If I Get in A Goofy Mood

 

 

I stood outside of the Celtic, having a cigarette when I see his youngish women, perhaps late 20’s approach. She had disheveled but clean hair, far too loose jeans that sort of ballooned as she walked and a soccer team T shirt of some European squad I never heard of. She had come from the direction of the 95 overpass over Route 1 that leads into Attleboro and I had heard, from the firemen that used the bar as their clubhouse, that there were homeless encampments all along the highway in the woods there.

She came straight for me, making eye contact and when close enough she asks:

“Can you give me a ride to downtown Attleboro? I have an appointment at 11pm.”

“11 PM? What business has appointments at 11?” I think

I then figure this out. She’s one of the homeless from the highway that just wants a ride. I stood there, immediately disappointed by this request because my plan that night was to sip beer, chat and otherwise be left alone and be brain dead for a bit. This was “my time” and wanted to ratchet down some w/o people needing something from me. Shuttling the homeless wasn’t in my plans.

So how do I get out of this w/o seeming like a bastard?

I then put on an act that I am deaf. Since I had worked with the deaf population for a good time back in the 90’s, I can do a very good impression of them.

So I say, in a mangled, fumbling voice the deaf have IF they can speak, sounding a bit like Marlee Matlin from the movie Children of a Lesser God, and signing with my hands, I tell her this:

“I cahn’t hear any-think be-cawse I am defff thinth birth. You haf to th-speak tuh me wif thine langu-adge u-thing your handz. Do you know A eth L? (ASL)”

Homeless girl just stared at me for a good three seconds when she leaned into me close and responded like this, loudly, thinking that’s all that was needed.

“Can you give me a ride to downtown Attleboro? I have an appointment at 11pm!!”

“What?” I say and sign to her. I tried not to laugh because she thought the cure to my deafness was to shout at me. She tries again...

“Can YOU give me...Oh the hell with it…”

Off to our side was Becky and a few other girls from the bar laughing, after watching this show I put on. I then turn to them and protest, “Th-stop laffin at me! It’z not nithe or rite! I can’t halp that I’m deff!!!”

Homeless girl just looked at me and the girls like we were nuts. She finally gave up and went on her way.

“Yayyy!” I get to finish my butt and go back inside to sit down and sip my beer in peace.

**

Every summer I keep all the windows and doors in my house open. I like the breeze, fresh air and the openness. It also is a nice invitation to a few in this area who have known me to pop by if they do. The problem is that others I do not want to talk to feel I’m inviting them as well. Particularly salesmen.

One day some one knocks at my door and I go and see. It’s a young guy, perhaps 22, dressed sort of like a Mormon, in a white shirt, black tie and slacks. His hair is close cropped and he’s carrying an iTablet.

While at the door I just look at him through the screen, silent and wait for him to tell me why he’s here.

“Good Morning Sir! Have you noticed that your neighbor across the street has solar panels on his roof?”

“Oh Christ.” I think, a solar salesman.

I didn’t plan my next reaction, it sort of just came to me, quickly and out of nowhere. I then start rocking on my feet like a guy I know at work who does the same out of boredom or habit. I raise my hands and fold them together and press them against my chest and let my face relax, become almost loose. I now look half aware and dense.

“..and if you allow us to do a FREE inspection of your roof and power requirements of your home, I’m sure we can find the perfect system array for you that’ll get you off RI Energy’s grid!” The commission seeking sales kid tells me.

He ends his sales pitch and I let a good 15 seconds go by in silence when I say, as if my tongue has swollen two times the size in my mouth….

“Do you wan to meet my doggie? He ith down thtairs in da cellah….his name is Debby.”

I tried hard not to laugh to myself when I told him the male dog’s name was Debby.

The poor kid then comes to a slow realization that he’s talking to a old adult with retardation.

“Is there anyone else here…” the kid asks.

“No...juth me ‘n’ Debby...do you want to meet him? He iz a good doggie...he only bit my face once!”

I love how people’s eye contact can be sooo focused when they’re in a situation they never had before or seen. This poor kid was locked onto my face the whole time I was acting it up.

“Uhh...umm...I’ll come back...OK…?” the kid says, backing away a few steps before he turns around, lest I let my Debby “meet” him.

As the kid walks away, I open the screen door and wave to him and say...”Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye!” far too many times.

Cool! That got rid of him...now back to my audio editor to fix up the Grateful Dead catalog I stole off the internet.

**

I was fourteen when this occurred and it was more out of desperation, short temper and apparently it became real bad timing when it was over.

For some reason, we were getting sales calls all afternoon. Roofs! Siding! Built in pools! Credit card offers! You name it. This was also the time when they used real people to sell you stuff on the phone vs. the robocalls they use today.

I had been answering the phone all day and was getting sick of it. Finally, around 6pm I got a call and without ever finding out just who was on the other end I start a tirade.

“Listen you cocksucking son of a bitch! We don’t want your fucking useless wares or shit! Take your phone and shove it up your ass till it comes out your mouth ….so FUCK OFF!”

