Racing the Neighborhood Now and Then Briefly

Dipping one's toes into the murky waters of childhood memories is therapeutic, so I'm told. It's also pretty exhausting. Case in point, remembering life at Everett High School (that's it to the right). It was my first. It didn't take - neither did the second, Cascade High.

What's a family to do with an unmotivated 16 year old who'd rather play hooky ... at the public library reading every book he could get his hands on? Why, have him get a GED and on to Community College, of course! That's it to the left. Guess what? It didn't take any more than the high schools, so off to the Navy I went.  Just after I had protested the recently mandated selective service registration by refusing to do so! 

Story of my life with higher education, as I'd do that same dance at a number of institutions over the next 17 years trying to catch that elusive degree. And story of my life with sticking to my political principles. But my heart's in the right place.

I tell ya, it's kind of creepy being able to tool around your old neighborhood courtesy of Google maps street view. It's too bad the technology wasn't around 40 years ago. I'd like to be able to cruise the homestead over time, watching it morph from how it was to how it is. I imagine in 30 years that this'll be a handy feature for future headcases (ya know, the ones being fucked up right now) as well as anthropology/sociology or city planner/architecture buffs. Then again, that'll play havoc with revisionist history (at least with some of the visuals your defense system might have since re-purposed for sanity's sake).


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My neighborhood has changed surprisingly little over the years. The biggest single difference seems to be the walling off of individual properties. Fences and landscaping were for backyards when I was a kid - now a good half of the homes on my old block have big ol' fences around the front along with trees, flowers and shrubs winding around and through the enclosures, all neatly trimmed and weirdly isolating. Everything was so open when I was young!

Other than that ... The same old plum trees still line the edges near the curb, the hospital and high school look pretty much frozen in time (okay, some minor nods to technology with the signage). Same corner stores and whatnot (well, they have new names and likely new owners, but look otherwise alike). More cafes and coffee shops, a vacant lot where we played pick-up ball kitty corner from our block is now a fancy little park.

It's easy to slip back in time. And out of the house, they were usually good times for me as a kid. Man, I can just see the Big Wheels riding down the street, the banana seat bikes with playing cards in the spokes, our Evil Knievel plywood jumping ramps over three(count 'em) trash cans (well, on their sides) in the alley, army forts built in the backyard thatch of bushes. Buying paper kites from the corner store and flying them all over the place. Building wooden hydroplane models. My best friend Brian lived with his grandparents and we'd use his grandpa's tools and paint to craft these hunks of wood into passable miniature replicas.

Hydroplane racing was HUGE in our neck of the woods, certainly back then anyway (this was '68 or '69). Miss Pay-n-Pak and Miss Budweiser were the Yankees and Red Sox of that particular universe. Remember, we didn't have professional football or baseball in our state back then. You had to go clear to Oakland, California to find such things and the A's were indeed my team as a kid (a great team to have in the early 1970s). But they could be only so much my team given their geographical distance. So we had Soccer (go, Sounders!) and Hydroplanes.

Brian was always the Budweiser and I was always Pay-n-Pak when we 'raced' each other on our bikes, dragging those hunks of wood we had lovingly crafted behind us, pretty much destroying them in the process. I hated the Miss Budweiser. When I started to drink, I always loathed Budweiser beer too. I'm pretty sure it was the red-neck image and awful after taste but there's something inside me that always harkens back to that rivalry. Turns out, the boat owners, drivers and crews were incestuous, with Miss Budweiser and Miss Pay-n-Pak pretty much interchangeable apart from the sponsor's name slapped on the sides. What did we know?





Any time you wanna race hydroplanes, Brian - give me a shout, if you're out there.

Family Guy

Family Christmas Party. Washington St. 12/12/2009.

I had a fascinating time with more of my relatives than I think I've been under one roof with before, discounting 1970s funerals. Dozens. Perhaps appropriately, those disco days included more than one close relation slipping off this mortal coil, including dear ol' Dad. My father is the reason most of us under said roof are alive. He's the memory that binds us together, and at least indirectly the reason some like me are damaged.

Most of those in attendance I'd never met before; of those I had, the previous get-togethers had been brief, mainly at funerals - there's that word again - one/two/three decades removed.

Everyone last night was very nice and down-to-earth, approachable. Kids of every personality, inclination and age abounded. Oh, and those kids brought their children too. :-). You can glean a lot about people through the behavior of their offspring and the young ones last night were each one terrific, many wise beyond their years and all filled with joyful life.

