Early one morning while it was still dark as night I saw a raccoon in our neighborhood while walking my dog. When the raccoon spied us, it scrambled to get under a fence getting only halfway through, stuck there, clawed feet scratching at the pavement, and not knowing whether to back out and fight or forge all the way through. I empathized with the raccoon.
Long ago, in Don Po's backyard our semi-circle of kids gathered around to watch Don our colorful neighbor, scout master, cheerful guy around town, slaughter chickens with an ax. They didn't have the chance that the raccoon had. These were candy-colored family pets-- they were sold with artificially colored feathers back then-- bought for his two daughters one Easter. Now the once colorful birds were grown up into mature chickens, and it was time for them to be turned into a family dinner. After a beheading, he'd throw a bucket over the headless bird, otherwise it would have probably run right at us. Gotta protect the children. This was one of my first experiences with real violence. I became increasingly shy of it as the years went on.
I came up short in the lottery to pick draftees for the military. The numbers were one to 365, the days of the year. Each birth date got a number, lower numbers got picked first. Mine was fifty-one.
We were playing a rough game of tackle football in the Struss backyard one day, and I'd been getting beaten up pretty badly, when an ugly side of me turned up. When Ernie took the snap and began to move forward with the ball, only to be tackled by both Strusses, I felt it was my chance to get revenge. I jumped down hard on top of them all, even though the play had already ended, and I think I knocked the wind out Ernie, who was on the bottom of the heap.
Maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but even in the rough-and-tumble world of the Strusses there was a code of ethics when it came to things like this. They could shoplift with abandon, and Tony Struss pushed me off of Woody's steps once, leaving me with a sprained wrist, but piling on in a football game, that was unacceptable. They scolded me for that.
I visited a draft evasion counselor. He hooked me up with a sympathetic doctor who testified that my feet were flat and my knees were none too good either. I mailed it in to the local draft board. No response. I began preliminary research into what life was like in Canada. How cold could it be, really?
I remember Lumpy getting tackled once up at the church field with everyone inadvisedly piling on. We had to carry Lumpy home like pallbearers, to find out later that he'd dislocated his shoulder. Or rather, we dislocated it for him. So maybe the Struss boys had a point.
But at the time, that didn't matter. Ernie and the Strusses were furious. I wrapped their harsh words around me like a Superman's cape. Their words didn't affect me as they were designed to do. For the moment, I was tough, I was invincible. But when we resumed play, I was back to my old self, not so tough, only the worse for it now, because now they were gunning for me to get even for my indiscretion. I was afraid to take my next turn at running the ball, and for the rest of the game I conveniently moved away from it. It was like dropping your pencil then reaching for it on the floor when the teacher looks around the room to call on someone.
Revenge was sweet, I'd decided, but it was fleeting and the kind of sweet that left a bad aftertaste. And, like the bible says, it begat more vengeance.
No letter arrived concerning my doctor's excuse. Instead one arrived telling me I had to report in two weeks to get on a bus with other unfortunates for a 70-mile trip to Wilkes-Barre. It was for a physical exam and other formalities as a prelude to service. There was no avoiding it, no dropping my pencil and looking for it on the floor. I had to take action... of a sort. Action by being passive, you might say..
After a trying day at school, my sister and her friend Jane rubbed me the wrong way, so I whacked Jane on the back of the head which forced her face into the tabletop. When Jane picked her head up from the table her face was smeared with blood. And there were the usual skirmishes with my brother. I have a vague recollection of knife play with me swinging a kitchen knife at my brother and notching the door jamb. Call it the fog of war.
These incidents, microcosms of war, were frightful. If I could swing a knife at my brother or mash my sister's friend into a tabletop, then what would lie ahead for me in a real armed sanctioned battle against an "enemy" I did not know. It was as good a time as any to end the cycle of violence.
I wrote a long essay detailing my aversion to war and violence in particular (leaving out those occasional flare-ups), and I sent it to the draft board, applying for Conscientious Objector status. The essay included some of the things I mention here.
I'd never been wounded really. I did get a busted front tooth that needed a crown which bugs me to this day. That happened when Tips and I were throwing rocks into the creek, and he reared back with a rock in his hand, trying to feed it to me I suppose. I nearly sliced the tip of my finger off with a pocket knife once, and all I can remember about that was the way my sister poured peroxide on it like pouring a glass of wine, the peroxide splashing everywhere. Soupon threw a baseball that opened me up right at the eyebrow. On that occasion, the doctor, who was new in town and still had a lot of his stuff in unpacked boxes, couldn't find the anesthetic, so he stitched me up without it. He thought I did very well with the tricky procedure. Once, when my parents were away on the only vacation I can recall that they ever took, I was a pirate jumping from the couch to the upright piano, gashing the back of my head, necessitating a row of stitches.
I had watched other people get injured in fights and football games, but I was immuned to the real bad stuff. With little experience in this area, I was left to fear the unknown. When I got a bit older, I'd lie in bed some nights trying to imagine myself in bootcamp, in Nam, in a VA hospital.
The crowded bus ride was a lonely one. We were all strangers packed into this vehicle as though we were a chain gang going off to a work camp. I took care to swallow some pills before we pulled out because someone told me that they might not take you if there was some controlled substance in your blood. In my childhood, my brother and I would brandish Fanner Fifty six guns in our cowboy outfits or saunter around in fake army uniforms. It seemed poignant to me now as I rode the bus to where I might be fitted up with the real thing.
It was not unusual to see guys from around town suddenly bulk up inside a year or two. Even diminutive fellows who started out kind of scrawny. Bill did it and in later years became mayor of the town. Ernie did it and he killed someone, however accidental it might have been. Like the US military, all that bulking up made them feel unbeatable. For the military industrial complex that extraordinary power led to Vietnam. In Ernie's case, the same mindset led to a fight and a killing, when Ernie hit a Marine in the head with a 2x4.
I got a letter. The draft board wanted to see me in regards to the doctor excuse. But that didn't matter now-- it was a moot point-- because I passed the physical up in Wilkes-Barre. I had done everything short of clicking my heels together and declaring "There's no place like home", so now I would finally get to see the people behind the curtain.
I'm reminded of Bernie, who lifted weights in a desperate attempt to lift his spirits too. Trouble was, the spirits were devilish in nature. Plainly put, he'd acquired a mean streak. What made him tick was a timebomb. Once I observed that he looked a little tired, and he pushed me up against a fence, demanding I rescind the remark. It was a reasonable request which I readily fulfilled for the distraught bodybuilder.
But he really did not look well rested. He had a nervous energy, thrashing about, looking for a place where he could utilize his practiced bravado. He found it in Vietnam.
I, for one, wasn't going to be a pawn in that game. I had a real problem with guys in offices calling the shots. And I had an innate fear of guns going off. I wouldn't send my dog into battle, though many people did in World War II. Sent their dogs to war. Some came back with a canine version of PTSD. And the whole fighting thing seemed useless, a feeling I have to this day. Add to that a crazy war about which even right-wingers were having their doubts, and you might understand my reluctance. Being a chicken didn't mean you had to end up in the stewpot.
When I got to the draft board office, I was blind-sided with a request to go before the board to defend my claim for CO status. Each of them had a copy of my essay, asking questions about my beliefs, referring back to the essay occasionally. They said I would hear from them in a matter of days.
We were a counter-culture crowd. I don't know if the phrase "semper fi" would fit our cohesive group exactly, but there was a club-like allegience and comaraderie that guided us. We didn't believe in the war and not much else that elder society hath wrought. While women and blacks were demanding equality, their eyes on the prize, the elders were oblivious. Their eyes were on the prize of a kewpie doll.
I got my picture in the paper demonstrating in front of the draft board office, learning much later that my dad had saved that grainy newsprint clipping for years in a drawer by the telephone.
Bernie seemed to suddenly understand the counter-culture thing. He'd travelled far and wide to get to a mellow place (when all the while I was already there.) He went to Vietnam and came back docile as a box turtle, though his body still carried some of the dangerous muscle attained from workouts. He had curiously returned earlier than the usual tour of duty, rumored to have gotten a dishonorable discharge. Espousing peace and love now, smoking grass, and listening to unpatriotic rock music, he attached to us as though to say, "Here's the new me". In effect he was extending an olive branch, a broken arrow.
We had this handshake involving our thumbs wrapping around, our fingers coming up over the wrist, our elbows touching. It was the hippie handshake. Bernie, just back in the neighborhood, extended his hand to me for the clasp. While I didn't feel an instant kinship, it was a reasonable request which I readily fulfilled for the freed veteran.
The letter arrived, granting me CO status. I left Catasauqua to work in a hospital fifty miles away as prescribed by the draft board, first mopping up blood from the operating room floor, then getting promoted to transport orderly for the Occupational Therapy department. I had beat the awful system. The dispensation from the war, which was nearly ended by that point, was my own kind of subtle revenge.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Retail
If I had a nickel for every time I'd gotten my ears boxed by Woody or Sam I would have had the biggest stash of comic books, penny candy and Pat's sodas that money could buy. Because that's what I would have spent those nickels on. If you wanted your nose tweaked or maybe your ears twisted, then Woody's was the place to go. That's the way they operated at Woody's. You didn't even have to step out of line to get teased, bopped, or get punked in some way. But we kept coming back for more. The place was in our blood.
Woodrow W. Wittman, along with his brother Sam, operated the store on the corner a few doors down from my house. Sam, whose real name was Harry, worked as the butcher. I remember Woody Wittman as a short stubby man with thinning hair usually working the counter. Sam, a bigger man, could be found behind the refrigerated meat case in the back of the store. Both wore white aprons all day long. In fact, I can only recall seeing either of them without the aprons but a handful of times, usually when closing up at night. They worked long days, and the neighborhood counted on them to be open those long hours. This was, of course, a time when supermarkets and the like were rare, and the people in my area did most of their grocery shopping at the corner store. In my assessment, of the seven or so corner groceries in town Wittman's was the premier stand-out, the apex of local small town groceries.
It was crowded as hell in there. The way Gertrude and Leo Stein filled their tiny two-room Paris apartment with Picassos, Cezannes, and Mattisses, that's the way canned goods huddled in masses along the aisles of his store. Many items just ended up stacked on the floor due to lack of shelf space.
Adult customers with legitimate adult needs waited in line at the counter to be checked out, but I would not be daunted when I deliberated over which particular penny candy would fit my mood that day. I was partial to the blocks of fudge. A man has to eat, I told myself. Such was my craving. I could see Woody getting impatient, and he wanted to get to his other customers, and in retribution for the delay he would pop me in the face with the butt end of a loaf of bread. As customers, us kids weren't always right, but we were tolerated.
I watch on ESPN some little Asian guy eating, what? some forty hot dogs. Diminutive women putting down more whatever than big, brawny hee-men. In our age of excess, we've supersized ourselves right out of our clothing, and the new frontier of excess seems to be food. The drink part was conquered a long time ago... by Jim Murtaugh.
The Pat's sodas were nestled in Woody's chest-like cooler in a pool of ice cold water. They hung suspended from a metal rack in there. It was the drink of choice, and at a nickel a bottle it was a third of the price of a Coke. Murtaugh probably urinated pure Pat's soda. They say that about ninety-five percent of our bodies are made up of water. In Murtaugh's case, about fifty percent of that was Pat's soda. I'm certain of it.
