Storied Shorts and Articled Briefs

The First Kiss

2010-01-08T10:31:00.001-05:00

There are events that occur in our lives that seem to self load into our memory banks by setting permanent records in our cranial databases. Many of these saved memories are universally shared. You know the typical examples: the JFK assassination, 9/11, Tiny Tim's wedding to Miss Vicky. But some of these stored records are personal, unshared, and therefore, uniquely defining. One such moment was logged and filed when I had my first kiss. I’m not talking about a little peck I might have given Gail Breeden in the second grade coat room. I’m talking about that first humdinger when more than static electricity sparked forth from lips touching.

I was a pretty sorry sight for most of my uninformative years—as comfortable with girls as Russell Crowe with decorum. A bottomless pit of self-effacing humor for someone so inclined. And I was nearly eighteen before I had achieved my first serious kiss—yes, even way back then, a social anomaly.

Anyway, the big event occurred at 8:23 p.m., Tuesday, December 30, 1969, right before the decade of testiness came to an end. But the lead up started a memorable day earlier.

I was loaded down with Christmas cash from grandparents, uncles, aunts, and others, who years before had given up trying to figure me out. I’m talking about tens of dollars, and it was burning a big hole in my pocket.

I received a phone call from Shirley, my best friend of the girl kind, completely out of the blue. She was going to Willowbrook Mall with a friend, and wanted to know if I would like to join them. Beautious! I wanted to buy the Crosby, Stills and Nash album released the prior June (I never bought anything on its debut). After short deliberation, I agreed to meet them at the corner of Bloomfield and Ridgewood Avenues, where we’d pick up the 33 DeCamp bus that would drag us out to the Willowbrook Mall.

When I arrived at the bus stop, they were waiting. Shirley introduced me to Sue. It took, oh let’s see, about 3.7 seconds. Nope, I think less. I’m pretty sure it was when I heard the “ue” sound of her name that I instantly felt something deep inside my chest. It was a ping right below the top of the rib cage, like an electric shock, only it didn’t hurt. It felt really goofy, really exhilarating. She was stunning. Her hair smelled like the freshest Breck shampoo I had ever laid nose on, and she was awash in Shalimar perfume, sending my testosterone laced olfactory glands into nasal nirvana.

During the bus ride to the mall, I was surprisingly overcome by an eerie confidence that pushed me to new heights of flirtatious wit. I was on top of someone else’s game and loving it! By the time we had arrived at the mall, I was hooked. Oh boy was I hooked. We had giggled our way into some kind of magic.

How quickly one’s fortunes change when suddenly plunged into the throes of youthful, romantic chase. We walked the long, winding caverns formed by nameless boutiques and anchor stores, laughing and smiling, and teasing and touching, and laughing some more. To the casual observer, it was probably nauseating, but I didn’t care. I was dominoing into a wonderful new world.
I bought the CS&N album. The girls replenished their perfume stock. Before we knew what hit us, it was time to go.

As the bus pulled from the gates of plenty, my mind was dancing in blissful exhilaration. But by the time we arrived back to disembark where the adventure had all begun, heaven had turned to hell. It was all too good to be true. Such was the fragile nature of my confidence.

The bus sputtered away from our stop, dumping an ominous, black cloud of monoxide in its wake. But all I could immerse myself in was Sue, who by now was wearing a dazzling array of seventeen fragrances she had tested on her delicate, soft wrists for me to blushingly critique. The air about her was a lush forest of scents to the finely tuned nasal passages of a teen boy in fresh, mushy pursuit. Unfortunately, it was a wondrous moment that could not last. It was time to be noble. Time to face her unwelcomed departure with an empty smile, and cherish the fond memory of the mall.

I took the lead step in the dance of disengagement.

“Well, I guess I have to get going.” As clever a line as I had ever led with.

Sue followed, “Yeah, well my brother is picking me any minute now."

I turned to Shirley. "Hey Shirls, can you give me a call later after din?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Yeah, we need to talk too Shirls?” Sue added.

My heart sank at the foreboding potential of their pending conversation. I reached deep inside to maintain the high road. “All right then, I guess that’s that! Everyone needs to talk! Everyone is talkin’!” Not a very good job. I probably needed to reach deeper. Unfortunately, my old friend, “panic” had made himself at home in my thoughts. Was this going to be as good as it gets? Was my breath killing her? Was she just now realizing the lowliness of her company?

I had to say something, but what? What could I possibly utter to rescue this sweet moment from the clutches of rejection like all the others preceding it? I found it. “Okay then, catcha!” (my rescue skills needed work too).

“It was really nice to meet you Bob. I had a really great time.”

My inner voice wallowed, “Yeah right. And I have a nice personality too. Isn’t that what you want to say? Go on. I can take it!”

“Me too, Sue. Take care,” I answered emptily. “Hey Shirls, talk to ya later!”

With shoulders drooped, I started my trek home in emotional upheaval, feeling exuberance and dread simultaneously. The day’s events played over and over in my head. I forced myself to think about something else, like hockey fights, but to no avail. The feel of her warm wrists kept interrupting.

I was in bad shape.

I barely ate dinner that night, which set off all kinds of alarms at home. Mom’s inquisition began: was I feeling okay, did someone steal my money at the mall, was I depressed about school starting in a few short days?

My inner self indulged, “Nope, I am just falling in love for the very first time. That’s all. There is nothing that can be done. My heart must travel this journey alone. I will find my way—somehow. Thank you though for inquiring.”

I probably should have confided in mom about my situation. It may have given her pause to engage in a much deserved sigh of relief. It’s safe to say that the growing concern mom had that maybe I buttered my toast on a different side was silently eating away at her. She had unsuccessfully tried a few times to match me up with girls. The most recent failure had been over the prior summer with my aunt’s mothers-helper. The girl was a year older than me and drove a car she bought herself. For some unexplainable reason, she was interested in me. After I reneged on an offer to take a ride with her in her fancy convertible, mom kind of gave up and started the internal process of coming to grips with "other" possibilities. Actually, there was never any doubt as to which side of the toast I buttered. I just wasn’t hungry for toast yet.

Until now.

I excused myself from the table to retreat to my sanctuary, where I listened to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” about forty seven times, waiting for Shirley's call. Finally, the phone rang.
“Hello?”

“She really likes you.”

“Oh God! Really?”

“Yeah. She thinks you’re really cute and funny.”

Suddenly another voice, “Oh my precious Bobby. My little lover boy.”

Damn! It was my little brother Steve. He could become a real pitbull of pain if I didn’t squelch this immediately.

“Hold on Shirls.”

I placed my hand over the phone.

“Hey Pedessy hang up or you’re dead!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. "Pedessy" was a cruel nickname we had for him.

I listened into the receiver. I could still hear him breathing. He was still on, the little bastard.

“I’m going to chop up your GI Joes! Hang up now!”

Click.

I didn’t like playing the GI Joe mutilation card but I was desperate to hear what Shirley had to say in private.

I removed my hand and continued.

“Sorry about that. So where were we? Oh yeah, ‘cute’? Can’t I ever be rugged or athletic or something?” I asked despondently. To me ‘cute’ was a notch above ‘nice personality’. ‘Oh, he’s so cute’ as in ‘he’s so cute to pat on the head’—that kind of cute.

“Forget rugged. She said ‘cute’ and meant it in a good way.”

“In a good way,” I repeated.

“Yes in a good way. Look she LIKES you!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I just got off the phone with her! She wanted to know about your status.”

“What status? I have no status. I’ve never had a status. I’m status free!”

“That’s what I told her—not in those words exactly. I smoothed it out for ya.”

“Smoothed what out? I don’t need smoothing.”

“Don’t make me laugh! You need plenty. I told her you were just coming around from a terrible break-up from over a year ago.”

“Oh that’s smooth Shirls!”

“Yeah, I thought you might like it. She thinks you are sensitive and likes that.”

I took a deep breath. “Wow … now what?” I was a fish out of water, pathetically incompetent in such matters. Maybe I could get advice from my younger brothers. Maybe even Pedessey. My mind was racing.

“Listen! There is a get-together tomorrow night at Shnooky’s house. Sue is going and wants you to come over.”

Shnooky was a good kid although she lived in this weird world where her ‘daddy’ proudly and publicly called her “my little Shnooky”—hence, the nickname. Visiting her house was like walking onto the set of Father Knows Best.

“Are you positive? Really? She wants me to go?”

“Yes! Don’t you get it? She LIKES you!”

“Are you going?”

“Yeah but not until later. Gotta baby-sit till 9:30.”

“What should I do?”

“Well, you could call her for starters and talk to her.”

“Talk to her? What would I say?”

Shirley was losing patience with me. “You know Bob, I don’t have time for this right now. Just go. Just be there.”

“Just be—”

“Gotta go. Catcha tomorrow night. Good Luck!”

Click. Dial tone. My lifeline was gone in an instant. I was swirling in a sea of uneasiness. I wondered what I should do now.

Well, I took Shirley’s advice and tried to call Sue, but her brother kept picking up the phone and I kept hanging up. I had a slight issue with her brother. He was my age. He was one of the many wealthy, stuck-up kids from the north end of town that I had to deal with on a daily basis back in seventh and eighth grades, when my daily dose of bullying was as common as breakfast cereal.
After a half dozen failed attempts, I gave up calling her and went to bed counting the hours to Shnooky’s.

It was a restless night of sleep and a very long day of angst, but 6:00 p.m. finally rolled around. It was time. After showering with my English Leather soap-on-a-rope, I toweled off and sprayed my armpits with Right Guard, enlarging the ozone hole over Antarctica by about fourteen square miles. Next, the goods were crow-barred into two of my cleanest, tightest “fruit of the loom” briefs. It was a precautionary measure, as the night’s activities could easily trigger an embarrassing predicament. After tucking the apparatus in real nice, I put on my favorite faded jeans, held nicely in place by my cool surfer belt. I threw on an undershirt, my best blue long-sleeve oxford shirt (“fag tag” still attached), thick matching crew socks, and desert boots. The ensemble was topped off with an old washed out navy blue crewneck sweater. The sweater served a few purposes. Primarily, I was under the delusion that it was a look. However, it also might make a useful cover-up should the double-bound underpants maneuver fail to conceal things in the event of a male situation.

Once dressed, I had to work on the face—no easy proposition. Apparently, during the prior night while sleeping, no less than four pimples showed up, accompanied by five long, wispy, dark, chin hairs. A quick buzz from my trusty rotary bladed Norelco and the chin hairs were history. A splash of British Sterling, well more like a dunking, tamed the burns of my freshly scraped chin. I was smelling pretty damn good. It was a skillful blend of the natural, fruity notes from Prell, the woodsy undertones from the English Leather soap, the bold, sporty scent from Right Guard, and the raw, sexual energy of British Sterling. They all came together in a circus of sensuality, as harmonious as a Schoenberg symphonic poem. This odor thing was very important, after all, it would have to mask the pungent stench emitted by the two pounds of Clearasil I was about to cake on the pimples.

Blemishes buried, hair combed, and lips embossed by Chapstick, I was ready to conquer the night.

I managed to get to the dinner table in time to down some grub, avoiding eye contact and communication with Steve the entire time. Successfully accomplished, I raced upstairs, gargled, brush my teeth and popped some Sen-Sen for added fresh breath insurance.

I wrapped my signature yellow and blue striped scarf around my thin neck, and slipped on my beige corduroy, Australian bushwhacker coat with epaulets and matching waist belt. After tucking in the scarf, I tugged on my gloves. The moment was finally upon me.

I trudged the two-mile walk through the snow-capped streets to Shnooky’s party with little more on my mind than Sue’s sweet scent. It was a beacon to the hormones. I arrived, a bit chilled but surprisingly refreshed. After greeting Mr. and Mrs. Shnooky with gratuitous pleasantries, i made my way downstairs to the finished basement.

There she was.

We made eye contact immediately and I smiled a grin so big that I could feel the frozen, plaster-like Clearasil on my zits cracking likes the Earth’s crust when the plates shift.

She looked so beautiful.

We sat close and talked awhile, staring into each other’s eyes the entire time. I could smell her hair. I was melting. At one point, she took my hand in her hand. It was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was warm and soft in ways warm and soft never felt. Her fingers were silky smooth to the touch—so different from thumb wrestling Joey M. I soon realized it wasn’t skin I felt. It was flesh—wonderful, living flesh.

Instantly, alarms were set off from my brain to every cell in my body.

EEERRPPP! EEERRPPP! EEERRPPP!
WWWHHHAAA! WWWHHHAAA! WWWHHHAAA!
“WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!”
“SILKY FLESH! SILKY FLESH! SILKY FLESH!”
“TAKE DEFENSIVE MEASURES IMMEDIATELY!”

I began to shiver uncontrollably. I had three thousand layers of clothing on, and I was shaking like a scared puppy. I would learn later on in life that I got the shakes with every new hand I held.

“Hey are you okay?” she asked in the sweetest disarming voice I had ever heard. I inhaled her breath. Electricity instantly shot down to my toes.

“Yeah, I just have these shakes for some reason. I’m not even cold.”

“That’s weird.”

“You’re tellin’ me?”

There was an awkward moment of silence. Then she spoke in a whisper. “Hey, I need to talk to you about something in private. Want to take a walk outside in the snow?”

I stared blankly.

“We could walk over to the country club. It’ll be fun.” She stopped talking and studied me for some kind of response.

I needed to say something, but what? I hadn’t heard a word she said. I played the tape back over in my mind until I found some key words to play off.

“You want to take a walk?” I nervously repeated.

Oh God the touch of her hand was so nice. “Please don’t let go! Please don’t let go! Please, oh please, oh please, don’t let go!”

“I mean sure. We can walk and talk. I mean you can talk while we walk or I can—”

She squeezed my hand, squinted at me with her bright blue eyes, and saved me from myself.

“Come on, let’s go,” she said calmly, leading me up the stairs by the soft hand I was now sweating on.

We threw on our coats, gloves, scarves and hats, and exited out the back door. Once outside, she put her arm around my waist, and in a reflex reaction, I put my arm around her shoulder. I had never hugged a girl like that before.

More sirens! More defenses re-initiated! I started to shake again.

Even though it was about twenty degrees out, even though we were swollen from layers of thick heavy clothing, even though I was shaking spasmodically, and even though my Clearasil was flaking off in large, crusty chunks, I felt like we were one being. As we plodded through the snow, we engaged in small talk, giggling into the gusty night, eventually crossing the freshly plowed street, and walking onto the golf course, hidden by a column of tall stately spruces. I didn’t want the moment or feeling to end.

The night’s darkness was of the deep gray variety. The dry white snow occasionally brightened our way by reflecting what little moonlight strobed in and out of the passing clouds. It was hard to tell from the drifting snow but I think we were walking across a green when she suddenly stopped and turned to face me.

“You’re shaking again. Poor baby.” She lifted her arms up and grabbed my striped scarf to adjust it. I placed my arms around her waist.

“Remember, I wanted to talk to you in private,” she whispered, her minted breath filling the crisp night air, dancing into my soul. Here it comes, the ‘nice personality’ speech. I was so short on confidence of any kind. I gallantly decided to cut her off at the pass.

“Yeah, I remember. Hey, look. You don’t have to say—”

But before I could be gallant, she puckered her glossed lips and headed my way. I instinctively closed my eyes before contact. Then, as if swallowed by the Earth, she stepped off the lip of a giant deep sand trap we unknowingly had been precariously standing above. In my effort to grab her as she slid down the slope, my feet went out from under me. I rolled down the hill in hot pursuit, crashing into her at the bottom, some eight feet below. We both began to laugh as she rolled over on top of me. And we laughed some more. Then we laughed a little less, and a little less until the only sounds we could hear were those of our silent stare.

then she leaned down and kissed me. Just like that.

What I remember most was that our teeth smacked into each other. I feared I had chipped one of her upper incisors. So I pulled back. She smiled. No blood. Nice white whole teeth. Undaunted she tried again. This time we were fine. Better than fine really.

For more hours than I wish to reveal, I have wrestled with capturing in words what I had felt at that precise instant. After many awkward, empty attempts, I realized I have neither the vocabulary nor the ability to do so. But that’s okay. I think any attempt would be akin to trying to capture the majesty of the Grand Canyon in a picture taken by a cell phone camera. It can not be done. And, for those who have tried either, well, you understand.

I will leave it at this: life for me at that moment had quietly and substantially changed.

Sue and I “went out” for four wonderful months—well, maybe more like one wonderful month, followed by three months of slow disintegration brought on entirely by my reluctance to believe any girl would want to have me as a boyfriend. And it didn't help that I was a clueless baserunner, one who was content to count his blessings at first base, even though she was constantly signaling me to round second and slide head first into third.

As would be the case with almost all my future girlfriends, she eventually broke up with me, leaving me stranded at first. At the time it was devastating. Sleepless nights. No appetite (and at a paltry 125 pounds I needed to eat). Endless internal what-did-I-do-wrong debates. The usual stuff.

However, I did learn that being dumped, as bad as it felt, wasn’t the end life as I knew it—a lesson I would repeat learning over and over again before I actually got it.

But one thing I discovered some time later I would never repeat—Tuesday, December 30, 1969 at 8:23 p.m.

A Holiday Story: "Aunt Bibbit's Christmas Calamity"

2009-11-27T11:40:00.001-05:00

Even today, I get that extra hop in my step once the last dry remnants of Thanksgiving white turkey meat work their way down my gullet, temporarily slicked by a warm coating of fat-thickened gravy. It is the “Christmas holiday anticipation bounce”. It is the same extra bounce I have felt after every long Thanksgiving weekend, most recently rusted a bit by bone density loss and redistributed muscle mass. But in my heyday, I holiday hopped without peer.

Mischief Night and Halloween, although formidable, could never hold a candle to the big one, the mother of all holidays, the King of Kings, Christmas. Especially Christmas at the Crane house, a modest post WW2 residence that restlessly sat on sleepy Madison Street, Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Christmas and I were meant for each other. I had a bottomless pit for an imagination, which became a wild playground for reveling in the Santa Claus story—a story that seemingly had real payoffs. Fantastic payoffs.

In my single digit years, while most kids wanted to play center field for the Yankees, I wanted to work the nightshift at the North Pole. It all made incredible sense to me—reindeer flying, elf tinkering, chimney descending, jolly pipe smoking—perfect sense. The story line fit together like the pieces of a well-crafted jigsaw puzzle. By the time I was nine years old, I had reached the summit. I was one with the Kris Kringle. Christmas morning always arrived in vivid, living Technicolor. No one was going to tell me otherwise about Santa. No one. Not even my younger brother Doug, a North-Pole-disbelieving-atheist at age seven.

It’s mind boggling sometimes just what a difference a year can make in the world view of a kid. I was ten. The year was 1962. It was a tsunami. Admittedly a bit old by today’s standards and probably by 1962 standards too, I was at the precipice’s edge of believing, and therefore, at the highest point from which to fall. It was the year I learned it wasn’t an old, weather-worn, gentle mountain top I had ascended, but rather a crusty, craggy cliff. One I inescapably knew I’d soon have to leap off. But denial in a ten-year old is always a formidable foe. I’d just need a slight push, a gentle nudge. Little did I know at the time it would be my well meaning, but slightly disturbed, Aunt Bibbit, who’d be ordained the “nudger”.

That autumn was not a good one for kids like me. I first sensed things were not quite right in the world based on the Sunday dinner adult conversations. Normally the thick, cherry-blend, pipe smoke filled dining room air was sliced apart by the verbal fisticuffs between my grandfather (a.k.a., Pop Pop) and anyone who dared whisper a good word about Kennedy or Roosevelt. But not that October. There was an eerie sullenness to the usual arm flailing. The summer months of heated arguments over the Supreme Court ban on prayer in public schools became a distant memory. And as the October weekends passed, each Sunday dinner became a bit more subdued, a tad more ominous. Even a great, late month N.Y. Giants’ 17-14 win over Detroit couldn’t get everyone back on track.

Meanwhile, at school we were having more drills than usual. Not fire drills. Nuclear bomb drills. By the last week of October, we were marching daily into the basement gymnasium to curl up into fetal balls of silent fear. Occasionally they instructed us to crawl under our oak desks in the event that time was of the essence. Although these were supposedly “just precautionary” drills, there was an air of seriousness not often demonstrated by teachers for such things. They clearly had zero tolerance for the normal amount of tomfoolery. Add the presence of uniformed, civil-defense officers with strange arm bands and there was an unavoidable, unnerving, unspoken sense of dread in the air.

In didn’t help that my teacher, Mr. Brice, was not equipped to deal with ten year olds under such circumstances. Mr. Brice was a mid-thirty, rugged, hairy-armed tough guy. However, contrary to his persona, he lived with his parents in town, unable I suppose to leave the cave. He was a Neanderthal who needed to get out more and he was childless—unable to find a woman to drag by the hair back into his lair for a little procreation. This left him with little chance of developing parenting skills. Instead, as a result of his inability to understand his shortcomings, he carried a perpetual chip on his shoulder regarding his rather dysfunctional mating ability. So he ran his classroom like a drill sergeant who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t a four star general. His idea of teaching toughness included things like showing off his calloused fingers from hunting with a bow and arrow. He walked from desk to desk, forcing us to touch the bubbles of thick blisters. His view of the future, which he shared with us weekly, was an Earth populated by soft humans with huge heads that bobbled about uncontrollably on the useless shoulders of little geek-necked bodies. His certainty was the direct result of his opinion that the nation was becoming a population of weak-kneed, intellectual liberals.

Now that’s a teacher. And fortunately not any kid's dad.

In his ever-stupid, doom and gloom style, he announced at the end of class on the fateful Friday in late October that there would be no school on Monday or any other day for that matter. He informed us that the Cubans along with the Russians would be launching a nuclear attack against every large American city over the weekend. Nothing would stand in its aftermath. It was inevitable. Good bye! And with that he dismissed us, shaking each of our hands as we left the classroom. (Just a personal aside: he had tenure, making him the poster man-child for why tenure was and is flawed.)

His announcement did not sit well with me, partly because Mischief Night and Halloween, a scant four days away, were now in jeopardy. But mainly because I was eyeball-to-eyeball with my own mortality for the first time in my life—thank you very much. And at ten years old, I wasn’t nearly equipped with enough reasoning power to wrestle with that.

By Sunday night, between the dumb drills and Mr. Brice’s ill-advised doomsday prediction, I was ready to implode. To make matters worse, that afternoon’s, big family dinner had a rather nonchalant, return-to-normal air about it. How could my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents be yucking it up, when all was going to be vaporized in a giant heat flash later that night? Were they uninformed? In denial? Content with the lives they had lived?

When I went to bed that evening, it seemed as if I was the only one who cared—silently, but cared nonetheless. We were about to go up in a mushroom cloud. I hated mushrooms, and now I had good reason. I had already planned how, at the sound of the blaring warning sirens, I’d instruct the family to march into the basement and curl up. But what about everyone else—the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins? The list went on and on. They would all be fried for sure. I had to break my silence and warn them. Time to make all the necessary phone calls was quickly running out. Even that would hinged on getting through the phone party line we shared with a half dozen, nosey neighbors. Doom was filling my head faster than a 25-megaton shock wave.

By the time I had descended the stairs from my attic bedroom, I was a sobbing mess. I’d never be able to usher my folks and brothers down into the basement in time. And even if I did, I knew it wouldn’t save us. The end was at hand.

I have to say, the folks were good that night. After they calmed me down—no easy feat I might add— I explained what Mr. Brice had said about the inevitable destruction. Mom hugged me while dad placed his large, protective hand on my shoulder. Mom told me that while it had been a very difficult month, the danger had passed. War was not going to break out. She continued to explain that although they were deeply concerned and nervous, they had agreed not to frighten us unnecessarily—something Mr. Brice should have considered. She promised to make a call to the school principal in the morning to discuss this Mr. Brice matter, which she did along with twenty other rather angry mothers.

That Monday morning proceeded as any other school day with Mr. Brice. Not a word was mentioned about Friday’s histrionics. Meanwhile a mushroom cloud of sorts was billowing down the hall in the principal’s office. By the time we returned to class after lunch, the fallout from Mr. Brice’s indiscretion reached the classroom. Mr. Brice and our principal, Mrs. Sharpe, stood at the front of the classroom as we took our seats. As soon as we settled in, Mr. Brice sheepishly apologized under the watchful eye of our beloved principal. I’m pretty sure that exercise wasn’t a first for him. Mrs. Sharpe quietly left the room satisfied he had righted himself. It took about five minutes before Mr. Brice marched us down to the gym where he punished us with boy-girl, square dancing for squawking like stool pigeons to our parents.

Just another day at school.

Fortunately, Mischief Night and Halloween were immediate distractions, but they couldn’t stop the subliminal damage. It took a few weeks for the real dark stuff to settle in. And when it did, I was not the same kid I was a few weeks before. I was prematurely older. Sadly less trusting. And Santa was nearing the crosshairs of my unexpected maturity. He and I would soon be standing at the cliff’s edge together.

Christmas was on Tuesday, giving me a weekend to get my business in order before Christmas Eve. The lead up days were days like no others, involving a number of Bob-has-to-do traditions that I had somehow patched together out of vague memories of seasons past.

There was never a better way to kick off the craziness than by opening up the annual Sears Christmas Wishbook Catalog, which I had covertly hid between my mattress and box spring weeks prior. It had to be kept from the clutches of my younger, reckless brothers. It was time to stake claim to the stuff I wanted, a task I took quite seriously. It necessitated privacy, so a guy could think clearly. The last thing I needed was Doug or Rick hovering over my every selection and laying claim too.

So out to the garage I marched, Sears catalogue discreetly tucked under my sweater and sharpened pencil jammed into my sock. I made garage entry through an out-of-sight side window. Once safely holed up inside, I set up a lawn chair, eased myself in, and cracked open the only book I read back then. I quickly scanned through to find where the serious stuff started—always the last section. During the search, I spent a little more time than the previous year sidetracked in the ladies undergarment section. Fortunately, it was a curiosity I still had some control over. For the time being, just a few quick peeks at the see-through nighties were all I took in the pubescent, prurient hope I might spy some nipplage. As usual, nothing. I’d later discover this inquisitiveness would mature into something quite overpowering and my disgust of air brushing resounding.

Kids clothing came next. Thirty pages for girls, five for boys. It was all filler to me. I leafed through the infant and toddler pages too—a waste of good paper. Next came preschooler playthings. I snickered mockingly at the pathetic crap passed off as toys, the kind of lame stuff my youngest brother Steve would be hoodwinked into getting. That was followed by girl things. Couldn’t call them toys or stuff. Dolls, kitchenettes, crafts, make-up kits. It was page after page of domestication-in-training paraphernalia. I plowed ahead, all along the way smugly shrugging my shoulders at my good fortune to be a boy. I sensed I was getting closer.

Ah, finally the real deal, where names like Mattel, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Flexible Flyer, and Hasbro ruled. Page after glorious, full-colored page of guy stuff. That alluring, musk-like scent that curled up from the binding glue. It gave me pause to press the catalog to my nose and breath in deeply, filling my empty soul with the promise of guy gadgetry and game gluttony.

