than me, the Dolphins. I asked around and was pointed towards a group of kids who were the smallest in stature of anyone there. I had on my shoulder pads, carried my helmet, from which hung my mouthpiece, and was clutching my permission slip to play. The jockstrap was squishing my testicles. I approached a man with a stopwatch around his neck. His hair and face were red. He was smoking a cigarette, and he was addressing a gaggle of uniformed boys who were already assembled on a long wooden bench. I stood there until he was finished talking, and he turned to me, irritated, as though I was late, although I knew I wasn’t.

“What team are you on, kid?” he spat.

“The Dolphins.”

“Well, that’s us.”

He looked disappointed.

“What’s your name?”

“Michael Chandler.”

I handed him my permission slip, and he looked at it, seemed satisfied, moved a pack of Old Golds off a clipboard and stuck the piece of paper onto the rest of them. He reached into a cardboard box under the bench and pulled out an arbitrary jersey.

“Okay Chandler, you’re number twenty-four. Siddown over there.”

He turned toward our fledgling team.

“Alright now, boys, listen up...”

The practice went okay. I wasn’t as fast as some of the other boys in sprints, but I got to knock around some kids who were bigger than me, even though the coach didn’t seem to notice. I was kind of shy, and I didn’t talk much to anyone, and I remember thinking that that was kind of tough, just like a real football player.

The following week, I found out that our coach’s name was Mr. Keith.

Mr. Keith set us up doing drills of running, throwing, catching, kicking the ball, tackling, et al., but he didn’t really explain any of the rules of football. Mind you, I had gotten my chops on “cream the guy with the football.” At the end of practice, Mr. Keith doled out our positions. I was to play defensive tackle. I was proud of that assignment. My dad had been friends with Nick Buoniconti of the real NFL Dolphins, and that was a legacy I wanted to follow... in both ways. I think it was, at the time, just as important for me to be friends with my dad as it would have been for me to become the next Nick Buoniconti. But I loved tackling. I followed the ball all over my side of the field, and after the final two practices, I learned that I would not start in our first game. As is the process in most sports teams, Mr. Keith gave instructions and encouragement to the team’s stars and to his favorites, usually better athletes than pee-wee me, or the sons of his friends. For all my enthusiasm in practice and attentiveness in team meetings, I was out of the loop and benched.

The Dolphins were not terrible; we were, for the most part, smaller and less experienced than the other teams we faced. We finally won our fifth game out of the nine to be played, as I mostly watched from the sidelines. Our team’s numbers dwindled as some of the boys didn’t like getting knocked around in the mud during what was obviously a losing season as we headed into game seven. I also think Mr. Keith’s commandeering attitude and his chain-smoking of Old Golds swayed some parents to grant their sons’ wishes to retire pee-wee football before their contracts were up.

“Chandler, you’re starting today,” Mr. Keith barked at the start of game number eight. He really had no choice.

I lined up across from a fat kid about my size, but who mightily outweighed me. As we went into the set position, he snarled at me and stared me dead in the eye. He growled and snorted. The ball was snapped.

On defense, I was allowed to use my hands, but I didn’t. I put my helmet into his right shoulder pad and knocked him back on his fat ass. On the second play, I put my forearm into his sternum. And now he had muddy pants and was getting frustrated. On third down, I just ran around him toward the quarterback and the ball. Seeing me coming unattended, the kid threw into nowhere, and they had to punt. As I ran back to the bench, Mr. Keith gave me a swack on the back of my helmet and coughed to the team, “That’s the way you do it, boys!”

On every subsequent running play by the opposition, I put Pudge onto his keister, and he began whining to the referee that I wasn’t playing fair. Oh yes, I was. On pass plays, I simply ignored his grass-stained uniform and followed the ball. I had one sack and two interceptions. We were up by four points late in the game, and they put on a running play to my side. I easily circumvented fatty-weepy and fearlessly ran for an open-field tackle toward their running back. It was me and him. He was at least a foot taller than me, a couple years older, more muscular, and definitely faster. I angled in toward him, saw my spot and, coming fast, dove for his knees.

If you have ever been the victim of a stiff-arm block, you know that it is an ultimate stopper. Mr. Keith had never taught us that one, yet it is a classic football move. As I flew through the air, the running back merely jammed his free hand into the top of my helmet, dropped me, and, with my facemask full of mud and grass, I watched him run for what became, for them, the winning touchdown.

As I trotted back to the bench, Mr. Keith did not acknowledge me. As the game clock ran out, he clapped his hands and called, “Alright, boys, next week!”

He lit up an Old Gold.

I, number twenty-four, started the Dolphins' final game in my spot at right defensive tackle.

I faced a kid smaller than me and, at scrimmage, put him on his back a few times until it looked like he was going to cry, and I pulled back on much force toward him after the second series of downs, and, I suppose, in gratitude, he let me run the field at will. Watching for the stiff-arm, I got a few open-field tackles. I blocked a couple would-be receptions on pass plays, and I dropped one potential interception. And the Dolphins were winning. We were up by three points.

The other team had one last set of downs at the end of the game to beat us. I knew the quarterback and his family. He was, again, older and way bigger than pee-wee me. On first down, he was running up the middle. I ignored the tow-headed kid in front of me, broke left, split the line, and I smacked that quarterback in the ribcage with my helmet and my arms. We both got up slowly. On second down, he threw a pass that his receiver couldn’t handle. On third down, I rushed him and he had to throw to Nether Land. To win, they had to make a play on fourth down, and I was becoming an undefended pest. They ran the ball, and there I was. I knocked that big guy into his stomach, and he fell, as did I. On the ground, he kicked me hard in the balls. We had won.

The quarterback got up and strode to his losing bench. I struggled to sit up. I struggled to breathe. I struggled to see what was in front of me. I heard cheering from our bench. After a few minutes, Mr. Keith walked over to midfield, where I was still struggling to my feet.

“Hey, we won. What’s the matter, kid?”

He was smoking an Old Gold.

I gasped a term of his, “I got my bell rung.”

“You wearing your jockstrap?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What. Did you forget your cup?” he asked.

“What’s a cup?”

“’What’s a cup?’ You tell your mom and dad to get you one next year.”

Another elemental football aspect that I had not been taught.

Mr. Keith turned, trailing cigarette smoke, and walked past the bench toward his car, far away in the parking lot.

There was no next year for me and Pee Wee football.

To Luby Small's Delight

2011-05-27T04:01:00.004-04:00

I could not wish for Luby Small to rest in peace, because he never, ever gave anything to The World That We Share other than peace, among many other gifts that we folks may often only fantasize of giving.

My father met Luby’s dad, Mr. Small, back when our family lived in Augusta, Maine, and Mr. Small was some manner of co-worker with my dad, as well as a pal. The two guys kept up a relationship after our family moved down to Portland. Mr. Small probably needed help with a CPA-related thing, and my dad, always with the eye for service work for a friend, put my mom, baby Charles, and me into the VW, and we rode the fifty-odd miles north to Waterville, where resided the Small family.

We got there, parked the VW, rang a bell, and walked up a couple short flights of stairs. On the second floor, there were the accustomed pleasantries between the adults. I tried to scope it all out. At my age of about eight years, I had mostly seen house-type homes. A walk-up apartment, within which a whole family dwelled, was new to me. Surely, any new environment is something which is to mentally process and quickly adapt. I felt an immediate warmth and comfort. It smelled nice there.

For me to assimilate next, of course, were the New People. We were met by Mr. and Mrs. Small, and by their daughter, Jean, in their kitchen. Jean was in her early teens, to me, a lot like another adult. She introduced herself, and she gave me a warm, confident smile that put me at ease. She and her parents used little effort to make we four Chandlers feel welcome. I happily accepted a glass of ginger ale out of the Smalls’ refrigerator and homespun kindness ...and with ice cubes in it.

After the pleasantries and my ginger ale, Mrs. Small and my mom left the kitchen to bond as women and to change Charlie’s diaper. My dad and Mr. Small plonked out their paperwork on the kitchen table. Jean took my hand and radiated, “Let’s go play with Luby.”

On the ride up to Waterville, my folks had told me that there was a kid around my age named, Luby, at the Smalls’ house and that I’d have a playmate. My thoughts danced. Throughout my young life, I had experienced, other than with cousins, only short, transient relationships with boys and girls my own age. Circumstance, not my adults, was responsible for this, but over my eight years, person to person, place to place, time to time, lives and deaths, I hadn’t gotten a much of a grasp of permanence. New friendships, to my young mind, were always welcome, yet I figured them as fleeting to me as I thought my new friendships were to them. I was excited to meet this Luby. Jean, I could see, was far more sophisticated than I, yet, from what I knew of girls, I was sure she’d rather play with dolls than to go in for my car, gun, action style of play.

Jean and I turned from the apartment’s short hallway into the family room, and the floor was somehow, neatly, cleanly, strewn with lots of basic toys and lots of books for kids to read and books of puzzles and crayons and pencils and pads of paper and boxes of jigsaw puzzles. And it wasn’t a mess. It looked like it all belonged right where it was.

“Luby!” Jean called, “Michael is here!”

Luby bounded awkwardly out of his bedroom toward me in his pajamas. He was pie-eyed with excitement to meet me, as I had been to meet him.

“Hi, Michael!” and he wrapped his arms around my far shorter shoulders.

I was surprised, taken quite aback, and, I must admit, somewhat revolted. Luby was severely mentally challenged, and that, due to hydrocephalus; he had what used to be called, “water on the brain.” His head was huge, his body, developed to hold his head up, was gangly. His smile sprang from his face in an unabashed way that I had never experienced. He was, as stated, taller than me, and he expressed far more immediate affection toward me than any of my grandmothers, great-aunts, or kissy, elderly neighbor ladies could ever muster. I cast a nervous glance at Jean. She beamed, saintly. Luby released me.

“Do you wanna play?” he asked, indicating the piles of stuff on the floor.

“Yeah, let’s play,” Jean answered for us all.

What a cruel trick my parents had played on me, setting me up in my child’s imagination for a new playmate. I was their rube. They had brought me up on this damn car ride to shunt me off while they did their adult things, onto a type of person that I wondered if they’d have invited over to their house. What a rip-off!

“Okay,” I answered.

Play we three did, and challenging, mentally stimulating play. Jean was intelligent, patient with us boys, gentle, encouraging, engaging, and that made her all the more, to my eight-year-old sensibilities, pretty.

Luby was fascinating. For all the toys and puzzles and books, which I knew for a fact he had played with again and again, each one seemed brand new to him. He showed and shared each one to me with openness and originality. Did we play!

Jean and I read aloud, to Luby Small’s delight. We all three played with cars and trains and the jigsaw puzzles. We built blocks, and until that afternoon, wooden blocks as a childhood recreation were beneath me. I learned. I didn’t learn about the complexities of reading words or those of toy cars and trains and building blocks, but I learned of simplicity. Between us three, there was no disparity. We were equals. What one lacked was shared for all by another.

I kept looking into Luby’s face and eyes and comportment to see or to perceive something; I knew not then, what. It was obvious that Jean had some of whatever that “what” was. She radiated it, and I somehow knew it was gotten from Luby. It was a purity, an innocence, a transmitted, transmittable comfort. It was a unifying, underlying ease. It was contagious. It filled the room, the heart, the mind, the soul. For goodness’ sake, it was in the toys and the puzzles and the books.

The adults said it was time for lunch, so we all had sandwiches and some more ginger ale together, and Jean played a few LP record sides that straddled everyone’s generational difference. Music. It seemed natural that Luby had even influenced the musical choices. Harmony was among us all, polarized, I have to say, by Luby. Nobody among all eight of us was the center of attention.

After lunch, it was time for the Chandlers to depart the Smalls’ home and Waterville, Maine, but not for good. We visited their place a few more times, and I hope we all experienced the same human magic that was present the first time. I know I did.

I have been of the mindset to try, in childhood and adulthood, to replicate a formative experience, but nobody in my life could do it like Luby. It was always like the first time we met. The Small family got us up to some lakeside cottage that they had rented for a long weekend one summer, and Mr. and Mrs. Small taught me how to eat and enjoy a lobster. Luby’s and my wading around among the minnows and the reeds was as original, as fun, and as memorable to me as any of our times together. We played and played and laughed and laughed and talked and talked.

A few years later, having not seen the Smalls during that time, and things being what they are in our societal lack of true observance of our friends and neighbors, we got a telephone call.