Woody initiated the contest, calling out to everyone who ever sat on the cooler, "Who could drink the most Pat's sodas?" Excitement ran high. Perched on top of the cooler, we'd discuss in hushed tones the merits of particular contestants, who were mostly high schoolers, elders to us. There were certain favorites, of course, guys who played football, strong athletic types, guys who had to keep their honor intact only by putting down a cooler full of soft drink. They were also the guys who had enough money to pull off the stunt. Us younger kids were always broke, for the most part, and had to sit on the sidelines. I can't recall just how many Pat's were imbibed by Murtaugh, but it was announced that, henceforth, Pat's would be renamed Murtaugh's.
It was said that one reason Woody had such a devoted customer base dated back to the Depression when he was one of the only stores in town to offer credit. This elevated him to a kind of sainthood around town. It gave him the edge over the other seven or so corner stores in town. It must have been that Depression mentality that caused Woody to deliberate over money in an almost compulsive, fixated way.
Today, in this age of fancy finance and derivatives followed by expletives, we say "Show me the money. No, really, Show me the money", because we don't know where it is.
This wouldn't have happened to Woody. He was the quintessential analog guy. He didn't just pinch pennies; he pinched dollar bills too when he was giving out change for your purchase. He punished a dollar bill. Dollars were tangible things, and in his card-dealer hands they were made to do magic. His method for giving out change: Take the bill between your thumb and forefinger-- you'll need a strong grip for this-- and squeeze till you wring every last bit of value out of it. Then snap it and repeat this in rapid succession. The snapping part is the key to separating sticky bills. You can try this at home when separating new bills or any paper products that are stuck together. He did this as a reflexive action like a dog shaking off a wet coat, and it kept him from ever giving out extra dollars to his customers.
He'd pull a nearly worn down number two pencil from behind his ear and go over your receipt with you, putting a check mark next to each line item, once, then twice over the top of first mark before going on to the next line item. And he'd do this with each item, matching it with the actual merchandise on the counter. He'd reach across the counter and do it in front of you, getting right up in your face to assure that you were paying attention, to get your verification that, yes, indeed this was a true accounting. Sometimes he'd put the tip of the pencil in his mouth before getting started. Like the bluesman's craft, it was all built upon repetition, call and response, and improvisation at just the right moment. Of course, this took a bit of time. It was not for the quick in-and-out convenience customer of today. We would not rush him. We understood Woody and his extreme theatrical ways. We knew he had to do this.
When it came time to leave, Woody would call out, "How many Murtaughs did you have?" or "How much brunch?" Brunch he called it, way before the swanky restaurants, and then the family restaurants, adopted the term. It sounded to us kids like such a hip term to use. We'd readily own up to the amount of Murtaughs and Tastycakes and then scramble for enough coins to pay for the lot.
Tips didn't need to scramble much though, at least for awhile, because his parents had a credit account at Woody's tallied in one of those small receipt pads stacked behind the counter with all the other customer credit accounts, and Tips would just tap into it. Woody rang up the purchases, no questions asked. That was until Tips's mom brought the hammer down on Tips and Woody and put a stop to the illegitimate transactions. From then on Tips had to lead a hard scrabble life like the rest of us. He was crestfallen like a dog when you've taken away his bone. (Dogs always had real bones back then, by the way, not these fabricated toy things.)
I'd been paying for my snack treats with cash earned from saving soda bottles for the deposits or collecting newspapers that could be turned in for cash. On Saturdays, we'd fill up the trunk of my dad's car with newsprint and drive it to the dump. And sporadically there was the allowance from my parents. But, if truth be told, I was also a silent partner from time to time in getting stuff on Tips's credit line.
There was always this slightly unsavory aspect to Woody's which we, as kids, liked. We liked it a lot. The code word for illegal firecrackers was simply, "Crackers". You'd go to the back of the store where Sam did the butchering and ask for "crackers", and that's all there was to it. You got your firecrackers, Sam and Woody got their payment and everybody went home happy. While it was a grocery store in the main, there was so much more to be gotten there.
Small hardware items could be found. Behind the counter, next to a gallery of wallet-sized photos of local high schoolers, on shelves way up high, there were little boxes of things coated with dust in packaging from another era, waiting for that one lucky customer to come in looking for just that one brand of pipe cleaner or something else. A kind word for the stuff would be classic. Woody and Sam just didn't work the shelves. I don't think they knew how. To them, there was money to be made up there on those forgotten shelves, and they'd be damned if they were going to miss out on it. If didn't sell, there was an innate faith that someday it would. It wasn't going to be replaced with the next big thing. The next big thing would just be crammed in alongside of the antiquated merchandise.
I bought my first James Bond paperbacks from a wire spinning rack by the door. James Bond was my graduation from the wholesome Hardy Boys, and the seeming adult nature of the Bond books spoke volumes to me.
But I'd read anything I could get my hands on. I'd sit on the floor in front of the comic book shelves, reading. Woody would call out, "Out of the libe!" ("Libe" being short for library.) I surmised that this was as close to a real library that Woody would ever get, seeing as how I'd hardly ever spot him outside of his store... ever. I vaguely remember some sort of signalling system the brothers had set up when Woody was too busy at the counter to police the comic book section. I'd be staunchly trying to finish reading another page or two when Sam like a ghost with his white butcher's apron would make a surgical strike, sneaking up behind me to clamp onto either or both of my ears and twist. Then, chastened, I'd get up off the floor, settle my account, and leave, only to return the next day to start the whole cycle over again.
Occasionally, I would indeed buy some of those comic books. It's where I got my first issues of Sargeant Fury and His Howling Commandos and many Classics Illustrated. I think I was Woody's only customer for the Classics Illustrated, which was the gold in the otherwise pulpish world of comics that attracted most kids. Classics Illustrated was my only acquaintance with certain oldtimey fiction like Call of the Wild and Two Years Before the Mast.
Kids just couldn't stay away from the place. Even on Sunday mornings. I had to go to church in those early years, but a lot of others didn't, I guess. So Woody's got to be their church. Woody called it Mass, and throughout the week took a poll to see who was coming to Mass. That was where the Pat's flowed like wine, and it was not lost on us kids how much a Tastycake could reasonably double for the wafer-like host that was handed out in church.
Woody and Sam had a following, no doubt about it. Just as customers were devoted to Woody and Sam, they returned the devotion, staying open long hours every day, never taking a day off, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was said, that Woody, after selling the store, could still be seen working there for the new owners. Like us, he just couldn't keep away from the place. That was in the seventies, I think. Woody and Sam would live on for at least another twenty years. I had since moved out of town, so my encounters with the two and their corner store have had to exist only in memory.
Sam died December 11, 1997 at the age of 83. Seventeen days later Woody, at 85, was dead. Though I don't know if this is true, I could imagine the two brothers buried next to each other up on a hill overlooking a landscape dotted with K-Marts, Targets and supermarkets of all kinds. Their identical headstones would be engraved "RIP" (Retail In Peace).
Woodrow W. Wittman, along with his brother Sam, operated the store on the corner a few doors down from my house. Sam, whose real name was Harry, worked as the butcher. I remember Woody Wittman as a short stubby man with thinning hair usually working the counter. Sam, a bigger man, could be found behind the refrigerated meat case in the back of the store. Both wore white aprons all day long. In fact, I can only recall seeing either of them without the aprons but a handful of times, usually when closing up at night. They worked long days, and the neighborhood counted on them to be open those long hours. This was, of course, a time when supermarkets and the like were rare, and the people in my area did most of their grocery shopping at the corner store. In my assessment, of the seven or so corner groceries in town Wittman's was the premier stand-out, the apex of local small town groceries.
It was crowded as hell in there. The way Gertrude and Leo Stein filled their tiny two-room Paris apartment with Picassos, Cezannes, and Mattisses, that's the way canned goods huddled in masses along the aisles of his store. Many items just ended up stacked on the floor due to lack of shelf space.
Adult customers with legitimate adult needs waited in line at the counter to be checked out, but I would not be daunted when I deliberated over which particular penny candy would fit my mood that day. I was partial to the blocks of fudge. A man has to eat, I told myself. Such was my craving. I could see Woody getting impatient, and he wanted to get to his other customers, and in retribution for the delay he would pop me in the face with the butt end of a loaf of bread. As customers, us kids weren't always right, but we were tolerated.
I watch on ESPN some little Asian guy eating, what? some forty hot dogs. Diminutive women putting down more whatever than big, brawny hee-men. In our age of excess, we've supersized ourselves right out of our clothing, and the new frontier of excess seems to be food. The drink part was conquered a long time ago... by Jim Murtaugh.
The Pat's sodas were nestled in Woody's chest-like cooler in a pool of ice cold water. They hung suspended from a metal rack in there. It was the drink of choice, and at a nickel a bottle it was a third of the price of a Coke. Murtaugh probably urinated pure Pat's soda. They say that about ninety-five percent of our bodies are made up of water. In Murtaugh's case, about fifty percent of that was Pat's soda. I'm certain of it.
Woody initiated the contest, calling out to everyone who ever sat on the cooler, "Who could drink the most Pat's sodas?" Excitement ran high. Perched on top of the cooler, we'd discuss in hushed tones the merits of particular contestants, who were mostly high schoolers, elders to us. There were certain favorites, of course, guys who played football, strong athletic types, guys who had to keep their honor intact only by putting down a cooler full of soft drink. They were also the guys who had enough money to pull off the stunt. Us younger kids were always broke, for the most part, and had to sit on the sidelines. I can't recall just how many Pat's were imbibed by Murtaugh, but it was announced that, henceforth, Pat's would be renamed Murtaugh's.
It was said that one reason Woody had such a devoted customer base dated back to the Depression when he was one of the only stores in town to offer credit. This elevated him to a kind of sainthood around town. It gave him the edge over the other seven or so corner stores in town. It must have been that Depression mentality that caused Woody to deliberate over money in an almost compulsive, fixated way.
Today, in this age of fancy finance and derivatives followed by expletives, we say "Show me the money. No, really, Show me the money", because we don't know where it is.
This wouldn't have happened to Woody. He was the quintessential analog guy. He didn't just pinch pennies; he pinched dollar bills too when he was giving out change for your purchase. He punished a dollar bill. Dollars were tangible things, and in his card-dealer hands they were made to do magic. His method for giving out change: Take the bill between your thumb and forefinger-- you'll need a strong grip for this-- and squeeze till you wring every last bit of value out of it. Then snap it and repeat this in rapid succession. The snapping part is the key to separating sticky bills. You can try this at home when separating new bills or any paper products that are stuck together. He did this as a reflexive action like a dog shaking off a wet coat, and it kept him from ever giving out extra dollars to his customers.
He'd pull a nearly worn down number two pencil from behind his ear and go over your receipt with you, putting a check mark next to each line item, once, then twice over the top of first mark before going on to the next line item. And he'd do this with each item, matching it with the actual merchandise on the counter. He'd reach across the counter and do it in front of you, getting right up in your face to assure that you were paying attention, to get your verification that, yes, indeed this was a true accounting. Sometimes he'd put the tip of the pencil in his mouth before getting started. Like the bluesman's craft, it was all built upon repetition, call and response, and improvisation at just the right moment. Of course, this took a bit of time. It was not for the quick in-and-out convenience customer of today. We would not rush him. We understood Woody and his extreme theatrical ways. We knew he had to do this.