First things first! Sports equipment! I needed boxing gloves, a boxing bag, a Spalding football, and an official New York Giants football helmet and shoulder pads. Circle, circle, circle, circle! Initial, initial, initial, initial! Mission accomplished, on to the board games. I needed the TV version of the Camouflage Game, and Stratego. Found them. Next came the Super erector set with electric motor. I made a note that the low-end erector sets would not do. It needed to be “super”. So far, I was finding everything I wanted. Some were unfulfilled needs carried over from the prior year, which I duly noted with my mighty number two pencil.

By the time I approached the last three pages of the catalog, I had worked myself into a frenzy. It was as if Sears read my mind every year, saving the best for last. Using my sleeve, I wiped away the mounting pool of nervous drool that had gathered on my chin. I spit the remaining saliva a good ten feet across the garage floor. It was a gob even Mud Finnegan would have been proud of.

At long last, there they were in splendid display, the battle sets! The wilderness forts with cowboys and Indians. The civil war scenes with picket death fences and cannons. Finally my favorite, the World War II army battle sets between green guys and gray guys. I marveled at the imagery of the elaborate scenes captured perfectly by the professional Sears photographer. I slowly scanned the entire page left to right, top to bottom, taking in every miniscule detail; the machine gun bunkers, the green guys holding grenades, the gray guys holding potato mashers, the squatting shooters, the fully prone gunners, and the bazooka men. They had it all. Holy cow, it was even endorsed by famed Sergeant Chip Saunders from the TV show, “Combat”. This was a must. I put a big “#1 choice” next to my circle and signed my complete name with full date and time, lest there be any doubt as to who made the claim.

Unfortunately, the idea that any of us would get the combat set was absurd. This army stuff had been a running battle with the North Pole for several years already. Mom, screening our letters to Santa like a prison warden, consistently reported back with each feeble attempt that some things were too violent and against elf policy to build, thus the requests were edited out of the final list. But a boy could wish. I was getting older after all. Maybe she’d weaken and cave from the annual assault. It was worth the try with my precious “#1 choice” rating.

Finished with chore one, I hand carried the book to my brothers for their selections. I eagerly helped them with their picks, especially Rick. Once completed, I marched the war-torn catalog to mom, who would then convert it into a single letter to Santa and mail it. Or so she said.

With my Santa “wish list” secured, it was time to pocket a handful of dimes and nickels from my Mischief Night secret fund and meander my way down to Bloomfield Center, about a mile away, to shop for parent gifts. I had thought long and hard, probably five minutes or more, about the perfect presents for the folks. This season was particularly important, after the way they were there for me back in late October.

I had settled on Mom’s. I was under the permanent delusion that mom and Liz Taylor were separated at birth. One became a dreamy, movie star. The other became insane from parenting four boys. Life seemed unfair that way. So it followed that the question which guided much of my thinking was what did Liz have that mom did not? The year before I had concluded it was ruby red lipstick and facial powder. I didn’t recall mom having used either of those gifts though. Perhaps she was waiting anxiously for the complete package. After performing a brief comparison of photos earlier in the week, it struck me like a snowball in the ear. Mom was waiting for eyeliner and fake eyelashes. It was a done deal. Mom would finally take her rightful position next to Liz Taylor. In a way, it was a gift to the old man as well. He was so dense when it came to such matters.

Yup, long shiny black eyelashes and sky blue eye liner were it. I shuttered at the thought of her beaming smile on Christmas morning when she opened up these treasures. My only concern was embarrassing dad by out shopping him. I decided I’d pull him aside and talk to him if it got to that point.

I still had to chew on Dad’s a bit more before making his final picks. As I navigated the suburban maze of narrow streets to The Center, I had time to think. I was once again leaning towards a colored handkerchief but was acutely aware that this would make it three years in a row. I didn’t want him to become comfortable and expect me to be his hanky hack. I needed to shake it up a bit. But what would make him gleam for eighty five cents?

This called for special thinking. So I employed a strategy that had served me well before. I selected a nice chunk of gutter ice and started to kick it down a nameless side street. Whatever I landed on by the time the chunk broke apart would be the right gift.

It wasn’t all that cold. There wouldn’t be a lot of time. I’d have to concentrate, and concentrate I did. As the final tiny ice pellets scattered every which way, the ideas were perfect. Chap Stick and an Indian belt.

Dad’s current Chap Stick was worn down to the silver casing, besides its effectiveness probably expired back in August. Certainly he was ready for a new batch. As for the Indian belt, nothing seemed more suave or debonair than the intricate mosaic of turquoise, red, yellow and white tiny beads wrapped around the waistline. It would spruce up his work clothes for sure. Besides, I was positive that Liz Taylor liked guys who looked dapper and flashy. And if that was good enough for Liz’s men, it certainly was good enough for mom’s man. I decided that if for cost reasons it came down to the Chap Stick or the belt, it would be the belt. It was all done but the wrapping.

I looked at my watch. There was still much to do. I started to run—my pocket change jingling like sleigh bells with every bounce. I was filled with the holiday hop.

***

Once the Crane boys plummeted into the gravitational grip of the seasonal black hole, making paper chains was the most creative way to sidetrack us temporarily. For at least an hour or so, we were unified, occupied and behaved. Mom used the short outbreak of peace and harmony to squeeze in time to bake sugar cookies and other traditional treats.

The actual task was easy enough. Mom cut colored construction paper into a rainbow pile of six-inch by half-inch strips. Armed with individual bowls of paste, the rest was up to us—linking strips by curling one through another, adding a dab of paste, pinching until glued, and moving on to the next. We each brought something different to the table. Doug was all about complex color patterns and precise edge-to-edge pasting. To Doug, perfection always trumped quantity. Not so for me, I was all about quantity, the same way I treated food—taste, shmaste—the more, the better. Then there was Rick. He had his own way of looking at things. His chain reflected an odd, random interpretation of color and shapes. His pasting technique was unsyncopated. I should have known then that he’d grow up to be a professional jazz musician. At the time though, he was just Ricky.

Occasionally mom brought out a cookie batter bowl and mixer blades coated in leftover cookie dough for us to maul. After an hour or two, she emerged one last time to link our chains together, creating one long decoration that eventually would find its way onto the tree. Christmas was sure approaching fast. Everything was falling into place. I went to bed that night planning the three songs Rick and I would sing on the Crane Brother caroling tour scheduled the next day.

Fresh from Sunday’s Christmas church service featuring the kids choir, which the Crane Boys carried, it was time to drag Rick out to the garage and practice a few seasonal tunes before we took it on the road. I had decided on a couple of real beauties from the Linden Avenue School Christmas Pageant. They were songs pounded into my empty skull by Mrs. Wolfe, a true maestro with flabby underarms, baton and all. She was as old as the hills and as testy as an alley cat. She demanded the best and ran her choir with the precision of drill sergeant. She was able to get the worst of the worst to buckle down and sing as if their lives depended on it. I liked her. Nothing was sweeter to me than the sound of perfectly pitched voices singing in three-part harmony, her mainstay.

Rick and I would opened with a short but tricky version of the “Hallelujah Chorus”. Next came “Silent Night”. We’d finished with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, hoping the audience would get the subconscious suggestion to give us candy and/or loose change. We also practiced a jazzy version of Little Drummer Boy. I sang lead while Rick laid down the vocal bass line, another precursor to what he’d grow up to do. We kept that one in our hip pocket just in case an encore was demanded, which occurred more frequently than we desired.

Once we were up to Mrs. Wolfe’s high standards, we hit the road, knocking on almost every door up one side of Madison Street and down the other. We always passed on a couple of houses though, namely Fitzy’s, Kedso’s, and Shlessinger’s. We couldn’t afford to have one of our pals join the sweet gig we had going and potentially ruin it, or worse, mock us. Otto and Gertrude Vanderbeek’s house was another one on our radar. He was the local watchdog and didn’t particularly warm up to the Crane boys. We added them to tour anyway, a smart move. For the ten or fifteen minutes it took us to belt out our repertoire, it was time well spent. Otto softened a little afterwards. The residual effect lasted a few weeks, as he resisted spreading ashes out on the snow packed street in front of his house—a maneuver that intentionally killed any sledding after a good Nor’easter snow.

We could always count on bubble gum from housebound, recluse Mrs. Melliott. A whole buck from drab Mrs. Rishe. Candy canes from most others, sometimes right off the Christmas tree. I handled the cash end, usually giving Rick 30% of the take, a fair share considering this was my operation. My only goal was to recoup the money I had withdrawn from my Mischief Night fund for the presents I bought mom and dad.

Our take turned out to be good that year. Maybe people were just happy to be alive after a harrowing autumn. By the end of the tour, I was able to add two bucks to the fund with enough left over to buy a grape Nehi and Sugar Daddy at DeLuca’s Sweete Shoppe. As for Rick, I don’t know what he did with his cut but it wouldn’t surprise me if he still has the money today. He was like that. We’d go on a day trip to the Asbury Park boardwalk with fifty cents each and he’d come back with sixty.

By late afternoon, it was time to get the tree. The old man piled us into his sputtering Buick and off we went to Bloomfield Lackawanna Station. It was a little later in December than normal for the tree search, but in dad’s mind, it was the best time to negotiate. He was pushing his luck this time though. It was December 23rd and the pickin’s were slim. The trees had either one really bad side, or big bare spots, or trunks that looked like Aunt Bess’s spine.

Dad didn’t like to be followed around by the “Help” either. Unfortunately, the only pickin’s slimmer than the trees were the customers at that time of year. So when dad arrived, flanked by three runny noses at his side, he got a lot of attention. The “Help” followed us around like hyenas on a three legged wildebeest. All the ingredients were in place to make the price negotiation experience memorable.

Next to buying a car, purchasing a Christmas tree was a close second to dad's art of the deal. He turned into someone else. He became the Donald Trump of the little guys. His considerate and gracious manners were all but gone. It was a little disturbing but still interesting to witness.

After shaking and turning two dozen trees, he narrowed the field down. Back and forth, more shaking, more turning. He hemmed and hawed over two, having me hold them up so he could take the whole thing in. His selection was made.

“How much?” Dad asked one persistent “help” guy who hovered nearby.

“Why that’s a fine tree ya got there pal. The kids seem to like it too. Right kids?” We wiped our noses across our sleeves as we nodded in unison.

“Yeah," dad bellowed, "they like to chew tar too! How much?”

“Umm, ten dollars and fifty cents should do her and that’s a deal. Why, just yesterday it was twelve. Already turned three people away today who wanted it for nine.”

Dad turned the tree, inspecting and tugging on the needles. He acted as if he had just come off a university grant study of coniferous forests on the Appalachian Trail. He was a venerable professor of the needled shrubs.

“It’s got this big hole here. The trunk looks like the letter ‘C’. And by the dryness of the needles, I’d say this tree is about nineteen days old and has about six days left before she becomes prone to combustion.” Then, he executed his famous pregnant pause maneuver. The “help” guy would soon be putty. He continued his inspection with a few well timed “aha’s” and “hmm’s”. “I was wrong. I give it four and one half days before it is combustible.” With that, he put his counter offer on the table. It would be the only offer he’d make. “I’ll give ya nine twenty-five and tip ya fifty if you tie it up and put it in the trunk.”

“Can’t do it pal. Turned away someone an hour ago for a ten spot.”

“Okay boys. Let’s go.”

Another well placed pause.

“Let’s go to Montclair," dad barked, "they have plenty. Com’on! To the car!” Then the deal closer, “That’s where we got last year’s anyway. When will I learn to start there? Com’on.”

He was working the “help” guy like a marionette. The poor sap had no chance against the old man. It was going to be $9.25 and tip or nothing.

“Good luck,” mumbled the tree guy. It was a noble last ditch effort that would melt most men but not iron headed dad.

“Have a merry Christmas!” Dad replied as he turned to start the trek down the long driveway with Rick in hand. Doug and I lagged behind, snorting and wiping our gooey noses some more with the wool sleeves of our maroon benchwarmer coats. It was the finale of dad’s perfectly executed transaction.

“Hey! Okay, I’ll do it for ten!” the guy yelled to dad’s back.

Dad continued walking without so much as a blink. We learned over the years that this was all part of the game.

“All right! All right! Nine twenty-five! Plus tip!”

Broken like dog!

“Bobby, take my keys and open the trunk.” The deal was struck. The old man did it again. It was a trait I would never able to develop. I'm too impatient, making it all the more admirable.

***

Christmas Eve arrived in overcast, cold bliss. There was already a bit of soot-crusted snow in place from a December storm a week prior. But the hint of fresh snow on Christmas Eve was way too much for my overloaded imagination.

It was shortly after lunch when the front door opened. I could hear dad enter. He was talking to someone whose voice was very familiar. I quickly finished applying green sprinkles to a baking sheet full of shortbread candy cane cookies before I bolted out the kitchen. As I raced through the short hallway to the dining room and around the bend to the living room beyond, I was greeted by a fragrant swill of thick, floral perfume and stale “Pall Mall” smoke. Could it be?

As I rounded the corner, there she stood, all five foot four and eighty pounds of her, dressed in her bright, red, full-length coat, her hair covered by her trademark, sheer, paisley scarf.

“Bibbit! What are you doing here?” I yelled. Dad placed her small light blue suitcase at the base of the stairs leading to the second floor.

“Well, I got a call from Santa saying that I better get down to the Crane boys and keep an eye on them because they are all close to getting coal! Except Pedessey.” Pedessey was a cute little name Doug gave Steve, the youngest Crane boy. Anyway, Pedessey was her favorite. She made no bones about it. She was under the impression that some how Pedessey was unfairly treated by the rest of us. We were okay with that. To some extent she was right.

“Really? He said that?” I feigned concern, knowing darn well she was making the whole thing up.

“Yup! So I’m here.”

“You mean you are staying over tonight.”

“Yup! And I’m sleeping on the third floor with you.”

“Wow! That’s great!” I didn’t mean a word of it. I had to let the thought of her sleeping in my room sink in a while. As much as I loved her—like an aunt— it might prove to be a bad thing. It might put a little crimp in my Christmas style.

Aunt Bibbit was as slender as a reed. On a breezy day she would become airborne if it weren’t for the twenty pound anchor she lugged around—her huge black shiny pocketbook. She was one sharp, tough cookie. She never married but she did have one or two questionable, almost seedy, boyfriends. None lasted long. Many years later I concluded she was a lesbian in denial. One thing was certain though, she loved the Crane boys, even if she was a bit strange about it.

Her name wasn’t really Bibbit. It was Elizabeth. Bibbit was how I pronounced Elizabeth when I was young. I was known for that. I learned much later in life, after seeing an old 1st grade report card, that I had something called “lazy tongue”. Personally, I think it was just that my jaw was tired from chewing all the time. Anyway, I had anointed others with my mispronunciations as well, like aunt Moo Moo, which was Bobby-speak for Mildred. To my credit, the names were cute enough to stick with them their entire lives.

One other thing about Bibbit, she really wasn’t a true aunt. Somewhere in the deep recesses of the Emmons clan, my maternal grandmother’s family, some unsavory things occurred, resulting in Bibbit being adopted by her uncle—I think. The whole situation has always been one big family-laundered secret. I have never been able to get the straight scoop on it. Over time I gave up trying. What I am sure of is that at some point she was raised by my great uncle Duke (her suspected uncle) and Aunt Bess, comprising the kind of threesome that sit-coms are made of.

Regardless of the family secrets, she was Bibbit all right. She was one ornery smokestack. And she was on a mission that Christmas Eve, as I would discover soon enough. She was a hired gun of sorts, brought in by my concerned parents to pound some sense into me. It was a plan that would prove costly though.

***

Christmas Eve night started and ended with dad setting the tree up for Santa to decorate. It was a simple and subdued tradition with one strategic objective: keep the boys calm, most notably me. While the Chipmunks’ Christmas medley album endlessly screeched through skips and scratches under repeat play, and while the crackling fire roared, with hot chocolate in hand, we took our seats to cheer on the great annual battle. It was a timeless war that pit man against nature. Armed with only cord, hedge clippers, and tape, dad circled the green beast, sizing it up like a cagey veteran boxer in the first round. With a final wipe of his brow, the match began. Dad locked horns with the $9.25 spruce, wrestling the pine giant in close arm-to-branch combat.

The tree took the first two rounds, building an early lead on points from a cut to dad’s brow. Dad turned the tide with a few well placed snips he reluctantly applied at the screams of his corner man, mom. She continued to bark more instructions, some bordering on dirty—hitting below the knot you might say. “Gentleman Dad” begrudgingly executed the orders. A little trunk turn here, a half nelson there, a couple of reattached limbs everywhere, and within an hour the old man emerged victorious once again, 7-0 as far as I could remember, transforming the thatch of scraggly needled branches into a magnificent proud pine, worthy of Bamberger’s store window in downtown Newark. But it took all fifteen rounds, dad slumping into the couch with that bruise above his eye and a cut to his clipper hand. Regardless, the verdict was unanimous. The old man found a way to pull off a late round win.

“Boys! Check for squirrels!” the tired warrior announced, sipping on an icy elixir his manager had concocted from odd shaped bottles we never saw much.

It was as if he had sounded a starting gun. We leapt from our ringside seats and slid under the tree, looking up the tree trunk. Although the possibility of spotting a squirrel seemed remote, it was all a part of the ritual, part of the grand picture, part of an Americana tradition Bill O’Reilly should really be talking about. It is something I do today, as well as my twenty-four-year-old son.

While our feet dangled out from under the tree, mom decorated the fireplace mantel with the piney green spoils of war.

“Bobby. See any squirrels up there?” Bibbit asked with an intonation that implied a punch line was soon to follow.

“Not yet.”
“Well you better watch out cause they're gathering nuts.” She blew out a river of smoke as she laughed a breathy, silent “heh, heh, heh”, like Scooby Doo. She was a pip.

“That’s funny,” I replied out of respect for my elders, shaking my head in disdain at her pedestrian sense of humor.

Doug turned his head towards me and whispered loudly, as only Doug could do, “yeah, you better cover your nuts!” Now that was funny! Secret words for male genitalia were always funny. I began to laugh.

“All right boys. That’ll be enough.” Mom knew without hearing a word Doug whispered, what Doug whispered. It was part of her maternal arsenal.

So I got back to the business at hand, dreaming, only I wasn’t prepared for where my dreams would go. As I looked up the snaking, thick, tree trunk, I was instantly reminded of a clip I saw on a TV documentary back in October. Back in Mr. Brice’s class. It was a clip in which a nuclear cyclonic cloud of dust raced past a stand of pine trees, bending them perpendicular one second, stopping, and then suddenly sucking them inward the next second, vaporizing them like moth wings to the touch. It was a clip I had no business seeing. My mind raced to dreadful places—we never stood a chance under our school desks. They lied to us.

“Okay boys, time to put your stockings up and get to bed.” Mom’s voice gently laced its way through the knots of branches, snapping the anxiety building in me before I became overwhelmed, temporarily soothing my soul as only a mother’s voice can do. I took one last mental snapshot, knowing on Christmas day I’d slink under the tree again, after opening the presents. By then it would be transformed into something magical, a place where squirrels might really be found.

Once the stockings were hung below the mantel, we staked out our real estate under the tree. The only thing remaining was the lollygagging—just trying to stretch the night out. Mom would have none of it though.

“Get upstairs. Brush your teeth. And get to bed. You never know when Santa will get here.”

I faked a yawn, thinking that somehow that would make me sleepy. "Good night ma.” I walked over to give her a hug and kiss, one of the three times a year I did.

“Good night dad.” He got a hug but no kiss.

“See ya later Bibbit.” I walked over to give her a kiss on the cheek. It was always a troubling expectation. She had a handful of long stray whiskers that bothered me quite honestly. Sometimes they were there, sometimes not. I was not discreet about looking for them either. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my eyes from darting back and forth along her jaw line, making sure I didn’t get one caught in my teeth or poked in the eye.

The rest of the boys followed suit.

By 8:45 p.m. I had tucked myself in under the mound of blankets tossed over an old mattress dad placed on the floor. Bibbit would be sleeping in my bed about three feet away. I waited for her like an old dog waits by the door for its master. She could be gone five minutes of five hours. The greeting she’d receive at her arrival was going to be the same.

With time to kill, I played over and over in my head what I had done wrong over the past year. I shot Joan Pederson in the cheek with a paper clip. But that was a misfire. It was really meant for my friend Zoo’s butt. I unknowingly stepped in dog crap on the way to school and inadvertently rubbed it all over the base of my wooden school desk, polluting the air with that unmistakable stench. However, that was clearly an unintentional accident. I set the living room closet door on fire after mom left it in the garage covered with paint remover. I think that could be classified as a simple misunderstanding. The empty can of stripper clearly said “inflammable”, meaning “not flammable” to me, so I tested it. How was I suppose know “inflammable” meant “very flammable”? That’s an affront to the English language and apparently quite indangerous.

What else? Oh yeah, there was the Kedso’s sister incident. I saw her in her bra and it wasn’t accidental either. Oh boy, that could be the one. We hid in the hallway closet to spy on her walking from the bathroom to her bedroom after she showered. I’d say that was pretty intentional. I concluded I needed to take precautionary action. I said a half an hour’s worth of prayers, hoping that might clear the slate.

Finally Bibbit arrived. I checked my clock. It was 10:35 p.m. I waited until she settled under the blankets.

“Any signs of him?”

“What? Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I can’t. I’m thinking about what I may have done wrong this year.”

“Well don’t. Go to sleep. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Twenty minutes later.

“Pssst! Pssst! Bibbit!” I waited for an answer. "Are you asleep Bibbit?”

“I was nearly asleep. What? What is it?”

“I have a question.”

“You get one question! Go ahead.” She was tough as nails.

“I have a friend, Kedso, who did something that he thinks was bad. He thinks Santa will leave him coal cause of it.” I paused a moment for a response.

“Yeah. What did he do?”

“He spied on his sister and saw her in her bra.” I was surprised at my frankness but a lot was riding on her answer. I needed to be clear. I continued, “He knew it was wrong and said some prayers to kinda clear it up.”

“Hmm, that’s not very good. But as long as he prayed for forgiveness and stopped doing it, he should be all right.”

My shoulders relaxed as I apokw, "That’s exactly wha tI thought.”

“Now get to sleep before Santa gets here and you scare him away.”

“Okay. Good night!”

“Good night!”

A very uneasy hour passed. My eyes were wide open. I think I might have blinked three times total. I was consumed with the science behind Santa. I suppose in a way I had been blindly accepting Intelligent Sleigh Design, but now it was under attack by simple fifth grade science and math. Finally, my clock ticked midnight. The alarm sounded, as planned. I was temporarily saved from my self-inflicted torment.

eeeee! eeeee! eeeee!

“Is it time to feed the chickens already?” Bibbit sputtered, as she emerged from sleep.

“Psst! Psst! Bibbit! There are no chickens. It’s just my alarm!”

No answer.

“Psst! Bibbit!”

“What alarm?”

“It’s midnight. Merry Christmas!”

“Oh. Yeah. Merry Christmas to you too. Now go to sleep. And don’t set your alarm again.”

“Kedso’s mom is talking to her dog Dotty right now. She’s says that animals can speak at midnight on Christmas Eve. Have you ever spoken to Pony?” Pony was Bibbit’s yellow lab.

“Never! That’s an old wives' tale.”

“Yeah, Mrs. Kedso is pretty old. Kedso told us she had tea once with President Lincoln. ” Kedso was always telling us stuff that was suspicious.

Bibbit snickered, “That qualifies her then. It’s just a tale. Is that it?”

It wasn’t. I went directly to the real subject of my inquisition. “I’m thinking that it’s impossible for Santa to reach every home in one night.”

“He has helpers!”

I pressed, “What kind of helpers?”

“Helper helpers. That’s what kind of helpers.”

“Helper helpers, hmm.” I mulled that around. “Good night,” I mused.

“That is it now. No more questions. I need my beauty sleep. Good night!”

I didn’t get the ‘beauty sleep’ reference because she would need to go into a two year coma if that were the case. I did sense a little tension in her voice though.

I decided to remain quiet for what seemed like forever, during which I occasionally drifted off, only to snap myself awake and inspect the clock. Time sure does pass slowly when you are impatient. I checked the foot of my bed to see if the stocking had arrived. It hadn’t. The clock said 1:23. Concern was starting to leak into my thoughts. I listened for a sign that someone was lurking about. Nothing.

A few more year-long minutes passed. I couldn’t take it anymore. “Pssst. Bibbit. Pssst. This is the last time, I’ll bother you! I promise. Are you awake?”

“No Nelse! One ham is enough.” Bibbit was apparently in the midst of a dream, calling out to Uncle Duke (a.k.a., Nelse; short for Nelson, uncle Duke’s real name).

“Bibbit. It’s Bobby. Uncle Duke’s not here.”

“Not here? Wha …?”

I gave her time to come to. “It’s Bobby.”

“I know who it is. What is it now?”

“He hasn’t come yet.”

“Who hasn’t come yet.”

“Santa! Or maybe he did come and skipped me.”

“Why would he do that?”

It rolled off my tongue as easy as a slippery watermelon seed. “Because I saw Kedso’s sister too!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember? The bra sister?”

“You gotta cut this nonsense out! What time is it anyway?”

“1:31” I paused. “I can’t sleep. I keep looking at the clock.”

“Where is that dang thing?”

“The clock?”

“Yeah the clock. Unplug it and hand it over. Now!”

“But why?”

“Just do as you're told. Suppose he is in the house, or on the stairs and can hear you giving me a hard time. He might decide to leave you coal. Now hand it over.”

I pulled on the clock until the plug came out of the socket. The light display dimmed slowly, going from white, to pale yellow, to dark amber before it disappeared completely. I handed it over to Bibbit. I thought she might be making a big mistake but I couldn’t take the chance that she was right about the stairs and listening and coal and all.

“Now shut your eyes and count sheep jumping over a fence. Eventually you’ll fall asleep.”

She really lived in a fantasy world. I entertained her dumb idea anyway.

“One, two, three—”

“Not out loud. Count in your head. Geez! Good night!”

“Good night.”

I got to about 463 when I realized that this little idea was going nowhere fast.

ttthhhhuuuummmppp!!!

Holy cow! Something landed on the roof. I was sure of it!

“Psst. Bibbit. Did you hear that? I think he just landed!”

Nothing. She was in a deep sleep, having pulled the pillow up over her head. Actually, she may have smothered herself in a successful suicide attempt but I had more important things to worry about now. My senses were on high alert. I was hearing all sorts of things.

ccrreeaaakkk!

Holy smokes! He was coming up the stairs. I lay motionless, my eyelids pressed shut, my breath rapid and shallow, my limbs frozen stiff.

Eeeerrrrhhhh!

The door. He’s no more than ten feet away. I had to stay still. I had to keep from peeing. I should have gone earlier. I swore I could smell his wet winter wool coat filled with the heavy scent of pipe smoke. Maybe not.