Luby had been riding in the school bus reserved for very special people. There weren’t too many convenient roads linking towns in the Great State of Maine, so the bus was making a short, daily trip on the interstate highway. Sitting across the aisle from the driver was Luby, being his gregarious, innocent, chatty self. The chain broke on a lumber truck in front of the school bus, and a long two-by-four smashed through the windshield and lanced Luby into his delicate, oversized, dear, dear cranium. It did not pierce either his heart or his soul. Luby lingered, comatose for several weeks, and I do believe that this was his penultimate gift to his loving family.

His final gift was given, at least to me, and I hope, several others.

We drove back up to Waterville, just me, mom, and dad, for Luby’s wake. I had been to several such ceremonies, so I walked immediately to his open casket, not out of curiosity, or anger, or grief, or a notion of loss, not to see, but only to be. Just like Luby.

I knelt, and I looked into his face and his being, searching for what he had, just like I did when we met. Just like what I had stopped doing during our times together and had simply accepted. That which I had begun to learn.

The top of his head was swathed in gauze. The make-up person at the funeral home must have had the easiest job of his or her career. Luby’s beatific face was what was very probably shone upon his proud new parents on the day he was born. The purity, innocence, emanation of care for others, then still alive in Luby’s countenance, could not have been augmented by a human hand. I glowed then, as he would have unknowingly prompted me in his living innocence. At peace was he, and so was I. He filled the room.

Thank you, Luby Small, for showing me and those around you a fragment of true peace, for which I still look to you so curiously, to vaguely understand, and thank you for your artless example of goodness, rarely duplicated, that you carried with impossibly unselfish ease.

Rosemary's Virginity

2011-05-05T18:27:00.004-04:00

Of course, there were babysitters.

The first one I remember was Penny, a secretary who worked with my dad at Peat, Marwick & Mitchell when we lived in Holden, Massachusetts. She was called into our household after my adoptive mom had died. I’m sure Penny was, in a manner, pressed into child-minding service; although, the time being the early 1960’s, and she being a young, single woman, might have been thinking about children of her own someday and might have been modestly considering that taking care of me could get her closer to my dad, a fairly successful, intriguing recent widower. That is speculation, but what is for sure is that my memory of Penny is of her being nothing but enthusiastic, tender, and loving toward three-year-old me. This was at a time in her young womanhood when she could have been enjoying a steak dinner with a suitor who could stay up late, didn’t need help going to the bathroom, and probably wouldn’t have asked to be read a bedtime story before turning out the lights. To my childhood memory she was really pretty. I sure liked her, and she sure liked me. Heck, I’d take her out for a steak dinner today.

The next string of babysitters began several years later, after my dad had remarried and we moved to Portland, Maine with my new little brother. In the interim, there had been caretakers and aunts and uncles for days and weeks at a time, but when we finally settled in Portland, and the newest of their three babies was no longer an infant in a bassinette who needed to be changed, my mom and dad found some time to get out of the house for dinner, or for my mom to clear her mind of us millstones of an afternoon with either errands, or her many sisters. For the babysitting duties, we mined the Asali family, two doors down, whose oldest daughter, Rosie, went to Deering High School. Rosie, mercifully, was tapped to mind the Chandler siblings when I was at the most obedient time in my life and when my younger brothers and sister were sleepy enough at 7 p.m. to rarely stir. At about age ten, I was known in the neighborhood as a fair artist, and Rosie would bring over magic markers and poster paper for me to draw renditions of Charlie Brown and Blondie cartoons to use as publicity for Deering High’s dances. I would challenge her initial ideas, and we’d have a final mission statement before I began the pencil sketches. Doing art for high school kids, I felt really big. She thought the posters were better than I did.

After Rosie graduated from Deering, Kathy Asali was the sitter next in line. Then about age twelve, I was rambunctious, and Kathy, roughly four years my senior, was game. She was wiry, wily, and wise. I was wiry, wily and not so wise. I was about two-thirds Kathy’s size, and she was a good wrestling partner, which I do believe falls into a babysitter’s job description. One afternoon during a wrestling fall, I inadvertently plunked my hand down onto one of her breasts. Her eyes widened, as they might, to see if I had done that for a purposeful pre-adolescent feel, and, locking my gaze, I am sure she saw nothing but my desire to win the match. I gave her a left knee to the buttocks, and, if memory serves, she pinned me on my back, un-aroused, at least two more times. I have to admit, she smelled nice. As skinny as we two were, we had voracious appetites, and our guilty pleasures were copious salads and ice cream sundaes. We loaded each up with everything that was available in the refrigerator and the cupboards. Each dish would be disgustingly decadent, three types of salad dressing and any cheese we could pilfer, tomatoes, carrots, olives, pickles, Bac-O-Bits, piled high over a quarter-head of iceberg lettuce (the only type known in the 1970’s); the sundaes were more and more and more so and involved anything that contained sugar, probably equivalent to a quarter pound in each dish. Marshmallow, strawberry preserves, jimmies, fudge, any kind of nuts, peanut butter, maraschino cherries, Cool Whip, and... oh yeah, Sealtest ice cream--it didn’t matter whether or not they all tasted good together. The sugar combination only made our wrestling matches tougher, our TV watching more intense, my bedtime later, and Kathy to forget about her homework. With all that food raiding, it is no wonder she only got seventy-five cents an hour. I think that because of the hardscrabble wrestling and my folks’ absolute acknowledgment that I was nearly too wild to be handled, they gave Kathy Asali and most other babysitters a fair nightly tip.

After a couple of years at the Chandler household, Kathy got a steady boyfriend and was unavailable for most corralling duties. I do have a chuckle today, knowing that I had touched her breast before her boyfriend did. After Kathy’s tenure, my folks would have mined the large Roy family from across the street for more babysitters had it not been for what continues to be referred to as “the spaghetti fight.”

My mom had a dear, elderly aunt who was dying in Boston. She was a spinster and a poor, lonely woman, and my mom cherished her like a furless Teddy bear from one’s childhood; although, in our years as a new family, I had met her only once. As she, my great-aunt, lay at the point of death in Boston General Hospital, my dad and mom had to scurry down for the weekend, and they, in a bind, called up Joyce Roy to do a couple overnighters with me - the crazy kid - and my crew of malleable, willingly-participating younger brothers and sister. Joyce showed up in the morning, and we waved my parents off. It all looked so innocent and open.

I don’t know how or when I discovered the spaghetti fight process. It must have been of an idle moment, absently poking at my hand or forearm with a stick of raw spaghetti. It snapped, and it snapped again. The synapse happened that if I pushed that pasta with steady pressure, it goes, “brraap, bbbrraaap,” several times like the rhythm of a machine gun. It has an odd and distinct feel on the skin, like six or eight rapid pinches, which mildly sting but don’t hurt for long. Mueller or Prince spaghetti work the best; use #8 spaghetti, as I’ve tried, in my recent babysitting years, both angel hair pasta and linguini, and they don’t work. That afternoon, I opened up a box of #8 spaghetti (of which there were a few) and started freely stabbing the arms, legs, fronts and backs of Joyce and my siblings. As in any war, the side with the most advanced weapons is at the early advantage until the losing side develops the same weapon or something better. I knew that they all knew the cupboard where there was more ammo to be found, and, hell, it ain’t a game until everyone is playing. We ran chaotically through the house, “bbbrrraap”-ing one another with delight. The youngest, my sister Julie, about four, excitedly bewildered, scuttled about in the mix, screeching and chasing us with a piece of uncooked rotini. We all took that skirmish onto the porch, the driveway, into the yard, back into and out of the house. Couch cushions were thrown, chairs and tables upended, magazines and newspapers heaved in self-defense. I think, at one point, my brother Charlie had been so clever as to use the ironing board as a shield.

The problem with a spaghetti war is that it leaves its participants worn out, while there are several pieces of spent “ammunition” at the site of every hand-to-body attack. Thousands of half-inch shards of spaghetti littered the house and yard. The sun had gone down, and we all, worn and satisfied, had a little supper, and I agreed with Joyce Roy that we would clean up that spaghettified mess in the morning. I even changed the vacuum cleaner bag so that we would have a fresh start. We got the kids to bed and settled down to television.

True to many parents’ form, mine did not stay overnight at their destination, as they and we at home had planned. No, they returned late that night to a floor-riddled mosaic of dried #8 spaghetti fragments and a houseful of at least disrupted, if not overturned, furniture and appliances. Livid, my mom and dad paid and dispatched Joyce back across the street to her far more peaceful family in shame. I stood in my Nuremburg and took all of the blame. I was too much for Joyce Roy to handle, and without a doubt in everyone’s minds (and mine), I had created and executed the entire debacle.

“Ma,” I decried, “We were gonna clean it up, and look, I put in a new vacuum bag.” I was told to put that new vacuum bag to good use immediately, and I was sweeping up the back porch and driveway until about 2 a.m.

By age thirteen, I was certainly old enough to mind our home and the kids when the folks went out, but given my track record with babysitters, broken furniture, windows, garden tools and sundry items, and my instigative, inventive, and mischievous hold over my siblings, hiring an outside babysitter was worth the nominal amount of money and inconvenience, my parents, enjoying a restaurant’s Muzak of a pleasant evening, partially safe in the knowledge that there would be someone to at least call the fire department or run screaming to the neighbors. Somehow we got a hold of Rosemary.

She was a student at McAuley, the Catholic girls’ high school. She was stout and tall; I think she played field hockey. She didn’t put up with too much crap from any of us, but she was intelligent and fun to be around when she found, after a night here and there, that I was not the prescribed Holy Terror of whom she’d been warned. I washed and dried the dinner dishes, did my homework, and, after the kids were put to bed, she and I would have our television time.

It must have been a Thursday night, because we were watching “The Waltons” together. As stated, I was quite sexually naive. In conversation, my immediate and extended Catholic family never alluded to anything of even a romantic nature in other than hushed tones. What I knew of sexual relations came from youthful, sandlot myth and speculation and from dirty magazines that the big kids would leave behind after their beer parties in the woods.

As Rosemary and I watched “The Waltons” that night, there was a scene in which John Boy was taking a bath in a steel laundry tub. If I remember correctly, he was singing loudly.

Rosemary squealed, “Ohhh! I just lost my virginity!”

Catholic upbringing had brought me to where I figured that word meant not much more than something along the lines of “purity,” “goodness,” and being “faithfully forthright.” Think of hearing the term, “The Virgin Mary,” by, at my age, tens of thousands of times, and I was not thinking of fornication. I laughed along with Rosemary’s comment, and I then believed that we had shared quite a hearty moment together. We went back to the show.

My parents arrived a short time later, and pretending not to, nosed around to see that their home was still intact. Pleased, they, Rosemary and I gathered in the kitchen. I was standing in about the middle of the group, the easiest spot to be whacked had the household inspection not come up clean, Rosemary behind my dad’s shoulder, where she would be less likely drawn into a fray.

“So,” my mom chirped, “How did it go tonight?”

We were in the clear, and now I could be witty and free and – oops! – pure, good, and faithfully forthright.

Grinning, looking straight into Rosemary’s eye over my father’s shoulder, I spilled what was our evening’s bit of conspiratorial humor, “Rosemary lost her virginity.”

Like a tarantula, Rosemary’s hand clasped over her jaw-dropped mouth, and her eyes sprang wide-open in such a way that even a midnight strangler could not evoke.

As my mom and dad looked across me at one another, it quickly dawned on at least my mom that I didn’t know what I had just said. She blushed, and I’m sure she was trying not to laugh.

“I think you’d better have a talk with your son.”

Poor Rosemary did not look up from the floor as she went to collect her schoolbooks, put on her peacoat, and wait for my father to open the kitchen door to give her a ride home. My dad still had to pay her, but I don’t think Rosemary was, at that moment, concerned about her earnings. I believe that was her last venture into the Chandler household. I wonder if my dad had any kind of reassuring words driving Rosemary home that night, because he never did have “that talk” with me.

"Ruby, get the ball"

2011-04-27T17:47:00.004-04:00

I lived in Austin, Texas for a couple years in the mid-nineties. I had many jobs over that short time, true to an alcoholic's resumé. I also packed about seven years of a normal person's life into those two and a half years, like a dog has to do.

