MY IMAGINARY FRIEND WAS TOO COOL TO HANG OUT WITH ME

2009-05-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

A CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING - 1970

When Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, created the religion in the late 19th Century hospitals were places you went to die. There was no such thing as penicillin. Doctors could only set bones, give you glasses and pull teeth. So Mary told her flock that they may seek medical care for broken bones, eye-glasses and teeth only. She said that for other diseases the cure was to know that they were unreal-- and that as soon as you recognized this fact that they would disappear.

In 1969, when penicillin had been around for 24 years, and doctors could cure a thousand diseases, I made one last visit to mine. Dr. Lionel J. Pepperman was a big, swarthy, gentle pediatrician, whose offices were attached to his house on Farview Avenue. He had medical instruments made out of chrome and Bakelite. I sat on butcher-paper and broke out in goose bumps when Dr. Pepperman asked me if I had a girlfriend. The back of my neck got this fantastic rush of tingles while I thought of all the things I would tell him about Amanda Clemmons, the girl I was in love with, if only I had the nerve to speak. Which, I never did.

Dr. Pepperman had a beige telephone with push button dialing. His fingers smelled like Dial and Kools. And when he gave shots, like for the mumps you could feel the needle go into your arm, but there was no pain.

Still my time with Dr. Pepperman was coming to an end. My mom was a Christian Scientist, named Mary after Mary Baker Eddy herself. My mom a half-Armenian, half-Russian Jew, born in the northeast corner of Tabriz, Iran – the capital of Azeri Persia was in fact named after the WASP discoverer and founder of a marginal Boston-based metaphysical offshoot of Congregationalism. Now I may be going out on a limb here, but I would even hazard a guess that my mom is the only half-Armenian, half-Russian Jew born in an Azeri area of Persia who is named for the blueblood Bostonian founder of a pseudo-ontological Nuevo-Christian denomination… at least the only one in her neighborhood.

About six months after I last saw my pediatrician, I told my mom that I had a 24-hour bug. She asked if I wanted to go to Dr. Pepperman, or did I want her to call Mr. Hoffnung whom I wouldn't have to see. He would pray for me remotely from his home.

You see, Bud Hoffnung was a Christian Science Practitioner. If Dr. Pepperman was nice, Mr. Hoffnung was someone from fairy tale land. He was Mr. Rogers wrapped in a Burl Ives container, filled with love and smiles. And let me tell you something, whatever I may think of Christian Science today, or what you may think of Christian Science today, Mr. Hoffnung was perhaps one of the nicest, kindest, most genuine human beings you could possibly ever meet in your life.

And, if my mom called Mr. Hoffnung, I didn’t have to go anywhere. I could stay home and watch television while my parents paid him to pray for me. Wonder which one I chose?

So I curled up on the mustard coach in our living room, under my blanket and my bedspread, and I watched Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, Gigantor: The Space Age Robot, Lassie, The Lucy Show, The Adams Family, Bachelor Father, Gilligan’s Island, Felix the Cat, Dodo the Kid from Outer Space, and Lost in Space.

All the while, Mr. Hoffnung prayed for me, utilizing the Divine Healing Power of Christian Science in order to see me as God's Perfect Child. This allowed him to heal me by fighting off the Mental Malpractice that had told me that I was sick. And sure enough, the following morning, twenty-four hours after I came down with a 24-hour bug, I was healed – healed without ever once stepping foot within a doctor's office, healed through the power of Divine Love, healed through the power of Christian Science prayer.

Was this the greatest discovery ever? I could be sick whenever I wanted or needed to be and I never had to be checked on again. All I had to do was say I was sick and bingo… we would call Mr. Hoffnung, he would pray for me, and I could watch TV.

Still, there was a catch, because when you have a Christian Science healing, it was hoped that you might give testimony. Christian Science churches had Wednesday Night services, at which one stands up and tells of their healing. I remember at one of the Wednesday Night testimonials one elderly lady saying that she had had something in her eye and at that moment when the pain was the most excruciating; that Divine Mind put a commercial on her television that told her to pull her upper eyelid over her lower eyelid to get rid of the object. She tried this and the item came out, proving God's love.

Between testimonies, the First Reader gazed out at the congregation with a beautiful smile. The First Reader was an elected member of the congregation who led all church services. In Christian Science our preachers were the Bible and The Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. Thus, we only needed a fellow member of the church, a reader to read these to the congregation.

I sat in the pews knowing I should rise and tell my story of being healed from a 24-hour bug in 24-hours. Mr. James, the First Reader cast his smile over to me. It was dark outside and I could feel the cold that had soaked into the windows. My eyes darted over to the words on the wall, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” (John 8:32). But I didn’t get up. I didn’t feel like my 24-hour bug was worthy. You see, the thing of it was, that I… I… hadn’t really, well, if you want me to be totally transparent and honest about it, the thing is that I hadn’t really had a 24-hour bug… The truth of the matter was that I had wanted a day off from school… to watch TV. I’d only said that I had a 24-hour bug, as an excuse… to get a day off… from school.

So I glued myself to the green cushion that ran the length of my pew and decided that I would get sick soon, really sick, honestly sick, close to dying sick and so that I could have a real Christian Science healing to make up for my pretend 24-hour bug. Then I would rise before the congregation, and give testimony of the divine healing power of Divine Mind.

In the months that followed, my attendance record at school become the worst, I have been told, in the history of Spring Valley Elementary. A meeting was called between my mom, my teacher, Mrs. Schaeffer, and the principal, Mr. Di Cicco, to discuss my horrific attendance and see why I had become so sickly. During this meeting, which I supposedly had a terrible sore throat and stomach ache that had caused me to miss yet another day, I got bored listing to the adults talk and got up out of my chair to run around the room, kicking the kick ball against the wall as hard as I could.

One day, yet a few weeks later, my dad was waterproofing our basement. He had a plastic drum full of chalky white waterproofing powder, which he mixed in batches in a trough, and then broomed against the cinder blocks. I put my face over the drum and a puff of powder flew into my face.

In an instant, I was blind.

I ran upstairs and put my face under the sink, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I tried to hide what had happened, but I was whimpering in fear and my mom found me in the bathroom sobbing. With some more water and toweling, I managed to regain my sight, but my right eye stung like I had poured salt and lemon juice into it.

The next day, Mrs. Schaeffer, stared at me, with my bright pink eye, running nose, and hacking cough. She took me to the nurse, and the two of them discussed the awful looking condition of my face for awhile. Finally they rendered a decision, and in their supreme medical expertise, they decided that maybe I wasn't a faker at all, because clearly I had pink eye. Calls went out to my mom and my dad, neither of whom answered the phone. The nurse went down to the principal’s office and came back with phone numbers for our neighbors. Eventually she managed to get Mrs. Petrusauka, our next-door neighbor on the phone, and explained to her what pink eye was and how she would need to keep me far away from the Petrusauka’s five-year old daughter, Alice. She was also to make absolutely sure that Alice and I did not share a Kleenex.

I tried to process if this was brilliant or inane advice. I had never shared a Kleenex before, but maybe this was common practice among non Christian Scientists. I wasn’t sure. Soon, Mrs. Petrusauka came and drove me to their house, and I sat and watched Sesame Street with Alice. She reminded both of us not to share a Kleenex.

I prayed. I prayed so hard to know the truth, so that the truth would set me free. I prayed to know that I was the perfect image and likeness of God and that I did not have pink eye. I knew that I did not have pink eye.

Actually, that’s completely accurate. I knew that I did not have pink eye.

I knew that I had waterproofing powder in my eye.

But my teacher and the school nurse were under the influence of Mental Malpractice and thus had given me pink eye, conjunctivitis. They had given me a real disease from which I could be healed and give testimony at the First Church of Christ Scientists in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

A few hours later, my mom picked me up and called Mr. Hoffnung. She read to me from the Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy and from the Bible. That night, my dad prayed with me. Now, to give both my parents credit, I don’t think they believed I had pink eye…but by the tenets of the church, denial of the existence of a disease is the first step to healing that disease.

My parents didn’t believe I had pink eye, because that’s what they had to believe in order to be good Christian Scientists, not just because they knew I had waterproofing powder in my eye. I prayed all night that, “There is no spot where God is not.” I knew I was the perfect likeness of being of God and that was all that was real about me, not the pink eye.

The next day, I awoke with two white eyes. My coughing was gone. My nose had stopped running. My mom sent me to school, where everyone was astounded to see me in such good shape. Amanda Clemmons studied my eye. It gave me that cold tingling on the back of my neck. The teacher told her to back away so that she didn’t catch my disease. Mrs. Schaeffer was a bitch. I told everyone that I had been healed by Christian Science, which got me beat up at recess.

The next Wednesday service, I went to church with great anticipation. As members of the congregation stood up to give testimony, I felt more and more nervous. At each gap between testimonies, I blanched when Mr. James, the First Reader looked my way with his benign smile. I bunched up the velvet cushion in my fists…and I held myself down to the pew, waiting for the services to end. When they finally did, we all stood up to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before…” I blasted my voice as loud as I could, giving testimony and thanks to God with the accompaniment of the entire church.

Then I went home and spent the next ten years convinced that I had had a divine healing. If you had met me between 1971 and 1981 and asked me why I believed in Christian Science, I would have told you that I had been healed from pink eye. It’s amazing how much truth we can build upon our own lie.

Mr. Hoffnung and I went on to become very good friends. His office was also in his house, which was surprisingly much nicer than Dr. Pepperman’s house except the black telephones had rotary dials. When I revealed to Mr. Hoffnung that my imaginary friend was the voice in my mind, the voice of God, he said that’s probably right. The voice in my head is God, and then he smiled to reassure me. Mr. Hoffnung was like one of my grandfather’s brothers, nice for no other reason than to be nice. Dr. Pepperman had an underlying purpose to his being nice… he was trying to get me to calm down while he stuck the Bakelite tip of some instrument into my ear or shined some piercing light into my eye. Still, I never once got the cold tingles he always gave me when I saw Mr. Hoffnung. Mr. Hoffnung never once asked me a question about a girl I like. Mr. Hoffnung never once got me to think about Amanda Clemmons…and I liked thinking of Amanda Clemmons.

But here’s the real rub…even though I eventually left the church, when I finally reminded myself of the waterproofing powder, nothing in this story contradicts Christian Science. How’s that possible? What I remembered was that I didn’t really have pink eye, that the pink didn’t exist. Christian Science teaches that we are healed when we realize that we don’t really have a disease, that the disease doesn’t exist. Thus, by my saying that I never had pink eye, I actually prove that I had a Christian Science healing.

Ah forget it…I didn’t have pink eye…that’s the truth, and the truth has set me free.

2009-02-15T16:11:00.000-08:00

NATALIE SAN SIMEON AND THE 1971 FORD TORINO BROUGHAM - 1980

The first time I saw Natalie San-Simeon was at 2:51 in the afternoon of October 13, 1976 standing near the Kresge’s, at the midway between Bam’s and Gimbel’s at the Garden State Plaza. She had deep brown eyes with a slightly Asian look about them. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. She was a Wella Girl. Her hair had Wella Balsam Shampoo full body. She wore a V-necked velour sweater over a synthetic satin shirt, Levis Boot Cut jeans and ski down vest. She was five solid feet of stunning.

We were at the mall to hear President Gerald Ford speak. I was holding a Kodak Tele-Instamatic 110 camera high over my head, snapping pictures of the President, while sporting a stained Sears t-shirt, threadbare work boots, and a Kodak Tele-Instamatic vinyl belt case that labeled me a, “Card Carrying Member of the Audio-Visual Squad.” Sensing it would be smartest to hide, I was hypnotized by Natalie. I stood there, in my worn-out yellow Sears windbreaker, next to my mom, and I stared at this Italian-American princess, this unspoiled paradigm of “spectacularness.”

The next day at school, I passed Natalie San-Simeon in the hall and discovered that the world’s most perfect woman went to Paramus Senior High. I quickly developed a case of unrequited love that lasted for six years.

Natalie didn’t have a boyfriend in Tenth Grade. I never asked her out. Natalie didn’t have a boyfriend in Eleventh Grade. I never asked her out. In Twelfth Grade she began hanging out with a friend of mine. Soon, they were walking down the hall together with his arm resting on her shoulders, like an ape limb hung over a Bottecelli. They went to prom together on a night that I stayed home to watch MORK AND MINDY. Natalie’s boyfriend and I both wound up at GW.

During freshman year, whenever Natalie came down to visit I knocked on my friend’s dorm room door every… fifteen minutes or so until he answered. And there would be Natalie San-Simeon, the cutest girl ever to walk the planet Earth, sitting with her knees under her like a cat, smiling at me and talking to me about D.C., New Wave, and Paramus gossip She was a cross between Stewardess Barbie and Mary Ann on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.

Sophomore year, Natalie enrolled at the Ameican University up by the National Cathedral. My friend came to me upset. His parents had spent two hours on the phone with him telling him he had to stop dating Natalie. It was getting serious and she wasn’t Jewish. My friend was devastated. I thought because he was going to disobey his parents, but, I realized he was devastated because he was going to dump Natalie. He was going to dump Natalie San-Simeon. How crazy was that? I was so stunned; I actually tried to talk him out of it.

A few months later, on Halloween night, my now single friend told me he was going to hide. Natalie was on campus looking for him. I gave him my sympathy as he trudged away. Then, I tore up to my room and took a scalding high-speed shower, liberally spilling Clairol Herbal Essence on my scalp. I put on my roommate’s Yves Saint Laurent cologne. I put on my Fiorucci jeans, my Capezio shoes and matching purple Polo knit and Oxford shirts, with the knit’s collar up. I even had a knit purple belt to match. I ran to The Exchange, the GW bar, and searched for Natalie, but she wasn’t there. Finally I slogged back to my dorm with my head hung low, and I walked right into Natalie. She was with a group of Long Island looking Amrican University students. She talked to me until her friends dragged her away. But, before she left, she told me that she lived in Anderson Hall…on the fifth floor.

I ran up the steps, three risers at a time, to get to my room and write down “Anderson Hall, fifth floor.” I told my roommate, Johnny Napali, about Natalie. My passion scared him a little and he pulled out his guitar and held it on his lap to steady himself. He told me that he was going to make sure that I got a date with Natalie. It was why God had sent him to George Washington University.

The next day, he dragged me into my room and slammed the door, with an admonishment that I was not allowed out until I called her. I tried to open the door, but Johnny found allies who would help him shove me back. Kids from my dorm took turns standing guard. Either I called Natalie or I lived out my life in Thurston Hall, Room 608. The trouble was that even though I was 19, I had never, ever, ever asked a girl out before in my entire life. I needed to learn how fast.

I picked up the phone and dialed the fifth floor of Anderson Hall at American University seven times, clicking the line dead before it rang each time. On the eighth call, a girl answered before the phone rang. My stomach tapped against my throat. I asked for Natalie San-Simeon. The girl asked who was calling. I said, “Chuck Freericks.” Fuck, that’s a stupid name! But, I couldn’t think of a better one.

Minutes of silence passed. Then there was flurry of phone movement… fvwishwkumpawmmm…and I heard Natalie San-Simeon saying, “Hello?” Even writing these words down now, 24-years later, my palms are sweaty, my heart is pounding against my ribs, my stomach is tapping on my throat and all the rest of my innards are melting. Do you understand? I was on the phone with Natalie San-Simeon. Holy fucking shit.

Natalie and I spoke for about an hour. I said what a funny coincidence it was that I ran into her in my lobby and wasn’t that fun? I talked about Springsteen and Rockpile, because someone had told me she liked them. And as the conversation finally came to clubs, she mentioned Scandals, and I realized that this was the opportunity, so I asked her if she’d like to go to Scandals sometime. When she said yes, I said it would be good to have dinner first. She said yes. Now, up to this point, I had mentioned going with me. I’d just asked her in general terms if she wanted to go to Scandals and dinner and not wanting to spoil things by having her reject me for a Friday or Saturday elite level date when she realized that I was coming with her, I suggested Tuesday. She said yes.

I hung up the phone and opened the door, to find that the hall was empty. I guess everyone got bored with the long call. I ran up and down the dorm, singing, on the top of my lungs, the barely known hit by The Tremblers, “I’ll be taken her out tonight, out tonight, out tonight…When I said I want to meet her they said boy you’re just a dreamer…just a make believer…but I’ll be taking her out tonight.” It was then that I realized that my car was in New Jersey.

I had a 1978 Buick Regal Limited with crushed velour pillow seating, opera lamps, a five liter V-8 and a padded landau roof. But, I didn’t have a mechanic in D.C., so I’d driven the car to New Jersey for an oil change. I’d borrowed my brother’s avocado green 1971 Ford Torino Brougham to get back to D.C. Problem was that it was Sunday night. I had class Monday morning. I had class Tuesday morning. I had a date Tuesday night. My car was 240 miles away and I was not going to take Natalie San-Simeon out in an avocado green 1971 Ford Torino Brougham.

Luckily, Johnny Napoli did a lot of cocaine or the events that follow probably never would have happened. He told me that I had two choices, fucked, or really fucked. Really fucked was calling Natalie back and changing the date to another day. Fucked was we drive five hours to New Jersey, swap cars, and drive five hours back to D.C., only missing our 9:00 classes in the process, getting back in time for our elevens.

It was One A.M. when Johnny Napoli and I got into my brother’s 1971 Ford Torino Brougham, and hit Pennsylvania Avenue, driving by the White House, before turning onto New York Avenue for the ride up the BW Parkway. I had enough adrenalin pumping through me to keep me up for the next couple hours easily. We sailed through Baltimore just before two. We stopped at the big rest area south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and Johnny took over driving because, to quote him, I looked like I was about to keel. It was close to 3:30 by then. We passed the Cherry Hill water tower about thirty minutes later. Within an hour I asked Johnny to pull over and let me drive again, because he was alternating which eye he kept open while driving. An hour and a half later, I pulled the car into my driveway in Paramus, New Jersey, at Six A.M. exactly. My father had already left for work.

My mom made us breakfast, and gave Johnny some coffee. She said how pleasant it was that we’d come to visit. At 6:30, half-an-hour after we arrived, we left again. I don’t remember the drive back to D.C. at all. I know it was in the Regal, which drove like a marshmallow on satin sheets. I know that we didn’t crash and die, but I do honestly believe that there were moments when we were both asleep, even though one of us was always driving. We got back around 11:30 and I dropped Johnny in front of his 11:00 class, before I drove back to the dorm and fell asleep.

Tuesday night, I found a message in Johnny’s handwriting, taped to the black rotary wall phone. It said that Natalie called and was sick and couldn’t keep our date. On Wednesday the same rotary wall phone rang. It was Natalie calling to reschedule. I suggested next Tuesday. She said yes. Next Tuesday, the phone rang. It was Natalie. She didn’t feel well again, but this time she rescheduled for Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I skipped a midterm to drive out to the Chevy Chase Syms, where an educated consumer was their best customer. I bought a European cut fine tweed jacket, Jordache jeans, a pink Izod-Lacoste oxford and a fake gold chain. I drove the Regal to AU and walked into the Anderson Hall lobby. I called the fifth floor and Natalie said she’d be down in a minute. An hour later, the elevator opened, and there she was, in a suede jacket that was – well… let me just say that I wanted to be that suede jacket. That was all I needed in the whole wide world.

There were three other girls with her…all staring at me…like I was the cool guy in a movie picking up the cool girl for a date, and they were the giggling friends wishing they could be my date instead. They were all pretty, but none of them was good enough.

Outside, I opened the car door for Natalie and sat her in my Regal. She reached over and unlocked my door for me. She then pulled the handle and tried to push the door open. Tears of joy sprang from my eyes. She petted the crushed velour on her seat and told me that I had a really nice car. She asked for a hairbrush, and I pulled my brand new, never used, Goody out of the glove compartment. She said I had the perfect kind of hairbrush. I drove very slowly and carefully. I looked at her hands and I thought, those are Natalie San-Simeon’s hands. Those little hairs on her arm are Natalie San-Simeon’s little arm hairs. Wow!

As we waited in the bar for a table at the restaurant, I went to the men’s room, looked at my reflection in the mirror and said, out loud, “I’m Chuck Freericks and I’m on a date with Natalie San-Simeon.”

At our table, Natalie glowed, as the candles flickered on her face and in her eyes. I tried not to stare at her while we talked. I tried to act indifferent to the fact that we were on a date, the way a real guy would act. I had onion soup and fettuccine alfredo. Well, I ordered onion soup and fettuccine alfredo. I didn’t actually eat anything. Neither did she. It went well.

Next I drove her to Scandals, but even though I had figured out a way to ask her on a date, I still did not know how to ask her to dance, so we spent the next two hours watching other people dance. Moreover, because it was a Wednesday, there were no college students there, just grownups, in their twenties. Finally, she told me she needed to go home. I got lost trying to get back to AU, but it was cool, because it kept her in my car longer. I turned up the radio, and I swear to God, I’m not making this up, Supertramp was singing “Take The Long Way Home…Take The Long Way Home…So You Think You’re a Romeo, Playing a Part In A Picture Show…Take The Long Way Home.” Natalie looked at me and we shared a moment of non-verbal communication, smiling at each other the way couples in love share spontaneous insights with just a look and a smile.

When I found her dorm and pulled to a stop, she said to me, “I had a really good time. You can call me again.” It was one of those moments, you know, one of those moments when all the other shit just doesn’t exist, when you think, “it’s all going to be all right, I am going to have a grand and wonderful life.” It was one of those fuck yeah moments. And as she walked up the steps to her dorm, I took out the hairbrush to hold for the ride home. It was 12:07 at night, seven minutes into November 21, 1980, when I started back towards D.C.

In the weeks that followed, I took Natalie out a few more times, but never got up the nerve to kiss her. On our last date, she brought friends along. Then, the Buick Regal began leaking oil and antifreeze and I had to sell it. Johnny Napoli moved back to Connecticut, never to be heard from again. And me? I let go of the crush…one…two years after our first date. As to Natalie, she married one of those Long Island looking guys she’d come down to GW with.

But, you know what, that’s not important. What’s important is that no matter what, I will always know that my life was charmed, on the night of November 20, 1980 when I took Natalie San-Simeon to dinner at an Italian Restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland and I took her to watch old people dancing at Scandals in Washington, D.C. How many people get to say that their first date ever was with a girl that they had already been in love with for four years?

