Of all the years of my life - and that’s nearly 43 of them - 1977 is the year I could tell you the most about. Actually it’s the year I would want to tell you the most about. It was a time so jam packed with intensity and emotion and drama - I don’t recall any other year of my life being quite like that one. Of course, I was barely 15 at the time and there’s enough emotion and insanity inherent in that alone to make the year worth telling about. But there was something so different about 1977, especially the late spring and summer. Especially in New York.

I was in the midst of my first year in the local Catholic high school. I had a new set of friends, a new way of life, a new outlook on the world. I would be 15 in a few months. Life was good. Life was mine.

Though we lived on Long Island, we weren’t that far removed from the glamour and excitement of New York City. Even at our young ages (and I doubt there is a Long Island parent today that would be as permissive as our parents were back then) we would sometimes take the train to the city on weekends and just walk around, using our allowance money to buy records and eat burgers at the Steak and Brew, where we tried to pass ourselves off as 18 year olds to get the free pitchers of beer that came with the burgers. No matter how good it was to be 14 or 15, it seemed there was always something better on the horizon. We wanted to be 18 or 19. We wanted to cruise around in cars and go to bars. We were jealous of the permissive lifestyle that was so prevalent in NY at the time - Studio 54 opened in 1977, punk rock was on the rise and bands like The Dead Boys were playing at CBGB’s - it seemed there was so much turmoil, yet so much excitement - it was all so glamorous in a decadent way, you couldn’t help but want to be caught up in it.

New York City was just coming out of terrible times - there had been a huge financial crisis (I’ll never forget the Daily News headline from when the president was asked to help bail NYC out: Ford to City: Drop Dead) and there had been a stretch when the South Bronx was literally on fire for the longest time - I remember this because my father was a fireman at the time and he was always talking about, how there would be no fires left to fight in the area eventually because it was all going to burn down and Bushwick (Brooklyn) where my father worked was no better. My parents discussed all this at the dinner table with us, and we watched the nightly news and together we watched New York City (meaning all five boroughs) almost die before our eyes.

So there we were in 1977 and the city was alive. There was so much happening. And we would sit on our suburban porches and be wistful about it because at our ages we may have been able to get to the city on a weekend day, but even in the summer there was no way we would be able to take part in the nightlife that was going on there. As much as we wanted to stick safety pins in our faces or some of us wanted to wear glittering dresses and platform shoes and dance the night away, it wasn’t going to happen. And we knew that by the time we were old enough to enjoy this stuff, it would all be gone and there would be new scenes, so we lived vicariously through newspaper accounts and tales from older friends’ siblings.

And then David Berkowitz came along and the aura of NYC seemed to dive headlong into a dark time that would abate only when the New York Yankees would win the World Series that year - and even then the drama of the Yankees’ season with Reggie Jackson and George and Billy Martin was somehow fitting with the climate of the times.

When parents realized there was a serial killer on the loose, it was like life outside of school and home shut down. It didn’t matter that it seemed this killer only wanted to hurt a specific type of person - most notably young brunette women in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens - we were in close proximity to these killings and who knew where this guy was going to end up? So doors were shut and curfews were made and this layer of fear settled over us that spring and lasted well into summer. People talked about Son of Sam everywhere, in stores and at the pool in the dentist office, but they talked in whispers, as if saying his name out loud would be to call him into our suburban haven. I remember one friend’s mother - a holy roller who would make trays of cookies for us and serve them with religious tracts - moaning about how we deserved this, this day and age was so decadent what with it’s disco and punk rock and women dressing like whores. She pronounced whores so it rhymed with sewers. Dressed like hooo-ers. She was afraid the end times were coming and Son of Sam was just the harbinger of certain death and destruction and God’s wrath upon us.

