Lock Your Diaries!

My brother Ken aspired to be a writer and to some extent managed to find a niche in a couple of RI monthly magazines. He wrote many comedy pieces, some serious articles and had a decent hand at cartooning. He got his start by keeping a journal (not a diary...diaries for guys are too sissified! Jack London kept a journal, Richard Simmons kept a diary). Ken was pretty forthcoming and truthful in his entries. How do I know? Because his jackass little brother (me) would secretly read them all. I was pretty good at ferreting out all of his hiding places within the house and it never did take too much work to discover hidden gems.

In 1976, my Dad was wanting his oldest son to acquire his first job, get a feel for the workaday life and learn to manage his very own money. Ken, then 16, caved in and got a job as a busboy at a place called Ponderosa Steak House on Washington Street (Rt 1) in South Attleboro.

Ponderosa Steakhouse was this cafeteria/Old West saloon-looking place that served nothing but various kinds of steaks. You got steak, a baked potato and a salad bar...that was it. It was also awfully lit up with yellow fluorescent lighting that made it feel like a bus station. My Dad loved the place as Dad discovered that eating red meats, a lot, was the path to nirvana. So, as a family, we went there more than often enough. Due to my having weak teeth, even then, I never did want to get the regular steaks as they seemed tough to me. I wanted what they called the “chopped” version. Think of it as those cube steaks you see in the meat display at Stop and Shop. It looks like a 2 ton metal press was rammed on top of it. Those were great...pre-chewed steaks! If my damn teeth weren't so mobile I suppose I could've had the Delmonicos and ribeyes.

My brother hated the job and kept it as long enough to satisfy my Dad, who then got him a position in the bank as a teller afterwards. As long as he was working, that was enough for Dad.

One night, while my brother was out with his friends, I was in the house, bored and a thought hit me. “It's been a couple of weeks since I read his journal, wonder what he's been up to?” So I find it again in the same place, on the floor of his closet, pushed to the back, with a few pennies on top to show if it had been moved. I, being a smart cookie, always put the pennies back in place after I read it.

I'm paraphrasing this because it's so long ago...but it's true!

May 18, 1976

(the usual stuff going on at St Ray's that day..) Then this funny thing about Ponderosa:

“I was asked by Paul, my boss, to take this vat of gravy from the kitchen out to the line. As I was carrying it, I felt this sneeze coming on. But because I was carrying a gallon or so of flaming liquid, I couldn't just put it down anywhere or whatever. I sneezed and I shot, from both nostrils, two globs of snot right onto the top of the gravy. I knew Paul was a stickler about food waste so I wasn't about to tell him about it. I found a table, put the gravy down and mixed the snot into it with a paint mixing stick I found nearby. No one saw it happen and I said nothing!”

When I read that, I busted out laughing. So much so that my Dad, irked by it downstairs, yells up, “What's so funny??!” I shouted back down, giggling, “This Mad magazine!” He shouted up to “keep it down.” I managed to do so but I kept giggling to myself at the idea of blowing snot into someone's dinner.

So, if you were a patron at Ponderosa Steakhouse on Washington St on May 18^th 1976, there was a small chance you ate a teen boy's snot. Those weren't roux balls floating in the gravy!

What's interesting about reading other's very private thoughts is that at times, they talk about YOU! I manage to find out what he thought about me. A few areas my brother was concerned with then was:

1. My hair was far too long, even for the late '70s.
2. My choice of friends he called, “sketchy.” How, at 11 years old, could I have sketchy friends? Well, I did I guess. Little pre-criminals...all of Pawtucket was full of pre-criminals.
3. That he probably, shouldn't have, maybe...given me my first pot to smoke.
4. My brother knew he a great reputation out there in the world, most liked him. One time, he wrote after we two had had an argument that, “Ronnie threatened to tell everyone just what kind of person I really was, behind closed doors.” This is true, I can remember this argument. I had found out my brother was gossiping about me to his friends out in the real world and it got back to me. I then threatened to alert everyone he knew just what a bastard he really could be. My brother responded by threatening me to beat my head in if I ever did. I said that perhaps we two should make a bargain, you shut up and I'll shut up.
5. That he was going to play MatchMaker and set me up with Gail, the girl who I bashed in the stomach a year earlier when I was 10 . She had split my lip with a balled up fist. The fight was a draw. When I read this, I was shocked...I didn't like the thought of him pushing me towards her to kiss her! We two might have been happier, at 11, to punch each other out instead.

A year or so after he had died, I violated the shit out of Ken's privacy once again. I had collected all his property, things and what not and had to decide what to do with them. One of the journals I wanted to share with his best friend, Tom. Tom was mentioned over a hundred times in his journal and I figured, hey, why not...give this to Tom and he can have a pretty intimate remembrance of Ken when those two were teens. A month later I get a phone call: “Jesus, Ronnie...all those memories...all those times...I hadn't known he wrote them down...but there's shit in here I'd never admit to anyone..even to my grave...even so...this was soo cool!”

I figured he'd like it.

