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.