Coming to Accords

So what does that mean? In the song, he wishes for a perfect, mechanical heart built in the Rust Belt that never gets old or broken, ever.

 

 

Most mornings, I wake up with a song playing in my head. I don't know why but it's a habit. Why wouldn't it be for me? I love music if you couldn't tell by my forever posting songs no one listens to anymore (or even like). Then there's the amount of cash I've spent on stereo equipment over the years trying to perfect that sound. In the world's “Things to do with your life,'' that's fairly noble...No? Hell, at least I'm not working on an ardent meth lifestyle.

Today I woke up with Jackson Browne's “The Pretender,” which isn't a bad song to arise to on a summer Saturday morning. After I get up, I make the rounds through the house. Turn on the computer, synch it with the stereo system and then grab a Coke. Once that is done, I click on MVY's station out of Tisbury and the day has now officially started. I then get curious about Browne's The Pretender so I Google that and I get a Rolling Stone article that impales the song and it's music.

“Dude, you don't know a fucking thing about what Browne's writing about” I say to myself as I read it. “You haven't lived with loss nor absurdity...you're lucky!” When I was young I'd take this critic for his word because he's a published critic, a professional! Now after piling on the decades, any critic's judgment is seen through my own eyes and that experience is as valid as theirs, perhaps more. 

 

**

Unfortunately for all of us, because it never lasts, our best creativity happen when we are young. There is a time in our 20s', say 30's where we “peak” and everything we touch, generally turns to gold, or at least silver. It takes almost no effort really as we are bustin' out, blooming all over. That is the nature of youth. It's supposed to happen that way. It's why you see the discographies of various artists simply just hit it, again and again, so effortlessly when they're peaking.

Browne is 72 years old now. His latest album, which so few will listen to, is called “Downhill From Everywhere.” In it, he still is looking for that perfect love, the Answer To It All and some hope for that fruition he's been searching for. In his defense though, he does reconcile the dreams he has with real life. He knows that even at his age the hope is still there, even if it's not realistic to ape the younger dreams.  Hope however, never stops nagging you to advance. It won't stop till you've spun out your line and are too worn out to try. Browne sees this coming and realizes life can be just too unknowable to solve, so he harmonizes the opposing truths as well as he can.

I remember George Harrison's last album and a song called “Stuck Inside a Cloud.” I had thought, with Harrison's lifelong devotion to Hinduism, all those yogis and tapping into the deepest of the deep, he'd have some answers. But in that song he admits he wasn't any closer to The Answer at all, even to the last when the throat cancer was taking him out. Whether he recoiled it all I don't know.

I digress with that, somewhat...

Browne writes a song about Barcelona where he gets, for a brief time, a feeling of being young once more. The strikingly different sights and culture of that city wake him up a bit. He mentions that he passes young women on the street and can't help but feel that spark to chase them, but realizes at 72, it would be a joke! He mentions his “Use by Date” has long since passed. The millions he has made over the years could find a young gold digger to pay attention to him but it's false and he knows this.

There are countless times I'm reminded of just how old I am, how far away I am from those salad days I did once own. At an old haunt of a beach I used to hang out in '94, I was walking up and down it, with a pair of giant Celestron binoculars, watching the rich frolic on their yachts and those tough motherfuckers who clam for a living, forever pulling on those rakes. Even 1,000 yards away, I could make out what they were up too. By the way, the well off like to piss off the side of their pleasure craft at times, not that I wanted to see that but when they think they're 1000 yards from anyone and all alone...

The only thing I needed to complete my white haired, old guy look was a metal detector.

As I walked along the beach, I came upon a women, perhaps barely 25, spread out on her blanket, her skin glistening from tanning oil. There are a few who still do purposely tan I was surprised to find out. As I got closer, I could tell how hot she was. I kept telling myself, “Don't stare! Don't stare!” but I had to look. Inside I heard myself “Go ahead, talk to her...she's alone...”

“Are you fucking kidding yourself?” the other part of my brain said. “What possible future would she have with a guy who's pushing 58? Never mind any of the other things she may want, like someone who doesn't nearly die panting while climbing a moderate sized mountain that doesn't qualify as one of New Hampshire's '48's'”

I kept walking and kept my mouth shut.

