new keds shoes

crouched on the corner

of my childhood block,

the breeze of my past

damp down my neck.

--

glancing at the house

once holding me close,

keeping me sick

with wino bourbon blight.

--

my friends are gathering

in the cross corner lot

for remembrances of broken glass,

ghosts at play with new keds shoes.

--

i'm always almost with them,

dragging a bit behind

carrying shattered consciences

of errant kites fallen into power lines.

--

this gorgeous patch of suburbia

in its formative years

fills the caverns of my memories

with rosebuds and plum trees.

--

safe for a time

from our little house of horrors

where mom always said,

"don't play happy in the house."

--

or maybe she simply set the stage

for me to draw my own conclusions

of our depressive misdemeanors

with a fierce beauty all their own.

Booze Battered Lineage

I feel the weight of the weird

and the strength of sad weaklings

as I crawl through the alleys

of childhood dreams.

----


I arise to the noises

of garbagemen retching

and I yearn to be trashed

until numb to the numbskull I've been and become.

----

Yesterday's misery

is mailed to tomorrow

as time disappoints me

once and again.

----

I'm malaise bloomed incarnate

in Kafkaesque shit storms,

drenched in digestion

of booze battered lineage.

----

I'm swamped in the ethos

of failed adolescence,

bathed in the strychnine

of putting up appearances.

----

I'm the muck that I'm stuck in,

cut on shiny shards of family

through the thick shag of sick

and the avocado bygones

of disco sad psychosis,

shot past present tenses

that haunt all my tomorrows

like an out of style spectre

cursed with everlasting shame.

Toyz in da Hood

This time of year - which seems to begin earlier every autumn - puts me into a nostalgic frame of mind. Up with the birds this morning, I was able to catch a bit of Saturday morning TV fare with the very first flush of the upcoming holiday season's toy advertisements already breaking bread. Now to be sure, my toys of yore were a bit different. We're talking toys circa late 60s/early 70s. I think the most "high tech" item I ever owned was Hasbro's Lite-brite.

Hot Wheels were my longest running passion. I remember a few Christmases with them, and they're still alive-n-kicking in the 21st Century; in fact, they are one of Mattel's premiere brands to this day. Of course today Hot Wheels is all fancy and whatnot. Back in the olden times it was just a bunch of orange plastic strips of miniature road connected together in sundry ways (loops and ramps and so), with little metal cars you dropped onto said tracks. Gravity did the rest of the work, no electricity required. It didn't take long for the day-glo tangerine strips to outlive their usefulness as race tracks, but they went on to new lives as play weapons (whips, swords, etc.). I can still feel the sting those three foot hunks of rubbery plastic exacted when used in pretend anger.

Slot-cars. They were right up there in the pantheon of toy Christmas pleasures, along with Big Wheel and my black Sears Spyder five-speed "muscle" bike. I could be getting some of my Yuletide memories jumbled with birthdays here but I remember the slot-cars distinctly on Christmas, racing them all day long under the tree.

Looking back now, my favorite time of Christmas wasn't rushing out of bed to see what the unkempt fat man and his mangy venison chauffeurs had delivered but rather putting things together afterward. My parents - and later, sister - were often up until the wee hours stitching together my Kris Kringle loot but there were several items still wrapped come morning and many required assembly once opened. This was the shit "Santa" hadn't delivered (presents from people living south of the North Pole). Dad and I often set to work on this task together and it was one of the few father/son moments I remember fondly. The other was Sunday mornings with the paper and powered donuts. After that it drops off into the abyss.

Other items of note:

• Unicycle. Not sure why my friend Brian and I learned to maneuver these things but I can tell you it's not like a bike: you do in fact "forget" how to ride as I found out not too long ago in a painful display.
  
• Remote-controlled model car
• Rock'em Sock'em Robots
• Barrel full of Monkeys
  
• Electric Football Game. Electricity vibrated the little players around the "field" - perhaps this was my highest tech toy.
• Various Play-Doh toys (mainly used to carve up said play-doh into numerous shapes and sizes). My Mom used to make homemade "play-doh" as well, of wildly varying color and quality.

