Some LIfe Moments and Sewer Girl

 

I have told plenty of stories of the young elementary teachers we had, who were minted in the late 60’s Human Potential Movement that included an extensive liberal awareness. We kids were steeped like a cup of tea in that environment. The height of it was when Ms...and I mean Ms..Barbadoes had all the 5^th graders pile into her classroom to watch live Congressional hearings on the abuses and illegal assassinations of the CIA and NSA. Heady stuff for us 10 year olds. 

Also with that political education, they also preached Women’s liberation too. We boys got a collateral education as the messages shot by us as they were aimed for the girls in our class. The message addressed the idea little girls could grow up to be Mommies, nurses, teachers...but also...doctors, CEOs and airline pilots.

I was OK with that and personally didn’t freak if women dared to move beyond to roles otherwise barred to them. However, I wasn’t completely liberated and open. Years later, I came across a curious event in my 50s which put me off, till I figured out the situation.

**

Grease Traps. Yes, grease traps. It’s a plumbing fixture that separates grease and oil from the dirty effluent that runs down the drains. The reason is that the EPA found that dumping grease into the Narragansett Bay wasn’t helping it in any way. It also makes the jobs of wastewater treatment easier. The problem with grease traps is that you have to remove that filthy goo yourself from the trap otherwise it gets clogged. Also you have to hire a professional every so often to really clean the thing out.

One day at work, I saw an older guy come in, wrapped up in a disposable environmental protection suit (minus the head gear) to check out our grease trap and mentions it’ll only take 30 minutes to do the job as it was easily accessible.

“I’ll get started when my assistant gets here in a few.” he tells us.

A minute later, the assistant shows up. In comes a person, in a similar throw away plastic body suit, but with dirty blonde hair spilling down her shoulders. Though she was in that same rumply body suit, her skinny female form shown through. She as well had been blessed with a prettier than usual “the next door girl” face too.

All the guys in the kitchen stopped what they doing and gave her that male gaze as she pushed a giant wet/dry vacuum contraption to the trap. She noticed our gaze and then I noticed her going completely poker faced. Her entire countenance changed from relaxed to displaying NO information, no body language when she realized our gaze. Everything about her stiffened up slightly.

Women do this when they cannot or do not want to respond to nor feed that male interest. So show NO interest in any form and be left alone. It must be interesting to be a young teen girl and learning this tactic those first times, depending on whether you want the attention that hour or not. Then be called a bitch if you press “No” too hard. I like to think women and men aren’t that all different in many things. But the moves you girls have to do at times due to being female...it must be like being on the balance beam.

Anyways...

My reaction to attendant girl? I thought she was pretty. There is a certain type I respond to and it’s hard to describe in total. Skinny, nearly ordinary and slightly androgynous gamine girls get my attention quick and she was one. Think Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, Roseanna Arquette, etc...

My second reaction which displayed my sexism? “How can a pretty girl like this do this filthy, disgusting job that requires personal protective equipment? Hell, MOST guys I know would not want to do this revolting, smelly work!” And my final judgment….”She’s too pretty to be doing this job. It’s not for her at all.”

Since I thought her attractive and very curious as to why she was doing this, I go into that side room where they’re working to watch and talk to her.

“You don’t see too many girls doing this work” I tell her.

“Oh, I know...but I’ve been involved with septic systems for years.”

“I’ve been involved with septic systems for years?” I repeat in my head, thinking it really strange thing to say. Just WHO is this?"  She should be sporting NYC attire and working for the Kennedy Center instead.

The two work on, removing the grease trap cover, positioning equipment when I hear her say…

“Dad?...Dad! Should I set the vacuum to 4 or 15 PSI for this?”

“Dad?” I think and then realize. “Oh my God...this is dad/daughter business! He raised her to be a sewer attendant!”

“OK..I guess...these things happen.” I think. But I couldn’t parse her pretty face with this gross, stinking and splattery job. I thought girls like her should be doing nicer, cleaner things.

(I guess I wasn’t totally indoctrinated by Miss McHale’s or Ms. Barbadoes’s teachings on feminism in 1975 it turns out. Girls can grow up to be anything, even sewer attendants!).