I had some great conversations with nieces and nephews and their families. I also talked at length with siblings I'd never gotten the chance to know growing up. That was fantastic and illuminating. Perhaps "talked at length" is a bit strong; however, I did a lot of gabbing for me. I'm generally pretty quiet at the parties I've attended sober, having never mastered the art of small talk.

Mostly I watched and listened, soaking everyone in. As the evening wore on, the holiday cheer took hold maybe just a bit, and conversations grew more animated, certainly the subject matter was eclectic and ran the gamut from the routine to the revelatory. Details of such things shall always remain out of bounds here (I spill my guts all across these pages but will leave it to others to do likewise in their own forums or to do it not at all, which is probably the smart move). Suffice to say this slice of my bloodline is as pleasantly screwed up in the ways all us human beings are (I would have been pretty suspicious if they weren't; I've been around "perfect" people putting on airs and for some reason that never fails to turn my stomach). Through all that, though, this crew seems to share a basic normalcy I've heretofore only seen en masse from people outside my family tree.

The fruits of the labor that forged that normalcy can be seen in the faces and body language of the next generation happily coloring and playing hide 'n seek last night in the back bedrooms, seemingly carefree from the entanglements I remember as a kid. And make no mistake: it is labor, real work put in over the long haul. That's a force multiplier across time as sure as dysfunction snowballs in the other direction.

This lively group is rooted by the children of my Dad's first marriage. I've been lucky enough to have gotten to know the youngest child of Dad's first family over the past few years as she lives in the Phoenix area where the sister I grew up with also resides (she and I represent the offspring of marriage #2, if you're keeping score). So I visit there often. But until last night, I hadn't really got the chance to catch up with my other two sisters and my brother, and certainly none of the children they've subsequently raised (now I've got great nieces and nephews to boot).

The stigma and pain of a crumbling marriage, infidelity and divorce in the early fifties with the subsequent bad blood between our father and their mother led to the circumstances of our unintended estrangement. I'm sure there were feelings of abandonment on their part. That's unfortunately a part of any breakup to some degree but here it was further fueled by the rancor of parents spilling over onto the kids and the manner in which it occurred. This too, unfortunately, is all too common but no less painful or affecting. I don't pretend to understand the depths of their pain related to this.

From my vantage point as the youngest of Dad's second family, born over a decade past the aftermath, I simply didn't know much about them. My "other" siblings (I hate the term "half sister" or "half brother") weren't talked about often in my presence and when they were, it was always using indirect, coded language meant to shield me from the confusion and unpleasantness of divorce (or so I surmise). I only wish my parents had chosen instead one of the litany of 800 pound gorillas squatting in our living room if they'd had a hankering for forging protective parental guardrails. "Shielding" a kid from the circumstances of a previous marriage with all the far larger gorillas hanging out in our particularly dysfunctional mist is like bringing your kid to a porno film shoot and covering his ears because one of the actors utters an expletive.

So I digress once again but what else is new?

Anyway, this has run on too long. In short, I had a great time and plan to make it back to the Seattle area again for the sibling get together next year, if possible. I've never been a real strong family guy but it's gotten its hooks into me just a tad as I get older. It would be nice to have (grand) nieces and nephews to buy Christmas and birthday presents for, absent any of my own (kids, not presents; the prospect of offspring grows dimmer each year). I do have my maternal cousins, who I love dearly, and little Leila, the newest addition there (she's adorable). Still, it never hurts to have too much family, they say. Of course, that's not a universal truism. Sometimes just a single family member can turn your life into turmoil in ways that friends just can't. I hope for me such turmoil remains in the past where it belongs.

Journey to the Center of the Members Only Decade

I've never owned a Steve Perry or Journey album and his voice is just this side of Geddy Lee fingernails-on-the-blackboard spine-twisting agony. But he's also a lead contributor to the soundtrack of the 1980s for me, probably much more than the songs and artists that I actually liked. Anyway, my tastes leaned (and still lean) toward late 70s punk and the first "new" wave. The 80s were kinda lacking in "my" kind of tunes and nothing much emerged again until Nirvana in the early 90s. The 1980s were destitute in this regard, even with a few bright spots along the way (early U2, the LA punk scene).

