I could get into deep shit for writing
this, stories of actual people I've known. But so what, I'm running
out of ideas and the best stories are the real ones. I'll have to
mask the identities of the guilty as well as I can.
Growing up on my street, I was witness
to a lot of middle class pride. Or rather, a buffoon-like kind of
pride. Loud mouthed, cocksure and swollen with hubris. Most of the
adults I knew made it as far as high school, never traveled and
looked upon reading books as near proof you were a Soviet spy. It was
an up and rising blue collar class street but like the old saying
goes, “You can take the girl out of the mountains but you can't
take the mountain out of the girl.” They benefited from the post
WW2 economy but didn't learn to pull their arms up and stop dragging
their knuckles. Many of my neighbors at times were judgmental and
coarse enough to bellow it from their front yards so all could hear
their wise savvy.
When it came to verbal chest thumping,
you stood your ground by being full mouthed and loutish. This brought
you street cred. Any attempts at higher class gentility to make your
point branded you “uppity” and therefore your opinion must be
wrong. Your views could be dismissed on that alone.
My Dad, never had friends in this
neighborhood, not the kind you have where you hang out on Saturday
mornings talking over a fence. He waved at them, said the required
“Good Morn!” or “Howya doin' Jake” and that was it. He'd look
down and disappear into the house or his car. He rarely ever spoke
badly of them either, not in front of me that I could tell. Not even
living in the same house did I hear of it whispered or slip out. But
even so, you could tell he felt grated by them. When you're a kid,
you possess an ever increasing ability to discern the people's faces and what they really thought.
Dad, who grew up in factory row
housing, served in Korea and luckily learned he had a brain had a
wild thought, get an education. With it, he left the Main St area of
Pawtucket and settled on the area here called then, “The Plains.”
The Plains was a flat grassland of Pawtucket near the Seekonk
border, where Levittown style Capes were built after the war. It
wasn't opulent but it was a step up. That
education he received from Bryant all those years ago got him
expelled from your average Joe PunchClock crowd.
So, back to my main story...
There was Mr Jeffries, a Nixon loving,
pro Vietnam, nigger hating braggart who once said to my face, “Are
you a boy or a girl?” He said that as my hair at the age of ten
was a might bit longer than your standard Marine cut. He had one son
who sort of seemed odd to me. He was “too good” if you know what
I mean. Everything in it's right place. Great grades and a Wally
Beaver haircut. But his eyes looked away if you looked into them
directly. He didn't want to be found out and I immediately started to
suspect something was wrong. I've mentioned before Mr. Jeffries had the balls
to say to me a few months after my Dad's death that he, in heaven,
would “be ashamed of you now.” True, after Dad died, I could do
whatever it was I wanted...and I did. But no cops ever brought me
home and I was always a stubborn prick when it came to guarding my
freedom and spouting off my opinions. This, was a sin in Jeffrie's
eyes. I was not toeing the line like a good soldier/son.
But being a smart ass, Wise Acker as
they called it back then, I dropped the worst bomb into his lap as I
could think of. I affirmed his suspicion about me and used it to
crush him. When he said that little insult to me, I countered with,
“Why do you think my Dad's in heaven?” He slowly backed into his
house and closed the door.
I...knew my Dad, he
didn't.
Then there were the up and comings on
the street who lost it all eventually, but before they did, they made
sure they rubbed it into everyone's face.
Mr DePasquale, made it sort of big
doing what he did and showed it off via cars, property and boats.
His kids, with that odd Sicilian tan in winter, were just as
obnoxious as they reminded you of what they had and what you didn't.
“We went to Disneyland over Christmas
vacation...what did you do?” I heard once. What was funny, in the
end, was that Mr. DePasquale had made the stupid move of getting a
loan from the local mafia chieftain. He couldn't pay back in time
and lo and behold, the boat, the 14 foot long Cadillac and a host
other goods were placarded with “For Sale Signs” outside his
house. After that, his bark, his kid's barks, were decidedly
quieter.