How did I manage to reconcile that? Barely. But I had this thought. It all keeps repeating, every generation that comes along gets to play for a while while young. And I knew that she, and some boys her age out there, are playing that game, enjoying it as well as they can. I had my time, now it's theirs. It hasn't stopped because I got older nor will it stop.

Good for them!

Dark Humor

 

There's a reason why “Easy, happy” stories don't get written. “Tom had to get a biopsy done as the Dr's noticed a spot on his pancreas. They successfully got the sample and sent it out. After a week, Tom got his results. The test was benign with no hint of cancer.”

The End.

Ok, now what? Where do you go from there? He celebrated for a few days? Ok, that wears off fast...No story there.

That's why you have to have a problem in a story. Conflict, grief, doom and gloom. OK, I'm being facetious but it's true. It can't be all puppies and ice cream because life isn't like that. More often, there is no resolution to more than one of life's problems or at best, an forever updating sloppy fix to it. These stories don't have to be novels and can be short. In fact, here's the world's shortest, saddest story.

Hemingway was challenged along with a few other writers to come up with the shortest, most miserable story they could create. When they all met again to show what they had done, everyone thought Hemingway instantly won. Here's the story he wrote.

“FOR SALE: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Immediately your own imagination fills in that tiny sentence, doesn't it? It's supposed to. You were led there to fill in the ugliness.

How interesting would be: “FOR SALE: Baby Shoes. $20 Bucks.” No real human drama to pull you in.

Even something like Twain's “Tom Sawyer,” is like this. Yes, it was turned into a family-friendly, sugary Disney flick but Sawyer's world included: Murder, child abuse, hinted at child sexual abuse, serious and medically damaging alcoholism, dragging a river looking for bodies, racism and a great argument negating the Protestant Work Ethic.

However, the story ends with Huckleberry and Tom surviving and finding the gold. Bad Injun Joe gets “his” from slipping off a ledge and dying. There's a hint that Becky and Tom may get married one day. Finally, the town widow manages to get Huckleberrie's first bath in eons as the boy felt bathing was pointless.

The point being, they had to go through a ton of shit to get to that ending. Otherwise it would've been boring as hell just to hear about two boys rafting on the Mississippi, occasionally picking their noses and telling one another how bored they were.

And...that's why I write some of the shit you see here. I could write Disney stories but they'd be five sentences long. Where do you go with them? Believe me, I have far more interesting things to show you but they include humanity's usual messiness and some stories I have look messier than a Harley crash on 95. If and when I upload those...well, we'll see. But they would be guaranteed to keep your interest and you'd forward them to people you know.

That last piece I wrote about, Gia, gave me second thoughts. Some will know who I was really talking about as there were enough clues. The part about disparaging her name bugged me but everyone who knew her then was aware of what was going on. That was no secret. Add to that, it's been 25 years and the past is dust, except for guys like me who keep digging it up as it were an Egyptian crypt. I could've written about how Gia was somewhat instrumental in my meeting that girl where I felt, “Ahhhhhh...my God..Look at HER! She's sooo pretty!” It was one of those reactions where I, the male, the GUY...remembered, for years, every single thing she was wearing that night and what we spoke about when we first met. But no, that story I had written about already. So I got over my initial hesitancy and spoke of Gia.

So a quick story with conflict and consternation where I looked like the asshole to someone. There, I satisfied the First Rule in Telling Stories.

**

My brother, and I, both understood black humor. To put ourselves in with great company, so did Mark Twain who once remarked, “...I haven't heard of anything funnier since the orphanage burned down.” You'd have to understand black humor to get it. Hint? If you ever had to live with complete absurdity, there is only one way do deal with it, you laugh as there is no other answer that will work. Think I'm nuts? Read up on Albert Camus then get back to me. My brother and I had major thinker-ers from the Sorbonne, Cambridge and Heidelburg backing us up and we didn't even know it! Our black humor was a universal reaction and it was quite common.

We both had a great respect for the truth and both honed our bull shit detectors. As kids, we both saw the incredible garbage grown adults would toss us and then demand “respect” only because they were adults. That will not do. Dark humor is great for ferreting out horse crap and holding up the truth as we saw it, to the light. If it deflated adult egos, too bad. And IF it deflated your adult ego, by the words said by a kid, then you have MUCH work to do on yourself buddy!