But when I hear 'Don't Stop Believing', I'm 21, in the Navy, and transported back to the shitty strip clubs and dive bars in Norfolk, VA or running wild through the heart (gut?) of Naples, Italy. Perhaps not everybody's idea of a good time - and in so many ways, not mine either - but I recall those days fondly now.

There was this 'us-versus-them' band-of-brothers vibe that was compelling, even as the nights of jovial revelry were in retrospect pretty pathetic. We acted as though we had been drafted against our will into war, when we'd really just volunteered to live on a big floating airport with a lot of people we discovered we'd rather have never known. Very few ever got the girl - not for free, anyway - we were generally despised by the locals in towns throughout the world, and even fewer of us actually owned a car, forever slaves to public transportation in towns with few options.

Lots of booze and tunes, though.

A bunch of other mediocre but popular 80s artists trigger these same memories - pretty much whatever was stuck on replay in the jukeboxes of the crap watering holes we frequented: Huey Lewis, Styx, Laura Branigan, Pat Benatar, etc.

This same weird melding of bad music and sense-memory is especially strong with Night Ranger/Sister Christian.

Sister Christian will always be James Sprouse.

Where in the world is Jimmy Sprouse now? He was the older, goofy next-door-neighbor-who-lives-alone type with rapidly thinning hair trying in vain to cover his scalp in the desperate wrap-around style obvious to all but those who do it. (Hey, waitaminute - I'm older and live alone! whaterya implying? I'm not goofy, at least, and still have my hair - bettercheckinthemirror...)

Jimmy worked as the intelligence division draftsman in a little crawl space of a room near the ship's foc'sle and lived to watch bad movies and bemoan the younger generation. I never understood why the intelligence division needed a draftsman, and I don't imagine he did either.

Sprouse was frozen forever in time, as seemingly old as the hills to us then but probably 15 years younger than I am now.

Anyway, how is Jimmy Sprouse Sister Christian?

It comes down to a specific moment in time for me. An epiphany. One of those surreal, how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here moments in life.

It hit me at a Night Ranger concert in Hampton, VA in 1985.

Scanning the crowd of wack-jobs 'rocking' to their groovy rhythms - Jimmy Sprouse 'jamming' harder than all the rest - scanning the crowd, it hit me dead on.

The question.

The question wasn't literally 'how did I get to this Night Ranger concert?' That much was easy enough: a bunch of others on the ship were going, I had nothing going on, there was an available ticket and beer was to be had before, during and after the show. In other words, a good time, riffing on the "uncool" and their "shitty music".

But that moment, scanning the crowd, with 'Sister Christian' in full swing and seeing Jimmy Sprouse playing air guitar and Dave "Rock Lobster" Ryan nodding to the tune like he was some strung-out jazz musician who had just shot up, I swear everything stopped and the urgency of the real question reverberated through my mind, drowning out everything else: How-the-fuck-did-I-get-here? And then: Find Something Else To Do With Your Life. Now. This place, this life, these people. It wasn't some grand conspiracy - I chose to do it and I could choose to do something else.

I'd met some great people - some fellow travelers, as it were - but this could not continue. The horror was that, yes it very well could. Sprouse was probably at some level thinking the same thing, 16 years earlier, and it did continue for him. Maybe he was, back then, even human. Now he appeared human only at odd moments such as this. What is your life when you can only express some kind of joy at a fucking Night Ranger concert?

Sister Christian took on another level of significance for me in 1998 when I first saw what might be the pivotal scene in Boogie Nights, set at a point in time almost exactly when my epiphany occurred - smack dab in the middle of the 1980s. For the most part the movie is silly, sharply, funny, riffing on 1970s porn and film.

But it takes a serious turn into the 1980s. Dirk Diggler, having become a has-been porn star turned drug addict and dealer, has exactly this same how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here moment, listening to Sister Christian. The camera focuses in on Marky Mark and his expression - well, I think it was actually a pretty fine bit of acting (who'd have thunk it?)


It was eerie. Different circumstances, of course, but the moment was singular. And Sister Christian was playing. He's motoring, for sure.

Watch it and you'll know the place I was at. And in many ways, how I got to where I am.

Where ever that may be.


via videosift.com

A Fortified Look through the Past

I'm officially cheered up with my new favorite web site, Modern Drunkard Magazine.