Over part of my term in Texas, I had two jobs at once. I had gotten a lovely girlfriend, and she decided to start up a high-end tamale business. I don't particularly like tamales, but I dove into the fledgling company, plunked my hands into it, and I even named it. It was called "Hot Damn Tamales," which came from an Elvis Presley outtake. I am in the tamale 100,000 club. I have extruded, wrapped in husk, steamed, and packaged more tamales than one person could healthily consume in a lifetime. Between my girl and I, we sold, gave away, and traded about a quarter million of those Hot-Damn things. We traveled all over midland Texas establishing our business at barbecues, fairs, and, primarily, farmers' markets. We made these tamales at home, but, to be in accordance with the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission, we also rented the kitchen at Captain Quackenbush's on "the Strip," in Austin. After we started renting their kitchen, that horrible restaurant asked if I would help them out as a cook for "a few weeks." Thus came my two sapping jobs. Captain Quack's began at 6 a.m. and ostensibly ended at 2 p.m., and from 6 p.m. to midnight, Hot Damn Tamales would, as we ought, make tamales.

Don't get me wrong; each job was a good one. They were right in finding me to be a "character" at Captain Quack's, but they paid exceptionally low wages, and I was a tool, bespoken in no uncertain terms by the management after those first few weeks, at a staff meeting. They asked me to be their kitchen manager. Boldly, I responded, "So you want me to order your produce and your Sysco delivery, do inventory, schedule your irresponsible college student workers, work their missing shifts myself, and take the blame for whatever isn't done on time as a result. Oh, and I don't suppose I'll be getting a raise for all that, right?" They looked at each other around the table, wide-eyed, in that false, taken-aback manner and literally laughed about what I had said.

"Yeah," said the restaurant manager, "That's about what it is."

I laughed along, but I continued to wake up at 5 a.m., show up at 6 a.m., and I completed, daily, what to them was a chuckle.

The nascent tamale company with my girl was, what? A labor of love for a product I didn't actually like to eat? At least I didn't cut into the profits. She, however, in a somewhat controlling way, was the creative one. I was the muscle, and I had to defer to many of her decisions. I worked hard at both jobs, and we took Hot Damn Tamales to many, many, farmers' markets throughout that Great State, and I enjoyed some of the finest organically grown fruits and vegetables the USA has to offer. Texas grows some of the best tomatoes in the nation, and I love "love apples," as they are known.

I took one Saturday off from the farmers' markets in lieu, I believe, of a televised baseball game, a consistent case of manic-girlfriend-induced sleep deprivation, or both, and early that evening when she returned, I learned that I had A Third Job. She couldn't have come back with a bagful of sweet corn (although she actually might have) or Fredricksburg peaches, or wild grapes.

No.

She brought home a puppy.

I am not a dog aficionado, I am an unrepentant dog lover, and this poor little thing was not yet even a dog. She (an easy call) was only about six weeks old, and I could hold her in the palms of my hands. To tell, at her pint-size, she was some sort of shepherd that any shearling lamb would easily trample, but I knew she would grow into her non-breed's height and weight. My girlfriend beamed. I asked, "Are you going to take care of this little thing? Do know what she needs to eat? Are you going to pick up her shit?"

"No," answered my lovely date, "I thought you would. She was the last one, and nobody wanted her. Don't you like her?"

I sure did, immediately. I believe it was that evening that we named that puppy "Ruby," and she was my favorite kind of dog; she was a mutt, and she was the runt of the litter. That makes a bitch smart and tough. She hadn't been properly weaned, so that made her smarter and tougher.

Tiny Ruby's stomach was distended with the farm-borne worms that had filled her intestines, and on that first frightful night off the farm, I counted her six week-old respiration at around 130 times per minute. I fed Ruby homemade chicken broth (from the tamale stock) mixed with over-cooked, mashed carrots and heavily diluted green tea as a laxative, to maybe poop some of the worms out and so that she might stay awake and not over-pant herself into puppy heaven. Of that Saturday night, cradling Ruby, I could not find a veterinarian by phone. She looked up at me with barely opening eyes in the apologetic way that dogs have when they think they're going to die on you. I cupped her in my hands and kept her warm all night long, in spite of the fact that it was late August in Texas. That night, I cried unashamedly and often over that poor little shivering dog.

I got to the vet on Sunday morning, and was told that I had done a good job keeping Ruby alive through the night. She was poked and prodded, and I got the damn worm medicine. Ruby liked the car ride home, and she seemed to understand that I had to jostle her in my lap while I operated the stick shift.

She began to thrive, loyal, healthy... but intelligent? True to her farm-bred nature, she was a herder. She was poised and strong. We had a fine backyard, and she did not have to be paper trained. Ruby also liked to do with me just about anything that I liked to do. She ran alongside me when I rode my bicycle. If I ate celery, she wanted to do that with me. She sat, rapt, as I did push-ups. She knew how to pay attention. That is, until it came to the word, "ball."

I don't think I have ever met a dog or a puppy who was not enthusiastic about a sphere. I have met Chihuahuas who will try for hours on end to get their jaws around a regulation NBA basketball. I have spent time with large-breed dogs who understand as many as thirty commands, look at a blue handball for the three-thousandth time like it was their first-ever experience seeing something they could go and chase, bring back, and do it all over again. When I say "ball," any dog I have ever known widens its eyes and expects me to do something with one and, if I'm not holding one in my hand, will at least make the pretense of looking for one or point me to where one might be. Not Ruby. She learned many words, and she loved to play ball, and I know she wasn't simply being obedient, but I could not, in spite of her overall intelligence, get her to pick up that word. She would tilt her head and gaze at me in wonder. This astounded me. She loved to play with a ball and knew what to do, but she just wouldn't get the darned word.

Over the days and weeks and months, I repeated the word "ball" to her at least 10,000 times. That count may not be accurate, because it might have been more like 12,500 times. She would not understand that word. Mind you, this was a puppy who, when I said, "No potato chips for dogs," would walk away and sulk.

"Ruby, get the BALL." "Where's that BALL, Ruby?" "Ruby, go find that BALL." "Here's the BALL, Ruby." "Do you want the BALL, Ruby?" "Here's that BALL!" "Ruby, do you like that BALL?" One hundred and fifty times a day. A guy can't do everything, and I want my dog to go find her own damn ball. I mean, why not? It's one syllable, and what a great toy! On the lawn, on the street, in the house, she gave me nothing but a longing, blank, probing stare.

One mid-afternoon, I got off from my Captain Quackenbush shift on time, for once, and I walked home. I walked Ruby, brought her home, cracked a can of Lone Star, and I plopped down in a big easy chair. She looked up at me. Just for the hell of it, for the twelve-thousand, five hundred and first time, I asked, "Ruby, where's the ball?" She tilted her head and gave me the perplexed doe-eyes. I thought I was going crazy. How could this seemingly loyal, intelligent, energetic dog not understand the one bonding, desirable word which the most moronic mastiff would comprehend before he could even learn the word "food?" My shoulders slumped. Dejected and tired, for the hell of it, I monotoned, "Ruby, get the ball."

She started whimpering. I didn't know what to think. She laid her head between my feet and poked her nose under my chair. I had a brief notion that I was not crazy, but that Ruby was. Ruby jiggled her tail, looked up at me, and continued whimpering. It dawned on me that this time, maybe, the ball was under the chair! My kitchen-weary knees cracked as I stooped down to look under there, and I pulled out one of her hairy, dusty, blue handballs from where Ruby couldn't get to it. We had broken through! She, on the twelve-thousand, five hundred and second time, not only knew what I was talking about, but she knew to tell me that she couldn't reach it.

I almost cried, and I rubbed her pink belly like the first night I met her. We played ball for hours after that, and you can be sure that, upon that afternoon and evening, potato chips were for dogs too.

The Scenic Route

2011-04-25T13:06:00.000-04:00

I was six years old today, and I was just beginning to learn what a birthday means. It wasn’t and isn’t only about getting presents and getting attention from the adults around you. It is about having been born. As a child, it is about being borne by the adults upon whom you rely. Later on, you find that a birthday is about the life you must carry with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers who, encompassed, carry you further. It is about what you give to all of them in return.

I attended Lincoln Elementary School, in Augusta, Maine. I had a new mom and a new home. I had a baloney sandwich with mustard in a brown paper bag, because it was any day other than Friday, the day when we Catholics had to bring tuna fish sandwiches or at least meatless lunches to school. I do believe that bagged lunches helped all Catholic moms remember which day of the week it was. I also had an apple in the brown paper bag. I had little youthful trust in my new mom, but, heck, she had my lunch ready most every morning, and she made Maypo for breakfast most every day.

Who hoards brown paper bags? Ecologists? Puppeteers? Practical moms? Many women are expected to be all three. I guess my new mom was getting to the end of the under-sink, brown bag reserve that day, for the bag was huge; she had scissored it down to a manageable height, but it still had far more interior than a boy’s lunch would ever require.

I was six years old today. I ate my Maypo, got my big bag of lunch, and headed off to school. I decided to take a shortcut and eat the apple as I went.

Dearly I ask you, do you know what a shortcut means to a six year-old boy? In all practicality, I needed simply to take a right turn out the front door, walk down Prospect Street, take Winthrop Street straight downhill for about a quarter mile, and go left at the huge, red brick public school. Not on your life. I knew then what I know now about shortcuts, and those in-the-know call them “the scenic route.” Eating my apple, there were fences to hop, brambles to untangle, neighbors to meet, and, eventually, thistles to pull from my socks, shirt, pants, and hair, as I would stand line for the morning bell.

How is school for a six year-old boy? If one may not have an adventure in transit, one must make an adventure of the classroom itself. To my experience, most schoolteachers are dismayed by young boys’ school day “adventures” in the classroom, so we try to get them while we can. That morning, I first decided to take the shortcut though Mrs. Spencer’s hedges, yard, and driveway. Mrs. Spencer and Betsy were a latter-day pair of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Mrs. Spencer had dementia and an Oldsmobile 98 with the original Maine State license plate of number 99. Betsy drove the Olds and was Mrs. Spencer’s caretaker. My shortcut had me climbing over that car to get behind their house where there was an embankment I could slide down on last autumn’s slippery oak leaves.

“What are you doing out there, boy?” Mrs. Spencer shouted through a window, “Bring about my horses!”

Of course, there were neither horses nor a stable boy since she had been a young girl. Now it was just the Oldsmobile 98 and Betsy. I slid down the hill on the leaves and lost my half-eaten apple. I dug around for it for a few minutes and gave up. I stuck some acorns in my pocket instead. My butt was muddy and wet. I crawled through some brambles, stood up, reached up, and tugged down a handful of lilac blossoms. I would suck out their pollen later. I put them in with my lunch, and then I crossed the street at the bottom of the hill. My shortcut continued toward an expanse of front, side, and back yards; there were quite some neighbors to meet and fences yet to climb. I ran through an open lawn toward an apple tree. It was near a short chain-link fence leading me to the next yard. I figured jumping from the crotch of the tree would get me over the little fence. It did not. I caught my pant leg on the top of the fence and plonked my head onto a spongy lawn. A woman wearing Bermuda shorts, an oxford shirt, a pith helmet and gardening gloves, holding a pair of pruning clippers, looked up from her gardening.

Stuck on the fence, my feet pointed to the sky, I had an earful of sod. She walked over to where I was hanging. She smirked.

“So, what’s up?”

“It’s my birthday.”

“Let’s get you down offa there.”

She unhooked my pants from the fence. I stood up and rubbed my ear.

She looked at the driveway toward a motorcycle. “You know, I have a boy a lot like you,” she said.

I saw where she was looking. “Is he still in bed?”

“No, he’s in Viet Nam.”

“Oh, is he in the army?”

“Uh-uh. He’s a Marine.”

“I wanna be in the army.”

“I want him to be a doctor.”

“Okay, well, I gotta go to school.”

She ruffed my hair. “Yes, my darling, you really do.”

“It’s my birthday.”

She pulled a piece of grass from my eyebrow and nuzzled in my ear, “Now it’s mine too, kiddo.”

I thought it strange that we had the same birthday.

I ran out her front yard, making sure that I closed the little chain-link gate behind me. As I did, I took a look back at the motorcycle, and I guess she had just washed it. There was still soap in the sand, and it shone in the sunlight. I hoped that lady wasn’t lonely.

The gate across the street was of blue picket fence, and I hopped it without catching my pants or hitting my head on the ground. I whipped around the house to the backyard and checked that brown bag with my lunch. It was losing its creases.

“HEY!” I heard, “What are you doing?” It was a man, sitting on the back steps, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

“I’m going to school. It’s my birthday.”