Which it may very well have seemed to a lot of people that summer. I know I had my share of fear. While the summer of ‘77 and all of its intensity and scariness played out on the front page of the Daily News every day, there were other, smaller things going on in my little world that just added to the thickness that was beginning to choke the life out of summer. A young woman who lived five houses down was murdered; thrown off the roof of an apartment building in Brooklyn by a jealous boyfriend. My friend Lori had taken to visiting her relatives in Queens that summer - she came home with stories that made me wonder if Mrs. Holy Roller wasn’t on to something - a girl who had been raped with a broomstick right in her own bedroom, by relatives. A shopkeeper gunned down by a 14 year old. And Lori’s 13 year old cousin, nine months pregnant and shooting up heroin. Now, I think about all those stories and I know that Lori was exaggerating some and making some up and maybe she liked to see the horrified look on my face. But then, in the midst of New York on the brink, in the midst of this general feeling of an uprising of evil and animosity towards anyone who didn’t walk the walk of the norm - animosity that bordered on hatred - I believed it all and it made me feel sick. Between the oppressive heat and humidity and all that was going on around me, I felt a sick sense of dread that summer, but it was a dread tinged with a curious excitement. There was so much electricity in the air you could almost hear the crackling of static when you woke in the morning. And it was so damn hot, it was the first time I felt the cliche that the heat could make people crazy wasn’t a cliche at all, but true. The relentless sweltering had gotten to all of us, kids and adults alike; we were short tempered and cranky and prone to starting fights over nothing. It was like living on the edge and we all knew it. I think we aged five years that summer, all 14 and 15 but cynical and hardened in a lot of ways, just from having so much death and tension and raw energy shoved in our faces every day, from the shell shocked parents harping on us and hammering us with statistics and warnings. And we were living all this out with a soundtrack, huddled in the abandoned house next to the high school or in the sump or in someone’s basement or fort every night, listening to this bizarre mix of the Ramones and Sex Pistols, Kiss and Foghat, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Queen. We were all revved up with no place to go, just some green grass and white picket fence kids both fearing the world we were living in and wanting so much to be an intrinsic part of all that fear, to be in there, at CBGB’s or on the quiet streets fo Brooklyn, looking for a serial killer. We settled for drinking cheap beer and smoking stolen cigarettes and alternating our disaffected youth rock music with the sounds of baseballs being hit out of Yankee Stadium.

July 13, 1977 found us sitting in front of my house. Nature was offering us a freaky show of heat lightning and we stared at the sky for a while, entertained by nothing more than streaks of electricity bolting through the air. And then a weird thing happened. It was subtle, almost imperceptible from where we were sitting, but I noticed it and so did Lori. The night sky got darker. Something changed. It was about 9pm. By 9:30 or so, news of the New York City blackout had spread and we realized we had witnessed it in a way.

I remember my mother having this sense of panic about her. I remember her saying “this won’t be like 1965″ and it was only later on that I knew what she meant - the blackout of 1965 was calm and peaceful. The blackout of 1977 was anything but, and we could almost anticipate it, sitting in my mother’s kitchen listening to the radio for breaking news. I thought again of my friend’s mother. It was all coming to a head - Son of Sam, disco, punk rock, Abe Beame and money woes and rapes and murders and pregnant 13 year old girls on smack. Somewhere in Levittown, Mrs. Holy Roller was probably under her kitchen table with some candles and her rosary beads and the bible, waiting for Satan himself to bang down her door.

I was scared. Out there on Long Island, where we had lights and television and safety, I was scared. The news of the riots and looting and mayhem came in and my mother remarked that New York City was a sinking ship, a disaster of Titanic proportions. My father was at work in Bushwick and that panicked me, it even panicked my friends. This was the climax of everything, of all the turbulence and fear and the explosion we had been waiting for - or predicting - was happening.

I thought this would be the end of all it, in a way. I thought of the graphic my English teach had drawn on the blackboard just a few months ago, showing the movement of a story, with the climax as the peak of a mountain and then everything slowly rolling down the hill after that, towards the inevitable resolution. I expected that everything after the black out would be anti-climatic as the conclusion of this summer drew near. Although it was only mid-July, it was if summer was ending right then and there. I never wanted so badly to get back to school and normalcy and routine. I hated that there was more than another month of this floating feeling left, that time and all the empty space between July and September was pulling us towards something worse, something even darker. Maybe the blackout and the subsequent mess of arrests and broken glass was it. Maybe from here on, we could get back to the business of being kids who don;’t think about things like men who stalk and kill. And we tried. We hung out, we listened to records, we went to the movies and started and ended teenage romances and some of us went to summer school during the day because we didn’t pay attention in 9th grade biology.

On July 31, Son of Sam struck again and broke us out of our complacent reverie. It’s not like we had forgotten about him - he was on the front page nearly every day and we were devouring every word from Jimmy Breslin, who had become this cult figure demigod, an agent to Satan to some people, who thought Breslin was giving the killer too much publicity, a hero to others who praised Breslin’s caustic, raw writing and his willingness to be a pawn in order to bring this killer into the open where he could be caught.