2009-02-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

A CAR TO NAP IN -1967 to 1979

What does a $40 car look like? Ours was held together with baling wire, Bondo and duct tape. It had 226,328 miles on it. The front seat consisted of springs and gaping holes. The after-factory air conditioner hung from the dashboard by a single bolt. It was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant 100 that had been my mom’s car for five years. It had been my dad’s car for six years. It had been my car for less than a year.

In August of 1979 my dad sold it for $40 to a friend of our handyman. The handyman’s friend touched each knob and dial on the dash repeatedly saying, “This is great,” over and over again. He turned to the handyman and said, “I can’t believe I’m going to have my own car,” and then he misted up, not ever noticing the two dozen coffee cup rings my dad had left on the top of the dashboard.

He lied down on the back seat and looked up at the torn roof liner. “I could nap back here,” he announced.

He pulled two crumpled twenties out of two separate pockets and shoved them into my dad’s hands. When my dad gave him the keys, he hoisted them up and down in his palm to feel their small heft. Then he yelped a rebel yell, started the car, and drove it out of our lives forever. We heard the motor roar when the handyman’s friend made his turn onto Spring Valley.

Twelve years earlier, I was about to turn six and my brother was turning four, when my mom began a search for a car that her children could nap comfortably in while she drove. She had a 1960 Valiant 200 that smelled like dust, maple syrup and celery. You couldn’t see the floorboard though my mom’s paper collection of flyers, handouts and catalogs.

The 1960 Valiant was a space-aged compact with a push-button transmission, a raised wheel on the trunk, tailfins and a silver embossed dash. My mom was a 32-year-old budding children’s book author who got upset with salesmen, bank tellers, checkout clerks and the like when the real world butted up against her fantasy of what the world was.

She dragged us from car dealer to car dealer, forcing us to lie down in the back of each car she tested, to see if we were comfortable napping. It was sort of like trying on new pants to see if they fit, but doing it with the backseats of Detroit’s finest. Oddly enough, as I remember it, all of these car dealers were selling the same cars. You see, she had a Valiant and liked that, so we visited different Plymouth dealers throughout the county, rather than actually looking at other brands.

She was very brand loyal. Our washing machine always had a box of Tide, a box of Cold Power and a bottle of Downy atop it. In the bathroom, we had a bar of Ivory Snow and a tube of Colgate with MFP. Our kitchen always had Brillo Pads, never SOS, Ajax, never Comet, and Palmolive Dishwasher Detergent, never Cascade. My mom had a Valiant and even though it was dying, it was a brand she knew… so we only looked at Plymouths, and most of them were Valiants.

Finally, she dragged us to a dealer who decided what my mom needed was a Barracuda. He walked us over to a gold fastback. It was the most beautiful car I had ever seen, a real Hot Wheel. Under the huge glass fastback there was a carpeted flat area that looked an awful lot like a bed to the salesman and my mom.

This was what my mom had been looking for all along, a car with a place for my brother and me to nap while she drove. She had us climb into the back and lie down. She tested the area between the rear wall of the car and my shoe like she tested new shoes for me, pushing a thumb against the front toe. I fit perfectly in the Barracuda.

My mom told the salesman she wanted to take the Barracuda for a test drive. He said, “Great, put your kids in their seats and we’ll go. My mom said, “I need to make sure they’re comfortable lying in the back while I drive.” The salesman said this was a bad idea. My mom insisted it was a good idea. Finally, he told her he didn’t want to come along if my brother and I weren’t in our seats. My mom took the car for a test drive without him.

As we pulled off the lot, I felt good, lying in the sun that was penetrating through the huge rear window. The sky was blue and the car smelled new. There were little lights at the end of each fender that flashed with the blinkers to let you know that they were working. I was in Heaven, until we hit first bump. My mom called back to see if we felt it. Then she had to stop quickly in order not to run a red light. My brother and I flew forward. Our heads smacked into the back of the back seat. Our bodies accordioned. We both began to cry. My mom took the Barracuda back to the Plymouth dealer and told him it wasn’t a very good car.

Frustrated, she dragged us back home, ready to give up, and told my dad this. He took us to another Plymouth dealer, Castle Motors, but they were closed when we got there. My mom looked in the fence at the 1968 cars all lined up. She squealed in delight, “Charley, that’s it, that’s it. That’s the car I want.” She pointed at a blue 1968 Plymouth Valiant 100. “Isn’t it cute?” After test driving a dozen cars and measuring the back seats of a dozen more using my brother and me as her yardsticks, she picked the Valiant out instantaneously through a chain-link fence. We went back the next day and bought it for $2,683.15.

Over the days, months and years that followed, my brother and I spent hours and hours napping and sleeping in the backseat, watching as the light and shadows from streetlamps swept across the rear window like a black and white kaleidoscope. Brand loyalty turned out to be a good thing, as history actually proved the Slant Six Valiant to be one of the most reliable cars to come out of the late 1960s. And as the years passed, eventually I went from napping in the Valiant to driving it.

Near the end of the twelve years that we owned it, I nursed it over to Parwood Sunoco one day, keeping the windows cracked open because the muffler was leaking carbon monoxide into the cabin. When Mark, the mechanic, opened the hood he looked at me and said, “You know what this car needs?”

“What,” I asked?

“A replacement car….”

My clearest memory of it the Valiant though isn’t about how old and enfeebled it became. In fact, my clearest memory is about napping… being six-years-old at my grandmother’s apartment. I was in my pajamas and my dad carried me down the long staircase and out into the crystal cold night. He put me on the hard vinyl of the Valiant’s back seat. He put my brother on a pillow on the floor. We drove home in that steady staccato of the streetlamps kaleidoscope washing across us and then fading into shadows.

As unbelievably dangerous as it probably was to let us nap in that car, when I did, I knew I was in the safest place in the world. And because of that, I understand why the handyman’s friend was so delighted to buy the car. I truly understand.

2008-09-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

NOBODY GETS BACK IN - 1981

For over a year, Ted Koppel had called out the days that the hostages had been held in Iran.

It was day 436 – And I wasn’t dating Natalie San Simeon, but I didn’t know that yet. Because she was my first girlfriend, and I needed to clear as much time to be with her as possible, I plagiarized my term papers and didn’t study for my finals so I could have time to randomly appear where she was – like at her campus – in her dorm elevator – 9.75 miles from my campus.

In fact, a couple weeks before, when George Washington University’s term was over and everyone else had gone, I’d spent a week in my empty dorm, so that I could coincidentally happen to be leaving the same day that Natalie’s term was over at Maryland, and be able to drive her home for Winter Break – “How cool, we’re both done the same day!” Everyone thought I was dating Natalie too. In fact the only person who knew I wasn’t dating Natalie was Natalie herself.

Day 437 – I got a letter from the Dean of Academic Probation that I’d been expelled – something about a 1.2 grade point average. I made an appointment to see him.

I didn’t want to leave George Washington. For the first time in my life I had a girlfriend. Besides, I’d recently been voted the most popular kid at school… at my dorm… on the 6th Floor of my dorm. And the politics of being in DC were intoxicating. I had met the Vice President of the United States, Walter Mondale. And I’d seen President Jimmy Carter not light the Christmas tree.

I’d worked at Kennedy Headquarters, where I’d used a Xerox Magnafax Telecopier that transmitted words on paper. I sent Ted Kennedy’s speech to him on the road using the phone. In as little as four hours, I’d been able to send ten whole pages to Oklahoma.

Day 438 – There was no way I was going back to New Jersey. I drove the 9.75 miles to College Park and filled out an application for the University of Maryland Continuing Education program. The admissions advisor said, “As long as you haven’t been expelled from George Washington your application looks fine.”

Day 439 – I had my appointment with the Dean of Academic Probation. I arrived early and sat in reception practicing looking like I was trying not to cry. Finally he saw me.

“How do I get back in,” I asked.

“Nobody gets back in,” he told me. I looked like I was trying not to cry.

“Fine,” he grumbled, “write a statement of appeal explaining what happened last semester get some letters of recommendation from professors, and TAs. But, not from students, and don’t work too hard on it; nobody gets back in.”

I worked fifteen hours on my statement. I began with the death of a relative at the beginning of the semester, not mentioning I’d only met the man once. I then tore into the epic of living with my insane, and since dropped-out roommate, Tony Abruzzi. I indicated there was voodoo and Satanism involved, although I failed to site any examples, not knowing what real examples would be. By the time I was done, the document was twenty pages long, but it wasn’t enough to save me.

Day 440 – With no sleep, I trudged to the offices of every professor I had ever had who had given me at least a C. I came back to with two letters of recommendation. I got two more from my RAs. Four letters wasn’t going to cut it, but I wasn’t going home. I was staying to meet more Presidents, spend more time with my girlfriend and continue to be the most popular kid on campus… in my dorm… on the 6th Floor. Suddenly it occurred to me, I was the most popular kid on the 6th floor of my dorm. Maybe two letters from students wouldn’t mean anything, but what about 15? What about 20? Fuck the Dean of Academic Probation. Let’s see him swim through 25 letters.

I went from door to door, leaving notes on all the dry-erase message boards and telling my story to all who answered. I poured my soul out to Jappy girls, to preppy boys, to closet lesbians, to stoners, to preppy girls, to Jappy boys, to out-in-the-open-but-I-didn’t-get-it-yet gays, to library moles, to fraternity drunks, to smokers, to tokers, to jokers, to weird kids no else one talked to. My plight became the cause-celeb of the dorm. Everyone wrote me letters. Letters upon letters upon letters piled up on my desk, each one of them extolling the virtues and the promise that was Chuck Freericks. There were typed letters. There were letters on flowery girl stationery. There were letters ripped from spiral notebooks. There was a letter on a brown paper bag. Close friends wrote two page long documents. Kids from the 5th and 7th Floors joined in and wrote letters. That night, after dinner gaggles of students sat all over the hallways, writing letters as the 4th and 8th Floors joined the Chuck Freericks cause.

Day 441 – I had 112 letters. I placed my 20-page statement on top of them and carried the pile to the office of the Dean of Academic Probation. When I handed the pile to his secretary she said, “You don’t expect him to read all of this do you?” I starred at her, looking like I was trying not to cry.

Day 444 – President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. I didn’t care much for Reagan, but, I wanted to experience DC one last time, so I went down to Pennsylvania Avenue and when the Caddy limousines with police lights passed, I cheered for Reagan and Bush just so I could be part of the crowd.

After the parade, I went back to my dorm, and found a huge swarm of kids from my dorm standing outside. Across the street from us was The F Street Club, “The” Republican Club in the Capital City. We all whooped it up as President Ronald Reagan climbed out of his limo with Nancy and walked up the stairs to the club. Then, George and Barbara Bush got out of their Caddy and headed up. Alexander Haig, Ed Meese, Michael Deaver and James Baker followed. I cheered for each and every one of them, good Democrat that I was.

After it was all done, I went to move my car to the parking lot on 22nd Street. As I pulled up to E Street, home of the State Department, the late John Lennon was singing, “It’s Just Like Starting Over.” The song was interrupted and the Z-107 deejay said we were going to the Associated Press for a special report.

“Frankfurt, Germany, The hostages are free, the hostages are free, the hostages are on a plane to Frankfurt.” And then I cheered a cheer that had nothing to do with festivity or pomp. I cheered for lost causes and how the hostages were finally free even after we all thought they’d never come home. They were getting a second chance.

“Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie,” the radio went on as I turned right, “has just flown into National Airport and is on his way to The State Department. Muskie successfully negotiated the release of the hostages this morning.”

As the radio said this, I pulled up to the light at 20th Street. A limousine pulled next to me. I assumed it was another Republican wonk going to the F Street Club, but when I looked in the rear seat, I saw, sitting alone, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. He looked at me. I smiled and gave him a thumbs up. Muskie grinned back at me, gave me a thumbs up too and a hearty nod. Then his car pulled off and Muskie went back to his office for the last time. Alexander Haig was now the new Secretary of State.

Later, that night on TV, I watched tape of Jimmy Carter waving anemically from the podium while Reagan was sworn in. Carter looked like he was trying not to cry. Edmund Muskie had freed the hostages. Jimmy Carter had tried to clean up Washington. Unlike me, they’d come here to actually do something, these two great men, and now they were being expelled from DC. They had no appeal. The Dean of Academic Probation had said it all, “Nobody gets back in.”

Day 445 – The phone rang. It was the Dean of Academic Probation.

“You’re back in,” he said. “In twenty years of doing this, no one has ever shown your fortitude. I’ve never seen a student with such a capacity to produce results. Go enroll in your classes. Have a good semester. Put the same effort into your classes as you did into your appeal and you’ll do great.”

Now I can’t say I ever put as much effort into anything in school again as I did my appeal, but I did keep my grade point average above 3.0 for the next two years. And, even I eventually figured out that Natalie wasn’t my girlfriend. The fact that she brought friends on our dates clued me in. As happy as I was that I got back in – I have to admit the lesson I took away from it was that being a little weasel gets forgiven (and even can get you to be the most popular kid on the 6th Floor of your dorm). While being great men of vision gets you ridiculed and run out of Washington DC on a rail – but I guess we’ve always known that, anyway.

2008-07-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

THE OFFICIAL 21 CHAMPIONSHIP OF COOPER PLACE - 1974

My brother and I were always in competition. When my dad came home from food shopping, my brother and I divided the Burry’s Scooter Pies and the Burry’s Fudge Town Cookies in half to ensure that neither of us got more than the other. But if my dad ate a cookie, destroying the evenness of our cookie count, it caused tears and accusations to fill our small house tearing apart the fabric of our family, and sending my brother and me into a small battle that would last until the next week’s food shopping.

My brother and I competed over vacuuming. My mom paid a dollar a room, and we would fight over the Hoover upright to earn it. I’d take the prize living room and hallway, leaving him the dining room and my parents’ bedroom—both filled with complicated furniture to vacuum around. We competed over the spot on the rug in front of our black & white 19-inch Magnavox Portable TV and what we watched on it. We competed over our best friend Frankie Petrusauka.

Frankie lived behind us. He was a year younger than me and a year older than my brother. Blonde and freckled, he was worldly. His parents had large tin cans of Charles Chips pretzels delivered to their house. His father had a Volkswagen Beetle. His mother had a Dodge Polaris station wagon. They went to McDonald’s. They had a dog. They had a vacation home in Lake Como in the Poconos. When the Good Humor Truck came, Frankie had money in his pocket to buy a Canonball with a gumball on the bottom. They were real people.

Frankie and my brother bought skateboards together one day in May, and I was felled by a wave of jealousy that crippled me. They went to Sam Goody’s together and bought 8-tracks of Jethro Tull and the Grateful Dead. My brother ran around our house holding his fist in the air chanting, “Dead, Dead, Dead.” The straw that broke the camel’s back came when Frankie took my brother to Lake Como for a weekend. They returned telling stories of having seen a drunk (something I had never seen, although in hindsight I now must admit I’d seen it twice every time I visited my grandparents).

I thought I had lost the war for Frankie’s friendship to my brother when another shift in our fortunes occurred. Frankie’s dad put up a basketball backboard at the curb of their front lawn, turning the cul-de-sac at the bottom of Cooper Place into a basketball court. The three of us began playing Twenty-One (one on one basketball, a point a basket, first one to twenty-one wins, but you must win by two points). The winner then played the next player, while the loser sat out. This meant that Frankie Petrusauka played every game. He could kill you with his standard cut into his signature lay-up. My brother got bored and left Frankie and me to play by ourselves.

It was then; in some misguided belief that keeping track of the standings would result in me coming back that I told Frankie that I was going to start recording who won each game. I announced that all our games up until that point had been practice.

And so we began the first game of The Official Twenty-One Championship of Cooper Place. Frankie beat me 21 to 3. While that may sound lopsided, one of my points was an astounding Hail Mary from the Grundin’s driveway that even Mr. Grundin stopped to admire. As the tournament had no official end, I felt confident that I could come back from my one to nothing deficit with ease.

After our second game, the record was two to nothing. By day six of the championship we were at Frankie twelve, Chuck nothing. It was around this time that my desire to be Frankie’s best friend was passed by my desire to take him down. Even within the losses there were real ups and downs. I lost one 21 zip, but two days later Frankie had had to score 31 pointes to beat me 31 to 29. My first win and the beginning of my comeback were clearly within sight.

Two weeks later we were at Frankie 68, Chuck nothing. It was unbelievable. No matter how well I played, no matter how big a lead I got, Frankie would come back and win. There was no defense against his standard cut to his signature lay-up. In one game I put in twelve lay-ups in a row while Frankie finished his Good Humor Canonball. Frankie beat me 24 to 22. I now had one goal in life… and that was to beat Frankie Petrusauka in basketball. I was like a gambler at a Blackjack table, losing hand over hand, convinced that the start of my streak of wins was just one more game away.

At the end of the first month it was Frankie 137, Chuck nothing. At least half of those games had been close and maybe a fifth of them had gone into extra points because we had been tied at twenty to twenty. We played in the sun. We played on days so hot that my bicycle kickstand melted the road, leaving a gash. We played in the rain. We played after the rain, when Cooper Place smelled of warm raindrops sizzling on hot asphalt. We played on days so long that our mothers called us in for bedtime.

By month two, it was Frankie 387, Chuck nothing. Luckily my family went to visit family in Delaware. It gave me time to regroup. While I was away at my cousins, I slept late each morning, trying to regain my strength. When I did get up, I ran in the field behind their house, building up my endurance. I drank all the orange juice in my cup. I ate all the meat I was served. I even tried a tomato when one was accidentally put in my salad. I’d heard that they build strength.

I returned with a new determination and a new outlook. I was not going to give up. I was not going to let Frankie always have that last shot. I was going to win. Even Frankie could see the new gleam in my eye. He was scared. He knew this was a new Chuck.

But, there was still nothing I could do to stop Frankie’s standard cut to his signature lay-up. We reached Frankie 500, Chuck nothing a few weeks later on a night that we both wanted to get in early to see Happy Days.

We climbed to Frankie 600, Chuck nothing on a morning after a storm that left tree branches, limbs and even trunks lying all over everyone’s yards and cars.

Frankie 700, Chuck nothing came the day before my family left for vacation in the Poconos. We were not going to Lake Como though, but to Milford, Pennsylvania, where we were staying in a cabin named Bambi. Needless to say, my brother and I both agreed we would never let Frankie know the name of our cabin. I took a book with me on how to become a basketball great. All week long I read about lay-ups and field goals and free throws and dribbling and how to make myself the best basketball player I could be. By the end of the week, I knew more about basketball than Marv Albert and Walt Frasier combined.

When I came back, I brought my new education to the macadam of Cooper Place. As I began to dribble the way I had learned to dribble, Frankie ducked in, stole the ball, and made a shot from the manhole in the middle of the street. The tournament had resumed.

It took three more days to reach Frankie 800, Chuck nothing. The games had become even more competitive. I never lost by more than seven, and was taking as much as a quarter of the games into extra points. When Frankie won his 827th game, it was as much due to his fouling me on my last shot and not admitting it as it was due to his outplaying me.

Frankie won the 828th game handily, but he had to fight me off all the way up to 35 to 33 to win game number 829. For some reason, this made Frankie angry. He didn’t seem to want to play anymore. He started hanging out with my brother again, skateboarding and skulking into the basement to listen to Tull: “To be thick as a brick…” A few days later I finally got him out on Cooper Place again. I made two shots from the center of the cul-de-sac. My lay-ups were flawless. I blocked half of Frankie’s shots. It was only by a miracle that he won 21 to 19. I suggested we play another. He didn’t want to. I told him he was poultry. He told me to give him the ball.

The game was brutal. It was the most intense and fast paced game of Twenty-One ever played on the streets of Paramus, New Jersey. It was 5 to 0, Frankie, when I began a streak of swishes combined with blocks that soon had us at Chuck 6, Frankie 5. The lead went back and forth twenty times, as I made astounding shot after astounding shot, only to have Frankie start pumping in some nothing but nets of his own. We reached twenty to twenty. When I took another long jump shot from the manhole cover, I heard Frankie swear. Then, as if summoning God to his side, he crossed himself and dropped a frozen rope through the rim. I said a silent prayer and scored a wicked shot. It was 22 to 21, my lead. Frankie dribbled the ball slowly towards me, and got ready to make his standard cut for his signature lay-up, when I reached in and knocked the ball away. Frankie continued on his cut, as if he had the ball. I grabbed, it, and dribbled to the basket with him. We both jumped together. The ball rattled around the top of the rim, and then dropped through.

I won, 23 to 21. The standings were now Frankie 830, Chuck one. I screamed and I yelled and I jumped up and down like I had won the NBA Finals. Frankie picked up his ball and walked into his house without saying a word to me.

We never played basketball again. He officially became my brother’s best friend. It was then that I began the Badminton Tournament of Hickory Place with my next-door neighbor on the other side, Becky Rosenberg, but that as they say, is another story.

2008-04-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

CRYING TO VIDA BLUE - 1971

I was among the best!

One of the greatest in the annuls of baseball history!

Few have tried, and even less have succeeded in reaching the levels of self-delusion that I achieved with ease on any day at any time and at any place.

Fourth grade for example, when I became convinced that I was going to be a Hall-of-Fame pitcher on the New York Mets. The fact that I had never played baseball did not discourage me. The fact that I did not own a baseball glove or baseball bat did not dissuade me. The fact that I was the last one picked for kickball, even after Lacy Leftkowitz, who picked her nose while waiting to be picked, did not dishearten me. After all, I’d read every book in the Paramus Public Library about baseball, and I had a near perfect set of 1971 Tops Baseball Cards, including the checklist cards, so I knew I was ready.

I determined the best way to pursue my baseball dream was to create my own Chuck Freericks baseball cards, so after dinner one night, I dressed the closest I could come to a baseball uniform – Dacron bell bottoms, a striped terry cloth shirt-sleeve, and black buckle Thom McAns. I posed by the hedge in the backyard, which was the closest I could find to an outfield wall. I wore my father’s antique left handed mitt and my dad recorded me on Kodak Tri-X Pan.

A week later I get my baseball cards, but they were black and white and big and floppy, not like real baseball cards at all. Still, I wrapped them with a stick of bubble gum to give them the right smell.