When it came time to leave, Woody would call out, "How many Murtaughs did you have?" or "How much brunch?" Brunch he called it, way before the swanky restaurants, and then the family restaurants, adopted the term. It sounded to us kids like such a hip term to use. We'd readily own up to the amount of Murtaughs and Tastycakes and then scramble for enough coins to pay for the lot.
Tips didn't need to scramble much though, at least for awhile, because his parents had a credit account at Woody's tallied in one of those small receipt pads stacked behind the counter with all the other customer credit accounts, and Tips would just tap into it. Woody rang up the purchases, no questions asked. That was until Tips's mom brought the hammer down on Tips and Woody and put a stop to the illegitimate transactions. From then on Tips had to lead a hard scrabble life like the rest of us. He was crestfallen like a dog when you've taken away his bone. (Dogs always had real bones back then, by the way, not these fabricated toy things.)
I'd been paying for my snack treats with cash earned from saving soda bottles for the deposits or collecting newspapers that could be turned in for cash. On Saturdays, we'd fill up the trunk of my dad's car with newsprint and drive it to the dump. And sporadically there was the allowance from my parents. But, if truth be told, I was also a silent partner from time to time in getting stuff on Tips's credit line.
There was always this slightly unsavory aspect to Woody's which we, as kids, liked. We liked it a lot. The code word for illegal firecrackers was simply, "Crackers". You'd go to the back of the store where Sam did the butchering and ask for "crackers", and that's all there was to it. You got your firecrackers, Sam and Woody got their payment and everybody went home happy. While it was a grocery store in the main, there was so much more to be gotten there.
Small hardware items could be found. Behind the counter, next to a gallery of wallet-sized photos of local high schoolers, on shelves way up high, there were little boxes of things coated with dust in packaging from another era, waiting for that one lucky customer to come in looking for just that one brand of pipe cleaner or something else. A kind word for the stuff would be classic. Woody and Sam just didn't work the shelves. I don't think they knew how. To them, there was money to be made up there on those forgotten shelves, and they'd be damned if they were going to miss out on it. If didn't sell, there was an innate faith that someday it would. It wasn't going to be replaced with the next big thing. The next big thing would just be crammed in alongside of the antiquated merchandise.
I bought my first James Bond paperbacks from a wire spinning rack by the door. James Bond was my graduation from the wholesome Hardy Boys, and the seeming adult nature of the Bond books spoke volumes to me.
But I'd read anything I could get my hands on. I'd sit on the floor in front of the comic book shelves, reading. Woody would call out, "Out of the libe!" ("Libe" being short for library.) I surmised that this was as close to a real library that Woody would ever get, seeing as how I'd hardly ever spot him outside of his store... ever. I vaguely remember some sort of signalling system the brothers had set up when Woody was too busy at the counter to police the comic book section. I'd be staunchly trying to finish reading another page or two when Sam like a ghost with his white butcher's apron would make a surgical strike, sneaking up behind me to clamp onto either or both of my ears and twist. Then, chastened, I'd get up off the floor, settle my account, and leave, only to return the next day to start the whole cycle over again.
Occasionally, I would indeed buy some of those comic books. It's where I got my first issues of Sargeant Fury and His Howling Commandos and many Classics Illustrated. I think I was Woody's only customer for the Classics Illustrated, which was the gold in the otherwise pulpish world of comics that attracted most kids. Classics Illustrated was my only acquaintance with certain oldtimey fiction like Call of the Wild and Two Years Before the Mast.
Kids just couldn't stay away from the place. Even on Sunday mornings. I had to go to church in those early years, but a lot of others didn't, I guess. So Woody's got to be their church. Woody called it Mass, and throughout the week took a poll to see who was coming to Mass. That was where the Pat's flowed like wine, and it was not lost on us kids how much a Tastycake could reasonably double for the wafer-like host that was handed out in church.
Woody and Sam had a following, no doubt about it. Just as customers were devoted to Woody and Sam, they returned the devotion, staying open long hours every day, never taking a day off, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was said, that Woody, after selling the store, could still be seen working there for the new owners. Like us, he just couldn't keep away from the place. That was in the seventies, I think. Woody and Sam would live on for at least another twenty years. I had since moved out of town, so my encounters with the two and their corner store have had to exist only in memory.
Sam died December 11, 1997 at the age of 83. Seventeen days later Woody, at 85, was dead. Though I don't know if this is true, I could imagine the two brothers buried next to each other up on a hill overlooking a landscape dotted with K-Marts, Targets and supermarkets of all kinds. Their identical headstones would be engraved "RIP" (Retail In Peace).
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Z-Brick
They called it Z-Brick. We called it a miracle. It could transform a house or any building of your choice from a simple structure to one with a fancy pseudo-brick facade that looked just wonderful. It was rough but elegant. It looked like a million white chocolate Zero bars stacked on top of one another.
The most popular color in our town was white with grey mortar lines, even though real brick wasn't even that color. It doesn't matter. Nobody ever questioned why artificial Christmas trees were silver. This was fantasy, not reality, anyway.
White was the color our neighbors, the Longenhagens, chose. We went to see it. It was kind of a house warming, but only on the outside... to view the new Z-Brick. We didn't go indoors; there was too much going on outside. The grown-ups stood on the front porch discussing the ins and outs of the material, How was it applied? How long did it take to accomplish? Was it guaranteed? Was it patented? Why Z-Brick? And the big question: how much did it cost? Just in general terms, of course, because it was considered rude and obnoxious to ask someone how much they exactly paid for something. They circled around that question, hungry for details.
Annie Gillespie, Tips's mom, treaded closest to asking the dreaded question of Z-Brick pricing. She said she would go to town and get some Z-Brick for her own house. She always prefaced her announcements with the phrase "go to town" or some variant thereof, as in, "I'm going to go to town and clean the house". I think she invented the phrase, just like she popularized the word "machine" when referring to her car. Actually, she might have been the only person to call an automobile "the machine". She was right on the money in her evaluation of the Z-Brick, I could tell, as she cast her fashion-conscious eye on the facade. And as it turned out, a couple of years later, when the Longenhagens moved out, she moved in, and the Z-Brick house became her own. She was no longer eaten up with envy.
The adults continued their searching inquiries about the pseudo-brick substance just put on the house. The house looked new, I had to admit, but nobody wanted to hear the assessment of a five year old. My dad, being in the building trade himself, moonlighting after work as a carpenter, took keen interest in the transformation. He cast his deft eye upon the structure and deemed it was good. The house, in actuality, might not be recognizable to the casual passerby, a definite drawback, as I saw it. Someone might wonder, wasn't that house made of cinder block? (Some called it Hollywood block, but I didn't see how it had anything to do with Hollywood. Z-Brick though really was Hollywood through and through, not that other junk that was underneath it.) It might confuse company when they dropped by. Company was always dropping by, especially on Sundays.
We'd seen Z-Brick before, in the city, I think. It's not like we just got off the boat, you know. (Just got off the boat. We said that frequently.) But Z-Brick was new, it was sassy, it said to the world "We're happening". There wasn't much of it in Catasauqua at that point in time, but my prediction that everybody was going to want this on their home really did come true in the coming years. In time, every other house, it seemed, had a Z-Brick facelift. It got to the point when even real brick was held suspect, and it was, despite its authenticity, looked upon unfavorably next to Z-Brick, its big time cousin. People said real brick paled in comparison. They pointed to its dinginess, that it somehow wasn't bright enough, that it just didn't stack up to the new space age material. Z-Brick, on the other hand, was everything real brick was not. It was brighter alright, and it was a lot thinner too. The Longenhagens had gotten in on the ground floor, at least in our town, and they were proud as Marines.
Mr. Longenhagen was irresponsible. He left his hammer and screwdrivers outside, and they got all rusty surviving many rainstorms. Tips and I were getting awfully bored listening to all the laudatory comments about the plaster-ish stuff with glitter embedded in it. What did they know about Z-Brick? We'd get to the bottom of it with some real hands-on experience. We went around to the back of the house, and that's where we found the hammer and screwdrivers next to a shed.
The guys who invented popcorn ceilings must have ripped out a couple of pages from the Z-Brick manual. It was just that amazing, like constellations of glitter. I thought that Elvis might have Z-Brick stuff in his stage outfits. We were going to investigate further to see what was inside the Z-Brick to make it so wondrous. We had to do a biopsy.
The essence of Z-Brick was locked in mystery like the Coke formula or MacDonald's sauce. I wondered about the twelve different ways Wonderbread would strengthen my bones. I was a pawn in the marketing game that was all around me. But here, right here, was a chance to get to the bottom of one of those great mysteries. Our experiment on the back side of Longenhagen's house was going to change things around here.
Hand me the hammer, Tips. And a screwdriver. We'll need to chip away some of this, very delicately now, so as not to disturb the surrounding area but still enough to give us a good core sample. It wasn't every day that you could get a unique opportunity to study a building material such as this, and I was furthering my construction skills at the same time. We would just remove a layer one brick wide, maybe two... or three. I worked feverishly with Tips at my side. There was no better sidekick than Tips, who was up for any kind of adventure, and he had just the right amount of curiosity to make this work. He joined in, chipping away.
It got to be fun, so we continued on into the night until we had a pretty wide swath chipped away, exposing the underlying blocks in an unseemly way. I hoped it would be worth all the trouble it took to examine this more closely as I'd already skinned my knuckles on it and almost hit my thumb with the hammer. I actually hit my brother's thumb with a hammer once accidentally, and boy, did he yowl, so I did not want that to happen to me. Especially not now in the middle of our research.
I am forced to admit that what we found might be considered dull and mundane to some. The glitter was just on the surface. So much for integrity, you might say. But it really was just a surface thing, this Z-Brick. You could pick at it all day long, how it was just a half-inch thick, how it was fake. But this was one of those rare cases when fake, for lack of a better word, was good. Besides, those thousands of households who had Z-Brick couldn't all be wrong. And there were thousands more who wished they had it. I rest my case.
Just as we were finishing up, me and Tips, the grown-ups came around the corner to the back of the house and began yelling at us. They didn't get the gravity of our quest. We wanted to understand Z-Brick in a way no other kids had done. We caught hell anyway. They tore the tools from our hands, they grounded us, called us names. I think Tips got hit also. We feared for our lives. We were made to vow that we would never do this again. Why would we? We'd gotten all we could out of this, and now it was time to move on to the next big thing.
The Z-Brick chipping was fun afterall, and it was certainly something for my mental scrapbook, which wasn't too full yet at this stage of my life. The Z-Brick caper, as I began to call it, had emboldened me to visit our other neighbor in the alley to check out the iron balls he had embedded into the concrete of his driveway to strengthen it. In the spirit of Z-Brick, whenever I got the chance, I would go out there and dislodge a few. The iron balls were the size of marbles, and in time I amassed quite a collection of them. I'd upgraded my tool set, adding a cold chisel to my arsenal. I'd work under the cover of darkness. I'd tell no one of my exploits. But in the end, this eventually got me into a peck of trouble too, just like my first love, chiseling Z-Brick.
The most popular color in our town was white with grey mortar lines, even though real brick wasn't even that color. It doesn't matter. Nobody ever questioned why artificial Christmas trees were silver. This was fantasy, not reality, anyway.