A bit later, I’m in the back parking lot and I see their van. On the side was written, “Dickenson and Daughter Septic Specialists.” Her name on the van was colored in hot pink though. OK. Confirmed. It’s a Dad/Daughter enterprise.

Later I thought it could very well be those two have the best dad/daughter relationship and are wildly successful money wise. They may even enjoy each other’s company all day long. I have met many women who were never that close to their Dad or absent altogether and that can source a whole host of problems.

Even in a besmirched protective suit, working with bacteria that could eat your face off if you gave it a foothold, she probably had the best bond a daughter could have with her Dad for all I knew.  

 

Dream Work

 

 

I know a lot of dead people. I don’t mean to be morbid but at this age I know more dead than living ones now. I include neighbors, teachers I had, clients I once worked with, co-workers, classmates, friends and family. So my net is wide and it fills easily as time passes. 

I also dream of them frequently.

Plenty of those dreams are humdrum, a repeat of a memory from long ago. I’m not surprised. They were once in my life so I would remember them in a dream associated with some commonplace day to day life event.

Then some stand out..

I have had a recurring dream of my brother, on a Harley, doing lazy circles in the street. I’m on the front lawn, a much younger version of myself, just watching him. Then finally, he straightens the bike and takes off down the street. For good. He’s left. Never to come back.

It’s not scary, sad or whatever. It’s void of emotion. Just me watching him finally taking off.

But it’s not about his dying nor a symbol of it. The dream was, I think...my finally understanding a life long wish of his. To get the hell out of our childhood home.

He did achieve that dream for a bit when he joined the Navy. That sure got him the hell out. He was in his mid 20s, with him just spinning his wheels waiting for his life to take off, and tired of playing nurse, as I was as well, to a mother who was barely functioning day to day at times. Well, he finally pushed the issue. Running way to the circus or military can work.

Till he was sent home again on a medical discharge a year later.

Back home, he saved up his money till he had enough to get his own place in Providence and took off again.

I once had a near snarky argument with my Mom over which son was worth more, as she thought he was over me. I reminded her that Ken left seven months ago...and NEVER has visited. He lived all of 5 miles away too.

“Who shovels the snow? Who fixes the faucets, mows the lawn, fixes YOUR car? Balances your checkbook? “Not him” I said.

“You know why that is?” I ask her as I felt myself cocking back the hammer on a tirade I was about to unleash and fire upon her.

The look on her face told me she did not want to know. So I chickened out and didn’t fire both barrels at her. The blast of the TRUTH would have really ruined her view of her first born son.

When I saw my brother’s first place in Providence, it was just a single room, where you shared the bathroom down the hall. I was a bit shocked at the meagerness of it and kinda said a bit too loud to myself, “You must’ve really wanted OUT.” He caught that and said:

“And avoid her? Damn right!” he replied.

He was going to stay the fuck away by any means.

**

I once knew, what they call, an “eclectic therapist” at Rhode Island College when I was pursuing my psych degree all those years ago. In the field, therapists/professors steer towards one dominant model and stick with it. You work with what you understand the best. Vin Calia, the guy I knew, was adept enough to draw from all of them at will.

“You gotta be careful of dream work Ron” he once told me, as I related that motorcycle dream to him over coffee at the Student Union. “Dreams are highly personal and any symbols you have do not translate to grand universal ones and that’s makes it unreliable to apply it to everyone.”

“Are you sure?” I ask

“Yep, the science doesn’t back it up as a panacea to cure everything nor can it be unified and generalized to everyone...but...at times, it can widen one’s perspective on your past.”

He goes on to tell me of learning about “dream work” at the Esalen Institute when he was there, for a bit, back when it was THE place to go for the latest in therapies, trends...anything avant garde and cutting edge in how to improve life. It was THE center for the Human Potential Movement probably started by Carl Rogers. Human Potential Movement? You know of it...if you read any kind of self help book.

Don’t know the Esalen Institute either? Here’s some of the people who lived and worked there for a time.

Joan Baez, Hunter Thompson, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, George Harrison, Neil Young and zillion others...and Vin, for a bit when he found out what they were up too and had to go see. If you were worth your salt in your field, you were accepted there to learn from the others.

Years later, outside of EastSide Marketplace I ran into Vin and told of another dream I had…to which he replied...”Don’t look too deeply into it...stay on the surface of it as you tell me.”