Man, reading all this now I see this kid was really spoiled as a child with all manner of crap. Somehow my parents came through with the goods come Christmas and birthdays, regardless of our financial straits. If only there were but two days in the year then things would have been golden all around. Damn Gregorians.

Oh yeah - I nearly forgot perhaps my favorite toy of all: Mattel's VaRoom! ...

Varoom by Mattel
Uploaded by kmail.

Leonard

Leonard was a hefty sort and a sad sack - the only overweight member of my Dad's rum buddies (or more correctly, whiskey chums). He was trapped in a miserable but inexplicably lasting marriage to the rarely seen "Bubbles", a hoity-toity gasbag forever berating him for being who he was: a falling-down chronic alcoholic prone to balling his eyes out at the drop of a hat.

But Leonard had his uses, at least to Dad and his pals: he had a vehicle, a truck. That was a valuable commodity to this crew, most of whom no longer had ready access to such devices (wrecked, repo'd, sold for liquor money; they all had a story).

Leonard's truck was a means to get to the state store or the bars, and was essential to his continuing inclusion in this band of boozers, since he rarely had any duckets to kick in for beverages. (Bubbles came from money and held tight to the family purse strings. She had long since put the kibosh on doling any out to her lush of a husband and he had to settle for scraps or whatever he could steal from the cookie jar when her back was turned.)

Leonard had mad skills behind the wheel as he weaved down the road bouncing from curb to curb, emphasis on mad. Terrifying, in fact. As one of the few people to ride with him sober in those days, my survival attests to his mastery of the art of lubricated locomotion. (I was 8, 9, 10 years old and wasn't prone to knocking back shots at 9am on a sunny August Tuesday like the others along for the ride in this deathtrap.) Leonard had a six sense when navigating to the state store (the truck pretty much drove itself).

His visits would start with a knock on the door. He'd plop down on the couch, forcing Dad to sit upright from his usual semi-horizontal position. Leonard would start with a bit of small talk, all the while licking his lips and shooting glances plaintively toward the corner where the old man kept his bottle. Medicine for the sick. If the bottle was empty, he would suggest a road trip and if it wasn't, he'd suggest a glass (I think he used a glass but my memories are kind of foggy; Dad usually didn't bother at this point). Either way, soon would be the booze a-flowin' and the tears would surely follow. Bubbles doesn't understand, woah-is-me, yada-yada.

Watching that fat drunk waddle-stagger to our bathroom after knocking back a bottle with Dad was a treat. He'd have done Chevy Chase and Dick Van Dyke proud with his prat-fall antics, though perhaps Chris Farley would be a more apt comparison. Leonard'd start out by invariably catching his shoe on the braided living room rug, nearly doing a header into the dining room. Next, he sluggishly danced with a leg raised in an attempt not to step on the tail of my sleeping dog Snooks (a failed attempt on several occasions I was present for - the damn dog didn't learn). Once past the dog for good or ill, Leonard would grasp for the dining room table and chairs to slow his stride lest the momentum tumble him into our 'china' cabinet. Safely through the worst of this journey, he'd stagger out into the hallway near the toilet, on two occasions tripping over the cord that coiled out from under the telephone table there, falling back on his ass.

Only once did Leonard alter his route to the can and he paid dearly for this deviation. For some reason on this one trip, he made the journey via our kitchen rather than directly through the dining room. Bad move. He was confused by this wrong turn, puzzled by the sight of a fridge where the hallway phone table should be. In a daze and about to topple over, Leonard made the mistake of using the stove for leverage and placed his hand firmly on a lit burner (I was getting ready to make coffee). You never heard such a banshee cry! It caused Snooks to hightail it out of the living room to safety under my parent's bed. I'm surprised Leonard ever went to the bathroom again in our house. Certainly he avoided the kitchen. And that's Leonard. Glad ya got to know him.