And I hang up the phone hard.

Sixty seconds later the phone rings again.

I pick it up and this time I normally say “Hello?”

“Ronnie? Is this Ronnie?” It’s Mary (my grandmother).

“I think I dialed the wrong number….Someone was yelling at me!”

I had happened to see the clock on the kitchen wall which said 6PM. Yep, every day for years Mary has called at 6PM to talk to my Mom. I stood there feeling the blood rush to my face and blush like I’ve never blushed before, hoping to God she didn’t recognize my voice from earlier. You don’t...you never...say words like that to your church-going Irish Catholic grandmother...ever. I had now done that.

I turn and say..”Mom...it’s for you” and I hand it off to her and slink out of there fast. 

 

 

Women's Intuition and How I Was Suprised By It.

 

 

I’ve prided myself, most of my life, on knowing I was right. And I was many times. I’d hear what others thought, were going to do about this, that or the other and realized they had it ass-backwards, upside down and 180 degrees the other way. When I told them to correct that, they looked at me like I was nuts. They thought they were right. Then many times I’d see them crash and burn. Quietly in my head I’d say after witnessing it, “You stupid fuck.” Add to that was my dismissiveness to anyone else’s suggestions about a problem I may have been facing. I’d listen to the first twelve words of it and I’d knee jerk react the second I felt they were wrong and reject their whole idea. Not to their face mind you, but in my head. I was polite enough not to shout them down and calling them half-wits.

**

I didn’t know Melba all that well. She was the girlfriend of my friend’s brother. I’d see her often enough around town or say at parties but we rarely ever sat down to chat and learn about one another. So be it. That happens all the time. Melba was tall with dirty blonde hair that she wore in a looser 80s fashion w/o all that AquaNet. She was one of those women who was born thin and would remain so no matter how many tacos she could choose to eat. Her packing on the weight was not going to happen. Some girls are born lucky in some ways.

She, for reasons I still don’t know, was unfortunately pegged as a dumb blonde. Her nick name was “’tupid.” I saw her face once when one of us guys said it right to her. She just took the insult, kept a poker face and let the moment slide onto the next one. I hadn’t managed to know her well enough to make any judgment about her but seeing someone say that to her face was unjust I felt. It’s also pretty loutish and typical of some of the white trash I knew around here. At that age, we crude guys knew little of the shit women had to put up with and did it w/o complaint.

In my early 20’s, like a million others, I was searching for a direction in my life. What career? Where’s that girl? Should I leave and start over in Telluride, Colorado? Every answer to those questions I came up with seemed right till a day later when I debunked them for some other reason. But I do remember feeling mildly unsatisfied with the way things were as nothing was happening fast enough. Due to my ever cautious nature (which has a very real basis as I found life can be god damned dangerous at times) I would twist and turn ideas over again and again w/o acting on them till I was assured of success, or at least not go down in flames trying. Who wants that? These reflections of then were not my sitting down thinking logically about it all, it was more of ‘feel my way through’ tactic. I know that way is more obscure and shapeless but when you don’t have hard facts, it’s the next best thing. You grope your way through the dark. I’ll know a correct answer because it’ll feel “right.”

One hot, sweaty June summer morning, I was sitting on the front steps with Mike and we were just talking. Melba was there as well. The subject shifted to what each of us was hoping to do for the summer and then even beyond that. Mike had got up to go in the house for something leaving Melba and I to talk further on what we wanted out of life.

She was straddling a 10 speed bike she loved to ride everywhere and finally looks at me, cants her head and says:

“Ronnie, you’re so close to blossoming. I can see it. You’re ready. Why not just take a shot and do it? I know you want too. It’s time to make that jump.”

“Well” she goes on, “I’m going for my ride, if you guys go to JR’s tonight, I might be there too.”

She peddles on off.

I sat there wholly stunned.

“How the FUCK does she know what I’ve been thinking about for months and months? I was never close enough to her to tell her anything of my private thoughts! Hell, I didn’t tell anyone! How could she possibly know that?” And to top it off as I thought on what she told me...she was right.

There are those moments when you finally do learn something about another person. That morning was one heavy one. Afterwards, I never thought of Melba as a dumb blond and that nickname was wholly and utterly incorrect estimation of her abilities. Ever since then, my evaluation of her was held on a much higher plain. To this day I think of that summer morning on those front steps and how she revealed to me who she really was, and how very little I knew about myself..and how much more she knew.

**

Women speak of that one guy that ruined them. I have heard of that all the time. Guys can have that too as well, a women that ruins them.

I’ll call her Shelby. She was the most fun, exciting roller coaster ride/relationship I had ever been on. I have written of her here before so there’s no need to get too deep into again. Leave it to say she was the most playful girlfriend I had ever had.

How was I ruined by her? After it all ended, I kept trying to replicate that in others, trying to repeat it again...to no avail. All women are different no matter how much you try to reshape them into something they are not. There was only ONE Shelby.