I came across this gem when attempting to google up some repressed childhood memories through good ol' brand association (in this particular case, Gallo Tavola Red jug wine: good for staining the insides of mothers and coffee mugs alike, at least in my experience). I really just wanted a picture for the dysfunctional family scrapbook I'm compiling. (What do braided rugs, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, a haze of smoke, cheap jug wine and whiskey have in common? My living room growing up!)

I finally found what I was grepping for on Modern Drunkard but it's tough to come up with an appropriately specific query for the product "Tavola Red" when it translates in Italian literally to "red table wine." As you can imagine, that's like looking for "pilser beer": there's gobs of it. Plus Ernest and Julio became yuppie snobs in the 1980s and cut back on a lot of their more, well let's just say 'foundational' stock (thanks a lot, Gordon Gecko).

My vino suppler of choice never wavered from their roots. I speak, naturally, of Mogen David, whose motto, "when nature needs a little boost..." captivated me from the get-go. Well, it should have been their motto. MD did get a little fancy with all the different flavors of 20/20: give me basic grape - no plum supreme or ... well, whatever you have in stock, but I preferred grape. I'd like one day to tour their vineyard, or their chemical processing plant (I think they may be one and the same).

My MD 20/20 phase was short lived, mainly played out in my early 20s in the Navy and then only when we were sufficiently broke to be priced out of clubs and bars. We could always scrape up enough scratch for a cheap room - can't bring the stuff back to the ship! - and a few bottles of Mogen David's fortified fun ('Tuesday' was an especially good vintage, I recall).

The mall arcades and movies took on an enhanced hue with a few swigs of the grape stuff. Since we couldn't afford bars and clubs - would we be drinking purple turpentine otherwise? - we terrorized the mall denizens instead.

I do remember one horrifying Saturday night around 11:45pm when we realized it was almost midnight and we were out of MD. We staggered across a heavily trafficked six lane highway at full stride, racing to beat the buzzer when Virginia's Sunday blue laws ticked into place, and the drug store booze fridge ("best served chilled") was padlocked until Monday. That would have put a real crimp in our Saturday night. We did make the cut but ended up dropping half the six bottles we purchased in our drunken glee (polishing off the others as we stumbled back toward the mall).

Sometimes we mixed it up and substituted 20/20 with Wild Irish Rose (WIR). WIR was an appropriate acronym as that was precisely the sound reverberating through your head the next day after a night ingesting that putrid shit (WWWWIIIIRRRRRRR!). When our first two choices weren't available, we just kept going down the list: Thunderbird, Night train, etc.

For whatever reason, beer was never considered - not enough bang for the buck, so to speak. We'd save beer for clubs, bars, etc.

Ahh, yes - Good times, indeed.

We were stuck without car, money or confidence in anything. Told time and again that our kind was despised by the townies before we ever set foot on dry land there (we jokingly referred to the town as No-fuck, Virginia). On top of that, we had the mark of the beast, the scarlet letter: our bad haircuts with the telltale taper above the collar, marking us as military. This was 1984 in a town where the younger locals grew their hair long precisely to 'clarify' such things. Some of the more creative among us attempted to wear "civilian" wigs, but that just made you look as desperate as we all felt anyway.

Wandering the highways and byways of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in groups of three, four, five with shitty clothes and pasty complexions borne from months in the bowels of floating gray prisons.

No wonder we became wine-o connoisseurs. Sort of a very low rent East Coast Sideways running on an endless loop, with the Military Circle Mall and its surroundings substituting for northern California wine country.

Yes, revisionist history is a fine thing, whether political or personal. Of course. Just like Sideways. Definitely. Memories should be like cars: you get new ones every so often.

Leave It To Bitcher

Maybe it's the nostalgia jag I'm on with Mad Men, maybe it's memories of the thrill I had as a kid getting my first typewriter (I was a wannabe writer geek as a boy, still am), but the thought of these obsolete machines brings with it powerful recollections.


I wish I'd kept at least a few pages of the reams of shit I knocked out on that thing. It was a little plastic-encased jobby, still a manual but not nearly so onerous to use as the 1950s metal Underwood monstrosity my Mom had.

I pecked out numerous "episodes" of a family sitcom entitled 'Leave it to Bitcher' on that little machine. My alternative 'Leave it to Beaver' universe had June turning tricks, Wally selling smack to Lumpy and Eddie at the local high school and Ward as an end-stage alcoholic (but ever the ham, he never quite leaves the stage). The Bitcher - Theodore - was a pyromaniac who was being sexually molested by Miss Landers. It was a merry romp, to be sure - shot through innocent eyes, framed in the Eisenhower age of the nuclear family. With a healthy dollop of my twisted worldview melting down its core.