“Oh, is it? Well, let me see what I got.” He went to reach for his pockets, but realized he was still in his boxer shorts. “Hold on, kid.” He stood up and went into his house. He returned, clanking coins in his hand. “Here ya go sport. Happy birthday.”

He gave me thirty-five cents, two nickels and a quarter. I was rich.

“What time do you have to be at school?”

“Eight.”

“Well, it’s five after. You’d better run, birthday boy.”

I stuck the coins in my pocket with the acorns. “Thanks, mister!”

Jumping his back fence, run I did. I got to Lincoln School ten minutes late. I scrambled up the staircase to Mrs. Brown’s kindergarten room and knocked on the door. They had already said the Pledge of Allegiance, and I interrupted her reading aloud to the class. She approached.

“Michael. You’re late.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Brown.”

“Wait here,” she ducked her head back in the door. “Class, please behave for a moment.”

She clacked to the first-grade classroom.

“Miss Harden, will you please watch my class while I bring this boy to the principal’s office?”

I was filthy with leaves, soil, and grass stain. I clutched my deteriorating lunch bag. Miss Harden glowered at me and said, “Yes, Mrs. Brown, of course.”

The first-grade class tittered. Mrs. Brown snagged me by the shoulder hem and pulled me back down the interminable stairs and halls to the principal’s office. He was Mr. Jordan. We marched to the front of his secretary’s desk.

“Hello Dorothy, is Mr. Jordan in?” Still holding my shirt, Mrs. Brown waggled me, as much to shake off my accumulated grime and foliage as to indicate her subject. “Michael is late today.”

We could all hear Mr. Jordan through his half-opened door shouting at somebody on the phone, so he was obviously in.

“Let me see,” Dorothy answered. She pushed a button on the intercom.

Mr. Jordan yelled, “What is it, Dorothy?”

“A tardy student from Mrs. Brown’s kindergarten class, Mr. Jordan.”

“Well, get him in here.”

I didn’t know what was the use of the intercom. They could hear each other fine.

In his office, Mr. Jordan was pudgy, seated, wore a dark, wrinkled suit, and his non-neck led up to a bright-red face stuck under the graying, balding pate of a television banker.

“Good morning, Mrs. Brown, what is this?”

“Michael Chandler was late for school.”

Mr. Jordan’s eyes narrowed, and he didn’t take them or his half-glasses off me as he opened a file drawer in his desk. He barely glanced down, and he drew out a mimeographed sheet of paper.

“Should we call his parents?” he asked.

“I think we should,” said Mrs. Brown.

Mr. Jordan looked at the piece of paper, pressed a button on his phone and dialed. “Hello?” he demanded, “Is this Mr. Chandler? Your son was late to school today.”

His face got redder.

“What? No. Who is this? Is Mrs. Chandler there?”

My folks had a party line which we shared with Mr. Burliss, a cranky old man who lived about five doors down and and didn't really know how to use the party line. He picked up about half of our calls. Mr. Jordan’s face got closer to purple.

“Yes, yes, I see,” and he slammed down the phone. He locked eyes with me. “I don’t like this, and I don’t have time for this. Why are you late?”

I looked down at my messy clothes.

“I guess because I took a shortcut.”

Mr. Jordan rose, and his clip-on necktie caught on the key of his top desk-drawer, yanking the tie from his shirt collar. He leaned on his big oak desk and shouted, “What do you think this is?! Your birthday?!!”

“Yup.”

I reached into my lunch bag.

“Do you and Mrs. Brown want some lilacs?”

The Butch

2009-10-08T01:39:00.000-04:00

My years in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades of grammar school at St. Joseph's, were the worst years in my life, and I have spent at least thirty more years of independence trying to make up for those three formative years robbed of my youth. Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that I have much of the preteen still embedded in me.

Sister Janet was our fourth grade teacher, and I have the mis-notion of what her age might have been, but, trying to uncloud what was my youthfully skewed mind as to the age of adults, I figure she could not have been over thirty. She was oppressive and sexist, and compared to few other students in our class of about 36, she truly had it in for me. She, however, picked on all the boys in our class in one mocking way or another, sometimes with truly good humor, more often with embarrassing sexual overtones. Carrying the rudimentary nuggets of what I know of womankind today, I have no doubt that she had her worst days when she was menstruating, and that what she really needed was a good, long, satisfying fuck.

She mostly ignored the girls in the class and almost daily set upon the boys. There were a few "cool" boys in our class, and she would rib them in a jocular tone; although, they too were subject to her front-and-center stabs at humiliation.

If a boy had his shirt untucked, she would pull him to the front of the class, unbuckle his belt, unsnap his pants, unzip his fly, tuck in his shirt, and do him back up again. The girls tittered, and the rest of us boys, you'd think, would have gotten the message, yet this process happened many times after recess.

During the winter, there were snowbanks to play in. She warned us that if we came back in from the schoolyard with wet, snowy pants, that they would come off and be hung on the radiator to dry. Pity the boy who sat red-faced, staring at the floor in his long-johns or, God-forbid, his underwear. Most of us wore two pairs of pants at a time, lest our recess shenanigans would have that terror befall us. Many boys, many a time were down to one pair; damn if the slush leaked through them both. Michael Malia, one of the "cool" boys, one winter morning, had his pants stripped off and sat, boots on, chin up, in his tighty whities, and Sister Janet fairly blushed and beamed at his unashamedness.

To this day, as back then, I keep a messy desk. Several times, this met Sister Janet's wrath. I clearly remember a few mornings walking into the classroom with the feeling that today was actually a good, new day and then seeing the contents of my desk in a pile on the floor, and my desk next to hers at the front of the class. Before the "Pledge of Allegiance," I was to pick up my books and papers, pens and pencils, ruler and eraser from the floor, neatly arrange them into my desk, and spend the rest of the day next to her, facing the class. Titters all around. That smartass bitch; I raised my hand all day and gave her every right answer that everybody in the class didn't know. I'm sure that didn't help my relationship with her. When the bell rang to let us out, I would carry my desk back to its spot, and, as I remember, Maria Taliento would help me, blushing.

At one point during that school year, there was some scandal or another about corporal punishment in public schools, and some ACLU people or parent group had it outlawed. Ours being a Catholic school, we were above the laws of mercy, tolerance, and compassion, so we were, all in our school, handed permission slips to be signed by our parents, to allow the nuns to continue to hit us. I brought mine home, sure that my mom wouldn't sign it. Surely, she didn't want them doing that. She and my dad had exclusive smacking rights. Her response, as she signed the slip of paper was, "I hope they sock it to ya!" A line from "Laugh-In." I carried that slip back to school and dutifully placed it on Sister Janet's desk. I felt all alone.

I had two very close friends in those terrible years, Patrick Keeley and Angelo Mazzone. Patrick, pale, freckled, and obviously Irish, was probably the smartest kid in the class (I was probably second among the boys.), and Angelo was squat and exuberant and wanted to be a policeman. We were imaginative and inseparable. They told me great stories of their summer vacations and adventures with older sisters and brothers, and I made up tall tales of speedboats and Corvettes that had no basis in reality, because my life seemed so dull in comparison. I guess they were good stories, and they were never questioned.

One day, after the recess bell rang, the three of us were being rambunctious, and Sister Frances Claire, the fifth grade teacher, grabbed me by the ear and pulled me up the stairs to Sister Janet's fourth grade room, Patrick and Angelo meekly following. She told Sister Janet that if we thought we were so smart, we'd spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs in the fifth grade class. Sister Janet curtly smirked at us and said that would be fine with her. The three of us were introduced to the class of older kids to a round of laughter, and we got seats in front of the class. It was time for English, and Sister Frances Claire asked what is a diphthong. Her class went silent. I looked around, and all of her students were trying to avoid her gaze. Time stopped. I hesitantly put up my hand. She cocked her head and said, "Michael?"
"It's when you have two vowels next to each other that make one sound together, like 'around.'"

Patrick and Angelo's eyes were like dinner plates.

"That's right", she said, "Anyone else?"

Their hands poking the air, the fifth grade class exploded with answers now that the convict had broken the ice. We had Sister Francis Claire the following year, and hard-assed as she could be, I think that bold move softened her attitude toward all three of us when we got there.

At the end of my fourth grade year, as the trees bud and bloom, wet, snowy pants become grass-stained, and the bugs come out, I did something stupid. My parents called it "bad" and"wrong," and I can't, for the life of me, remember what it was (breaking a window? playing with matches?). Whatever it was, it was to be punished with the final humiliation of that fourth grade. Instead of waiting for school to let out before they did it, my parents sent me to the barber to get "the Butch."

I believe that the term "the Butch" comes from "the butcher," and it is a crew cut with a waxed-up front. It was a rite of summer, and, because it was so embarrassing, especially as this was the beginning of the 1970s, the days of long hair, my parents would mercifully let me get the Butch after school let out. Not this year. Whatever I had done warranted getting my hair lopped off and spending the last week of school, downcast, among my classmates, all of them knowing that I was being punished.

I went to school on Monday of the final week, staring at the ground, and it was a beautiful Spring day. I remember the lilacs. Patrick Keeley and Angelo Mazzone met me and they said the buzz job was alright, and I said no, it wasn't. I felt like hell. I was the only bald kid in the class. And buck teeth besides. Sister Janet's eyes sparkled; it was punishment that she didn't even have to mete out. My parents agreed with what she thought I deserved. At the end of the day I skulked home.

I got to school on Tuesday morning and both Patrick and Angelo ran up to me, and I'll be God-damned if both of them hadn't each had their hair shorn off. They had both gotten a Butch! To this day, it mystifies me how two nine year-old boys would conspire to such solidarity for a friend. Their act - they must have each asked their parents to bring them to the barber after school - still, to me, defines friendship, to share a friend's humiliation in an act of unity and defiance of convention. If one of us was not going to be "cool," we would all not be cool together, and it did not matter what anyone thought. We were friends, and everyone could see it.

I wonder what Sister Janet thought of that.

Trilingual Pets

2009-08-28T02:40:00.000-04:00

I speak very little French nowadays. I studied the language for about nine years in the Great State of Maine as a child and as a teenager. My accent got good, as I am a fair mimic, and my French grammar, as with my English, was learned as much through my knuckles as it was through my noggin. Given two weeks in France, people think that, partly because of my size XL nose, I am a native.

I do not speak French to Puck.

Puck, my dog, grew up in New York City, as I did not. I lived in Spain for a few years as Puck did not; however, having lived in Madrid and on the Island of Majorca, I returned to the USA, years before Puck was born, with but a rudimentary knowledge of the Spanish (less so, Majorquin) tongue. My friends overseas were either American or British, or they were Spaniards who wished to learn American vernacular. I studied the Spanish language while I lived there, but, in large part due to my own laziness, I lapsed. Hell, I taught English while I was there to people who insisted that I not speak Spanish during the lessons. There is another aspect that displaced Americans and foreign Europeans – Dutch, German, Irish, English, Belgian - found it a relief to speak English to somebody, anybody.
When I returned to the USA, I found that my fledgling knowledge of Spanish helped a true communication with the people who work in bodegas and elsewhere in the service industry. That I tried to communicate in Spanish made many daily acquaintances pleasurable and entertaining. I helped them out with their questions about English, and they were happy to oblige my grammatical queries. I would ask (and still do) a Dominican counter person or a Columbian waitress, for instance, what is the difference between a certain phrase in Castellano, versus the same in South American or Caribbean Spanish.

I do not speak Japanese, but, in a Pavlovian manner, I enjoy learning things which appeal to me. So does Puck.
The Raunch Hands played a short tour of Japan, again, long before Puck’s birth, and our entourage – and please do not diminish the exact meaning of that term – referred to me consistently as “gitchee guy.” “Tsandra-san” was another moniker, but I understood that one (“Chandler, sir”). I asked what is the meaning of the word “gitchee,” and I was told that it means “cool and crazy;” although, they said “clazy.” I translate the term to mean “nutty.” “Gitchee guy” also pairs up with “gitchee gar,” meaning, “gitchee girl,” so the idiom is not gender-exclusive. I selectively learned that term, and “arrigato,” as my only Japanese words.

Now back to little Puck, the eternal puppy.