Something was placed at the bottom of the bed. I continued to squeeze my eyelids together. I stopped breathing. And I stayed that way for about a half an hour. After a long internal debate, I decided to pretend to roll over and position my arms so they would cover my eyes but leave a small opening through which I could peek. I executed the maneuver perfectly.

Ten minutes later, I carefully opened my eyes. The shadows played some tricks on me but I was sure he was gone. I slowly sat up and looked down at the end of my bed. I could make out something. Yes! It had to be. I rolled out of the mountain of covers, snatched the stocking and climbed back into my cocoon. I couldn’t see at all but I certainly could fondle. It felt heavy and lumpy, two very good signs. I rescued a few items poking out the brim. One most definitely was a big balloon to be blown up. The other was possibly a butterfly yoyo. Oh boy! No coal. I breathed a giant sigh of relief. I guess my little confession earlier sealed the deal.

Clutching the stocking close, I drifted off for some much needed shut-eye, about two hours tops. When I woke, I checked the stocking. It was still there. It also appeared as if the first dark gray hints of dawn were clawing at the window.

“Pssst! Bibbit! Pssst!”

“Wha? Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Bobby!”

“Bobby? Where am …”

“Bobby Crane! It’s getting light out. I got a stocking!”

“Oh yeah, Bobby. Glad to hear you got a stocking. I told you not to worry.”

“It’s getting light out. Is it time to get up?”

“What light? It’s dark as Haiti.”

“Check the time. Is it 6:30 yet? Mom said we could come in their room at 6:30.”

“It can’t be. Hold on. Here’s my watch. Take it over to the window and see if you can tell the time.”

“Okay!”

I grabbed the watch from her hand and looked at it. I didn’t need to walk over to the window. By then my pupils were the size of black marbles. There was plenty of light to see right at my bed.

“It’s … it’s … four … four … thirty … seven. It’s four thirty-seven.”

The watch must have been stuck. It was plenty light out. The sun wasn’t far behind. But then again, those are the kinds of tricks an overworked imagination can play on a young boy’s mind.

“You have two hours yet! So get back to sleep.”

“Can I hold onto the watch?”

“Yeah, sure. But don’t look at it every five minutes.”

“Okay! I won’t.” Of course I did, making those two hours the longest two hours of my life, just as they had been in years past and would be for years to come.

Eventually, the darkness rolled around to 6:30 that intolerable morning. No more “psst’ing” was necessary. There was barely a trace of early dawn gray, just a shade lighter than at 4:37 earlier, but the moment had arrived nonetheless.

“Bibbit! It’s Christmas! Wake up!”

“Yes Bess, the pot roast is cooked. Where’s the baister?” She was babbling nonsense.

I pulled the carefully packed booty from out of the stocking. It was a butterfly yoyo all right, in fact it was a Duncan, the best. There was the perennial Bam-Bam Paddle Ball and my personal favorite, a dart gun. I immediately licked the rubber suction cups and got off three quick rounds at my closet door, each stuck exactly where I had aimed. I immediately popped them off the door and proceeded down the attic stairs to Rick and Doug, stocking in tow.

As usual, they were still asleep. Asleep! How could they do that? It was beyond me to understand how they could waste the day away like that. So I did what any big brother would do. I loaded my trusty, spring action, six-shooter and fired away. The first grazing Rick’s head, the second catching him square in the eye. He was awake now, crying but awake. The commotion woke Doug too. I retrieved my bullets, handed Rick his stocking and Doug his, and marched off to rouse Steve and the Folks.

Christmas morning was the only time mom could bark out chores and we’d do them without hesitation. “Make your beds! Change out of your pajamas! Brush your teeth! Wash your faces! Clean your rooms! Hang your clothes up.” We did them all without as much as a peep, even stooping to help each other.

Mom’s orders were all about buying time for the old man to shake off the effects of eight hours of tree trimming, bicycle building, neighbor visiting, and moderated imbibing, topped off with three hours of sleep. It was the complete opposite of what the formula really should have been. Mom too was looking for just a few more minutes of rest, knowing what the long day would entail.

Finally, the chores were complete. We nervously took our positions at the top of the stairs.

“Mom! Is it oldest first?” I always asked hoping she’d change the order one year.

“Bobby you know it is youngest first.”

“Oh ma, it’s never oldest first.”

“Bobby, listen to yourself. You are ten years old. You’re whining like a little baby. Youngest first!” She was right of course—about the whining.

“Ah, geeh wiz.” And with that I pushed my way past the other boys as we re-ordered our bodies for the descent.

Doug was getting hyper. He was munching away on his cuticles. Not a good thing.

“Comon’ ma. Hurry up!” he barked. When would he learn?

“I’ll be there in a minute Dougie. Do you have socks on?”

I don’t know how she did it. How did she know what to ask without looking? It was as if she had x-ray vision or something.

“Do I have to?”

“What kind of question is that? Do you want to die from pneumonia? I mean if you do, go ahead. Be my guest. It’ll be one less mouth to feed! Bobby won’t mind that. More food for him.” Mom sure had a way with child psychology. It was pretty effective though.

"Oh, okay!” Doug sauntered past me, head down, defeated.

Then in an unusual moment of alertness Rick asked, “What about Bibbit? Is she still in bed?”

Holy mackerels! Where was she? I had completely forgotten about her. The four of us clamored up the attic stairs to rustle her out of bed. Weary from a night filled with interrupted sleep, she seemed a bit out of sorts about the whole thing.

“Bibbit! Bibbit! Get up! It’s time! We can’t go downstairs until you get up!”

The four of us each took a corner of the bed, surrounding her like a pack of hounds on a fox in a tree. We pulled and tugged and in general were real pains in the butt.

“Okay! I’m coming. Just give me a second will ya. I need a cigarette first.”

“Here you can have one downstairs on the couch!” I grabbed her pack of Pall Malls and took off.

She wasn’t excited about that idea. She wanted one right then and there. “Where do you think you are going with that Bobby? Bring them back right now.”

I didn’t listen. I got to the top of the second floor landing, launched them down the stairs, and took my place at the top of the stairs once again.

Doug was the first to come down from the third floor. “You really did it now. She was cursing and stuff. I don’t think she is ever coming back here.”

“Hmm. Well deserves her right. She shouldn’t smoke anyway! I’m doing her a favor.”

“She thinks you are trying to kill her. I’d stay out of her way.”

“Fine by me.”

Rick rounded the bend next, shaking his head. “She’s gonna kill you dead for sure.”

“She’ll get over it.”

Steve was the last to return, clutching his favorite stuffed giraffe, something he did when he was a bit nervous. “Bibbit said a square word. Santa isn’t going to like that.”

“You mean a swear word you little turd head. Get in your spot.”

"Bobby! Watch your mouth!" Mom stood at the bottom of the attic stairs waiting for Bibbit to come down. As frail as she was, she sure could make noise coming down stairs. “Well Merry Christmas! Get a good night’s sleep?” mom asked, displaying the slight hint of a smirk.

“I’m telling you right now, as God is my witness, I will never be back. That boy has a problem.”

“Oh, he just gets a little excited.”

“Bibbit," I belted out, "your cigarettes are down at the bottom of the stairs.”

She eased past us without making any eye contact, zero acknowledgement of our existence. Her hands shook as she reached for the banister.

“Be quiet please,” I warned. “Dad hasn’t checked for Santa yet.”

Nothing. She continued to make her way down the stairs, disappearing around the bend like a pale robed ghost, floating almost.

Speaking of the big guy. “Where’s dad?” Doug yelled. “Can we go without him?”

There was an unsettling, throat-clearing sound. Then a gruff, tired voice came from the bathroom. "You boys wait right there. I need to go down and check to see if Santa is still here.”

It was the same line we would hear years later in high-school, in college, even with grandchildren in tow. It was dad's single most time-honored line, “I need to go down and check to see if Santa is still here.” It has taken on a life of its own now, but that year I was falling off the cliff of belief, joining the ranks of Doug when it came to what was truly going on. I think dad’s proclamation reminded me of the jump I was facing. It was upsetting for a flash.

Nevertheless, the moment of Christmas spirit heights had arrived. My zenith was precisely that instant when dad bumped his way down the stairs to do his ‘checking’, as we sat anxiously at the top of the steps waiting. Youngest first! Locked in like race horses at the starting gate. Muscles twitching in anticipation of the bell to sound and the gate to open.

It was literally downhill from there. Don’t get me wrong, it was a wonderfully long descent as the day unfolded, but the energy, the hope and the wonder were never so peaked as they were at the top of the steps. It was a moment that lasted about two minutes. Worth every fret and worry it took to arrive there.

It is no different for me today.

“Is that you Santa Claus?” Dad repeated, as he plugged the tree lights on, turned the heat up, and lit a fire.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” he bellowed, impersonating the jolly fat fellow. Steve’s eyes became as big as softballs. Doug shook his head in mockery. Rick scratched the back of his throat with his index finger, barely in our world. I wrestled with the thought that this might be it for me.

Dad continued on as he took care of a few last second details,“How does he do that? How does he get up the chimney like that?” Apparently, Bibbit had settled in too, as the sudden scent of her beloved pall malls snaked its way up the stairway in bursts of billowing white clouds. Hopefully, the cigarette would smooth her out a bit.

“Is he gone?” Steve asked, his knees bouncing up and down uncontrollably.

“Hold on! One second!” Dad turned on his prized stereo tuner to a station playing the Christmas classics 24-7.

“It looks like the coast is clear.”

I asked, “Can we come dow—”

Before I could finish, Doug grabbed r
Rick by the pants and crawled over him, clawing at Steve who was rising to make his way down the stairs.

The time had come. The race was on. It was a rugby scrum most of the way down, usually resulting in a few minor scratches, once in a while with a poked eye, and in one rare occurrence, a bloody nose. Regardless, it ended the same way every time. We started youngest first but ended oldest first by the time the tree was in sight.

And what a tree it was. Large, bright, lifesaver-colored lights, soft cotton snow, twinkling glass decorations, the dangling paper chain, and the perfectly placed icicles. Ah, Santa, or the old man, or whoever worked a miracle once again. As it turned out that was no $9.25 tree we had after all. It was a million bucks.

The folks sat with Bibbit on the perimeter, occasionally refereeing a gift dispute or locating a misplaced toy, while they exchanged gifts quietly and drank endless cups of coffee.

After I was done rifling through my presents, I went to the closet and pulled out the gifts for mom and dad I had wrapped and hid in my coat sleeve. I’m pretty sure that mom was impressed by my shopping prowess. She seemed to like the eyelashes and eyeliner. She was even more impressed by my logic, that there was a theme, that Liz Taylor had nothing on her. Dad was pleased to get another chap stick and seemed unfazed by Bibbit’s cackling when he unwrapped the Indian belt. It was a home run.

The day played out like years before. Clothes and a dollar from Pop-pop and Nan Hock. Five dollars from Nan Crane. A dollar or two from Bibbit. Uncle Duke and Aunt Bess surprised us all that Christmas. Usually under the control of Aunt Bess, they were good for mittens or a hat or boots. But not this time.

Uncle Duke did the shopping. Well, it wasn’t quite shopping. I’m not sure what he was thinking actually. Granted he was pretty old and a little out there, but when it came to free stuff, he was coherent and always scheming. Apparently, he had learned that he could open a bank account, get a free gift, close the bank account, open a new one at a different bank, and get another free gift, so on and so on. And that’s what he did, at least four times, grabbing a different free gift with each new account, one for each of us. Steve got a dandy set of lady hair brushes. Rick got a multi-purpose frying pan. Doug got an electric steam iron. I got a set of extra absorbent dish towels in an interesting orange and green, tea kettle pattern. Bibbit got a hiatal hernia from laughing. As was always he case, we each thanked them for the gifts, although void of any deep thoughtfulness.

By the latter part of the evening, the adults were gathered in the kitchen, yapping away. I was ready to call it a night, already thinking about the next year, going over in my mind the approach I'd take to get that WW2 battlefield set. Tired and emotionaly spent, I tapped dad on the shoulder. He was snoring in much deserved sleep while sitting perfectly straight up in front of the TV, his head tilted down and chin resting comfortably on his neck.

“Dad thanks for everything.”

“Wha ... oh ... yeah ... ah ... thank Santa Claw ...,” he replied, his enunciation slightly slurred by a combination of sleep deprivation, two pounds of fresh ham and plenty of hearty adult beverage.

“Sure, Santa.” I said. I didn’t want to think about it.

I made my way to the kitchen to thank everyone and say goodnight. As I was shuffling through the short hallway to the kitchen, I overheard Bibbit talking about the night she had, intermitently interrupted by great bursts of laughter.

“At one point, he confessed that he saw some friend’s sister … what’s his name ... up the street ... sneakers?”

“Kedso?” mom answered.

“Yeah Kedso’s sister. Get this! In a BRA!”

The elderly aunts, my grandmothers chuckled a few polite "oh dears" and "oh mys". I couldn't hear mom. But Uncle Duke and Pop Pop howled, nearly choking on whatever cookies they were devouring.

She ontinued on. I listened in on her some more.

“He was so worried about what Santa Claus was going to think and waking me up every five minutes that I almost told him there is no Santa Claus just to shut him up. I’ll tell ya one thing, I’ll never do this again.”

Then mom spoke up, “Yeah, Bob and I were real close to telling him before you came over yesterday. He is a little old. I mean even Dougie doesn’t believe anymore. But Bobby is different. I don’t know, maybe we should have told him.”

“Nah. Let him be," Nan Hock suggested. "He’ll grow out of it soon enough. You never thought he’d give up his blankie and he finally did.” Finally, someone who was making a little sense.

Bibbit reminded everyone, “Yeah but that was because I hid it from him when he spent the night that one time, and told him it had died and gone to heaven.”

Sporadic chuckles followed from the peanut gallery.

“Yeah, well I remember how that didn’t work so well," mom sputtered, "It took weeks to get him to sleep.”

“It fixed him didn’t it?”

Bibbit sure was onery. Well, anyway, what I had earlier concluded in the day, Bibbit in her infinite wisdom just confirmed. I really did jump off the cliff.

Saddened by this uninvited confirmation, I turned around and walked back into the living room. I decided it was best if I just went to bed and skipped the ‘good night’ formalities. Before I went up the stairs though, I slid under the tree one last time to look for squirrels. While I lay on my back, I thought of Bibbit’s wisecrack about looking for nuts and Doug’s little comment. It made me smile again.

But it didn’t last long. I was soon reminded again of that damn film clip, the pine trees vaporized and the needless, inescapable destruction.

There really wasn’t any “sleep in heavenly peace”, as Rick and I sang just days earlier. And now there wasn't any Santa Claus. None of it made any sense.

I lingered a little longer, eventually crawling out from underneath the tree to organize my gifts. Satisfied, I grabbed my shiny NY Giants football helmet to take with me.

I stopped momentarily at the base of the stairs to listen to the muted laughter coming from the kitchen, probably at my expense. I put my football helmet on, hoping it would block out the sound. It did. A unexpected bonus.

While lying in the bed, I was mulling over the day in great detail when the sound of someone coming up the creaky stairs got my attention. It was mom.

“Hey, what’s with the helmet? You must really like it,” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s the best. That Santa is something. How does he do it?”

“I don’t know but he does, doesn’t he? Can you take it off a second?”

“Yup.” I pulled the helmet off and placed it at the side of my bed.

“So why didn’t you come in the kitchen to say good night?” mom asked as she tucked me in.

“Oh, I am real tired and you guys sounded like you were having a lot of fun. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

“Well, you know that it is good manners to thank everyone and say good night, especially after everything they gave you, including the dish towels.” She smiled and when she did, she was strikingly pretty—more like Liz Taylor and less like mom.

“Hey ma, do you like the gifts you got?”

“I sure do and I can’t wait to put on those eyelashes and eyeliner along with the powder and lip stick from last year. That is once I get a wig.”

Of course! She would need a wig to finish the complete Liz makeover. How clever of her to set the seed so subtly. My mind was a bank vault, locking it all in place for next Christmas. I wondered how much wigs cost. Rick and I might have to branch out to neighboring streets when we go on the Crane Boy Carol Tour.

“Well," mom continued, "I'm going to chalk this up to being tired, but it’s not really like you not to say thank you. Are you sure nothing else is wrong?”

The old lady was like Dr. Joyce Brothers. It was seldom that I could pull the wool over her eyes. I gathered as much acting as I could under the circumstances. “Nothin’s wrong ma. Christmas was great.”

She stared at me for a moment with those wide dark eyes. I was beginning to crack under the scrutiny.

“Okay then. Merry Christmas Bobby.”

I made it. I didn’t crack.

“Merry Christmas mom!”

She leaned forward, kissed me on the forehead and said, "Love you.”

“Me too,” I wasn’t much good with the “love” word at that age for some reason.

She stood up and started towards the stairs, when something came over me, a sudden need to publicly acknowledge my discovery.

“Hey mom!”

“Yes honey?”

“Thanks for everything and especially this great football helmut ... Santa!” It was on the table now.

She stood at the doorway for a moment. “You’re welcome honey. Good night!” I could see the outline of her soft grin in the pale light as she spoke. She was prettier than Liz Taylor ever was.

She started down the steps and stopped to lean back, poking her head around the corner. In a whisper, she added, “Oh. Don’t tell Ricky or Steve okay. They aren’t as old and wise as you.”

“My lips are sealed Santa,” I fired back through a grin as wide as the room.

She paused a moment. “You know, you can still believe in the whole spirit of the thing. Nothing wrong with that. I still do. So does Bibbit for that matter, although you’d never know that by the way she talks. She’s just embarrassed to admit it I suppose. Some folks are like that.”

“Yeah, Bibbit sure is.”

“Yeah. Oh well. Ho! Ho! Ho!” Then her head disappeared as she made her way down the stairs.

“I love you ma,” I whispered to the empty doorway.

And with that last exchange, I rolled over and pulled the covers close. I was asleep by the time she reached the bottom of the stairway and turned off the light.

***

It would take me some time to really understand what mom meant by “believing in the whole spirit of the thing” and regain that exrra little hop in my step around the holidays. But I eventually got it, ending up in pretty good shape considering everything.

As for nuclear destruction, that hung around for quite some time, that is until Apollo 11 and Buzz Aldrin. It’s amazing how something as simple as “a man on the moon” has the power to repair the spirit of a broken dreamer—kind of snapped me right out of it. The truth is, I haven't thought much about it since.

That is, of course, until these trying times.
(I'm thinking a woman on Mars would fix that.)

A Conversation with that Kooky Intelligent Designer

2009-10-15T13:21:00.000-04:00

It was about four in the morning, the usual time for me to wake up with an idea, a solution, a question, or some gas. But this was no ordinary wake up call. I was contacted by the big guy himself. At least I think it was. You see, I have been mulling over this whole Intelligent Design stuff for a year now. And finally, I got my answer but I never expected to get it from the Designer’s mouth.

Here is the transcript of our conversation as best I can recall.

“Hey Crane wake up.”

“What? Who’s there? Who’s talking to me?”

“Are you awake?”

“What? I hear choirs.”

“Hold on. Let me turn down my iPod. There. Is that better?”

“Yeah. Who are you? Where are you? I want you to know I am a practitioner of the seven death blows. I can and will kill you!”
(I was making it up. Who was I kidding? I watch Project Runway.)

“That won’t be necessary. I bring you no harm. I’m the guy responsible for Intelligent Design.”

“Oh that’s nice. What’s your name?”

I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. It seemed to surround me. I fumbled for the lights. They didn’t work. I checked the radio. It was dead. The dog continued to sleep, leaving me to believe this was all taking place in my head.

“Never you mind my name. I’m the big Designer.”

“Hold on a second. It can’t be. God is that you?”

“No. It’s the cable guy. Yes it’s me! I’m going to clear the whole thing up so you can take it to Robertson!”

“But why me? Why are ya tellin’ me? I mean, you know, I haven’t exactly been what you might call a big fan of yours recently.”

“Yeah, I know that. Consider it a blessing of sorts. A reaching out. An olive branch if you will.”

“If you want to bless me, find me a literary agent or publisher. You wanna help me, get me a spot on Oprah for Christ’s sa—”

“Yo!”

“Um … oh yeah, sorry.”

“No problem. It’s just that he’s blood and all. And as far as your request is concerned, good luck. Even I can’t find a good agent.”

“Hey, wait a minute. How do I know you’re God? This could be my subconscious playing a cruel trick on me. You sure don’t sound like God. I mean no disrespect but you sound like that guy from the infomercials. The one who pawns his book on how to make millions in real estate.”

“Thou hast cast from thyself a rife and great shadow in the midst of attestation and advisement fore with thine glory who hath spoken unto thee revealing the holiest of intelligence and design to instilleth! How about them apples?”

“Holy cow! You are God, even if you do sound like my twelve year old nephew, Winston!”

“You Earthlings sure are a macho lot! Not sure how that got so outta of control.”

“Hey listen, I’ll tell ya why Mr. Squeaky Voice. Nothin’ for nothin’, nobody understands a word you were sayin’ back on the day. Everyone is runnin’ around saying they know what you meant. No one knows. I mean you were pretty esoteric if you don’t mind my sayin’. Almost harder to read than Ralph Waldo Emerson. And it’s a mess around here as a result.”

“First of all I had nothing to do with the Bible or Koran or any other manual. They were all written by a bunch of men filled with their big ideas and high brow language skills—the self-serving nudniks. And secondly, like I said, I couldn’t find a good agent.”

"Well maybe you should consider giving us the word now. Thought about using a good Holy Ghost writer? I’d suggest Stephen King but he might take some liberties with Satan and the Fire and the Brimstone. How about John Grisham? He writes clearly. He’d be pretty good. Besides, he’s a former attorney and could keep everything you have to say on the up and up.”

“I don’t like lawyers. They were a mistake along with talk radio.”

“Wow. Imagine that! God made mistakes.”

“Believe you me, I made plenty but I’m not getting into that! Listen, I don’t have a lot of time. Are ya or aren’t ya going to tell Robertson?”

“Well, how come you don’t talk to him yourself? I mean you’re always telling him who’s sick in Pagetown, Ohio and stuff.”

“Say what?”

“Yeah, he’s always telling people you told him they’re healed and to stop their dialysis or their medication and stuff.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Oh no! Ya mean you haven’t been talking to him? He’s lying? Jesus Chri—”

“Yo! What did I tell you!”

“I mean, geez! There must be hundreds of people he has healed. Or killed I guess.”
“He’s nuts! I’ve never talked to him.”

“What about Benny Hinn, Jerry Falwell, Tony Robbins, Mayor Nagin?”

“Mayor who?”

“Come on. You’re kidding right? The mayor from New Orleans.”

“Why am I talkin’ to him?”

“I don’t know why? It was your hurricane!”

“What hurricane?”

“Katrina? Dah!”

“I have nothing to do with the weather. It is what it is.”

“Ya mean the tsunami wasn’t a message to the Muslims?”

“What tsunami? What the hell is goin’ on here?”

“Robertson said you told him it was a message.”

“It was a big wave. It was a big wave because the ocean floor had an adjustment. What do ya want from me already?”

“So you are tellin’ me you haven’t talked to Pat Robertson?”

“Who’s Pat Robertson?”

“The guy you want me to tell all your big design secrets to.”

“I mean that new Supreme Court fellow, John Robertson.”

“You mean John Roberts?”

“Roberts, Robertson, whatever.”

“Whatever? Ya see what I’m talkin’ about. You’re kind of blasé about your instructions.”

“Got a lot on my mind okay.”

“Like what?”

“Like I have this new planet I’m working on. I’m trying out a few minor tweaks so that if life takes hold and evolution kicks in that it will stop with the apes. The plan is to have dolphins develop thumbs and reading skills. It’s when you damn humans come into the picture that all the trouble starts. And it keeps happening over and over again. I’m runnin’ out of space, so to speak, out here! It’s enough to make a grown god cry I tell ya.”

“Aha! So there is evolution!”

“Hello … of course there is. That’s the whole design: a little predictability, a little chaos, some survival of the fittest. That’s the plan. What do ya think? I just throw down a man here, a rib over there, and a few penguins in for fun? Come on. Think Bobby think!”

“You’re startin’ to sound like my mother.”

“Speakin’ of which, you know you should have listened to her more.”

“Yeah, I know—thank you very much. So let me get this straight. You are claiming to be the Intelligent Designer and the design is evolution.”

“Bingo!”

“By the way, what’s with you and bingo?”

“Great game! Gave it to the Catholics you know!”

“No I don’t know but what I do know is that you are kind of kooky.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. You’d be too if you had all these things going on.”

“So what’s the issue on the new project that has you all in a knot?”

“I already told you. I haven’t found a way to stop humans from evolving. Every time they do, the planet is eventually destroyed. The closest I came to getting the right mix was a planet where the humans had both sex organs. They called themselves Phmales. Everything was looking pretty good until they discovered they could be their own sex partner. That created some serious inbreeding issues. And talk about same sex marriage. How about same person marriage? It was a disaster, truthfully.”

“Wow! And you want me to tell John Roberts all this stuff.”

“Just tell him that I am the intelligent designer and the design engine is evolution. Tell him that I got the wheels in motion, and it’s up to you guys to keep them moving. Tell him, I’ve got no llama in this race.”

“But I have to ask again. Why me? And why tell John Roberts?”

“You both seem like good guys, like you could work well together.”

“But he’s a pretty serious Christian and I’m kind of a lowly humanist.”

“Yeah and your point would be?”

“Well, humanists are considered atheists in many Christian circles and atheists don’t make great messengers for God.”

“Are you and atheist?”

“I prefer to be called a humanist. They have better social lives. Besides, look at whom I think I’m talking to. Like I’m gonna to tell you I’m an atheist.”

“Well whether you are or aren’t, it doesn’t matter. The mistake humans make is that they place this blind faith in me, as if I have plans to do something, to save them, whatever that means. That I listen to their prayers or, what did you tell me earlier? Oh yeah, I send tsunamis as a message. I’m not into that. As I said before, what you see is what you get. WYSIWYG bigtime! You are on your own unfortunately and that is why I have to fix the formula.”

“So all that talk about Revelations and the Rapture and all?”

“That was no message of mine. Talk to the folks at King James publishing.”

“And you didn’t talk things over with President Bush about going into Iraq?”

“I have to laugh. You call me wacky! I don’t talk to anyone much anymore. I used to. But it always ended up wrong. A lot of killing in my name. So I disconnected my phone. Let’s see the last time I talked to someone was Gandhi. Now he got it right.”

“Wow. And now you are talking to me. Dubya and Pat aren’t going to like this. I just want to be double sure I heard this right, you don’t mind humanists?”

“Look humanists revel in the “goodliness” humans have. It is the only evolutionary weapon you have to work with quite honestly. It doesn’t matter that you believe in me. Like I said, wouldn’t do you any good anyway. But by believing in “goodliness”, you in essence believe in me, after all “goodliness” is just “godliness” spelled with an extra “o” for “good” measure.”

“Oh, that’s cute God.”

“Yeah, kind of like it myself.”