Shelby was tall, blonde and had one of those mile-wide toothy smiles that lit her face up when she did grin. Her whole countenance would change when she smiled and became immediately attractive to anyone around her. She was also took far more risks than I would and that was a large part of my attraction to her. She managed to coax me onto some of life’s carnival rides I would never have tried. I’m glad she did. I had the time of my life.

As I got to know her, I found her not stupid but pretty uneducated. She was raised blue collar in a home with no books and the parents had no aspirations of sending any of their daughters to college. In Shelby’s very early 20’s, it was low wage service jobs for her with no plans on improving her job skills just yet.

At Scarborough beach one late spring, we were sitting on the benches looking across the ocean. I had gotten up to lean on the rails that lined the boardwalk and continued watching the waves slump one after another.

Shelby breaks our silence by saying...

“Those are strato-cumulus clouds on the horizon. There’s a layer of dry air above them that stops them from growing higher.”

I turn around with this astonished look on my face. She was right.

“How do you…” and she cuts me off.

“Didn’t you know that stuff? My apartment is full of weather tech!”

It was. There were barometers on the wall. A rain gauge outside her porch in a garden. On a birdhouse near it a weather vane with a speed indicator as well. Back inside on the coffee table a hygrometer (humidity) indicator. I had thought all that stuff was just New Englandy, maritime kitch you decorate a summer vacation shack by the beach with. No, they were real instruments that worked.

She goes on. “I’ve always been into meteorology...not sure why, just so interesting ya know?”

I just stared at her. I had no idea. From the way she had acted for the longest time as we went out, how she allowed me to use her as fuck toy, as a party girl, her risky behavior...and my now learning this about her and how incongruous it seemed….I now was perplexed at who I was with. And I wondered why would she hide this from me and….what else didn’t I know about?

An hour later riding home, I had asked her this, why did she not let me in about her other sides, her other delights and interests. She smiled at me and said nothing. It was like she was keeping an ages old secret men were never to know or be told.

You grow up, you mature, you learn. I had learned then that women of depth open up like onions, layer after layer, as they feel confident to do so. As I got deeper, I had learned of more surprising, fun and cool things about her and of other women I knew in general once I was now aware and would look for this. How women are able, to completely shield their innermost aspects was an eye opener to me. It’s a talent most guys do not have. What You See Is What You Get...is mostly true for men, mostly...at least for the more open and evident of us.

That little awakening about her changed how looked at her, how I acted too. This girl was far more complicated than I knew and this previously shallow, party-time summer fling took a deeper turn where I had to mature as well if I was to navigate those deeper canyons within her.

Shelby may have come off as a Boy Toy, but she wasn’t just that at all as she proved she could stand just as high and confident I was, and in more in ways I had no clue about too.

**

At a social service job I once had, they had hired a hippy/diaphanous girl named Gloria. She was close to my age and as I worked with her, I learned she was completely fucked up in the head, a real emotional basket case. This was an awful hire but a body is a body, no matter how much they suck, but if they routinely show up for work each day, that seemed to be more important than the shitty job they did once there.

I had to bring her up to speed, train her, repeatedly on how to deal with clients with psychiatric/developmental issues and how some day to day normal responses to them would not work. You had to use other ways, that may have seemed odd, to get them to calm down and comply with living in a group setting.

Gloria barely could remember the training, she just went off on her own, not maliciously, but stupidly setting off the clients...and that made my work day harder as I had to put out the fires she was setting. She sure as hell had no idea how to extinguish them.

Fun.

I took a dislike to her and then, all of her and wrote her off as a “nothing” in my mind. “I don’t like you and I consider you ‘worthless.’ That was a pretty strong global conviction of her but I was getting sick of fixing her fuck ups.

As the months passed, we got to know one another. She was the product of the States Foster Care program as the courts stripped her parents of their right to raise her. Dad was a drug abuser and Mom just preferred to party and leave her six year old at home to fend for herself. Gloria was bounced from one foster home to another and when at 18, they deem you “cured” and the State dumps you on the streets to live your own adult life.

I had then knew why she was the way she was.

One day, we were talking and she opines...”You know...you display orphan behavior…you raised yourself...didn’t you?”

“Huh” I said, sort of shocked.

“You never listen to anyone else you don’t respect, completely writing them off... you are sooo independent, never ask for help and try to do everything on your own...you’re stubborn as hell too. You won’t change your mind because you think you’re right.” she tells me.

I took an immediate offense to that and denied it hard. It was part of an old tactic of mine to seem as normal as possible, even though I had a Mom who was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and a Dad who was permanently ensconced in his corporate job in Providence. Our family was not as normal as the ones I knew around here and tried to keep those ugly secrets buried as deep as I could. I learned at an early age that you try to “fit in” as well as you can and knew what would make the neighbors gossip...and judge. So you put the best foot forward….Image! Image! Image!

One day Gloria just quit the job. Oh well, another one flew in then flew away, it’s the nature of the occupation.