Now, here’s the funny thing about ridiculous fantasies… those of us that have them will somehow manage to get ourselves into grand situations that others can only scratch their heads about, How the hell did that Goober manage that? And thus, a few days later I received an ad in the mail from Pro-Way Baseball Camp for Boys.

My mom took me to see the camp, where I met the great former Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella. While others pursued their baseball dreams by playing Little League or in stickball games, I, at all of nine years and three months old, pursued mine by networking.

I stood at the side of Roy’s wheelchair, scared to touch it, and desperately tried to think of what I could tell him from all the books that I had read and all of the baseball cards that I had perused that would immediately convince him that I was a baseball star to be. I mean, this was it… right? This was my chance. I had the ear of Roy Campanella. I stood there and stared at him. He smiled, the way kindly men will often smile at stupid children. Finally he asked me what position I played.

“Pitcher,” I sort of whispered, but not much sound came out. Campy nodded and turned away. Man, oh, man, this was it and I was blowing it. I had to say something brilliant, something to let him know what a great ballplayer I was… “Who was your favorite catcher when you were a kid?” I finally mustered out. “Bill Dickey,” he said… and our conversation was done.

I got my mom to sign me up for a session just so I could try to talk to Campy again. My parents deposited me at my grandmother’s apartment and left on vacation. That night, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my mom’s twin bed beside my grandmother, Mama’s twin bed and listened to her sleep. Mama snored like a horse with strep. She had two glasses on her nightstand, both filled with water, one with her teeth. As an aside, Mama used to say water needed to breathe the air before you drank it. For years I would pour a glass of water and let it sit for hours before drinking it. It did taste better, but I’m not sure why.

Anyway, back to that night. Mama’s dressing table was smothered with photographs, mostly black and white. Her casement windows overlooked the parking lot, and when cars came in, tires munched the gravel. Their headlights reflected four squares against the dressing table mirror and glided silently up over the pile of Reader’s Digests, the table fan, and across the ceiling. The room smelled of old newspaper and mothballs. I lied there, imagining that when they made the movie about my life as the world’s greatest baseball player, they would show this scene of me lying in bed the night before, watching the headlights glide across Mama’s ceiling and having a drink of dusty water.

The next day, Mama was sick. Still she somehow managed to put a winter coat over her nightgown and walked me to Tenafly Road in the 95 degree heat. She held my hand in a death grip as she quizzed the camp bus driver if he was really from Pro-Way and hadn’t stolen a school bus and twenty-five kids in order to kidnap me. Mama escorted me down the bus aisle, keeping her death grip on me until she found a seat for me, which she wiped clean with a crushed Kleenex.

An hour later, I was at camp listening to Roy Campanella speak. Campy told us that baseball was designed to break our hearts. His heart was still broken from the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, Bobby Thompson’s homerun in the 1951 playoffs. Campy also said that after that game Ralph Branca, the pitcher who gave up the homerun, sat by himself, weeping in the Dodger’s locker room. No one went to talk to him. No one would sit with him. If we went on with baseball, each one of us would one day have that moment when baseball broke our hearts and we wept like a baby.

After Campy’s talk we lined up to play catch, but I couldn’t actually get the ball to the guy I was paired with. I couldn’t actually get it anywhere close to him. I was sort of pushing it through the air to the floor in front of me. Campy took me aside from the rest of the boys, and spent the afternoon teaching me how to throw.

“No, no…you’re pushing the ball …see what I’m doing…reach back and then high and then snap your wrist….No, no, no…you’re not watching me, are you? Do you really want to do this? Then why aren’t you trying? That’s not trying is it? Like this, okay, like this.” During the whole time, I was trying to please Campy, but I kept sort of missing what he was saying because I was too busy trying to figure out what I could tell him that would let him know that I was a superstar baseball player. Finally camp was done and he told me to go get on my bus.

As the days went by, I learned more and more about baseball. Like, did you know that there are special baseball shoes? Did you know I was the only kid at camp who didn’t have them? Did you know that baseball gloves need to be broken in before you use them? I did not, and had a glove that was as stiff as wood. Did you know that baseball players wear protective cups? I was not aware of this, and it was a bad thing when other kids played “Cup Check.”

Did you know that baseball players eat meat at lunch, to get their energy up? Mama packed me Welch’s grape jelly sandwiches on Arnold White Bread. She included an aqua blue chemical Ice-Pak the size of my head, which mashed the jelly into the bread so that it looked like I was eating a purple penicillin farm. She’d also give me a can of ShopRite ginger ale.

After lunch, sailing on a sugar missile of insulin, I’d head out to the ninety degree heat and 100% humidity to play baseball. But that part of camp wasn’t that interesting. What I needed was to make more contacts… and one day, when I got in trouble for not changing in front of the other boys in the locker room, I was told to sit in the gym Campy, Johnny Bench and Ted Kluzewski of the Cincinnati Reds walked in. This was my chance. Once Johnny Bench and Ted Kluzewski met me, and heard what I knew about baseball, I would be on my way. I tried to think of what would be the best thing to tell them… maybe that the Reds used to play at Crosley Field. That seemed like a good opener. But I couldn’t get the words out, so I just sat there and stared at them. They never noticed me.

Then it hit me… I would tell them how good I was, it was that simple… Oh damn, all of a sudden, every boy in camp suddenly poured into the gym and filled the bleachers. We all formed a line to get Ted and Johnny’s autographs. When I got up to Johnny, I took a deep breath to get ready to explain to him that I was a future star, but when I breathed out, no words came. He looked at me staring at him, grabbed my baseball glove and signed it.

“It’s a little stiff,” he said to me, as he handed my glove to Ted Kluzewski, who signed it too. They ruined my mitt. I never said a word. I just took it back and walked on.

Afterwards, all the boys went out for a catch, but the kid I was paired with kept hitting me in the back with the baseball. (He threw so hard I had no choice but to spin away from each throw, causing him to hit my back.)

That night I tried to wash off Johnny Bench and Ted Kluszewksi’s signatures from my mitt, but all I did was make them fade.

Even more days passed, and I started to realize that I was lost at camp. There were just too many boys there for me to be noticed. What was worse, was that there really was no way to get to talk to Campy, as he was only actually there an hour or so a week. The next time we saw him, he told us Vida Blue was going to visit, on the very last day of camp

Vida Blue was the 18-year-old ace of the Oakland Athletics. He had been on the cover of Time Magazine. He was considered the greatest prospect in a generation. This was it. This was my last chance for greatness. I had to tell Vida Blue about myself. I had to tell him everything I knew about baseball and how good I would be if someone would just give me a chance to play.

I thought about what brilliant information I would impart to Mr. Blue as I came up to bat in a scrimmage game. The pitcher looked in to the catcher, wound up, and threw a ball that appeared to be coming straight at me at the speed of a rocket propelled grenade. I ran away to the left side of the backstop, while I heard the umpire yell, “Strike One.” I got back into the box. The pitcher set, and threw, another bullet, this one aimed at my temple. I ran away, to the left side of the backstop, while I heard the umpire yell, “Strike Two.” I returned to the batter’s box. The pitcher lobbed in a slow curve. I ran away, to the left side of the backstop. “Strike Three.”

On the last day of camp, I ripped a piece of paper from my lunch bag for Vida Blue to autograph. We all gathered in the gym to meet him. Vida stood off to the side, this young boy, only nine years older than me. Unlike Campy, Kluzewski, and Johnny Bench, Vida was more of a boy than a man. He was the same age as some of my baby sitters. He seemed baffled by the kids wanting to meet him. I practiced what I was going to tell him in my head as we began to form a line. I wanted him to know that I was going to use the same pose he did on his baseball card on my first baseball card. I pondered the best opening… Mr. Blue… Vida… Vid… Vi?

I looked up and all the younger boys were gone, already in line. When I tried to move to them, a councilor told me not to cut, and put me in the back, with the 12-year-olds.

“What are you doing here, faggot?” one of the boys asked. I didn’t have an answer, so I didn’t respond.

“This is the kid that Campy was trying to teach how to throw,” another one pointed out. “He’s the reason Campy didn’t come see our game.”

Two of the 12-year-old boys grabbed me by the arms, while a third whispered in my ear, “Cup Check.” I saw his knee flying at me, but I could not move. And then I was on the ground.

“I don’t think he’s wearing one,” one of the other’s pointed out.

I don’t believe that I had ever cried so hard and yet I did not make a noise. I sobbed silently, unable to hold back the tears, the pain, or the embarrassment. When I looked up, I was next in line, and Vida Blue was looking at me.

And then something miraculous happened. Vida Blue dropped to his knee and asked me if I was the kid that Campy and Johnny Bench had been talking about. “I hear you’re going to be a star.” I nodded yes.

“Do you want to come to Yankee Stadium with me?” he asked. “You can help me warm up and I can teach you my curve.” I nodded quickly. “You remind me of me. I think you’re gonna be a Hell of a ballplayer,” he said. “And I want to be your mentor.”

Okay, none of the stuff after the Cup Check actually happened. The reality was that that when I looked up, Vida was looking at me sobbing and he asked, “Are you okay?” When I nodded yes, he took my baseball glove and signed it before I could tell him I had paper in my pocket. Then he signed the mitt of the kid who had just launched my private parts into my stomach.

An hour or so later, camp was over and I was back on the bus to Mama’s house. I noticed that the Johnny Bench and Ted Kluszewksi autographs on my mitt were sort of faint, so I traced them with a green pen to make them darker. I then traced Vida Blue’s autograph so it would be in the same color.

Now you may think that sometime during those weeks I realized that I was never going to see my face on a Topps Baseball Card, but that realization took another five years… ten years. What I did learn was that baseball will break your heart and make you cry.

And I’ve cried many times since, from watching Freddie Patek choke up on national television when the Royals lost to the Yankees in the 1978 playoffs, to seeing the movie Field of Dreams a few weeks after my dad passed away, to meeting Roy Campanella’s son when I was an adult and telling him this story, and having him grin and say, “I’m gonna tell my dad. He has to have really liked you to have taken you aside and taught you how to throw. It’s going to make him really happy to hear that you still remember it.” And I cried again when Campy died only a few months later.

Tom Hanks once uttered the famous line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Tom Hanks was wrong. And I speak with authority. You wanna know how well I know the game? Roy Campanella taught me how to throw a baseball. Vida Blue has seen me cry.

Okay… now that that’s settled – everyone… Cup Check!

2008-01-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

A POKE IN THE EYE - 1991

My relationship with CBS was not unlike the one with my college girlfriend. One moment I was the greatest thing that they had ever found. The next moment I just wasn’t really working out. Then in a third moment, I would get a call asking if I wanted to try again. Like an idiot, I said yes, only to be fired once more.

No matter how many times I went through this, when I got another call, the joy of knowing that I was wanted would fill my veins like a shot of morphine, forcing one word to sputter from my lips again and again, “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”

This personally debasing affiliation with the Tiffany Network lasted for five years; beginning at a Shell Station in Orange, California, where I met an older woman of twenty-nine, who said that she could get me temp work at CBS and that I had a nice ass. It ended with a Brooks-Brother-clad, Kool-Aid drinking, Mercedes Benz 450SL driving, CBS Executive Vice President telling me, and I quote, “You are one of the smartest and hardest working people on this floor, but that’s not what I need right now.”

To the credit of the woman who complimented my posterior, she had thought that I was gay and would take it as a girl to girl compliment. And to the credit of the EVP that fired me, he talked my next employer into hiring me at a substantial raise. But still, to this day, when I drive down Beverly Boulevard and see the 1950s edifice of Television City, I feel as if I’m driving by an ex-girlfriend’s house, stalking her while she sleeps.

Most of the times I found myself out of work during my on-again, off-again CBS affair were really just the endings of temp assignments, although some of those temp assignments had been open ended, so finding myself back at home eating bologna sandwiches over the sink was still hard to take. But my first real firing, from a permanent position at the Columbia Broadcasting System, didn’t come until I’d been with the company for two years, going through at last a half dozen firings during that time.

I had been given yet another open-ended temp assignment, this one to the desk of the Director of Dramatic Specials, who needed a permanent assistant. The HR woman who liked my ass felt that all I had to do was do a good job and I would be offered the position. On day one, I catalogued the Director of Dramatic Specials’ videos, arranging them alphabetically, with Dymo Label Maker labels on each one. When the Director of Dramatic Specials saw what I had done, she was in awe, and called other executive into her office to see how all the tapes were perfectly arranged, and labeled, with different color tape for different television seasons. For the next three months I was Mister Efficiency, jumping on every issue, and arranging everything neatly. The Director of Dramatic Specials soon asked me to be her permanent assistant.

I was finally a real CBS employee, and to prove it, on my first official day, I sat through an orientation of video tapes introducing me to CBS, and briefing me on what health insurance to sign up for, how much to put in my 401k, how to open a credit union account, and who to make my beneficiary on my life insurance.

I took my picture for my ID badge and went back to my desk feeling giddy with accomplishment. I may not have had a girlfriend, but I had a job that I could get a girlfriend with. Not only that, but my ex girlfriend’s parents were in town and were going to take me out to dinner that night. I was planning on how I was going to wow them so that they called their daughter to say, “You idiot, that boy is a rising star at CBS… take him back or we will disown you,” when Gerta, a Czech Germany administrative Assistant with a pure Sudetenland accent and an Elke Summer bob came to my desk and said in her very Czech/German/Sudetenland kind of sexy way, “Matthew wants to see you.” Gerta’s Arian eyes were teary, belying her smile. Her boss, Matthew Addelman, was the Senior Vice President of Daytime and, as Gerta and I both knew, would have absolutely no reason to talk to me, the brand new administrative assistant in Dramatic Specials unless it was something bad.

I went over to Matthew’s office and took a seat. He introduced himself and said that this was really kind of uncomfortable (like it was my fault) but although we’d never met, he’d been asked to let me go. I wondered if he realized that I didn’t want to go.

I took a deep breath and tried to listen more carefully. After all, I was being laid off on the very day I had taken my orientation. Why had I been hired only to be fired? I couldn’t have done anything wrong yet. I hadn’t even been at my desk yet that day. Matthew told me I’d get severance, based on my length of service, which was four hours. When my final check came, there were two extra weeks pay in it. On a percentage basis, it was probably the best severance ever in the history of CBS.

Three years passed, when I got a call from a friend that there was a job I’d be right for at CBS. I figured it would be okay to try there again as the entire Dramatic Specials department was no more, and Matthew Addelman and his assistant Gerta had both been let go in the interim. I was interviewed by three execs, finally ending up in the office of CBS President, Ed Wright, who was known for nixing candidates because they were not a star. Apparently I was, as I was offered the job a few days after that.

I was Manager of CBS Entertainment Productions. I had my own office, and that office was on the Third Floor, the executive floor, of Television City. Sure, I didn’t have a window and the area outside my door was used to store thirty years worth of TV Guide… but I was doing better than a million other people who wanted my job. I was watching TV and reading scripts for a living. Every day was a lazy rainy Sunday in March.

I had five bosses, which was pretty daunting at first, but actually gave me an advantage. Each one of them assumed that I was being kept busy by the others. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard, but I also realized it wasn’t about the work, it was about appearances.

The rules were simple. Always have something that I “just read” to talk about. Always have a list of writers that I carried with me in case someone asked about writers. Always have a pile of scripts in my hands when heading home. Do these things, and my actual work, and I’d be okay.

Then, one day a new head of in-house was hired by the company. The brother of an infamously malevolent producer, he introduced himself saying, “I’m Kevin, the nice brother.”

Now if someone tells you something good about themselves, you can bet that they are lying. Nice people don’t say nice things about themselves. Oh, they may talk themselves up, like any of us do… but that’s not what I’m referring to. I’m speaking specifically of people who feel the need to randomly blurt out self-compliments. These are liars and should be avoided.

I should have started looking for a new job right when Kevin said he was the nice brother, but I didn’t. It’s hard to say why… I think being at CBS was still, even with all the firings, a magical place to me. I walked past the PRICE IS RIGHT sets outside the Studio 33 and could spin the wheel whenever I felt like it. I smelled a metalic odor of burning antique electricity everywhere I went. I felt the ghosts of William Paley and Desi Arnez stroll past me in the halls - cigarettes dangling from their manicured fingers, spats gleaming at their feet, the sweet scent of gin and Vermouth wafting along in their path.

And most of all, when I came in to work every morning, and looked up at the CBS Eye, I could imagine my enemies and my exes seeing me walking to work through that special executive only door at the bottom of parking lot. I knew for a fact that were all jealous of my success, and that was a good thing.

Then the new head of in-house hired, as his assistant, Gerta, the Czech/German who had called me in to my CBS beheading three years before. Upon seeing me, Gerta shouted out with glee, “We’re both back.”

Things were going great, or so I thought. Kevin was grooming me. He'd tell me to use the stairs instead of the elevator so I could be fit like him; to have lunch with my colleagues and get the inside dirt on their departments; and to learn to read upside down, so I could read what was on other people's desks while chatting with them. Meanwhile, a co-worker overheard him describe me as a "college professor picking crumbs out of my beard."

After a few months Gerta, who never once came over to my desk, came over to my desk. She said, in her very Czech/German/Sudetenland kind of sexy way, “Kevin wants to see you.” Gerta’s Arian eyes were teary, belying her smile. It was an odd moment… a sort of slow motion tragedy, in which both of us were only players… players very aware that we had done this scene before. In that instant, Gerta knew that I was being fired and I knew that I was being fired, and yet, I still jokingly said to her, “This isn’t for me to get fired again, is it?” She smiled, and tilted her head like a dog who had just heard a sound it didn’t understand.

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the head of in-house’s office. He told me that he thought the time had come for me to start looking for another job. I just sat there, unsure what to say. He said that I could be fired or resign, it was up to me, depending on if I need the unemployment or not. I still just sat there. He got exacerbated… unsure how to deal with me or how to keep me from crying.

Then he said to me, “You didn’t really want to be a television executive anyway, did you?”

You ever have someone ask you a question in such a way that they are pushing you to give them the answer that they want -- and then you give it to them to be nice, even though it’s not true?

“No, I guess I didn’t want to be a television executive,” I lied, trying to make this man who was firing me like me. He nodded, knowingly. “What do you want to do?” he asked. I told him I wanted to write.

“Go drive a truck,” he said… "get some real life dirty experiences that you can write about." Well… if I wasn’t crying before, I have to admit the “go drive a truck” line sort of pushed me over the edge. When I looked up, there were tears in his eyes too.

“Look," he said, touching my knee to let me know he cared, "I wanted to play basketball once. I was on the best college team in all of America, keeping their bench warm and cheering all the star players when they came in off the court. I’ve got three NCAA rings, but not because I deserved to be there, only because I was good enough to be the worst guy on the best team in America." A shiver ran through him as he held back a sob.

"I'm the worst guy on the best team," I sort of sputtered. His face clouded with mawkish malaise and he nodded yes.

The fuck – he was firing me and he was crying! “I’m sorry about this, "he said, "but I need someone who wants to stab me in the back … a guy who I can play tennis with in the morning, but have to lock my office to keep from going through my files in the afternoon.”

“Huh?” I finally managed.

“Look,” he blurted out, “you are one of the smartest and hardest working people on this floor, but that’s not what I need right now.”

I took a deep breath.

“You’re like I was… good enough to get on the best team in the world… but not really good enough to be a part of it. You’re sitting on the bench, while the rest of us are being stars. Anyplace else in the world, you'd be a starter... a star, but here, you're nothing. I’m doing you a favor letting you go. I know what it’s like… I was you. I was the dullest star in the Milky Way, knowing that I could have been the brightest star in any other galaxy. I’ve been there.”

He turned away so I wouldn’t see a tear that had fallen to his cheek. I waited a moment more, expecting him to deliver the Coup de Grace… you know, something like “It’s not you, it’s me…” or “CBS still loves you, we’re just not in love with you anymore…” but the final line never came.

I got up and left, knowing that I’d chosen to be fired. I’d done this by pursuing a career in which the only guarantee you have is that you will be fired from every job you ever get. And although I was done with CBS, I had many more firings to go. All of us in development do. In fact, I have something in common with every person who ever fired me from CBS. Every single one of them was fired by CBS too.

2007-12-31T22:21:00.000-08:00

TWO PERSIAN BOYS WERE KUNG FU FIGHTING - 1973

If you know the song, you may sing along now… “A-woe-who-woe, a-woe-who-woe, a-woe-who-woe. Everybody was Kung Fu fighting, duut di da duut di da duut. Them cats was fast as lighting…” Even back then, I knew this was the lamest song I had ever heard, making even “The Night Chicago Died” seem like a masterpiece.

But Kung Fu was popular and I was not. I’d spent my afternoons with my mother, whose greatest skill was turning the most tenuous of connections into invitations into a stranger’s homes. I have countless memories of sitting in the living rooms of unfamiliar people, trying to figure out if they were close relatives, distant relatives, friends of relatives, decedents of friends of relatives or maybe just half Jewish, half Armenians from Iran, like my mother. The only constant in these visits were the perplexed looks on the faces of the people we were visiting, as they tried to figure out who we were too.

I spent most of these stopovers examining the baseboards and radiators of the different homes. At some point, I had become fascinated with baseboards and radiators and how there were so many variations. I also had come to love wall switches. These mysterious throttles to the unknown could turn on a closet light, turn off a bathroom light, start a garbage disposal or even open a garage. In one house, I discovered a wall switch that turned on a floor lamp and the TV. I was a lonely child.

These visits really had no tangible effect on my lack of social skills until one day, when we wound up at the home of Melchior Bahramzadah. Melchior was a tall, dark, muscular boy from my 7th grade class at Eastbrook Junior High. He had just turned twelve. I was about to turn twelve. Melchior’s family was Persian, and when my mother had found out there was a Persian kid in my class she called his mother up and told her that she was Persian.

The Bahramzadahs lived in a very large house in a brand new subdivision on the other side of Van Saun Park. They had shiny metallic wall paper and thick carpeting and hollow doors so light you were scared you might put a fist through them. Because they had a new house, modifications had yet to be done and their wall switches were the standard variety, doing the standard things you would expect of them. Their baseboards were hidden by baseboard heating, long narrow radiators that ran the length of a room. I had never seen such sparkling new radiators before and was anxious to take the covers off those babies to see what made them tick on the inside. The baseboard radiator was to heating what the Ford Pinto was to subcompact cars – a new direction in superior American design, sure to be copied for centuries to come.