“But why me? Why not talk to Roberts directly?”

“Too risky. It might make him think I’ve been talking to him all along. I don’t want it to go to his head.”

“So you want me to talk to him.”

“Yeah. You know that deal with Gandhi? Well I didn’t really talk to him directly. I got a hold of some sheep herder, Raataahaninghianna. He took care of it. That seemed to work. This is the same idea.”

“I see. Kinda like that movie, “Oh God”, with John Denver.”

“Didn’t see it.”

“Yeah, I think George Burns played you.”

“Nice choice. He’s funny. But wrong voice.”

“You know, you really are out there.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“So, you don’t care that I’m a humanist.”

“Could care less. I’m not the least bit interested.”

Swept up in the moment, it occurred to me I had an opportunity to ask the million dollar question, “Can I ask you one last thing?”

“Make it snappy. Gotta a super nova planned in an hour.”

“What happens after we die?”

“It’s a god damn mystery ain’t it?”

“Yeah, it sure is. But sadly, I pretty much think wild beliefs in false answers are at the root of a lot of what goes wrong here.”

“Yup, ya might be right. Look, I wish I had the answer for you, but I’m no Einstein. Vikings were one of my big ideas for cryin’ out loud.” He giggled.

“So anyway, that’s it? You want me to tell John Roberts about Intelligent Design and Evolution? Again, the reason why John Roberts would be …”

“Well, it’s just a suggestion. He is after all the most important judge on your planet. I think that is a good start to getting this evolution and “goodliness” idea back on track. Maybe make it clear that I’m not on any country’s side. He could put it all in the Constitution.”

God stopped for a moment. The dog continued to snore. I pinched myself. He continued on.

“And while you’re at it, tell him I said to forget that marriage amendment crap. Phmales tried to do the same thing and it didn’t work so well. Besides, sexual orientation is all a result of design and shouldn’t be punished by stupid human fears!”

“Now you want amendments to the Constitution. It doesn’t really work like that. But hey, if you think it’s a good idea, I’ll send him an email and await his response, although I’m not holding my breath.”

“I can hold my breath a long time. Just do what you can.”

“Do what I can—”

“You know Bob, I’m thinking you’re right. I need to get this place back on message. Remind me again, who was that Holy Ghost writer you suggested before?”

“John Grisham.”

“A good fella is he?”

“I wouldn’t know. He is a lawyer remember.”

“Yeah, that troubles me. Well what about you? Maybe you could be my Holy Ghost writer.”

“Are ya sure you want me to be your writer? A humanist?”

“Sure why not. You don’t have an agenda.”

“You really are nuts.”

“You have a business card?”

“You’re kiddin’ me?”

“All right, I’ll tell ya what. I’ll mull it over during the Super Nova and drop you an email.”

“Sure whatever. Just get me an agent. You know, during your breaks with the Super Nova. And speaking of Nova, could you kinda help Villanova in the NCAAs next year?”

“You’re pushing your luck little man.”

“I’ll settle for the final four.”

“Don’t hold your breath. Catcha later. Ta ta.”

“Yeah. Later.”

Since the heavenly visit, this is what has transpired:

1. Sent the transcript to NPR in hopes of getting an email address for John Roberts.
2. Holding my breath.
3. Awaiting FBI agents to show up at the door soon.
4. No email from God yet to greenlight his little ghostwriting project.
5. Still no agent.
6. No calls from Oprah either.
7. Not real reliable, I’d say.

Eight Lessons for Unpublished Writers

2009-08-27T02:23:00.000-04:00

If you are unpublished, you are one of my peeps. We are a nation of a million poor saps who scratch our heads in constant angst with every killer query letter returned in standard issue rejection, while we squirm in our Costco leatherite desk chairs to take pressure off the birth of a new hemorrhoid.

For my own sanity, I'd like to share some things I have learned over the past ten years. It is the least I can do. But before I begin, I must warn you, remove any loaded guns, put the arsenic away, tuck the noose under the bed, and pull the box of Kleenex near.
Are you ready? Let’s do a little sharing then, shall we?

One: Contests

I dabbled in writing scripts about ten years ago, entering two in some smalltime but legitimate screenplay contest in Monterey County, California. When informed that both made it to the second round, I secretly allowed myself the simple pleasure of imagining my acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. When I daydream, I don’t mince fantasies. A month later, I received the “sorry but” letter for both scripts. I realized later that the second round was reserved for those scripts that were submitted in the correct format and with a payment that didn’t bounce. So much for Hollywood—I filed my acceptance speech away.

Lesson One: the second round of any writing contest only means two things: 1) your work was formatted correctly, and 2) your check/credit card entry fee was approved.

Two: Paying to be read

Undaunted, I decided all I needed was to have one of the scripts read and critiqued by a literary agency/service. I found one, The Star Literary Service in Tucson Arizona (it was before Google was around for any type of cheap investigation). So I forked up $90 to have it critiqued, believing that once read, they’d clamor to represent me. I soon received a boilerplate response with a few standard critique paragraphs essentially saying, "The writer has promise but the script is not marketable. Thank you very much."

In all fairness, having dusted off the script recently for a reread, it was amateurish but not because it was not marketable. In fact, a few years later “You’ve Got Mail” was released, a slightly modified version of my story called “Roomance”, right down to the actors I had in mind—so much for no market. The truth is, the script was amateurish because, other than the dialogue, the scene descriptions read like a Tolstoy novel, making it about sixty-eight pages longer than it needed to be. Regardless, I would have been better served if I had just played the slots in Atlantic City with the ninety bucks.

Lesson Two: if one pays an agency to read her/his work, make sure the cost can be covered by disposable income, as in trash disposable. The good ones don’t charge to read!

Three: The International Society of Poets (and all permutations)

Having felt the rush of finishing not one but two pretty lame scripts, I was somewhat satiated. Meanwhile, my full time job was becoming quite intrusive. Happy to have two completed scripts under my belt, I filed the writing away, thinking I was over it. But if you are my peeps, you know the urge to write always lurks below the surface, kind of like a life long skin allergy that suddenly bubbles up on the old epidermis just when you think you out grew the damn thing.

Well the urge hibernated for many years. And when it awoke, it was for poetry of all things. I was suckered into submitting a poem to a weekly, $100 prize contest sponsored by "www dot poetry dot com". If any of you have stumbled across this little ruse, you know what happens next. You receive an unexpected email or letter from that irascible Howard Ely and the folks from the International Society of Poets (or a handful of other related societies). Before you can say iambic pentameter, you discover you are in the semi-finals of some big contest and your poetry is going to appear in some grand Anthology.

For the uninitiated, I can’t say this any clearer. If this occurs, pick up your quill or mouse and run for the hills! It is all about collecting cold cash from gullible poets to buy a copy of a $59 heirloom quality anthology containing their poems. And if that doesn’t pull in the bucks, they take it up a notch. How about a recording of your poem read by a professional on a CD? Still not doin’ it for ya? Why not attend a Poet Society sponsored convention to read your poetry to your peers? Or buy a plaque? Or a pen? Or a glass football? Or a set of coasters? Or whatever you want to imprint your maximum-of-twenty-one-lines poem on? How about dem apples?

I must admit. My vanity leaked out a wee bit when I received that first unsolicited announcement letter from Howie. Fortunately, I was rudely snapped out of it by my son who said he thought the poem I had submitted was “somewhat pedestrian”—pretty harsh for an eight year old.

Now if I could write my query letters to agents like the folks from Poets Society write their anthology invitations, I might not be writing this piece of drivel right now. I might actually be on the other side of the publishing wall, separating myself from my peeps as fast as possible, while hopping from one terraced hot tub party to another with the likes of the Collins sisters, Annie Rice and that wild mother-daughter pair, the Clarks! Call me shallow. Don't care. Been called a lot worse.

Alas, with my vanity in check, thanks to the insight of a second grader, I matured as a writer and human being. This "growing up" is best demonstrated by the good natured fun I have had with the International Society of Poets over the past few years. I’ve been submitting really lousy poems from Inlin Freebosh, a North Pole elf friend of mine. In return for his efforts, Inlin has been receiving fantastic accolades and requests for more. He has obliged by sending worse and worse poems for more and more anthologies. There is final payback for my mature ways though. Howie and the gang named Inlin one of the top two hundred new poets in the world. It’s true! I didn’t even accomplish that! It gets better. Just last week he was officially certified as an International Ambassador of Poetry—cool certificate and all. I submit, I can’t get any more mature.

Lesson Three: If vanity is your thing, writing can be a fulfilling endeavor. There are ample slugs, I mean caring publishers, ready to turn your paper dollars into paper pages. (Note: if vanity is not your thing, visit www.vanitypublishing.info for a nice 101 course in what to look out for—lest you find yourself manipulated into purchasing a depressing, demoralizing, disappointing, heirloom-quality dust collector.)

Four: Rejection

Okay, so the poetry wasn’t very rewarding. Nevertheless, the writing allergy was back, and I was itching to scratch out a small Christmas novel about an ill-advised journey by that notorious elf, Mr. Freebosh. At the same time, I was tumbling head first towards a job layoff, looming a mere two weeks away. Frankly, there was no decision to be made. I planned to live off the forthcoming nine month severance and turn myself completely over to the urge. I took this plunge a little over two years ago. With the next great family holiday story in hand after months of writing/editing, writing/editing, writing/editing followed closely by a dozen rewrites/reedits, I started the literary agent query crusade.

I did my homework, as I’m sure you have all done. I bought all the must-have books and agency lists. I even found some fantastic query examples on the internet, one in particular demonstrating the merits of humor—something that always resonates with me. Each one pager was agonizingly engineered to open with a clever hook, which shrewdly segued into an assortment of wild, witty claims. I sealed the deal with a silky smooth story summary that led into a lengthy, if not heartfelt, farewell. The queries flew off my desk—approximately an unpublished author’s dozen—to agencies that had children’s stories listed among all the other genres they represented. You know, the typical collage of categories agencies tend to represent: war chronicles, lesbian erotica, Eskimo grilling, New Jersey destinations, and of course children’s books.

I think I must have sent the serious queries to the agents that wanted humor and vice versa. Anyway, the rejection form letters came racing back. Some were completely pre-printed, including the signature. Others were pre-printed, except the signature. Some contained personal responses in real ink, one-liners like, “sorry but somewhat pedestrian”. If I remember correctly, one reject form had a pre-printed, dried, tear-drop stain near the fake signature. All of them claimed their own personal hell of toppling query and unsolicited manuscript piles with only two hands to reject them, closing their private grief by imploring me not to give up—"there must be an agent or publisher out there somewhere for you". Gee, little did I know about their agony. Frankly, it made me feel better to know that someone out there has a more dismal life than mine.

Lesson Four: Writing’s a joy. Query rejection, a poke in the eye!

[At this point, I want to check-in with you. I’m sure there are several of you shaking your heads in agreement, possibly reminded of your own bounty of rejects. What do you do with yours? I file mine away, occasionally pulling them out to read them in worst to best order. I’m always filled with the delusion that someday I’ll be plugging my book on the public access show “Local Corner”, at which time I’ll build a small bonfire with the rejects right in front of the set's vinyl couch, dancing around the flames screaming “that’ll learn ’em”.]

Five: Agents live in secret places

However, out of the darkness of defeat, a dull beacon pulsed. There was one response from Rosemary Stimola of Stimola Literary Studio fame that gave me pause to indulge in a morsel of hope. She actually read the three chapters I submitted with the query, and hand wrote a note back to me at the bottom of the rejection. She told me the main character, Inlin Freebosh was “charming”. I slept with the letter—stained by tears of joy and a little champagne—under my pillow that night. I slipped into a deep peaceful sleep, during which I dreamed I was firing off snappy one-liners to Oprah’s probing questions!

Filled with a renewed passion, I took it up a notch. I wrote a memoir from limited memories of growing up in the Sixties. It’s a collection of humorous stories about my pathetic uninformative years (occasionally featured in this blog). I found a way to buy another year of dedicated time, during which I learned to build my own website to get my work out there. The carrot that dangled from my flat screen monitor was the promise of the next thirst-quenching query letter I’d send off to Rosemary, my newest, bestest friend. It would be brilliantly constructed, reminding her of our past relationship and near connection. She’d be impressed with my persistence, resilience, and most of all, talent.

Well the day came not long ago. Armed with a very carefully worded query letter and best story from the collection, I decided not to just mail it but to hand deliver it. If she saw me, she’d see instantly I was marketable, someone she’d be proud to send to publishers and public access TV (channel 538).

Lesson Five: The only thing more difficult than finding a literary agent is finding their actual habitat. After a gallant attempt, I could not find Rosemary’s office. I ended up mailing it. I think she is squirreled away within the safety of a gated condo complex, possibly drowning in a sad sea of crumpled queries.

[Note: I did hear back from Rosemary. This time the response was a bit cool and aloof, almost as if she sensed a little stalking potential in my latest inquiry. I probably should have toned down the salutation, "To my sweetest angel of agents". Thank god, I didn’t find her office, she might have shot me on the spot. Oh well, I’m still thankful to her for that original response. It really did make a difference. My gut feeling is she is a real decent person and therefore a good agent to have, if one is fortunate enough. I say this under the remote possibility she might actually be reading this right now—a little pathetic sucking up can be an effective tool in the desperate hands of the miserable.]

Six: Your Own Website

I do recommend building a simple website. It helps a lot. It keeps the brain sharp—well, working anyway. It also can be an endless source of hope. My site has generated many encouraging responses. Okay, so I've received a few … um … a hundred, all right a few hundred of those obligatory "Hey faggot" emails. I have a theory they’re sent by those kind of people who spend their spare time doing Google searches for porn sites using the word "the"—unfortunately “the” happens to be one of my most creative and effective meta data keywords. Generally speaking though, a few good apples keep the many bad apples from ruining the barrel (or whatever that saying is).

Lesson Six: Building a website with a "comments" form reaps plenty of valuable feedback—much of it challenging one’s thoughts about sexual norms.

Seven: Writersnet

My most recent endeavor was to join an internet writer’s group, "www dot writersnet dot com". I figured it would be a great place to visit and chew the fat with other writers, both published and unpublished. Kind of schmooze with the goods, so to speak. So, I read a few of the discussion threads they had. Instantly, I started to notice a few things. There seems to be a high school cafeteria clique among some of the more ‘successful’ authors. Actually, that’s not fair—to high school kids. It’s more like eighth grade.

With this in mind, I did something really stupid.

I don’t know why? I was feeling pretty good I guess. I thought, maybe, if given an opportunity, the kidlets would settle down and act like the adults they surely are. Okay, so I put a query letter out there that I have been struggling over, and asked for help. Okay, so maybe I should not have titled my discussion entry, “chum for query sharks”. I don’t know why but I did. I thought it would be disarming. It took a while for the scent of fresh split infinitives to flow through the bandwidth. But before long, they appeared. One by one, they took a mouth full out of the query until there was nothing left but a few helpless dangling participles. I was chewed up pretty good but was able to swim back to my hell hole of a website.

In retrospect, the query really did suck. It was for "STILL LIVING IN THE SIXTIES", my collection of humorous short stories. Let’s face it, if you are an unknown, humor is a tough sell. And I’m possibly the unknownest. Furthermore, to make matters worse, the stories I’ve written are about nothing. It’s the old Seinfeld bit. Try writing a one-page query to hook an agent on a manuscript about nothing. For example, me to agent, “We had a funny family dinner”; agent laughing hysterically, “Stop it! You’re killin’ me with this stuff!” You see what I mean? Mission impossible.

So I took another stab at the query. Moved stuff around. Took stuff out. Added a boatload of missing commas. Trimmed the cutesy stuff. And I did it again. I doggy paddled out to writersnet reef and dropped another round of chum into the depths below. Okay, I probably should have known better than to try it again but I did. Then I did something else. Being the bonehead I am, I opened up the discussion entry with “Here Sharky, Sharkies! Come and get it!” It didn’t take long. Apparently, they stayed in the neighborhood.

WHACK!
SQUONCH!
GLUMP!

It was worse than the first time. They even ate the two semicolons, which I’m sure left a terrible lingering after taste in their mouths. They didn’t care. These were Great Writes. That’s what I’m talking about.

So there I was, trying to reach out for help, writing something that all agreed was a tough assignment, putting myself on the chopping block again, and one of the self-proclaimed suggested “at the risk of being bitch-slapped, maybe you should reconsider your career in humor”. This they call help? Some knucklehead reads two first-time queries for a difficult sell, written by a novice, and suggests the writer should give it up?

To my peeps, the unpublished, I highly recommend that you stay out of those waters.

You know, anonymity in the hands of a sociopath can be a dangerous thing. I really don’t know anything about those sharks, other than their usernames. They claim to be published writers but only a few have links to their books. Interestingly enough, those that did have websites or email addresses were the most helpful. Kind of makes you wonder about the rest. What are they hiding? Huh, "Gulliver H"?

Well, the truth is the second query wasn’t any better than the first—still quite amateurish frankly. I’ve scrapped it, as the sharks suggested. I’m working on a whole new angle that just might do it. But I have to tell ya, I’m not going back for any more “help”.

Lesson Seven: Writersnet (and other cliques like it) is the unpublished writers’ Bermuda Triangle. You innocently drift in, never to be read from again!

[Another check-in: I’ve been listening to a continuous stream of Nat King Cole classics while writing this. Does that mean anything? Am I close to the cliff? Has anyone experienced this? Just tell me Lawrence Welk isn't next!]

Eight: Paula Abdul

That brings me to the present. I’m sending my updated resume out to the corporate world, trying to spin the last two years into a meaningful, job-related experience—probably some of the best fiction I’ve written to date. The fact is I need to find income to feed this addiction. It’s sad really. At the same time, I’m trying the competition route, but a part of me, the suspicious part, thinks it is a waste of both time and entry fees. I’m also writing a bunch of political and humor articles for an ezine in a desperate attempt to publish something somewhere. Besides, it does keep me occupied and off the streets during the day, while I figure out my next project and this little employment dilemma.

All in all, I don’t know. This writing is tough stuff. What can I say? It makes those author rags-to-riches stories almost unbelievable.

Enough already, it’s time to wrap this up.

My fellow unpublished friends, those anyway who have not poisoned themselves yet, there is little one can do to stop the madness. The truth is, if you are fortunate enough to have writing DNA but cursed with an enduring optimism gene in the mix, you are in for a long, lonely, hurtful ride. A journey best not taken by the timid or weak of spirit.

I think Paula Abdul of American Idol fame said it best recently when she told a really talent-challenged crooner, “when I hear your voice ... I mean when you sing ... I mean when I look around, I love the way you stand there. You have the right outfit for that song. Never give that up”. Actually, I’m not sure that says anything best. What she was trying to say was never let the talent thing get in the way, just dress nice. Even that doesn’t make much sense. Oh well, she should’ve said, “If you love to sing, then sing already!”

I think the same holds true if you love to write.

Lesson Eight: Never use a quote from Paula Abdul as an example of anything!

Tales of the Stupidimentors: Episode One - Basket Case

2009-08-04T10:07:00.003-04:00

It was a thick, slow, early summmer evening, as most would be in ’69 to this bored seventeen year old. More bored, however, were my two younger brothers, the so-called Irish twins: Rick, sleep walking into ninth grade, and Doug, soon to collect more “A’s” as a sophomore. An odd couple of sorts, forced by pure bedrooms-to-bodies math to share a third floor sanctuary. Yet both also shared a penchant for living outside the Wally Cleaver box, which inevitably resulted in episodes of stupidimentation (i. e., the teen version of experimentation).

This would be such a night.

It all began with a knock at the front screen door, which acted like a kitchen strainer, separating the mosquitoes from the slightly cooler night air sucked into the house by dad’s network of strategically placed window fans set to maximum exhaust.

A voice from the darkness.
“Hello?”
Mom answered from the living room couch, “Hi Timmy, Come on in.”
“Are Rick and Doug home? We had plans to play Parcheesi this evening.”
“Yes they are. They are expecting you upstairs. I think they have potato chips too. Would you like some ice tea to take up?”
“Oh no Mrs. Crane, I’m trying to cut sugar out and lose a few pounds. But thank you for offering.”
“All right then. Go ahead on up and have a good time.”
“Thank you Mrs. Crane. I’m sure we will!”

Timmy (a.k.a., Fitzy) sure could pour on the “Eddie Haskell” in a pinch. With security clearance obtained, Fitzy bolted up the endless flights of stairs. Winded, he rapped the secret knock on the locked door to gain entry into the laboratory of the stupidimentors. Once inside and the vault secured once again, the stupidimenting commenced.

Doug was leaning out the window. “Shit! The basket is caught on an freakin’ branch!” he barked.
“Here! Let me try,” Fitzy yelped.

A moment later, “Nevermind! It’s coming!”
Fitzy sighed, “You guys owe me big time for this one! I stole them from Joe and Paul. They’re having a big party and won’t even know they're gone!”

Of course what Fitzy was referring to was the basket full of cheer ... no, spectacular cheer ... that he confiscated from his older brothers and Doug was now carefully pulling through the window: cold Michelobs and Dutch Masterson cigars. It was the stuff of great stupidimentation. And stupidimenting they did that sultry night. So much so that Doug left Rick in charge of “discardation”. Big mistake—especially after such a robust episode of idiocy.

The clean-up was usually airtight. Doug lowered the basket to the ground as Fitzy said his slurred Haskell good byes to the folks. Once outside, Fitzy dumped the ashes, retrieved the empties and tossed them into neighborhood-kid-hater Otto Vanderbeek’s perfectly groomed hedges on his way home. Doug pulled the basket up before going to sleep and placed everything in the closet. A smooth operation really.

But not on this particular night. Rick was a bit more easy-going about the whole process. Well, actually Rick was blitzed. He tied off the basket too high up for Fitzy to reach and Fitzy wasn’t good with the follow through, leaving a basket full of empty cheer dangling along the side of the house. Rick fell asleep in the meantime.

Saturday morning eventually arrived after a long, humid night of off-and-on sleep. It was a window cleaning Saturday to boot, one of the handful of chores assigned to me. So there I was, a bit tired, minding my own business, just windexing away, whistling a slightly merry tune, when I got to the side dining room window, positioned directly below the infamous third floor portal. Mom was dusting the dining room table nearby. I pulled open the drapes and there it was! My Easter basket with a bunch of crap in it! Before the import registered, I blurted out, “Hey! What’s my Easter Basket doing—”

It was about the time the word “doing” came out of my mouth that I realized what the import part was.

“What did you say Bobby?”
“Um, nothing ma. I said nothing.” A noble effort at cover up but way too lame for the likes of mom.

In a spurt of panic I jerked the drapes closed, pulling the rods from the wall—as usual dad didn't use all the nails. Everything tumbled to the floor exposing my Easter basket, overflowing with empty beer cans and ashtrays. A more telling still-life of teen tomfoolery would be hard to find.

l will say one thing about mom, she meted out punishment fairly and swiftly. Within seconds she searched through dad’s tool box, found a screw driver and ascended the stairs to the third floor, speaking in tongues all along the way. She unscrewed the locked, security door hinges from the frame and removed the entire door. Clutching it in her hands, she proclaimed to the astonishment of the drowsy stupidimentors sleeping inside that entertainment of all forms on the third floor would desist immediately and something about teen privacy being a privilege, not a natural born right as the constitution might have some believe.

I smirked as I listened from the second floor hallway below—BOBS (i.e., Boring Oldest Brother Syndrome, an affliction I had) at its worst.

I do believe later that day when things quieted down, Doug hammered Rick with a couple of forearm shivers and placed him in a particularly painful full nelson for several minutes. Punishment travels downhill very quickly in the underbelly world of male siblings.

But within weeks the knuckleheads were at it again as episode two emerged when the boys became attic horticulturists.

Tales of the Stupidimentors: Episode Two - Attic Horticulture

2009-08-04T09:42:00.001-04:00

It couldn’t have been much more than two weeks after the basket caper before the infamous stupidimenters, Doug and Rick, were on to bigger and better ideas. They decided to become herb horticulturists. They sprouted a farm of sorts under the eave of the house which ran parallel to their bedroom wall that faced the front of the house where the slope of the roof ran outside. This was not your normal little pasture by any standard. This was one secret little garden, requiring the skills of a Nebraskan navy seal to reach and cultivate.

It lay beyond the unfinished attic area just off the laboratory (a.k.a., the third floor bedroom). A crouch to the left, then another left, and finally a six foot crawl through a two-foot high by two-foot wide, right-angle triangular tunnel would get any kid there in a jiffy. An adult, impossible. Not exactly the yellow brick road. Once through, there it was, a larger five-foot high by five-foot wide by fifteen-foot long room whose slanted rafter and frame ceiling sliced across from top to bottom—shingle nails exposed for the occasional skull puncture.

For years it had been a useful retreat for recharging crushed youthful spirit after particularly harsh and unjust parental decisions were meted out. But those days were long gone. Now it seemed more fit to be a pasture.

Once mapped out by mastermind Doug, it was time for the green thumb boys to get to work. The two upstart 4Hers toiled with their crops long and hard, hovering over each seedling like proud new parents, nurturing their babies into mature, splendid young ferns. Green, lush and bountiful.

Every night as the sun dropped from the orange sky, they unraveled the string of extension cords tucked under their mattresses. They plugged one end into the lone, life blood socket in their bedroom, laying the chain of cords out to reach the potted plants. At the other end they plugged an assortment of four confiscated lamps, shining warm, welcomed light on the shrubs. Sometimes they'd even leave the lights on during the day when conditions were ripe, like when mom was working and the risk of discovery small. When the sun rose bright and the milk truck roostered the start of a new day with the crowing of its screeching brakes, Doug and Rick just as carefully retrieved the extension chords and hid them away for safe keeping.

Their attention to detail and fastidious caretaking were eventually rewarded with as fine a crop of Mexican Gold as ever was grown under the rooftop of a New Jersey, suburban home. With the anticipated reaping of their harvest just a scant few days away, the boys were soon to become the new modern farmers of the local hippy underground.

How they escaped discovery still eludes me though. As a rather renowned squealer, I was more than up to the task of figuring this out. I mean the hints were all there for the spying. The sudden disappearance of my desk top lamp, an official Man From Uncle, two-switch, 75 watt beauty. The notable shortage of extension chords and novel new wiring of various household electronics. And finally, the perplexing interest these two dazzling teen suburbanites took in soil water retention and drainage strategies.

Well, to their credit, it truly was a wonderful stupidiment for some time. But like all things dumb for Doug and Rick, something unexpected inevitably revealed them. This would prove to be no different.

As usual, leaving details in Rick’s untested hands was when the whole operation took a sudden turn for the worse. It was a normal Saturday morning. Doug was hijacked early by dad for his quarterly haircut battle, leaving Rick in charge of unplugging the lights before going up to the park to hang out for the day. This required that in addition to unplugging he also took care of the hiding. Apparently, it was the hiding part that proved to be too formidable a task for Rick. He left the unplugged string of cords sitting there, weaving a snaky trail to the promise land—exposing the whole kit and caboodle to discovery by anyone who might stumble by.