HERstory of Pawtucket

The women's movement didn't hit Pawtucket, the girls or me till 1976. It was introduced to us in Miss Mara's 6^th grade class by part-time, younger nurse in training, Nurse LeClair. For years in residence, we had a fat, bitchy, white clothed nurse. She would admonish us, rubbing salt into the wound, when she patched up skinned knees. “Well, that's what you get for jumping off the fence!” Those kids who got “sick” during the school day had better have proof for her, like vomit on the floor, because w/o some kind of tell-tale sign, she sent you right back to class. She trained in '76, the new nurse who we found out did time with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. She didn't wear the usual white garb of nurse at all but regular street clothes with a white lab coat. Add to that her outspokenness.

This new nurse had “modern” ideas. Every time she'd come into the class to hold a talk about health, cleanliness and whatnot, we'd learn them. One time she had us all chew those red dye pills, then brush out teeth and admonish, the boys mostly, for doing a shitty job. The boy's teeth had gobs of that dye still stuck to where we missed teeth. The damn girls were always showing us up because they did a far better job.

“Nutrition Day” I got busted for once. For years, I had an addiction to Coca Cola (and still have!) and I admitted to something that got her on my case fast. She was going over the four food groups and then started to ask each and every one of us what we had for breakfast that morning. When she got to me I stupidly told the truth.

“...and you Ronnie? What did you have?”

“A glass of Coke and a Flintstone vitamin.”

“What?”

“A glass of Coke and a...” I repeated before I was cut off.

“Who lets you have Coke for breakfast?”

“I let myself have Coke.” I say.

“But doesn't your Mom cook breakfast?” she asks.

Shit, time to divert this conversation, don't want any pesky questions about my home life. I tell her that I was never ever really hungry when I got up. I managed to change the subject just enough to prevent the nurse from calling DCYF with charges of neglect. To this day, I still don't have breakfast. I ain't hungry when I get up. I'm 52 and still have Coke for breakfast instead.

“Open your mouth.” she demands. So I do. She looks in, inspecting it all.

“There's eleven fillings in your teeth!” she says.

“Yes!" I proudly say, like it's some badge of honor.

“All that soda you drink is doing that to you! You should drink water instead.” I respond to that by saying I couldn't stand water. It's true. As a kid, I hated it. Want to know why? Pawtucket chlorinates their water so much that it tastes like a YMCA pool.

**

There was sex education in 1976, for the girls...a one time only “talk” from the nurse. We boys got nothing, nadda, zilch, zero. Any sex education we learned was from friends and older siblings who opened our eyes to how babies were made.

“I have to stick it in where? In her? Augggghh....Grosssss!” we eight year old boys would shriek.

I'm sure the girls were just as thrilled at the prospect of filthy, rambunctious boys trying that.

Nurse LeClair came to our class one day and after a quick, quiet chat with Mara, she said, “OK, all you girls follow me to the library.”

We boys were perplexed. Why not us?

After an hour, the girls came back. Every.single.one of them walked in in dead silence, sat at their desks and not a peep was heard. All of us boys really began to wonder just what talk had happened. We later found out from one of the other girls what it was all about. YUCK!

A minute or so later, LeClair comes in and starts to speak mainly to the girls of what they want to do when they grow up. It felt like a continuation of a conversation they had just minutes before. I swear LeClair wasn't quite done with the girls yet.

All through grammar school, there were three occupations the girls said they wanted to be, nurse, Mommy or secretary. You rarely heard anything about being a CEO of biomed company.

LeClair takes note of the Mommy occupation. “You just want to be a Mommy...” She had repeated this answer of one girl when asked. “There are a lot of things you can be....than just a Mom.”

She went on on how the girls were just as good as the boys and could attend college, get a degree and be engineers for NASA, doctors or business women. She went on on how the women won the vote, did the jobs during WW2 and that any girl in this class could do the same or better.

“But won't we have to join the Army if there's a war?” one worried girl said.

“If you want to be EQUAL...yes! It's a great career! And there isn't always war.” she goes on.

“My Mom said that I'd be a great mommy one day. I can already cook 'n' clean 'n' I babysit!” one girl chimes up.

“Does your Daddy clean the house?” asks LeClair.

“No...”

“Why not?” LeClair let that question hang in the air.

The girls didn't really know what to make of this talk, gauging from the looks on their faces. I doubt they ever entertained an idea of anything else but what they saw their moms, aunts and sisters do. We boys felt a bit miffed as we were totally cut out of the conversation. We could easily feel that the nurse had turned coat and had joined the girls against us boys. Or at least that's what it felt like for a bit. What about us?

But I'll tell you this, by 8^th grade, two quick years, most of those sixth grade girls became harder core feminists. By then, the saturation on TV and media was complete and it was personally introduced to the our local girls by a Peace Corps nurse in our classroom. The girls at 14 began to really shove it in the boy's faces then. This was Second Wave feminism reaching Pawtucket finally. Some of those girls I went so to school with then, one runs a real estate agency, another became the bond desk manager for Merrill Lynch and one other a dentist. Not bad.

Some, not all, of the 20 Something girls I run into at times today, are steeped in that Third Wave Feminism that's here now. Long since ditched are the ideas about work, equal pay, pornography and the such. Now it's all Lesbian Theory, retaliation against any sexual repression and slut shaming. It's all niche rights now and fractionilized to a Baskin Robbins 4,504.6 flavors of sexual identity. 

I don't care what you do in your backyard, if it involves sheep, great, go for it, rape them all! But please don't ardently dump your lifestyle into my backyard. There is a reason for the word "tact" being in existence. Don't molest your sheep in my driveway please.