Now, while I was admiring the radiators, Melchior came into the house looking for me. His mother had told him that a twelve-year-old Persian boy was coming over. If he was disappointed to see a twelve-year-old one-quarter Wasp, one-quarter German, one-quarter Armenian, one-quarter Russian Jew from his class, he didn’t let on. Melchior oozed cool, wearing a yellow and blue rugby shirt, Lee jeans and Hush Puppies. Up until then he had never noticed me. But now, seeing me as a fellow Persian, no matter how tenuous, he suddenly perceived me as a friend, a pal, a buddy. His enthusiasm and desire to play nearly gave me whiplash. I carefully put the cover back on his radiator and went with him to explore his room. After going through his stuff and establishing that he was a Three Dog Night and Miami Dolphin fan, while I was an Elton John and Minnesota Vikings fan, we went out to throw a football in his backyard.

Disaster nearly struck moments later when Paul Gaston, already a derelict at age twelve, came bobbing into the yard with the daviding gate of all Paramus’s derelicts. Paul Gaston didn’t talk to kids like me. He pounded on them. But here’s where things got weird. When Paul asked Melchior why he was hanging out with a fag, Melchior told Paul that I was cool, a fellow Persian. And Paul, with a barely a second look, agreed, and put an arm around me and said, “Did you know you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose.” All three of us cracked up and repeated the line to each other at least two dozens times, cracking up each time like we’d heard it for the first time. We played three man football, Melchior against Paul with me as the swing quarterback for the next hour. Every time I went back to throw, I called out like Howard Cosell, “Bob Griese takes three steps back into the pocket and releases a rope to Mercury Morris.” After Melchior scored a touchdown, he told us that his name meant king.

Once we were all marked with grass stains and our faces were red with wind burn, Paul went back home and Melchior and I went in to the kitchen where my mother was talking to Mrs. Bahramzadah like they were close cousins and Mrs. Bahramzadah was talking back to my mom like she wasn’t quite sure who she was. Melchior asked if he could play with me again, tomorrow. His mother reminded him that he had karate. Karate? My eyes lit up. I hadn’t yet figured out a way to try and learn the martial arts and join in the craze sweeping the country, the mere knowledge of which was sure to make me popular and lead to a life of joy, wealth and nothing but unabated happiness.

24-hours later, I was standing in a storefront dojo, called the Academy of Goshin-Do Karate in Maywood, New Jersey waiting for Melchior and watching as my mom handed the teacher my enrollment check. There were posters on the walls celebrating the short life of Bruce Lee, who I hadn’t known was dead, and I hadn’t known had taken on a career in Kung Fu movies since I had last seen him in the TV show, THE GREEN HORNET, and on my Green Hornet lunchbox. There was a whole world out there I knew nothing about, but I realized I had a chance to discover it now that I was friends with Melchior.

Melchior was just as popular in the karate school as he was in his neighborhood. He was a pre-pubescent Omar Shariff, with a dash of James Caan. You could not help but love this kid. Together, we learned blocks, kicks, and punches and had match after match, where even though he was much stronger than me, I somehow came out on top half the time. Within just a few karate lessons and a few more visits to his house, Melchior and I were best friends, Two Boys from Persia.

Even at almost 12-years of age, I understood that our friendship was unreal, the sort of thing that happened in movies and books, but not on the cold maple-tree lined streets of Paramus, New Jersey. I mean, I was the class fag and Melchior was the class most likely to become the starting quarterback of the Miami Dolphins while working part-time as a neurosurgeon and still having time to pose for the cover of Tiger Beat. What’s more, Melchior, or King Melchior as I had come to think of him, had taken on an even more important role in my life than friend. When kids like Greg Claussen and Jimmy Roddick felt the need to compensate for their unpleasant childhoods by pounding on me until they produced bruises, Melchior stepped in and produced the bruises on them. Melchior was my bodyguard.

Melchior asked our teacher, Miss MacDonald if we could move our desks next to each other and there was an audible gasp from the rest of the class. None of them had ever seen someone rise in the social rankings so quickly and cleanly as I had risen. Melchior and I passed each other notes about karate, Carolyn Ward’s bra, Mad Magazine, ALL IN THE FAMILYand Steve Miller. We sang “The Joker” together, “I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker. Sure Don’t want to hurt no one.” We talked about all the great episodes of KUNG FU and wondered each Thursday if it would be the night in which Caine finally found his brother.

One day, Melchior made plans to come over to my house, instead of me going to his. I combed my hair and put on my brand new yellow and blue striped Rugby shirt, my Lee jeans and my Hush puppies. I spent fifteen minutes trying to force my cat to sleep on my bed, because I thought it would look cool if the cat loved me so much that she slept on my bed, but she kept growling and running away. I brushed my teeth and picked up my room and straightened the Jerry Koosman picture on my wall. I put the really cool reel-to-reel tape recorder my Uncle Leo gave me up on my desk and plugged an extension cord into it to make it look like it actually worked. When Melchior came, he wasn’t the big talking Melchior I knew. He was quiet and wouldn’t look at me, but his bottomless brown eyes inspected every single thing in my room little by little and he asked to see my baseball cards, my car brochures, my records and my tapes for my reel-to-reel. I had to say I’d lent the reel-to-reel tapes to my next-door neighbor. We sat on the chairs in my room, our feet in the air and our heads on the floor and pondered what they were doing in Tehran these days.

"Two Persian boys were Kung Fu Fighting, duut di da duut di da duut…”

But there was a problem…I had a secret that I was hiding from Melchior, and I didn’t know how to tell him, because, you know, he trusted me and was a true friend, he was more than a friend really, he was a friend...friend, a Persian...friend… a fellow Persian, even though I wasn't really Persian, but the truth was that I... well...I, really…I...hated KUNG FU the TV show.

They were always breaking things. I hated to see things get broken. I hated THE BOWERY BOYS too. I couldn’t stand THE LITTLE RASCALS. LAUREL AND HARD bothered me. THE THREE STOOGES were unbearable. And I never once went to the after-school showings of ITS’ A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. I saw nothing entertaining in entertainment about breaking things. I hated Mo, I hated Bruce Lee and I hated David Carradine.

And, and, and, I hated karate class too. They made us stand on one leg. They punched us and they kneed us and they kicked us. And Melchior just kept rising belt-wise, white belt with yellow tape, yellow belt, yellow belt with green tape, green belt, while I just stayed at white belt with no tape. Also, as it was now winter, this wearing nothing but the karate pajamas (as an aside I could never bring myself to say karate ghee, like I could never bring myself to say "yero" instead of "gyro") anyway, this wearing nothing but karate pajamas in the cold storefront of the Academy of Goshin-Do Karate was painful. The wind would whip up those karate pajamas and rifle across the little hairs on my skin, freezing me so bad that I had to use the blow dryer on my privates back home just to feel human again.

I thought long and hard about it and decided Melchior would be okay if I quit. KUNG FU and karate class had very little do with us, right? There was so much more to us than just martial arts and silly television shows about martial arts. We were the two Persian Boys, the two swarthy he-men of Paramus, New Jersey, the best friends who could never be separated. So I resigned from karate. No big deal. Right?

The day after the first time I didn’t show up for Goshin-Do, Melchior came up to me in class looking worried. He asked if I was okay, and what had happened. I told him that I had quit. My words didn’t register somehow. He starred at me, confused, like I’d told him my father was Cher and fairies lived in my ears. Then, he turned and walked away.

I had broken his trust and betrayed him. The next time Greg Claussen and Jimmy Roddick led an attack-Chuck-in-the-halls raid, Melchior appeared down the hall. He walked purposely towards us. He shoved Greg and Jimmy aside. I thought, well, he’s mad at me, but he’s still my bodyguard, we’re still the two Persian boys. Nothing can change that. Then, he lifted his leg in a karate stance, and kicked me in the gut with full force. He never said, “Boo.” He just walked away. Greg and Jimmy were back on me within seconds.

A few days later, my mom took me to an ancient home in HoHoKus, where an old lady painter lived with six ghosts. After awhile, I figured out that the woman was a friend of a woman who knew my grandmother…or something like that. She had detailed, carved baseboards in her house and cast iron radiators that were painted in layers and layers and layers of black, black paint. The wall switches in her house were mechanical and made a huge click when she switched them on and off, unlike the silent mercury switches we had in my house. One of her switches turned on the light in the vestibule, even though it was around the corner and you couldn’t tell you had turned the light on. I didn’t see any ghosts, but that was okay, the old lady said that the girl ghost had come down the stairs and said that she liked me. I was good at making friends.

Melchior Bahramzadah never spoke to me again. He never said a single word to me after that, even though we went to the same school together all the way through 12th grade. Last I heard of him, was years later, when I was dating a first year med student in Philadelphia and she told me that there was a third year named Melchior Bahramzadah from Paramus at her hospital. I told her to tell him I said hi. She came back that night and said that she'd sent him my hi, but he'd told her he’d never heard of me. Maybe it was a different Melchior Bahramzadah from Paramus. Maybe it was the same one.

2007-12-26T14:03:00.000-08:00

JEWS DRIVING HOME FROM CHURCH – 1973

When I was twelve, my brother and I were the only Christian Scientists in the Paramus school system. Uniqueness is not something one strives for at twelve. About a third of the kids in school were Irish Catholic and rowdy – the kind of kids who played stickball on blacktop and drew on their hands with ink. Another third of the kids were Italian Catholic and lived in a world of vinyl runners over the carpets in their houses and vinyl covers over the car seats of the big Impalas, which their mothers drove while smoking lipstick ringed cigarettes.

The last third of the kids were Jews. Now, I believe that we are all the same…but, something inside of me liked the Jews best. They scaled baseball cards with me and played knock hockey with me. They included me in kickball. And though they made fun of me for being a Christian Scientist, “My grandmother's older than your religion,” they actually talked to me.

Still, as much as I liked them, I did not belong among the Jews. They went to Hebrew School in the afternoon, while I went to the Paramus Boy’s Club to play pool, eat Hostess cupcakes and watch reruns of "The Munsters."

On Sunday mornings, when my family drove to church, it seemed as if ours was the only car driving out of town, past the Catholic churches and the Chinese restaurants all the way into Ridgewood– where the Christian Scientists went, where for an hour each week, Christian Science was normal, until we climbed back into our car and drove back to our town.

Then, one day, driving home from church, driving from the place where I had my hour of normalcy to the place where I was "that Christian Science kid" that my dad started talking about one of the families in our church… a family that had a son my age, and my father said that the family changed their name so that people wouldn’t know that they were Jewish.

This conversation went on to include all the Jews in the First Church of Christian Science of Ridgewood, New Jersey. There were the Rosenbergs, the Levins and the Greens. My father was convinced there were probably even more. And as the car rolled down under the Erie Lackawanna tracks, my mom said it’s true of the Englewood Christian Science church too, after all, her mother went there.

Now, you don’t hang around with Jews for twelve years, and not have it pounded into your head that the Jewish religion is passed from mother to child. If your mother is a Jew, you are a Jew. And my mother was saying, out loud, that here mother was a Jew, which meant that I was a... ohymgod... could it be true?

I did the math instantaneously.

“WE’RE JEWISH?,” I screamed in delight.

"Well, sort of... but we're Christian Scientists..." my mom answered.

Sort of was good enough.

No words had ever been spoken before as wonderful as these. I was sort of a Jew.

My mom tried to stem the damage… explaining that yes, we were a little Jewish, but we were not allowed to tell anyone…because of the terrible things that had happend in the past to Jews… but that she guessed it was okay that I knew I was a Jew as long as I never told anyone.

I nodded my head and promised; no one would ever know that I was a Jew.

Monday morning, I got early and dressed in my best Lee jeans and Sears t-shirt with the Triumph motorcycle iron-on decal on the front. I ran down to the school bus fifteen minutes before it was due, and when it arrived, I rode in the front, egging the bus on, “get there, get there, get there.” Never before in my life had I so wanted to get to school.

And all day, that day, I went up to everyone I knew, Irish, Italian and Jew…especially Jew, and I said with a face that couldn’t stop smiling, “I’m Jewish. I’m Jewish. I’m a Jew just like you.”

And of course... now I've just told you too.

2007-12-11T12:08:00.000-08:00

YOU ARE BAD MAN - 1970

When I was nine I was the world’s most perfect child – um...in the eyes of my grandmother – um...the one on my mom’s side, Mama. To my third grade teacher and principal I was a child with a very poor attitude about all aspects of school life. To my mom, I was a walking advertisement for retroactive abortion.

The thing is – I was the same kid whether I was at Mama’s apartment, Spring Valley Elementary School or my own house. So, I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong. Looking back at it now, I was a child who needed desperately, to touch, fiddle with and alter anything and everything in my reach at all times – resulting in many a snapped, “Stop touching that,” through gritted teeth by whatever grownup was around.

Well, most grownups. Not Mama. Mama was an artist who had studied with Wassily Kandensky. Her apartment had at least a dozen paintings standing up against every inch of every wall. She would say, in her Russian accent, “Charley Jonitchka, you are so pretty, I must draw you.” One day, she gently pulled out an antique bible that had been my late grandfather’s. She peeled two layers of tissue paper away from the treasure. It was a suede bible and the cover had flaps that hung over the pages. Obviously, the overhangs were a mistake, I figured, so I tore them off – destroying the museum piece in an instant. Mama said, and I quote, “Oh oh…okay, the Bible goes back away now.” And that was that.

At school, after Miss Freling, my pretty and girly third grade teacher left to get married, Mrs. Johnson took over. She was sinewy, like a Dominican shortstop, but paler. Her hair was rusted Brillo. When she smiled, she left an uneven glaze of saliva on her teeth. Mrs. Johnson was good friends with Mr. Barbieri, the principal of Spring Valley School. He was a younger Edward G. Robinson but with freakishly large eyes. One day, Mrs. Johnson took us to the nurse’s office, to get our TB tests, Mr. Barbieri came out of his office, and all the kids asked him questions. He answered each one, so, wanting to join in, I tried to think of the most polite question I could, and asked, “Where are you going?” He turned and looked at me like I was Viet Cong. “Never ask an adult where he is going,” he fired. “Learn your manners.” Then he turned on his heels and walked out. Mrs. Johnson shook her head in disgust.

So I was confused. Sure, I wasn’t faultless. Even Miss Freling had given me four “U’s” on my report card. But more than half the class had gotten four “U’s.” Mrs. Johnson gave me seventeen. The only “S’s” that I got were for Music and Art, which she didn’t grade. Mr. Barbieri wouldn’t even look at me when we passed in the hall.

Then there was home. My mom bought me a Virginia Beach collapsible cup that you could carry in your pocket. This was a small round plastic box, that when you took the lid off, had a cup accordioned on the bottom. You pulled the outer ring up and the whole thing became a drinking cup. I thought, this is great, I can walk around with a glass of milk in my pocket for later. My mom got my brother, me and herself dressed for dinner, and while my dad was getting himself ready, I thought, now is the opportunity. Restaurant milk never tastes like milk from the refrigerator, and now I could bring it with me in my pocket. I filled the cup with milk, sat at the table next to my mom and collapsed it. The deluge of milk sprayed from my hand, all over me and my mom with an astonishing thoroughness. Within seconds, I was across my mom’s lap, pants down, getting spanked until she saw red on my fanny.

Still, no matter what happened, there was always Mama’s apartment to seek refuge in. While there one morning, I awoke to discover that I had peed the bed. So, I did what you would expect. I made the bed and put my pajamas behind a stack of paintings. Now, had I ever made the bed at Mama’s before, she might have said, “Good boy.” But, because this was an unprecedented event, she went to inspect it to prove to herself what a wonderful boy I was. “Dis is vet,” she said. She found the pajamas, soaking against a painting she had done at the Moscow Academy for Fine Arts. She told me that my wetting the bed was her fault for giving me grape juice during Johnny Carson.

Back at home, my mom rushed me out of the house to get to school in time. As I got out of her car, I realized that I had left my lunch at home. My mom screamed “Get back in the car.” She pulled my door shut and then gunned the little 225 cubic inch straight six in her Valiant with all she could. She got the car up to 50, which was pretty good in a 25 Mile-Per-Hour School-Zone. The police cruiser came out of nowhere. The officer was courteous when he asked my mom if she knew how fast she was going. She raised her voice to him, “It’s my son’s fault. He forgot his lunch on purpose to make me late.” “Ma’am, that’s not a reason to drive unsafely.” My mom was ready, “The other day I took him to a girlfriend’s house and he played with the wall switches until he broke their automatic garage door. That’s a hundred and fifty dollars.” The officer tried again, “But, Ma’am, there are children on this street and you were doing 50 miles an hour.” “Do you have children?” my mom asked him. She started to completely fall apart, shouting at him, “He fills soup bowls with orange juice, drinks some with a soup spoon and then leaves the rest under his bed. I found three moldy bowls of juice there.” I thought I was going to be arrested. The officer let my mom go with a warning. Then she gave me a warning – the next time I got in trouble she was taking away my bed, not a favorite toy, not television time, not even dinner – she was taking away my bed.

For the next few days I listened and I didn’t talk in class. It was a miracle. Mrs. Johnson smiled at me and said good morning to me and didn’t scream at me once. I knew I had achieved good boy status when my mom put Burry’s Mr. Chips cookies in my lunch, and even gave me the little Mr. Chips poly-bag hand puppet that came with them. As things improved, and I reached very good boy level, the cookies improved too. Burry’s Fudge Town, the scalloped sandwich delights started to appear in my lunch, with the cutouts of Mayor Fudge, Finster Fudge and Duddly Fudge. Then I officially graduated to very very good boy when I found Burry’s Scooter Pies in my bag. Throughout this miraculous detente, Mama’s attitude towards me stayed the same as if I had done nothing to improve.

Then one day it all collapsed around me. We had a decorating party at school, to get our room ready for a parent/teacher event. Mrs. Johnson and I were telling each other jokes and having a blast, cutting out construction paper designs and hanging them from crepe paper streamers. Mrs. Johnson showed us all her brand new PaperMate Flair Felt-Tip Pen, which was a cross between a Magic Marker brand Marker and a BIC Ballpoint. We were all impressed. Then, I thought, you know, putting a thumbtack in Mrs. Johnson’s new PaperMate Flair Felt-Tip Pen would be really funny. She’d get a good laugh at that. So, I put a thumbtack in the top of Mrs. Johnson’s brand new PaperMate Flair Felt-Tip Pen and showed her. She smiled, grabbed me by my ear, and dragged me down the hallway all the way to Mr. Barbieri’s office, where she deposited me across from his desk. There were tears in her eyes. She left me there, blowing her nose as she went.

Mr. Barbieri went on for some time, but I was so freaked out, unable to figure out why I was there, that I didn’t listen to him dither on, until he said he was calling my mother. I was about to lose my bed over a Magic Marker genetic mutation that they wouldn’t have made out of plastic if you weren’t supposed to be able to put a thumbtack into it anyway. I got hysterical. I begged him not to. “Please, please, please don’t call my mom,” I wailed. “You can’t do that. Please.” Mr. Barbieri looked at me with disgust and lifted the phone receiver to his shoulder. “What’s your phone number?” he asked.

“I’m not telling.”

“Don’t make this worse than it is or it will go on your permanent record,” he responded. And he got up and went into the other room, returning moments later with my permanent record. Inside the folder was my phone number. He picked the phone up again and dialed. “Please, please, please don’t,” I muttered.

Someone answered the phone on the other end and I heard Mr. Barbieri tell the story of how I had ruined Mrs. Johnson’s brand new PaperMate Flair Felt-Tip Pen and how it was frankly the last straw because – and then he kind of went into this litany that was boring, so I stopped listening and started wondering what was life going to be like without a bed? Would I stay up all night watching television? No. Television stations go off the air at Midnight. Finally, I heard him say, “Charles John doesn’t listen and continues to misbehave no matter what we tell him.” What did he mean I don’t listen? I listen… I wonder if once you lose your bed you have to go live with another family who has an extra bed.

It was then that I heard coming out of the phone receiver, not my mom’s collaborative and cold agreement, but my grandmother, Mama’s Russian wrath. I’d had no idea that she was visiting our house – but her timing was perfect. Mr. Barbieri pulled the phone away from his ear, as my grandmother screamed, “Charley Johnitchka is good boy. You are bad man.”

A refreshing set of tears welled behind my eyes. My chest rose. Mr. Barbieri had met his Waterloo and her name was Sophia Sonia Semenova Lifshitz Avakian, better known as Mama. He stared at the phone. He tried to bring it back to his ear so he could respond, but he was being called “gavno” at such a high decibel that it hurt my ears across his desk. I don’t think he knew “gavno” was Russian for shit. He put down the phone and told me to go home. Mama never said a word of what happened to my mom.

So I kept my bed – for a week. Then I peed in it and stuffed all the sheets, pajamas and bedspread in the back of my closet, where I had already stowed a moldering soup bowl of orange juice. My mom found them and came to school to punish me during lunch. That gave Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Barbieri the chance to tell her about the PaperMate Flair Felt-Tip Pen and about Mama. Mr. Barbieri even asked my mom if she knew what “gavno” meant. Luckily she was well-mannered enough say no. She also, thank God, refrained from singing the song my dad and her had made up for such occasions, “What do you do with a pissy poo, a pissy poo, a pissy poo, what do you do with a pissy poo so early in the morning? Wash him off with pHisoHex, pHisoHex, pHisoHex, wash him off with pHisoHex, so early in the morning.”

My mom gave my bed to my brother. He was pleased…too young to really think about whether he wanted the second hand bed of a bed-wetter. I was given an old red couch that had been on the porch. My mom put sheets and a bedspread on it and I slept there until third grade was over and I kept the couch dry the whole time. Finally, my mom bought me a new bed.

I didn’t get into nearly as much trouble in school in fourth or fifth grades, but I’ll never really know, was that because I had matured, because I had teachers who understood me better or because Mr. Barbieri was scared shitless of Mama. As to my mom, when I took apart the kitchen clock because it wasn’t working, she was ready to rip into me again – but I put it back together and it worked. She bragged to all her girlfriends about how smart I was and how I could fix anything – actually she’s still bragging.