By then, mom had become a notorious stumble-byer. Ever since the basket of cheer episode and a few follow-up cigarette mishaps, she had morphed into a round-the-clock, super sentinel with a nose for teen trouble. She had to. She had no option. As part of the “new” mom, she employed sudden bedroom inspections and hallway shakedowns.

This was such a day.

It didn’t take long before mom stumbled by.

Spotting the unplugged extension, her eyes followed the thick beige line until it attached to the next cord, a dark brown contrast. It continued on until it inched under the attic door. She opened the door. The house heaved the stale breath of warm, moth-ball, storage air. She followed the string in hot pursuit, letting it slip through her gentle grip as it slid along. It turned tightly to the left and around the corner. She moved the trunks that acted as a barrier, a rather poor impediment at that. She crouched to see the now white cord fade into the darkness beyond the shadows of the eave entrance. She sat back on the floor. “What in God’s name are they up to,” she wondered.

She pulled herself up and went back into the bedroom to cool down and regroup a bit. That is when she plugged the extension cord in and returned to the entrance. She crouched down to poke her head into the tunnel. She could see the brightness. “What are those? I don’t believe it. Why those gab dab no gob ...” This is approximately when she began speaking in tongues.

Mom was many things, but a navy seal she was not. She was determined though. And when mom was determined, well, the unimaginable occurred. She got down on her belly and inched through the 2 by 2 opening—the occasional bite of a shingle nail reminding her to keep her head and butt down. She made it, sweaty and a bit disheveled, but she got in there all the same. In fact, she would leave and return several times that fateful morning, clearing brush like George W. at his Crawford ranch. And once completed, she sealed up the field of dreams tighter than an abandoned Scranton mine shaft.

As hot a summer day it was, she sure was frosted. No two ways about it. In a mom instant, she decided the stupidimentors were moving downstairs into my bedroom and I was being promoted to the third floor. As usual, I was the first to feel the swift slice of her sword. It all happened so suddenly. I wasn’t more than two steps in the front door, when her interrogation began.

“So tell me young man what do you know about the crops!” she inquired, her eyes icy steel, her nostrils flaring.

Now if I knew anything, I knew that “young man” was not the kind of salutation that promised good things. I was cautious in my answers.

“Umm, what crops?”

“You mean to tell me mister you don’t know about the little gardening project in the attic?”

Oh baby! “MISTER”! I hadn’t heard that since the Popoff affair, and that was ten years ago. This was going to require a very careful repartee.

“What are you talking about ma?” Repartee was not my strong suit.

“You know! THE POT PLANTS!”

“What pot plants?” I was grabbing at straws, while I tried to piece together what the hell she was talking about. It sounded like the kind of gibberish I might hear from my great uncle Dukie. But he was 118 if he was a day. And he always had foam about the toothless gums like a rabid possum. This was mom. She was apparently crazed over something.

“Someone has been growing pot in the attic!”

“What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about any pot plants.” Then it hit me like a brick. THE STUPIDIMENTERS! They were up to their old tricks. Oh boy! This was a good one!

“You heard me. I found them today! And by the size of the plants, they’ve been growing for some time.”

“Wow! You gotta be kiddin’. Are ya sure?”

“Am I sure? Of course I am! What else would be growing up there? Corn!?!” she snapped, exposing some of that sarcastic combativeness we had all grown to love.

My immediate thought leaked out of my mouth, “Pot! Holy shit! What idiots!”

“Hey! What have I told you about swearing!” No matter how distracted she was, she was always on auto-alert for certain infractions. She truly was a multi-tasker. Clearly all indiscretions were currently up for grabs.

“I meant, ‘shoot’! Sorry.” An empty an apology as ever I had mustered. I was still in awe of the enormity of this stupidiment to care much about a little slip of the tongue.

“So you really didn’t know about this?”

“Ma, I don’t smoke pot. Besides, the boys don’t tell me anything.”

She studied me for a moment to see if I’d crack, but she knew I was telling her the sad truth. It was a known fact that I didn’t smoke, drink, have sex or do anything that seemed even remotely rebellious. Ever since the Popoff affair, I was a sparkling example of good adolescent citizenship. I also was afflicted with BOBS (i.e., Boring Oldest Brother Syndrome). All right, so I ran around barefoot the whole summer. That’s not exactly the stuff of family turmoil. Yeah, I had a fascination with Playboy magazine too but that was about hormones, not rebellion. Growing pot? In the attic? Now that was some superior shenanigans.

The other sad truth was that Doug and Rick never divulged anything to me, lest it be known by all before dinner time. Mom was well aware of this sibling relationship, adding a measure of honesty to my response. Coming to her senses about my lack of involvement, mom barked a direct order.

“Switch rooms with them!”

“Now?”

“Yes! Right now!”

“Okay, if you say so.” Holy cow! What a stroke of luck! I was getting the third floor all to myself, and I didn’t even have to rat on them to get it. I even got to put the security door back up! This stupidimenting sure had its dividends.

It also had its hidden costs. Mom was pretty upset about the whole farming foray for some time. Even dad was demonstratively alarmed about the mess as well. As for me, other than a week or two of some tension packed dinners, I was content to get the attic bedroom. As for the dynamic duo, Rick was grounded for two weeks, and Doug for three—the extra week was for a beating Doug extended Rick later that afternoon for his inattentive gardening skills. They accepted their punishment and served their time on best behavior with the knowledge that most all of their friends’ parents would have shot them execution style on the spot. They would at least live.

In the end, two things were quite certain to me. First, my family had swiftly moved into a tumultuous era. One that reflected in many ways the challenges the late Sixties came to impose upon folks. Pot and drugs were going to be around a while, a long while, and the Crane clan was not immune.

The second certainty, the boys were allowed to live, which guaranteed the stupidimenting wasn’t quite over. Oh brother, it wasn’t by a long shot!

Tales of the Stupidimentors: Episode Three - Basement Shenanigans

2009-08-04T08:52:00.002-04:00

The boys moved their stupidimenting to the final frontier, the basement. It took some time but they eventually stitched together quite a “pad” in the cellar. Using the asbestos covered pipes that crisscrossed the exposed ceiling as curtain rods, they proudly hung India print sheets bought at cost through their connection at the local head shop, The Last Straw, to close off a big chunk of the basement. Behind the thinly veiled walls, Doug and Rick added the perfunctory black light, strobe light, and curbside-retrieved couch, armchairs, rug, and table. At the center of their dungeon-den sat the entertainment system, the Zenith 4-speed, stereophonic, portable phonograph with detachable speakers. It was a technical marvel in both sound and practicality, manually enhanced by the three quarters taped to the armature for skip reduction and clarity of tone. The “F” word—barked by the likes of Captain Beefheart, the Fuggs and the Mother’s of Invention—never sounded better. It was the perfect finishing touch to a wonderful, cheerful escape from the doldrums of school and teenage life.

With a private entrance at the back door, it soon became the scene for every wannabe hippy in the county. Quite frankly, the army of faceless visitors that marched up and down the basement stairs in complete anonymity was of concern to me, and I think, the owners of the house. But with no hint of things afoul, there was little probable cause to shut the joint down. In fact, it was looked upon as an experiment in building personal responsibility—the delusional thought of parents in desperation.

Suspicious that the dank lounge was more about stupidimenting than anything else, I occasionally snuck down to poke around their palace of pubescent pleasure. It took several weeks but the usual stench from the crotchety oil burner that choked the basement air was all but gone. In its stead was the heavy scent of musty cushions, and the stale remnants of sandalwood incense cones, which caked a pickle jar cap sitting on the coffee table. However, there was another familiar note that permeated the cellar air. It was barely evident but unmistakable—reefer madness. The knuckleheads were at it again. Unlike the last time though, they were down to the last piece of available real estate. In addition, mom had developed a beagle-like snout when it came to identifying the subtle, ropey, bouquet of Mexican Gold.

They couldn’t afford another slip-up. They also couldn’t resist a challenge. Apparently, the boys had been weed deep in stupidimenting for some time. To their credit, they had somehow successfully masked the pungent warning scent. Only traces were about. Mom would have to develop her nose to another level before suspecting anything like this operation.

How did they do it? My inquisitive mind needed an answer. It took a little more snooping but I finally figured it out. And to their credit, it was almost flawlessly brilliant. The keyword being “almost”.

Within the confines of the drapes, tucked away in the upper corner of the pale-green painted, cinderblock wall, sat a small, rectangular, three-pane casement window. It was held open by dad’s missing screwdriver. Placed prominently on the wide windowsill was a small, metal-bladed fan that had expanding panels on either side to close off the open space—probably a contribution from Fitzy. I plugged it in. The blades slowly spun, initially clanking in complaint, but soon accelerated to a frenetic hum. Wow! At max speed, its blades rotated at about two trillion revs per second. It may have been extracted from the innards of a jet. It could mince carrots into juice if given a try. One thing was certain, it generated a powerful draw for its tiny size. The draw was exactly what the boys had in mind. Get that lingering brown smoke out of there. Eliminate the smokey fingerprints.

The set-up was very inventive and quite effective for the most part. In fact, it would have been the perfect solution had it not been for one small law of nature. Summer meant sleep-depriving heat. And the first sign of sleep-depriving heat triggered dad to fire up his patented Dad's Air Disbursement System (a.k.a., DADS).

Regarded as an expensive indulgence and an instrument of weakness, dad disdained air conditioning. Instead, he designed DADS, an intricate airflow network, which utilized the precise placement of big window fans to draw stagnant, warm, indoor air out and suck cooler, evening, outdoor air in. When it came to fan-powered cooling systems, the old man was in a league of his own. The design included deploying a large fan to the first floor dining room window, where it was set to intake level “4”, the highest. Another design component required placing an equivalent window fan in the master bedroom, setting it to outtake level “4”. The rest of the design consisted of a complicated series of opened and closed windows throughout the house. Once fired up, it was a blue-collar success, sucking in the cooler air outside the dining room window, pulling it through the living room, and drawing it up the stairs to the steamy bedrooms above.

Ah, yes, that dining room window—the old beer-basket, dining room window. Now it was the intake window for DADS. It was also directly above a basement window, but not any basement window. It sat five feet above the same basement window where the stupidmentors’ steel-bladed jet engine roared nightly.

It was a Friday evening, when the systems conjoined for the first time. A night of wild teen merriment in the den of the stupid below and a quiet evening of tv above. It didn’t take long before it all played out like a lost episode of “Married With Idiot Children”.

Let me offer a visual to help. Imagine that aerodynamic test during which smoke is blown through a wind tunnel at a sleekly designed sedan to show air drag. Take that image and now visualize the dull yellow cloud of smoke building up from a dime bag’s worth of pipe play. Imagine that cloud sucked out the basement window, creeping up the side of the house and then pulled back into the house, blasting across the dining room into the adjoining living room where it stops to regroup—where the folks are settled in to watch a night of tv humor after another long week of human office trials.

What the dynamic duo managed to pull off without much effort was push the thick pungent cloud—made of the finest hash smoke south of the border—from their basement digs into the living room over head, where it re-strengthened like a tropical depression to a Cat 4 hurricane in Gulf of Mexico.

By the time I came home from the movies that night, it was about 11:30, just in time to hear Ed McMahon bellow “Heeeeres Johnny!”. As I walked through the front door to join the folks for Carson’s monologue, the first warning sign that something was afoot was the drab beige air that filled the living room. It reminded me of the burnt amber haze I once saw at the Garden during a “Yes” concert. Of course, the more telling indication was that scent. It was like being greeted by a ten-foot tall joint at the door. However, none of that prepared me for the interaction I was about to have with the folks.

I cautiously greeted them as I walked in.

“Hey,”

Dad replied with a goofy smile plastered across his bleary-eyed face. “Hey, it’s Bobby C. How are ya Bobby C?”

“Hey honey. How was the movie? Was it groovy?” mom asked.

“Was it groovy? Is that what she just said?” I thought to myself. I looked over at her. Her eyes where slits and she had that grin, the same grin dad had. I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

“Hey Bobby C wanna watch some Johnny C with Mommy C and me?” He burst out laughing. Mom joined right in. It wasn’t even that funny. Something was definitely wrong.

“Hey, before you sit yourself down Bobby C, why don’t you refill that bowl with some more chips. There is an open bag in the kitch. I’m a little hungry.” He turned to mom. “How about you my little canary, are you a little hungry?”

“Oh, I’m a little hungry all right.” She smiled and started to giggle.

Mom did a lot of things. Giggle was not one of them. I apparently had stepped onto the set of an Ed Wood movie. It was disturbing. It was about to get worse. My eyes looked down as not to make any more contact with those of the people I called parents. I scanned the coffee table for the chip bowl. I spotted it immediately, but my eye also caught something else. The bowl was resting on a strange clump of straps and white material. What was it? It wasn’t a place mat. I walked over and looked down.

“What the heck is that?” I asked.

“Oh that’s my bra. I’ve decided to burn it. Well, I'll burn it later. Women’s Lib you know.”

“What? What is she talking about?” I asked dad, hoping to make some kind of sense of it all.

Dad smirked, “No bra Bobby C. No 'B', 'R', 'A'. I think you kids say far out, huh?” They looked at each other and started to laugh again.

My stomach began doing flips. I had seen and heard enough.

“I’ll be right back!” And with that, I picked the bowl up off the bra, marched down to the basement, unplugged the exhaust fan, picked the needle off Ten Years After, and confronted the guilty.

“Hey man, what’s the matter with you?” Doug complained. “You’re spaced out man. Chill.”

“You freakin’ idiots. Dad’s got the fan on in the dining room! All your smoke is going right into the living room. They’re stoned outta their minds. Ma took her bra off you dicks!”

Doug and Rick looked at me as if I was insane. I was but not at that moment. I was quite clear headed. They studied their silent little exhaust system for a moment. Then they looked distantly into the ceiling where the dining room fan roared above. Their bee sting eyes traced the path into the living room. I followed their eye movement again as they replayed the trail of their folly. Finally, the light bulbs went on in their empty little heads. They looked at each other and instantly exploded into uncontrolled laughter. Soon the whole bunch of them, including a few faces I had never seen before, were rolling around, tears streaming down their cheeks, gasping for air. All of them in the throes of a contagious mass laugh fest.

Everyone was having fun except for me.

Rattled and disgusted, I stomped up the basement stairs, making a detour into the “kitch”. I grabbed the open bag of chips, filled the bowl, and delivered it to my wasted parents as requested. I glanced at the discarded bra once more to verify the crime. Sadly confirmed, I retreated up to the third floor where I reflected on the last fifteen minutes and the far-reaching impact it was sure to have on my life and those around me.

I figured the boys were going to get killed. They didn’t. I thought mom would never wear a bra again—something I would never be able to deal with. She returned to full dress the very next day. I concluded dad would start saying “far out” to my friends—something that would push up my plan to move to New Zealand and live off the land by a year. He didn’t. As it turned out, absolutely nothing happened to anyone, if you discount the setback to my emotional development. Also, nothing changed. Doug and Rick continued to use the exhaust fan successfully, but they were mindful to turn the dining room fan on exhaust mode (versus intake mode) when the need arose.

Yup, it was a large bullet they had dodged that Friday night. It was also just another episode in a long series of stupidiments they executed routinely. They truly were legendary.

Sex Ed: Part 1 - The Early Years

2009-07-31T03:25:00.002-04:00

Mud Finnegan began it all, holding court with a rapt group of adolescent boys sitting around a long wooden table on a warm, thick day at our local summer hangout, Carteret Park.

He asked, “What did Roy Rogers say to Dale Evans in the bedroom when the lights suddenly went out?”

Mud was twelve years old, a year older than I and several years older than most of the kids sprawled across the benches. That was age-wise, but he seemed a generation older than all of us in every other way.

He squinted a dare, working the table like a seasoned Catskill comedian. The smartest of us had no intention of answering the question because it really wasn’t a question at all. It was an obvious lead-in to the punch line of another fantastic dirty joke; besides, no one had a clue as to the possible answer—no one, that is, except Moon Muller, who was always quick to be dumb.

“I know!” Moon yelped in a lame attempt to impress the guys, as if he was really in the know.

“Shut up! You don’t know crap!” Fitzy snapped back, warning that one of his patented headlocks might be coming Moon’s way if he didn’t keep his big trap shut.

“Do too!” Moon fired back in a surprising show of bravado.

“Are you two f’in jerk-offs through?” Mud, as only Mud could do, used the “F” word sometimes purposely, other times gracefully, but always effectively. He truly was a master, the Shakespeare of swearing. Having regained the attention of his fickle audience, he moed ahead to close the deal.

“Do you f’in dick heads wanna hear the f’in joke or doncha?” His eyes got wide and crazy, one eyebrow climbing forebodingly higher than the other. Of course, we wanted to hear the punch line. Everyone settled down, even Moon. Mud waited a moment longer, after all, comedic timing was everything. He delivered the goods.

“I’ll pull out my flashlight if you turn on your headlights.”

A silent wave of vacant thought rolled across the sea of open-jawed faces. It was like the eerie stillness before a tornado strikes, as our feeble brains scrambled to “get it”. Then, as if prompted by an audience monitor, a tsunami of rip-roaring, doubled-over laughter swept across the table. Ah, Mud sure could bring it home.

Making it all the more incredulous was that most of us struggled to understand the gag. But we knew enough to laugh. To not laugh at a Mud Finnegan dirty joke was tantamount to a social misstep, opening the possibility to being tagged a “fag”, whatever that was.

Mud proudly acknowledged his success with a wide grin, as he watched us wipe tears from our eyes, boogers from our noses, and drool from our chins. He was on top of his game. Being the veteran performer he was, he launched into an encore with another doozey about some lost traveler asking some guy, who is with his naked girl friend, how far is “The Old Log Inn”. You can guess the answer. Another eruption of roaring, clueless laughter followed. Another tidbit of prurient information tossed at the knowledge-starved masses to chew on for a while.

That was my introductory class to sex education in the Sixties.

We weren’t taught concepts like “private parts”, and never heard of or cared much for formal words like “penis” or “breast” or “vagina”. Our language was narrow and practical. "Logs”, “rods”, “headlights”, and “cams” were all we knew, or needed to know to communicate with each other when in the sudden throes of carnal conversation, which in the summer of '62 was becoming as routine as Little Rascal reruns.

Of a specific note, regarding “vagina”, only a few guys with older sisters had even the slightest notion of what that might be. Most of us were under the delusion that girls had simply broken their logs off at birth, possibly by accident, more likely through carelessness.

Anyway, all we had were Mud’s dirty jokes, and embellished stories of older sisters spied on or caught in some state of undress. Our full understanding was limited to the obvious symbolism of certain words to body parts, resulting in mindless sophomoric banter—a primitive survival technique if it was anything. Make no mistake, underneath all the big talk lay a constant uneasy sense that there was more to this stuff than met the eye. Something sinister. I suspect even for Mud Finnegan.

As I’d soon come to discover, there sure was.

Sex Ed: Part 2 - Health Class

2009-07-30T15:20:00.000-04:00

It was Seventh Grade and among many other tortures, came Mr. Brown’s Health Class. It met once a week for forty-five minutes. He taught us all about the stuff that a worrywart like me wallowed in: lockjaw, puss, cancer, infection, sprains, broken bones, internal bleeding, poison, influenza. In short, the things that bring hypochondriacs to their knees. Every weekend was a new battle. A fresh set of symptoms to give warning of yet another killer disease. I was certain mom was close to suffocating me with a pillow to put me out of my misery, as I twitched and moaned each Friday night to the nightmares of bloody operating tables and melting body parts.

The only beacon to see me through was the final lesson Mr. Brown would teach, Human Growth and Development—code words for ‘Sex Ed’. It was a little parting gift of sorts to send us off for the summer.

The promise became a certainty the day Mr. Brown announced at the end of class that we were going to be broken out into two groups for our last class—one boys, the other girls. Oh, baby! There was a definitive buzz in the gym locker room later that day, as witnessed by a zooming increase in wedgies and towel snapping incidents. The inside scoop was that we were going to see some skin, some female skin, as in real headlights and real female mystery parts.

“OH! MY! GOD!” my inner voice screamed. “Seventh Grade is great!”

Haunting memories of black-and-blue arms, headlocks, bathroom shakedowns, and female rejection evaporated for the time being. It was as if Christmas had come again. I couldn’t get any sleep the night before the big class. I was simultaneously excited and scared. Actually, it was more like scared of getting excited.

When the day arrived. I was up by 5 a.m., pacing my room. I had had some early warning signs for a while now that certain parts of my body were no longer under my direct control. Although unsure of what might happen, I was convinced of one thing. I couldn't afford any more humiliation. The school year had humiliated me out. After much angst, I came up with a rather simple yet dramatic precaution. I squeezed into three pair of tight underpants. Brilliant. Steel couldn’t protrude through this wall of combed cotton. With a renewed confidence I was ready for anything thrown my way.

The walk to school that day with my buddies was particularly quiet. There wasn’t one mention of “the class”. I wondered if the other guys were as prepared as I was. It was hard to tell by the way they walked but I suspected Dan the Man was prepared. There was a peculiar bulge below his belt that wrapped evenly around his waist. I began to wonder if I was as obvious. Oh well, it was certainly the lesser of two possible embarrassments.

We had “Civics” right before “the class”. Coach Horey, our “Civics” teacher, droned on and on about God knows what. I didn’t own a watch. So I spied on the clock in the back of the room by using a mirror I had cleverly placed in my text book. My body coiled tighter with every tick of a completed minute, forty-six to be exact.

When the bell finally sounded, the boys shot out of the room, and sprinted down the pale, yellow lit, basement hallway to Mr. Brown’s class room. Heavyweights Elliott and Rugby led the way. The usual acrid stench of ammonia, mold and dried vomit that permanently emanated from the mopped, cement, hallway floor, was whisked away momentarily in the draft created by our wake. The girls remained in the “Civics” room, nervously giggling as they rearranged their seats before their special session.

I hurried to sit in the back of the room—an absolute must. Not only did I luck out with a back row seat but I was flanked by my pals Zoo and Dan the Man. Oh boy, this was going to be something. It didn’t take long for the tempo and volume of trash talking to pick up. It quickly grew into this piercing symphony of voices cackling in every octave.

Mr. Brown walked through the entrance pushing a film projector ahead of him. The buzz in the room faded quickly. Once cleared, he shut the door behind him. He never did that. Next, he pulled the curtain above the door window down. Holy mackerels, this was going to be better than I had ever imagined. We were going to see a film of female parts, as in moving pictures. WOW! I was so glad I had taken the proper precaution. I could really talk it up without fear of embarrassment or anything. Life at that moment was good and getting better.

“Today’s special class is about human growth and development,” he began. Some nervous snickers scattered around the room. I caught Dan the Man’s eye. We winked in cocky approval.

“I have a special film today that deals with some very important health issues but first I want to talk about the male and female body.”

“Oh God this is going to be great,” my mind raced.

And with that little introduction, Mr. Brown proceeded to place two charts on the blackboard. One had the word “MALE” in big, bold letters across the top and the other “FEMALE”. That was the only difference between the two charts. The outlines of the bodies were nondescript, like those lame silhouettes used to identify men’s and women’s restrooms. If there ever was a time for descript, this was it. There was a vague bump reference to the male genitalia and an even more vague reference to the female equivalent. Other than that, and a slight indication of breasts on the female, there was nothing else going on. They detailed fewer physical attributes than those chalk outlines police make of murder victims at a crime scene. Disappointment immediately swelled among the legions.

Mr. Brown began the lecture with his trusty, ever-present yardstick at his side.

“The man … blah, blah, blah … hairy chest … blah, blah, blah … more muscle mass … blah, blah, blah … penis … blah, blah, blah …” he spewed in a monotone voice, while pointing to the associated generic area on the male chart.

“This can’t be all,” my inner voice reasoned.

“The woman … blah, blah, blah … breasts … blah, blah, blah … clitoris … blah, blah, blah … vagina … blah, blah, blah … uterus … blah, blah, blah …” he rambled on, again pointing to the approximate position on the female chart.

My not so subconscious mind was scrambling, "Hmm, some new words there. I’ll look ‘em up later. Can we get to the movie already?”

He continued, “When a man and woman … blah, blah, blah … marriage … blah, blah, blah … children … blah, blah, blah … erection … inserts … blah, blah, blah … vagina … uterus … orgasm … blah, blah, blah … sperm … ovary … egg … pregnant … nine months … baby … blah, blah, blah.”

“WHAT? The man does what?” My mind was unable to translate. I tried in vain to playback Mr. Brown’s words. Possibly, I had misheard them. Then the horror struck me like a bolt of lightning.

“DAD? MOM? DAD! MOM! Oh God! I don’t think so! NO WAY!”

I looked around the room to see if maybe I had it all wrong. I couldn’t tell. It was an ocean of young, blank, oily faces. My three pair of underpants were starting to cut off the circulation to my legs. My armpits were dripping perspiration like a cracked garden hose. The little washed-out color I had from being in basement lock-down all year was completely drained from my face. Up until that moment, I thought holding hands and kissing were sex. This was way too much information. I didn't sign up for this. All I yearned for was a glimpse of the secrets that hid under female clothing. Was that asking too much?

I kept returning to the math. I have three brothers. Dad forced this atrocity upon mom four times. I was feeling sick to my stomach. I didn’t hear a thing Mr. Brown said next. I was stupefied.

The film was no help either. It turned out to be about all these god-awful diseases one was destined to contract if one, for some unexplainable reason, committed these bizarre acts before marriage. Yeah right, like someone would actually do that for enjoyment.

After the movie ended, Mr. Brown opened up the floor to questions. There was only one question asked. As usual, it was asked by Arthur, the most obnoxious and oblivious of the four class brains. He inquired about the association between masturbation and the sudden onset of blindness. It was a disastrous question like this one that gave me pause to reexamine why I felt bad about Arthur's hourly beatings. Besides, I already knew the answer to his question from hanging out at the park with the guys from Holy Name, the local Catholic grammar school. Arthur had better invest in a seeing-eye dog.

We were finally dismissed. I was in 3D: dumbfounded, disillusioned and disappointed. Worst of all, I was still in the dark about female anatomy. Instead of unveiling the mystery of something as important as that, I learned that some day I would have to do something really weird to an unseen female part with my part. It gave a whole new meaning to the word “partner”; after all, it was all becoming about parts. How could anyone expect me to perform something to something if I didn’t even know what that something looked like? Suppose I entered the wrong something? What then? And what about all the disgusting diseases? Holy crap! Was there no end to the madness!

Apparently, the girls got the same deal from the school nurse. It took weeks before I could look a girl in the eyes again—not that I was big with that anyway, but now I really couldn’t. I also sensed a revitalized female animosity directed at all boys. We went our separate ways for some time. Maybe in the end that was the school’s objective. If it was, it was quite effective.

I walked home from school that day by myself. I needed to be alone. It struck me that girls sure do have a lot going on down there, and that the more I learned the less I knew.