Certainly, he is not little; however, I think of him as such, and that is a defining element in our man-to-dog relationship. In our early days, I gave him a ham bone, which he promptly took into his mom’s (my girlfriend’s) bed. I scolded him, and I tried to take that bone away, to bring it into a drool-proof environ. I know, now, what Siegfried and Roy dealt with daily. Puck bared his teeth and lashed out at me with same. I was frightened, but I realized that I had to put him in his place. I yelled at him in the way that I reserve for the microphone in a rhythm & blues performance, and my howl, though much out of fear, beat him down. I felt like a lion. He unequivocally understood what I meant, and not only did he drop the ham bone, but he perceived, in no uncertain terms, who was his master. That instance changed our relationship.
Certainly, Puck responds to the sound of my voice, as much as he recognizes my scent... umm, as, admittedly, I do his; however, we refer here to language. When I use the words, “walk,” “food," “treat,” “ball,” or “beach,”, Puck knows exactly to which I refer, and he is a ready dog. When I tell him, as his affirmed master, to “stay” or to “behave,” words which he very well knows, he makes a decision.
Puck is trilingual, and there are no three ways about it. Not only does he know the above English words, but he responds well to “enough,” and the phrase, “knock it off!” When we walk together, he knows the Spanish terms “vete” and “venga” and “basta,” and, I hope he finds endearing the term “idiota,” which he hears from time to time when he would, and does think he should, “walk,” when to a person who is lucidly aware of rapidly moving automobiles and who is not color blind and who, by the way, is holding the leash, knows better.
Happiest of all languages that little Puck understands, is my microscopic knowledge of Japanese. When I call him “gitchee guy,” he knows exactly what I mean. When I call him by his name, in whatever tone, to him, it could really mean anything, “Wanna Treat?” “Wanna ball?” “Wanna go to the veterinarian?” etc. When I call him “gitchee,” in any circumstance, will he follow proper direction, but he, under more comfortable, domestic conditions, happily, obediently, soundly, plunks his big, furry, black head on my chest. Those eyes, that sighing breath...

65-pound little Puck, indeed trilingual, is cool and crazy.

The rock 'n' roll element.

Near-Death Experiences Part ll

2009-07-28T05:32:00.001-04:00

I have spoken of the railroad tracks and my fascination with them. I have always kept far from oncoming trains. To pedestrians, they are imminent death. Wanna do it? That is one way. From 1979 to 1980 I attended Fordham University in the Bronx, as long as they could stand to take my money, and I gave them a run for it. Running alongside our dormitories was the ConRail Westchester line. The easiest way over the tracks was a skinny, wooden pedestrian trestle. I think if you were to hang your legs over the side of the trestle, the tops of the diesel trains would have taken your feet off at the ankles. The trains came from Manhattan, at that spot, on an incline, and the triple engine locomotives roared to get out of town. I learned the schedules, and I would sit, cross-legged on that walking bridge, waiting for diesel locomotives to pass inches below. As they did, the enormous topside exhausts blew my hair and shirt up. I learned the feeling of being blown away by a train, and that feeling was liberating.

A year and a half later, I moved to New York City for good and true. I had just gotten my job at the ostensible “bookie joint,” and after a long day, got a fair wad of cash. I was walking across town to have a few beers with my new co-workers, and I was on a dark street. I heard running footsteps behind me, and I turned around. The man ran past me, and I thought everything was okay. Ten yards ahead of me, he stopped and turned, walking, back toward me. A hand plopped onto my shoulder, and there were three guys behind me. There was a handgun shoved into my back, and they told me to be quiet. They all four surrounded me, and two of them rifled my pockets. Of course they took my money, and they took my wallet, which contained nothing else of interest to them. They stole my phonebook, they stole half a pack of Kool non-filters. They stole my fucking matches. As they were about to run away, the one with the gun demanded, “Are you gonna yell when we leave?”
I trembled, “Oh, no. Oh, no, no sir.”
One of the other guys shouted in my ear, “Yes he is! Let’s kill him. Let’s just fuckin’ shoot him.” My knees went weak.
“Oh man, please don’t,” was my meek reply.
“Yeah, come on, fuckin’ shoot him!”
They looked at each other, dropped their shoulders, and all four darted off. I met my friends at the bar nearby, and I don’t know that I have ever needed a beer more than at that moment.

The second time I was mugged at gunpoint, I was walking home at about 4:30 AM with my short-time roommate, Carlo. We were sharing a sublet near Avenue C, and we were both finishing work at Club 57. The tips we had made that night didn’t stack up to more than seven dollars apiece. As we neared our tenement, two kids ran across the street towards us, one of them shamelessly brandishing what was either a .357 or a .44 blue/black Magnum. It was freezing outside, and the kid stuck it in Carlo’s neck. They shoved us into the ante way of what they didn’t know was our building. They thought we were in that desolate spot to buy drugs. I know that they wanted to get us off the street to cover the hold-up, but I am sure that half the reason they brought us into the building was that it was about ten degrees below zero outside, and they wanted to keep warm during the robbery. The barrel of that gun was nothing less than awesome. They took our meager cash, and Carlo and I kept our wallets, phonebooks, cigarettes, a bag of pot – and our matches.

When I am a drinker, I am a provider, and at the onset of the Raunch Hands, I had a good job at the “bookie joint,” so I would buy the beer for the band at our rehearsals. We rehearsed in Staten Island, and often, instead of taking the ferry, Mike Mariconda and I would meet our drummer, Vince, in Hoboken, and Vince would drive us over the Goethals Bridge to rehearsal. In those days, Vince would become either quite angry or quite silly when he drank. He had a few at rehearsal one night, and Mike and I got in the car with him. Drunk driving laws were not so stringent back then. It was snowing to become a blizzard. Vince was silly, and he drove that way. He was swishing fishtails across the Goethals and along into New Jersey. Both Mike and I nervously warned him to quit it, but Vince was in his cups, and he said he knew what he was doing, and he made more treacherous swerves in the heavy snow. There was very little traffic on the road, except for the bold or foolish.

Routes 1 and 9 arrive in Hoboken off the Pulaski Skyway, and it is a high approach. We were in Vince’s silver 1971 Chevy Nova, a fairly heavy automobile. Vince laughed heartily as he did another fishtail, coming down off the Skyway. He lost control of the swerve just as the car hit a patch of snowless pavement where the tires caught, sending us at a straight line across three traffic lanes toward the bridge abutment. When your life is in danger, everything slows down. That Nova did not. I looked at the speedometer; it read 45 miles per hour. I looked into the window of a sixth-floor apartment that was dead ahead of us. The abutment was about three feet tall, and I knew that if it collapsed under the weight of our car, we could not be saved. We bounced off the short wall, and the bumper sliced open one of the front tires. The radiator burst. Mike and I had to push it the rest of the way down the ramp, across some bare railroad tracks (a nightmare, in the snow) and into a parking lot. Vince was hardly even embarrassed. Mike and I walked to the Hotel Victor, soaked to the skin, and got hammered on 35-cent Schmidt’s draught beer with the old men.

A few years later, the Raunch Hands were on the road in London, Ontario, Canada. We were being driven by The Real Neil Meal Deal (Neil Vickers-Harris), and we were traveling with our buddy Rob, from Toronto, who habitually came along for our entire Canadian tours. We had heard of a party after the show and, of course, went to find it. We found the street, and the Raunch Hands galloped off to the house. I stayed in the van for several minutes to jaw with Neil and Rob. They went to find the party, and I lingered, I guess, smoking a hash joint and drinking an excellent Canadian beer, of which we used to buy cases – not to share with the hoi polloi. Well, I had the address of the party, but those screwy Canadians hadn’t done their streets like we do them here. There were even numbered and odd numbered homes on the same side of the street. Between houses, there were ten-digit skips. I looked all up and down that damn block, and no place exhibited a party. I was damn good at finding them too. There were lights on in the top apartment of a three-family home. I rang the bell and got no response. I walked to the backyard and there were porches on every floor, and I peered up, but I couldn’t tell if that was where the party was. I rang the front doorbell again, and received no response. I went around to the back, but there was no way up to the third floor. I went back to the front of the house, and there was a guy, about my age, standing on the porch. It looked like he had his hands in his back pockets. He asked me what I wanted, and I asked him if there was a party upstairs. I was astonished when he pulled a rifle from behind his back and leveled it between my eyes. I know my .22s from my Mossbergs, and I believe this was a Winchester. The barrel was about eight inches from my face, and the guy cocked the gun and asked me what the fuck I wanted. I told him that I was from America and that I was only looking for my friends and the party. He wasn’t buying. He told me I had better get out of there and poked me in the sternum with the barrel. I hastily obliged. I eventually found the “party,” and it was a madhouse. There was a nearly empty keg, the Raunch Hands, and maybe a dozen shitfaced Canadians. One guy had a flirty girlfriend, and he was being repeatedly pounded in the face by some guy she was coming on to. Both were very loaded, and when one would get weary of punching, the other would start pummeling back, until he had to stop. It was a ridiculous, lugubrious fight, and I watched for about ten minutes until one guy got his head smashed through the window of the storm door in front. The Raunch Hands left, and we never returned to London, Ontario.

I am sure there have been other near-death experiences in my past, but these posted are elemental. Although I am an alcohol and drug abuser, those incidents have not yet been caused, on my part, by alcohol or drugs; although, many times on them or afterward, I have wanted to die.

The rock 'n' roll element

Guitar

2009-07-28T01:50:00.000-04:00

Whenever I see someone smash a guitar, I see someone who does not love music. I was walking down LaGuardia Place one day, and I saw three men, in the demolition phase of an apartment renovation, and they were flipping a beautiful art deco piano down the brownstone stoop, in the process, destroying it. Further, they humped it into a garbage truck and crushed it. My jaw dropped, and I could not look away. It was preposterous. I felt as though I was watching an execution, a slaughter.

I have seen "fine art" painters who have slashed their own canvasses. Would one think that I, if I were to be a fine artist in the field of stained glass, would smash my own work? Do you think that either Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would destroy his own piano. Have you ever seen Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley or Hound Dog Taylor or John Lennon smash a guitar on stage? They never needed to do that.

That is not rock 'n' roll.

Where I come from, musical instruments are regarded as sacred. We use them so that you, in the audience, may feel something. Maybe I wish to send you angry chords and angrier lyrics. I do not get on stage to send you shards of wood.

Very truly,

The rock 'n' roll element

Near-Death Experiences Part l

2009-07-25T02:58:00.000-04:00

As far as what I did or did not know about death, as a child, I experienced a few circumstances of what could have ultimately been. Since then, I have been in situations with handguns, rifles, drunken drivers, muggers, hard narcotics, and seemingly accidental circumstances which have brought me as close to my Maker as He will charitably allow.

Have you ever sniffed up a line of rat poison? How about a bag of Ajax that you just had to have? If so, would you admit this to your loved ones? When I was about four years old, I snorted up a whole salted Spanish peanut. It got way the hell up there, and I got an infection in my sinuses that made my nose and ears bleed profusely. As a four year-old, it was hard to admit, finally to my adults, what I had done up my nose... It required an operation, which, I suppose saved my life. I think I got off light. In my twenties, I experienced another, more harrowing, death-defying food experience from someone other than myself; a guy at a barbeque in Tennessee fell backwards, drunk, off an outdoor bench, onto a glass pickle jar; the jar smashed, a shard piercing one of his kidneys. You want to talk about ants or rain spoiling the picnic? How about Emergency Medical Services?

It wasn’t but a year or so after the peanut incident that I jumped into a swimming pool, for the heck of it, at a motel on a family vacation. To this day, as then, I swim like a pebble. I remember looking at the bottom of the pool and looking up through the water, which I was breathing, at the refracted rays of the sun. I was relaxed, and I suppose I felt confused, but not panicked. My uncle Bill Sitnik swam like a seal over me and plucked me out by my shoulders. I was not embarrassed by the worried response of my adults. It was one of those things I did.

When I was about seven, now in Portland, Maine, I was on my way to school, and I was not paying attention while crossing the street. I don’t suppose I had the light, and a car screeched to a halt, inches from clapping me to the pavement. The driver blasted his horn in guilty, frustrated fury. My wrist stung from where the car’s grille had rapped it, and I ran away, scared as hell, across the intersection. Quite an intersection it was. It was known (and still is, as far as I know) as Morrill’s Corner. It was home to The Brass Rail, a hard bar where I saw my very first bullet hole in a window. A few months after the personal bounce with the Ford Town & Country station wagon, I was walking home from school, regularly, crossing toward The Brass Rail; figure that this was about three-thirty in the afternoon. As soon as I crossed Forest Avenue and got onto the sidewalk in front of the bar, a man in a Fox Lumber uniform stumbled out. Fox Lumber was just the other side of the railroad tracks from there. The man was white-haired, balding, red-faced and short. He had to have been in his sixties. He was reeling drunk. He had a handsaw in his hand, and I caught his attention.