Hal

His name was Hal Lambert. Hal-o-wishes. A charter member of my Dad's drinking entourage, he was forever decked out in his pork pie hat and dapper threads, a gentleman in the 1950's sense of the word. Kind of sophisticated for Dad's crowd. Sophisticated, that is, when he wasn't throwing up in the corner or crying like a baby into a pillow on our couch (both happened more than once). Looking back, Hal reminds me a bit of William Burroughs. Did that make my Dad Jack Kerouac? Probably not. I think the resemblance ended with the gentile nature and omnipresent hat. And of course their mutual addiction to mood altering drugs. With Hal, it was booze while Burroughs was hooked on pretty much everything (opiates were his "drug of choice" when pressed). The fog forever enveloping my childhood memories is usually as thick as pea soup, but if I strain my psyche particularly hard, things more or less come into focus for an instant, exposing my revisionist history. Then the fog rolls back in again, protecting me from things I'd rather not know. But it also has an insidious way of hiding the detail that is a necessary ingredient in the pictures I'm trying to paint here. I guess ya can't have it both ways. I get the feeling that Hal-as-Burroughs is one of those false fog-infused recollections. My memories momentarily a bit more lucid, I see he most resembled Mr. Magoo (who, it should be said, was a sharp dresser in his own right). I'm pretty sure they attended the same Driver's Education class and shared a similar field of vision, Magoo's courtesy of two bum retinas and Hal's brought to you by the makers of Bourbon everywhere. Having experienced the spine-tingling terror of being the lone sober passenger on a liquor run with Hal at the wheel, I can attest to his routine Magoo-like supernatural escapes from the jaws of vehicular death. Hal's wife Darlene was anything but gentile. Boisterous with the bluest of collar, Darlene was a "tavern jacket" type who could go toe-to-toe with the best of them when it came to knockin' back the sauce. She was tall, "big boned" and prone to strut, he was diminutive of stature and perpetually hunched over. Opposites who attracted, bonded by the booze and little else.

Darlene would have fit right in on the local bar bowling team. Hal would have looked more at home pacing the sidelines of a football game, Tom Landry/Bear Bryant style. Well, he would were they prone to vomiting into the Gatorade and weaving drunkenly onto the field at inopportune moments.

This odd couple often graced our home, to drink and talk and cry (well, Hal cried; that wasn't Darlene's style). And then one day, Darlene up and died. It was a strange death, apparently in her sleep. Hal waited several hours before calling an ambulance (I think he may have dialed our home first and chatted up my Dad while awaiting Darlene's rigor to kick in).

Perhaps Hal had been drunk and was confused (that was always a good bet). But we often wondered whether he'd finally had enough of her noise and simply wanted some peace and quiet. As mentioned previously, Hal knew his way around a pillow and likely could wield it in anger just as skillfully as he did in sobbing drunken sorrow. But this was merely idle talk; Darlene had any number of legitimate reasons for casting off this mortal coil at a relatively young age (I couldn't hazard a guess as to exactly how old she was - maybe late fifties). Booze and cigarettes likely played a starring role.

We saw Hal occasionally after this sad event, he prone to crying more than usual and just a bit more blind to boot, thanks to an amplification of his natural melancholy fueled by Darlene's passing and distilled (both metaphorically and literally) through the usual spirits that represented their life blood. I can't say for sure when Hal joined Darlene and Dad in that great liquor store in the sky. I imagine it's just one of many details lost in my particular fog of time.

plumbing supply chain blues

My father danced

from the gallows of life,

a Don Draper swinger

gone to advertising seed.

Should you find yourself in need

of plumbing supplies

or second hand cirrosis

and can wait out a Strand Hotel

bender or two,

come on down to North Everett cira 1969

and darken our door -

my daddy-o, he can oblige;

this hep cat pappy,

with his dad gone mad skills.

Sweet sounds of sickness

and Aqua Velva whiskey fragrance,

deep thrusts of indigestion

and tortured circumspect;

the fury weighed heavy

on this slightly animated corpse

but he'd be glad to help you out

for just a taste

of formaldehyde distilled.

Broken Bell Bottom Blues

She was perfect

in every flaw.

He was hopeless

but looking up.

Just your average

sad sack couple

born of hard shell

fecal magnificence

festering around a chicken shit

suburban core.

This early morning quiet

remembrance

waxes my ears, sears my mind

silly.

Through it all

the sun still she rises

and the crows collect payment,

mockingly.

The Walmart Empire

finds its footing

even as our sad sacks fade

into avocado

deep pile purgatory,

their dancing days short-lived

yet so sour sweet.