As for the revelation of dad’s indiscretions, I couldn’t talk to him for days, the dirty bastard. And regarding mom, my poor mom, I felt only sympathy. I decided to do extra chores around the house. It was my quiet way of acknowledging her unselfish sacrifice to the old man’s needs.

What I really needed was a good Mud Finnegan joke to set me straight. There'd be a summer full of them coming up shortly, thank God.

Sex Ed: Part 3 - Scoring a Playboy!

2009-07-29T15:15:00.000-04:00

When eighth grade started in the fall of 1965, drab colored with frail wings, we rose from the basement like cecropia moths from cocoons, attracted to the light of day, where the upperclassmen preyed. And much like a moth, our life expectancy was about two weeks. Fortunately, we had started double sessions while a much needed new high school was being built. The sessions gave us a little less exposure to the moth eaters.

By the time the first school buzzer sounded, I had added another half inch to my height, and two pounds of sinew to my growing 105 pound frame. I had also become a secret admirer of Inger Stevens who played a Scandinavian housekeeper in the TV show, “The Farmer’s Daughter”. Every Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m., I’d tune in to watch another inane episode that meant little more to me than that her beauty moved me, in the physical sense that is. Things moved. There was a direct connection. I think it is fair to say that Mr. Brown’s lecture was beginning to come home to roost. I was seeing things differently. I was maturing.

Assigned to the morning session of double sessions, it was 7:00 a.m. the first day of eighth grade. I was planted in my assigned homeroom seat next to Clark Shangle. In seventh grade Clark was not a real popular guy but his stock was rising quickly in the beginning of eighth grade. The reason was good enough. Clark had found the key to the Promised Land. That summer he had successfully hunted down his Dad’s stash of Playboy magazines. More importantly, he was so hungry for attention that he brought them into school. That made Clark the main dog, temporarily anyway.

Back then, every guy tried to hunt down his old man’s cache of girlie magazines. The reason we did this was simple, as are most things with young men. We are visual animals. It’s how we are wired. We have to have pictures. And, if one was lucky enough to discover some treasure, a guiding corollary generally applied. Keep it to one’s self. Sharing your good fortune with lesser men usually ended in disaster. It was a rather elegant truth. It was rare to find a guy who would risk it all. That made Clark one of those uncommon types. But kids do strange things for a chance at celebrity and fame. So was the reason for Clark’s ill-advised generosity. I didn’t care. All I knew was I was sitting right next to him every morning in homeroom. It was a beautiful thing.

With big plans brewing, I needed to do a little cultivating if they were to yield fruit. I spent most of September and the beginning of October nurturing my friendship with Clark. My ultimate goal was to borrow an issue over a weekend. It took the patience of a cat and slyness of a fox, but in the end, I got what I wanted. It was only going to cost me a buck, a reasonable fee considering what was at stake. I was able to scratch the coins together by trimming off the top of my Mischief Night fund.

We had arranged for the transaction to take place Friday, October 22nd during lunch. He had discreetly camouflaged the October edition with a homemade, brown paper-bag, book cover. On the front, he had cleverly written “Building Word Power Exercise Book”. Of course, all you had to do was look at the patented thick stapled seam to know that there were more than just words inside its covers.

The exchange went well, if you discount my shaking sweaty hands. I jammed the counterband into my book bag, making it feel oddly heavy in the grip of my slippery palm. It was as if I was carrying a time bomb around. I rushed off to history class, after a parting wink back to Clark in adolescent rebellion. Settled in my desk, feigning attention to a nameless kid as he rattled off an oral report on some obscure war, my inner voice started in on me.

“Go ahead. You know what you want to do. Give her a little open up and take a tiny gander. Come on. You know you want to. Do it. DO IT!”

The thought was particularly convincing. I couldn’t resist. A little look wouldn’t hurt anybody anyway. I took the first step by discreetly slipping the magazine behind my opened text book. Before caving in to my all-consuming desire to open its thick shiny pages and have a quick look-see, I painstakingly studied the room, and waited until I was positive the coast was clear.
The opportunity came. Without looking down, I quickly flipped it open, letting it take me wherever it wanted. Of course it opened like a rose to the very center, where the staples were creased, creating a natural bookmark where the centerfold lay.

I watched the class. My peripheral vision was never more broad and sharp. When it was finally safe to look down, I apprehensively did. It was a brief glance, very brief, briefer than brief. It was the briefest. But my receptors were at full power. I locked in on every vivid, colorful detail.
“Holy cow!” I quaked.

Her name ran up the left side, Allison Parker. She was Miss October. She was a very happy, tanned blond and she was buck naked right down to the top of her breasts, revealing exposed soft white flesh against dark bronze skin where her bikini had been removed. The folded double page covered the rest. I could only imagine what was waiting below.

ccrreeaakk!

What was that?!? In an involuntary overreaction, I slammed the text book shut, creating a little unwanted attention.

“Mr. Crane? Is everything okay?” Mrs. Singer suddenly asked.

“I’m okay. No problem. Everything’s okay. I’m right here.” I answered, alternating between alto and bass while making little sense. All heads were turned towards me. I wondered if they could see the sweat ball running down the side of my cheek. I picked up my pencil and pretended to take notes—a sure way to regain control. It worked. I had pulled it off. Class resumed. No one was the wiser. I was living on the proverbial teenage edge.

The rest of that Friday afternoon a war raged between personal values and hormonal hallucinations. On the one hand, I was consumed with uninvited guilt. On the other hand, I was riveted by what I imagined lay hidden underneath the folded sheen of the double page. The battle was pitched between the soul and the flesh, good and evil, right and wrong, “Boy’s Life” and “Playboy”. It wasn't going to be much of a contest.

I took no more chances at school as I fought off the sweet siren calls of a relentless inner voice. I eventually navigated my way safely home and was ready to try again in the privacy of my third floor bedroom, which was perched high above the maple trees and the riffraff that scurried below on Madison Street. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t going to be. My brothers barged unannounced into my room. Mom moved about the house in her finely choreographed Friday ballet. It was a dance that included cooking chili con carne, distributing folded laundry, and chasing combatants around the house, armed with a wooden spoon in one hand and hair brush in the other. There were too many close calls. I decided I’d have to wait it out until later, like bedtime later. So I hid the magazine in the safest place known to young teenage boys, between the mattress and box spring. Excited by my failsafe plan, I tried to relax and carry on as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

My normal late Friday afternoon activity was shooting hoops in the rear of the house. Like all the other neighborhood garages, it stood in the back corner of a postage stamp sized yard. Our narrow driveway, which ran right alongside the house, opened up to a double driveway for about twenty feet just as it cleared the back of the house, providing paved access to a two car garage. It was one of the few ‘doubles’ on the street. It made for the best backyard court around.
I stuck to the program and shot baskets imitating my favorite player at the time, Princeton’s Bill Bradley. I drove deep into the corner, uncoiling like a loaded spring to launch Dollar Bill’s patented jump shot from an impossible angle.

Swish!

“Yes!”

I was getting extra height that day. It felt good. For the moment I had all my feral urges under control. I was just practicing my jumper until dinner, after which I’d take an early shower, watch a little TV, fake a few yawns, retire to my lair, and start my lesson in female anatomy with instructor Allison Parker.

The moment of truth had finally arrived. All the planets were lined up. No more interruptions. Fed, showered, and rested, I reached underneath the mattress with my right arm to retrieve Allison. I reached a little further under the mattress. I reached up the mattress. I reached down the mattress. I reached under with both arms flailing. I looked under my pillow. I tossed the pillow and pulled the mattress off the bed. I looked under the bed. I looked under the circular area rug. I looked in my closet. She was nowhere to be found. Where had Allison gone?

Dread washed over me. Reality was sinking in. The magazine was gone. It had vanished. I sat on the floor perplexed, searching for answers. I kept landing on the same alarming outcome. I was going to die soon and I’d die a clueless kid.

I never did find out who took Clark’s magazine. My worst nightmare of a long painful death never materialized either. Although I suspected it was mom all along, I avoided confronting her from fear of the shame I’d feel if it had actually turned out to be her. In order to control the rippling implication of this scheme gone bad, I had to pay Clark off with five bucks. He calculated that was the price for his silence should he be tortured at some later date by his dad for information. Of course that never happened because his old man would have implicated himself in the process. After all, it was his secret stash to begin with. That in turn would require some real explaining to do to his wife, who, by the way, never struck me as the understanding type.

Nope, we all had our own motivation to keep quiet. The powder keg eventually diffused in a few weeks. Although my Mischief Night fund had been depleted to buy Clark’s silence and my longing for knowledge remained unsatisfied, I was still alive.

There’d be another day.

Sex Ed: Part 4 - French Playing Cards

2009-07-28T15:10:00.002-04:00

We were still in double sessions but now I had the afternoon shift, and it always started with something called “X Period”, which was a boys only twenty minute homeroom. I guess it was by design. I have a hunch that the “Adults with Children” somehow convinced the “Adults without Children” (who ran the insane asylum), that this was in everyone’s best interest. Anyway, I was assigned to sit in the back of the room. Right in front of me sat Cal. Cal was the only eighth grader I knew who drove his own car to school.

I was keeping a low profile, just trying to get some last minute math homework done, when Cal turned around and nodded his head at me. He got my attention. What else could I do? He was twice my size and ten times more hairy. He pushed something partially hidden by his large matted hand onto my desk and left it there. He signaled with his eyes to take a look. He turned around to continue whatever it was he did: chew wood, tattoo his arm, write poetry, whatever.

I sneaked a peek down. Based on the box, it appeared to be a deck of "Bicycle" brand playing cards. I checked on the teacher in charge of monitoring us. He was completely preoccupied with a crossword puzzle while he mauled an egg salad sandwich. I leaned back, pulled the box underneath the desk and into my lap. I searched around again for any suspicious onlookers.

None.

So I returned to the deck, flipped opened the top and pulled out the cards to have a gander. I thought big deal, a mere deck of cards, Cal must be bored, but if I want to grow up and have a family of my own someday, I must entertain his wishes.

There are times in one’s life, very rare moments, when words like “surprise”, “shock” or “astonishment” don’t quite capture the essence of the event. One second you are minding your own business. The next, you find yourself in the middle of something big, something spectacular, something outrageous. What was about to unfold falls into such a category.

It was a deck of cards all right, but they weren’t for playing. On the face side of each card was a black and white photo of a fully explicit sexual pose between an assortment of male/female combinations. As I leafed through the cards, the images were not registering at first. For instance, there were male body parts that scooted by completely unidentifiable because of their grotesque size as they reached skyward out of a jungle of thick underbrush. There were shots of impossible body juxtapositions and strange intertwined limbs. There were even some close-ups of what I thought might be tongues touching strange unidentifiable objects. I couldn’t be sure though. I just could not comprehend. I was incapable.

Slowly however, my brain began to connect the dots. It took some time, I’d say about twenty different cards, held in four different directions, before I could link the images to those of human kind. But once the identification was made, and I had a frame of reference, I raced through the remaining cards, while my heart pounded. I had become oblivious to the world that swirled around me. As my hands nervously fumbled through the deck, my eyes bulged wider and wider with each new picture. It was as if I had been suddenly kidnapped by aliens. I didn’t know what world I had entered.

Cal turned his head around with this strange smirk plastered across his face. He winked as he asked, “Whadda ya think?”

I don’t really know what I must have looked like to him but I know my eyes were desperate with shock. I just blankly stared back at him. I also believe that a bit of foam may have accrued around the corners of my mouth. I couldn’t muster a response that was intelligible. I was attempting to say, “not too bad”, but my mouth was full of saliva. I couldn’t control my tongue. I made a gurgling noise instead.

“Nargahh ta bah,” I answered.

I fumbled to get the cards back in the box but moisture from my wet palms must have soaked a couple, making them difficult to slide together. Eventually, I was able to maneuver them back into the box. The traces of black ink smudged on my thumbs were the only proof remaining of the bizarre world I had just visited. I slowly pushed the deck back to Cal. My fingers were involuntarily twitching. He scooped the box up and muttered, “Pretty cool heh? Pretty damn cool.”

He paused a moment.

“France! They’re from France. Yeah, they're French.”

He turned back to his desk.

BEHHEHH! BEHHEHH! BEHHEHH!

The buzzer for “X Period” blasted.

The alien spaceship dumped me back in my chair as suddenly and coldly as it had picked me up. I felt like a rejected specimen. I scrambled to collect myself when my worse nightmare struck in full revelry. I couldn’t leave the desk. Things had moved. The pictures had turned sawdust into iron without any one telling me. I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. I could’ve used a Snickers bar.

My friend Jimmy waltzed by, “Hey Crane com’on. Whadda waiting for?”

“I’ll catch up. Just need to write something down before I forget.”

“Will it take long? I can wait if you don’t take long.”

“No. Go ahead. I’ll catch up. Go ahead.”

"Okay.”

The classroom had emptied. It was only me and Cactus Jack, the sandwich gobbling, crossword teacher.

“Mr. Crane? Gotta problem?”

“No. No Problem. Just writing some notes. No problem with notes. No. No problem.” I don’t think I fooled him. There was plenty wrong.

The gig was up unfortunately. I had run out of time. I needed to get up and go. So I grabbed my books and pads, tucked them under my left arm, squeezed my free right hand deep into my front pants pocket, and did the best I could do. I forced myself to straighten up even though I was really doubled over in agony. I shuffled out of the room and made my way down the corridor.

I survived, as we all did somehow.

I left school that day in a drunken stupor of swirling gray images. I will never, ever forget the very first card that registered. In a split second, I went from knowing nothing to knowing it all. Well actually, as it turned out, I still knew very little but it seemed like everything at the time.
With my memory banks now loaded with mental pictures, I was much more equipped to sift through and make sense out of the endless sexual references and innuendo that dotted the language landscape of a fourteen year old male.

I was still missing a big piece though. Who were these people who did these gross things to each other and why? The faces I recalled from the French deck of cards all seemed grimaced with pain, every single one of them. It didn’t appear that anyone was having fun. Certainly, my parents were not doing this stuff. In fact, not any parent I could think of was carrying on like those French people. It was bad enough that parents did what they did just to have kids. I couldn’t imagine they’d do this just for the hell of it. I figured maybe it was just a French thing and left it at that.

Sex Ed: Part 5 - Finally, the Big Talk!

2009-07-27T15:05:00.000-04:00

I was at last beginning to feel like I was in the know.

Yup, I had an idea of what things looked like. I had some idea of the sequence of events. I even understood that it might all feel good. Indeed, I was in the know.

Well we all know what the truth was. I was in the ‘no’, as in not know. Sure I could hold my own during a Friday night get-together with the guys, but I was really not ready. Something was still missing. Maybe what was missing, what might pull it all together for me, was the dreaded American family tradition: sit-down-in-the-living-room-with-the-folks-to-talk-about-sex ritual.

Sometime later in the spring of my freshman year in high school, the dreaded took place. Much like Cal’s deck of cards, it snuck up on me, when my guard was down. Even the warning shot was subtle.

"Bobby, after the boys go to bed, your father and I want to talk to you about something very important,” mom volunteered matter-of-factly, as I dried the dishes.

She was good at being matter-of-factly, but this was different. “… your father” was not a phrase casually heard around the house. If we heard it, it was always preceded by “wait until”, as in “wait until your father comes home”. I hadn’t done anything even remotely wrong lately. My third semester grades were solid. I wasn’t in trouble. I don’t think they saw me hide a sliver of extra steak under my mashed potatoes. No, this was different. Something ominous was in the air.

Clueless but cautious, I replied, “Sounds good.”

I pondered some more. In my best play-it-cool impression I added, “Anything wrong? Something I should know about?” Unlike the old lady though, my voice cracked under the gun, giving away the little game I was up to.

“Nothing’s wrong. We just think it is time to talk to you about something. That’s all.”
My brain instantly began doing what I can only describe as a rudimentary form of a Google-like search against “it is time to talk”. After some tedious searching through my cranial indexing method, bam! Pay dirt! A match!

“So my mom says to me, ‘it is time to talk to you about sex’,” Rye Bread reported at the park table one evening as the reason why he was so late to swing jumping.

I ran the search again to be sure. I came up with the same result. I was finished, done for, doomed. It was going to be about sex. Mom lived for moments like this. She wanted her boys to know the facts so we’d grow up being knowledgeable, caring husbands. She didn’t beat around the bush either. Her style was direct and to the point. This was going to be really brutal.

The old man on the other hand would rather have been left out of the whole matter. This was not his bag. Shooting hoops. Splitting tops. Making a yo-yo sleep. Hitting fly balls. Those were the things he did best—things that didn’t require conversation or discussion or chatting. Dad was not big with the chatting and I was more than okay with that.

Apparently though, mom had made up her mind that it was important that dad be present, just in case I had a specific, male-only question. She was out of her mind. I think raising four boys whose ages spanned a paltry six years will do that to any normal human being. She was no exception.

Sadly, because she had turned insane, I was going to have to endure the big talk—the sit down session of all sessions. For a brief moment I thought of breaking a limb to buy a few months. Alas, I was trapped. I was also certain that I’d have to ask one question just to show interest and get her off my back for fear of follow-up talks. What could I possibly ask? Dishes dried, I schlepped out of the kitchen to retreat to my third floor room to give this quandary serious consideration.

As I walked through the living room, dad was sitting in his favorite spot, staring blankly at the sports page, while the TV weatherman prattled on about a low in the Ohio Valley.

“How them Dodgers looking this year, Pops?” It was my standard spring sports question. I just wanted to make contact somehow to assess his response. Maybe my primitive Google memory search was faulty.

“Yeah, whatever,” he mumbled from behind his paper curtain.

Normally, he’d go on about the pitching of Koufax and Drysdale. I’d then counter with the hitting of Mays and McCovey from the Giants, and we’d have at it. But he didn’t even invite the argument. He was obviously preoccupied. It was a dead giveaway. There I was, stressing out over coming up with one knucklehead sex question to ask. Meanwhile, dad was sweating bullets over having to answer it.

Suddenly, without warning, it spilled out of me like a backed up toilet.

“Guess were gonna talk about something later, huh dad?”

Dead silence from behind the Newark Star Ledger. I continued on my way. Then, he mumbled.
“Yeah, it’s your mother’s idea.”

Oh, no! Not, the ‘it’s your mother’s idea’ answer. I suddenly had one of those mysterious shivers through my entire body. Someone must have stepped on my grave. My shoulders slumped as I ascended the stairs.

Now, if dad and I had it in us, we could’ve tossed around this “your mother’s idea” a little. Maybe we even could’ve worked out some innocuous dialogue—create a little win-win scenario. But no! We were the doomed, stupid, silent types. The deal was sealed. I was going to get the “sex talk” for sure. I entered my attic sanctuary, shut the door behind me, lit some sandalwood incense and pondered the possibilities.

Time passed slowly and harshly. Eventually, a knock at the door and I was escorted down the stairs to the chair. The only thing missing was Revenend Anderson following behind me softly reciting the 23rd psalm.

Dad sat in his favorite part of the couch. He looked defeated, war torn. Mom took her place next to him with her hand placed reassuringly on his leg. It was a sure sign he was under her control, that they were unified. There was going to be no “divide and conquer” that night.

I was invited to sit in dad’s arm chair, which mom had pulled in from the head of the dining room table. It sat lonely and isolated in the middle of the living room. To be honest, it was weird, way weird! I felt like I was being brought in for interrogation. To top it off, I was sure I could hear the faint asthmatic breathing of my brother Doug coming from the upstairs landing, just out of sight.

“So did I tell ya what happened to Otter today at lunch?” I tried to throw a curve ball, buy some time, and possibly subvert the whole discussion.

Dad didn’t disappoint. He fell for it instantly, “No what hap—”

“Your father and I think it is time to have a talk with you about sex.”

Dad sank back into the couch. I began to sweat and needed to pee.

“We want to answer any questions you have. Do you have any? That is, any about sex?” she inquired.

The ball was clearly in my court. I anticipated this. I had come up with a bland, generic question but my mind went blank under the scrutiny of mom’s probing eyes. She had a way of doing that to me.

“Um … um … um—“ I was wracking my brain, searching. What was that question I had? Nothing was coming to mind, nothing except some muted images from the French cards. Whoa, what a time for those to show up. I had to do something. I took a thoughtful pause. Nothing.

“Actually, no I don’t.” I heard the faint sound of snickering coming from the shadows upstairs.

Dad relaxed briefly. “Great! I guess—”

“So then you know that when a married couple decides to have a baby, they engage in sex during which the man has an erection and inserts his penis in the woman’s vagina.” she was brutal.

I looked at her like a deer in headlights. What was she? Nuts? I couldn’t believe she had the chutzpah to say that. I was trapped like a guilty witness under cross examination by Perry Mason. Dad looked at me sympathetically. He was bailing out, leaving me on my own in that solitary chair in the middle of the room.

“Yeah, I know,” I replied, exposed. But suddenly, out of nowhere, a burst of formidable savvy. I continued on. “Yeah, we learned all about that stuff in Health, in seventh grade. Yeah, it was pretty interesting. Yup, there were charts and even a movie if I recall. Real informative. Mr. Brown did a nice job explaining what you just said and all. Think I even got an ‘A’ on the test.”

It was as slick a piece of weaseling as ever there was, but would it work? Did I play it too strong at the end? I waited for a response.

“Oh really? That was two years ago. I don't recall any ‘A’ on any test on human sexuality. Why didn’t you say something to us then?” she asked.

She was calling me on it. I was sunk if I didn't do something real fast. Sensing defeat, I pulled out the wild card.

“Oh gee ma, com’on. What was I gonna say? Dad, help me here.” I pleaded for his rescue. He couldn’t hide anymore. I dragged him unwillingly into the fray. It was my only hope to end this torture.

He surprised me. Dad leaned forward, put his hand on her hand and looked her square in the eyes.

“He’s right. Do you really think he’d say something or bring home a test on that? I mean look at him.”

It was supportive, yet demeaning, all at the same time. I didn’t care. If it stopped the madness, I was fine with it. There was a long moment of silence.

Mom continued, "Well that is good. No questions. I just wish you felt like you could talk to us about this kind of subject. Anyway, here is a book explaining how babies are conceived. Read it. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask us. We want to open the lines of communication. Okay?”

“Lines of communication” What was that babble? It dawned on me that she got this whole, hair-brain idea from one of her magazines. Probably it was that “Redbook”, that piece of drivel.

“Sure thing ma,” I quickly responded, sensing this ordeal was coming to a swift close.

And it did.

That was it. It was over. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the silhouette on the landing disappear. Mom got up and handed me this book called, “Growing Up”. It was okay. No real sweet pictures though. Just a lot of charts about nine months.

She retreated into the kitchen. I got up and dragged the chair back into the dining room and proceeded up the stairs to bed.

“Good night dad,” I moaned.

“I’m thinking Koufax is going to win twenty five games this year. It’s all ours,” he replied.

He was back in the saddle.

“Not if Mays has anything to do with it.”

He smiled, “We’ll see. Good night. Oh yeah, and keep those lines of communication open buddy.” then he winked, the same wink he had given his friends a hundred times. My first dad wink. Things were looking pretty good.

We had connected.

“Sure thing dad! Sure thing.”

My formal sex education was complete. I think it was sealed when mom very clinically spelled it all out in that one sentence. It was almost as if she had to get three words out on the table, “penis, erection and vagina” or it wouldn’t have been official. Her job was done.

My younger brothers never had to suffer through this. I am sure that my little ad lib about seventh grade health class was my single most oldest brother contribution—a stroke of genius quite honestly. Come to think of it, if that was in fact true, they owe me big time. Probably more true was that by the time they were out of eighth grade, they could have taught my parents a thing or two.

Well, another truth was that my formal sex training was now behind me, but the real tests were waiting in the field.

And they would wait for quite a while.

From the Carteret Park Boys Chronicles - The Nip Incident

2009-04-21T15:35:00.005-04:00

There is something about young teen boys getting together that should be the perpetual concern of all others. It’s not necessarily about what kind of trouble a group of stunted brained kids will get into. It is more about what is on their minds and how they share those thoughts with each other.

And if you give them more than five minutes, female anatomy, I’m sorry to say, is going to come up—even for those who might have a suppressed gay gene floating around. Also, there isn’t a better time to find a bigger group of nitwits carrying on like a bunch of self proclaimed experts about something they know nothing about—sort of like Kevin Trudeau and his Natural Cures infomercials. Never! Ever!

Such was the way it went one insufferable summer day at the Carteret Park, where we collected like hyenas before the hunt …

♦♦♦♦

It was early on a sunny summer afternoon at our local playground, Carteret Park. Just another warm one during a particularly rainless 1965 summer season. Fitzy and I were the first to show up and had already taken up our positions at the park benches, waiting for the recreation director and his daughter-assistant to return from lunch and open up the field house. We sat patiently as our buddies drifted in one by one. It was a gathering storm of “pre” and “early” male teenagers, always something quite ominous.

Rye Bread was approaching the tables, munching on a plum. He was always mauling some kind of exotic fruit after lunch.

“Whatcha have for lunch, Rye?” Fitzy asked without looking up, as he carved the finishing touches to his initials.

Rye Bread hopped up on the park bench, sat on the table top, resting his feet on the bench seat, while he scraped off every bit of fiber from the pulpy pit that he had shoved into his mouth.

“Usual. Grilled cheese.”

Rye Bread slurped as an unexpected thick river of drool leaked out of the corner of his mouth, landing on the top corner of the “F” in Fitzy’s initials. The muddy purple dribble started to fill the wooden canals that Fitzy had just toiled over with his mighty Boy Scout knife. I instinctively began to laugh, as Rye Bread wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve.

“Hey!” Fitzy complained. “You’re staining the ‘F’ you idiot!”

“Sorry Fitz.” But as Rye Bread spoke, another gem spilled onto the table.

“Geez Louise! What the hell is wrong with me?”

With a quick swipe of his hand, Rye Bread slapped the puddle off the table top and onto the bench. He turned his head towards a neighboring oak tree and spit the bare pit at it.

WHOO PHLEGGGG!

He hit the tree trunk dead on. The pit ricocheted back and bounced under the table.

“Bulls Eye!” Rye Bread yelled as he cleaned his mouth once more with his sleeve.

Fitzy meanwhile retrieved a used napkin from the trash can, a three day old remnant from pizza day most likely, and dabbed at the ‘F’ to clean out the slop inadvertently dropped by Rye Bread moments ago. I continued to laugh, which was beginning to annoy Fitzy.

“Hey Bosk, it’s not funny. How about if I were to spit a looger on your initials you jerk brain?”

“I’m just laughing at Rye Bread that’s all. Not you.”

“Hey that period is too big.” Rye pointed to the period next to the ‘F’.

Fitzy studied it. Rye Bread was right. Fitzy started to enlarge the period after his first initial to even it out. Meanwhile, my attention was drawn to Moon Muller who was approaching from the southern park entrance about fifty yards away.

“Hey here comes Mooner,” I announced.

Rye Bread looked over at the asphalt path that started at the south Carteret Street entrance. It snaked between the old and new basketball courts, meandering past the Barrows Field memorial rock and flag pole, and ended at the north entrance, where the Lorraine and Madison Street boys entered the park.