When my Dad was elected CEO of the
First Federal and Loan in '76, the neighborhood was abuzz I found
out. Not all of the talk was positive either. I overheard one
conversation as they saw me, his son, ride a bike by them, shifting
the conversation to my Dad. They soon forgot about me but being 12,
my hearing was that of a hawk.
Mr. Cody, who we kids dubbed, “Stinky
Little Midget” was a 24/7 green Dickies wearing man. I'm hard
pressed remembering him wearing anything else. He probably was about
five feet tall at best and drove this large Pontiac that made him
seem even smaller. We'd see him drive home from his job, which was
all of two blocks away, behind that giant steering wheel. No one saw
his wife, who was his size and he had one son a few years older than
me. He hated my guts, but for the life of me I still don't know why.
Now that I think of it...I may have seen Mr Cody's wife once or
twice..in a quick glance.
Mr Cody, I overheard, said to another
neighbor about my Dad's promotion, “Hmmph! He gets promoted for
what? He's never done REAL work in his life! He's a PAPER pusher! He
works at a bank for God's sake...he counts money all day long!”
This is what Mr Cody thought bank
managers do all day long.
In the end, Mr Cody dies several
decades later. His wife, without even notifying their only son that
Dad had died, has him cremated and puts the house up for sale. I
think his son found out a month later. I wonder if she flushed her
husband down the toilet?
Then there was Mr Enos, a worker for
Quonset (a one time industrial/defense concern that did something for
the Navy). He was a piece of work. In 1977, he still put Brill Cream
in his hair when Disco hair fluffed with hair dryers was the norm
then. Also, he sometimes rode around on a CHIPS-styled highway
patrol motorcycle. He fancied himself a Master Carpenter and
reworked his own home so many times that the peak of the roof was
sagging from his removing the supporting inside walls to make his
house seem “bigger” on the inside. He also was believed in Bing
Crosby Parenting Style, beat your kids...in the front yard...where
everyone can see. He was great friends of the aforementioned Mr
Jeffries.
His wife was this small, fattened shrew
who sported this hairstyle and never changed it, even throughout the 80's.
Mr Enos too had his opinions and
usually aped the ones Mr Jeffries had. I suspect parenthood didn't
wear too well on Enos as he struck me as a fidgety, nervous guy who
was always yelling at his litter of boys to stop this or stop that.
Mr Enos also told my mother that I was “far too out of control.”
But again, I reiterate, I never had the cops stop by my house, my
grades were excellent and I never set fire to anyone's cat.
This story is funny and it does show my
“un-parented” side when my Dad was gone...it also brings in Mr
Enos.
Jim and I managed to find a stray dog
while we were out goofing around. Stray dogs are very gregarious and
if you feed them anything, they will follow you
home. Jim and I were outside my house when I threw a hard ball to see
if the dog would fetch it. He did! I then had an idea that I shared
with Jimmy, who hated Mr Enos as much as I did. I told him I would
throw the ball as hard as I could down the street, it would probably
bounce once or twice...then smack Mr Enos's garage door. The dog
would fetch the ball and bring it back to us for more fun.
It was night, around 9:30 when we
started. I whipped the ball as well as I could and it did exactly as
I thought. It bounced once and BANG! It hit the door. I held the dog
back as Mr Enos's light would come on and he'd scout around to see
what was wrong. When he went inside, I let the dog loose and he flew
down the street, and after some time, find the ball and return it.
Jim and I were guffawing with laughter. We smacked his garage door
about twelve times when Mr Enos finally figured it out.
He rang up my Mom, who then came
outside and question us both. We of course, denied it all. Thanks to
my Mom's low opinion of Mr Enos, she thought that this crime wasn't
worth any effort to scold me. Once inside the house, she tells me
that Mr Enos said to her, “Don't you think 10pm is a little late
for your son to be out?” I was 14 then.
P.S. I don't regret that incident, it
was funny as hell! And Enos was a jerk among jerks.
Now all my neighbors weren’t jerks.
Don't get the impression that they were. But for some reason I swear
we had our allotment of them, perhaps too many than the standard few
everyone gets.