White was the color our neighbors, the Longenhagens, chose. We went to see it. It was kind of a house warming, but only on the outside... to view the new Z-Brick. We didn't go indoors; there was too much going on outside. The grown-ups stood on the front porch discussing the ins and outs of the material, How was it applied? How long did it take to accomplish? Was it guaranteed? Was it patented? Why Z-Brick? And the big question: how much did it cost? Just in general terms, of course, because it was considered rude and obnoxious to ask someone how much they exactly paid for something. They circled around that question, hungry for details.
Annie Gillespie, Tips's mom, treaded closest to asking the dreaded question of Z-Brick pricing. She said she would go to town and get some Z-Brick for her own house. She always prefaced her announcements with the phrase "go to town" or some variant thereof, as in, "I'm going to go to town and clean the house". I think she invented the phrase, just like she popularized the word "machine" when referring to her car. Actually, she might have been the only person to call an automobile "the machine". She was right on the money in her evaluation of the Z-Brick, I could tell, as she cast her fashion-conscious eye on the facade. And as it turned out, a couple of years later, when the Longenhagens moved out, she moved in, and the Z-Brick house became her own. She was no longer eaten up with envy.
The adults continued their searching inquiries about the pseudo-brick substance just put on the house. The house looked new, I had to admit, but nobody wanted to hear the assessment of a five year old. My dad, being in the building trade himself, moonlighting after work as a carpenter, took keen interest in the transformation. He cast his deft eye upon the structure and deemed it was good. The house, in actuality, might not be recognizable to the casual passerby, a definite drawback, as I saw it. Someone might wonder, wasn't that house made of cinder block? (Some called it Hollywood block, but I didn't see how it had anything to do with Hollywood. Z-Brick though really was Hollywood through and through, not that other junk that was underneath it.) It might confuse company when they dropped by. Company was always dropping by, especially on Sundays.
We'd seen Z-Brick before, in the city, I think. It's not like we just got off the boat, you know. (Just got off the boat. We said that frequently.) But Z-Brick was new, it was sassy, it said to the world "We're happening". There wasn't much of it in Catasauqua at that point in time, but my prediction that everybody was going to want this on their home really did come true in the coming years. In time, every other house, it seemed, had a Z-Brick facelift. It got to the point when even real brick was held suspect, and it was, despite its authenticity, looked upon unfavorably next to Z-Brick, its big time cousin. People said real brick paled in comparison. They pointed to its dinginess, that it somehow wasn't bright enough, that it just didn't stack up to the new space age material. Z-Brick, on the other hand, was everything real brick was not. It was brighter alright, and it was a lot thinner too. The Longenhagens had gotten in on the ground floor, at least in our town, and they were proud as Marines.
Mr. Longenhagen was irresponsible. He left his hammer and screwdrivers outside, and they got all rusty surviving many rainstorms. Tips and I were getting awfully bored listening to all the laudatory comments about the plaster-ish stuff with glitter embedded in it. What did they know about Z-Brick? We'd get to the bottom of it with some real hands-on experience. We went around to the back of the house, and that's where we found the hammer and screwdrivers next to a shed.
The guys who invented popcorn ceilings must have ripped out a couple of pages from the Z-Brick manual. It was just that amazing, like constellations of glitter. I thought that Elvis might have Z-Brick stuff in his stage outfits. We were going to investigate further to see what was inside the Z-Brick to make it so wondrous. We had to do a biopsy.
The essence of Z-Brick was locked in mystery like the Coke formula or MacDonald's sauce. I wondered about the twelve different ways Wonderbread would strengthen my bones. I was a pawn in the marketing game that was all around me. But here, right here, was a chance to get to the bottom of one of those great mysteries. Our experiment on the back side of Longenhagen's house was going to change things around here.
Hand me the hammer, Tips. And a screwdriver. We'll need to chip away some of this, very delicately now, so as not to disturb the surrounding area but still enough to give us a good core sample. It wasn't every day that you could get a unique opportunity to study a building material such as this, and I was furthering my construction skills at the same time. We would just remove a layer one brick wide, maybe two... or three. I worked feverishly with Tips at my side. There was no better sidekick than Tips, who was up for any kind of adventure, and he had just the right amount of curiosity to make this work. He joined in, chipping away.
It got to be fun, so we continued on into the night until we had a pretty wide swath chipped away, exposing the underlying blocks in an unseemly way. I hoped it would be worth all the trouble it took to examine this more closely as I'd already skinned my knuckles on it and almost hit my thumb with the hammer. I actually hit my brother's thumb with a hammer once accidentally, and boy, did he yowl, so I did not want that to happen to me. Especially not now in the middle of our research.
I am forced to admit that what we found might be considered dull and mundane to some. The glitter was just on the surface. So much for integrity, you might say. But it really was just a surface thing, this Z-Brick. You could pick at it all day long, how it was just a half-inch thick, how it was fake. But this was one of those rare cases when fake, for lack of a better word, was good. Besides, those thousands of households who had Z-Brick couldn't all be wrong. And there were thousands more who wished they had it. I rest my case.
Just as we were finishing up, me and Tips, the grown-ups came around the corner to the back of the house and began yelling at us. They didn't get the gravity of our quest. We wanted to understand Z-Brick in a way no other kids had done. We caught hell anyway. They tore the tools from our hands, they grounded us, called us names. I think Tips got hit also. We feared for our lives. We were made to vow that we would never do this again. Why would we? We'd gotten all we could out of this, and now it was time to move on to the next big thing.
The Z-Brick chipping was fun afterall, and it was certainly something for my mental scrapbook, which wasn't too full yet at this stage of my life. The Z-Brick caper, as I began to call it, had emboldened me to visit our other neighbor in the alley to check out the iron balls he had embedded into the concrete of his driveway to strengthen it. In the spirit of Z-Brick, whenever I got the chance, I would go out there and dislodge a few. The iron balls were the size of marbles, and in time I amassed quite a collection of them. I'd upgraded my tool set, adding a cold chisel to my arsenal. I'd work under the cover of darkness. I'd tell no one of my exploits. But in the end, this eventually got me into a peck of trouble too, just like my first love, chiseling Z-Brick.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Obsession
The snow had been falling for nearly an hour, glittering in the dim light, and my feet were beginning to lose their grip on the slippery patches where the ball had tamped down the snow. I'd be called into the house soon for supper and probably be asked to go down to the cellar and shovel some coal into the furnace or bring up some potatoes from a fifty pound burlap sack down there. Just one more shot, one more. I wasn't going to leave until I swished it. The ball had to get through the rim without touching it. And it was oddly satisfying when the ball passed through the net, making a sound comparable to the rubbing of my cordurow pants legs as I moved around in the cold weather. Like one who buys lottery tickets (which, by the way, didn't actually exist back then), I just stayed in the game hoping for that one big payoff. I wasn't going to go back in the house till it was done. I wasn't going to mope my way through the evening, thinking what might have been.
Such was my obsession with the game. I was OCD about it. If I was going to loop a hook shot from the right side, then my next move had to be a layup from the left, and so on. I made up little mini-games in my head. You were always reaching, trying to get better. It was built into the game, with its paradigm of outstretched arms and legs, climbing the air spider-like towards an ethereal goal.
Basketball was all around me. This town danced to the beat of swishes, dribbles and rebounds and the cheers from spectators witnessing these feats. I had to be a part of this.
Basketball players in my town were treated like royalty. In the corner store, on the court at the playground, wherever people would meet, the talk would always come around to what Miller and Superka were doing in last night's game. They, along with other players on the high school team, had led the Rough Riders to state finals and semi-finals throughout the sixties, with Miller ending up on Parade magazine's top five high school hoops players in the country, and then going pro. It was the game of kings, and I was proud to be associated with it in my own small way, though I was just a knave.
Knave that I was, I was not without my signature move, a layup that confounded opponents as it was virtually unstoppable. It was one of the few tricks I had up my short sleeves. I learned it from Kevin Deutsch. It involved a bit of trickery, a fake, a delay, tucking the ball into the ribcage on the ascent to the basket only to release it at the final moment, later than you would in a conventional layup. The opposing player, expecting a traditional layup would time his jump to block accordingly, but by the time I was putting the ball up to the basket, he was already descending. It worked like a charm, and it really did become my charm, winning me some hard earned respect amongst other players my age. I'd see them shake their heads in disgust after each deployment of this secret weapon.
My obsession with basketball really kicked into high gear when Gary Bennett, whose dad owned a sporting goods store in the next town over, said he could supply a rim complete with netting if only I could provide a place to put it. I put my father on the case and had him follow some rough specs I'd drawn up to produce a backing board with some 1x's nailed together. I then instructed him to mount it regulation height of ten feet on the apex of our garage above the overhead door. The whole operation precipitated a major coup in the local sporting world, turning it on its head, and making me the man to talk to if you wanted some extra practice time away from the big courts at the playground.
The basket, hanging high, stood as a beacon for kids from all over town, drawing them in. It was my Field of Dreams moment, and I bathed in its glow. I would arrive home some days, only to find a pick up game in progress involving amateur atheletes from other parts of town, guys I didn't even know. It put our garage on the map. No grousing from neighbors, nor the uneven paving, was going to stem the tide. They came in waves, looking for basketball gold.
It was where I spent some of the high points of my youth, throwing a ball at a ring in the sky. In a sense, basketball was therapy, and a basketball was on my hypothetical desert island packing list.
The area was bounded on one side by a big old barn, the kind you'd see in the country with "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" painted on it, only this one was right in the middle of town, right next to my kingdom of hoops. If I could have declared eminent domain, this barn would have been razed. In executing a fade away jump shot, we'd slam ourselves backward into the side of the barn. There was a continuation of the door track overhanging the edge of the barn by about three feet, just enough to get in the way of a perfectly good shot from the far right corner.
On the opposite side, there was a pavement drop-off where the driveway met the walkway to the house. The odds were very good that the ball would hit this ledge at just the exact angle to propel it away towards the neighbor's parked car, or worse into the territory of Blackie, Blackie the terrible, Blackie the near rabid mongrel dog the color of night, the nightmare of all our basketball dreams.
Blackie's eyes pierced our souls like the magnifying glass we used to concentrate the sun's rays when frying ants. He policed his turf, held back only by a chain that glided along a wash line. He was the model for all junkyard dogs to follow, actually dogged in his pursuit of us. He'd lunge, he'd jerk, he'd feint to one side then go to another, not unlike a basketball player. We hated to see our own actions mirrored by the troublesome canine. His turf was potholed with his own diggings that were deviously just the right size in which a basketball could lodge. We had to create diversions by teasing the wretched beast on one end of the chain's length while another player would race into Blackie's domain and race out again with the ball. There were inevitably some bitings. It was a mighty distraction, and, come the think of it, could be viewed as an entirely separate game in itself. We didn't see it that way, though. We were terrified, and only the excitement of continuing our game in progress kept us from faltering and giving up.
Of course, it was a real treat to head up to the playground and shoot hoops on the level blacktop. Sometimes we'd play full-court, but mostly just half court, freeing up half for other players. And there would always be several kids, arriving late, who had to stand on the side watching. They had the hungry look of jackals, anticipating their turn to be called into action when someone on the court fell down hard, became too worn and bleary-eyed to go on, or just realized he was late for a dental appointment.