Now to be sure, my mother was not a prostitute, though she always gave me the impression she wouldn't be opposed to the idea, liking to brag that her paternal grandmother was thought to be a turn-of-the-century hooker in Norway. The truth is that my maternal grandfather did not know his biological mother - it's just speculation, rumor, gossip. But the point is made. Anyway, my sister didn't sell black tar heroin at Everett High (at least not that I'm aware of) and I neither set fires nor screwed any of my grade school teachers (from what I recall of them, thank God for that).

That leaves dear ol' Dad. He was the real deal and a model for my Ward in the Bitcher series. But Ward was mainly a supporting character in my teleplays. Sure, he'd stumble in and out of scenes, vomit caking his 'business suit,' always with a slur and a "honey, I'm home, ya goddam whassa, don't tell me, Christ! Blahhh." Still, he didn't generally stay conscious long enough to figure into any of the main story lines.

Ward did have one memorable scene attempting to show the Bitcher some fatherly concern and support upon hearing the news that Miss Landers was pregnant and the fire marshal was gunning for the boy. The old man leaned over his son for a pat on the head and a hug, but he mismanaged the distance and lost the delicate balance of his equilibrium, weaving to and fro. The next thing you know, up came his liquid lunch all over the Bitcher's face. Whatta mess!

And Ward always seemed to be involved indirectly.

For example, there was the recurring 'coda' bit that took place in the boys' bedroom after June walks by the door with a john and pauses to remind the Bitcher to do his chores "or there will be no 'fireworks' for you tonight, young man" before heading off to the 'working' bedroom to ply her trade.

The Bitcher then usually turned to his older brother for advice, complaining about one chore in particular. Wally would be measuring out his baggies of heroin as he provided some perspective to 'the Bitch' during this Taster's Choice moment of brotherly affection.
Occasionally Eddie or Lumpy were there, having stopped by in need of a fix. But they were simply background fodder here, tying off and shooting up quietly or already on the nod in the corner.

The sappy Leave It To Bitcher theme music softly, slowly plays in 'there's a lesson to be taught here' style:

Bitcher: "I really hate emptying out Dad's vomit bowel, Wally"

Wally : "Gee, Bitcher, I know it's kinda nasty but shucks, I had to do it when I was your age. Just breathe through your mouth and look away from the puke. You're lucky, back when I was a little squirt like you, Dad could actually eat food and the stuff he heaved up was way more disgusting. I'll dump it out for you this time, I have to go down stairs anyway."

Bitcher: "Gosh, Thanks, Wally!"

Wally: "Sure. I remember what it was like to be a little goof your age. I gotta run down to the park now. Your pal Larry wants a taste and looks like he might be a potentially good customer of mine in the years ahead. Watch Lumpy, will ya? That's some potent stuff he's mainlining and Mom will clobber me if we have another O.D. in the house and have to call Dr. Bradley again. Remember that mess when Mary Ellen Rogers shot a speedball up here laced with fentanyl and died? Gosh, the medical examiner raised a stink and ol' Dr. Bradley almost lost his license!"

Bitcher: "Sure, Wally. Ya know, for a degenerate drug dealer, sometimes you're an okay big brother."

Wally : "Gee, thanks, Bitch."

Wally tassels his kid brother's hair with the usual goofy look on his face.
Roll Credits.


I'll admit, that particular scene wasn't taken whole cloth from my imagination - I have to tip my hat to Dad for some real life inspiration there. Thanks, Pops, I couldn't have done it without you.

The main story lines usually revolved around Bitcher's fires and trysts with Miss Landers or with June's burgeoning prostitution business. And boy was business booming, so to speak. Fred Rutherford served as her pimp and pretty much every other character regularly passing through Mayfield ended up as a client whether they be male or female, young or old.

I was 14/15 or thereabouts when pounding out these masterpieces. I miss the thrill of whacking the return/paper feed lever one last time and pulling the final sheet out of the machine, the mechanical moves putting an exclamation point on completion of my handiwork. Lots of strike overs and whiteout editing remained, of course, but still. I'd be all warm with either pride or the start of what became a peptic ulcer, my bare feet curled up under the desk in my room, toes lost in the orange shag carpet (hey, that was styling in the day and besides, I inherited the room and carpet from my sister).