“I’m gonna saw your head off,” he slurred, and he stood so not to let me pass.
“Oh, no you’re not,” I gave him and went to take the circuitous route around him, streetside.
He blocked me, I, wearing a Catholic school tie and hauling my damn bookbag.

He growled, “I’m gonna saw your head off.”

Fear crept into my voice. “Oh no you’re not.”

“Oh yes I am! I’m gonna saw your head off!”

I darted one way and the other, but this drunken little man expected each move I made to get past. He laughed a hearty drunken laugh and said again, “I’m gonna saw your head off!”

What an adversary! I was trembling. I could not imagine, in any capacity (pun intended), what was going to happen to me in that moment. There was a grassy alleyway next to The Brass Rail, and I had never dared to explore it; it led to Hell. Would he drag me down there to kill me? To saw my head off?

“Oh no you’re not,” I quavered.

“Oh yes I am!”

From above my shoulders, in a deep voice, came the words, “Oh, no you’re not.”

I turned my chin straight up, and I saw a cop, a glimmering Police Officer. He was staring down the guy from Fox Lumber who had the saw. He told me to get home, and I did not look back. I have never, before or since, seen a cop walking a beat anywhere near Morrill’s corner. The only guys around there with guns – and saws - were always in The Brass Rail.

The rock 'n roll element

First Date

2009-07-16T02:03:00.000-04:00

I do not usually divulge people’s real names here, but in this case, I will, because there were no shenanigans. My first-ever girlfriend was Leah Salvatore.

I attended St. Joseph School in Portland, Maine, from when I was admitted at age seven, until I finished their eighth and final grade. Our classes were small, less than thirty students, and you have no choice but to become familial with your classmates. Hell, you’re growing up with them. I had many crushes on girls throughout our childhood together, but those girls were like cousins to me, or they were unattainable. Katie Goulden was like the Statue of Liberty; what a prize she must have become. She was an easy comparison to Maureen O’Hara. Carolyn Steinhagen arrived in about the sixth grade, and she was a bad girl. She smoked cigarettes, and on “dress down day,” she wore overalls that you could see her underwear. Theresa Knaupp was one of the most fascinating and intelligent young girls one would ever want to meet. In boyhood, many of us are preoccupied with war, World War Two in particular. Theresa Knaupp, at age thirteen, upped all of us boys by submitting and reading aloud a biographical report she had written on Adolph Hitler. I believe she was looking through us boys, and her report was concise and honest, as much as any newspaper article I read these days. She sure was pretty.

We had school dances at St. Joseph’s, reserved for seventh- and eighth-graders, and I danced with every girl in both of those classes, bar none; I held every single one in my arms.

When I was about thirteen years old, my dad yapped at me about “what was I doing with my life?” I got pissed off at him, and I picked up the wildly, negatively-life-changing paper route; I started running with a cross-country team, running, another futile endeavor; I was already an altar boy, and I competed in spelling bees, but significantly, I also joined the Sea Scouts (then known as the Sea Explorers). In his youth, my dad had been one, and it made him proud to see me in the same place. I cannot say enough about having been in that organization. Boy Scouts had to carry packs on arduous hikes. I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, and I was allowed to pilot a six-ton 35-foot craft with twin diesel engines and get the crew home safely. I worked bow watch on that boat and plowed through swells that were about to break six feet over my teenaged head, and I am among the world’s worst swimmers. I beat Navy and Coast Guard crusties at the pool table. What a thrill! Ever swab a bilge? Experience it once.

There were girls in the Sea Scouts, and our crew was enlisted by Portland policeman, Officer Treffery. He was truly a recruiter, and many of the boys and girls he got to be in our crew were kids he wanted to get off the street corners and out of broken homes. I like the bad girls, the lonely girls, and, in the Sea Scouts, they pervaded. Although I thought we were aligned, the ones I liked were having little to do with my youthful attentions.

We were going to have a dance, of which we had several, and at age thirteen, I felt I ought to bring a date. I looked, subversively, for someone to ask, and she was not to be from my eighth-grade class. I surely could not ask an eleven year-old sixth-grader out on a date, so it was to be the female representation of the seventh grade. Here was Leah Salvatore. She was blond-haired and brown-eyed, which is like the combination of opiates and alcohol to me. Her lips were full and very red, and they twisted up like you see in portraits of 18th Century French or Russian royalty. She lived directly across the street from the school where there was a chain link fence and a gate. Of a morning, when the gate was locked - and I can still see her breath in the winter days - she would hop that six-foot fence like it did not exist. She would land, poised, on her toes, and I wonder if she ever knew I was watching.

Well, I was, and it was she that I decided to ask out on my first date. About a week or so before the Sea Scout dance, I got up the damn nerve. It wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t ask, and I knew where to meet her as she cut through the schoolyard at the end of the day. We eighth-graders got out a few minutes before the rest of the school, and I waited and fretted. I was also waiting on my brother, Patrick, a first-grader and my charge for the walk home.

As much as I was a first-timer at asking a girl to go to a dance with me, Leah must have been at least as taken aback. Besides the cousinly dances, my asking her attention was maybe the first time we had really spoken. I looked her in the eye, and the bell rang for all the little kids to get out of school. Patrick ran out and said he wanted to go home. I told him, “in a minute,” and tried not to stammer to Leah Salvatore. Patrick started, again and again, kicking me in the ass and smacking me with his lunchbox, and I put on a brave face and asked her out, repeatedly being kicked and smacked by my brother...

She said yes.

The parents happened next. Of course, being a youngster, Leah told her mom and dad (proudly, I hope) that a boy had asked her out. Portland, Maine, at the time, was a town of only about 60,000 people, and my Catholic enclave was divided into about five parishes. Rarely could any family elude the grapevine. Our telephone number was in the book, and it wasn’t an hour and a half before Mrs. Salvatore’s call came in, wondering what the hell was I doing, asking out her daughter? In one of the most stunning elements of my experience with adults, both my mom and Leah’s decided that the dance would be alright. Young, or too young, or not, it’s what people did. Leah and I went to that Sea Scout dance, and she really was my date, and I felt big, because everybody else, older teenagers, boys and girls alike, even the bosuns, arrived stag.

After some time at the dance, I walked with her out to the pier, to show her our boats. There was the aforementioned cabin cruiser (made of steel, constructed in Holland), a wildly heavy dory that actually held a state license number in spite of the fact that we only ever rowed it, and a Korean War surplus rubber raft with a kick-ass Mercury outboard motor. I wanted to kiss Leah, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to hold her hand, and I was very unsure of that. My palms were sweaty, and my voice, although I remember confidence in what I was talking about, felt like it was coming from another person. I did not hold her hand, and I did not kiss her. It’s funny that I had no qualms about wrapping my arms around her waist when we danced later to those terrible 1970s slow numbers. She laid her head on my shoulder, and at my young age, I felt like a real person.

In my early rock ‘n’ roll career, I was much maligned for portraying a misogynistic attitude. I knew what I was doing, and I was making cynical fun of rednecks. Some people were offended. I thought I was being cute and making a statement. The Sam Goody chain banned Raunch Hands records. I have since had several girlfriends who were raped by a boyfriend or a relative when they were in their teens – or younger. I continue to look a girl or a woman in the eye when I would be so bold as to simply hold her hand.

To innocence, Leah,

The rock ‘n’ roll element

Junk

2009-07-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

When I moved to New York City, I had no real idea about heroin and heroin abuse. I am an alcoholic, and seeking out drugs, except for pot, back then, never crossed my mind. I turned 21 years old here, and I don’t think I had ever tried cocaine. I certainly liked pills, and I took them whenever they were available and free of charge. They augmented drinking; they often made a nightly stint in a bar, like after having given blood, far less expensive.

A couple months after my twenty-first birthday, I went to “little Club 57,” at 57 St. Mark’s Place, in Manhattan, for a beer. The staff was painting the place, and they said the bar was closed. I asked if I could help them paint, and they told me to come back the following day, figuring I wouldn’t. I did, and I helped them finish their work over the next few days. They asked if I was able to be a bartender, and I told them if anyone knows anything about alcohol, it is I, what ought to be an enormous detriment in the bartending field. I began tending bar, playing records, and entertaining onstage shortly afterward, and I worked alongside a manager who I will call “Adam Lefkowitz.”

Adam would leave the bar, a bar very slimly attended on most nights, to go “get ice.” He would return several hours later with a story about being mugged, and, so distressed, his chin would soon hit his chest, and he would “fall asleep” in a chair. I swear that guy got mugged about three times a week. Naive as I was, it took a friend to tell me that what Adam was doing was going out to buy heroin, spending the bar’s till and lying about it before he nodded off. Before Adam would pass out, it was sure that he would give me a lecture about how I was drinking up the profits. “So that’s how they do it,” I thought. Adam’s habit led largely to the demise of Club 57, as we were constantly behind in the rent.

A few years later, a friend of mine from Rochester, NY (Rah-Cha-Cha), named King Farouk, was visiting The City, and he overdosed at a friend’s apartment. He was about 26 years old, and I thought of him as an “older” person. The Raunch Hands had visited Rochester many times, and Farouk had been involved with booking our shows, and he and his brothers had put us up in their home regularly. He had taken the whole band and an entourage out to some lakeside property his folks had bought, and we all took turns shooting a shotgun. I found out that I am a terrible shot. When Farouk died, I didn’t really know what to express. I have been around death for much of my life. When I was twelve and thirteen, an altar boy for the church that adjoined my school, I would check the obituaries the previous night to see whether it would be math or English from which I would be excused to serve a funeral. I could get out of doing a bunch of homework by doing five minutes of research in the newspaper. I had also attended many funerals of people far closer to me than of those in the papers I delivered. Irish as I am, I look for the after-party to be like a consolation prize to the human loss, but it rarely is. Farouk’s death seemed senseless and wasteful.

Over time, I learned about heroin and its effects and as a social phenomenon, and many of my questions about other people’s unusual behavior were answered.

The first time I ever had the drug was under false pretenses. The Raunch Hands were about to play a show at the Blue Rose, on the Upper West Side, and I was at the home of a friend, having a few before the set. Another guest, my Dubliner friend, Billy-O asked if I wanted a line. I figured he meant cocaine, and I said, “Sure.” He was playing a prank on me; it was dope, and I performed what I felt was one of my worst shows ever. No matter what you think of Johnny or of Sid or of Billie Holliday, opiates do not enhance a performance. I cried hot tears after that show.

I had a few more trials and errors with dope before I moved to Madrid in the early 1990s. There, one night, I was out and about, and I had some money in my pocket. My girlfriend was an airline stewardess, and she was out of town. I was just knocking around, and I came across someone the Raunch Hands had stayed with in northern Italy. I will call him “Carmello.” I saw Carmello on the street in Malasaña early in the evening, as I was on my way to eat in a delicious pizza restaurant, and I invited him along. We left the restaurant and went to a nearly empty nightclub, early, and I recognized a couple girls there. Carmello, married, took about 15 minutes to whisper into the ear of one of the two girls, a displaced French girl named Anna Maria. Shortly, we were on an easy quest for dope. Drug procured, we all went back to Anna Maria’s place. I was a nasal user, and I was taken aback when Anna Maria gave Carmello a spike of hers to use, which had clearly been used before.

We did up what we had bought, and we sat around, talking, drinking Mahou. After some hours, Carmello wanted more, about which, fundamentally and financially I spoke up, and they laughed me off. Copping is a fun and dangerous part of the process. I did not think it was a good idea, but I went with him and Anna Maria for another round from under the tongue of a Moroccan kid. We went back to her place, and they shot up again, somewhat deriding me for “wasting” the junk up my nose. It is a clear remembrance of mine not wanting to fall asleep, in case either of these two dropped off.

I did fall asleep, and at about 6:30 of that shining Sunday morning, I startled myself awake to find Anna Maria breathing and Carmello not. I slapped his wrists; I slapped his face; I lifted him up and shook him. I shook Anna Maria awake. I felt Carmello’s pulse, and it was waning. He was still warm, and he hadn’t had the courtesy to turn blue. Anna Maria lived in a pension, a place where she lived with many other women and from which she could, with overnight “gentlemen” guests, get kicked out. Almost nurse-like, she advised me to get Carmello down the stairs, and she would call an ambulance. True to Spanish form, the only phone was outside in the hallway.