For all the glamour of playing on the playground court, there was something antiseptic and too official about it. Besides, the garage court was so much more convenient. A guitarist doesn't want to go fishing around for his guitar when the inspiration strikes. And so it was with me. I liked the idea of filling in a few extra minutes by shooting baskets without actually having to fish around for a court.
When it came time to try out for the school's CYO team, it was only natural that I give it a go. Most of our practices took place in the school basement with only an eight-foot ceiling and water pipes suspended several inches below that. We got a lot of practice passing, pivoting and crossover dribbling. Shooting? Not so much. It bothered me. I felt cooped up, not just by the basement location, but also by the regimentation and discipline of it all. I soldiered on. Before a team was even picked, I'd already stuck it through several grueling practices, and I wondered if I had what it took.
That question was answered for me subsequently when the prospective team gathered for a trip to a high school game waiting for the bus to leave. It was snowing hard. (Snowing again.) Ice had formed in places. We started a snowball fight, breaking up into two factions on either side of the street. Some of the snowballs contained ice and hardened, not even splitting apart when they hit the pavement. It was one of these that hit me in the side of my knee, and I went down, not just down, but down into a huge puddle of water. While it was painful, to be sure, it was also humiliating. The thrower, Tom Stengel, crossed the street and apologized to me, practically getting down in the water with me. We went on the trip, me sitting on the long bus ride in soaking wet pants. I overheard one of the guys saying, "I'm surprised he came along. If that was me I would have gone home." It got me to thinking, always a dangerous thing for a basketball player.
It wasn't long after that when I quit. I went home. The team hadn't been picked yet, but the scuttlebutt about my quitting was that it was premature, the coach telling the others that he thought I really had gotten game. Game or not, I'd go back to my alleyway court and shoot baskets into the night. It would have been nice to make the team, but the regimented teamwork wasn't for me anyway. In time I began to spend more and more time indoors with my other obsession, reading books, none of them about basketball. The way I drifted away from religion, I drifted away from this game. My story was that of a fading jump shot slamming the backboard, bouncing around, circling the rim but never going in.
In the years following, from time to time I'd visit my old neighborhood and drive down the alley past the old garage, but the backboard and basket weren't there anymore. The new owners just didn't get it. They sucked at trying to grasp the grandeur of the thing. They were the antithesis of the hopefuls you see on Antiques Roadshow, and they didn't realize the treasure they'd thrown away. I thought in passing that maybe I should go knock at their door, my old door, and tell them what they were missing. It was kind of complicated though, and I wouldn't want to have kept them too long in the listening.
Such was my obsession with the game. I was OCD about it. If I was going to loop a hook shot from the right side, then my next move had to be a layup from the left, and so on. I made up little mini-games in my head. You were always reaching, trying to get better. It was built into the game, with its paradigm of outstretched arms and legs, climbing the air spider-like towards an ethereal goal.
Basketball was all around me. This town danced to the beat of swishes, dribbles and rebounds and the cheers from spectators witnessing these feats. I had to be a part of this.
Basketball players in my town were treated like royalty. In the corner store, on the court at the playground, wherever people would meet, the talk would always come around to what Miller and Superka were doing in last night's game. They, along with other players on the high school team, had led the Rough Riders to state finals and semi-finals throughout the sixties, with Miller ending up on Parade magazine's top five high school hoops players in the country, and then going pro. It was the game of kings, and I was proud to be associated with it in my own small way, though I was just a knave.
Knave that I was, I was not without my signature move, a layup that confounded opponents as it was virtually unstoppable. It was one of the few tricks I had up my short sleeves. I learned it from Kevin Deutsch. It involved a bit of trickery, a fake, a delay, tucking the ball into the ribcage on the ascent to the basket only to release it at the final moment, later than you would in a conventional layup. The opposing player, expecting a traditional layup would time his jump to block accordingly, but by the time I was putting the ball up to the basket, he was already descending. It worked like a charm, and it really did become my charm, winning me some hard earned respect amongst other players my age. I'd see them shake their heads in disgust after each deployment of this secret weapon.
My obsession with basketball really kicked into high gear when Gary Bennett, whose dad owned a sporting goods store in the next town over, said he could supply a rim complete with netting if only I could provide a place to put it. I put my father on the case and had him follow some rough specs I'd drawn up to produce a backing board with some 1x's nailed together. I then instructed him to mount it regulation height of ten feet on the apex of our garage above the overhead door. The whole operation precipitated a major coup in the local sporting world, turning it on its head, and making me the man to talk to if you wanted some extra practice time away from the big courts at the playground.
The basket, hanging high, stood as a beacon for kids from all over town, drawing them in. It was my Field of Dreams moment, and I bathed in its glow. I would arrive home some days, only to find a pick up game in progress involving amateur atheletes from other parts of town, guys I didn't even know. It put our garage on the map. No grousing from neighbors, nor the uneven paving, was going to stem the tide. They came in waves, looking for basketball gold.
It was where I spent some of the high points of my youth, throwing a ball at a ring in the sky. In a sense, basketball was therapy, and a basketball was on my hypothetical desert island packing list.
The area was bounded on one side by a big old barn, the kind you'd see in the country with "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" painted on it, only this one was right in the middle of town, right next to my kingdom of hoops. If I could have declared eminent domain, this barn would have been razed. In executing a fade away jump shot, we'd slam ourselves backward into the side of the barn. There was a continuation of the door track overhanging the edge of the barn by about three feet, just enough to get in the way of a perfectly good shot from the far right corner.
On the opposite side, there was a pavement drop-off where the driveway met the walkway to the house. The odds were very good that the ball would hit this ledge at just the exact angle to propel it away towards the neighbor's parked car, or worse into the territory of Blackie, Blackie the terrible, Blackie the near rabid mongrel dog the color of night, the nightmare of all our basketball dreams.
Blackie's eyes pierced our souls like the magnifying glass we used to concentrate the sun's rays when frying ants. He policed his turf, held back only by a chain that glided along a wash line. He was the model for all junkyard dogs to follow, actually dogged in his pursuit of us. He'd lunge, he'd jerk, he'd feint to one side then go to another, not unlike a basketball player. We hated to see our own actions mirrored by the troublesome canine. His turf was potholed with his own diggings that were deviously just the right size in which a basketball could lodge. We had to create diversions by teasing the wretched beast on one end of the chain's length while another player would race into Blackie's domain and race out again with the ball. There were inevitably some bitings. It was a mighty distraction, and, come the think of it, could be viewed as an entirely separate game in itself. We didn't see it that way, though. We were terrified, and only the excitement of continuing our game in progress kept us from faltering and giving up.
Of course, it was a real treat to head up to the playground and shoot hoops on the level blacktop. Sometimes we'd play full-court, but mostly just half court, freeing up half for other players. And there would always be several kids, arriving late, who had to stand on the side watching. They had the hungry look of jackals, anticipating their turn to be called into action when someone on the court fell down hard, became too worn and bleary-eyed to go on, or just realized he was late for a dental appointment.
For all the glamour of playing on the playground court, there was something antiseptic and too official about it. Besides, the garage court was so much more convenient. A guitarist doesn't want to go fishing around for his guitar when the inspiration strikes. And so it was with me. I liked the idea of filling in a few extra minutes by shooting baskets without actually having to fish around for a court.
When it came time to try out for the school's CYO team, it was only natural that I give it a go. Most of our practices took place in the school basement with only an eight-foot ceiling and water pipes suspended several inches below that. We got a lot of practice passing, pivoting and crossover dribbling. Shooting? Not so much. It bothered me. I felt cooped up, not just by the basement location, but also by the regimentation and discipline of it all. I soldiered on. Before a team was even picked, I'd already stuck it through several grueling practices, and I wondered if I had what it took.
That question was answered for me subsequently when the prospective team gathered for a trip to a high school game waiting for the bus to leave. It was snowing hard. (Snowing again.) Ice had formed in places. We started a snowball fight, breaking up into two factions on either side of the street. Some of the snowballs contained ice and hardened, not even splitting apart when they hit the pavement. It was one of these that hit me in the side of my knee, and I went down, not just down, but down into a huge puddle of water. While it was painful, to be sure, it was also humiliating. The thrower, Tom Stengel, crossed the street and apologized to me, practically getting down in the water with me. We went on the trip, me sitting on the long bus ride in soaking wet pants. I overheard one of the guys saying, "I'm surprised he came along. If that was me I would have gone home." It got me to thinking, always a dangerous thing for a basketball player.
It wasn't long after that when I quit. I went home. The team hadn't been picked yet, but the scuttlebutt about my quitting was that it was premature, the coach telling the others that he thought I really had gotten game. Game or not, I'd go back to my alleyway court and shoot baskets into the night. It would have been nice to make the team, but the regimented teamwork wasn't for me anyway. In time I began to spend more and more time indoors with my other obsession, reading books, none of them about basketball. The way I drifted away from religion, I drifted away from this game. My story was that of a fading jump shot slamming the backboard, bouncing around, circling the rim but never going in.
In the years following, from time to time I'd visit my old neighborhood and drive down the alley past the old garage, but the backboard and basket weren't there anymore. The new owners just didn't get it. They sucked at trying to grasp the grandeur of the thing. They were the antithesis of the hopefuls you see on Antiques Roadshow, and they didn't realize the treasure they'd thrown away. I thought in passing that maybe I should go knock at their door, my old door, and tell them what they were missing. It was kind of complicated though, and I wouldn't want to have kept them too long in the listening.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Humbuggery
There was that one little trick by my dad, who wasn't generally known for his tricks. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel and denounce Santa, we got a knock on the door one night. It was Santa himself, in the flesh. Of course, some time later, I found out it was one of the guys my dad worked with. They'd conspired to have the man visit our place wearing a Santa outfit.
I went to the airport one Christmas and saw the big guy in red disembark from a helicopter and thought, "This can't be!" But he gave me a Peter Pan board game, which I took home and immediately spread out in the doorway to the kitchen, and I was a believer. While certain other kids were going around Santa-bashing, I kept quiet in the knowledge that I'd actually seen him. It didn't occur to me at the time that something was wrong with this, that Santa had come out of a helicopter instead of the traditional sleigh.
My memory has never been top-notch, but lately it's gotten, as my son would say, ah...sketchy. It's like a filing cabinet. Trouble is, someone's gotten in overnight and rifled the drawers. Some memories, like the Santa stuff, stand out and won't go away. But I always wonder how much I am forgetting and how much sticks like lint to the mind's fabric.
When my son was growing up, I was well aware of this. I drew a map of my Catasauqua neighborhood and posted it on the refrigerator. It could give him a schemata of the places and things I was remembering and telling him about. It was as much to jog my own memory as it was to give him a visual layout of the neighborhood.
Broke down memories aside, the truth will always come out, one way or another. It almost doesn't matter if you get the details wrong as long as you've got the essence of the thing.
Nowadays, you don't know who to believe when news is fiction and so-called reality TV programs that are just so ... programmed. And that isn't all. That's just modern times, man. Back then, in the Elvis era, we knew who to believe. It was the church. Christ, even Elvis believed in that.