2007-11-19T16:33:00.000-08:00

MY RIGHT NIPPLE - 1974

I was 12-years-old when I first heard of breast cancer. A few days later, I found a hard disk inside my right nipple. Now, I am a boy, well a man as I write this, but a boy when it happened. I am also a lapsed Christian Scientist who was extremely religious at the time. This meant I could not go to a doctor. In fact, I believed I couldn’t even tell anyone about the disk in my nipple, because, to do so, according to the writings of the church founder, Mary Baker Eddy would be to empower the nipple disk and make it real.

Being a Christian Scientist, I had found that I could stop a headache by not acknowledging that I had a headache. I could stop a cold by not acknowledging I had a cold. I had even stopped the flu by not acknowledging it. I had made them all go away by not allowing them to be real. Of course, the fact that I rid myself of these things in the same amount of time it takes said ailments to run their normal course through the human system, was neither here nor there. I could pray away a 24-hour bug in as little as 24-hours.

But, it was harder with the disk in my nipple to do this, because I could feel it with my fingers. So, for some weeks, I tried not to touch my right nipple, to pretend I did not have a right nipple at all. Normally not touching your nipples is a fairly easy deed to accomplish. They are overly-sensitive and boring. They are easily dismissed. But, when you are a 12-year-old boy who believes that you have breast cancer… well it becomes very difficult not to touch it.

I started with very light, brief, self-examinations in the tub or in my bed. Soon I was lying on the grass under my window, desperately trying to squeeze, crush, and pulverize the disk away. It would not go. It just grew larger and larger. There I lay, on the side of our three-bedroom ranch, my feet pointing west towards the Herman’s identical three-bedroom ranch, my head pointing east towards the Kasperavitch’s identical three-bedroom ranch, my hand under my shirt, softly caressing, and then pinching and then trying to mash the disk inside my nipple.

The long hedge of yews hid me from the Rosenberg’s yard next-door. The yews had blunt needles so waxy that they almost appeared plastic. They were young, but were growing into a perfect wall of green. My dad and Mr. Rosenberg had planted the hedge together after pulling out a gnarled and overgrown mess that had been there before. During this process, my dad stumbled upon a hornets’ nest. The hornets swarmed and stung him on the face, the arms, the legs, the hands, and the body. This was before we were CSers. My dad ran into the house and stripped down in the bathroom, where my frantic mom called Dr. Keller and asked him what to do. Dr. Keller called in a prescription to Paramus Drugs, while mom held a sewing needle over an open flame on our white porcelain Welbilt stove. Once the end of the needle was stained blue from the fire, she tried to dig stingers out of my dad while he shivered. There were only a few, as hornets don’t generally leave their stingers behind. Fifteen minutes later, a high-school kid came to our door with a little white folded bag from Paramus Drugs. My mom didn’t tip him. My mom was from Iran and didn’t know you were supposed to tip people. She opened the bag and quickly put the Pepto-Bismol like lotion all over my dad. He stopped shivering, and his forehead unwrinkled, revealing the sweat that had been caught in the creases.

This had all happened back when we still called doctors and still had Paramus Drugs deliver prescriptions to our house.

Now, we had joined the Christian Science Church and wouldn’t do that anymore. Now, if hornets attacked my dad, well, the needle would probably still come out, because you could see the stingers, but the pink lotion that had made him better, that sort of thing was not allowed. I lay on the lawn squeezing, squashing, compressing, pressing and pounding the hard disk in my nipple. Just to other side of me, was a basement window, with a galvanized steel window well.

When I had been smaller, I used to sit in the well and pretended it was a school, my school, where I was the principal. I held meetings with imaginary students, had PTO parties (yes PTO) with imaginary parents, and hired and fired imaginary teachers. As an aside, my town had a PTO, a Parent Teacher’s Organization.

The well was my favorite place to play; it was where I could change the real world into my world. It was where kids like Kenny Weaver, David Glynn and Arnie Neville got made fun of and punished, instead of running riot, like they did in the real school. The well was the best place on Earth, even though when I accidentally moved the cinder block that I sat on, pill bugs would scamper or roll into balls if they couldn’t see an escape.

But, what did any of that matter anymore now, that I was dying from this thing in my nipple? I knew I would never play principal again, never sit in that hole and rule my own world. I was twelve and I was dying from a nipple disk. I got up and went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. My right nipple was larger and redder than my left. Oh god, it was getting worse. I had no idea what to do. In fact, I was sure that the only thing keeping my alive was the fact that I hadn’t told anyone about it. The only power I had over the disk was that my silence had kept it a secret from the world.

Eventually, I stopped going out to play with my friends, out of fear that they would spot my grotesquely larger nipple. But, summer was coming and the Paramus Municipal Swimming Pool was sure to be a theatre of Chuck Freericks and his amazing elephant nipple. I wanted no part of it. And yet, mostly, I did not want to die. I have always been absurdly afraid of death… well, wait a minute, if you really stop and think about what death is and that we, no matter how faithful we are, really have no evidence whatsoever that is anything but an absolute end… then, my fear is actually not absurd at all. That being said, death at twelve seemed all the more unpleasant.

Now, this tale would wrap up neatly if someone of authority, a friend’s caring parent, a teacher, a school-bus driver, the Good Humor Man, the paper boy, had noticed my ailment and rushed me to a doctor, where a quick operation saved my life. But that did not happen. I just began to pray like crazy. I prayed in the morning, while listening to Harry Harrison on Music Radio, WABC. I prayed at lunch, while eating my Welch’s Grape Jelly and Arnold White Bread sandwich at my desk. I prayed in the afternoon, while watching kids play football on our street. I was too sick to join them. I prayed at night while I drank milk from a Welch’s-Grape-Jelly-free-Flintstone’s-glass-with-purchase and watched baseball games on TV.

“Meet the Mets, Greet the Mets, Step right up and meet the Mets.”

I realized I was never going to be a Met. My nipple throbbed. I was never going to design new cars for Chrysler. My nipple ached. I was never going to be President of the United States of America. My nipple burned. I was never going to marry a girl who could be President of the United States while I designed new cars for Chrysler after finishing my illustrious career as pitching ace of the New York Mets. I was never going to marry Mindy Nussbaum. Mindy Nussbaum was never going to be President of the United States without me to guide her. I prayed to God to make me stop believing that I had a hard disk in my nipple.

Summer came, and I did go to the pool. No one noticed my nipple. As weeks passed, and I still didn’t die, I became less and less interested in the disk. Still, it lasted for about a year, until one day, I notice my nipple was smaller, and I squeezed it, only to find that it felt just like the other nipple. The disk had vanished. I don’t know where it went. I don’t believe in Christian Science, so I won’t tell you I had a spiritual healing. I just know I was dying and then I wasn’t… no, that’s not true. I was dying fast and then I was dying less fast. And that’s all I really know about the disk in my nipple.

2007-10-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

MY DAD'S 1966 FORD GALAXIE 500 - 1972

My dad and I were in the front seat of his 1966 Ford Galaxie 500, when he stopped the car at a light, and wobbled the key in the ignition. This made the dashboard lights flicker on and off in progression, like at a grade crossing. “Look, railroad lights,” he said.

We had been in the middle of a conversation about when everyone was going to die. We were on our way to church, driving through the underpass below the Erie Lackawanna on Ackerman in Ridgewood. The snow tires were roaring on the salty pavement and the low winter sun made the rolled asphalt siding houses and the concrete auto repair garages look like a postcard of a New England village. The car’s heater cooked my polyester pants, making me feel like they were being ironed with me in them.

I was 11 and I couldn’t believe that my dad was willing to have such an important conversation with me, a kid. He never talked to me about stuff. He always just told me to do something, or actually, to stop doing whatever it was I was doing. And yet, here we were discussing what order people in our family would die in. My Dad said that Mama, my mom’s mom, would go first. She was getting frail. He thought that his dad, my Grandpa, would be next and that his step-mom, Granny, would be last. As it turned out, he was right.

We were taking a separate car to church so we could leave early to watch the Super Bowl, without forcing my mom and brother to come with us. And because we never really had time alone together, we were talking---about death…about my dad’s mom, who died when he was in college, about my mom’s dad, who died when she was 10, about Uncle Alex and Auntie Goharik and Uncle V and Auntie Berj and when they would all die. My dad, being prescient got the eventual order of their deaths correct too.

He was good with death. He’d found his mom, sitting in a wingback chair in their living room, a cigarette burned out between her fingers, her body the same temperature as the room. He had called Grandpa with the words, “I got some bad news, Pop,” a tendency towards understatement he got from being half WASP.

I wasn’t good with death. Just two years earlier, I’d been changing into pajamas, watching the commercials after THE FLINSTONES went off the air and the before Bob Barker came on, when something in the darkness made me realize that I was going to die. I was nine and panicked. On the TV Charles Lyon beckoned, “It’s time for…Truth…or Consequences with your host, Bob Barker.” For me, the consequences were the truth. Being alive meant that one day I was going to die.

I screamed in horror and my dad ran in to see what was wrong. He took me into the kitchen and sat me there, trying desperately to calm me down. Finally, I caught my breath and told him that I didn’t want to die. The kitchen was dark and I could only see his face in the glimpse of light that came from the TV in the other room. He said that I shouldn’t worry. I had at least 80 years left of being alive. I wailed again, hyperventilating. Eighty years was not enough. Eight-hundred years was not enough. Why do I have to die at all, ever? My dad stayed up with me all night, telling me I was going to be okay. The next morning, he went off to work thinking that I had recovered from my realization, but I hadn’t, and I still haven’t.

Two years later we were in the Ford, talking about the deaths of people we loved, grandparents and great aunts and great uncles. But, it was cool, like I said, because my dad was saying what he thought. Mama didn’t take good care of herself. Grandpa was fairly old, so was Uncle Alex. My dad had solid reasons for the order of his predictions. And as we reached the First Church of Christian Science, Ridgewood, New Jersey on Godwin Avenue, I felt the edge come off my pain; knowing that some of the most important people in the world to me would blaze the trail into death. They were all going to jump into the pool first so that when I was thrown in they would be there to catch me.

And what does any of this have to do with my dad’s 1966 Ford Galaxie 500? Well, the Galaxie, as strange as this may sound, was my first experience of a full life cycle because up to this point in time I had never had a pet for long enough to watch it age, and because up to this point in time I had never had a relative die, and because up to this point in time, the Galaxie was the first new car we had ever owned, it was the first car I had ever witnessed go from sparkling and fresh to dingy and dying. And as we parked it in the church lot, we were both aware that our brand new 1973 Plymouth Valiant in blue sky blue, was on order from Marmac Chrysler-Plymouth. And when that new car came, our old friend the Galaxie would be traded in. Getting rid of a car you bought used is no different than turning in a rent-a-car. Getting rid of a car you bought new is like giving away family. So, maybe that’s why, sitting in the front seat of this 4-wheeled family member, my dad and I started talking about death.

When the salesman from Marmac called a few days later to say our new car was ready, we all piled into the Galaxie and my dad wobbled the key on the dashboard ignition a few times to make all the dashboard lights flicker in sequence. “Railroad lights…” All four of us, my dad, my mom, my brother and I got in the front seat. We drove to Marmac, parked the Galaxie in the front and walked over the brand new Valiant. The new car smell was unbelievable. As we drove home, I looked out the window one last time to see the Galaxie, but it was gone. The salesman had already driven it away.

Six years earlier, my dad had bought the car from Oradell Ford. It was a silver blue 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 2-Door Hardtop with the 351 cubic inch V-8 engine. It had four headlights, stacked vertically separated by a massive horizontal grille. Its roofline was sloped, like its little brother, the Ford Mustang fastback…in fact; it was a Mustang with a thyroid problem. It made the same throaty chug when you started it. It chirped its tires when you touched the gas. It looked mean and ready to take on the road for you.

And, on the day my dad brought it home he took my brother and me and put us both on his lap. He put the key in the ignition and he turned it on and off, making the lights on the dashboard flicker in the exact way that the lights at railroad crossing flicker to warn of a train. My dad thought this was the greatest.

We took the Galaxie to my first major league game ever, at Shea Stadium. We took it to Paramus Junior Baseball League games. We took the Galaxie to Paramus Jaycee’s picnics where my dad would talk to the mayor of Paramus– my dad knew the mayor of Paramus. We took the Galaxie to the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby where my pinewood racer had to be coaxed down the ramp by hand after the rest of the cars had finished. When we went out to eat, I would finish fast so I could listen to Galaxie’s radio in the parking lot. I’d climb into the driver’s seat, make the railroad lights.

When my dad would come home from work in it, the car’s hood would be hot. In the winter, we would climb on it for warmth. In the summer, it was a fire breathing dragon.

So, that’s really it: A lot of words about a car that was a piece of crap—a Ford; 135,000 miles were on its odometer, it got seven miles to the gallon, it’s clock was right twice a day.

As to my dad, over the years that followed, he was the one who made the calls to me when everyone started to die. He never remembered, or at least never mentioned, how ironic it was that they died in the exact order he had predicted. I was home with my roommates in South Orange when he called to say that Mama had died. I was in Los Angeles in my grad-school dorm when he called to say Grandpa was dead

When the next death call came, had it been in my dad’s order, it would have been Granny. I was living in Playa del Rey, and was awoken by the ringing. I’m not sure why this is, but I have found that when the phone rings and the call is that someone has died, I am aware of that fact before I pick up the phone. I can’t say I believe in an afterlife or any sort of spiritual gobbledygook, but when then phone rings to say someone is dead, all of that changes, and for that moment—that moment in which I know what the call is about before I pick up the phone, I am a believer in all of it, Heaven, and Hell, and ghosts, and spirits and connections and the human soul as one single entity feeding and watching over all of us.… and this time I knew again that the phone was ringing to tell me that someone was dead and because of that, I felt connected to everyone who was dead and everyone who was alive.

Years earlier my bedroom was right across from my parents, and I would kick the wall while lying in bed. My dad would scream at me to go to sleep so he could go to sleep. The morning of this call, I had a dream that I was lying in my bed and my dad was lying in his, and he was screaming at me to wake up so he could go to sleep. And it was then that I realized that the phone was ringing and I needed to wake up, not just to answer it, but to obey my dad.

It was mom on the other end of the line. “I have bad news,” she began. It was really odd to hear her say my dad’s line. She’d never been the one before to tell me that someone had died. And even though the news she gave me made it impossible, I still couldn’t quite understand why my dad wasn’t the one telling me.

And I guess that’s the reason why I miss the car. More than any other one my dad had before or after, in my mind, I see him driving the 1966 Ford Galaxie 500, bouncing the big silver blue behemoth into our driveway, opening its enormous door with the squawk of the dry hinge; then calling me over and saying, “Look, railroad lights,” as he turned the key back and forth in the ignition.

2007-09-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

I’M FOREVER YOUR GIRL – 2000

Hey baby
You gotta remember
I’m forever your girl...

My earliest clear memory of Paula Abdul is watching her dance in the black & white video of FOREVER YOUR GIRL. She was a toy-sized Jewish goddess from Van Nuys wrapped in an oversized leather jacket; henna, mousse and hoop earrings. But unlike the other stars on MTV, Paula was real. Had she missed that Laker Girl tryout, or messed up on Janet Jackson’s choreography, she could have just as easily been working a desk at William Morris like I was; living her life to get invited to parties put together by other agents’ assistants where everyone told each other long stories in exacerbated tones about how hard their jobs were, while actually talking about their bosses’ jobs and pretending that they ever did more than answer the phone. We were a pack of 25-year-olds, each making $365 a week, while being annoyed that Rob Lowe wouldn’t stop calling. As if any of us had ever really said anything more to Rob Lowe other than, “I’ll try him in the car for you, Mr. Lowe.”

Baby just remember I gave you my heart
Ain’t no one gonna tear us apart…

But in Paula’s case, it wasn’t all made up. We really were almost connected. My roommate, Peter Rothstein, had gone on a blind date with Paula. She was friends with his sister. So in a sense, I knew Paula… we were buddies… sort of… through close association. We traveled in the same circles, our births were months apart. She was fully Jewish, I was sort of Jewish, and really liked Jewish girls, especially nubile ones that could dance. The only difference between us was that she had already made it, and I was still on an agency desk.

Hell, I’d even hung out with her once… at Alzado’s in West Hollywood, when I was out with a group of fellow “Did-you-get-a-desk-yet” wannabes. Paula walked off La Cienaga, and through the door right past us. She had an entourage of leather clad friends surrounding her like a strolling rugby scrum. And at the moment that she was just by me, she turned back, looked directly into my eyes, and grinned. She looked me up and down, at my oversized Italian leather jacket, Lambada-ish chinos, and Hawaiian shirt. I smiled back and nodded confidently sharing the moment with her, but she turned away… and in the end, I wasn’t actually sure if she’d ever really been looking at me, or had she been looking at Roxanna Zal, the star of SOMETHING ABOUT AMELIA, who was standing just behind me.

The next day, when relating what happened to other agents’ assistants and mailroom hopefuls, I said “Yeah, last night I went to Alzado’s. Paula was there.” I said this in a strong, “I really don’t care that much” tone, as if I might have been saying that my brother was there. When you worked on an agency desk one of the first things you learned was to refer to stars on a first name basis as if they were part of your clique and seeing them was really no big deal whatsoever.

Straight up now tell me
Do you really want to love me forever oh oh oh
Or am I caught in a hit and run…

But then suddenly ten years flew by and everything changed. Lyle Alzado died, and with him Alzado’s closed. Instead of working a desk at William Morris, I was a Vice President at New Line, where I was admired and respected by the folks upstairs (which at New Line was actually downstairs on the 2nd Floor). Paula essentially vanished after no one bought her third album. Occasionally, I might catch a glimpse of her starring in a TV movie or making a guest appearance on SPIN CITY.

Meanwhile, I was living large in a spacious office with two leather chairs, a leather couch, a glass coffee table, and a view of the Pacific Design Center. My job was watching television; I watched dailies, directors’ cuts and final cuts. I watched pilots that my assistant had managed to trade for in the secret society of pilot-tape-traders that would one day run Hollywood themselves. I watched English television shows, for which I was so important that I had a separate English VCR that could play the PAL format. My life was a dream for a kid whose mother had once screamed at him, “What are you going to do with your life? You can’t watch TV for a living.”

I also took pitches and general meetings. People appeared at my office with a look of panic in their eyes, like starving omega wolves waiting for the alpha wolf to let them have a taste of gristle. After all, getting a meeting with a New Line Vice President was a coup, a chance of a lifetime. So much so, that writing these words right now, I’m thinking what I wouldn’t do to get a meeting with a New Line Vice President… and I used to be one.

Do do you love me
Do do you love me

Many of these meetings were set up by agents and managers as “favors,” and involved spending a half-an-hour here and fifteen minutes there with the detritus of Hollywood; washed up writers, directors and actors with leather cases full of ideas for TV shows. Sometimes I’d get a truly desperate one, sitting on my leather couch, squeaking the cushions and squeaking his leather bag, forcing himself to smile, holding his legs tightly together and responding to my, “No one’s buying woman-in-jeopardy stories right now…” by yelping out, “Oh, I’ve got a terrific woman-in-jeopardy story that Jaclyn Smith is attached to.”

“I love her cologne,” I’d sputter back and then just smile, trying to look like a therapist does when your hour is over.

You gotta remember
I’m forever your girl.

So when Paula Abdul’s name appeared in my Outlook one day, it was both exciting and troublesome. I realized this would be my chance to tell her all about my obsession with her and how I’d come so close to meeting her back when she was famous. I could ask her if she had really looked at me that night at Alazado’s. Then, I thought better of all that.

Five minutes before Paula was supposed to arrive, I got up to use the bathroom, as I always did five minutes before any meeting was about to arrive. This was probably a vestige of my parents making me go pee before we got into the car. As I walked towards the men’s room, the elevator opened, and Paula Abdul stepped out, all by herself. She aged well. She looked almost exactly the same, only thinner and more cultured. Now, I had a standing rule that I didn’t talk to my meetings if I passed them on the way to the men’s room, and I decided I should keep to this. I walked past her and did my business.

When I came out of the men’s room, I saw Paula, way down at the other end of the hallway, way beyond my office, reading the little signs on each office doorway. She had walked right past the first door after the elevator, my door. Now I was in a quandary. If I yelled out to her, “Paula, it’s down here,” I would lose my New Line Vice President superiority, as it would look like I was some silly obsessed fan searching for her. Or worse, if she had actually noticed me the way I noticed her when she got off the elevator, she would wonder why I hadn’t said anything then, before I let her walk all the way down the hall like an idiot. I did what anyone in my situation would do. I went back into my office suite and waited for her to find it.

Two more minutes passed. I went back out into the hallway, and found that Paula had worked her way back towards the elevator, reading all the signs for the offices on the opposite side.

“Paula?” I called out, as if not only seeing her for the first time, but also not 100% sure who she was. She looked up; the way stars look up when you call their names, expecting to see a fan asking for an autograph. “I’m Charles Freericks,” I said. She looked at me blank. “Um, your manager Mitch set up a meeting for you to see me?” She nodded, that sounds right, and followed me in. “Mitch will be here in a minute,” she told me. “Great, I responded. “My colleagues Ernie and Roberta will be sitting in too.”

When everyone arrived, we began with the requisite pre-pitch chit-chat, all but Paula smiling falsely as we discussed my three-year-old’s ability to count to twelve, and Roberta’s son’s trip to Tokyo, and Mitch’s new offices that was just around the corner from a great dim-sum place. I was quite proud of myself that I didn’t mention once that I’d ever heard of Paula before that day, utilizing one of the standard development executive ways to disarm a star.

Then, again in standard studio mid-level honcho behavior, I finally threw her a bone by saying I was honored to meet her, and I enjoyed her music.

Straight up now tell me

Is it gonna be you and me together?

oh oh oh

Or are you just having fun?

Now in my mind, I was desperate to buy Paula’s project and work with her on it and have it become a success.

I wondered, if I would leave my wife if Paula asked me to. No, no, I was quite sure I wouldn’t… but I would certainly be flattered. It could be the start of wonderful friendship… Thirty years later we’d be having dinner at her house when I’d say, “Oh, do you remember the day you asked me to leave my wife?” “I do, I do… you were so flustered and precious…,” Paula would respond.