Have you ever lifted a dead body? It does not matter the person’s height or weight. It is different from the person who is merely passed out. Gangly limbs go in all directions, and there is nothing but heft. I ratcheted Carmello’s body down the wide spiral staircase of Anna Maria’s pension, sweating, cursing. How could this fucker die on my watch? I made much noise coming down the stairs with him slung over my back. I didn’t care about Anna Maria’s station; I wanted as much help as I could get. I was staring up into the glinty, dusty, morning rays through the spiral staircase, a dead man in my arms, with my abysmal Spanish, yelling, “Dame alguien!” Three or four women appeared over the cylindrical railing, and one who spoke some English called, over and over, “He is only sleeping. He is only sleeping.” I got Carmello out onto the sidewalk in quiet, brilliant, Madrid Sunday sunshine. Anna Maria dressed and ran downstairs. I had no papers to be in Spain legally, so she told me I ought to get out of there, but I would not leave Carmello on the street; I waited for the ambulance with some element of hope. When the ambulance team arrived, they didn’t even try. They felt under his chin and then they looked at me and then they looked at the ground. Carmello was gone, and we all knew it. Anna Maria wasn’t coming back down, and I surely couldn’t stick around, so I left Carmello in the hands of the emergency crew; although, it was certainly no longer an emergency.

I wonder if, on that bright, Sunday summer morning, I have ever felt worse in my life.

Junk is not, and never will be,

The rock ‘n’ roll element

"Meat Market"

2009-07-09T00:33:00.000-04:00

I live on the cusp of the former “meat packing district” in New York City. No meat is packed around there anymore. Well that isn’t true; plenty of modeling agencies and discotheques and nightclubs where the “minimum” for a tabled bottle of Stolichnaya is $300, have replaced the wholesale butchers. The new establishments absolutely pack their share of meat. On the West Side Highway, the exits at 14th and 16th Streets read: “Meat Market,” an irony that I believe is intentional by the public works people.

In the 1970s, the meat packing district was home to empty semi-truck trailers, where the term “anonymous sex” among the homosexual community, outside the bath houses, really began. You could look it up or watch the movie, “Cruising.” The spread of AIDS took a wild toll there. The “Triangle Building” in the district, in the 1980s, was also home to the Hellfire Club, a later-period, infamous S&M and bondage joint, replete with an array of bathtubs used for “personal” defecation. They also had floor shows and floor shackles.

The debauchery continues today, with sex now being the undercard to money-worship. People come nightly from at least three states (New York environs, New Jersey, and Connecticut) to wait in lines to pay outrageous amounts of money for entry to these nightclubs and to, henceforth, fall down in or throw up on their Chanel dresses, Brooks Brothers suits, and my block. I guess that's what they call, "being noticed." Parking in my neighborhood is a nightmare every night of the week, and people fight over spaces. If your parked BMW, Mercedes, or Cadillac SUV needs constant attention, and its alarm and horn need to start loudly sounding every time a truck or a Harley Davidson motorcycle drives past it, then, please don’t leave it alone. Its alarm makes me as sick as you get when you are doing as the Romans did in their luxurious vomitoriums.

When I first came to the West Village of Manhattan in the early 1980s, I met people who had grown up there. They had played ball in the streets; they had met characters that you now see represented in cinema; they had opened businesses that then catered to their neighborhood’s needs. There were “mom & pop” stores and restaurants. I entertained a visitor from Atlanta, GA a few years back and, off the top of my head, remarked, “There used to be families around here, but now it’s just yuppies with babies.” There is a significant difference between the two elements.

As well as the yuppies, there is a preponderance of fashion models in my neighborhood. You notice them, because they are too skinny and coltish – they comport themselves on dietetically spindly legs – and, although beautiful and clad in state-of -the-fashion clothes, they are never smiling... ever. At night, there remain vestiges of the late 1970s and early 1980s. If you see, of a late night, a stunning young black woman in stilettos and a stole, you may be in for a big surprise when that individual accompanies you back to your overpriced “Meat Market” hotel room, of which there are plenty, for just such romps. Most of those black angels are men, and those men have a tendency to kick the actual female prostitutes off the block.

I might complain of the other residents of my purported “neighborhood,” but I am sure that they don’t like the looks of me either. I find myself to be one of the last remaining bohemians in New York City’s Greenwich Village, once regarded, and renown, for such outsiders. I see some others who were part of the Village in its heyday, long before I ever arrived, and they appear haggard and beaten down, not from their outsider’s lifestyle, but from what I would perceive, constantly swimming against the tide of money, from the true outsiders.

The rock 'n' roll element

Punch Line: I've Got My Bag On!!

2009-07-02T01:54:00.000-04:00

Whit has been my friend for many years. He has a semi-ex-wife and many grown children. He comes to New York City from his upstate town occasionally, and we find ourselves in one another's environs at some of his visits. When I see him at a nightclub, he is pleasant company, and he is about as polite a drunk as I ever have been. It's often too late for him to get a train back to his upstate home, so I am able, sometimes under duress, to put him up at my place.

One night, after a King Khan & BBQ show at Don Pedro, Whit was jolting around on his feet and asked if I would let him stay my place. I told him yes, if he would not keep calling out from the other room with drunken questions, which he has a habit, albeit forgivable, to do.

As it is with many drunk friends on many nights, it was very difficult to get him to say good-bye to everyone at the nightclub, and it was no easy task to get him into my car for the ride back to Manhattan. He got in and I started the car. He was wearing a bicycle messenger's shoulder bag, and he is, put charitably, portly, so he had to awkwardly wriggle into the bucket seat. I snapped on my seat belt and told him to do the same.

He squirmed about, trying several times, five, six, seven, to get the shoulder restraint across his body but could not. I told him we were not going anywhere until he put on the damn seat belt, and he tried again, fumbling with it over the messenger bag's strap across his chest. It's strap looked like it could have been the car's shoulder restraint.

Loaded and frustrated, he said, "Yeah, but I've got my bag on."

I said, "I know you got your 'bag on,' but you still have to wear your seat belt!"

Don't feed me a frickin' straight line.

the rock 'n' roll element

Night and Day: "The Music of Your Life"

2009-07-01T07:16:00.000-04:00

I don’t remember how I was introduced to Clammy, and I don’t think we hit it off immediately. We eventually did, and we developed a close, formative friendship in our late teens. It was not necessarily a productive friendship in the short run, and I must say that it was a destructive friendship on the part of other people’s property.

We were punk rockers at the turn of the decade into the 1980s, and, as far as Portland, Maine went, we had the run of the joint. There was the amazing Downtown Lounge, which presented Lou Miami & The Kozmetix, some of the first Lyres shows, Pastiche, The Neighborhoods, La Peste, Mission of Burma, The Outlets, and many non-Boston bands like the Slickee Boys and The Rattlers.

There was a community among the DTL (as it was known) patrons, but there were schisms as well. Clammy and I traveled freely among the various tribes, but we sincerely allied with none but ourselves. Tim Warren, future founder of Crypt Records is a person that I met there as he played deejay, another brotherly person in my life. The DTL, however, was only open a couple nights a week, and Clammy and I were, the rest of the time, starved for beer and our own live entertainment. We did quite well on both counts.

Kids, if you are too young to get served booze, go to the homosexual bars. They will be pleased to see you there and will be friendly. I was old enough to drink, and Clammy wasn’t, but Clammy, his girlfriend, Adrianna, and I could always get a beer or a devastating Kitty Carlisle at a bar or discotheque in the then-burgeoning Portland gay scene. We also, Clammy and I, spent much time playing pinball in the suburbs where we lived. Clammy went to vocational school and had a friend whose mom was an ambulance attendant, and that friend would provide us with scores of unidentified pills. Adrianna’s dad was a doctor, so she had a Physician’s Desk Reference, and she would find out what we had. If a pill was tagged not to take with alcohol, we knew it was a good one and, of course, drank on it. I remember our finding the last of some Abbott depressant and wondering how to split the capsule. I dumped some out on the pinball machine to snort and gave the re-closed cap back to Clammy to eat. I rolled up a dollar bill and sniffed my half. It was like putting molten lava up my nose. I thought my face was going to fall off.

When we were “visiting,” we weren’t simply satisfied with making beer and alcohol vanish. You, personally, did not want to invite us to your home; although, many people did. Their homes became our homes as well, and we took many liberties with petty cash, medicine cabinets, recreation rooms, laundry areas and teenaged daughters. Strangely, I guess, we were affable enough to be invited back, time and again, to places we had wrecked.

On the street, we were no better behaved. In the winter, in Maine, one has to keep busy to keep from getting too cold; once Clammy and I started to “keep busy,” we kept it up throughout the rest of the year as well. People often did not lock their cars back then, and their coins for tolls became abundant beer money. FM converters became literal “hot” items for us. I remember someone hurrying out of their house after me one night; I ran, and a few blocks away I smacked into a telephone pole’s guy wire. I had a red stripe across my chest for a week. It was about 2am, and, as usual, I was wearing sunglasses.

I was also wearing an earplug connected to a transistor radio. In those days, in Maine, radio was abysmal, and there was no such thing as a Walkman. Clammy and I took to listening to an AM radio format called “The Music of Your Life,” hits from the 1920s through the 1950s. At home, we listened to Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Dead Kennedys, 999, and others, but out and about, it would be Rudy Vallee, Nat Cole, Jo Stafford, Frankie Laine, Vaughan Monroe, et alia. Portlanders still don’t know that a large amount of their early-1980s graffiti was sprayed to the tune of pre-war Frank Sinatra.

The “music of our life” was never so evocative as late one night when we, Clammy, Adrianna and I, decided to go for a clandestine swim in the Kiwanis pool. The entrance was shut, and we climbed the 9-foot fence to get in, stripped to our underwear and splashed and swam around. After about a half an hour, a carload of drunken rednecks pulled up with the same idea, but they saw us in there, and they changed their plan. They wanted to kick the shit out of us. You want to be the fish in the bowl, staring at the cat? There was a nine-foot chain link fence; the only place to escape was to climb out to where those loaded jackasses already were, and we were in our underwear. We had a radio playing, I’ll never forget, “The Jones Girl,” by the Mills Brothers. I didn’t want to die to that song. That carload of morons were so drunk that they couldn’t get up the fence. Thinking about it, I don’t know that they tried to climb it like we had, but they tried to lift it up to crawl under. I thought we had had it until one kid, holding the bottom of the fence up for his drunken buddy, let it slip out, putting a gash in the guy’s neck. They all gave up, staggering back to their car, cursing us and giving us the finger.

We three got into our clothes and climbed back over the fence. At the time, we all lived in an apartment downtown, and I suggested we stop into the Miss Portland Diner, a landmark, stainless steel railroad car affair. We walked there, went in and sat down in a booth. We waited a few minutes, and I looked around for someone. There was an ashtray with a lipstick-smeared butt at the end of the counter and yesterday’s Portland Press Herald. I went into the kitchen, and there was no one. Obviously, someone had forgotten to turn out the lights and lock the place up. I turned on the grill and turned on the radio in the kitchen. It was the Chordettes playing “Mister Sandman.” I found a butcher’s knife and got a platter of ham from the refrigerator. I walked back out behind Clammy and Adrianna; I put on my best Looney Tunes face, wielded the knife and screamed, “WHAT’LL YA HAVE?” I must have taken three years off each of their lives.

We had ham and eggs and roast pork, orange juice and buttered toast. I didn’t feel like making a whole urn full of coffee.
When we were done, I shut off the grill, did our dishes, and we turned out the lights as we left, but I took that meat cleaver, and I told Clammy and Adrianna I’d use it on any subsequent car full of rednecks. On purpose, I left the radio on to “The Music of Your Life.” As we left, I think the song playing was “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” by Tex Beneke and the Modernaires.

I have not heard from Adrianna in almost a quarter of a century. Clammy and I are back in touch, and we have a chuckle about our delinquent past. It is startling to see how little either of us has changed since we were teenagers. In many ways, we have grown, but I feel we have never grown up. I guess it’s like a bottle of cognac; it tastes really good when it’s eighteen years old, but can you really tell the difference when it’s forty?