I have no idea as to the quality of this shit. Somehow back then I was sure each piece was pure Gold, Jerry, Gold - goddamn genius in the eyes of this beholder. At least once I was done with the incessant editing, which I did to the point where you couldn't read the thing, with more whiteout visible than there was plain paper. Man what I could have done with a word processor.

Still, brilliant for sure. Had he started Inside the Actor's Studio (for you non-believers, not for actors only) back in the early 70s, I'm sure James Lipton would have killed for the privilege of asking me my favorite curse word. But alas, he was toiling on soap operas and I was a prodigy without a pedigree, destined not to be discovered.

Given I was the only one to ever see these masterpieces, and they are lost to the world now, we'll just assume I was right as to their worth and move on.


Lots of bad Dylan and Costello knock-off "lyrics" or "poems" also came off the Birnam assembly line on the rat-a-tat-tat machine in the late 70s as I perfected my touch typing skills. I guess that typewriter and the work it produced represented my Ignatius Big Chief tablets through that period. The 'wisdom' of a teen locked in his thoughts, barricaded in his room, blasting out Costello and the Clash on the eight track, fingers emptying onto those clacking keys work that would rock the world. Or something along those lines.

In the end I'm pretty sure it was all pure dreck, but that's sort of beside the point.
BTW, if you don't get the 'Big Chief' reference above, shame on you: go out now, purchase a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces and read it at once.

Sense memory is a strange thing. All this from a glance at one of them sleek cling clang machines.

Plums are Tricks, Prunes are Treats

The Discovery Health channel has had Plum Smart (and Plum Smart Light!) commercials on heavy rotation of late.  Just can't wait the 14 days for yogurt to work for ya? Then let Plum Smart come to the rescue! It is mighty fast reacting, often in minutes! (Get a two-for-one deal - a package of Depends with every six-pack of Plum Smart!)
I love how the Prune industry is trying to go after a 'younger', more 'hip' demographic by referring to their product as a 'Dried Plum.' Hence Plum Smart. Come on! It's fucking Prune Juice!! Now to be fair, 'Plum' is probably a more accurate name for the swill (prunes by definition have no juice or they'd be plums). But I'm a traditionalist here and this is clearly a shameless marketing ploy, a grab for the youth vote.

To add some color to my umbrage over the prune/plum dodge, as well as my love/hate relationship with Raisin's big brother, let me tell a brief story of one of my lasting memories of childhood, an event that scarred me in an indelible way. It took place during one of my first Halloween trick-or-treat runs so I was very young, just a pup.
Late on my rounds, I came upon one particularly evil looking home (though not due to any decoration - just year-round general-purpose creepiness). I was hesitant to visit, but the porch light was on and my chaperon (either my mother or sister, I forget) nudged me forward. So I knocked.

The door slowly groaned open to reveal a dark interior from which an irritated elderly crone clutching a huge wooden cane emerged. Real old. Wicked Witch of the West times twelve old (though she wasn't decked out in any trappings of witchcraft I was familiar with). Hunched over yet still towering above my tiny fraidy cat form, I recall clearly the feeling of dread shooting up my spine. "Trick-or-treat?" I hopefully half muttered my part of the bargain. She frowned, hard pursed lips. I was clearly not her first visitor. And it was apparent she had tired of this insufferable, rhetorical cry of spoiled children. "I don't have candy! I drink prune juice!" She waved her cane as I braced for the expected blow, frozen in my tracks. Then she slammed shut the door and it was over.

My first rejection. Bitch. Turn out your fucking porch light then. That's the signal! You're no babe in the woods. You know the deal!!
I hated prune juice from that point on, though I wasn't sure what it was exactly. I'm still not certain.
Fast forward 25 years and prunes had become my savior, my liquid plumber. The only thing standing between relief and misery. But this new alliance didn't extend to prune juice, that oxymoron of a beverage. And it never will, no matter what flights of linguistic fancy Madison Avenue types use to try and pull the wool over my eyes.
That autumn encounter of yore left an indelible mark that can't be washed away by some plum/prune shell game.

Bob and Ruth

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

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

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

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

Ring, ring.

Ignorant Acquaintance: Hello?

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

Click.

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

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

This was simply Bob's way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Errhhhhhh.