It's also why I can come off as politically incorrect. There are heaps of BS on both sides of the political spectrum and don't try to install a particular belief in me I know to be horseshit. I have a piece on women's liberation that I've been tweaking a while and the working title? “Is It True Women Can Do No Wrong?”

I can hear the seething now. If I upload that and I will have my balls sliced off. My point, political correctness can be a gag order on free speech if taken too far.

Anyways, back to dark humor.

My brother was older so he came up with most of the comedy. He eventually ended up writing comedy for a local Providence magazine and he spared no one from his barbs. Why? Well, in order to be seen as “fair” and that you are not attacking a particular group, profession or whatever, you attack EVERYONE and mercilessly too. Everyone including orphans, the ill, whitey, the Irish, Girl Scouts and anyone else for that matter that seems to enjoy a protected status.

At 15, my brother took a bunch of my Dennis the Menace cartoons and re-wrote the captions with the most politically WRONG, bizarre, twisted yet highly honest interpretations of life. He used Dennis because of the action that was drawn in them. Peanuts cartoons are kids just standing there, Dennis actually moved around and that lent itself to many jokes. They were begging to be written!

So, one night and due to the fact I had bunch of those old cartoons in the trunk of my car, I was telling a girl I know about them and how funny there were. Well, you'd think you'd know someone well enough when you decided to open the good wine to share with them...

“What? What's the matter? You don't like Sangiovese wines? You just spit it on the floor!”

I get the cartoons out of my car, go back into the bar and plop them down before her. I had done this countless times with others in the years past and I was expecting her to laugh so hard she'd start tearing. It has in the long past with countless others!

But...

She's just flipping the pages, not saying a word.

I'm waiting and am getting curious about the silence.

Finally, she stops on one and bellows out, so the whole bar can hear.

“What the FUCK is this!?? YOU think that's FUNNY?!! This is the SICKEST shit I've EVER seen!!”

To be honest, I was really taken aback. Not anyone, in the past 30 years, had ever reacted so strongly and sooo negatively to them. Add to that a bunch of heads in the bar were turning to us to find out just what it was I had done.

So I quickly start back peddling, explaining and trying to put into context just what they were. Well, what was the point now, she was so damn emotional that 1 + 1 equaling 2 wouldn't have tallied in her head. It's impossible when some women get like that. Think that's cruel and untrue? Ask any guy...and other women how some can roll a snowball down a hill till it grows and flattens a ski village at the bottom of it.

It's called, “Blowing Things Out of Proportion.” I heard my Dad yell that at my own Mom more than a few times in the past.

So relying on my de escalation training I had from another job, I cooled the situation down. How do you do that? One very helpful thing is NOT to add to it. You don't toss gas on a fire. For a good week after when I saw her, she looked at me like I was something she'd scrape off the bottom of her shoe.

**

For a while I wondered about that reaction as it came out of nowhere. I finally talked to another in the bar about her reaction and decided to show him, privately out by the car, the cartoons. He was laughing his ass off when he read them. When we got back in, he had mentioned that “Did I know her Dad was a Pentecostal minister?”

“Uh..no...really?” I say.

“Yep... from deepest Arkansas, the entire family were Holy Rollers, well some were. She goes from absolutely loving her family or hating their guts, it depends on the day.” I'm told.

I think...”O-Kaaaaaay...that explains a lot.”

I had caught her on her “religious” night I think when I showed that stuff to her.

So, for your entertainment, I've scanned and uploaded what my brother did in his off time. I give you two options you can pick from as you read the cartoons. One day I'll tell the story of how he pissed off the Bruce Sundlund administration when he published a comedic piece on the Governor. 

1. If you are offended, I apologize.

2. Or if you are offended, go fuck yourself. 

    

    

   
   
   
   
   
   

   
   

    

 

Die Young, Stay Pretty

 

 

That's Gia Carangi. She was called the world's first super model and up-ended the industry back in the late 70's when all they promoted were tall, thin ash blonde women. Gia shows up as a stark opposite and threw those models off the magazine covers left and right. She was also one of the very few models who used little or no makeup whatsoever, she didn't need it. If you get that famous that fast, the notable photographers like Richard Avedon beg you for a shoot.