Hey baby
You gotta remember
I’m forever your girl

Then things went bad; really bad. Paula began to talk as if we were all intimately familiar with her video for OPPOSITES ATTRACT. She talked about how it was based on Gene Kelly in ANCHOR’S AWEIGH, and how it had been her most popular video. When she mentioned MC Skat Kat, Ernie and Roberta both nodded, indicating that they not only knew the video, but also knew, who, or what, MC Skat Kat was. I was screwed. I was the only person in the room who didn’t know what Paula was talking about. I couldn’t even think what the song sounded like. My mind did what it always does when I’m in trouble. It went somewhere else. I wondered if the dry cleaner would still be open when I drove home. Would it be better to take Pico or the freeway? I thought I might get a BMW for my next car. I liked the five series.

Hey baby
You gotta remember

Damn, I was a blank. The conversation had received a clear for takeoff and I was still standing at the gate. Mitch, Ernie, Roberta and Paula discussed the intricacies of the OPPOSITES ATTRACT video, MC Skat Kat, and how it would all make for a wonderful children’s series, MR. ROGERS meets BOYZ IN THE HOOD. Forced to say something so I didn’t look like a complete idiot, I did the playbook move for when you have nothing intelligent to say, I parroted the person’s pitch back to them, “It was inspired by ANCHORS AWEIGH,” I said, as if pulling a kernel of knowledge out of the ether. Paula nodded… and wasn’t it amazing how everyone knows the great scene with Gene Kelly, Tom & Jerry?

I didn’t know that scene. I didn’t know what anyone was talking about. I tried another standard executive question from the TV executive playbook. “What do you see happening in episode 22?” This question always floored whoever was pitching and gave me back the power.

Paula looked directly at me and said, “MC Skat Kat and Paula break up, and we leave it hanging if they’ll get back together until the next year.” Just as I was about to sink into complete idiot-hood, Paula turned to me and handed me a video tape. It was NTSC, so I put it in my American VCR. Had it been a PAL I could have turned the conversation to why I had two VCRs, but it was no help here. Thank God, however, it was the video for OPPOSITES ATTRACT. It began to play and I saw Paula from ten years earlier, standing on a cartoon staircase, as the music began. I immediately recognized it and I immediately knew why it had slipped my mind. I hated that song and I hated the video even more.

I take—2 steps forward
I take—2 steps back
We come together
Cuz opposites attract.

MC Skat Kat was Paula’s dance and singing partner in the video. He was a cartoon cat, drawn to look like a sinewy street thug hanging out in a junkyard. I hate sinewy. I hate the word and I generally don’t like sinewy people. They’re the ones who even when they’re five five, can still beat the crap out of you. Beyond that, I don’t like cartoons, I don’t like junkyards, and I don’t like rap when it’s bleached and dyed for white people. MC Skat Cat was a sinewy cartoon rapper, doing Caucasian-friendly rapping that my mom could dance to. Everyone in the room smiled at Paula to let her know how great the video was.

Paula’s idea was to do a show that took place in the world of the video. It would be a live version of her living in the cartoon world. She opened her incredibly expensive leather portfolio and pulled out painstakingly executed ink drawings of each of the other characters, including MC Skat Cat and his sinewy arms. As an aside, MC Skat Cat wore a wife-beater, which I thought would be nice in a children’s show. As Paula pulled each new drawing out, she cradled it, and then watched nervously as it was passed around, before she protectively took possession of it again and put it back in the portfolio.

I glanced over at the television, where the video stood paused… and I realized what bothered me the most about it. It was Paula, all by herself, the only human, in this cartoon world of sinewy junkyard cats. This was a hardened and lonely Paula who liked to make out with a cartoon character. This was not the girl who sang to me…

Hey baby
You gotta remember
I’m forever your girl

This was a girl I didn’t want any part of. And because of that, I became scared of the real Paula Abdul sitting on my leather chair too. So, I did what any television executive would do in the situation. I said, “I love it. It’s fantastic. I can totally see it. Thank you so much for bringing it to me. I’m going to take it upstairs (which was actually downstairs) as soon as you guys leave.” I felt like a total shit.

All throughout this, from when I first saw her in the hall, until she got up and shook my hand goodbye and I asked her if she needed validation, Paula Abdul never once smiled a single smile. I guess I’d already received the only Paula Abdul smile I would get in my life ten years earlier… that, or I’d witnessed Roxanna Zal’s only Paula Abdul smile. I’ll never know.

Still, I didn’t really lie to Paula, no matter what you may think. I did take her project upstairs (which at New Line was actually downstairs), but I didn’t get any response. No one cared about Paula Abdul at the time. A few weeks later, I heard from her manager that he’d fired her. No one wanted to buy the MC Skat Kat idea, and he needed to give more time to his other clients, like Don Knotts.

And in that moment, I felt horrible… I felt like scum… having somehow helped push Paula down a hill she was already rolling down. My career was soaring. I’d be a Senior VP some day soon and Paula would be forgotten forever.

Hey baby
You gotta remember
I’m forever your girl

About a year later, a new reality show came on the air. It was called AMERICAN IDOL. For the next few years, my bosses at New Line kept asking me why we didn’t have a show like AMERICAN IDOL. One day in a crowded elevator, one of the top guys actually screamed at me, “Find me an AMERICAN IDOL.” Those aren’t so easy to find, and I never did actually locate one. I never made Senior VP either. After six years, I was “let go” when my contract came up. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find another television job anywhere, because all of my successes were in TV movies and no one was making them anymore.

Careers are funny things. In a way, Paula and I were on a seesaw ride, with one of us soaring to the clouds, while the other was hitting the macadam. And like all seesaw rides, this one leaves it up to the person on the bottom to push off to keep things going. The person on the top was helpless. I may push off soon. I just need a project that will let me push off again… that I can sell… and make myself big. What do you guys think of a series based on MC Skat Kat?

Hey baby
You gotta remember
I’m forever your girl

2007-08-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

SARAH MILLIANO - 1978

One day in 1968, I went with my mom to pick up my brother from his visit with Sarah Milliano. This was in the age before play-dates…but it was, if there ever was, a play-date, because my brother was in love with Sarah Milliano and she was in love with him. They were five. I was seven.

The Millianos lived in the last house on the northwest end of the Bernley Homes Colony. We lived on the southeast end. Our homes, like all the homes in the colony, were identical three bedroom ranch houses. My family had two kids; the Millianos had seven, of which Sarah was the baby.

When we got to Sarah’s house, we found my brother in the backyard, where Sarah’s father had a pigeon coop. It was large as the house. Mr. Milliano told me that he drove the pigeons all over New Jersey and even into Upstate New York, released them and then waited for them to fly home. No matter what, they faithfully returned. I could not figure out the purpose of this exercise.

My brother fed pigeons with Sarah. They looked at me and whispered a secret to each other. Now, at that age, I had to admit, Sarah was cute, but she was also five…a mere child compared to my seven. I did not share my brother’s attraction for her. But, even then, I was jealous of the pigeon coop and I was jealous that my brother had a girlfriend, and I had to admit it was kind of fascinating to look at her because her eyes sparkled.

Ten years later, in 1978, I was the last 12th grader at Paramus Senior High still taking the school bus. Sarah Milliano, now a 10th grader, was on the same bus.

I couldn’t stop staring at the way her eyes sparkled.

How would you describe perfection? Was it in her golden white Joan Jett girl-mullet? Was it the two slightly bucked-teeth that appeared the moment she even thought about smiling? Was it the way her giggle felt like a tickle? Or, was it just that on the afternoon bus going home, she always sat next to me even when there were seats next to girls.

My brother, who wasn’t really sure if he should be mad at me (he’d stopped liking Sarah by first grade), still found it within himself to let me know that Sarah probably didn’t like me, she just found me really, really safe to sit next to (or so went his theory – but I found comfort knowing that he was also the same child who still believed that the song My Eyes Adored You really was Miles to Georgia).

One day I looked at Sarah’s textbooks and notebook through the side of my eye, and pieced together an accurate schedule of her day – specifically, what corridors she walked through between what periods. I made sure to pass her in the corridor between every class she had, because even though she didn’t quite look at me when she saw me, she would smile when she looked at the floor.

Between algebra and English, I only had to walk a hall out of my way, as she was in the 400 corridor and I was going from the 700 corridor to the 300. Other times, like between Power Mechanics and French, I had a three-quarter mile hike from the 100 corridor, to the 800 corridor, where I passed Sarah (who was always with Lori Israel at that point) and then had raced back down to the 200 corridor, where I was late for French.

After a month of this I got cocky. Sarah had shorthand in the 600 corridor when I had study hall in the 500. I figured that by going to the upstairs boys’ room, instead of the downstairs boys’ room, I could pass Sarah’s classroom and see her for another precious second. But, as I turned down the 600 corridor, Sarah Milliano came out of her classroom and headed my way, to the downstairs girls’ room.

We were both startled…and I realized that I had no choice. We were all alone. There was no place to hide. I had to do it. I took a choppy deep breath, and as I passed her, I nodded my head with a manly jerk, and I croaked, “Hey.” Although I had known her for ten years and she had been to my house for three of my brother’s birthdays, it was the first word I ever said to her.

She smiled. She croaked, “Hey,” but only got about half of the word out before her voice caught in her throat. She giggled and looked at the floor. And then she was gone, down the hall.

And I was screwed, because there was no way to walk back until she’d cleared the corridors…and I couldn’t figure out where to hide, so I went on to the upstairs boys’ room, where I stood by the sinks, looking in the mirror, until the bell rang. I sang, quietly, “My eyes adored you…though I never laid a hand on you…Miles to Georgia…”

I realized I was being a coward. I mean, she sat with me all the time. She almost said “hey” back. She giggled around me. Enough was enough…the next time she sat with me I decided, I was going to say something.

Sarah didn’t show for the afternoon bus that day. For the next two weeks, each day I saved her seat and each day she never appeared. Sure, I saw her on the morning bus, but she was picked up two stops before me…meaning that to sit with her on the morning bus, I would have to be the one with the guts to take the empty seat next to her.

Besides, we had never actually spoken again after that one corridor “hey,” and because she’d never sat next to me again, I didn’t know if maybe she’d realized that I was in fact stalking her and was frightened of me. The thought that with one stupid “he,”, I had managed to ruin months of preparation and planning towards maybe one day asking her out made me violently sick to my stomach. What was even more disturbing was that I did not know what she was doing instead of taking the afternoon bus home.

I set out in search of an answer. I skipped eighth period Comparative Religions, and I waited in the vestibule at the bottom of the 300 corridor. When the bell rang, the floor was flooded with students…but I caught a glimpse of Sarah as she headed off, not towards the exit, but towards the girls’ locker room. I went through the boys’ locker room into the gym and sat in the bleachers with a few other kids who were there waiting. I did not know what we were waiting for. Sarah appeared with other girls in basketball uniforms and drilled lay-ups. I was about to run, having my answer, when she saw me. She flushed pink and smiled and looked at the basketball in her hands. Throughout the next hour, she kept glancing up to make sure I was still there.

An announcement called that the late bus was leaving. The bleachers cleared. I stayed. All the mattered was watching Sarah. She looked up and saw me alone in the bleachers, and she turned and grinned a million dollar grin to the wall. My insides were spun into butter.

When practice finally ended, I climbed on the late, late bus, and took a three-seater. Sarah, showered and fresh, clambered onto the bus, walked past a dozen empty seats and sat next to me. Of course…we didn’t say anything to each other. But when she talked to other people on the bus, you could tell she was playing it up for me. And, when the bus dropped me off, I ran to my house singing as loud as humanly possible, “Miles to Georgia, like a million miles away from me, My eyes adored you…”

For the next two weeks, like a pigeon to its coop, I faithfully returned to every practice and I faithfully saved a seat for Sarah on every late, late bus. She always sat next to me. But we never did talk. And then one day…one day… she didn’t sit with me either. She sat with a boy with a round face full of acne. And he talked to her. And she talked to him. And she didn’t look my way once. And I realized that moment that for every question you don’t get around to asking, you turn the answer into a no.

When I think about it now, I realize that for those few months before acne boy appeared, Sarah truly, truly knew me. She knew that no matter where she went or where she left me, I would re-appear, finding my way home to her. And in the end, isn’t that what love really is? Knowing the one you are in love with better than you know yourself.

2007-08-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

WORLD RECORD WEDGIE - 1975

I believe I am the world’s record holder for Receiving A Wedgie From The Largest Group Of Assailants. The incident occurred on the lower field of Eastbrook Junior High School, on Spring Valley Road, in Paramus, New Jersey. The lower field is down a slight hill, and although it is big enough to hold two baseball diamonds, it is low enough that it is not visible to the teachers and yard attendants up by the school building.

The lower field is a dangerous place for any child not in with the jocks, heads or girls-who-smoke and I had avoided it for not only all of my seventh grade, but for most of my eighth grade too. As spring came though, I had improved enough at baseball that I started to feel confident that I could at least watch the jocks’ lunch break pick-up baseball games on it. I was careful, mind you. I sat on the top of the hill itself, so that my head and body were still visible to the teachers and yard attendants back by the school. Below me, the games were amazing to watch. Somewhere between seventh and eighth grades, many of the boys had gone from okay to dazzling. Pitches sailed in at 80 miles an hour. Balls were cracked out by bats, and soared 250 feet easily.

One day while perched on the top of the hill, I caught the attention of Peter Emerson, an extraordinary third-baseman, who called out to me with a friendly, “Freericks, you fag, what are you doing on the lower field?”

“I’m not on the lower field,” I answered, pushing my rear-end to the top of the hill to make sure.

Now, at the bottom of the hill, along the first base line, sat the girls-who-smoke and the queen of the girls-who-smoke was Angela Fonti. This was a name to savor as it rolled off your tongue…Angela Fonti. Ask anyone from Paramus about Angela Fonti, and they will still get nervous and giddy at the thought of her.

On the first day of seventh grade, when we went around our class telling what we hoped to grow up to be, Angela said she was going be a Playboy centerfold.

Angela was olive skinned, had almond shaped eyes and was so hot that Mr. Van Pelt, our assistant principal, blushed whenever she went by him. One day, in seventh grade, Angela walked up to me and announced loudly, “I’m never going to sit on your lap, Chuck, so forget it, you fag.” I later discovered that Al DiMeo, as a goof, had told Angela that I said I dreamed of her sitting on my lap – but he’d made it up. I’d never told anyone that I liked Angela – still, everyone liked Angela and everyone knew that everyone else liked Angela.

One day in the eighth grade, Angela came to school wearing a tube top that was basically a colorful sock around her chest. She attracted some attention with the tube top and that day’s baseball game was short a few players, as slowly but surely, more and more of the jocks left to sit with Angela and the other girls-who-smoke, over on the first base line. They had a ghetto-blaster that someone had snuck onto the field and it was playing Paul McCartney and Wings “Band on the run. Band on the run….” I was in my place, up at the top of the hill playing Lindsey Nelson, the New York Mets announcer, in my mind, “Bench hits a long fly ball to Freericks…Freericks is going back, back, back to the warning track and he makes an incredible leaping ice cream cone catch against the wall. To those of you listening on your radios, you’re missing a great shot of Angela Freericks, crying in the stands with joy for her husband. You know, that is one nice tube top she has on.” My imagination was snapped when Jimmy Maplewood, the best pitcher at Eastbrook Junior High School, called up to me with a friendly, “Hey, Fag, put on a glove and get out here. We need a left fielder.”

This was a moment of decision. Why was I up here if I didn’t want to play? Why was I up here if not to play for Angela Fonti? The boys circling Angela looked up at me. Angela and the girls-who-smoke looked up at me. If I didn’t come off the top of the hill, I knew that any chance I had for Junior High happiness would be gone. So I got up and against every voice in my head, I walked down the hill onto the lower field.

Steve Cosenza threw me his glove. I snagged it and trotted out to the outfield to a supportive round of “Don’t fuck up, Fag.” It was a truly great moment in my life. The jocks needed me. They wanted me to play. I stood in left field and began to shag flies. To the amazement of every one there, I was catching them left and right and my throws back were on target and clean. Paul Scanno even yelled out, “Good arm, Freericks,” when I nailed a runner at second.

And that turned the tide for me. For the next fifteen minutes, I played baseball with the jocks on the lower field. I couldn’t see the school from where I was. It was fucking amazing. Not only that, but they stopped calling me fag. I was Freericks. I looked over to Angela Fonti and the girls-who-smoke. Angela Fonti was watching me play and I was playing well. The crowd of boys around her had grown bigger. The boys were all watching me too. That was odd. Maybe they were surprised how good I was.

Suddenly, for the first time since our misunderstanding in seventh grade, Angela Fonti spoke to me. She yelled to me actually. She screamed, “Run, Chuck,” and I thought it can’t be. Angela is calling my name. She screamed again, “Run…” How cool it was to hear her addressing me! Then all the boys around her got up. There were well over thirty of them. Another twenty from the baseball diamond joined them. And every single one of them ran towards me. Once again, Angela’s sweet and beautiful voice called out, “Chuck, run!”

So I ran. But there really was no place to go. The lower field ended at a chain link fence, and my passage back to the hill was blocked by fifty boys running at me.

I made it about fifteen feet before the first body landed on top of me. Within a second, there were more than a dozen hands and bodies all over me. One hand reached into my pants and pulled up the back of my underwear.

I tribal chant filled the air, as forty-nine voices all intoned, “Wedgie, wedgie, wedgie.” The fiftieth boy had climbed back up the hill to the upper field to let all the other kids who never came down to the lower field know that it would safe for them today, as long as they helped.

Within two or three boys, my underwear began ripping. By the sixth boy, the elastic band was over my head and around my neck, and they were now pulling on the torn fabric.

Now, you may think, what an awful, awful thing for a boy to go through. But at the time this was happening, I have to admit the biggest thought running through my head was that Angela Fonti had warned me. She liked me enough to try and help me. The second thought going through my head was, “Yeah, they’re giving me a wedgie, but they did let me play baseball with them too.” The third thought I had was, “this will be over soon, because the fabrics going to completely give and what will they yank on?”

Through seventy or eighty boys, the fabric tore here and there, but never completely gave. My you-know-whats were in my stomach. As the line to wedgie me finally began to thin, the musical theatre club kids, the school newspaper staff kids and other assorted upper field kids piled on top of me and continued the assault. I remember Eric Horawitz, who I could beat up 364 days out of the year, but this was the 365th, was one of the last attackers. By this time, the front elastic was being yanked out of the back of my pants and any actual delivery of pain was luckily just to my waist. The last boy to jump on was Al DiMeo, who had told Angela I wanted her to sit on my lap the year before. He actually punched me because, and I quote this, because I couldn’t make it up, “We were friends and I should have let him be one of the first ones to wedgie me, not made him wait.”

The bell rang signaling that we had to get back to class and I was left alone on the lower field with strings and scraps of underwear tethered to my legs and my neck. Slowly, I brushed myself off, stood up and hobbled back to B3-E9, my classroom, while stuffing the tattered fabric down the back of my pants.

When Angela saw me she said, “I tried to warn you. I hope they didn’t hurt you.”

And in that moment it became the best day of the year, the best day I’d had in a very long time. Angela Fonti cared about me. Angela Fonti wanted to protect me.

And then she finished her thought. “You should run faster, Fag,” she said before strutting away.

2007-07-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

PARAMUS SMOKE - 1982

Weed… cannabis… Mary Jane… marijuana… pot… chronic… reefer… ganja… dope… grass… doobie… keef… sensimelia… boom… skunk… herb… Aunt Mary… Acapulco Gold… Hawaiian… Alice B. Toklas… Christmas Tree… Texas Tea… Maui Wowy … stick… Tijuana… Panama Red… cheeba… it’s all the same thing.

And it can take me from uncontrollable laughter to paranoia in the instant that it takes to think of something… like crashing the car into the K-Rail or getting stopped by the New York Police Department (Why doesn’t he pass?). Often it makes me ponder things like how arbitrary aneurisms are.

Sometimes it allows me to feel inside my organs, like it did on the otherwise normally calm evening of August 26, 1982 when suddenly it crept into my viscera and gave me a heart attack. Now, wait a second, you’re thinking… you’re not dead. No, no I’m not… and in fact, I’ve never had a heart attack either. But I was primed to think I was, not just from the marijuana, but because my grandmother, her brother, her mother, and her grandfather had all died from heart attacks. It was a family tradition. My first bout of angina came when I was ten. Okay, it may have been heartburn. But I couldn’t be sure.

And even though those last few precious moments of my time on earth somehow lasted eleven more years, on August 26, 1982, I smoked the straw that broke the camel’s back… well; the doobie that broke the camel’s back.

Let me set the night up for you. I had been up for more than 24 hours having flown back from six weeks in Europe the night before. It would have been logical to stay in and get some rest, but I was 20 years old and my friends wanted to go into the City to see Pink Floyd’s THE WALL, and no 20 year old is going to say no to going into the City with their friends ever, even if it's just to see Bob Geldorf shave his eyebrows off.

I was steering my Plymouth Sapporo down the Henry Hudson Parkway, with Mitch I Steal My Friends’ Clothes Lindenbaum riding shotgun. In the back seat was Bobbie You Guys Want To Leave Yet Lifshitz. Mitch was wearing a shirt of mine. Bobbie was rolling a joint from a Ziploc filled with Hawaiian.

Now, Mitch I Steal My Friends’ Clothes Lindenbaum was one of the happiest people I ever knew. He was the kind of guy who would come over to my house to help me mow the lawn. He didn't need to be entertained. He enjoyed being with people. The only problem with this was that he would take clothes from my closet.. He didn't even do this in secret. He'd stand there and say, "Nice velour V-neck. Try not letting me have it." And then it was gone, until I saw him wearing it the next time we were together.

On the other hand, Bobbie You Guys Want To Leave Yet Lifshitz was completely miserable. He was always looking for the next thrill and viewed wherever he was as the most boring place in the world; even if there were girls, and free bottles of Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels. I mean, if you went with Bobbie to see Led Zeppelin at the Playboy Club, and your seats were with the starting lineup of the 1973 New York Mets, and the food was catered by the Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr himself, Bobbie would turn to you within ten minutes of your arrival and ask, "You ready to leave?"

But on this night Bobbie was happy because he was on his way somewhere. And Mitch was happy because he was Mitch and wearing Bobbie’s jeans. And I was happy because I was with my friends on the way into the City while using my lungs to fill the Plymouth with blue doobie smoke.

Mitch took smooth, silent drags. Bobbie and I sounded like the hose on the vacuum cleaner when you switch cleaning tools with the vacuum still running.