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

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

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

So these are my slanderous memories of just a couple of characters from my childhood. An introduction. They will return. They were central to my upbringing in many ways.

It takes a village. Indeed.

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

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

Hal

His name was Hal Lambert. Hal-o-wishes. A charter member of my Dad's drinking entourage, he was forever decked out in his pork pie hat and dapper threads, a gentleman in the 1950's sense of the word. Kind of sophisticated for Dad's crowd. Sophisticated, that is, when he wasn't throwing up in the corner or crying like a baby into a pillow on our couch (both happened more than once).

Looking back, Hal reminds me a bit of William Burroughs. Did that make my Dad Jack Kerouac? Probably not. I think the resemblance ended with the gentile nature and omnipresent hat. And of course their mutual addiction to mood altering drugs. With Hal, it was booze while Burroughs was hooked on pretty much everything (opiates were his "drug of choice" when pressed).

The fog forever enveloping my childhood memories is usually as thick as pea soup, but if I strain my psyche particularly hard, things more or less come into focus for an instant, exposing my revisionist history. Then the fog rolls back in again, protecting me from things I'd rather not know. But it also has an insidious way of hiding the detail that is a necessary ingredient in the pictures I'm trying to paint here. I guess ya can't have it both ways.

I get the feeling that Hal-as-Burroughs is one of those false fog-infused recollections. My memories momentarily a bit more lucid, I see he most resembled Mr. Magoo (who, it should be said, was a sharp dresser in his own right). I'm pretty sure they attended the same Driver's Education class and shared a similar field of vision, Magoo's courtesy of two bum retinas and Hal's brought to you by the makers of Bourbon everywhere. Having experienced the spine-tingling terror of being the lone sober passenger on a liquor run with Hal at the wheel, I can attest to his routine Magoo-like supernatural escapes from the jaws of vehicular death.

Hal's wife Darlene was anything but gentile. Boisterous with the bluest of collar, Darlene was a "tavern jacket" type who could go toe-to-toe with the best of them when it came to knockin' back the sauce. She was tall, "big boned" and prone to strut, he was diminutive of stature and perpetually hunched over. Opposites who attracted, bonded by the booze and little else.

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

This odd couple often graced our home, to drink and talk and cry (well, Hal cried; that wasn't Darlene's style).

And then one day, Darlene up and died. It was a strange death, apparently in her sleep. Hal waited several hours before calling an ambulance (I think he may have dialed our home first and chatted up my Dad while awaiting Darlene's rigor to kick in).

Perhaps Hal had been drunk and was confused (that was always a good bet). But we often wondered whether he'd finally had enough of her noise and simply wanted some peace and quiet. As mentioned previously, Hal knew his way around a pillow and likely could wield it in anger just as skillfully as he did in sobbing drunken sorrow.

But this was merely idle talk; Darlene had any number of legitimate reasons for casting off this mortal coil at a relatively young age (I couldn't hazard a guess as to exactly how old she was - maybe late fifties). Booze and cigarettes likely played a starring role.

We saw Hal occasionally after this sad event, he prone to crying more than usual and just a bit more blind to boot, thanks to an amplification of his natural melancholy fueled by Darlene's passing and distilled (both metaphorically and literally) through the usual spirits that represented their life blood.

I can't say for sure when Hal joined Darlene and Dad in that great liquor store in the sky. I imagine it's just one of many details lost in my particular fog of time.

Leonard

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

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

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

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

Leonard had a six sense when navigating to the state store (the truck pretty much drove itself).

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

Watching that fat drunk waddle-stagger to our bathroom after knocking back a bottle with Dad was a treat. He'd have done Chevy Chase and Dick Van Dyke proud with his prat-fall antics, though perhaps Chris Farley would be a more apt comparison.

Leonard'd start out by invariably catching his shoe on the braided living room rug, nearly doing a header into the dining room. Next, he sluggishly danced with a leg raised in an attempt not to step on the tail of my sleeping dog Snooks (a failed attempt on several occasions I was present for - the damn dog didn't learn). Once past the dog for good or ill, Leonard would grasp for the dining room table and chairs to slow his stride lest the momentum tumble him into our 'china' cabinet. Safely through the worst of this journey, he'd stagger out into the hallway near the toilet, on two occasions tripping over the cord that coiled out from under the telephone table there, falling back on his ass.

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

And that's Leonard. Glad ya got to know him.