However, growing up in shitty circumstances like she did, learning and enjoying being feral as an early teen didn't help her in adulthood. She was raised in a crazy household and that doesn't teach you about how to anchor your life to some secure point nor find a harbor in a storm. So, get real rich and famous as a young adult and knowing nothing of how to navigate life, you smash up on the rocks quickly.

Before Gia discovered drugs while in NYC people said was a charm to be around. No negativity or darkness. However, the drug usage grew (lastly heroin) and due to this and a host of other problems, she became too unreliable, too erratic to be employed in the fashion business. Her bouts of anger, storming out of photo sessions or not even showing up at all wasn't helping her career along much. The photographers began to complain of the track marks on her arms and tried to touch them up in the developing room. It wasn't long after when no one would hire her.

She burnt through her cash and ended up homeless in NYC's shooting galleries. Feeling sick one day, she goes to the hospital and after a bunch of tests, she was found positive for the AIDs virus from sharing needles. This was the mid 80s when this diagnosis was a death sentence.

She died in 1986 and from what those saw who visited her then, she was emaciated and covered head to toe in those skin cancers AIDs patients were prone too. It was months later that the fashion industry had learned of her passing and just one photographer friend from then, sent a Mass card to her parents. Otherwise the business did nothing to remember her.

To replace the mega bucks Carangi used to bring into the agencies and recreate that “look,” they found Cindy Crawford and the fashion world dubbed her, “Baby Gia.” 

Angelina Jolie played Gia in a biopic and said about her character: "When she's free and just being herself, she's unbelievable; that's the tragedy of Gia's story. You think, 'God, Gia didn't need drugs -- she was a drug.'"

 

**

I'll have to be careful about how I write this next story and the reason why is that you're not so supposed to speak ill of the dead or disparage their reputation. So I'll have to tread carefully but tell the truth as well as I can. Yes, the person I will speak of is dead and has been so for over 20 year now I believe. I'll call her Gia.

Since I'm an awful stalker on Google looking up people I used to know, I looked up Gia and she didn't exist. So I put a search through Google images and the first picture that showed up shocked me. I swore it was Gia. The picture linked to a Facebook account that was open and I hit it up.

It was Gia's daughter. I had found out at Gia's death that she had two kids but that's all I knew. The girl on the Facebook page looked like a ghost I knew from long ago. This spectre I saw was a near clone of Gia from then. Spooooky! I never bothered “friending” because all I had were the ugly stories about her Mom.

**

I briefly hung at “Horton's Lot” by the Teknor Apex Chemical complex as a late teen. More truthfully, I was pestered and dragged to hang there by J, who for some reason liked those kids. They all were your real lower blue class types. Their parents worked in shit factory jobs then and because they and their kids were closer to “the street,” they were rougher and more prone to pound the shit out of each other, including the girls.

J. and I show up one night at the lot and Gia (16), Eric(19) and Sue (17) hop into my car and we take off to drive around aimlessly. I had known Eric from the lot but not the two girls. So after a bunch of “Hi's” we talk and listen to the radio. The two girls were pretty in their own right but Gia had something else...a cuteness...a personality that was very engaging. Her heart was in the right place and that can make a girl look even prettier. It's that freshness anyone has, before life beats the shit out of you. Hopeful, full of energy and showed promise. I knew many teens then who were already wrung through wringer and were too soon ruined. But not Gia. Not yet.

Eric and Gia were in the back seat and from the conversation I figured out they were a couple. I had learned that as Gia was trying to hold Eric to a promise he'd “buy her those earrings” she saw at the flea market.

“That's it! Hold him to it!” yells Sue from the front seat to them. Girls must stick together you know! For about thirty minutes the chatter from the back seat is typical teen couple shit, arguing somewhat with protestations of love seconds later.

After a bit, the back seat gets real quiet and I turn my head around to see what's gone wrong. I then see Gia's head slowly bobbing up and down on Eric's lap and I quickly turn my head back to driving. Whoops!, I shouldn't have seen that I think. Sue had turned around too but kept watching.

“Wow, this chick Gia doesn't care at all, and neither does this Sue.” I thought.