The Neighborhood Handyman

My Dad lay passed out in a neighbor's upstairs bathroom in the tub. His toolbox had been propped open next to him, a half empty bottle of whiskey poking up among the pipe wrenches and other equipment in it. I stood over him, frozen. What should I do? Run down the stairs and out the front door, pretending I never came back? Try and wake him up? This latter move might just be worse if he's as in the bag as his slobbering snore indicates. The choice was made then: I ran.

And thus ended my Dad's very short career comeback as the neighborhood handyman. But it all started a month or so earlier. Well, not exactly. Really it had been ongoing for many years.

Dad had steadily become unemployable to the regular nine-to-five rank and file over the years leading up to the tub incident. It wasn't all that big a town we lived in and he managed to drink his way into and then back out of pretty much all the companies that needed a plumbing supply salesman.

Even the alcoholics among Dad's sundry bosses had gradually thrown in the towel with him after a few dances. And by the second or third generation of Dad's career transitions, a high percentage of his hiring managers were raging alcoholics (that's bound to happen when you go job hunting primarily from the vantage point of a bar stool). Those whose boozing buddy loyalty instincts outweighed their fiduciary responsibilities eventually either drank themselves to death or at least out of any positions of influence that could protect Dad's ass from the boot.

Dad drifted into odd jobs and seasonal work after his chosen profession up and ran from him. The only one of these part time jobs I remember distinctly was his stint as a 'peace officer' with Northwest Protection Service (I can still picture his 'police' jacket with company logo and fake badge hanging up in the hall closet).

He got minimum wage to sit in a chair overnight next to the outdoor summer sale merchandise racked up in front of Kmart. There was enough shit that I guess it was cheaper to hire a guard than to haul it in and out of the store each day.

I'm not sure what Dad could have done had criminal types decided they wanted to make off with the inventory (it's not like he had a weapon; not even a club or mace). I guess he could have taken his lit cigarette, dropped it into his ever-present bottle of whiskey, and heaved it after the would-be thieves, Molotov Cocktail style. (By day, mild mannered couch-bound lush. But when night arrives, he is transformed into Whiskey Man: crime fighting Northwest protector of truth, justice and the American swing set.)

Regardless, Dad sat vigilant guard over bicycles, patio furniture and lawn mowers. Lt. Columbo, Sgt. Friday, One Adam-12, Serpico. The one incorruptible cop. Dum Da Dum Dum. That's my Dad! Couldn't wait for career day at school!

The truth is, I loved Dad's Northwest Protection job more than all the others, simply because he often brought his work home with him in the morning in the form of pilfered toys for me. I was on the receiving end of a pitch-n-catch trampoline-style baseball backstop along with a number of other items we otherwise couldn't have afforded. He was a fountain of ill-gotten gifts all around for the family during this summertime blue-light sentry duty. Likely the store would have suffered fewer loses had they simply left the stuff unguarded.

But that kind of work wouldn't pay the bills and didn't last long in any event; he needed something steadier. One of our neighbors, Austin, was a commercial artist and he volunteered to draft up some brochures hailing the "Return of the Neighborhood Handyman" in an attempt at a career revitalization for the old man. It was very nice of Austin and I really wish I had kept a few of those pamphlets around as a keepsake.

Austin's kids and I distributed these handyman leaflets like newspapers to doorsteps all around our neighborhood. The picture on the cover was a caricature of Dad, a tall lanky fellow, staggering under the weight of an overflowing tool belt filled with screwdrivers, tape measures, pipe wrenches, saws, etc. It was a bit like the picture on the left here.

Austin should have sketched in a couple of fifths of booze tucked safely away in Dad's pockets on the front of those pamphlets if he had adhered more strictly to the adage 'truth in advertising.' Whiskey topped Dad's list of the most essential tools of his trade and it didn't even make the cover! Sadly, he'd prove that out in this failed attempt as an independent business man, much to my embarrassment and his continued economic decline. Which brings us back to where we started. The tub. Almost.