“Look at him,” Rye Bread said, indicating a little envy. “He thinks that madras surfer hat is the coolest thing. I bet he sleeps in it.”

We were all wearing surfer hats those days. To be blunt, they were dumb, as evidenced by the lack of any revival they should have had during the forty years of teen fashion hence. They were made of six or eight 6” triangular soft cotton panels that ran from the top of the hat lengthwise to a 2” floppy brim that circled the whole mess—each panel had a different color or print. The hats just sat kind of lifeless on the skull. The more shocking the color and pattern combination, the more cool the hat was considered. I think the hats were about the only thing more disturbing than the shirts we lived in. Surfer shirts were T-shirts with really wide horizontal stripes that had alternating colors like: orange and blue, or yellow and green, or red and black. We pulled the whole ensemble together with surfer beads and a surfer belt. This hat of Moon’s though, with the different madras patterns, was testing even our most primitive fashion senses. It was quite a look.

The truth is that we were all sleeping with our hats on. Another truth is that none of us surfed, except Kedso, who claimed he surfed at his lake—he had issues.

Hat aside, Moon was a bit different from the rest of us in one other curious way. He thought of himself as a downtown boy, kind of the Eminem of his day. He loved his Motown songs and was always singing something by the Four Tops or Temptations as he danced, while holding his heart, or shaking his flapping hand, or pointing his fingers at his eyes. Between the surfer look and black-speak, he was a breathing, cultural deformity, but fun to hang out with. And here he came, snapping his fingers, his face contorted as he sang.
“Baby, I need your lovin’. Got to have all your lovin’ …”

“What are you singin’ now?” I asked as he approached the tables.

“Four Tops man! Doncha know anything baby!” Moon slid over onto the bench and watched Fitzy. “Oh man, what happened to the ‘F’? A bird drop a little mulberry load on it?”

“Rye Bread drooled on it.” Fitzy snapped, as he continued to work on making the periods match.

“Shoowee! That’s not cool!”

“Well look who’s early?” Rye Bread yelled.

The Cooch had just arrived on his banana seat two wheeler, making a sweet flapping noise as the wheel spokes smacked the baseball cards held precisely in place along the rear wheel bar by two spring loaded cloths-pins. The Cooch was a mop-headed flagpole with a big attitude and a raspy, squawky voice that just didn’t fit his scrawny body. He backed away from his fine machine in admiration, pulled out his surfer hat, folded neatly in his back pocket, put it over his head, and turned to walk up to the benches. He always had a bop to his step.

Moon greets him first. “It’s the Coocher.”

“Hey!”

“Hey Cooch,” I followed.

“Hey Bobby.” He was one of the few kids who called me “Bobby” without it sounding stupid.

He walked around the table and leaned over the busy Fitzy.

“Hey what happened to the ‘F’?”

“Nothin’! All right nothing!”

“Well somethin’ happened to it. It looks like a bird dumped some purple diarrhea on it.” (There was a theme developing.)

Laughs broke out from Rye Bread and me, while Moon shook his head.

“It’s drool man. The Rye Man laid a little plummitation on it!”

Cooch walked around the bench to sit down.

“Oh man that's nasty—plum drool,” Cooch mumbled.

“I’m cutting it out! All right retardo!” Fitzy was starting to get a little short tempered, That could spell disaster for the first kid inadvertently putting him over the edge.

All of a sudden the Cooch reached down under his pants, his face squished with concern.

“What the hell is that?” He stood up patting his butt. “One of you jerk-offs spill something? It’s wet!”

“Hey look! Cooch had a wet fart!” Rye Bread claimed. We immediately broke into this chorus of spasmodic laughter. There were certain gratuitous words that just did that to empty headed guys—"fart" being one of them. And if you added "wet" to it, well then, you pretty much had pulled a rabbit out of your hat.

"Get outta here ass wipe! I sat in something!" Cooch cackled in useless defense.

"Ass wipe? You're the one who needs an ass wipe!" Rye Bread quickly countered. The laughter was moving into the uncontrolled type.

In the seedy world of adolescent male behavior, this was a no win situation for the normally subdued Cooch. It was the type of thing that would have driven lesser kids home for the day. To his credit, he stayed and took it.

“It smells like plums man,” Moon said. “Been eatin' plums Coochie?"

"Is that plum juice spit? Did I sit in spit?" Cooch was desperate to know so he could put an end to the "wet fart" claim.

"Nah, it's just some plum drool. What’s the big deal?” Rye Bread revealed.

“The big deal? The big deal?” Cooch was upset. "The big deal is that it could've been spit. Is my butt stained?”

“Looks like you sat in some purple crap, Coocher,” Moon said, while he practiced a Temptation spin move.

“What? God dammit! Son of a bitch Russell! You’re lucky it's just drool and not spit or you'd be hurtin' for certain, when I got done with ya.”

It was an interesting distinction between spit and drool the Cooch was making. One that was wisely intentional. Just as interesting, Cooch had no choice but to peacefully accept his misfortune. Rye Bread could snap him in two, if he chose to. It was a well played hand by Cooch to use the distinction as the only reason Rye Bread's life was spared. Such was the chess game that often meant the difference between a little red face or a big black eye.
“Here’s a napkin Cooch,” Fitzy barked. “Just use it and quit your complainin’. It doesn’t look so bad anyway.” Fitzy handed him the napkin he used minutes ago to clean his initials.

Cooch wiped his butt and threw the napkin into the grass, as he shook his moppy head in disgust.

“Well, anyway, I hunchie the Nok Hockey!” Cooch announced.

The “hunchie” was a simple but effective reservation system. When you “hunchied” something, it was yours as soon as whatever it was, became available. But you had to be there during the time it was unavailable to make the “hunchie’ stick. This way you could guard the “hunchie” from being trumped by a later “hunchie’. For example, when you arrived at the park after lunch break, you could “hunchie” the Nok Hockey table for the afternoon (as the Cooch was doing in this case). You could try to “hunchie” it for the afternoon before going home for lunch, but you might just as well have spit into wind—the "hunchie" wasn’t going to far.

“I hunchie second!” Moon shouted, trying to guarantee he played Cooch in the first game.

“Dibs here!” Fitzy screamed simultaneously to Moon’s claim—“dibs” being a rather loose synonym for “hunchie” but just as effective.

The concurrent claims created a situation.

“All right. I'll shoot ya for it. I’ve got odds,” Moon announced. ‘Shooting for it’ was the preferred and civil way to break a tie. It beat fighting by a long shot.

“Fine I got evens.” Fitzy responded. It didn’t matter what Fitzy chose, he was equally adept at “odds” or “evens”, when it came to “shooting for it”.

Moon leaned across the table to face Fitz. Their eyes locked on each other.

“Two outta Three!” Moon was following the normal protocol for this kind of decision.

“Okay loser!” Fitzy was always a bit cocky when it came to this test of cunning. He seldom lost.

Since Moon called for the "shoot", he got to call out the countdown, giving him a slight advantage. Something he would need if he was ever to have a chance of beating Fitzy.

“Once, twice, three—shoot!”

Having studied Fitzy’s hand during the count, Moon noticed Fitz was showing two fingers poised for release. Moon shot one finger out, anticipating Fitzy’s two fingers, thus giving him a count of three—an odd number and hence a win. But at the very last second, Fitzy released only his index finger. It was the patented Fitz fake.

“Even!” Fitzy bellowed. “One, nothing!”

Moon took a moment to lift his surfer hat up and wipe his brow. He pulled the hat back down so the brim hid his eyes from Fitzy. He started the second count.

“Once, twice, three—shoot!”

This time he had picked up that Fitzy had only one finger teasingly poised. Moon figured that Fitzy wanted him to think he would throw two but really throw one, employing the old double fake. So Moon shot out two fingers hoping to catch a single from Fitzy and get an odd count to tie the score.

Fitzy shot out two fingers. It was another shut-out.

“Even again. I win.” Fitzy said matter-of-factly, really annoying the usually subdued Moon.

“Damn boy! How do ya do that?”

“How do I do what?”

“How do ya always fake me out like that?”

“Cause you’re stupider than tar.”

“Yeah, whatever. Man, I have first winners then.” Moon declared.

“Seconds!” I yelled.

“Thirds!” Rye Bread chirped.

While the negotiations for playing Nok Hockey were in progress, Brain and Boner joined us.

Boner and Brain addressed the tables in unison.

“Hey!”

“Yo my brothers!” Moon replied.

“Hey,” sprinkled from the rest of us.

“So where is Louie?” Cooch asked impatiently—‘Louie’ being the disrespectful name of our summer recreation park director. “Com'on Fatso! We don't have all day!” he added gratuitously.

Mr. Louis Fortunato was a large, roly-poly, sweaty man who always wore this bright red bandana around his neck. Many of us thought he was simply on the "take", and that his real job was being a body guard for Tony Imperiale, a rather infamous state congressman from Newark. There had been some riveting debates at the park tables about this allegation.

More importantly though, he had a twenty year old assistant, his daughter Jeannie, who was the object of our collective, adolescent desire. On that there was no debate. She had beautiful, long, thick, auburn hair that smelled real clean, like freshly washed hands. She also maintained a fantastic body that looked even “fantasticker” in the short cut-off dungaree shorts she paraded around in. Her exposed long limbs always seemed to glisten in the sun as the rays played gently against her perfectly moistened skin. Her eyes were dark and enchanting. She was the complete package. And she was the cause of a lot of speculation, rumor and bravado by this motley group of stinky, drooling boys. I also think she was the endless worry of her overly protective dad.

“Forget Fat Louie,” Boner announced. “I want to do some arts and crafts with Jeannie.”

Hearing her name was a queue for us to break out in a chorus of our favorite ditty.

“I dream of Jeannie with the dark brown hair,” we sang in unison.
So there we were, singing about Jeannie, talking trash, and carrying on like a bunch of drunken sailors, when out of nowhere the Brain made a bold disclosure.

“Hey, I saw one of her nips yesterday!”

That was all it took. That was all it ever took for us to switch gears. The Brain had just shot the starting gun. We were off to the carnal races.

“Oh, yeah! Like you would know what one looked like?” Boner challenged—so much for the support of a best friend. Boner was like that. He challenged every claim. It was his duty and he took it to heart.

Brain quickly demonstrated the poor judgment he was known for. “I know what they look like. I saw my mom’s once.”

“Ooo-wee! That’s not good Brain,” Moon chimed in.

“That’s queer!” Rye Bread added.

“Oh yeah, what did it look like?” Boner asked, hounding Brain like a trial lawyer, pressing him into a sudden ‘guilty’ proclamation.

“It kinda looked like Fitz’s, if you gave him a purple nurple.”

“Hey Fitz, show us your nips!” Rye Bread teased.

“No you faggot!”

“Oh let me touch your nips Fitzy!” Rye Bread feigned.

“Get outta here douche bag!”

“Yeah, well how did ya see Jeannie’s nip Brain?” Cooch chimed in.

“Well ya see, we were making potholders—“

“You are such a queer!” Fitzy interrupted.

“I am not!”

“Ya are too!”

“Am not!”

“Am too!”

“Not!”

“Too!”

The exchange met its natural conclusion in a tie. Brain and Fitzy dropped the verbal jousting. Brain picked up where he left off.

“Anyway, Jeannie dropped something and leaned down to pick it up and I could see down her shirt.”

“Wow! You saw down her shirt?” I asked incredulously, always wondering about female mystery parts.

“Yeah, I looked down her shirt! What do ya think?”

“So what? You looked down her shirt ya dickhead.” Cooch yelled. “She wears a bra idiot.”

“Yeah, but it kind of puffed out at the top, and there she was, saying hello brain.”

“There what was?” I asked pathetically.

“There was her nip ya turd brain!”

“And—?”

“And what?”

“And what did it look like?” I was desperate to hear details.

“I already told ya. It looked like Fitzy’s but more pointed outward.”

The image rattled around my head for a while. It was not a pleasant one. And one, I might add, that was beginning to taint the girl of my dreams.

“Ah, ya didn’t see nothin’!” Moon claimed.

“I don’t know about you”, Fitzy mumbled. “But I’m kinda getting’ a little boner just thinkin’ about it.”

“Yeah, me too.” Boner announced. No shocking revelation there, after all he was nicknamed Boner for a reason.

"You guys are douches. I don't wanna hear about you gettin' boners!" Rye Bread complained.

"Yeah, we'll at least we get 'em! Fag face!" Fitzy snapped back.

Oh man. Such was the certain and simple logic of testosterone when left unchecked. And if one could get past the name calling and moronic points being made, it had a sing-song charm to it.

Fortunately, before headlocks and full nelsons were applied, the old Ford wagon pulled up to the curb, sputtering and choking as the engine refused to shut off long after the keys were removed. Leaving a blue smoky plume of pungent carbon monoxide in his wake, Mr. Fortunato had arrived. He lumbered out the driver’s side, tilting the shock worn wagon to its proverbial knees. And from the passenger door, in stunning contrast, like a contradiction in the physical laws of heredity and evolution, the beautiful but now less-than-perfect Jeannie hopped out.

I have wondered from time to time what it must have felt like to her as she walked up to the tables. I mean, there we were, all filled with saliva and "x's and y's", blankly staring at her with an assortment of devilish smiles plastered across our faces, looking pretty formidable in our collection of surfer hats and broad striped shirts. As she approached us, Mr. Fortunato opened the field house where all the games were safely locked away. Fitzy and Cooch followed him in to sign out the Nok Hockey board. Fitzy had to burrow his hands into his front pockets to run a little camouflage. The rest of us waited for a whiff of Jeannie’s shampoo.

“Hi boys! Have a good lunch?” she asked in that sweet breathy voice.

“Yeah.”

“Yup.”

“Uh ha.”

“Um hum.”

That was the best we could muster. Our steel-like maleness that just moments ago had us on the edge of pubescent heights was reduced instantly into pathetic blobs of soggy milquetoast. Meanwhile, deep inside the oft inquisitive recesses of our adolescent minds, we all pondered the alleged Brain “nip” sighting, as we tried desperately to keep our eyes from wandering into the “zone” in question. Some of us in vain.

We were all spellbound and moronic.

TTHHWWAACCKK!

The Nok Hockey board slammed onto the table, breaking the tension momentarily.

“All right!” Rye Bread shouted. “Let’s get this thing going!”

“Yeah!” Moon blurted. “A little Nok Hockey guys! Let’s do it!”

“Yeah! I’m after Moon!” I yelled.

“Then me!” Rye Bread proclaimed.

“Okay boys, I’m going inside the field house. It’s too hot out here. I’ll be listening. So keep the language clean!” The sound of her voice melted me instantly. The Brain blemish was a fading memory. She was perfect again.

But as she turned to leave, she spotted the discarded napkin the Cooch had tossed after cleaning his shorts. It had found its way underneath the corner of the bench seat, opposite where we were all sitting.

What happened next was debated endlessly for the remainder of that summer and into the next.

She leaned over to pick up the discarded napkin, revealing the zone for our eyes to zero in on. I couldn't control them. My eyes darted in and out, in and out, in and out. I was barely able to hide my indiscretion. The others were more obvious. The Cooch looked like his head was going to explode. And as quickly as the door of opportunity had opened, it had slammed shut. She stood up, seemingly unaware of our intrusion, although later I would find cause to doubt her innocence.

Unfortunately, Mr. Fortunato, standing behind us in silence, witnessed our little inquisitiveness.

Suddenly, he cleared his fatty throat.

“Ahem! Ahem!”

Startled, we snapped our heads to look at him. We were caught dead to rights! We knew it! He knew it!

“You boys gonna play some Nok Hockey or aren’t ya?” he bellowed, his chins bouncing in perfect cadence to his words. But his eyes were black slits, striking fear into every fiber of our being. He'd kill us for sure if he thought there was a chance he could get away with it.

There was prolonged silence while we were trapped in his icy gaze.

“Jeannie, I need to have a word with you,” he gruffed. They walked back into the field house.

The awkward stillness lingered in the thick humid air for some time, while each of us—head down, eyes to the ground—tried in our own inadequate way to sort out what had just occurred. None of us were really up to the task.

Finally, I looked over at Brain. He had this huge grin pasted across his face. By all accounts, he looked vindicated.

“Believe me now, Boner?” he whispered.

“You’re nuts!” Boner never gave in. “It was covered!”

“I think I saw somethin’ too Brain!” Fitzy claimed.

Rye Bread's face was the same color as his orange hair.

As for me, I couldn't tell if I had seen something or not. I mean there was something going on there but it sure wasn’t like Fitzy's but more pointed.

“You’re all nuts! Com'on let’s start this stupid game. I’m first!” Cooch said as he grabbed his favorite Nok Hockey stick.

He placed the wooden puck down in the center of the table, aimed and slapped at it. It smacked the side panel just above the faded blue line and caromed into the hole for a goal.

“One, nothing!” Cooch announced.

And the game began, pouring cold water on our overloaded imaginations. Just another afternoon at Carteret Park, as we all became a little more dumb and a little more smart.

From Blog to Blook through CreateSpace

2009-04-15T17:02:00.001-04:00

So you want to publish a book. Do you have a blog? Have you had your blog for some time? Have you been writing posts like there's no tomorrow (or day after anyway)? Then why not write a blook?

And what is a blook you ask? A blook is a blog that has been turned into a book. Pure and simple. And why not? They turn diaries into books, don't they? They turn journals into books. Some are even quite successful.

Then why not a blog?

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The material is all there. You even have feedback from readers already. It's a natural. And that is what I did! I turned my humor blog, Cranelegs Pond, into "Cranelegs Pond the blook". And I did it quite quickly, quite cheaply, and with fantastic results.

You can too!

It's easy thanks to a most odd bedfellow, Amazon. They have a subsidiary, CreateSpace, that is, as far as I can tell, the best self publishing offering around. If you are okay with a quality, standard paperback (they offer a few other options as well), you might want to give them a look. They take the cost out of vanity. Don't get me wrong. They don't take the vanity out of vanity, just the cost. If you are a diligent, detail oriented sort, this could be your answer to that first self published book, and I guarantee you, it won't break the bank.

My story may be able to give you a good idea of what is involved.

After several years of blogging and at the same time having a boatload of rejection letters from agents and publishers for a collection of short stories I was pushing, I decided it was time to do something completely different. So I selected 150 of the best posts from my blog, organized them in a way that tells a little story, and started looking for an inexpensive but professional self publishing solution.

With the help of fellow blogger/writer, Pam Beers, who took an early interest in my humor writing, we plowed through dozens of options. My qualifications were simple: 1) it had to be cheap, and 2) the cover had to be good. The former is easy to understand but the latter needs some discussion. I believe strongly in the new adage, you will judge a blook by its cover. So the cover had to look like the real deal. And I didn't want to have to work with a "creative staff" to design one for additional costs. I wanted a free, easy-to-customize selection of templates to work with. I tried a few self publishing solutions that after an hour or two of file moves and layout issues, always fell short when I got to the cover.

Not CreateSpace.

I found a front and back cover template that closely matched what I was looking for in terms of form and appearance. I was able to change the colors, fonts, titles, and back cover text easily. And better yet, I was able to upload the pictures I wanted, albeit I had to play around with a free trial of Adobe Photoshop to get them to the minimum 300 dpi.

But at the end of the day, It was a beautiful thing.

Yada, yada, yada! I had a completed blook. I had already decided to pay the annual $39 fee for the professional membership option over the free option. I did this because it made "cents" over the long haul for my business plan. So I gleefully ordered my first proof and paid the pricey two day delivery fee (because of unchecked glee mostly). The cost: $2.17 for a 108 page book, plus the shipping fee of $12.

[note: if you are able to control the glee factor, you can do this for a lot less, depending on number of pages of course.]

From the moment I ordered to the time I received the blook, it took three business days. Simply stated, the proof copy exceeded my expectations by a long shot! Holy smokes! It actually looked like a book!

I made changes and ordered another proof (a few cents more because I now had 110 pages). More glee. Blah, blah, blah. I finally had my finished blook. I promptly ordered 40 copies, shipped at a moderate glee price of $12, and had them at my front door in less than a week at a total cost of just under $100. I had met all my objectives. The closest other self publishing option that would have been able to generate the cover I wanted would have been at least $300.

Also, for no charge, CreateSpace took care of the ISBN number and gave me three channels for sales: 1) an e-store option that gives me a pretty good royalty per book sold, 2) Amazon, which has a more pricey cost per book, and 3) Target, which is essentially an extension of Amazon.

So now it's up to me. It's time for the transition from self-published to self promoted, something that doesn't come easy to me. It puts the capital "V" into Vanity! We'll see, after all, the proof will be in the pudding. With a lot of pudding and a little luck, who knows, maybe I'll be firing off snappy one-liners to Oprah's probing questions—the delusional thoughts of a gleeful, self-published writer.

So have at it my unpublished peeps and happy self-publishing!

The Brilliant Rejection Dating Maneuver

2009-04-15T11:26:00.004-04:00

I was talking one day with my two teenage nieces—both sensible young women who apparently have never suffered through the dating experiences I had wrestled with. I started the conversation because I was curious as to the techniques and strategies of the mating dance in the 21st Century. After all, it was my casual observation that dating, as I knew it in the Sixties, had died some years ago.

With patience and a healthy respect for elders, the girls gave me an inside look into their world, although I did get a few rolling eyeballs and a couple of those Dad-was-right-Uncle-Bob-is-really-dense, big-eyed, blank stares. But they hung in there like champs and explained to me the rules of engagement. I learned that “hooking up” is grounds for locking up and “hanging out” is something between a date and a party. I’m pretty sure that there is still a concept of dating but it no longer leads to “going out” or “going steady”. It simply leads to more dates closer together which eventually lead to some kind of nameless monogamous relationship, at which point all roads lead to ownership, jealousy and breaking up. Whew, at least something is still the same.

As for the process of engagement, it is accomplished by IM’ing, or through facebook discussions, or text messaging on cell phones. Essentially you can contact potential targets in the safety of your basement or bathroom or garage, without even actually talking to them directly. That translates into a New Cowardly World, void of dark snarling parents, crackling octave-changing voices, irritable bowel syndrome, and most importantly, the cold bludgeoning slam of a callous phone rejection. It’s just servers, routers, cell towers, satellites and keypads nowadays.

It is sad in a way that this has all changed because I had mastered a dating technique so sophisticated in its simplicity that it is a shame to see it whither away like so many of my other inventive adolescent coping skills—and I had developed a sack full of them.

The technique is called “The Rejection Dating Maneuver”.

Its birth was the result of the following phone call I made to supposedly a very sweet girl to whom I had been introduced about a week before that lowly moment. It was my first “cold” call to a girl for a date.

After a lengthy pause, during which my short uneventful life passed before me, I released the last digit of her phone number on the rotary phone. I stared blankly at the spinning dial, clutching my sweat soaked notes between my thumb and index finger, unaware of my trembling hands.

deh-deh-deh-deh-deh-deh-deh … dah!

Silence.

My ear began to sweat against the receiver.

Ringtone!

Rehrehringgg … Rehrehringgg … Rehreh

“Hello?” a deep voice boomed into my ear.

Oh my god! It was her dad; her raspy voiced, connected (as in Tony Soprano connected) dad of all people. I never expected that he’d be home that night. I figured he’d be out breaking legs or making books or both, but not at home on a Friday night.

I needed to respond. He was waiting for some kind of sign of life from my end of the phone. But my vision was blurred from anxiety, rendering the stupid script I held in my shaking hand useless. My lips were glued together with fear. But somehow I managed to eek out some sounds.

“Umm … hello … umm … is Gina … umm … home?” I cackled like a constipated Leghorn hen.

“Yeah she’s home. Who’s calling?”

I … I … I didn’t know. Who was I? Quick my notes!

“Yeah, this is Bob. Umm Crane. That’s Bob Crane who this is.” I answered in broken English, as smooth as Barney Fife on crack cocaine.

“Bob Crane huh? You that Hogan’s Heroes guy? You Hogan?”

Was I? Maybe I was. I checked my notes. Nothing there.

“No sir. Just regular Bob Crane. No Hogan Bob Crane. I’m just regular. I like Hogan’s Heroes but that isn’t me. I’m just—”

Her dad cut me off.

“I get it. You’re not. Jesus Christ I was just jokin’ with ya son. Hold on!”

“Thank you!” But before I finished, he covered the phone with what I could only imagine was his thick knuckled hand. Though muted, I could still clearly hear him.

“Gina! Phone!”

Muffled voice.

“The guy from Hogan’s Heroes!”

Muffled voice.

“Just pick up!”

It felt like an hour but I think it was about three seconds.

Click.

“Got it Daddy.”

Click.

“Hello”

“Hi … Gina?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Bob Crane.”

“Who?”

“Bob Crane. We met about a week ago. Remember? After band practice? Carteret Park?”

“Were you the guy wearing that red bandanna with the big floppy socks like that basketball player, ‘Rifle Rick’?”

“‘Pistol Pete’ … yeah.”

“Yeah, I remember you.”

Silence. Hmm … she remembered. I guess I was looking pretty cool. But there was no time to bask. Where was I in the script? My notes!

“Yeah, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to go out to the movies or something?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

Yeeoowser! But I didn’t stop. I continued along the script like a runaway train.

“I was thinking we could see The Last Picture Show.”

“Bye.”

Click.

“I can pick you up at 7 okay?”

Dial tone.

“Okay, see ya then. Bye.”

I gently lowered the receiver and placed it onto the cradle. I felt sick to my stomach. I stared at the phone. It stared back, snickering.

At that very moment I went from “loser” lowercase to “LOSER” uppercase. But not for long. Soon I would develop the “maneuver” and what a sweet maneuver it would be.

Without going through the long story of how I figured this all out, it eventually occurred to me that it was not getting a date that mattered, but controlling the rejection. It was, after all, rejection—cold unadulterated rejection—that was at the heart of the searing pain. I needed to become one with rejection. And what better way to do that than guarantee rejection. So going forward, I did just that. I always made sure to schedule a first date at a time when I was sure the girl could not make it.

Knowing full well rejection was guaranteed, it was just a matter of judging how I was rejected that would determine if I would make a follow-up call for a real date.

And you know what? It worked perfectly. Girls who wanted a date pleaded I call back, sometimes telling me what time worked best for them. In a rare case or two, they even rescheduled the date right then and there. As for those girls who were uninterested or violently ill at the thought, they simply jumped on the built-in excuse and politely bowed out. My feelings were never hurt. It was a beautiful thing. And I used it unapologetically for years with great results.

Needless to say, I handed this little juicy morsel down to my son. He has embraced it. And he has assured me should the dating world ever return to the days of the rotary dial phone, he will be ready and he will be thankful for my guidance. He also asked that I not share it with anyone else, that it be our little secret. I did not promise (to his chagrin).

And now I share it with all. Sorry son. My mission is now complete.