It wasn’t till a few months later when I was thinking about what she had said and then it dawned on me. She was right. She readily saw through me so easily as she had been brought up with a bunch of other waywards in the system which taught her a few things. She had seen time and time again how people act with little biological parental influence. She was so damned observant and perceptive that day when she made those comments to my face. Any personality quirks I had, their source and genesis, I thought were hidden well inside of me where they belonged. And here came this women, who I thought was wrecked by the State foster system, who opened me up as easily as a can of tuna with a can opener.

At my old age, I can still be as intransigent about what I think is right and blow off damn near everyone else’s ideas. I’m a guy, infected with that male pride that isn’t so easily doffed when it gets in the way of living life successfully. But one trick I have learned when faced with this, tell my story to a woman. The answer I can get back can be one I had never thought of.

Even now I can still be surprised

 

(After reading this again, this is soo truncated. I could expand on 5 topics i brought up here but that would take days and you'd have to read 11 more pages. Ah, I'll leave it as it is..)

 

Ah, Others Have Done Far Worse...

 

 

So I can write about anything I want. I’m old enough, close enough to retirement that maintaining an upstanding moral image isn’t really needed as much now. When younger and still trying to build a financial life, I suppose I would have to suck up, comply and conform as a reputation needs to be protected if I were to move up. Now, it’s so less of a concern. Another reason is that the more distance from adolescence you have, you lose that desperate need to belong. When you get much older, you really do not give a fuck what other’s think of you.

So I will talk of cocaine.

I was never an addict. I had probably spent, in my lifetime, less than $100 purchasing it. I did however, have an acquaintance who was one of the major dealers of it in northern Rhode Island. Crossing paths with him (who shall remain nameless) was easy. I was one of the many who hung at the “One Way” in Slater Park in my teens and very early 20s. The One Way was an open air pharmacy, much like a farmer’s market, where, as you pulled your car into that parking lot, teen dealers with every kind of substance would run to your car to be the first to sell you their wares. It became outrageous for a good year and half, perhaps two years before the local police shut it down. Why they waited so long is another story in itself. Prior to it’s zenith, it was just low level dealing that garnered no attention from any law enforcement, but it got way out of hand eventually.

**

I remember the date I first saw cocaine, December 24, 1979, Christmas Eve. I was 15 and my brother and two of his friends from the band came into the house and ran upstairs to his bedroom. I followed. They stood around my brother’s desk as one of them cut the lines onto a mirror. I sat on the bed like the hanger-on kid brother, just wanting to fit in, be part of it, but there was no way in hell would they share that expensive stuff with a 15 year old highschooler who’s never felt a girl’s titty.

“Damn, in three months, I’ve lost two pant’s sizes.” say Nick, while tugging at the waistband of his jeans. I interpreted that as coke ramps up your metabolism, a high society weight loss drug! I watched as my brother snuffed up two long lines of it, stand up with his eyes slightly bulging and smiling.

“What’s that cost?” I ask.

“More than what you have!” retorts Nick, making sure I knew my place as the kid brother. Twenty minutes later, they had left he house to hit a party on a side street next to Providence College, which, to this day, is notorious for over indulging frat antics and girls puking in the neighbor’s yards.

Now let’s move forward nearly 10 years to about 1988.

I had met P from a small bar in North Providence called “Rolls Touring Company.” It was a snug, comfortable bar owned by a 30 something couple. They sold every kind of beer manufactured in the world and for some reason, just served German snack food sandwiches like bratwursts. He once showed us the 9 inch vertical scar on this chest from a triple bypass operation he had at 32. 32? Wow! Once fully recovered, he had applied his dream of owning a place like this, figuring his brush with death was a good enough reason to start living now. I enjoyed the coziness of the place as it was more of a salon than some neighborhood watering hole.

P was biochemist. His Dad was one as well employed by one of those major biotech firms on 128 outside of Boston. P. was rich, knew other wealthy types of his age and lived in Dighton in a home that made me think mine was pig shed. He was married to sort of bland girl, Racine, who had a similar bland personality. She was nice enough but I couldn't figure out why he was with her. After the two got to know me better they admitted they were in an “open” relationship and were fine about it. I then wondered if they were toying me with an inviations. That fact didn’t want me to try Racine out for a ride as I wasn’t the least bit attracted to her, no matter how available she was.

Others I knew, along with P., hung at the bar for perhaps two years before everyone drifted away into their own changing lives. P floated away as well.

I had never had a line of coke yet. I had only seen it once years before.

2003

I had come across P. again at house party over by Brown University, where my brother was friends with an Art professor there. I found it an odd event and wasn’t entirely comfortable to be hob-nobbing with Ivy League types. I was in no way an idiot, I could keep pace with the conversations there and even fire off witty, sardonic jokes but there was an air of exclusiveness as I was not a part of it as I was a from a lower middle class upbringing. Born a pig, always a pig.

P was there and I didn’t know it till he came to me. “Ron! Wow! Haven’t seen you in the longest time.” says P. He looked different now. Older, for sure, but also red faced, fatter and w/o Racine now.