The first customer who came calling was a homeowner several blocks north of us, a person we didn't know who had nonetheless been taken by the unique advertisement placed on his doorstep. The guy wasn't disappointed: Dad fixed their leaky faucet quickly and efficiently, with yours truly by his side as faithful assistant. (It was summer and this eight year old was either bored or goaded into servitude, I honestly don't remember which.)

The second customer was not so fortunate. These were neighbors we were friendly with, just around the corner. I knew the kids there, as did my sister. Theirs was a big house, they were fairly well off as I recall (the father was a physician). They had a complex job for the old man, something related to the installation of all new fixtures in one of the upstairs bathrooms. It was monotonous work and I wandered off to do kid stuff after watching Dad for a bit.

That was a mistake.

When I came back to the neighbor house a few hours later to see how Dad was progressing, well ... he was tubthumping, but I already went over that. And then I ran. I'm not sure if the neighbors stumbled upon Dad snoring among the rubber duckies or if he finally came to and managed to slither away sight unseen. I do know that he never went back to the neighbor house to finish and never received any payment from them for services rendered prior to his siesta. The argument that ensued between Mom and Dad made it clear that no check would be forthcoming, and the phone never rang for his handyman talents from that point forward.

I felt guilty a long time afterward for leaving Dad to his own devices. On the off-chance I forgot, Mom made sure to remind me loud and often. I had left my post. That's why he got shitfaced and screwed everything up. Makes sense.

Thus became the Exile of the Neighborhood Handyman. A one hit wonder. We hardly knew ye

Shiny Boots of Leather

It's a shame that two of New York City's most historic rock and roll haunts now only exist in cyberspace - namely Max's Kansas City and CBGB.

I was too young to have made it to Max's but was lucky enough to see several shows at CBGB, albeit long after its hey day as home to the Ramones, Blondie, Television, New York Dolls, etc. in the mid-70s (just after Max's first closed).

Max's was a regular hangout of the Velvet Underground, along with Andy Warhol and crew and one of the places to play in the late 60s and early 70s. Jim Carroll practically made it his second home as he illustrates in his book, Forced Entries. It's a deli today, which is a crying shame.

Why mention this? I was re-reading the Lester Bangs 'bio book' Blondie. Lester was, at least in my opinion, the best rock and roll writer the world has known, and one of the best writers of any kind. Not enough people know of him, certainly not those under a particular age. Sadly, Lester passed on much too young in 1982 and though he left a rich body of work behind, much of it is maddeningly inaccessible, save for a couple of compilations. The best of the compilations - and most commercially successful - is Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, put together by a buddy of his and another pretty good rock writer, Greil Marcus - if you haven't read it, I highly encourage you to pick it up.

Lester worked for a number of magazines in the 70s, including Rolling Stone (where he was fired at least once) but his voice really took root in the pages of Creem Magazine (God, I wish I had saved my copies from that period). Creem was an irreverent rag out of Detroit, 'America's Only Rock and Roll Magazine' it proclaimed on each cover. Creem now sadly also only has a life online (of course, it certainly isn't alone in that equation). Lester did get some posthumous exposure when Phillip Seymour Hoffman played him in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous but his work is largely incarcerated in those Creem back issues.

Anyway, I got off track again, as I'm wont to do.

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah - Blondie.

Lester was was a subversive motherfucker by nature. The Blondie book he had been hired to write was supposed to be a typically shallow fan bio, published only to take advantage of their unexpected success in the wake of Heart of Glass. Lester, though, had other plans. He used this relatively high profile exposure as a bully pulpit in order to preach his special brand of punk religion. He confused and infuriated the publishers (not to mention Blondie) but it's a great read. He talks about the roots of punk and in particular the Velvets and Max's and Television, the Dolls, Patti Smith, Ramones and, yes, Blondie at CBGB.

Screw the boring ass Museums that dot NYC (with a sponsor's exemption for the Guggenheim, which is kinda rock'n'roll in its own right) - I would pay dearly to be able to visit this kind of history outside the pages of a book (no matter how well written it might be).

Ahh, but that's not right.

Rock and roll isn't like other art and maybe trying to fit it into that mold would be the worst thing that could happen: you become - well, you become the Hardrock Cafe.

Max's is better off as a deli. After all, what's more New York than that? Except for perhaps the fate befallen the CBGB building, once Patti gave the final concert there in October 2006 and the doors closed for good as a rock joint.