I was in a flat, Midwestern America field, alone, with the sky sprawling about me. I am walking through waist high weeds and dry grass. I’m passing pieces of shredded aluminum, electronic parts and pieces of aircraft wing, parts of a large plane that had long since crashed and spread itself all over. In the years since, the field had just grown up around the debris still left there.

“What are you doing there?” Vin asks.

“Nothing, I just happen to be there, looking, but for some reason I...me...was on that plane...and the only one to have walked away from the crash. I know all about this place for some reason.”

He then asks this out-of-nowhere question when it came to dreams.

“Who is NOT in the dream...What is NOT there?”

How do you answer that? It felt like I was being asked, “Tell me what the sound of one hand clapping is?”

I think, not hard, just letting my mind drift and I say, “My family.”

Vin’s leaning against his car, quietly, waiting and then prods me, “Go on, finish the story...finish your thought.”

“I’m dreaming...visiting the past again, seeing how the family I grew up in was wiped out...and how I am the lone survivor...beating nearly all of their life spans by 20 years or so.”

“And that’s as far as we can take that dream...that’s all it is.” Vin finally says. “We can’t dig any deeper as there is no “deeper”, and you know what it was about anyway.”

“Look Ron..grief, loss is a strange thing...you never really ever get rid of it. It’s like waves on the ocean during a storm. At first, they’re huge! But as time goes by, they become smaller and smaller but still lap at our ankles decades later...and waves never cease to keep rolling in. You own this experience….make do with it like you always have been doing.”

Parking lot dream work therapy, free of charge!

I still have all sorts of dreams of people I once knew. But I treat it as just a visitation, my time traveling which gives just some practical explanations of how things once were with the benefit of today’s 20/20.

 

 Esalen...built into the cliffs of Big Sur

 

 

4th of July

 

 

Our gang used to have a July 3^rd bbq/party/fireworks party for the past...25+ years? It was an excuse for us boys to be 12 again with adult sized fireworks, with the addition of alcohol. Never once did we blow our hands off, set fire to a neighbor’s house but we did upset and distress a few neighbors who did not share our idea of fun. We managed to stop the scrutiny of the Pawtucket PD due to one of us being related to the dispatcher there. Who, when called, immediately recognized the offending address and then...never relay the complaint to a patrol car.

These parties included too much food, too much beer and perhaps $4,000 worth of fireworks, all set up with either fast or slow burning fuses, depending how much noise we wanted to make. Like most drunken or near drunk adults, there was a fair amount of romantic play between the singles, the marrieds, the cheating marrieds…who were more than a few.

But…

As the years went by, we got much older. The last party I attended I had noticed that most of us originals, now inhabited the table where the oldies we knew from before naturally gravitated too. You know the table, everyone’s fat, bald or white haired or all three at once! I found myself there because I knew them and they were the only people I could relate to. I was kind of shocked we were all there now, when once before we’d be the ones dancing, drinking our guts out or nearly blowing our hands off with fireworks.

When younger, the party lasted till dawn. Those w/o the stamina would sleep in chaise lounge chairs, in their cars or various places around the property. Eventually, the first light would come and we’d all finally leave.

But that last time, as I sat there with the others watching the young ones on the dance floor, doing triple jello shots and handstand kegger tricks, I heard once couple my age say…

“Honey...look...it’s past 11”

Those two excused themselves and said their Good Byes to the rest of us.

Since they broke the seal...others within minutes started to excuse themselves with BS or actual reasons to leave. One friend my age, then said to me, “Ahhh...guess I’ll go home too.” He had spent a better part of our conversation detailing how his surgeon fused some of his vertebrae due to years long back pain.

I stayed...knowing I didn’t have to be anywhere the next day and could easily sneak drive home avoiding the cops should they be out there. I had in me a huge total of...3 beers in 3 hours. Hardly DWI levels, but as I got older, it took sooo little alcohol to put a buzz on.

I stayed an additional 20 minutes when I felt my eye lids getting heavy, it was 11:45pm.

I left.