A few months go by and I get to know the two girls better. Gia was a pure goofball personality wise. It was a nice goofball mind you, nothing that would suggest malice at all. I figured there was some mental damage along the way that made her ditzy silly. But the problem with that is that there was plenty of pot, coke and pills then and if she took any of those at all, her ditzyness was raised 300%. That also made her an easy target for the boys as well. When the beer and pot made her brains run out of her ears, her panties ran off too. Apparently, the girls of that little clique at Horton's Lot didn't really care that she was like this. Your lower classes start early when it comes to anything “adult.” To add to that, we were just out of the 70s where shctupping anyone you wanted was fine.

I was there at the Lot for a few months when I started to hear my inner smoke detector going off. The boys at that lot were far too willing to be pre-criminals and I could see where this was going to lead, graduated criminals with degrees from the ACI. I didn't want to be associated with this and as the old saying goes, 'You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.' So I stopped going there.

No loss. I wasn't about to caught up in their little petty conspiracies and car thefts. Also, I had turned myself into Mr. College Kid by then and that was the path I wanted to follow.

But, on occasion, we'd drive by there and stop for a few minutes because someone from our original haunt in Slater Park had wanted to go and one night I saw Gia again.

She was high as shit. She had shaved one side of her head down to crew cut style and swept the rest of her long hair over the other side into this puffed up 80s style. She wore torn jean cut-off shorts and her tee shirt was tied up into a mid riff. She was bouncing from car to car, sloppy drunk. When she had some to ours I was already outside, leaning against the hood

“Ronnnnnny!” She had remembered me. I got the hug and sloppy lush's kiss and she had asked me how I was and all that. Before I could get her into a conversation, she had seen something shiny over there and ran off. She still possessed that nice open hearted innocence in her but she was a mess. Life, I guess, even in her state, had not made her bitter and ugly yet. Or perhaps she was too numb to notice anyways. Perhaps she wanted it that way.

By my car, on the side walk against the fence, were three girls I had remembered who still hung at the Lot. After Gia had run off the girls made their pronouncements to themselves.

“Fuck...what a pig!” “Wonder what different kinds of DNA will be in her stomach tonight?” “God...she's sooo disgusting!” The panel of judges ruled her as a bonafide skank and this, coming from girls, is solid sentence of social death.

This, coming from real lower class girls who lost their virginity by early 15 and who could beat on a Pawtucket cop w/o any reservation if need be. That's a heavy judgment when your condemned by them!

Those girls could tell I had heard that and one says, “You haven't been here in a while...you know what Gia's doing now?” I'm asked.

“Her Mom threw her out of the house....she's been fuckin' n' suckin' guys for a places to live now...the last one let her sleep in his car only!”

Then a couple of years go by w/o seeing her.

**

J. who used to bug me to go to Horton's Lot to begin with, now had a small apartment on Barton St. He was in a longish process of leaving RI anyways so our crew didn't visit him much. He was on his way. But one night he had gotten ahold of me and said Gia was just recently staying with him.

Gia and I were alone in my car as J. had gone back inside. She looks at me and asks, “Do you have a washing machine and dryer...J doesn't and this building doesn't either.” Gia's entire life was in a Hefty bag she had thrown in the back seat of my Nova.

I thought about it...and gave in.

She looked haggard now for a 20 year old. Her hair was a bit greasy and you could see the skull pushing through her face a bit. She had lost quite a bit of weight when she had no reason to begin with. She just looked plain worn out and tired. That bouncy ditz I knew were replaced by a look in the eye I've seen in schizophrenics, it's a wolf's look that's always on guard, ready to spot any danger at anytime and ready to flee, or pounce. Those stupid jokes she used to tell weren't needed as they no longer served her, that was substituted by hard core survival duplicity and strategy. Life had sure changed her these past years.

She tells me to leave and blow off J., to just leave him at his apartment.

“He thinks he's gonna get some but fuck that!' she tells me. I guess she was tired of that as well and had an ounce of dignity left.