First CBGB was shuttered/abandoned and then it became a high-end fashion store. NYC is very well known for plenty of both. The fashionistos left the club graffiti and playbills in the bathroom intact as a shrine for the richies to marvel over when they need to take a piss while shopping for high priced John Varvatos clothes and fragrances.

Andy Warhol would smile. That's very NYC indeed.

Bob and Ruth

Bob Douglas was all chest high plaid pants, wild eyes and eager ears, working the police-fire scanner knobs and his telephone dial with savage efficiency in the darkened room at the back of his house. This was his war room, his command center. The Information Station.

Hey, down there at 1310 Hoyt! Get ready for the fire truck! You, up there at 706 Grand! The police cruiser's coming your way! Yo, over there at 925 Rockefeller! Domestic Squabble just down your alley at 918 Wetmore!

He was wired into it all, hooked into the information grid of nineteen hundred and seventy. Everett, Washington's emergency dispatch signals surfing across his brainwaves, his thoughts tuned into their frequencies. Forever clearing his throat of the perpetual phlegm of ignorance, he thirsted for the knowledge that these crises and misdemeanors washed down into him. But it wasn't enough to obtain the wisdom, he was compelled to impart it onto others. And not gently either - no, this education was delivered to his friends and neighbors with a vicious ruthlessness. Mr. Douglas, you see, was a man both supremely impatient and utterly mad. He suffered neither fools nor the rational gladly.

A call would come over the scanner and his shock of curly hair shot straight up, his hairy ears throbbing with the details of this latest catastrophe. Incessantly tuning the signal to clear the noise from the necessary, Bob would focus, waiting - until, Bam! He'd catch wind of a juicy one through the static and hone in on the location. A picture would form in his mind's eye as he zoomed in for a close up. His gnarled fingers would then start clawing down the phone book white pages, mapping the dispatch address to a neighborhood and the 'hood to his acquaintances, however vague the connection. Match! Yes! Now he would make with the telephone dial.

Ring, ring.

Ignorant Acquaintance: Hello?

Bob: Ummmrrgghhh. Hey, down there at 1215 Colby, you got a heart attack one block down, 1314 Wetmore. Ummmeegghh.

Click.

With that said, Bob would abruptly hang up. He needed no reply from his pupils and had no time for idle chit-chat. They didn't even have names to him, his friends; he referred to them only by their addresses.  There was serious work to do, removing the blinders from the beleaguered citizens of this jerk-water town. How little they knew of these moments of consequence taking place right under their noses! But Bob, he knew. Strokes, heart attacks, burglaries, peeping toms. Bob had total coverage. He was the master of this knowledge. The great and powerful Oz!

This man was a god to me growing up, a giant. Fueled by Antabuse and aggravation, he was nothing so much as a raw nerve personified. All work and no play was not in Bob's vocabulary, though the definition of 'play' is subjective. For instance, he 'played' his long-suffering dog Wolfy into a quivering nervous wreck until the poor thing could take no more, finally succumbing to a fatal heart attack. Not satisfied with simply schooling his own pet, he worked the neighborhood animals into frenetic basket cases as well (they were unable to sleep for days after one of his visits). But unlike Wolfy, at least the neighbor doggies had times of relief when 'uncle' Bob went home. None of these unfortunate side effects were intentional, of course. Mr. Douglas was simply being Mr. Douglas. Wass a gooodd dooggg?!? yessyouare, yessyouare, wass a good dog!?!?! eh? eh?!?!? Was a good dog!?!?! Ehh, ehh, ehh!! On and on and on, he'd go. Bob would have them chase their tails, tug on rags, run down Frisbees, play chop sticks on the piano, clean his garage, mainline meth, and tear their own tongues out. And that was for starters. Waasss a goood doogggie!?!? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Errrmmmdddhh!!

This was simply Bob's way.

His bright plaid pants weaving to and fro, manic voice booming and the constant gurgling of phlegm in his throat, Bob just couldn't stop, had no sense of boundaries or limits. Luckily he was clearing his throat so much of the time that you couldn't make out most of his psycho-babble. His affliction was Turrets Syndrome melded with an obsessive-compulsive disorder and manic tendencies all rolled into one fifty-something package. Or was he sixty-something? It doesn't matter: he was ageless, beyond time.