Band Box Baseball

2009-04-11T13:21:00.007-04:00

Disorganized sports were the mainstay of my youth. It was almost always more fun to pick captains, have them do a little “once twice three shoot”, and let our skills and friendships determine who played with whom. There were no adults, no umps, and rarely any fights. Whether it was touch football, basketball, two-a-cat baseball, capture the flag, it didn’t matter. We managed to figure it out and have fun.

Then little league came along. It was well organized with a draft, uniforms, schedule, travel, all-star teams, and trophies. The evidence was mounting. The more organized a sport became, the less fun it was to play. Having said all that, there was one loosely supervised game in town that transcended all sports. It was in a league of its own and it was fantastic.

It was Band Box Baseball!

♦♦♦♦

"Listen up! I want you to count off by four!” Mr. Fitz barked, with a small Louisville Slugger resting on his shoulder, pigeon toed in his old, motley, black Keds sneakers, still wearing his work slacks, and a pale blue pull-over golf shirt with a fresh Chef Boyardee stain right where his stomach reached out the furthest. The shirt had seen better days and a smaller waist line.

He was addressing a line of fifty eager faces, t-shirts dirtied, ragged long-legged jeans torn, and ratty PF Flyers worn smooth by hours of play on the hard-top streets and playgrounds. Some were tall. Some were short. Some were wide. Some were narrow. It resembled a police suspect line-up for a bazooka bubblegum heist. There was a buzz in the air as the kids commiserated, bartering for position, making empty deals, trying to anticipate the count so they could play on the same team as their buddies or with the living legend, Rye Bread Russell.

The ritual count-off alone was worth the price of admission. Mr. Fitz gripped the junior sized bat and practiced his tee-shot, as he followed the count down the line, only stopping to point at kids unable to eek out their number correctly. For the time being, he was the drill sergeant and the kids were his first day recruits. The counting started, as the kids belted out their numbers.

“One!”

“Twoooo.”

“Tree.”

“Fo-werrr.”

“UNO!”

“Two!”

And on down the line the counting continued.

“Three.”

“Me four.”

“Five.”

“Hey, he said ‘five’ Mr. Fitz!” my brother Doug, a stickler for procedures and rules, instantly complained.

The count, however, continued on like a runaway train.

“One!”

“Two, two got to pooh!”

A chorus of laughs and giggles bellowed out from the older boys.

Doug escalated his displeasure. “Hey Mr. Fitz! Moon said ‘five’! He said ‘five’!”

Mr. Fitz interrupted, stopping the count dead in its tracks.

“Okay! Okay! That will be enough of the poetry Mr. Cruiser! Next one who feels like they have to be a comedian can laugh all the way home!”

He had a way of squelching idiocy before it became reckless. He hunted down Moon Muller, the object of Doug’s objection.

“Mr. Muller, pay attention. You aren’t FIVE! You are ONE!” Mr. Fitz, using the bat, pointed at the next kid in line.

“Okay. Pick it up from there.”

“One,” the next kid yelled incorrectly.

“No, he’s ONE, you’re TWO. Come on guys! Let’s listen up and pay attention. We’ll do this all night long if we have to. I know your parents won’t mind. They might even get a full night’s sleep without you guys around for a night.”

He was a master, as he milked the parents sitting along the wall for a few laughs and barbs.

“You can keep mine, Joe!” one slightly inebriated father yelled out. Mr. Fitz smiled back.

He pointed to the next kid to speak his number.

“Three?” the kid asked timidly.

Mr. Fitz nodded his approval. The kid for some unexplainable reason pinched his groin and started hopping around in circles like the Holy Spirit filled him or something.

“Fo! Or!”

“One-zeees!”

“Two,” a shy, shallow voice proclaimed. It was Paula or better known as “Miss Park”, the only girl brave enough to play with the riff raff. I was probably eying her at the time because she was really cute. Unfortunately, she had an older brother who was protective of her, which explained why none of us ever had the nerve to approach her—probably not a bad thing for all involved.

Anyway, Mr. Fitz had the train back on the track, that is, until it got to Rick, another one of my younger brothers. He was scratching the back of his throat with his index finger, drifting off into his own little dream world. Once again the train came to a grinding halt, as it almost always did when it got to Rick’s station.

“Ricky Crane! Oh Ricky Crane! Earth to Ricky!”

“Twelve!” Rick yelled out. Some of the parents laughed.

Doug smacked his own forehead with open palm in disbelief and embarrassment.

“No Ricky. You are TWO. Remember that! You are TWO!”

I think in the three years that Rick participated in these drills he got it wrong all but twice, not because he was stupid but because he floated in and out of consciousness.

The count miraculously found its way to conclusion.

“Okay guys! Listen up! I want the ONES and FOURS …”

He was temporarily drowned out by a chorus of simultaneous moans and cheers as kids immediately sized up their strategies to see who they would be playing with. There were always some winners and some vocal losers.

“Hey quiet down!”

The groans subsided as the kids prepared to storm the field and lay claim to the position they wanted to play. They immediately started searching for their gloves—some to tie their sneakers. A couple of kids paced. Itchy Nick, and a few others, nervously plucked at their crotch as they rocked side to side on their feet, acting as if their bladders were about to explode. Others knelt down into a sprinter’s position waiting for the sound of the starting gun. They were all poised for the next command to get this thing going—even Rick had removed his finger from his mouth in full concentration.

“Okay, TWOS and THREES—” he paused as a teaser, feeling a certain amount of joy knowing that this was one of a handful of moments he, or anyone else for that matter, obtained the rapt attention of fifty kids between the ages of six and ten.

“Are—”

Even Johnny Alder’s nose stopped running.

“BATTING!”

And like a truckload of squirrels let loose on a chestnut tree farm, twenty five “ones and fours” scurried out onto the field to lay claim to their favorite positions, while the twenty five “twos and threes” scrambled to line up to bat.

Mr. Fitz took his place at the pitcher’s mound. My dad got behind the plate. Legions of locals lined up their lawn chairs along the sidewalk, tall tonics in hand, protected behind a six foot high hurricane fence.

It was time to play a little ball—a little Band Box Baseball.

To this day, I am not sure who actually dreamed up this game. I am equally puzzled by the name, “Band Box Baseball”. It really doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t believe it was a sponsored township activity, in the same way the little league was. It just may have been a few dads who wanted to have a little fun while giving first, second and third graders a chance to learn the game they so loved.

It was always played on Tuesday and Thursday nights at our local grammar school. The field itself was a paved playground. The only signs of grass were random clumps of weeds that somehow managed to grow through cracks in the asphalt. The part of the playground we used was in the far northern corner, the furthest from the back of the school. It was actually carved into the ground in order to make it level. The perimeter was defined by a four foot high cement wall that reached up to street level. Running along the top of the wall was a six foot high hurricane fence. The bases were painted right on the blacktop. Home plate was tucked into the corner where the street side of the playground, which became the right field foul line, and a property line boundary, which became the left field foul line, met at a right angle.

When you stood at home plate with bat in hand, you could see the looming backside of Linden Avenue School. The old, “L” shaped, burnt-orange brick building towered ominously like the Green Wall of Fenway Park. For some of the long ball hitters, the school windows were in play. They were large targets that beckoned, almost to the point of teasing the batter to swing wildly. It was the only time a kid had a shot at breaking windows, school windows no less, without punishment. And there were a few legendary ballplayers who came real close. For the rest of us, it was more about the dream.

Some kids brought their own bats but most of us used one of the five bats Mr. Fitz lugged up to the playground in a large dark green canvas bag. A good number of kids didn’t have gloves, so gloves had to be shared. As sides switched from fielding to hitting, kids coming off the field to bat would throw their gloves up into the air. The kids coming onto the field would run around catching the gloves as they plummeted to the ground.

I was fortunate enough to borrow dad’s softball mitt. It was huge. When I opened that baby up at short-stop to taunt opposing batters, it looked like a giant 10 foot clam yawning with a miniature human appendage attached. And I shared it. It was probably the only time I remember sharing anything with anybody so willingly, but this was Band Box Baseball. It was the right thing to do!

The ball that was used was a soft-coated rubber hardball. It was the same size as a baseball, but it had this white rubbery skin that had fake stitching pressed into it. There were two kinds. One was a dense and heavy ball, making it harder to hit further and more painful to catch. The preferred type was lighter and seemed to have a hollow center. It had this nasty “english” when its spin met the pavement, causing it to take some wild bounces. It made fielding one-hop grounders to short-stop, my favorite position, virtually impossible. However, as a batter you could crunch it, which meant the windows to Mr. Rice's classroom, a rather universally despised teacher, were in jeopardy, and that made it the official ball of the Band Box Players Association.

The game had some modifications to the standard rules of baseball. Well actually, it might be more accurate to say that it had only a couple of rules and they had little to do with baseball. One of the more prominent rules was that a batter could not strike out. Kids swung away at every pitch until the ball was hit into play. Sometimes “in play” had a rather broad interpretation.

Mr. Fitz pitched underhanded. He was real good at figuring out where and how fast batters swung the bat so he could pitch the ball into their swing zone; after all, he was an engineering professor at Steven’s Institute. He’d do anything if it meant getting the ball “in play”. Sometimes that took some real “doing”, like walking to within ten feet of some kids to pitch the ball into their stationary bat.

Another rule was that a team was done batting when everyone on the side had been up to the plate. That eliminated the need to keep track of outs. The remaining three rules were: hitters had to run the bases in the right direction, no swearing, and all final scores were 62 to 62.

One time, just to mix it up a bit, Mr. Fitz proclaimed the score to be 63-62 without identifying the winning team. It caused Doug and a few others great consternation. Doug tagged behind Mr. Fitz as he retreated to his station wagon with his green canvass equipment satchel in tow.

“Hey Mr. Fitz! Which team had 63?”

“Hey Mr. Fitz! I think we had 63!”

“Oh Mr. Fitzgerald? I have a question?”

“OH MR. FITZGERALD! WHY AREN’T YOU PAYING ATTENTION TO ME?”

To his credit, Mr. Fitz just kept moving ahead, paying little heed to Doug’s barrage. He had five kids of his own at home. Doug’s incessant cackling was small potatoes. To Doug’s credit, he was vigilant, like a dog on a bone. The next time we played, Doug waited at the curb. Mr. Fitz pulled up and Doug continued where he left off.

“Hey Mr. Fitz! Remember the last game?”

“Who won? Who had 63?”

To which Mr. Fitz brilliantly replied, “The winning team had 63, Dougie Crane, that’s who won!”

“All right! Thanks!”

Doug was satisfied for the moment while he chewed on the statement’s worthlessness. Mr. Fitz bought enough time to start up the game’s count off. Perplexed, Doug reluctantly let go, as he moved into a calculated position for the countdown.

There were several types of batters: the power hitter, the power runner, the powerless, the bat carriers and the bat throwers. The more renowned power hitters were: Oatey-ka-Boatey, Chucky, and Rye Bread. Whenever one of these guys got up, Mr. Fitz would adjust the outfield to block the gaps. He’d send three or four of the fastest players into the right field hinterlands to keep the ball from running out onto the street. Then he’d position a battery of kids in left field to keep the ball bouncing into thick hedges. The school walls covered center field and a large portion of left-center and right-center fields, leaving only the corners vulnerable to ball chasing injuries.

Short of losing a ball or a kid, there was one other thing Mr. Fitz was concerned about when the big bats were up. He didn’t want any of the dozen infielders or himself to get whacked in the head by a screaming line drive. He usually talked it up to the infielders, while he directed the gloves in the outfield. Satisfied that the infielders were alert and the gloves were in place, he’d turn his attention to the batter to start a little dialogue and get the action underway.

“Well look who’s up? If it isn’t the incorrigible Mr. Oates.”

“Hey Mr. Fitz, you better take your false teeth out. I don’t want to mess up that pretty smile.” A chorus of “oohs” rang out from fielders and batters alike.

The spunky Oatey was always good for a clever one-liner. He was a muscled squat whose crooked nose proudly displayed what happens when used to catch a pepper shaker rifled by an irate older brother over a slight dinner misunderstanding.

“Hey Mr. Fitz, don’t let him get away with that! Brush ‘em back!” screamed Chucky, standing in deep right, demonstrating he knew the subtleties of the game. Mr. Fitz smiled and pitched away.

BAM!

Oatey cracked a deep one over the tossed gloves of the five left fielders. The race was on. The bare pawed hounds chased the ball, disappearing deep into the hedges. A few seconds later the ball flew out of the brush like a roused quail. Oatey was already rounding second and on his way into third. A kid pounced on the wayward ball and whipped it, rolling to the ground from the effort—ball distance trumping ball aim. The streaking orb zoomed over the outreached gloves of three first basemen and smashed into the fence. Oatey raced home, clearing the bases, and met dad at the plate. Dad gratuitously executed his patented fake tag maneuver. Chucky, who started out in another zip code, somehow found his way to field the ball at first base. He winged it home about ten seconds too late to dad who was standing gloveless. He snagged it before it smacked an oblivious kid taking practice swings in the batter’s box.

The play was finally over. Gloves were thrown to the ground in disgust. Another big batter had just had his way. Another kid’s life was spared by dad’s lightning quick reflexes. Such was the chaotic action of Band Box Baseball when the sluggers batted.

Other than the slugger, the bat thrower was the other type of hitter that raised the alert from yellow to orange. But this was usually taken care of by moving the line of upcoming batters as far away as possible and asking them to curl up in balls like we had learned in the event of a nuclear attack. It was something we had become quite comfortable with.

The “bat carriers” insisted on taking the bat with them down to first base, as if it were a baton in a relay race. A few actually carried the bat completely around the bases, using it as a weapon to clear the base path.

Even more entertaining were the power runners. Doug was such a player. It didn’t matter where the ball scattered. He was determined to run the bases until one of two things occurred: he was tagged unconscious, or he ran out of bases. He was also known to occasionally pass one or two other runners in the process, launching the play into complete pandemonium, while giving fielders a chance to practice their throwing skills.

Last, but never least, was the kid who was powerless, the one who had to wear special shoes, the one who had to take a special bus to a special school, the one who was incapable of hitting a pitch and running the bases without assistance. Usually dad would help with his swing by standing behind him, reaching around, placing the batter’s small hands in the proper grip, and enveloping them with his own hands. Mr. Fitz would lay one in the strike zone. Dad would direct the bat to hit the ball back to Mr. Fitz and the choreography began—

Mr. Fitz knocks it to the ground barehanded. Dad reminds the kid to run to first base, sometimes chasing him down the third base line to do so. The kid, grinning from one jumbo ear to the other, runs to first base, sometimes stopping at the pitcher’s spot by mistake. Mr. Fitz bobbles the ball while fielders scream and carry on like wild banshees. The kid, churning his tiny short stride with head down, eventually arrives at first. Just as he steps on the base, Mr. Fitz launches the ball over the heads of a sea of first basemen who are screaming, “ME! ME! ME!”

The kid takes off to second base, one hand holding his hat and one hand holding his pants. The kid reaches second, ducking instinctively as he weaves in and out of seven second basemen. The ball is nowhere in sight. It has already been thrown into a yard. Four fielders are scaling the six foot high hurricane fence in hot pursuit. Personal injury insurance is the furthest thing from anyone’s thoughts. Our little hero is urged by two dozen berserk teammates to run to third. He holds his hat, grabs his pants again, takes a deep breath and starts the sprint, knock-kneed legs flailing.

A chaser grabs the ball and hurls it into center field, caroming off the school wall. The law of “distance over aim” applies once more. Our runner is waved into home as he steps on third base. He rests a moment for a little underwear adjustment and nose cleaning before he bolts for home. His face is lit with determination. After four relay tosses, Rye Bread has it at short-stop and wings it home. Dad bobbles the catch. The kid jumps with both feet smacking down on home plate. Dad makes the tag too late. Mr. Fitz declares, “SAFE!” Bedlam breaks out. There are town parades the next day.

Although the batters and runners were amusing, the real entertainment value came from the field.

One breed of fielder staked out small pieces of turf in some remote area of the outfield and planted themselves like squatters. They played their own game. Their “ready” position was usually to place their glove on top of their head like a hat while they squatted down to study an ant scurrying across the tar with a gnat in its clutches. When they heard the crack of the bat, they would snap to. Once assured the ball was not coming into their space, they would launch their bodies skyward in spastic response, poking their gloves at empty air, snagging an imaginary ball, and throwing it to some make-believe place, possibly robbing Roger Maris of his 61st.

Should a ball actually come within arm’s reach of their position, mysteriously, the mitt would remain on the head until it safely passed them by. Once cleared, they’d toss their mitt at the ball and make chase, only to be squeezed out of the play by another interesting fielding variant—the ball chaser.

The ball chasers were like a pack of wild desert dogs in predatory pursuit of a panicked wildebeest. From the time the ball left a bat until it found its way to the completion of the play, the ball chasers ran. Some scurried to the ball’s anticipated resting place, while some followed its route. My guess is that in the course of a normal night, they ran about thirty seven miles. They loved the sport of the hunt. Today we might say they have ADS. Back then they were just ball chasers.

Finally, the infield, and in the infield lived the chatterer, and when I talk about chattering, I have to talk about Moon Muller. He loved first base and he loved to antagonize batters.

Let me just start by saying, “Hey batta batta! Hey batta batta! Soo-wing batta batta!” was his. And to Moon it was small potatoes. His real talent was unleashed when a slugger came up. He took great pride in getting inside a big bat's head.

“Everyone in. Batta can’t hit! Everyone in!” Moon screamed to the thirteen outfielders.

“Oh yeah Moon. You’re gonna need Mr. Fitz’s false teeth, when I hit it down your throat.” Oatey announced while pointing his bat at Moon, ala Babe Ruth.

“Oh I’m scared! Oooooh! I’m shakin’ in my pants!” Moon countered, while knocking his knees together in feigned fear.

“It’s comin’ turd brain!” Oatey snapped.

Moon had gotten to him.

“Hey Mr. Oates, there are little kids around!” Mr. Fitz warned.

“But Mr. Fitz he started it.” Oatey complained.

“Mr. Muller, we know you can’t count but could try to play a little baseball and stop yakking down there.”

“Okay Mr. Fitz, but he still swings like a girl!” It was a cheap parting shot that struck a raw nerve.

“I’ll come down there and we’ll see who the girl is four eyes!” Oatey had lost it. Moon did it again.

Eventually, peace would be restored, until the next batter and then Moon would stir up the hive all over again, unable to contain his need to yap. Being the quiet type, I always had a strange respect for the “Moon Mullers” of Band Box Baseball. They gave it a harmless grittiness that tickled me for some reason.

Mr. Fitz carried on Band Box Baseball a year or two after I moved on to the more organized and serious little league. At some point he left to coach little league but only after getting smacked directly on the ear by a smoking line drive off the bat of Doug, possibly payback for not telling Doug who won that game. He actually was injured quite severely, permanently losing some hearing in that ear. But he continued to help out nightly, although he turned the pitching over to Moon Muller’s dad and my dad.

I have heard the game still goes on today, carried into the next generation untainted by the cry for T-ball. That doesn’t surprise me. It had to survive. It’s Band Box Baseball after all. It was a game that reached beyond the legions of loose toothed kids and doting parents. It actually gave life to the lifeless, even if momentary. I wouldn’t say that unless I had witnessed it with my own eyes.

Otto Vanderbeek lived several houses down the street from us and was the neighborhood troll. He perpetually guarded his precious little postage stamp piece of lawn from birds, squirrels, cats, dogs and kids. Even his living room furniture was arranged so he could sit shot-gun at a window. His disdain for boys, especially the Crane and Fitzy boys, was the catalyst for many calls into the police, as documented by four or five entries in the weekly police blotter of the “Glen Ridge Paper”. It was also the reason he was the number one target on Mischief Night.

He was a cantankerous, angry old man whose fury I suspect came not from our occasional trespasses but rather from being married to a woman named “Gertrude”. No disrespect to the hundreds of “Gertrudes” out there who I am sure are perfectly fine people, but when I hear the name “Gertrude”, I get this unexplainable shiver up and down my spine, as if someone stepped on my grave.

To Otto’s credit, his lawn was the envy of all on the block. And it should have been! Hell, he cut each blade individually with mustache scissors and watered them with an eye dropper. Most of the folks on the block raised three or four kids or spoiled a dozen grandchildren. Otto raised and spoiled ten million seedlings. The truth is the Vanderbeeks were not unique on the street. Every block had a few “Otto and Gertrude” types, older couples who traded in raising offspring for the chance to grow Kentucky Blue and Rhododendron. I suspect that holds true today as well.

As bad as he was though, mom instilled in us to be respectful, to be courteous and to be glad we weren’t like him. Being the sensitive type, I felt sorry for him truthfully. If he could have just lightened up a bit, he would have been fine. But I was sure Gertrude had an iron-clad grip on him.

In my mind, people come in two types: the miserable and the truly miserable. Otto was truly miserable—with the exception of two hours every Tuesday and Thursday night in the spring. Those nights he’d walked five blocks to discreetly stand behind the hurricane fence that protected deep right field at Linden Avenue School. I’d see him sometimes from short-stop—usually while the game was delayed as the chasers were trying to convince the Schneider’s German Shepherd to stop gnawing on the ball. He’d just stand there and watch.

By game’s end he would vanish. I was always fascinated by that. He came and went, standing alone, gripping the hurricane fence as he leaned forward to watch us play. Never a smile. Never a peep.

One night I managed to hitch a ride home with Mr. Fitz. After piling out of his family wagon, I started the trek up the street to my house, which rested at the crest of the hill on the opposite side—the Vanderbeek side. Dusk had settled in. I didn’t notice Otto crawling around on all fours talking to his blades in some foreign language. I crossed the street too soon and found myself on the sidewalk that passed his front yard. The same sidewalk he guarded like a centurion. Had I known, I would have stayed on the other side to avoid upsetting him by my mere presence. It was too late though. I was committed.

I kept my head down as I walked by quietly.

“Bobby Crane!” he squawked.

Damn.

“Hello Mr. Vanderbeek,” I acknowledged sheepishly, keeping my head down to avoid eye contact, awaiting some angry warning.

“Nice double play tonight son,” he said.

I stopped to look at him.

A hint of a grin seemed to grace his face. Not a big one mind you because his facial muscles were not trained for that but it was a grin nonetheless. I was shocked.

“Gee … thanks Mr. Vanderbeek!”

He nodded his head and returned to watering. I was dumbfounded.

“Good night,” I said as I turned to make my way home.

“Good night.”

He continued on with his lawn.

In the short time it took me to get to my front porch, I had realized maybe Mr. Vanderbeek wasn’t so bad after all. As I had guessed, he just needed to lighten up a little.

And that’s why we will always need Band Box Baseball.

I just want a cell phone!

2009-04-08T14:13:00.001-04:00

Is it asking too much to own a cell phone that does one thing well? For instance, act like a phone. I don’t need a camera. I don’t need voice recognition. I don’t need a word processor. I don’t need a recorder. I don’t need a Clay Aiken love song as a ring-tone. I don’t need news bulletins. I don’t need stock tickers. I don’t need a daily horoscope. I don’t need a joke of the day. I don’t need a TV. I don’t need movie trailers either. I have a boat load of technology for all that stuff.

What I need is a phone.

You know, one I can carry with me that allows me to send and receive something called a “phone call”. And while I’m on the subject, it would also be nice if the phone worked in such a way that I might hear the person on the other end without having to shove the whole thing up into my ear canal two or three inches. And if this could all be done with the assurance that I’m not adding cancer cells to what already is a damaged brain, well then, that would be swell. Is that asking too much?

I just want a phone, which is derived from the Greek word “phone”, whose translation of all crazy things is “voice”! Even the Greeks got it right and they didn’t even have phones.

I think this all came to a head when I recently upgraded my cell phone to one of those RAZRs. It’s thin. It folds. It’s easy to carry. That’s enough technology for me. Now if it could just be a phone, it would be perfect. But alas, it’s not. It’s a swiss army knife for people who have to hear, read and see everything about everyone, everywhere, every second of the day. So it comes packaged with an owner’s manual as thick as a Clinton memoir, and just slightly less interesting. The handbook is so complicated that it’s accompanied by a quick reference guide—the inoperative word being “quick”.

It’s not all bad though. The phone comes with a CD that, once you skip through all the shameless plugs for something called VCAST, sends you to a website. And if you click through a half dozen more commercials, it eventually lands you at a very nice interactive reference guide on the motorola website, which I recommend you bookmark (that way you don’t need to view the CD ads every time you have a question). Like the other day I was at a baseball game. Somehow, I had pressed a secret button that sent my phone into VCAST mode. I needed to make an actual call and wasn’t sure how to get back to phone mode without signing up for VCAST for ten years. Fortunately, I had the foresight to lug my desktop PC and monitor with me to the game—ever since I bought this phone, I cart around my reference tools wherever I go. Anyway, I’d say about five minutes later, after I found a concession stand that would let me use a power source, I had my answer.

I suppose for some, the image and video bells and whistles are fun in a real self-indulging way. That’s nice when you know how to use them. But what about the cell phone challenged? Like me? I tried the camera. Big mistake. Played with the button while holding the phone in my lap. Took a close up picture of my crotch by mistake. The pants had that embarrassing bunched up thing going on too. In my attempt to delete the picture, I made it the background picture. Can’t get rid of it. Now I’m too embarrassed to lend my phone to someone. So I don’t any more, which upsets my friends, which I have fewer of now.

Although that photo and video stuff isn’t for me, at least I understand the appeal. Who doesn’t want to show off a one inch by one inch ten second video of the Grand Canyon?

What I don’t get, and yet what seems most popular, is text messaging. I think I understand the underlying principle. Instead of using the phone to converse with someone by voice in real-time, I’ll pay twice as much each month for the privilege of using a ten digit keypad to type obtuse, short messages—you know, like “U R L8”. It’s like using the phone to make vanity license plates for God’s sake. What’s next? People in networked cafes holding their laptops up to their ear and mouth to make phone calls, which is all I want to do with my cell phone?

Why would anyone want to text someone anyway, when talking seems so much more easy and engaging? Might it be because you are in a situation where calling someone would be impolite? For example, you’re at dinner with a boring date. So, instead of excusing yourself to make a call from the restroom, your head abruptly tilts down enough to let your eyes dart to the phone buried in your lap and snap back to feign attention to the witless dialogue you so desperately want to escape. You frantically press your cell phone keypad as if you are thumb wrestling it for the life of your first-born. Your lips curl with concentration. The corners of your mouth alternate up and down. A bit of your tongue sticks out to the side, as you finish the probing message that must get to the outside world, “wat u doin”. You send it off, believing your date has not noticed. Great success!

Dream on. You were as discreet as the sounding of a spicy burrito fart in a crowded elevator.

I don’t know. It must be me. For instance, right now I hear my phone playing Rachmaninoff. Don’t know why. Don’t know how to stop it either. Sometimes I go to voice mail and hear new messages people sent me weeks ago. Sometimes I get my own messages that I left other people months ago. I even get messages from dead people. By the way, they seem content. The white cotton robes breathe nicely. The food is hot and tastefully seasoned. The only complaint so far—the lines to play bocce ball are long.

I just want a phone.