I had asked about her and he said, “Oh her? We’re divorced. She was boring anyway and only was with me for one thing only.”

I joked to him, “What one thing? Your big dick?”

“No...the coke.”

I had suspected he was into that but didn’t know the extent of it till later.

The party had shifted from Brown U. to a home off Blackstone Blvd and I got to see how some of Providence’s wealthy live. It was an eye opener as I began to realize they were just as fucked up as any white trash family from West Warwick, only with nicer clothing and a Mercedes in the driveway.

After that, P invited me to follow him home to his house in Dighton. How do I describe the house….think of an out of place hacienda stucco mansion from Sedona, Arizona weirdly located now in cold, Puritan Massachusetts. It did not fit the neighborhood of other New Englandy homes at all.

We went upstairs to his den where we was at his computer and spoke of the old times at Rolls Touring and people we had known. He then pulled the desk drawer open, takes a small packaged out and cuts two very fat lines of cocaine on the desk and says, “You’re OK with this...right?”

“Sure, I’m OK.” Free coke? Sure...I’m way ok with that.

About every 20 minutes, he cuts more lines and we snort them up. 1AM becomes 2AM which becomes 3AM and we’re still doing it. During the time I had just sipped two beers as to kill the cottonmouth I had but was fried mainly on the coke. We were talking a mile a minute about every subject that came up and then sub-referenced those as details of them made us turn a corner to another idea. What subjects? Girls. Marriages. Jackson Browne. My asking where the Civil War artillery shell that was on a table nearby came from. Anything and everything. I learned that cocaine is a wonderful drug for conversations. I just wanted to talk and talk and talk.

The sun was finally rising and I had gotten up to use the bathroom because I felt nauseous. I knew it wasn’t the two beers over 4 or 5 hours, it was all the coke that I was swallowing from it dripping down the back of my throat from my nasal passages.

I get to the bathroom downstairs and puke hard. Afterwhich I feel better and return upstairs but the sun is up and the night’s revelries are over.

There’s a hard knocking on P’s front door and he leaps up, swipes the coke, tubes and mirrors from the table and shoves them in a filing cabinet. He runs off saying something about a Probation Officer.

He finally returns with two women in their 40’s and introduces them to me as his cleaning ladies who had an appointment at that time to fully clean his house. That’s all they were. I wondered, “What probation officer?” he had mentioned. Apparently he had been busted with possession, again and had a probation officer visit him at any time he wanted too.

I drove home and the worst of luck I ended picking up a Pawtucket cop on my tail. I was one of the very few out that early in the morning and I think, if he pulls me over, he’ll see that my eyes are just slits and I’m acting weird, He tails me for a good couple of minutes before he finally turns off. I figured he thought I was perhaps an early commuter on my way to work, ran my plates to see what came up, which was nothing at all.

I get home, pull off my shirt and dump it on the floor and try to go to sleep as it’s 6AM. I can’t. I lie there, with my heart racing from the other effects of the drug as the fun part is gone now. I’me left with the residue and my body is reacting to it. I finally collapse to sleep and wake up at 3 in the afternoon.

I sit up, and reach for my shirt and put it on and there’s this weird smell. I swear it smells of my dentist’s office, medicinal. I then shove my nose into the front of it and really pick up that scent and realize that it’s the coke that had fallen from my nose or whatever and is now in the shirt.

“Holy shit! How much did we do last night if it’s in my shirt?”

For about a month in that winter of of 2003, he’d invite me to his house for overnight snorting festivities every 4 to 5 days. One night, a bunch of black guys show up, all wearing red bandanas, red silk pants and the whitest sneakers I had ever seen. P. left to go upstairs with one of them for a bit, then comes back down and we party for a hour before they leave.

“Who where they?” I ask P.

“The Latin Kings, some of them, from Providence.” he tells me.

“I’m thinking, Jesus H Christ. How many weapons were they carrying while I yakking away to them while they were here.?” P knows some too interesting people I think. Well, the coke had to come from somewhere and probably not from 128 biotech companies.

By January of 2004, he and I were at a media event he was invited to in a restaurant over by the old Last Call Saloon down by the party district in Providence. He had fed me a line before we went in and after the initial rush had come and gone, I felt an incredible crash of tiredness, mood and it felt like gravity had amped up three times the normal pulling me into the floor.

I had heard of this, the “crash” people spoke of who did this regularly. It also hit me this was the first step to addiction. In order to remove the low feeling, you do another line.

I didn’t when offered. I had reached that “point” and knew enough was enough

As the weeks of January went by , I offered lame excuses for not hanging out with him till he he got the point. That was 20 years ago and I haven’t snorted a line since. I don’t say that as a happy ex-druggie in recovery, proving he’s clean. It’s just a fact. It’s also more of a fact I’m too damn cheap to buy it anyways. This happy miser likes $ more than coke.