Bob would also visit upon children what he inflicted on the town's canine population. I cowered in terror upon his arrival at our doorstep. As I said, he was a god to me. Sort of like Loki, the Norse God of Mischief. Or Satan.

Bob stopped drinking years before I knew him, though it took a few trips through treatment before the "cure" took hold. His regiment of Antabuse and terminal psychosis remained the only vestige of a drunkard's past. I have no idea why as a child I was cognizant of his pharmaceutical intake, probably because my parents kept no secrets, as long as they weren't theirs. As though taking Antabuse was a scandalous thing, especially when compared to the unrestrained active alcoholism my folks reveled in.

I had always assumed that Bob and my Dad had been drinking buddies and that was how our families became friends. Those two may well have been boozing pals at some point; however, Mr. Douglas sold insurance back in the day - before he retired to his role as town crier - and that was how our families originally came together. (We had insurance?!?) A television commercial come to life with your broker as best buddy and trusted adviser. His friendship, though, was more akin to Jim Carey's Chip Douglas in The Cable Guy: you'd have to pry your relationship with him from his cold, dead hands. He mated for life in this regard.

Speaking of mating, Bob was not alone. He came as a package deal, wrapped up in a bow with his stubby chubby swinging 60s red headed whack job misses, Ruth. Ruth had the unfortunate habit of wearing skirts sans undergarments on occasion, but was not blessed with the body of Sharon Stone, nor was she of an age - she was somewhere north of fifty - when that behavior might have been viewed in a different light (a black light was too luminous for her particular horrors).

Mrs. D would readily cross and uncross her legs with a silly, knowing smirk as she visited with our folks making gabby small talk, always sounding and acting to me like Sue Ann Nivens from the Mary Tyler Moore show come to life with a dye job. I'd see red and go blind. The carpet matched the drapes, though neither of any shade nature could have conjured up. What nightmares these visuals would give me! ("Join me for a crimson bath! Red-dye #5 mixes well with Mr. Bubbles! Come on in, the water is fine!")

Errhhhhhh.

My Mom - also a Ruth - cut Mrs. Douglas's hair regularly, though she had no training or 'natural' talent in the tonsorial arts that I'm aware of (certainly the results bared that out). This ritual would take place in our kitchen, the two ladies enjoying a beer or two while my Mom took the scissors to that red fright wig atop Mrs. D's head. I had my first taste of the suds in this setting, though I'm not sure why I was offered (I couldn't place my age, maybe 10?). A first initiation into the alcoholic profession my parents saw as the family calling. I was strangely drawn to watching this beauty parlor ballet unfold, my Mom hacking at Ruth D's head while they both got toasted. I shutter when I think about this today. Now that I am thinking of it, my Mom's services to Ruth also included regular dye jobs (though they were, to my knowledge, all on the "up and up").

Bob and Ruth spawned one child, Lee. An odd kid who became a cop, he was by some accounts a sexual deviant. The girls in the neighborhood all dreaded Lee's approaching swagger, as he put his moves on them in his best 70s Disco Stu style.

Nature, nurture - Lee had both going against him and probably didn't stand much of a chance. But at least Father Douglas could follow his son's adventures from the comfort of his back room courtesy of the trusty police scanner. Sometimes his son would be dispatched, and sometimes his son would be dispatched upon. Sort of a one-man game of cops and robbers (or cops and flashers, to be more precise). Who would Bob call during these episodes? Himself? But the line's forever busy! I imagine that after episodes such as this, a confusion of sorts must have hung for a time over Bob's Rear Window lifestyle.

So these are my slanderous memories of just a couple of characters from my childhood.

An introduction. They will return. They were central to my upbringing in many ways.

It takes a village. Indeed.

[Postscript: my sister recalls once, back in the days when Bob had been drinking, he accidentally flushed his false teeth down the toilet. The mental picture of that event and the subsequent dental panic - Did they result in a clog? My dad was a handyman, did he break into the sewage pipes to retrieve the choppers? - was strong enough to me that I felt I needed to share.