To me, as an impressionable kid, happenings around town had an air of unreality about them at times. There were things I found just unbelievable. Like the time when Bear got his penis caught in his zipper and had to go to the ER to get it removed. Or the time when Tips's mom threw me and Soupy out of her house using the F word-- not cool. (That was before the term had gained so much currency among young and old alike.) Or when Kevin taught his Bassett hound to "say" hamburger, and I was momentarily taken in by it.
Our days were laced with petty irrationalities. Kevin and I buried a skate key a foot deep into the alley near his house by pulling stone by stone out of the road surface. (This was before Macadam had become the go-to paving material it is today.) I joined the Struss boys in throwing rocks at a fish they'd hung from the railroad trestle. Once, someone had packed my shoes with snow while I was ice skating the frozen canal, so I walked home in my skates. Cookie, my next door neighbor, shot his friend Jimmy Reed with a BB gun from his third floor window. My mother would ask, "What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?", then, disobeying my request, she'd make the usual marble chiffon cake. The G in the word, god, had to be upper case.
So it wasn't so far-fetched when I was asked to believe that a stranger two thousand years ago was put to death on my account.
I was getting up in the middle of a school night to eat cereal. My dreams were mixing with reality at two, three in the morning. I was launching a promising career as an insomniac. There was a face of Jesus in concave relief up on our wall, constructed in such a way that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room. They were always watching, like some primitive form of the surveillance camera. At night when everyone else was asleep I was awake, and so was Jesus.
The only saving grace was the absolute reality of the church's teachings. The church kept us grounded.
I'd get up at the crack of dawn, fighting performance anxiety, to serve Mass as an altar boy. I mean, I was so into it that I went to visit a seminary to see what it would be like if I, Jim Hoffman, were to fill the shoes of a priest. My mother was really pulling for me, couldn't have wanted anything more. I'd go to confession on Saturday afternoon, rattle off the usual offenses-- bad words, impure thoughts, talking back to my parents. The hard stuff. And I'd feel just great afterwards.
I remember that one afternoon... I came home from confession, feeling all cleansed, and went right out to the alley behind our house. I got on my cluncky Roadmaster bicycle though, up till then, I couldn't even keep my balance on it at a standstill. I'd been out there day after day trying to create some kind of two-wheeled magic, but my mojo just wasn't working. What was the trick? I don't know, but that afternoon, I lifted one leg over the top bar, gripped the rubber ends of the handlebars with assuredness, clenched my teeth, and I began to ride. There was the smell of diesel fuel and the sound of squealing tires. No, that was the traffic in the nearby street. But it was a miracle (ok, a small miracle), and my confession had a lot to do with it, I was sure. If I followed the rules, then good things would come to me.
That was the high point. But slowly, in increments, it began to sink in that I was being deceived. Everything began to unravel about the same time I realized my mother was persisting in serving us canned peas instead of frozen. I felt it was time for an investigation into the final whereabouts of all that cash we collected and gave to the nuns for "pagan babies", as they called them. I became wary of grown-ups and all their chicanery.
Our assistant parish priest allowed his car to smash into the house diagonal from the rectory where a universally disliked, rotund kid lived. We'll call him Tommy, 'cause that was his name. Tommy was known for committing oral sex on a lot of the guys in town. (I hasten to add that I was passed over.) The crash was no simple accident as it turned out. God was punishing the boy for his indiscretions. He was smiting him down by sending a messenger's car to demolish his house. And, lo, the indiscretions stopped soon after this. Perfect! And then I found out about the alcoholism, and it came back to me how the assistant pastor would routinely smack his lips when drinking the altar wine from the chalice during Mass. (You'll recall that I was an altar boy and had a front row seat to this.) This kind of dashed my vengeful god theory.
It was getting harder to believe from then on, that the priest was indeed God's messenger. Not just because of this; I was by then already becoming rebellious and suspicious of this cleverly constructed Rube Goldberg contraption that was the liturgy.
Our assistant pastor disappeared from the scene, replaced by a young, wholesome-looking priest who proceeded to run off with the Irish immigrant housekeeper placed in her position by one of the leading families in the church.
The grand scheme was coming apart. Never mind the Crusades or the Inquisition. It was happening to me on the inside. It culminated in a visit from our pastor one day in the late sixties. My mother had put him onto the case to ferret out why I had been skipping Mass. It was a clever ruse to get me back in the fold. We relaxed in the living room, the room that was made ready whenever company was coming to call. The pastor had already gotten the money he came to collect as part of an annual tithe and was now content to spend a few moments doing the counselling part of his job. I explained that I didn't believe anymore. I couldn't. He stammered, then stated forthrightly that he did.
Of course I knew he believed, but what about me? He had the answers for himself but no real answers for me. I felt I was putting him on the spot, that I'd cornered him, for he started repeating himself. I could see that I was forcing him into a no-win situation, and I felt sorry for this.
One of the earliest memories I have is that of a book of fairy tales. The cover had been torn off, and it was worn as the deck of playing cards my dad always had handy. It had all the classic tales in it. There were characters like Chicken Licken (alias Chicken Little) and Henny Penny, and Goosey Loosey. You may have heard of them. They'd been alarmed that the sky was falling. The name Foxy Loxy too comes to mind. He said he could help and cleverly lured the animals into his cave to be eaten. He was a sly one. Crazy too, I might add.
I went to the airport one Christmas and saw the big guy in red disembark from a helicopter and thought, "This can't be!" But he gave me a Peter Pan board game, which I took home and immediately spread out in the doorway to the kitchen, and I was a believer. While certain other kids were going around Santa-bashing, I kept quiet in the knowledge that I'd actually seen him. It didn't occur to me at the time that something was wrong with this, that Santa had come out of a helicopter instead of the traditional sleigh.
My memory has never been top-notch, but lately it's gotten, as my son would say, ah...sketchy. It's like a filing cabinet. Trouble is, someone's gotten in overnight and rifled the drawers. Some memories, like the Santa stuff, stand out and won't go away. But I always wonder how much I am forgetting and how much sticks like lint to the mind's fabric.
When my son was growing up, I was well aware of this. I drew a map of my Catasauqua neighborhood and posted it on the refrigerator. It could give him a schemata of the places and things I was remembering and telling him about. It was as much to jog my own memory as it was to give him a visual layout of the neighborhood.
Broke down memories aside, the truth will always come out, one way or another. It almost doesn't matter if you get the details wrong as long as you've got the essence of the thing.
Nowadays, you don't know who to believe when news is fiction and so-called reality TV programs that are just so ... programmed. And that isn't all. That's just modern times, man. Back then, in the Elvis era, we knew who to believe. It was the church. Christ, even Elvis believed in that.
To me, as an impressionable kid, happenings around town had an air of unreality about them at times. There were things I found just unbelievable. Like the time when Bear got his penis caught in his zipper and had to go to the ER to get it removed. Or the time when Tips's mom threw me and Soupy out of her house using the F word-- not cool. (That was before the term had gained so much currency among young and old alike.) Or when Kevin taught his Bassett hound to "say" hamburger, and I was momentarily taken in by it.
Our days were laced with petty irrationalities. Kevin and I buried a skate key a foot deep into the alley near his house by pulling stone by stone out of the road surface. (This was before Macadam had become the go-to paving material it is today.) I joined the Struss boys in throwing rocks at a fish they'd hung from the railroad trestle. Once, someone had packed my shoes with snow while I was ice skating the frozen canal, so I walked home in my skates. Cookie, my next door neighbor, shot his friend Jimmy Reed with a BB gun from his third floor window. My mother would ask, "What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?", then, disobeying my request, she'd make the usual marble chiffon cake. The G in the word, god, had to be upper case.
So it wasn't so far-fetched when I was asked to believe that a stranger two thousand years ago was put to death on my account.
I was getting up in the middle of a school night to eat cereal. My dreams were mixing with reality at two, three in the morning. I was launching a promising career as an insomniac. There was a face of Jesus in concave relief up on our wall, constructed in such a way that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room. They were always watching, like some primitive form of the surveillance camera. At night when everyone else was asleep I was awake, and so was Jesus.
The only saving grace was the absolute reality of the church's teachings. The church kept us grounded.
I'd get up at the crack of dawn, fighting performance anxiety, to serve Mass as an altar boy. I mean, I was so into it that I went to visit a seminary to see what it would be like if I, Jim Hoffman, were to fill the shoes of a priest. My mother was really pulling for me, couldn't have wanted anything more. I'd go to confession on Saturday afternoon, rattle off the usual offenses-- bad words, impure thoughts, talking back to my parents. The hard stuff. And I'd feel just great afterwards.
I remember that one afternoon... I came home from confession, feeling all cleansed, and went right out to the alley behind our house. I got on my cluncky Roadmaster bicycle though, up till then, I couldn't even keep my balance on it at a standstill. I'd been out there day after day trying to create some kind of two-wheeled magic, but my mojo just wasn't working. What was the trick? I don't know, but that afternoon, I lifted one leg over the top bar, gripped the rubber ends of the handlebars with assuredness, clenched my teeth, and I began to ride. There was the smell of diesel fuel and the sound of squealing tires. No, that was the traffic in the nearby street. But it was a miracle (ok, a small miracle), and my confession had a lot to do with it, I was sure. If I followed the rules, then good things would come to me.
That was the high point. But slowly, in increments, it began to sink in that I was being deceived. Everything began to unravel about the same time I realized my mother was persisting in serving us canned peas instead of frozen. I felt it was time for an investigation into the final whereabouts of all that cash we collected and gave to the nuns for "pagan babies", as they called them. I became wary of grown-ups and all their chicanery.
Our assistant parish priest allowed his car to smash into the house diagonal from the rectory where a universally disliked, rotund kid lived. We'll call him Tommy, 'cause that was his name. Tommy was known for committing oral sex on a lot of the guys in town. (I hasten to add that I was passed over.) The crash was no simple accident as it turned out. God was punishing the boy for his indiscretions. He was smiting him down by sending a messenger's car to demolish his house. And, lo, the indiscretions stopped soon after this. Perfect! And then I found out about the alcoholism, and it came back to me how the assistant pastor would routinely smack his lips when drinking the altar wine from the chalice during Mass. (You'll recall that I was an altar boy and had a front row seat to this.) This kind of dashed my vengeful god theory.
It was getting harder to believe from then on, that the priest was indeed God's messenger. Not just because of this; I was by then already becoming rebellious and suspicious of this cleverly constructed Rube Goldberg contraption that was the liturgy.
Our assistant pastor disappeared from the scene, replaced by a young, wholesome-looking priest who proceeded to run off with the Irish immigrant housekeeper placed in her position by one of the leading families in the church.
The grand scheme was coming apart. Never mind the Crusades or the Inquisition. It was happening to me on the inside. It culminated in a visit from our pastor one day in the late sixties. My mother had put him onto the case to ferret out why I had been skipping Mass. It was a clever ruse to get me back in the fold. We relaxed in the living room, the room that was made ready whenever company was coming to call. The pastor had already gotten the money he came to collect as part of an annual tithe and was now content to spend a few moments doing the counselling part of his job. I explained that I didn't believe anymore. I couldn't. He stammered, then stated forthrightly that he did.
Of course I knew he believed, but what about me? He had the answers for himself but no real answers for me. I felt I was putting him on the spot, that I'd cornered him, for he started repeating himself. I could see that I was forcing him into a no-win situation, and I felt sorry for this.