The second reason these parties came to an end was due to the older teen kids my friends had and would show up to see the fireworks display we would put on. And while we were busy with that, the kids would fill up on Manhattan Iced Teas and Alabama Slammers. The adults/parents knew and hopefully thought, “Well….how drunk can you get in 30 mins?” This was allowed for...one year only.

Getting older makes you get far more fearful of what might happen because all your life you’ve seen things happen to those around you or even in your own life to know...wild shit does happen.

When it became very obvious that the State would prosecute the hell out of the hosts if one teen slid his car into a family SUV of six...and that kid got his booze from that party...the liability stopped the event for good. It was damn near impossible to require ID at the property line to see if you were old enough to drink and never mind the culpability host laws that apply to full grown adults who can legally drink. You get them drunk at your home, enjoy the lawsuit that may come should they too slam into a family of six.

The party ending was not a big deal really, all of that coincided with our becoming old fucks who can’t keep our eyes open past midnight anyway. 

 

Moon Traveler Bottle Rockets and Mugsy Or “The Mugsy Seeking Smart Missle”

Poor Mugsy. She was an elderly dog that lived across the street from me with the Poal family. Every morning if it was warm enough, they shoved Mugsy out the kitchen door where she just lay and sleep in the sun in the driveway and coughed like hell once in a while. The Poals had two other dogs that were more loved and treated better. The were two little needle toothed, yippy little shit Toy Poodles, named Zsa Zsa and Buttons.

My friends at the time then, were were under 8 years old, preferred Mugsy’s laid back, too damn tired to move anymore attitude vs. those two yapping, tiny Nazi dogs who would do nothing else but bark at us and try to nip our ankles when they were out. The only thing Mugsy ever did that astonished us young kids would be to heave up her Alpo dinner onto the sidewalk 10 minutes after eating it, then have a good 20 minute sit down to catch her breath. After that rest, she’d get up, re-eat the pile of dog barf she had deposited earlier.

“Auggggh! Grossss! She’s eating her own puke!!”

But my brother and his friends, who were around 12, had other ideas for Mugsy one day.

I, Jim, Pat and John came upon our older brothers one afternoon after we had heard the whooshing and loud bang of bottle rockets being set off. What we saw was that they had fashioned a kind of bazooka out of a pipe which could be loaded with bottle rockets and aimed at...Mugsy.

The boys couldn’t stop laughing their asses off each time they fired one across the street into the upper driveway of the Poal’s house. No one was home there except Mugsy that day. The two little Nazi criminal dogs were inside all day until Mrs Poal let them loose at 4PM to chase us kids up and down the street.

Phhhhsssssh….BANG! And the older boys roiled with laughter. Lucky for Mugsy, bottle rockets are not accurate in any sense and would go off on their own trails no matter how expertly you aimed them.

We little kids were surprised at this. We had never seen anyone shoot off fireworks at a dog before. Mugsy, to her credit, took it in stride, just sitting there and just looked to where the rockets veered and exploded 10 feet to either side of her. This went on for a good 30 minutes.

Finally, Mr Cardosi, a retried neighbor came out shouting, “You leave that poor OLD dog alone! How would YOU like it if I shoved a bottle rocket up YOUR ASS?!!!”

I never had heard nice ol’ Mr Cardosi threatening our older brothers with shoving anything up their asses before. You learn surprising things when you’re 7.

So being guilted into cutting it out, the older ones relented and sulked their way down the street, all butt hurt being denied their “fun.”

We younger ones never followed them, we just were sat by the curb, hanging out trying to come up with something fun to do when we hear too close to us...

“Phhhhssssssshhhh BANG!”

Our bastard older brothers are firing bottle rockets from down the street...this time at us. 

I include the following cartoon...all of this happened in one form or another in our neighborhood growing up.  

 

On the bottom right  you see the "Mouth Loading Lady Finger Grade...NON Repeater." stunt. There was a kid who came to our neighborhood at times, one we didn't really like, Scott. Scott was older, a bully and permanently  dressed in filthy clothing.  He said to us he could "spit out a lit salute that he held in his lips" before it exploded. If you know anything about salutes, their wick's burn time is either two seconds or IMMEDIATELY. So we watch Scott put one between his lips and light it. A tenth of a second later it went off and we saw Scott hopping around spitting out  salute confetti as hit had blown into his mouth. 

Dumb fuck...