We get to my house and I sneak her in, then down stairs and she starts dumping her clothing into the machine. She then walked away from me over by the furnace to block my view but I can see somewhat. She pulls off her tee shirt and quickly puts on as far too large sweat shirt I had for her. When she pulled that shirt, I saw her stomach and it had about 6-8 largish mosquito bites with bruising all around them. What was weird was that the mosquito that bit her loved Euclidean geometry, a nice straight line of them.

It hit me what those marks were. “Well, at least she ain't mainlining it.” I thought.

The wash took a couple of hours so we took off driving and I hear about her life, as she told it but it was full of lies and horseshit, trying to cover up what a mess it was now. I didn't bother to extract the truth out of her, what was the point? I let her ramble on.

We get back and collect her stuff and she says to go back to J's house and I drop her off there.

Another five years go by.

Snippets of her life came to us in dribs and drabs. She was living in the shittier parts of Providence. I heard nothing more till around 1999.

**

Rhode Island is a small town. You will hear about people you haven't seen in decades eventually. Since I was friends with the EMT crews on Pawtucket's fire department, I'd hear all sorts of weird stories and on rare occasions of calls these guys went on where we knew the person.

I was talking to D and we were hitting old memories when I mentioned Gia.

“Oh, shit..I was on that call.” D says.

“What call?” I had no idea where this was going.

“Ok...we get a call that two kids were across the street from their home, telling their neighbor's that 'Mom won't wake up.' So the neighbor shrewdly kept the kids at his house and he goes across the street. He was the one who called.”

“We found her in her bed, dead as a door nail. The cops and medical examiner have to come so we wait and when they arrive, they find out who she was...I swear, they knew what to look for and they found it, needles, pills, heroin and the works.” Like I said, in RI, your life is known by all.

I say, “Wow, she finally did it! Straight down!”

“Not really,” D goes on, “her life went to total shit and she got into a rehab program, managed to get off of it, get a job, rent that house and got her kids back from the state. What the medical examiner suspects, she fell off the wagon, got the drugs and shot herself to the moon. She fucked up dosing herself.”

She was 28.

Since it was the Pawtucket FD that went on that call, I asked D. “Where was this house? I didn't know she was back in Pawtucket again.”

“Hell, it's three blocks from YOU...Over by Beverage Hill...It's a good area, a nice house too, clean inside, lawn cut and all.”

I had no idea she was less than a half mile from me, or that she had gone that way.

**

  

It's been years since I used to sneak back to Gia's daughter's Facebook page just to look her photos, all grown up at 22. “You have Mom's face...you're Gia.” I'd say to myself. After a bit I stopped looking, you process stuff from the past and move on. It's what we all do.

 

Canoga Park

 

 

Being 14 years old was great for me. It was the first year after my Dad's death which meant I could do any goddamn thing I wanted, and I did mostly without getting caught. It also was the first year of hitting puberty but that's not what we're here for, but you get the point. A host of all sorts of new discoveries open up for you. So, being 14 for me was like standing up the entire time on a roller coaster ride, hanging onto the safety bar for dear life.

This must have happened to you countless times. You meet someone for a few weeks and they make an impression on you. Then, as quickly as they showed up, they flew away, never to be seen again. I had that experience with a 14 year old kid who was from California.

His name was Tim. The first time we had seen him, he had walked down our street and stopped to talk to us which was weird to begin with. No stranger just stops to talk to you in New England and if they do, your suspicion is greatly aroused. “What...Do you want from me?” is forefront in your mind. But he being a Californian, it's totally natural to do so but we didn't know they were like that.

Tim looked different too and I couldn't put my finger on it till I was much older. We New England kids, especially the boys, dressed with whatever it was our parents could afford. In the late 70's it was a lot of tee shirts or flannel shirts for the winter and the ubiquitous jeans and sneakers. That didn't change too much over time. And there was no attention paid to whether any of what we were wearing “clashed.” Our hair then was longish and not always “kept.” We were sort of sloppy looking. The girls of our neighborhood were constrained by their parent's budget but did a much better job at looking presentable...except for a few who were accursed gutter slop muppets, never to be salvaged from their sad state. There was Rose Mary, a missing front-toothed, malevolent as hell bitch who, if she threatened to beat your ass, you had to sit up and took notice.