“Driving drunk is bogus,” Bobbie decided it was time to point out.

“But driving stoned,” I responded, “Is cool.”

“Totally,” Mitch said. “Weed does not effect your driving.”

“No,” I answered, “But it does sort of make the consequences of smashing into something not seem so important.”

“What word do people say most when smoking pot?” Bobbie asked.

“Ear,” Mitch said, passing me the doobie.

I started to feel static electricity and pressure in my chest. I was spinning. I probably would have been okay had I just taken a deep breath and kept driving, but instead I concentrated on my chest to try and make the spinning and pressure go away… even though I was high… on Hawaiian.

Let me stop for a minute and ask you a question. Have you ever thought about your breathing? Tried to figure out how it works? Then, because you are thinking about your breathing, you realize that you can’t breathe anymore? You start to panic that you don’t know how to breathe? Okay… imagine doing that stoned. Imagine doing that stoned on Hawaiian. Imagine being stoned on Hawaiian, and trying to figure out how you make your heart pump. Imagine being stoned on Hawaiian and trying to figure out how to make your heart pump when you have a family history of sudden death from heart attacks.

“Guys, I don’t mean to sound stupid, but I think I’m having a heart attack,” I sputtered out.

Mitch and Bobbie both cracked up.

“I’m serious, guys.”

This caused them both to roll with waves of laughter, while they each pounded on me in some sadistic version of saying thanks for the laugh.

“No, you don’t understand… You have to take me to the hospital.”

“But we might miss the movie.” someone uttered.

”One of you has to drive,” I wept.

“It’s a stick,” Mitch answered.

“I can’t drive a stick,” Bobbie said.

“Me either,” Mitch responded.

“One of you has to. I can’t drive.”

“Bobbie’s cousin has a stick …,” Mitch offered.

“Chuckie, you better really be having a fucking heart attack because this is bogus,” Bobbie said as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

As soon as we jerked back onto the Henry Hudson, I knew that letting Bobbie drive was a mistake as he ground the gears and hurled us both into the windshield. Meanwhile, the feeling in my chest was getting stronger, making it hard to catch my breath. I begged, begged, begged them to wave down a cop. Mitch felt this wasn’t a good idea because he had a half pound of Hawaiian in the glove compartment. I told him to throw the bag out the window and flag down a cop before I died. He ignored this instruction.

The sensation grew more powerful, pounding against my ribs and solar plexus. Suddenly, I could map my nervous system from the throbbing line of neurons firing into my left arm and along my chin.

None of us knew Manhattan, and because of this, none of us knew where to look for a hospital. Bobbie stripped the shit out of my clutch, as he jerked along side a cab, “Where the fuck is a hospital?” The cabbie, who didn’t know Manhattan either, pointed at a bodega and said ask them. Lindenbaum ran in and then rushed back. “In the fifties,” he shouted at Bobbie.

“Where in the fifties?”

“Fuck, I have to go back.”

“No, let’s just go. We’ll find it.”

“Shit… Chuckie’s dying.”

We drove like a yoyo down 56th Street, up 55th Street, down 54th Street, up 53rd Street and finally down 52nd Street, where we found St. Clare’s Hospital Emergency Room. Bobbie went to park the car, while Mitch and I went in. The nurses were sitting around. One asked me, “What’s wrong with you?” I said, “This may sound stupid, but…I’m having a heart attack.”

Her expression shifted slightly and she took my pulse. Next thing I knew, I was in a wheelchair, being wheeled into the examination room. Two nurses in pink scrubs where joined by two doctors in blue scrubs, all checking parts of me.

“What seems to be the problem?” one of them asked and I had to say the words again… making the whole thing all the more real…. “I might be having a heart attack.”

When I looked up again, there were now two more nurses in yellow scrubs, and two others in purple scrubs, and ten interns in white jackets. I felt like I was being attended to by two rolls of LifeSavers: fruit flavored and peppermint. They all looked at me with deep concern. The head life saver asked me if I had taken any drugs. His 19 flavors of helpers all looked at me. I thought about it for an instant. Do I tell the truth and save my life, or lie and not get in trouble?

“A little, tiny, little bit of a marijuana cigarette,” I answered. I felt very proud of myself for choosing to be saved, even if it meant being arrested and thrown into jail.

The head life saver laid me back on the bed. Vaseline and electrodes were applied to my chest, back, neck and legs, as the rest of the LifeSavers worked on me. Mitch I Steal My Friends Clothes Lindenbaum told me later that he hadn’t thought anything was really wrong until he looked into the examination room and saw the rainbow of 20 frantic medical personnel working all over me. I yelled out to call my parents and tell them that I loved them and how I’d died. The nurses watched the EKG. The interns watched the nurses. The doctors watched the nurses. No one was leaving, and I just knew that this was bad. They would have walked away if this wasn’t bad.

Finally, the head life saver tore the EKG from the machine and said, “You’re not having a heart attack.” I looked for Mitch to tell him to cancel the call to my parents, but he was gone.

A nurse gave me Valium. The sweating, the pressure on my chest, the throbbing line of nerves into my arm and chin, and the spinning all stopped. They gave me some papers to fill out and told me I could go. I asked Mitch if we were still going to see Pink Floyd’s THE WALL, but he said we’d already missed the trailers, so there was no reason to try.

Bobbie got the hang of the stick and drove us home. My parents stood on the front stoop, waiting for me. It was sort of awkward. I mean, how exactly do you explain to your parents that you just spent $500 of their money on an emergency room visit because you were smoking pot? I tried to sneak past them… but my mom stopped me and hugged me while my dad looked like he would have hugged me if he just hadn’t been born part WASP, and hoping that I understood being part WASP myself.

Funny thing is it was that very WASP part of my dad and me that liked to drop dead young. In a coincidence that I could not make up, my dad told me that he’d been to St. Clare’s Hospital himself, as a child to visit his grandmother when she was admitted with chest pain.

“But that won’t happen to us,” he assured me… at least that’s what I think I remember.

Seven years later, my dad dropped dead from a heart attack.

When I flew home for the funeral, Mitch Lindenbaum came over to hang out. He was wearing my shirt. He told me that no one knew where Bobbie was. I told him that Bobbie had actually shown up at my apartment in Los Angeles once, got a job at CAA, and then quit the next day. That had been the last I’d ever heard from him. Mitch told me that he had a tree planted in Israel in memory of my dad… in memory of my dad the WASP… the WASP with the sad expression on his face as if he wished he could be warm and loving… warm and loving like the Jews he knew.

But back to 1982: that next night, Bobbie You Guys Want To Leave Yet Lifshitz, Mitch I Steal My Friends’ Clothes Lindenbaum and I did get to see Pink Floyd’s The Wall at the Warner Cinerama Twin in New York City. Bobbie wanted to leave, but we made him stay. The movie was about searching for reason in a world in which all we know is that each of us has our own expiration date. And I realized then that, that is why God, or Mother Nature, or whatever force is up there gives us things like Hawaiian Weed, nights in the City, friends like Mitch and Bobbie, the 1973 New York Mets, moms who hug us after we do something stupid and dads who wish they knew how to hug us. These trinkets are God’s, Mother Nature’s, or whatever’s way of saying, “sorry, sorry I didn’t work out that death thing very well. Here… have a LifeSavers. Take a cherry one. It’ll make you feel better.”

2007-07-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

UPSIDE DOWN - 1969

I was in second grade, in Mrs. Valerio’s class. All the kids were lined up to go to an assembly in the gym. The girls were up front, up by the door with Mrs. Valerio. The boys were in the back. I was talking to Donnie Maplewood, the new kid, about how different our school was from his old school. Donnie Baker was behind me.

Then, I was floating in air. I couldn’t figure out where the floor had gone or where the floor was. It was a terrible feeling, as if the Earth itself had suddenly vanished. I couldn’t even tell if my head was up or my feet were up. Within no time at all, I heard a loud crack. The crack was intense, like an explosion, and it didn’t come from in front of me or behind me or to the left of me or to the right of me. The cracking explosion came from inside me. It was inside my head. There were thousands of lights, orange, red, blue, yellow, all flaming and flashing in the darkness of my mind. The pain was so intense that my head went numb. I knew it must hurt terribly, but I couldn’t feel it. When I managed to open my eyes, I was in on the floor of my second grade class. There were feet where the other kids should be: feet in Keds, feet in P.F. Flyers, feet in Hush Puppies and feet in Buster Browns, all around me. Everyone was very high up, above me. And they were all laughing, except Eric Nixon, who was standing behind Donnie Baker.

“He didn’t even see that coming,” he told Donnie Baker. I wondered what it was that didn’t I see coming? What had happened? A cool blackness started to run over my eyes and then suddenly, it was a full minute later. A minute of my life had vanished without me experiencing it.

Mrs. Valerio was kneeling over me and everyone was asking what happened. Donnie Maplewood was looking the other way, like he didn’t want to say. Donnie Baker was trying not to giggle. Eric Nixon was saying, “Donnie, picked him up and dropped him on his head.” Then Donnie Baker looked at Eric Nixon in a bad way. Mrs. Valerio asked if I could stand up. I thought, wow, I don’t know. Can I stand up? She gave me her hand to help. She had a very nice hand. I stood up and I felt like the blackness was coming again, it was oozing like syrup over my vision. Mrs. Valerio told one of the girls to go to the nurse’s office to get smelling salts. I didn’t want that, no…so I forced the blackness away and we all walked to the assembly.

And that’s all I remember about that.

2007-07-12T13:49:00.001-07:00

MY MOM CALLED THE POLICE ON OUR CAT - 1970

When I was nine my mom called the police on our cat. But this was not unexpected; she always went to extraordinary lengths to protect us from the world. You know, from evil things, like Crest Toothpaste with Fluoride. We were Colgate with MFP children who were not allowed to use, taste or get close to Crest—because mixing toothpastes makes poison.

Fresh off the boat from Iran, my mom graduated number one from her American high school and from her American college. An artist, poet, book author and teacher – she boiled ground beef after cooking it, to wash away the grease. Ours was the only house on Veraa Place where you could get—boiled hamburger. She bought chicken-loaf, ham and roast beef at our local delicatessen, Komsa Farms then cut out all the fat, so that our cold cuts looked like paper snow flakes. She told my brother and me never to go under the television table because, "It could come down on us.” Now, to me, come down meant a slow evil descent, rather than crashing, and I was scared of the television table, which I thought was sentient and waiting for someone to crush. One day, our cat Silverbell went under it and I cried, thinking this was her end.

Luckily, the table never got Silverbell. Sadly, our oven did. My mom was making turkey and checking the temperature for the 12th time, because if it wasn’t exactly 450 degrees—you would die from eating it. Silverbell went out of her mind at the smell of the roasting turkey, jumped on the open oven door, which was exactly 450 degrees, screamed and ran out the back, never to be seen again.

Two years later, on a cold fall day we got another cat. My mom took my brother and me to visit a family with two pregnant women. One of the women was my mom’s student, a teenage girl, and the other woman was her mom. They had a dog and a cat, and because both women were having babies, they were giving away the cat, who was named Charley. He was a furry dark grey Tom, almost black, with a white bib that ran down to his belly. He ate food from the dog dish until he was shooed away and scrambled onto the kitchen counter to eat cat food. The older woman put cans of cat food into a bag and told my mom to feed Charley a quarter of a can a day.

At our house, my mom opened a can and scooped out a quarter, putting it on a paper plate on the floor. Charley ran up from exploring and gulped it down in a single swallow. He looked up at my mom. She said that was all for today.

When my dad, Charley, came home, there was a brief discussion about changing the cat’s name so it wouldn’t be confused with me, also Charley…but I said I didn’t mind sharing a name with my new best friend.

On the next day, my mom took the can of cat food out of the refrigerator and plopped a quarter of it on a paper plate. Charley ate this instantly and looked up at her. “That’s all for today,” she said. She was following the rules we’d been given.

As the cat napped on the living room rug, my mom pulled out a pad and some charcoals and sketched a picture of him. While she drew, she told my brother and me about her pet lamb. When she was a little a girl in Tabriz, Iran, her father had brought home a lamb, which my mom and her brothers played with in the garden. My mom said that because they ate lamb for dinner every night, she didn’t know exactly when they ate her lamb, she just knew that one day it was gone.

I hugged Charley as tightly as I could. No one would ever eat him. By the by, bit of advice, cats don’t enjoy hugging.

As the weeks passed, my mom gave Charley a quarter of a can every day. He’d eat it so fast he’d nearly vacuum the paper plate up with it. Slowly, he began to get aggressive about joining us for breakfast, lunch and dinner, jumping on the table and stealing food. My mom put him out while we ate, but Charley lurked on our back porch like a panther on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

One dinner, I saw a face in the backdoor window. I screamed. It had only been there for a second, but a monster had been looking in. My mom, my dad and my brother all turned to look and sure enough, there was the face again. It was Charley and he was jumping up to the height of the four-foot high window so that he could watch us eat. With each leap, he mimed a meow, silently begging on his descent, “For God’s sake, feed me!”

And yet, because we had been told that the cat only ate a quarter of a can a day, that was what we fed him. It never occurred to any of us that at his old house he also had a large plate of dog food in the kitchen, so a quarter can of cat food was his snack.

Thanksgiving my mom made turkey. As she had to check the temperature to make sure it was exactly 450 degrees, Charley was banished to the porch for his own safety. When the aroma began to fill the air, Charley began to jump so that he could see in through the backdoor window. He looked so sad, jumping higher than he had ever jumped before, miming a meow at the top of each and every bound. I went out to comfort him.

I picked him up and carried him over to our outdoors [sic] couch. I hugged him in hope that a little love would take his mind off the turkey. I was Jim Fowler out in the field with the wildlife, reporting back to Marlin Perkins in the studio.

It was then that Charley, not wanting to be held away from the turkey aroma, growled a warning. This was a new sound that I had never heard him make before. Then for the first time ever, this gentle cat who had never hurt one of us, scratched me.

I ran into the house, crying. My dad didn’t even look up from the newspaper he was reading, but my mom…my mom, well, she quickly achieved a level of panic that I had never seen before. She studied the scratch on my arm and wailed, “Ohmygod, a rabies bite…ohymygod, a rabies bite.”

She made my dad put Charley in the garage, while she dialed the phone number we had on stickers on both phone in the house, 262-3400, the Paramus Police… Now, I was scared. This was bad. My mom was calling the police. Still, Charley deserved to get in trouble. And, I felt safe, knowing my mom loved me and was going to make sure that he was punished for his crime. Frantically, my mom told the police that I had been bitten by a cat, which they had captured in the garage. The word rabies came out of my mom’s mouth at least six times.

Five minutes later, a white and blue Paramus Police cruiser whipped down Veraa Place. It had its siren on and its cherry top turned our whole neighborhood into a red disco. The policeman, with his police jacket and police walkie-talkie and police baton and police revolver and police belt with three full rows of police bullets in their individual police loops on the belt, came into the house and asked, “Where is the animal?”

My dad said he had something to do in the basement, and left. My mom and I led the policeman through our laundry room and into the threshold of the garage. The policeman took his police flashlight and aimed it into the cold depths. The leather of the policeman’s jacket made leather noises. Night had fallen and there was nothing but dark silence. I could see my breath. Charley was crouched far from us against the garage door. His green eyes reflected wildly against the police flashlight beam. He mimed a meow. The policeman explained to my mom that they would have to cage the animal and watch it for a week to test for rabies. It clearly wasn’t foaming at the mouth or acting strangely, but with a wild cat, it was hard to tell.

“Let me see your bite,” he said. I showed him my arm. He said my bite was a scratch and he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think you could get rabies from a scratch, especially seeing as this one hadn’t broken the skin. He asked my mom if we had ever seen the cat before. “Charley is our cat” she responded.

The policeman made a face. He put his flashlight away, told my mom to put some Bactine on my scratch and because it was our cat, it would be best if my mom watched him for the week.

Charley lived in our garage for the next seven days, while my mom checked for foam at his mouth. When the week was up and she was sure he didn’t have rabies, she drove him to his old owners and gave him back. On his first day there, he jumped up on the kitchen countertop and appropriated a leg of lamb; dragging it into the backyard with his teeth.

Ten years later, I took the train home from work one summer evening and called for a ride from the station payphone. I heard the line ring twice, be picked up and then fall to the floor. First thought I had was, Oh God, my mom just died before she could say hello. I ran up the hill towards my house, only to see my mom waiting for me in her car. I yelled, “Someone answered the phone at our house and dropped the receiver.” My mom blanched and said no one was home. We raced back to the house and found the receiver on the floor. “Call the police; someone’s here” I yelled. My mom ran to a neighbor and dialed 262-3400. Two cruisers came this time with their cherry tops strobing into every house on Veraa Place, and two officers jumped out. Both unsnapped the leather straps that locked their pistols in place. They searched for the intruder who had answered the phone, but all they found was our new cat, Toni, cowering in the bedroom. It was then that I noticed sticking to the sticker with the Paramus Police number on the phone—fresh cat hair. Toni had knocked the phone off the hook. Sure enough, once again, we had called the police on our cat. And this time, I was the one who panicked and forced the call. I truly was and am my mother’s son.

2007-07-05T20:36:00.001-07:00

THREE CARS FOR THREE CHEERLEADERS - 1980

I applied for a freshman year Federally Insured Student Loan, or FISL, two weeks before freshman year was over, and with all of my tuition, books, meals and dormitory expenses paid for months earlier from money my dad inherited from Aunt Blanche.

I applied for a sophomore year FISL the next day with all my sophomore year expenses already allotted for from Aunt Blanche’s largess too.

Soon, I had $5,000 in FISL money; so I did what any responsible 18-year-old in my situation would do…

I bought a used Buick – a 1978 Regal Limited with a waterfall grill, whitewalls, and crushed-velour pillow seats.

My decision may have been morally questionable, but being car-less at college was being date-less at college… and because the FISL was for college, and college meant living in dorms full of young women waiting to be asked out on dates, and having a car would make asking them out so much easier, I figured I was doing the right thing buying the used Buick.

I spent that entire summer break visiting the Sears Automotive Center, polishing and pampering the car, hanging a little evergreen air-freshener tree from the rearview mirror, and putting Armor-All over every thing resembling leather, all in preparation for sophomore year.

Just before school began again, my family and I planned a week down the shore in Wildwood Crest. But, the morning we were to leave I slept through my dad’s dozen and a half attempts to wake me up. Finally, through the stupor of my sleep, I heard him say “Fine, drive yourself.” When I woke up four hours later I found directions to the motel, a ham sandwich and an apple left for me on the dining room table.

I packed some clothes in a Glad garbage bag and hit the road, cranking the radio, blasting Holme’s “Garden State Parkway Boogie.” “When the weather gets great in the Garden State, everyone heads for the shore… Doing the Boogie, the Garden State Parkway Boogie, yeah.”

As I reached the Raritan River Bridges, I cracked the window to smell the ocean. Then, I saw a glint on the pavement. Remembering the lesson in driving class that it’s better to run over something small than swerve into something big, I rode over it.

BOOM – it banged against the undercarriage, at my foot. BOOM – it banged again, under the trunk. ROAR – the car screamed like a jet plane. My muffler was punctured.

Now, most people would have stopped for help, but I was 18, so I kept driving, with every other passerby yelling out, “You need a muffler.” “Thanks,” I mouthed, waving back. But I was making good time, and though the roar seemed to get louder and louder, the Regal sailed down the Parkway like on glass… very fast glass. I looked at the speedometer and saw that I was doing 100. I yanked my foot off of the gas but the car accelerated to 110.

Braking didn’t help, so I downshifted to first. But the safety on the transmission wouldn’t change gears because of my speed. So I stomped on the parking brake. This slowed the wheels enough that the safety on the transmission disengaged and the car downshifted at about 50 miles an hour, launching me into the windshield and retarding the wheels enough that the parking brake locked them up, which put the car in a full 360 spin, on the Garden State Parkway, the second heaviest artery in the most densely populated state in the Union.

Miraculously still alive and unhurt, I figured out that I could drive the car by keeping it in second and using the brake pedal to adjust my speed. I got off and found the first garage, where a mechanic put my sweet, cuddly, pretty, little Buick Regal on the lift and said that I’d bent my linkage. He did a little bit of work so that I could sort of drive again, but told me that the leak in the muffler would poison me with carbon monoxide pretty soon, so I probably shouldn’t drive the car that much.

It was like a gut punch. My Regal… my girl tool, wounded by a piece of who knows what? I drove back to the Garden State Parkway on ramp unsure if I would get on heading home or get on heading down the shore. Somehow, even though I was 18, common sense took over and I headed home.

I drove home praying that I’d be able to afford the repairs and wondering how I would ever get a girlfriend, let alone a cheerleader without the Regal. I nursed her to Midland Gulf, which was closed. I put a note on the windshield for Ed the mechanic, saying that I’d be back with the keys when they opened on Monday morning. I started on the shortcut back to my house, cutting through people’s yards like I used to when I was a kid, when all of a sudden, a middle-aged man jumped out of his house and shouted at me. I turned around and ran back to the sidewalk, taking the long way home, dreading telling my dad what had happened and hearing him tell me off for destroying the car.

It was Saturday night and I had nothing to do. I called Rappaport, my best friend who’d been working hard on making me the kind of guy who would get a girlfriend, taking me shopping for velour sweaters, getting me to listen to Led Zeppelin, and taking me to parties where kids knew how to dance like John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. “Come over,” he said, “I’ll call around and see who’s having a party.”

I told him the bad news, and that I’d be coming in my brother’s 1971 Ford Torino… a car that used to be mine… a car that Rappaport and I had both agreed was cool for hanging in… it did zero to sixty in eight-point-two seconds… but which would never attract a cheerleader, being huge, olive green, and sort of rusty.

On the way to Rappaport, doing 70 in a 25 MPH zone, I slammed on the brakes when the light at Farview changed from yellow to red without warning. For the second time in a day, I needed a protractor to measure my forward progress, as I did a 90 degree turn with all four wheels locked. The motor stuttered, sort of like the death rattle that I’d seen my grandmother’s silver tabby Brandy make just before she lay down and stopped breathing. And like Brandy, the Torino wouldn’t start again no matter how many times I tried.