One of the earliest memories I have is that of a book of fairy tales. The cover had been torn off, and it was worn as the deck of playing cards my dad always had handy. It had all the classic tales in it. There were characters like Chicken Licken (alias Chicken Little) and Henny Penny, and Goosey Loosey. You may have heard of them. They'd been alarmed that the sky was falling. The name Foxy Loxy too comes to mind. He said he could help and cleverly lured the animals into his cave to be eaten. He was a sly one. Crazy too, I might add.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Discipline
I came from a fairly disciplined place in the early sixties to another place that has become increasingly less hostile, less rigid. But even back then discipline always fought hand-to-hand with leniency.
In many ways, it was a simpler time when my parents always believed the nun's word over mine and we were actually encouraged to hang out with priests. Platonically of course, but still unsettling when I think back on it. There was the nuns and priests club, and then there was our club, and sometimes lay persons like us were allowed to enter for brief visits into their club.
Things were not always black and white, of course, and when it came to discipline the lines really became blurred. It was a mixture of the yin and the yang.
The nuns in my Catholic school were the sheriffs of my neighborhood. They were the ATF agents, the mafia goons, the swat team swatting with all their might. The year long, we suffered many slings and arrows, some shaped like crosses. The yard stick was the weapon of choice for the Darth Vader lookalikes, just as the wooden serving spoon was the weapon of choice at home. The only thing that would garner you a little praise at school was a win at one of the frequent spelling bees. I have to admit, I was a champ at these contests. After the glow of each victory wore off though, the nun would go back to calling me slow as molasses in January.
We all waited throughout the school year for the annual school picnic at Bushkill amusement park where nuns let their hair down, what little there was of it, to ride the bumper cars. It was here that my passive aggressiveness turned active as I rammed nun-filled cars with abandon. It was a death race, without the death part, the smell of revenge mixing deliciously with the aroma of cotton candy. Occasionally, we'd see a nun off in the corner with a parent, talking business, but generally they seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I had trouble reconciling the two phases of nun-hood, one a disciplinarian, the other a person just like us, caring, personable, even fun-loving... kind of. One dark, the other light. Admittedly, it's this dichotomy I now try to embody as a parent to varing degrees of success and failure.
Take my dad, for instance. He was a bundle of nerves, I could tell, but he kept it well hidden, in reserve for sporadic outbursts. These were explosive moments that seemed to last forever and were none too fun to be a part of, I can assure you. But looking back, I'm guessing this was his own way of dealing with that same duality: good cop, bad cop in one neat little package.
Yes, there was responsibility, but we were left alone to our own devices quite often. We were allowed to go out for the day and not check in till supper time, taking long walks to the next town, stopping at the pharmacy there to drink the free quinine water. We dawdled about the old factory ruins on the bank of the river. We hung out at the river, which had already swallowed up a few locals. And we walked the train trestle by the canal. All in a day's work, you might say, with no helicoptering parents, at least until we got home and had to answer a few pointed questions.
My feeling was that Rita Millheim had to answer for a lot, even though I didn't hear the expected cries of terror from her house as she tried to atone for her one big mistake. Actually, in retrospect, I'm sure she was treated quite fairly by her parents. But this is how it went down:
Johnny Shugart and I were sitting on the curb next to the fire hydrant in front of Whitey Sodl's corner store eating ice cream as we were wont to do in those hot summer days. Johnny, a polio victim, had a leg with the girth of my arm, and he wore a brace from hip to ankle. He got around pretty good though. He could run to the ice cream truck as though it wasn't going to come around anymore. Me too. As we sat musing about the day's events, which weren't many, we looked up from our cones to see little Rita Millheim-- she was probably five years old then-- come out of the side door to her house and run across the lawn to her dad's Oldsmobile. We watched as she got into the driver's seat, and before we knew it, the car with Rita in it was rolling into the intersection towards us, slowly at first, then quietly picking up speed. It moved silently past us like the shark just missing Sheriff Brody's son. In a standard transmission car like the Oldsmobile it was easy to let it coast without the engine running. We didn't care about the mechanics of all this. We just wanted to get out of the way. Johnny was so shocked that he jerked his whole body backwards, knocking the back of his head on the pavement behind him. There was ice cream all over his shirt and pants. The Olds was veering now, heading down Arch Street, past us, but jumping the curb alongside the store. As we peered around the corner, we saw the car up on the sidewalk and halfway into the wall of Whitey's basement. It crashed through the wall. Just weeks before my dad had built it on one of his moonlighting jobs. And now it was demolished. Worse yet, the car came through the wall, hunting down Helen Sodl, stopping just two feet from the piano on which she was practicing. Where were Rita's parents, I wondered both silently and aloud.
Several years later, as I was preparing (in my own slipshod way then) to embark on a cross-country hitchhiking trip with one hundred dollars in my pocket and a headfull of ideas, my parents and siblings were all too present. My backpack was stuffed, but that didn't impede my mother and older sister from jamming into it various household items, including clothes pins. All that was missing was the fabric softener. It was as though they thought I was going to set up housekeeping out on the prairie somewhere. The trip was filled with many adventures, including sleeping on a cliff on California's Highway 1, lining up my sleeping bag perpendicular to the dropoff so as to not roll off the edge in my sleep.
These days, I see my teenaged son going out the door alone on a regular basis into Philadelphia via mass transit, and my wife and I, we say "Wait. When and how are you coming home? Better yet, we'll come and get you." Your mind races. There he goes, off with little Rita Millheim in the Oldsmobile. It's nuts, like sleeping on the edge of a cliff.
In many ways, it was a simpler time when my parents always believed the nun's word over mine and we were actually encouraged to hang out with priests. Platonically of course, but still unsettling when I think back on it. There was the nuns and priests club, and then there was our club, and sometimes lay persons like us were allowed to enter for brief visits into their club.
Things were not always black and white, of course, and when it came to discipline the lines really became blurred. It was a mixture of the yin and the yang.
The nuns in my Catholic school were the sheriffs of my neighborhood. They were the ATF agents, the mafia goons, the swat team swatting with all their might. The year long, we suffered many slings and arrows, some shaped like crosses. The yard stick was the weapon of choice for the Darth Vader lookalikes, just as the wooden serving spoon was the weapon of choice at home. The only thing that would garner you a little praise at school was a win at one of the frequent spelling bees. I have to admit, I was a champ at these contests. After the glow of each victory wore off though, the nun would go back to calling me slow as molasses in January.
We all waited throughout the school year for the annual school picnic at Bushkill amusement park where nuns let their hair down, what little there was of it, to ride the bumper cars. It was here that my passive aggressiveness turned active as I rammed nun-filled cars with abandon. It was a death race, without the death part, the smell of revenge mixing deliciously with the aroma of cotton candy. Occasionally, we'd see a nun off in the corner with a parent, talking business, but generally they seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I had trouble reconciling the two phases of nun-hood, one a disciplinarian, the other a person just like us, caring, personable, even fun-loving... kind of. One dark, the other light. Admittedly, it's this dichotomy I now try to embody as a parent to varing degrees of success and failure.
Take my dad, for instance. He was a bundle of nerves, I could tell, but he kept it well hidden, in reserve for sporadic outbursts. These were explosive moments that seemed to last forever and were none too fun to be a part of, I can assure you. But looking back, I'm guessing this was his own way of dealing with that same duality: good cop, bad cop in one neat little package.
Yes, there was responsibility, but we were left alone to our own devices quite often. We were allowed to go out for the day and not check in till supper time, taking long walks to the next town, stopping at the pharmacy there to drink the free quinine water. We dawdled about the old factory ruins on the bank of the river. We hung out at the river, which had already swallowed up a few locals. And we walked the train trestle by the canal. All in a day's work, you might say, with no helicoptering parents, at least until we got home and had to answer a few pointed questions.
My feeling was that Rita Millheim had to answer for a lot, even though I didn't hear the expected cries of terror from her house as she tried to atone for her one big mistake. Actually, in retrospect, I'm sure she was treated quite fairly by her parents. But this is how it went down:
Johnny Shugart and I were sitting on the curb next to the fire hydrant in front of Whitey Sodl's corner store eating ice cream as we were wont to do in those hot summer days. Johnny, a polio victim, had a leg with the girth of my arm, and he wore a brace from hip to ankle. He got around pretty good though. He could run to the ice cream truck as though it wasn't going to come around anymore. Me too. As we sat musing about the day's events, which weren't many, we looked up from our cones to see little Rita Millheim-- she was probably five years old then-- come out of the side door to her house and run across the lawn to her dad's Oldsmobile. We watched as she got into the driver's seat, and before we knew it, the car with Rita in it was rolling into the intersection towards us, slowly at first, then quietly picking up speed. It moved silently past us like the shark just missing Sheriff Brody's son. In a standard transmission car like the Oldsmobile it was easy to let it coast without the engine running. We didn't care about the mechanics of all this. We just wanted to get out of the way. Johnny was so shocked that he jerked his whole body backwards, knocking the back of his head on the pavement behind him. There was ice cream all over his shirt and pants. The Olds was veering now, heading down Arch Street, past us, but jumping the curb alongside the store. As we peered around the corner, we saw the car up on the sidewalk and halfway into the wall of Whitey's basement. It crashed through the wall. Just weeks before my dad had built it on one of his moonlighting jobs. And now it was demolished. Worse yet, the car came through the wall, hunting down Helen Sodl, stopping just two feet from the piano on which she was practicing. Where were Rita's parents, I wondered both silently and aloud.
Several years later, as I was preparing (in my own slipshod way then) to embark on a cross-country hitchhiking trip with one hundred dollars in my pocket and a headfull of ideas, my parents and siblings were all too present. My backpack was stuffed, but that didn't impede my mother and older sister from jamming into it various household items, including clothes pins. All that was missing was the fabric softener. It was as though they thought I was going to set up housekeeping out on the prairie somewhere. The trip was filled with many adventures, including sleeping on a cliff on California's Highway 1, lining up my sleeping bag perpendicular to the dropoff so as to not roll off the edge in my sleep.
These days, I see my teenaged son going out the door alone on a regular basis into Philadelphia via mass transit, and my wife and I, we say "Wait. When and how are you coming home? Better yet, we'll come and get you." Your mind races. There he goes, off with little Rita Millheim in the Oldsmobile. It's nuts, like sleeping on the edge of a cliff.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Icarus
Like a scrawny referee wedged between two prize fighters, Catasauqua with its population of around 5,000 stands between the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem. History lesson: About 1910 Catasauqua had the highest per capita income in the United States. This is a far cry from the working class town of my youth. In fifty odd years the place had taken an economic nose-dive. It was like the sled rides we took down the alleys near my home, riding high, only to reach the slushy cross street below.
Catasauqua's own versions of robber barons had put it on the map with money from iron foundries and textile mills. But the gothic mansion of iron magnate Mr. Thomas was by the 1960s an apartment building. Mr Dery had an even greater abode several blocks up the street, adorned with Grecian columns (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian? I can't remember.) It was a Hearst kind of castle. It too was fitted with apartments by the time I had come along.
When the silk industry failed due to the arrival of synthetics, Dery failed too, proving the classic cautionary tale about putting all of your eggs in one basket, even if they are golden. Directly across the street from the mansion, there was a modest clapboard house painted gun metal gray, one that my parents could have afforded. And in this typical working class house the broke Mr. Dery lived out his final days still able to look out across the street at the block-long edifice which he once owned.