Tim just looked...”right...” all the time. I found out why so much later. He was a Californian and they tend to be a bit shallow when it comes to their “look.” They spend more time than most getting it accurate. His hair was styled after Barry Gibb and neat. His jeans were spotless, ironed and creased. Any shirt he wore was ironed as well. His sneakers were impeccable, as if they were new, perpetually new. Our sneakers looked like shit. Our Keds were stained, torn, falling apart or some awful color no one should purchase, like puke green. Hell, the sneakers under my desk right now are ratty as shit. Some things never change!

On top of that Tim was fully tan in June. None of us Irish or Polish kids ever gained a tan till late August. We burned, turned red, peeled then got slightly darker. Tim on the other hand “worked” on his tan and should've been in an ad for Hawaiian Tropic, the Golden Boy. I don't think any of us ever laid out in the sun to “work” on it but he would. If we tanned, it was an accidental tee shirt tan.

Then, anything that came from California was “with it” and cool, or so we East kids felt. Any fad or style that came to us, first came from LA. This was the 70s! Everything prior to 1980 was better! Sex didn't kill you because there was no AIDS, cocaine wasn't so pure as to cause addiction and skin cancer was pretty much unheard of. Being lily white in California was sooo uncool then. When it came to us, we tried but northern European genetics won't allow tans.

Tim made his way into our group fairly easily because we took a liking to him. His natural friendliness we found out was authentic (After our New England-y natural frostiness warmed after we found he didn't “want” anything from us) and he seemed fun to be around with.

So what the hell was he doing in...Pawtucket?

He told us that his Dad was a salesman for a large company and that he lived in Braintree but was staying with his grandmother a few streets over for a while.

Where was his Mom we asked.

“Oh, my parents are getting divorced, so I get to live on both coasts if I want too.”

That really struck me as I had NEVER met anyone whose parents were divorced. We all have heard of it but never met anyone going through or living it. Around here at the time, marrieds stayed together, even if there were weekly scream fests we all could hear a street away. None of the kids I knew at school had divorced parents either. It would take a few more years before our little world learned the phrase, “irreconcilable differences” and what a boon that was to marrieds who wanted nothing but OUT.

“Where are you from..where were you born?” J asked.

“Canoga Park...” Tim says

And...we just stare clueless.....Duuuuuuhhhh...What's a Canoga Park?

“Canoga Park...Ya know...The Valley?” 

We all looked dopey to him when he finally says loudly...

”LOS ANGELES!”

“Oh yeah, that...Yeah, We know it” we all chimed in, finally getting it but that lead still gave us no idea to where Canoga Park was.

**

One time, he and I were sitting on the curb near J.s house behind me, because it's summer and there's nothing to do but waste time when he asks me:

“You know anyone who has 'ludes?”

“Ludes?” I say.

“Yeah, ya know, mandrakes, 714's, lemons...”

I have no clue.

“You have no idea what they are do you?” he says.

So I, being a 14 year old boy and having to seem as worldly as he is say,

“I know! I know! It's just that it's dry here now for them!” It was total bullshit. I hadn't the slightest idea what they were.

Later on that night, I ask my older brother, who was at Providence College at the time, what a lude was.

He turns around and with a shit eating grin and almost accusingly asks:

“Why...do YOU want to know what a lude is?”

So I tell him Tim was asking for them.

He had met and known Tim from seeing him with our gang and figured it out.

“He's from Los Angeles right? Quaaludes are like Tic Tacs there. They're legal and wicked popular.” He had seen some around his college but they weren't as popular as cocaine was. Quaaludes were so well liked because there was no real damage from doing them daily. They were invented as a kick ass sleeping pill. If you could get past the first 30 mins of drowsiness and stay awake the euphoria you felt after was great.

I, and our gang, knew Tim was just 14, but as we got to know him we realized he was older than that. He was far more grown up than we first thought.

And I and the gang, were getting jealous.

All kids want to seem more grown up than they are. We were no exception. We bragged to one another about our worldly knowledge, things we never did but claimed to have. It was typical teen boy posturing. But, Tim was doing it, living it. He was real.

I remember the feeling I started to have. I knew I had deficits in seeming cool, successful and such. Compared to him, I was lagging and I wanted to catch up.  Being a young teen, I had no idea on how to improve it except for one.