I got out, pushed the crippled behemoth to the curb and walked home. Half an hour later, I met the Triple A driver at Midland Gulf. He had my brother’s Torino in tow and with the dexterity of a hall-of-fame wrecker driver; slipped the Torino into the narrow space between my Regal and a concrete wall. I left a note on my brother’s car for Ed the mechanic, explaining that I would come back with the keys to it on Monday morning. As an aside, Ed later told me that I jumped the timing chain in the Torino, which was impossible, because in order to generate the lateral force necessary to do that, I had to have been going 120 miles an hour when I hit a brick wall.

Once again, I started to cut through yards to get home, but when I saw the man who shouted at me, I made a quick U-turn to the sidewalk, while dreading telling my dad what had happened and hearing him tell me off for destroying two cars.

When I got home, I got the keys to my dad’s 1973 Plymouth Valiant and started it up. If you don’t know the Valiant, it was a box on four wheels. The headlights and grill looked like a perpetually smiling face – like a Christian Science usher at Sunday Morning services. My dad’s Valiant was nearing 200,000 miles and had old pillows stuffed into the springs in the holes in the front seat. If the Regal was a girl tool, and the Torino was a hanging out ride, the Valiant was an “I’m a nerd with no hope of ever talking to a cheerleader as long as I live piece of crap.” But it was all I had.

As I drove to Rappaport, I threw my dad’s old papers, boots, umbrellas and coffee cups from the front seat to the back seat. When I looked forward again black smoke was gushing from under the hood. For the life of me, I hadn’t done anything wrong, but there was no denying that smoke was billowing from the power steering. Other people on the street yelled out, “Your car’s on fire.” Well it wasn’t really on fire. It was just smoldering.

I was too embarrassed to call Triple A again, so I drove the smoking Valiant to Midland Gulf myself. I wedged it in front of the Regal and Torino, opened the hood and poured water over the power steering motor. I put a note on the windshield to Ed that I would be back on Monday morning with the keys to the Valiant.

I walked home on the sidewalk, which took twice as long as cutting through people’s yards. I dreaded telling my dad what had happened and hearing him tell me off for destroying three cars. God had gotten me back for using my FISL to buy the Regal.

“Chuckeee…” Rappaport said when I got on the phone with him, “I’ve got even worse news. There are no parties anywhere tonight.” I tried not to let him hear the tears in my voice, but I couldn’t help it. In three hours I’d destroyed three cars. I was in huge trouble when my parents got home. I didn’t have the money to fix any of the cars. My FISL was all gone. I was a loser. A loser, who was never going to get a girlfriend, let alone a cheerleader. Then Rappaport had an idea. We’d have a party at my house, with girls, lots of girls.

Two hours later, there were five guys at my house. They were drinking beer and singing along with Billy Joel’s album 52ND STREET. Finally, a knock came on the door. It was three… more guys. Then the doorbell rang again; it was two… more guys. We all stared at each other. The door swung open again. It was a guy who had a girl’s name sort of. I had 11 guys in my house and no car.

We danced like lunatics, jumping up and down to the music, “You had to be a big shot, did’ya...” When the door opened again, it was Big Red with more beer. The 12 of us bounced across my living room like we were on pogo sticks; gold chains and feathered haircuts flying everywhere, pounding to the beat of Billy Joel. I may have been a loser, but I wasn’t alone.

Then the doorbell rang – I walked over to it unenthusiastically and swung the door open. Suddenly my skin cooled, my capillaries slammed shut and my breath got lost in my lungs. I stood at the threshold of one of those moments in life when life is forever changed – when the road itself turns, rather than my having to turn myself. Standing on my stoop were three… varsity cheerleaders from Paramus High School, including the cheerleading captain.

They were beautiful. They smiled as if they had been trained in the art of smiling cutely. They had perfect teeth and perfect complexions. They burst through the door and kissed the cheeks of the boys they knew, while bobbing their heads to the sound of Billy Joel.

Rappaport gave me a high five and said, “Chuckee… it’s God’s present for his messing up your cars… God’s giving you three cheerleaders for the three cars.”

I ran to my room and got a camera. I took a picture of the three cheerleaders sitting at my parents’ dining room table. All of life is temporary sure, but moments like this were just a flicker… the single flash of a lightening bug, and I knew I had to record it to remind myself that it had actually happened. Then Rappaport grabbed me and sat me down with him and the three girls. He told them all about the three cars and how I’d had the worst day of my life. One of the girls asked what they could do to make me feel better. Rappaport answered, “Chuckee needs a girlfriend.”

BOOM, I felt my heart pound against my chest. BOOM, I felt my heart pound against my skull. My stomach did a 90 degree turn. My scalp began to smolder.

“Chuckee could get a girlfriend in a second if he just tried,” one of the cheerleaders said. I took another picture of her. This was a moment I had to remember forever. And it was then that I realized that God or not, the Regal had worked. The Regal, through whatever indirect means it chose to do it, had put three cheerleaders at the same dining room table on which I used to sit pretending to fly an airplane. The Regal had taken a bullet for me. Damn, I was going to do whatever I had to save that car.

As the night went on, more kids arrived and other kids left, but the three cheerleaders stayed put at my dining room table, asking me questions about college and, when I made them laugh, brushing their fingers against the top of my hand. I felt each touch in my spine.

And when the party finally came to an end, the three cheerleaders stayed and helped Rappaport and me clean the house so I wouldn’t get in trouble with my parents. One washed glasses in the sink. One vacuumed. One picked up trash and beer bottles. I wish, wish, wish I had had the nerve to photograph that – I etched it into my memory instead.

On Monday morning I woke up at 3:30 in the afternoon. I walked over to Midland Gulf, where Ed had moved the Torino into the garage, moved the Valiant into the Regal’s spot and moved the Regal into the Torino’s spot, all without keys. All three had their hoods up and he had to order parts for them, which was going to cost a bundle. “I hope your dad doesn’t get mad,” he said.

I nodded, self-assuredly, the sort of nod that a guy who hangs out with cheerleaders has, the kind of nod that says, “whatever… that’s life… everything will work out.” Because the truth of the matter was that is who I was. I gave the Regal a pat on the fender and then headed back home for breakfast, cutting through people’s yards like I used to when I was a kid, and didn’t get yelled at once. People don’t yell at guys who hang out with cheerleaders.

2007-06-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

JUST A LITTLE FART-A-LINA - 1975

Okay, so we were driving in the car, having just turned off Route 4 onto Route 208, towards Oakland, the Oakland in New Jersey, not the one in California, the little rural town-one that I think of when you say Oakland, and my dad’s farting, the way my dad did— a lot— whenever we were trapped in a car with him, but this time he’s not even trying to hide that it’s him and blame my mom or me or my brother, he’s right out there, proud as a rooster of each and every fart – announcing them with gusto, “Just a little fart-a-lena,” he says and then he laughs in that baritone of his that could have made him a radio announcer if he wasn’t so shy outside our family.

And in-between the farts he’s singing camp songs, or at least his version of camp songs, like “Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim, she put him in the toilet bowl to see if he could swim…”

“Shhhhfffffwwwwwiiiiiitttttzzzzzz….,” the sound was horrific. “Just a little fart-a-lena,” my dad said again. My mom turned up the radio as if that would help get rid of the smell. “School bells ring and children sing, it’s back to Robert Hall again… Mother knows for better clothes, go back to Robert Hall again…, Robert Hall, all stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

My dad was farting his way to our weekly picnic. My family picnicked the greater parks of Bergen County, Passaic County, Rockland County and Westchester County. We toured these parks the way jetsetters toured the cities of Europe. We did it all for my mom who loved eating outdoors. We had charcoal and lighter fluid, paper plates and Dixie Cups and brand new cans of Hi-C and Hawaiian Punch on the rear floor of our car.

On the radio, the newest mall from my hometown (we already had the Garden State Plaza, Bergen Mall and Paramus Fashion Center) sang, “Have a picnic in park, have a picnic in Paramus Park, you’ll find shopping fun again, once again, when you head on down to Paramus Park…”

Given his druthers my dad would have just stayed in our house in Paramus. The town was reticent and withdrawn like him. Paramus would never do anything as garish as other towns like say have a city hall, or a town hall, or even a borough hall. We had a municipal building in a municipal complex. Built around 1970, it was and is an amorphous cinderblock structure. When you stood on any side of it, it looked like you were standing in back of it. Let’s be very clear. On all four sides, wherever you were standing you were in the back of it. It was as if the whole building was hiding behind its mother’s skirt.

Wait a minute, I’m sorry, I got distracted; we were in the car, going up Route 208.

“Just a little fart-a-lena…” my dad said as we passed Fair Lawn. What a grin that man could have when something amused him. I mean Jack Benny, the Smothers Brothers and farts were the absolute troika of comedic entertainment to my father.

He opened the little triangle window on his door to try and clear some of the air. Many years ago he had named this window the Spritzer extractor. Yes, like that old urban legend that the Inuits had 400 words for snow, my dad had thirty words for fart. While most are lost to the ages, I do remember fromunda cheese, which came fromunda you.

“Pwwwffffftttttttzzzzz….,” was heard from the front seat. “Just a little fart-a-lena…” my dad announced as we turned into Wyckoff. Remember, we were on our way to eat. Again, my mom hit the radio dial, like the AM static might cleanse the air. “At the Gap now, fall into the Gap, we’ve got four tons of Levis waiting for you, at the Gap now, fall into the Gap. All stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

“Just a little fart-a-lena…” my dad said, switching the radio off.

He tried to soothe us with another of his camp songs, “Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station, I love you, Every night just after dark I goose the statues in the park, if Sherman’s horse can take it so can you.”

So, why did the man fart so much?

One Saturday, I set out to observe—to try and figure out what could be done to end this scourge on our existence. He began, like every morning, mixing Savarin and Sanka in his stove top percolator. He drank a cup and put the rest in the refrigerator in an empty soda bottle for later. He cooked himself a bowl of Wheatena, a hot cereal that smelled like wet rags. He chewed this mush even though there wasn’t anything in it that required chewing. Then he made orange juice from frozen concentrate, putting it in another empty soda bottle. After that, he mowed the lawn while I sat on the red couch we kept on our porch, smelling the greatest cliché of all clichés, the fresh cut grass. Every once in a while a fart escaped my dad, loud enough to be heard above the mower.

The sounds of lawn mowers reverberated up and down Paramus, as a half dozen other dads mowed their lawns too. But, my dad was unique, in his special lawn mowing outfit–old Oxford lace up shoes, black socks, Bermuda shorts and… and nothing else. He was topless. His only concession to fashion was that he made sure his socks matched.

His pet peeve was getting a single sock returned to him in his drawer when he had put two matching socks in the hamper. This was an unforgivable sin. He’d squat in front of the dryer, turning the drum with his hand, searching for a sock, believing that somehow, if he turned the drum slow enough, his missing sock would magically appear and tumble from one of the Bakelite flaps attached. Clump, clump, clump down the hall he charged, screaming, “Mary! Where’s my black sock?” Finally, when he just couldn’t stand the sock loss anymore; he announced that my mom was not allowed to ever do the laundry again.

Anyway, I got side-tracked, I was telling you about a picnic and how our car was so filled with stink that none of us knew if we would live to reach the actual picnic grounds. We were on Route 208. My mom turned the radio up to drown out my dad’s flatulence, “When you think you’re ready, head down to Crazy Eddie… Crazy Eddie…All stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

“Kwishhhhhfffwwah…Just a little fart-a-lena …” my dad exclaimed as we turned up towards Franklin Lakes. “Just a little fart-a-lena…” he began to say as we hit Skyline Drive, but this time the words caught in his throat. With shear horror and dread, he stammered, “Oh Shit, I did a wet one.”

And in that moment, that one moment of time, for the first time that I can remember in my life, the Freericks family came together as a single entity—facing a horror greater than any of us had ever known before.

For the truth of the matter is, none of us knew what to do, but we knew that whatever we did, we had to do it together, as a family.

Now, should we turn back? Should we go on to our picnic? Should we move to another state? Enter the Witness Protection Program? How does one recover from such an incident?

My dad’s neck turned red. His ears turned red. There were tears in his eyes. There was sweat on the top of his head. My mom, my brother and I all scoured the landscape, looking for an open gas station. Amazing thing about gas stations—look out the window of a moving car when you don’t need one. There are thousands of them. Now, look out the window of a moving car when you do need one. There are none. Why is that?

Anyway that didn’t matter then. All that mattered was my dad’s horror, because his horror was a shared horror. His shame was the family shame. Because, when you fart, you fart alone. But when you soil yourself, you soil your entire family and your loved ones are your crutches and your support. I tell you – Who knew?

It was in those minutes, those dreadful, horrific minutes that followed that the Freericks family came together as a family in a way that I don’t know that I ever knew we were capable of. We were united, like a pack of wolves with a single goal—to restore our Alpha Male to his full human dignity again and to do so as quickly and quietly as humanly possible.

We forgave him his tasteless songs, his Wheatena, his topless lawn mowing, his sock tirades, his everlasting farting. None of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was steering this man, this leader of our family, back to his greatness, back to his unsoiled pulpit of supremacy – and so we all scoured the landscape, until together, we saw a Sunoco, and pointed it out, screaming “There, there ,THERE, there’s a gas station, there it is. Hurry, hurry, quick. You can make it. You can do it. Go, go, go, GO!”

My dad pulled in to the Sunoco near Oakland, and went into the men’s room while we all waited silently in the car. Ten long minutes later, he came out and assured us that everything was taken care of. None of us asked for details. None of us needed to know more. My mom, my brother and I all took our individual sighs of relief.

We went on to our picnic, somehow changed, somehow better, somehow stronger. To this day, if you meet a member of my family and utter to them the words, “Just a little fart-a-lena” they will respond, without hesitation the response that warms my heart and brings a tear to my eye, “Oh Shit, I did a wet one.”

These words are as deeply ingrained in who I am and what it means to be me and what it means to be one of the Freerickses of Paramus, New Jersey as is the line, “All stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

This is who I am— just a little fart-a-lena.

2007-06-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

THE DISHWASHER - 1971

When I was nine our only television was still a black & white 1956 21” General Electric Pacer with faux mahogany finish. It didn’t get UHF, only the VHF channels of 2 through 13. You pulled a button out to turn it on, and pushed the button in to turn it off. When the GE broke, television repair men with arms as thick as my dad’s legs came to the house and carried it away, one on each side of the set. A week later, the television returned, in working order.

But, one day when the GE once again refused to turn on, and the frighteningly large television repair men took it away, we received a phone call from their shop, telling us that the television was gone. It was not worth repairing. The GE had been the only television I had ever known. (I mean, in my house. My Uncle Alex, who had a huge house on a third of an acre in Yonkers, had a Magnavox Far Eastern Classic Model 4-MV416, with Imperial Sound System, Series 200 Radio with stereo FM, Total Remote Control, finished in natural walnut, and with concealed castors for easy mobility. The television was a piece of furniture like you saw in a house museum. The remote was thick, like a cigarette pack, with two buttons; one to change the channel and one to adjust the volume. Air escaped from the remote when you pushed a button. And on the front of the remote there was a grill, making the remote look like a little hand-held Oldsmobile – obviously, Uncle Alex was rich.)

My hopes ran high that we might also get a Magnavox Far Eastern Classic Model 4-MV416 with Imperial Sound System, or a Zenith Space Command, maybe even an Admiral with the exclusive Admiral Tilt-Out Control Center, or if one might dream, a Quasar by Motorola (Featuring Space Age Solid State Reliability). Unfortunately, we didn’t get anything. And as the clock radio in our kitchen had also recently had some sort of catastrophic event that resulted in it becoming… a clock, there was no entertainment left in our house whatsoever.

Well, there was my dad’s Westinghouse portable record player. It came in an orange and white suitcase, and was made of hard grey plastic. For the first few days, I played my family’s collection of 45s, all five records – which my mom had bought for a dime at the First Presbyterian Church on Palisade Avenue’s rummage sale, Problem was that I had to change the spindle collar from one 45 to another, so that they would fit on the 33 spindle and every time I put the spindle collar in I was running about a 50/50 chance of snapping the record in two. Soon we had no 45s left.

I moved on to my dad’s 78s. I had a blast. Even though they were scratched and missing pieces that had broken off, they spun so fast that the concentric motion of the grooves slapping up against themselves and then bouncing away was a sort of shellac hypnotist’s spinning wheel. As the record played, I would enter a trance, my eyes glued to the groves dancing with the labels of Decca, Victor and Capital. But the 78s were my dad’s records, and there was just so many times I could listen to WOULD YOU LIKE TO SWING ON A STAR… 247 times to be exact.

So I moved on to my old Show’nTell. This was a children’s toy from the 1960s that looked like a television with a record player on top. It came with small storybook records and cardboard sleeved film strips, which were projected onto a faux television screen. Problem was I was nine and the Show’nTell programs I had were Winnie-The-Pooh, Babes in Toyland and Walt Disney’s It’s a Small World presented live from the New York World’s Fair.

And so, desperate for entertainment, electronic entertainment that is, I turned to the washing machine. Ours was a white Kenmore. The drum was dark grey and the agitator was black, with years of encrusted laundry soap cemented to it like periwinkles. I could turn it on with the lid open for the entire wash cycle, from the water filling the drum, floating the dirty clothes and making their colors so vibrant, through the soap bubble lapping water of the agitation, right up to the drum draining again. The smell of the clean water hitting the metal drum and the Cold Power detergent was intoxicating. Sadly though, I had to close the lid when it got to the spin-cycle. There was a safety switch that wouldn’t allow the machine to spin when open.

My mom was delighted with my new interest. All I did was laundry. But, my inability to witness the spin cycle burned inside me. Oh, sure, I could lift the lid in the middle of the spin cycle, and see the clothes spin for a little. But it was only momentum. The motor shut off the moment the lid came up, and the clothes soon fell down the drum wall, into the agitator, as the drum slowed to a halt. I’d have to wait for the rinse cycle to see anything again.

Then, I had a revelation. I found a pencil, and I jammed it into the safety switch, where the little prong on the lid was supposed to go. The tub filled, the agitation went beautifully, the tub drained. This was the moment. The dial clicked over to spin…and…and…and…the drum began to turn…faster…and faster…and faster still. The clothes began to climb up the walls. Every minute or two water sprayed from nowhere, like the fountain under the grand staircase to the parking lot at the Paramus Fashion Center Mall. It was marvelous.

Enlightened, I determined I would take my new found knowledge to the next level. I removed the clothes from the washing machine and placed them in the dryer. The dryer’s mysteries had yet to be revealed to me, as it didn’t run with the door open. But, I had broken the major appliance code of safety and no one could stop now. I stabbed the pencil into the dryer’s safety switch, and I sat there, watching it tumble dry…for the next hour. Occasionally a sock or a pair of underwear spilled to the floor, but mostly the clothes were held inside by the tumbling itself. Not only was it entertainment, but it was a lesson in the properties of gravity too. I felt complete.

It was then that my thoughts turned to the dishwasher. Now, I knew I couldn’t try it with people around. Unlike the washer and dryer, which were hidden in the garage, the dishwasher was in the kitchen.

No, I had to wait. So I bided my time. Soon the days turned into weeks as I stewed in waves of desperate curiosity. I needed a plan. Luckily, I was nine, so I came up with a brilliant one.

The next morning I told my mom that I felt like I had to throw up and couldn’t go to school. She gave me a salmon-color mop pail to carry wherever I went…in case. As I snuggled on the couch with a big pillow, my blanket, and the salmon-color mop pail, I heard my mom call in to work that she had to stay home and watch me.

I was screwed. She sat with me for a an hour of sheer Hell. Finally, she checked my forehead for fever, placed the salmon-color mop pail within my easy reach, in case, and went out the backyard to garden. I was alone. I had my chance. I loaded the dishwasher quietly, hoping she wouldn’t hear it from the outside. I poured detergent into both trays, the roofless one and the one with the little cover you slide in place, even though they were on the door, which I realized would be of no use if I kept it open. Unbowed, I took my trusty pencil and looked for the dishwasher’s safety switch.

But it wasn’t there. Where could it be? I scoured with my eyes. I scoured with my fingers, but nowhere on that dishwasher was there a safety switch. So I tried to turn it on… but… nothing happened.

I was baffled. What could be keeping it from turning on? I played with it for about ten-minutes, trying to latch the lock with door open and constantly checking on my mom to make sure she was still busy. But it latch wouldn’t go more than half way… that is…until, I saw, from the corner of my eye and within the latch mechanism itself, a small metal tongue that would be pushed to the side if the door was closed. I pushed against the metal tongue, and swung the lock to the right. It went all the way and the dishwasher clicked metallically.

Suddenly, a wave of water…no, let me rephrase that, a wall of boiling water, shot from the dishwasher, through the kitchen, over the table and against the wall on the other side of the dining room. The water was wild, blistering and desperate to get out of the house. It was like watching a water freight train roar over the grade crossing in Bergenfield on the way to my grandmother’s in Englewood. It soaked the Persian rug, and filled the floor with water. It peeled the paint off the wall.

I somehow, in my shock, managed to pull the dishwasher lock back, killing the evil machine. I stared out in awe at the damage I had caused.

When my mom returned and found my dabbing at our new dining room swimming pool with paper towel, she screamed at me. But, I swore that I had no idea where the water came from. She was stunned; it was beyond anything she could imagine. She wanted to catch me in a lie. She knew I had done it, but there was no possible way she could figure out how I had gotten that much water, that much boiling water, mind you, into the dining room.

I offered to help figure it out where it had come from, because clearly it wasn’t a good thing and we needed to find the source to stop it from happening again. She agreed with this thought, and we went into the attic to search for a leak in the roof. There was none. We searched the basement to see if water had jumped up through the floor from one of the pipes. It hadn’t. She called a plumber, who told her that someone must have taken a garden hose into the dining room. My mom explained to him that she’d had the hose outside. He theorized that while watering the garden, she must have looked away with the hose on full blast, and accidentally sprayed the dining room window, turning the dining room into a swimming pool herself. He couldn’t explain how the water had become hot, however.

She looked at me again, knowing I must have done it. Amazingly, I didn’t crack though. I just denied… and as the hours and days passed, I never fessed up. Eventually, the rug dried, the wall was repainted and everyone forgot about the dining room mysteriously morphing into a lake. I’m thinking that one day; I might finally tell my mom what really happened. I’m just waiting until a good moment, one when I’m sure she won’t get mad.