That’s it. My lone month of snorting a bucket’s worth of cocaine. My only longish term experience with it that lasted 30 days. I met a lot of interesting, screwy rich people over by Blackstone Blvd, learned of a major chain, semi upscale restaurant in downtown Providence where some of the waitresses were dealing it to the customers who knew (I won’t say the place, I’ll get sued). I met a few Latin Kings and up and coming 20 Something professionals of Providence’s banking, art and media types who were into this...more than a few I can tell you, all well dressed with degrees from better known colleges.

 

June

 

 

There are those times when things are going along swimmingly and you don’t notice it because you’re immersed in that flow without forcing it, it naturally unfolds on it’s own. The current takes you downstream and you are part of that river. I had a few hours of that the other night, mainly due to the weather which was perfect at 9:30 PM when the last light of the sun faded. I was chatting with neighbors, was barefoot, add to that an nice breeze out of the south carryng the not too loud songs of Courtney Barnett coming from my stereo.

Courtney

After a half an hour of that, it was then I realized just how pleasant everything was, for a little while anyway. I then remembered as kids, we were on the same streets, same fields on such same nights, bug bitten, dirty and trying to catch fireflies. That night the local kids were doing gymnastics on the front lawns, or zipping up and down the street in their electric powered go carts, the shouting by them not annoying at all.

I suppose there are a hundred or so of other summer moments like that I’ve had. Ones that managed to fasten themselves in my mind.

July 4^th 1978, Route 4 on the way to Scarborough beach, passing the rail fenced horse ranch. The fields are cut and all that hay smelled wonderful. Jack Staw was playing on the 8 Track and I’m wearing my favorite shirt, a sort of Beach Boys blue and white stripped cotton one. In 20 minutes my brother will drive to a spot in the grass parking lot and we’ll share a joint. I’ll spend the day getting sunburned and basking in the fact I have the rest of the summer off till school starts again in September, but that’s a long ways off. But for now, I’m free. The salt air, Hawaain Tropic tanning oil mixed with fryolator oil from the burger shack is in the air. I see the very pretty women in bikinis and wonder, will I...can I...date one of them some day? Right now they look sort of like Hollywood models, way beyond my class or reach. Hell, I’m 14 and barely starting out. So far, I’ve only clicked front teeth with another girl’s teeth in a furtive first kiss. But no matter, we’re all oogling the girls as they pass by. After the beach, we head down to Galilee to poke around. My brother manages to score two shots of some awful whiskey at that hotel with the windmill contraption on the roof. I was surprised the bartender didn’t ask him how old I was at the time, or probably he just didn’t care at all. We get over to the docks in that green water and watch the Block Island ferry dock and disembark. More odd smells, diesel, salt water, seaweed and more fryolator oil from somewhere.

We drive home finally. I get out of the car and am sunburned, stoned, slightly dirty with sand and otherwise feel great.

Paddy’s Beach bar in Misquamicut sometime in the early 90’s with my friend M. It’s a very clear night at 1 AM. I am sitting at one of those polycarbonate outdoor tables, drinking a warmed beer hearing the mild surf crashing at a slow pace. We had been drinking in the summer sun since 11AM but at a measured pace. I’m lit up and I notice, for the first time, that I can see Block Island’s lights on the horizon off to the left. I had never seen that before. Damn, that’s twelve miles away and I can see it! The moon is full and scintillating off the waters as well. I come to realize that the first tattoos, when it just started becoming popular, on the ankles of girls from Connecticut, aren’t that bad at all. Misquamicut, I find out, is the go to beach for those nearby in Connecticut as Long Island Sound is filthy. In time, the Guidettes from N. Providence and Cranston will sport ankle tattoos.

The ride home after dropping M off in Coventry was great. I had the top down on my Dodge 400 and I was zipping along the back country roads, trying to reach the Scituate reservoir and then Rt 95 via 37. The woods there are thick and am diving and rising out of hollows filled with nearly impenetrable fog as I cruise along. I cross the dam at the reservoir and I can see in the clear sky, all those stars. And as I cross the top of the dam and what I don’t know yet is that in five years time, I’ll be dating Annie who lives not 200 yards from that straightaway in an Aspen-like home that smells of the pine woods.

But back to the present and driving home. I then think of Kelly as I pass that dam knowing I am close by her now. Should I stop by and see her? If the white Camero is in the driveway, I’ll pull in.

No..don’t...it’s 3 AM. Her parents won’t be that happy if I do. Plus, she’ll wonder where I was coming from and why I am there so late, buzzed and looking scruffy. Her feminine radar will flash on and know what I want. So I don’t and instead fly by and look to see her Camero is there but the house is dark.

I finally pull up to my house in Pawtucket. I shut down the stereo deck and turn off the car and I think, “I should’ve been busted for DWI all the way home from Misquamicut.” But the best of luck prevailed, I had not seen one cop car the entire time coming home. It’s 3:30 AM and it’s still 68 degrees, clear and I have no work the next day. I am free.