In my youth there were certain iconic kids who led the rest of us around like so many grains of metal in an Etch-A-Sketch (a popular toy of that era operated by dragging metal filings around an enclosed screen using dials, which would... oh, hell, never mind.) Jeff was one of those guys who didn't follow: he got followed. He was one of five brothers whose dad managed the local movie theater. Not he nor any of his siblings had decent teeth. But Jeff's were the worst, with a couple of front ones missing and others blackened, only adding to his menacing appearance. He had concurrent cupcake and pinball addictions which he nursed simultaneously at the local malt shop. A couple of years later I saw Jeff get beaten to a bloody mess in a schoolyard skirmish. So much for heroes, or even anti-heroes like Jeff.
We would attend fights religiously like medieval townsfolk watching a beheading. Not much soul searching would happen after one of these events, except the usual sour grapes if your guy lost.
As they say in today's parlance, it should have been a slam-dunk for Doc, the almighty Doc. He was a few years older than our tribe and tall, taller than most guys his own age. Some of us looked up to him, and his pronouncements were welcomed with a certain reverence. I think a few of us, the Struss brothers for instance, saw him as a protector. I guess we overlooked the gentler side of this giant, the one who raised rabbits in his backyard and did chores around the house. What we saw was an overlord. So it wasn't much of a stretch for us to back him one hundred percent in a fight with the smaller, younger Jake, someone from the othere side of town about whom we knew little. We would have put money on Doc if we had any.
So we trooped down the alley behind my house to a row of garages, a neutral territory of sorts where no homeowner would chase us off. (We were accustomed to getting run off of properties, and we were wary of this.) It was there behind the row of garages that we saw our future as Jake pummeled the stomach of the towering Goliath that was Doc. And then we saw with dismay how Jake landed an upper-cut to Doc's face, drawing blood and reducing Doc to tears.
Those were real tears. We couldn't believe it. Then Doc pleaded for Jake to stop which he was reluctant to do. We couldn't look away from this derailed train, and the jumbled wreckage stays with me over time and place. On the way back up the alley afterwards there were the usual sour grapes.
When not dealing with these earthly matters, I looked to the skies. A bunch of us would fly kites in the town's ball field. On that day, I remember Tips was there, as was Jim S., his brother Johnny, etc. The entire cast of five characters eludes me now. We each had our own kite, vying for the title of whose went the highest and farthest. We must have been at it for a good half hour with our necks bent backward, gazing at the air above, before Jim's kite began to falter, then swirl in widening spirals, finally hitting the ground awkwardly on the other side of the field. Shortly thereafter, Tips felt an uncertain tug of his string and knew that the end was near. His kite crashed too.
One by one, kites looped, dipped, then kissed the earth as strings were reeled in and wreckage examined. We stood over a crumpled kite, surveying the damage, murmuring to each other. "It might have been the tail: it was too long." "No, the frame is off kilter." "The bow string could have been tighter." We didn't know, but we were like CSI officials. We were crazy serious.
We now had four kites on the ground, but mine was still aloft. I hadn't had many crowning victories in those years, and flying a kite now seems rather pedestrian, but it was all I had on that afternoon.
With only one kite up there, our minds became one. We all had a stake in this game now. Tips tied the end of his string onto mine, and one by one, each comrade tied the end of his own string onto the previous one until the combined length of string released my kite to an unimaginable height and distance. It became smaller and smaller in the atmosphere above as it became larger and larger in our imaginations.
At times we wondered if the kite had somehow gone into the stratophere, breaking free of the string, but then we'd see the string still arced upward, and with a glint from the sun the kite would show itself once more. It crossed my mind that this might be wrong, that we were defying the laws of science and the laws of our Roman Catholic God at the same time, that this wasn't meant to be.
The takeaway from this as I look back was the sense of teamwork on that day. We were our own NASA crew there in the final stages, each one of us contributing to the whole experience. You don't get many opportunities like this, not then, not now.
The inevitable was finally upon us, however, and reality brought us back down to earth. I think it was Tips who noticed it first. The string, it lagged, it went slack, it was becoming horizontal. The kite, a mere dot, looked miles away, but not straight up now. Then it was gone from sight. It was down; there was no denying it.
It was obviously not in the realm of the ball park anymore. We followed the string, traipsing through town to find the fallen kite. At times the string would go from the ground up over a power line then down again then over a rooftop. It had been run over by cars on it's way, invading people's backyards, decorating their front stoops, until we found the broken and dismembered kite itself in the middle of Bridge Street.
We knelt in reverence to delicately pick it up as though it were a wounded bird. Oh, noble craft that had been to the heavens and back! We paused for the proverbial moment of silence, or do I just remember it this way, all of us standing in a circle before turning to go, the onset of traffic breaking the silence. Our day was done, and we all went home after that. Our heads were filled with a feeling of accomplishment and the promise of even greater things to come.
Yet even such triumph had to come to an end. Why do I tell you all of this? It may be instructive, but I don't know about that. Things fall apart, and they will always fall apart. Things come crashing down. We repeat history with a vengeance. And there will always be Docs and Derys. The mighty are falling all around us to this day: Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener, The News Of The World... In the early sixties, we were no strangers to this same forboding, yet we tried to make the best of things as they were. We were so hopeful, and I don't know why. Maybe it was the kite flyer in all of us.
Catasauqua's own versions of robber barons had put it on the map with money from iron foundries and textile mills. But the gothic mansion of iron magnate Mr. Thomas was by the 1960s an apartment building. Mr Dery had an even greater abode several blocks up the street, adorned with Grecian columns (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian? I can't remember.) It was a Hearst kind of castle. It too was fitted with apartments by the time I had come along.
When the silk industry failed due to the arrival of synthetics, Dery failed too, proving the classic cautionary tale about putting all of your eggs in one basket, even if they are golden. Directly across the street from the mansion, there was a modest clapboard house painted gun metal gray, one that my parents could have afforded. And in this typical working class house the broke Mr. Dery lived out his final days still able to look out across the street at the block-long edifice which he once owned.
In my youth there were certain iconic kids who led the rest of us around like so many grains of metal in an Etch-A-Sketch (a popular toy of that era operated by dragging metal filings around an enclosed screen using dials, which would... oh, hell, never mind.) Jeff was one of those guys who didn't follow: he got followed. He was one of five brothers whose dad managed the local movie theater. Not he nor any of his siblings had decent teeth. But Jeff's were the worst, with a couple of front ones missing and others blackened, only adding to his menacing appearance. He had concurrent cupcake and pinball addictions which he nursed simultaneously at the local malt shop. A couple of years later I saw Jeff get beaten to a bloody mess in a schoolyard skirmish. So much for heroes, or even anti-heroes like Jeff.
We would attend fights religiously like medieval townsfolk watching a beheading. Not much soul searching would happen after one of these events, except the usual sour grapes if your guy lost.
As they say in today's parlance, it should have been a slam-dunk for Doc, the almighty Doc. He was a few years older than our tribe and tall, taller than most guys his own age. Some of us looked up to him, and his pronouncements were welcomed with a certain reverence. I think a few of us, the Struss brothers for instance, saw him as a protector. I guess we overlooked the gentler side of this giant, the one who raised rabbits in his backyard and did chores around the house. What we saw was an overlord. So it wasn't much of a stretch for us to back him one hundred percent in a fight with the smaller, younger Jake, someone from the othere side of town about whom we knew little. We would have put money on Doc if we had any.
So we trooped down the alley behind my house to a row of garages, a neutral territory of sorts where no homeowner would chase us off. (We were accustomed to getting run off of properties, and we were wary of this.) It was there behind the row of garages that we saw our future as Jake pummeled the stomach of the towering Goliath that was Doc. And then we saw with dismay how Jake landed an upper-cut to Doc's face, drawing blood and reducing Doc to tears.
Those were real tears. We couldn't believe it. Then Doc pleaded for Jake to stop which he was reluctant to do. We couldn't look away from this derailed train, and the jumbled wreckage stays with me over time and place. On the way back up the alley afterwards there were the usual sour grapes.
When not dealing with these earthly matters, I looked to the skies. A bunch of us would fly kites in the town's ball field. On that day, I remember Tips was there, as was Jim S., his brother Johnny, etc. The entire cast of five characters eludes me now. We each had our own kite, vying for the title of whose went the highest and farthest. We must have been at it for a good half hour with our necks bent backward, gazing at the air above, before Jim's kite began to falter, then swirl in widening spirals, finally hitting the ground awkwardly on the other side of the field. Shortly thereafter, Tips felt an uncertain tug of his string and knew that the end was near. His kite crashed too.
One by one, kites looped, dipped, then kissed the earth as strings were reeled in and wreckage examined. We stood over a crumpled kite, surveying the damage, murmuring to each other. "It might have been the tail: it was too long." "No, the frame is off kilter." "The bow string could have been tighter." We didn't know, but we were like CSI officials. We were crazy serious.
We now had four kites on the ground, but mine was still aloft. I hadn't had many crowning victories in those years, and flying a kite now seems rather pedestrian, but it was all I had on that afternoon.
With only one kite up there, our minds became one. We all had a stake in this game now. Tips tied the end of his string onto mine, and one by one, each comrade tied the end of his own string onto the previous one until the combined length of string released my kite to an unimaginable height and distance. It became smaller and smaller in the atmosphere above as it became larger and larger in our imaginations.
At times we wondered if the kite had somehow gone into the stratophere, breaking free of the string, but then we'd see the string still arced upward, and with a glint from the sun the kite would show itself once more. It crossed my mind that this might be wrong, that we were defying the laws of science and the laws of our Roman Catholic God at the same time, that this wasn't meant to be.
The takeaway from this as I look back was the sense of teamwork on that day. We were our own NASA crew there in the final stages, each one of us contributing to the whole experience. You don't get many opportunities like this, not then, not now.
The inevitable was finally upon us, however, and reality brought us back down to earth. I think it was Tips who noticed it first. The string, it lagged, it went slack, it was becoming horizontal. The kite, a mere dot, looked miles away, but not straight up now. Then it was gone from sight. It was down; there was no denying it.
It was obviously not in the realm of the ball park anymore. We followed the string, traipsing through town to find the fallen kite. At times the string would go from the ground up over a power line then down again then over a rooftop. It had been run over by cars on it's way, invading people's backyards, decorating their front stoops, until we found the broken and dismembered kite itself in the middle of Bridge Street.
We knelt in reverence to delicately pick it up as though it were a wounded bird. Oh, noble craft that had been to the heavens and back! We paused for the proverbial moment of silence, or do I just remember it this way, all of us standing in a circle before turning to go, the onset of traffic breaking the silence. Our day was done, and we all went home after that. Our heads were filled with a feeling of accomplishment and the promise of even greater things to come.
Yet even such triumph had to come to an end. Why do I tell you all of this? It may be instructive, but I don't know about that. Things fall apart, and they will always fall apart. Things come crashing down. We repeat history with a vengeance. And there will always be Docs and Derys. The mighty are falling all around us to this day: Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener, The News Of The World... In the early sixties, we were no strangers to this same forboding, yet we tried to make the best of things as they were. We were so hopeful, and I don't know why. Maybe it was the kite flyer in all of us.
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