I suspected Tim of having SECRET KNOWLEDGE and I wanted that. I wasn't alone apparently, others began to desire that too. What secret knowledge? Looking back on it, it was just plain confidence and probably growing up way too fast for his years. He just had more experience than we possessed. We looked up to that and very much desired to know what he knew. 

And did I ever want to know what he knew. You couldn't just ask him, that would come out as sooo dweebish raised to the nth power. So you do what all kids do, watch and emulate as best as you can.

In this neighborhood, we were strip mall-rat kids. The plaza on Armistice Blvd. was our Sherman Oaks Galleria. We just hung out there like our older sisters and brothers would. One of the stores we hung out in was a CVS. Usually the first week of the month because the new magazines came in and we would read them, but never buy them. Why do that?

So one day Tim comes along with us to CVS and as we enter, I see Nicole S. and a couple of her friends down the girl's beauty aisle.

Nicole...was born fairly pretty and between 13 to 14, sprouted these big Hollywood tits in a damn hurry. We boys were sort of amazed by her. She seemed soo much older than us but she wasn't. I think we all tried to talk to her but being that young, we knew jack shit about girls. If anything, any talk we had with her degenerated into talking to the other boys around and trying to seem as tough as we could. Again, more posturing. It's no wonder you girls couldn't figure boys out because we were horrible at talking to you! What can you learn if you see a boy put another boy in a headlock in a CVS? He's signaling to you about how strong he is but you didn't know that! All you wanted to know was what he's really like on the inside.

Tim's ahead of us as we enter the CVS and he sees the girls and stops as bit. He then goes over to a frisbee display and grabs one, and waiting till their gaze was elsewhere.....then lightly flies it down the aisle till it sort of bounced off Nicole's arm. As it he let it go he followed it quickly down the aisle. In a few seconds he was with them.

“Oh hey! I'm sorry! I wanted to see how this frisbee was...I didn't hurt you right?” says Tim.

Nicole and the girls were taken by surprise.

“I'm Timmy....I live on Liberty St...I used to live in California! Hi!”

Nicole immediately starts talking to him and she and Tim have an easy banter going back and forth. As he is talking, I see him touch her arm and compliment her tan. Tim says something else and Nicole is laughing.

I stood there, watching this and all I thought was:

“How..the FUCK...was he ABLE...to do THAT!??”

My jealousy scale ran off scale high. I mean it's pegged all the way up. I bet my mouth was half open in amazement too. What he just did, was magic to me.

I probably had that thought again, “He DOES have secret knowledge!! I knew it!!” The other thought I knew was this...”Oh PLEASE! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! How you did that!!!”

So after few, he leaves the girls and returns to us.

We boys were silent. We just saw a Jedi Mind Trick Nicole was unaware of the whole time.

“These aren't the droids you're looking for...” (waves hand)

“These aren't the droids we're looking for...”

Or what it looked like to us young teen boys.

Tim: “You'll slide your jeans off...” (waves frisbee)

Nicole:  (Eyes all hypnotic n stuff) “I will slide my jeans off...”

In seconds, he got her attention, talked to her, managed to leave a good impression then leave her like he didn't care about her at all.

I know our boy brains were flat lining the whole time we looked at Tim. “What did we just see? How is it possible?”

Since I couldn't ask him how...that again would seem desperate, I resolved to be with him when we were near girls and I'd go with him if he hit any up, or just plain talked to them. My radar was on HIGH adsorbing anything..anything at all. I WILL get this secret knowledge!

**

Weeks later, Tim stopped coming around. We didn't give it much mind till one of us spoke up about it. We then all went to his Grandmother's house to get him.

“Timmy's gone home to his Mom's...to California.” she told us.

I think we were all let down by that news. He was cool. We were a bit miffed he hadn't said a word about that but that was his lifestyle, moving here and there. It was nothing to him. We never saw him again.

**

Twenty-five years later, I was working at a place in Pawtuxet Village and I had walked down the hall and saw a group of three women and one who was pretty cute. I reached into my pocket, took out my car keys and flung them down the hall. They slid all the way to her feet. As I walked up to her I said, “Ugh! I'll lose these things if I'm not more careful...I'm Ron by the way, you new? You just start here...?”

Thanks Timmy!