One early summer night when I was 14, I had seen my first concert at the Providence Civic Center. Frank Zappa had come to town and I probably wouldn’t have gotten into his music if my brother hadn’t bought all those albums of his, trying to learn the guitar parts. Outside of the Civic Center, I had never seen such a throng of held over hippies, young pretty women and what looked like, a specimen of every human zoo creature known.

Strange and bizarre.

This was also my first introduction to a well designed sound system. I did not know till that moment that rock music was to be felt as well as heard. All we had at home was a Radio Shack Realistic stereo with a tiny 30 watts. Zappa had 4,000 if needed.

Not that you know it, but in the song “City of Tiny Lights,” there is a transitioning into musical chorus that starts with a bank of synthesizers in the low end. Those notes shot from the speakers into my chest with a THUMP! What a feeling! I hadn’t known of this. I heard things I never heard before. That synthesizer solo then sounded like it was crackling the air as it played too. Wonders! Can this be done at home I wonder?

At the intermission, the main lights come up and I see a cloud of marijuana smoke slowly drifting to the rear. The Providence cops stationed here and there paid NO mind to any of it all.

My brothers friends had come well supplied and passed joints between us during the first set. It was during the intermission, when I had looked over my left shoulder for a bit, holding a joint and seeing my English teacher from Goff Jr High sitting two rows up behind me, looking straight ahead trying to not notice me whatsoever. Too late, we BOTH know each other is there.

After the concert, walking to the car, it was sort of humid, foggy in down town Providence as it had rolled in during the show and my ears, for the first time, where ringing from the PA system of a first concert. Cool! We ended up the night at Sambos in East Providence for burgers. It was then my 19 yr old brother admits to me that he had taken mescaline prior to the show and he figured he’d be up the rest of the night. Mescaline? I had never seen that before. He was further along on some things than I had known.

The next morning in Goff, in English class, the teacher and I locked eyes, for a good few seconds and our eyes said: “I won’t say nothing if you don’t say nothing.”

**

At 60, I was glad to have had another night where the planets align. Even it was just some thing simple. Things seem to align quite a bit in June.

 

Other Lives Unknown

 

 

 

This is quite personal but so what, it happened decades ago and some of you know the story anyways.

**

At an annual Fourth of July party a friend has, I met an old childhood neighborhood playmate, Scott, who I hadn’t seen in decades. We recognized each other but were equally shocked at how the other grew so old.

“You’re totally white!” said Scott.

“And you got FAT” I retorted.

We played “catch up” as people who haven’t seen each other in a long time do and then it became, “Whatever happened to So ‘n’ So?.” I wasn’t all that surprised to hear that Julia, a girl a couple of years older than me who lived down the street, was now a lesbian living in New Hampshire with her partner and working for the US Mail. It explained why she managed to beat all the boys up in our neighborhood when we were kids then. I can remember a few times when she threw me to the ground, knocking the air out of me and then responded to my complaining that she was “just playin’.” Just playin’? Or avenging? Who knows.

During our July 4^th conversation, Scott mentioned that he, way back then, “had never seen the inside of my house, ever.”

The first thought that ran through my head was “...Oh...that! Well, you were never going to see inside! No one was.” When I thought that, I knew I displayed that personal reflection on my face, I could feel it and he must’ve read it.

This takes explaining.

I knew my Mom was different from the other Moms in my neighborhood. Also, I knew our actual home was as too. I had been inside other’s homes and saw how organized and kept most were, how peopled those homes were, how open and usually inviting. The Moms I met were all sorts of various types, fish wives with a penchant for swearing, others were prim and proper and one was a child of the 60s kinda Mom who openly smoked pot. Other Moms were just complete screaming, yelling bitches and a few others seemed normal.

My Mom and home fell outside the usual parameters and I learned it from comparison. I then realized that, early on, that if I was to maintain any positive image and street cred, I was going to hide all the “different-ness” my home embodied by barring visitation by anyone. Why confirm what everyone sort of suspected anyways?

For whatever reason, my Mom suffered with major depression a good half of her life which sometimes slipped into batshit crazy psychosis. That meant dragging her off to various psychiatric hospitals a few times in the 70s. When stabilized and not loony, she did as little as possible around the house as depression wholly saps your energy and motivation. So I was quite accustomed to clutter, piles of undone laundry and carpets that needed vacuuming five months ago. When you’re born into that, that something is normal as you aren’t aware of any other way until you start traveling your own neighborhood.

What did she do all day? Sit at the kitchen table, drinking Lipton tea, smoking two packs of Newports a day and listening to WPRO AM radio talk shows. She did however get breakfast, lunch and dinner ready (most times) and the laundry when my Dad bitched about not having any clean Oxford shirts to wear to the bank.

I have wondered, just what my Dad thought of this situation. He was married to a women who became persistently ill and he, bound by the “in sickness and health” marriage dictum he could not break. Personally, if it were me, I’d feel robbed.