My sister also recalled for me Bob's love of the pornographic (which explains his wife Ruth). For example, Bob liked to keep his extensive collection of Playboys piled high in plain view on top of his living room coffee table, in order to give all visitors the chance to peruse the interesting articles. He often left the mags open turned to the "article" spread. He went so far as to send my then teenage sister a fold out of a playmate pic because he thought it looked like her. He ratcheted up creepiness several notches in his day, claiming the word as his own. ]

A Thousand Innocuous Admonitions

A child's eye view of life's possibilities is expansive beyond boundaries at first, a vision bright enough to blind an adult's perspective long since relegated to the shadows.

But then slowly the light dims, the vibrant colors grow flat and muted; the edges sanding smooth, blending in.  A thousand innocuous admonitions handed down through generations combine to form an unseen family heirloom of dysfunction we all carry inside to greater or lesser degree.  Growing.  And choking.  Sewing a web around your dreams in translucent chains, hiding hideous across the expanse of your life.

Young childhood.  The unfettered joy washing over me with my hands on a new book, or a hot water heater cardboard box, or a kite.  The exhilaration in flying my bike up a plywood ramp over an overturned garbage can.  Happiness that trumps the best high I ever had as a grown up.  But it was a drug in itself, the flame we chase our whole adult lives, whether through workaholism, or alcoholism, or religion, or sex.

It's ironic we're so absorbed on tasting the pleasure again for ourselves that we end up unwittingly extinguishing this very ability in our children, our own chase futile thanks to our parents' rendition of the same sad song a generation ago.  The gift that keeps on giving.  Adam raised a Cain.  It's as old as history's introduction of the first vestiges of neuroses upon us in the form of predators, famine, drought, whatever.

The genesis of this particularly self indulgent screed was a mother standing in line at the supermarket today, yakking about some sort of marketing campaign on her cell phone out of one side of her mouth and telling her kid to shut up out the other side.  Maybe the child will emulate type-A obsessions the likes of dear ol' Mom one day, or perhaps he'll cultivate a drug habit instead, before he kicks that in favor of a fundamentalist bent aimed at beating down some target demographic vulnerable enough to curry his misdirected rage.  Now maybe Ma's just having a bad day and the kid'll emerge relatively intact from his youth.  Or it could be the brat's a born sociopath who deserves whatever tongue lashing he gets, though I'm not sure Mom even knew what she was yelling at him about.  In the end, I gotta bad feeling about this particular mother and child (re)union:  I think she's into herself pretty intently, he's mostly left on the outside looking in, and the prognosis for him isn't on the sunny side of life.

This parental watershed flashed me back to my childhood days.  My folks liked to try and put on a stylish face to outsiders, even when their world was obviously collapsing around them.  They remind me now of the Bouvier-Beale gals of Grey Gardens fame, all consumed with manners and close-ups and seemingly oblivious to the death, filth and smell that surrounded them.

Mom and Dad's plastered-on-smiles paranoia in mind, I was always told to shut up whenever we had company over.  In case I might point out to strangers the fact that Dad just finished his usual morning dry-heaves into the family vomit bowl an hour before their arrival. Or, "hey, didya know that isn't coffee Mom's sipping from her mug!?!"  In fact, when one of my friends spoke up out of turn in this setting, I would be the one who would be told to shut up even though I hadn't said anything.  It was comical in retrospect.  As though I'd developed expert ventriloquism skills and was throwing my voice.  Consequently, I've rarely spoken up in casual conversation from then to now.  I have a lot to say but am compelled to keep it to myself.  I make up for it with the written word, I guess, but my verbosity here does not translate to other forms of communication in my life.

If I had kids, would I have visited an innate shame of one's own opinion upon them?  Probably not.  My particular dysfunctions would likely have resulted in some other psychological damage, as unique as a snowflake up close and as depressingly similar from afar.  Some things aren't meant to happen, thankfully.  If Shirley McLaine is right, I guess there is some lucky soul out there who was spared my particular brand of self-absorbed parental neglect.

Or maybe I'd be a great parent.  It could happen.  And might happen still.   It's this last possibility that really gives me the chills.