The rock “n” roll element

Bernard's Adoption Q&A

2009-06-22T23:11:00.000-04:00

I thought about scanning this, but I am typing it out, editing some of the boring and embarrassing parts about baby food and stools formed...

In 1961, I was born and subsequently, immediately put up for adoption by Catholic Charities in western Massachusetts. Although those elements may have been distracting to my young life (no olfactory sense of a mom, adults in my life being there in "shifts"), this, I presume, woman kept notes on my behavior for potential adoptive parents. I have a record of my infancy.

It follows, with the name I was given, as an orphan, pre-Baptism, of Bernard. I was adopted at 4-1/2 months (born in late May, adopted in early October), so these descriptions refer truly to those of an infant.

It is definitely formative in the Rock 'n' Roll Element. See:

Time baby wakens:
Bernard sometimes awakens early in the morning and plays and talks to himself, but will invariably fall back to sleep. He wakes for the day about 7:00am.

Time baby naps:
Bernard is not fond of napping, and when he falls asleep during the day, it is usually for a short while.

In what position does baby sleep?
He chooses his own. Sometimes on his side, sometimes on his back. He moves freely.

Does baby sleep with toy or any other article in crib?
We leave his soft dog at the top of his crib so he can talk to him when he awakens.

Is baby a light or heavy sleeper?
I think Bernard is rather a light sleeper and is apt to be startled by noise other than the noise of other babies. This he can sleep thru (sic), once asleep, but crying will keep him awake and irritated when he is tired.

Time baby plays:
Continually. With his toys, with his hands, with his feet. Anything he can reach.

Where does baby play?
In his crib, on your lap, in his Teeter Chair. The last took some getting used to; he didn't like it and gets tired of it quickly.

(Here, I skip much about a baby's diet in 1961.)

Bed time:
Bernard likes to "stay up." Some evenings it is 7:00 - 7:30 before he falls off to sleep. We settle the nursery about 6:30 by lowering the venetians, lighting a dim night light, but Bernard travels all over his crib, and when he drops off, we cover him.

Foods baby dislikes:
Bernard hasn't formed any dislikes.

Does baby take water or orange juice?
We do not give orange juice. Bernard is not particularly fond of water, but he takes it occasionally.

Habits:

Does baby suck thumb or use pacifier?
Bernard had the use of a pacifier when he was a little boy, but he won't have anything to do with it now. He likes his fingers, all four at once. And he is even enjoying his toes!

Does baby like to be rocked?
He loves it, as he loves whatever keeps his adults in view.

Is baby fussy, good-natured, etc.?
He is the best-natured boy in the world. On the rare occasions when he "cries," he can change a sob half way through into a laugh.

Any other habits that should be noted?
NOTE: Please try to be as careful as possible in making out the schedule or noting any other information that would be of help to the adoptive parents.

All Bernard's movements are quick. We have had to keep two eyes and hands on him during bath period especially. During feeding, he tries to help with the spoon. It takes stiff resistance sometimes to win. He does not like his food “soupy.”
He loves his bath, but he always acts startled when he gets into the tub unless you distract him with soft talk and slow motions.

He does not like a free-flowing nipple. We use Evenflo (silicone – twin air valve nipples). He is apt to play with the nipple at the beginning and end of his feeding. Just put a little pressure under his chin... this will stimulate him to suck.

If you are wearing glasses during playtime, watch him when you get close. He removes them with ease.

Don’t become alarmed if you hear him scream... he is enjoying himself. He makes a variety of sounds. He is trying to raise himself up, and given two fingers and a lot of encouragement, he feels like a hero when he reaches the upright sitting position, which he can maintain, with a lot of wriggling, for a period.

He likes having his hair brushed.
---------------

I think more than a thousand thoughts when I read this. I was told by a physician that the likelihood of my birth mother having been a teenager was great.
She also told me that my chances of not being born an alcoholic were a sucker bet (my term); she said a thousand to one.

On one side, I will never know my birth parents. On the other side, I have a dad and two moms, my adoptive mother, deceased when I was three years old, and my mother who put up with my emotionally erratic behavior for all the rest of my youth and adulthood, all of whom I love and who love me as there is to be familial love. It is not that of blood, but then I wonder about the (young?) woman who gave me such a glowing report when I was an infant. I have sold used cars, and it is clear that she was not just trying to get me off the lot.

I think she loved me too.

The son of many, yet none,

The rock ‘n’ roll element

The Tracks

2009-06-22T05:46:00.000-04:00

When I was about six and a half years old, my folks moved to Portland, Maine. There, my father bought a house built in about 1910 but which, more importantly to him, had a fair chunk of land – about five acres – that came with it. There were neighborhood kids that I met and didn’t understand, and we played baseball on the cleared part of that triangular tract. There was also “the gush,” where water collected from runoff between the house's back yard slope and another mild slope that came down across our playing field. Aquatically, the gush was foul territory; afield, part of it was in fair territory, down the third base line. Rosie Asali, in her early teens, was a torrid hitter and “parked” many a ball into the gush. Often, when we’d lose a ball in straightaway center in the milkweed, we’d search the gush for a long-lost waterlogged ball, and, man, when you hit one of those, it would concuss from your wrists through your jaw and spine.

Behind the field, there were the woods, and they were significant. When I was very young, I was able, almost, to get lost in them. They were thick and dark; there were lady slippers, praying mantises, a twelve-foot cliff with a rope swing, and there was, buried, an old dump among the trees and undergrowth where you could actually dig up stuff like collectible bottles and tin ware, centipedes, and a million other things a kid could find. Once, I got a still-sealed Ball jar of mustard relish with a handwritten label from 1932.

Behind the woods were the tracks, the railroad tracks. I’m sure one of the subliminal reasons my dad bought that house was that his father was a railroad man. My grandfather is buried only about fifty yards from a set of rails, and I was surely and magnetically drawn to those behind our house. From the first day we moved in, in late winter when no leaves on the trees muffled the sound, freight trains rattled by four or five times a day. That became a sound of my life. It also became a place of my life. Walking up the tracks took me to Morrill School, St, Joseph’s School and a fair way to Cheverus High School, when I attended them. In the first grade, I played hooky one day, just because I wondered what it would be like (Miss Shock – her name, honest to God – never missed me.), and I had my lunch in a bag and fifteen cents "milk money," which I spent on penny candy. I sat around all day at the switching yard near Fox Lumber. (Parents, see if that wouldn't end you up in Family Court today.)

Rock-throwing was a big deal. From the track ballast, there was an infinite number of rocks. If you started to make a divot, you could just move down a few feet. A lot of high school kids used to drink around there, so bottles as targets were easy to come by. I could routinely take the top off a “bullet bottle” of Budweiser from 25 feet and have it toddle but remain on the rail. I left half-shattered bottles up to see the freight trains obliterate them. Many of my diversionary companions were stray dogs, squirrels and toads, butterflies and, in the evening, fireflies. There was also the occasional car full of teenagers partying on the dirt service road or the errant raccoon who each had the chance to scare the hell out of me. I had, however, plenty of ballast ammo, and, as stated, a fair arm.

The tracks went two ways; one way went north to Skowhegan and Bangor, and I sure didn’t want to go there. The other way went to, I suppose, Boston, but you couldn’t walk across the trestle over the Fore River into South Portland without the risk of violent, locomotive-driven death, and hey, the destinations of both South Portland and Boston are not so enticing either, but I used the tracks from age six to age nineteen as a pedestrian thoroughfare. I seldom saw another cross-tie walker, except for the occasional hobo, and, even as a child, I was never afraid. I believe we could see in one another's eyes that we were doing the same thing.

I had a few good friends when I was a boy and as a teenager, but none so sure and stable as the rails. They were always there, like a man-made river, calling, going somewhere and not telling the destination. There were no passenger trains back then, and there still aren’t now, only the conductors and the guys who rode in the caboose who would wave back to all the little boys and girls who hung out by the tracks, longing to go somewhere else.

Truly,

The rock ‘n’ roll element

The Rock 'n' Roll Element

2009-06-20T00:17:00.000-04:00

This has to do with the kids today and how they seem to be in more trouble with the cops than when I was a young miscreant.

It is also "the rock 'n' roll element," sadly missing in our society.

I spent some time in jail in New Hampshire a few years back, at about age 40, and all of my suite mates (five cells, two men per) were young enough to be my son, if I had one. One inmate was one of the Dartmouth professors' killers, and the rest were perps, or victims, of what I would term as "youthful exuberance." One kid, 19 years old, I believe, was just a knucklehead who had tried to rob a general store with a pellet gun and was beaten up and subdued by the one-armed counterman. The kid took constant ribbing for this and, in the New England tradition, was held in the fairly high regard of a likable stupid ass. I think the guards even thought so. It was like gym class or being on the high school baseball team in there. These kids were comfortable in a highly controlled situation, busting each others' balls. When I was released, I wanted to keep the "G___ County Correctional Facility" t-shirt that I was issued, but the staff said no.

Now my story, which is the difference, I think, of what fun kids are not allowed today:

When I was in high school, I looked too young to drink, and at 17 years-old, I surely was. Frustratingly, I had two girl friends who were younger than me but looked far older. Don't get me wrong, almost any male bartender will up a girl's age in his mind. We'll call one of my friends "Katie Silver." We had a great and platonic relationship and we liked to drink and smoke and take pills. I could rarely drink at bars with her, so, with a flair for the dramatic, we took to wearing costumes to bars, and we slayed 'em. I would spray my hair gray and pencil my eyebrows in silver, and on our first couple sojourns, I wore a priest's collar. When I showed up in the collar the first time at Katie's kitchen door, she was wearing a frosted wig and full makeup; I remember the hot flush that went up my neck when I was sure she was her mother. At the bars, anytime the cocktail waitress would come by, we would talk about how I thought Katie should leave her husband for me, Father Whomever. We did the costume thing several more times and even pulled it off on fairly close friends (with me sans collar as a college professor).

Among those times, I had a cousin who worked at Old Orchard Beach, operating a ride that turned people upside down. Wallets would fall out of their pockets, and he would generally take a "tip" for finding them. Grateful, the rubes would often not check for their drivers' licenses, which, back then, had only a vague physical description and no photo - and were no longer in their wallets. I got one with the right statistics, eye color and everything; that's what the people who sold you alcohol looked for. Finding a paper license for a guy with green eyes, 5' 10" and brown hair, in his early 20s was no daily deal. I used it with shameless enthusiasm.

Katie's sister was a bank teller, who one day got the bright idea to steal four cashier's checks from the middle of the stack of another teller, so they wouldn't be missed for several days. She made them out for nominal amounts (a lot in the 1970s) and proposed to us that we cash them to split three ways. Katie was the signature forger, and I would use my purloined DL.

I had a pair of Foster Grants that I had found on the street that altered my appearance but through which I could still make eye contact. I had a military dress-uniform jacket from Germany that I didn't like, and I wore a red bandanna around my forehead and tousled my hair. I looked like the guy who brings Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to the commune in "Easy Rider."

We hit four banks in about an hour and a half, and I cashed all the checks. I do not play poker as well as I handled the tellers that afternoon. We finished the last bank, split up the money, and I changed my clothes in the car. I put the costume in a brown paper bag and walked the few hundred yards to one of my jobs as a cashier in a French restaurant, casually tossing the bag into a public trash receptacle on the way. I got drunk with the owner during my shift and added up the guest checks by hand, as he wanted a drinking buddy and couldn't really cover my wage.

So that was that, until about six moths later; I was at work in the hospital parking booth, which was my primary high school job, and Katie called, as she often did. The FBI had been at her home, and briefly, they had duped her sister into signing a confession by telling them both that they knew she was the teller who had stolen the checks. The agents made Katie sign a witness statement, and she realized afterward that there was a big, identifiable "K" on the checks as well as in her statement signature. I guess the FBI's handwriting experts never got around to that one.

Katie told me over the phone that the agents had said that they would probably never find the (person's name) who had cashed the checks... umm, me. I am certain that they went to the guy's house and questioned him. I tore that driver's license into tiny pieces, threw some down the sewer, burned some and ate the rest.
I was scared to hell, but I had few more exciting moments in my 17-year life than to know that I was pursued by, and had fooled the FBI.

I look back at those young kids in jail, and I know that they are looking for somewhat of the same thrill. At the time, it was a game and a REALLY elaborate and fun one. It beats the shit out of what I've watched of people playing "Grand Theft Auto" or "Rock Hero."

Poor kids.

More, baby!

The rock 'n' roll element