**

Funerals are big events. At my Dad’s, I met people I had only heard about and then met people I never knew who were related to me. It was a surreal event at the wake as so many came up to me, his work colleagues and other relatives on both sides I rarely saw who then had to explain who they were to me. At 13, I was pretty standoffish to total strangers who wanted to effuse their “Sorry about your loss” and obliged hugs on me. The whole time I was thinking, “Who the FUCK are you!?” as they wrapped their unfamiliar arms around me. That action just repelled me as I didn’t hug intruders who I have never met. But I had to be nice, stand there and fake my thankfulness for their offerings. “Thank you...yes..thank you..(Get AWAY from me! Who the hell are YOU? NO! Don’t hug...shit they’re hugging...better hug back..UGH!) I must’ve said that to myself 30 times that night.

One of the intruders was an Aunt Edna, who came from my Mom’s side and never knew existed.

A year later, this aunt Edna invited us to her home which was not more than a mile away. I had to be told she was at the funeral but I never remembered. You meet someone once and in certain situations, you can forget them forever as you’re pretty sure you’ll never see them again.

I was being forced to go visit. My first thoughts? “Oh, Christ, visit a supposed relative I know nothing about? Who I only met for 80 seconds a year ago...What...the WHOLE day we have to be there? What can we possibly have in common? What are we going to talk about?”

So we go and I remember the day, August 11^th 1977. Why? Because on Edna’s kitchen table was the latest news.

Yes, that long ago.

My Mom and Edna fell into conversation quickly and it moved onto people and events in the past I knew nothing about so I wandered off through her house. It was a smaller bungalow type and each room was nicely appointed, clean, ordered and inviting. Not pretentious nor a hovel for the poor. I started to like this house quickly.

This may seem odd but I swear I see homes, houses and think I can “feel” a certain vibe about them. Usually white trash homes I knew of and see today at times tell me ugly stories of who lives there. I guess it came from knowing some kids back then who I knew lived in perilous families that had abuse (both physical and sexual), drinking, unemployment, nightly arguing parents and God Knows What Else. Those homes eventually show their inner lives on the outside with uncut lawns, peeling paint, general shabbiness and the occasional cop car parked out front.

The vibe I got from Edna’s house was the total opposite. It was healthy, vibrant and welcoming.

As the day wore on, Edna and I began talking. She was good at warming me up quickly to lower my guard about her. She understood and didn’t rush at me with falseness of a hostess at a cocktail party. She was open and real. Her sincerity was what I quickly cued in on. She was quite different from most of the fucked up adults I knew in my neighborhood or school. She struck me as one of the very few people who were balanced.

Later into the afternoon, a feeling, a thought occurred in the back of my head.

“I want to live here.,,please adopt me!” This thought surprised me as it came out of nowhere and with great firmness.

I recognized this house as a good place to be. I was certain of it. I damn well knew what the lousy ones looked like and it’s not a huge effort to see what the opposite looks like and know it for certain.

Certainty. I’ve known some homes in my childhood neighborhood that oozed normalcy, health and stability, but my inner smoke detector told me otherwise. The outward appearance of these homes were a show for others to see. The sad fact was that some of these “normal” homes I knew of held some ugly secrets within that were buried...purposely and deeply buried to last past Judgment Day. Some of those secrets in those homes I never knew about till I was 40.

Shit. I was right about my estimation of some of those parents, homes and such. It goes far in explaining why some childhood friends were the way they were and how their lives eventually evolved.

But not Edna’s house. I gathered no indication of abnormality at all.

The day’s visit was over around 9PM. I had enjoyed my time there and realized it wasn’t the torture I thought it was going to be. Driving home, I mentioned to my Mom that Edna was “cool” and she agreed.

A year later, being 14 and summertime again, I found myself doing what I did a lot of, tool around on my ten speed, trying to find ways to entertain myself on a hot humid day. There was no one around to hang with so I just went off on my own, exploring and hopefully find something that would engage me, to kill the school/summer vacation boredom.

I found myself riding south along York Ave, then by the hospital and finally, in front of Edna’s house. I had not planned that. I just sort of did it. I wasn’t aware of any subconscious motivation at that age yet.

I sat there on my bike in front of her home, noticing her car wasn’t and was there for a good 15 minues, looking and remembering...and still wanting. It was a fantasy and I knew it then. The whole idea just wasn’t legally nor practically possible. I knew that much at 14. I wasn’t going to emancipate myself from my own home to Edna’s.

I never saw her again. As my Mom’s sickness cycled in and out, the outs had her further retreat into our home, blowing off the entire world and with that, any more visits to Edna.

When she was “bad,” I became a psychiatric nurse, check writer, bill payer, food cooker, clothing washer. The benefit that occurred was I had no parental supervision at all and did whatever the hell I wanted. I and others roamed Pawtucket at 2PM on our bikes, looking for shit to entertain us. I however was smarter than your average bear and never allowed myself to be in the back of cop car at 14. I do admit, it was a fun then at times as our mouse pack of a gang tried to emulate what our older siblings were doing in the late 70s.

Still, I wonder how I and a few others, would have done had we all been adopted by an Edna.