And finally, he was caught. August 10, 1977, with summer almost over, with back to school banners already hung in the windows of May’s department store with all the hot, open days of freedom already taken from us, a killer was moved off the streets and into jail and the sigh of relief everyone breathed nearly cooled the air.

Somehow it fell to the Yankees to salvage 1977 for us. Ron Guidry, Mike Torrez, Sparky Lyle, Mr. October with his five home runs in the series, three in one game. Watching those games against the Dodgers, listening to the sounds of the cheers, New York seemed good again. It seemed whole. And then there was Howard Cosell on ABC during game 2 of the series, as another one of those Bronx fires burned out of control behind the Stadium and he intoned “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” And that seemed to epitomize it right there, to encapsulate everything about that summer.

The Yanks won the series, Ed Koch replaced Abe Beame that November and New York, as always, recovered. But not without leaving its mark on some of us, even 14 year old kids out in suburbia who vicariously lived through the whole sordid summer, but felt every bit as if it belonged to them too. It makes quite a story, anyhow.

]]> http://alifeafterall.com/?feed=rss2&p=202 http://alifeafterall.com/?p=197 http://alifeafterall.com/?p=197#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:25:23 +0000 michele http://alifeafterall.com/?p=197 1. The DJ Plays Our Kind of Music

Now and then he takes a phone-in
And anyone who’s feeling lonely
Can call him up
And make a little conversation
And in the night there’s music playing
Soft behind the words he’s saying
Would I like to make a dedication

Curtis Freeman is a small man with very little hair. He walks hunched over, making him appear smaller than he already is and he pushes that little hair off to one side, which only serves to accentuate the fact that he is on the downhill side of going bald. He wears a constant frown and his brows are always furrowed and people say that Curtis Freeman is the very definition of sad and pathetic. He is a puppy who’s been kicked, a child who is lost, a man without an island and any other metaphor the people of Green Valley can find for sad or forlorn.

On this day, Curtis Freeman is wearing an ill fitting black trench coat that hangs almost to his heels and slopes off his shoulders lazily. He is holding an attache case that seems to weigh him down, causing his hunch to be even hunchier and he bows his head toward the ground as he walks, so as not to let the day’s barrage of rain strike his face. He discovered a flat tire on his car in the train lot, so he is walking home the two miles from the station, in the cold autumn rain, occasionally slipping on a wet leaf or being chased by a loose dog. Such is the life of Curtis Freeman.

Curtis gets to his house at 6:13 p.m., a full hour after he usually gets home. He is soaked right down to his underwear, which he wrings out over the bathtub before depositing them in the laundry basket. He puts on his pajamas - grey sweatpants and a t-shirt that depicts the women of Farscape - much sooner than he normally would and settles down at the kitchen table for a meal of Dinty Moore stew and crackers. First, he turns on the radio.

If there’s one thing in Curtis Freeman’s life that brings him a small glimmer of happiness, it’s the WKLX greatest hits of the 60’s and 70’s, especially from 6 to 10 pm Monday through Friday and 10am-6pm on weekends, when Stu McLundy is spinning the discs.

Stu really does spin discs. He believes he is the last disc jockey in all of the US of A who still puts the needle on the vinyl, spins the black circle, plays the oldies the way they were meant to be played. In fact, his show is called Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy, as a tribute to what Stu thinks is the best part about listening to records.

Stu is a beefy, flabby man who wears sweat-stained blue Seersucker suits and masturbates to the Dawn part of Tony Orlando and Dawn. When he plays a long song, like McArthur Park, Stu is either taking a dump or rubbing one out to the cover of Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Greatest Hits. Despite these personal defects, Stu is somewhat of a celebrity in Green Valley. He makes appearances at charity car washes, department store grand openings and the annual Kiwanis Thanksgiving Dinner for senior citizens. When people see him, they say Hey, it’s Scratch and Skip Stu! - though the kids have taken to calling him Scratch and Sniff Stu, thanks to the creeping sweat stains that make Stu smell like a can of old chicken soup. Sometimes they’ll ask him to say something radio-like and he’ll always, without fail, say Stu McLundy here with the greatest hits of the only eras that matter, about to drop the needle on the Defranco Family. Heartbeat, it’s a lovebeat. He says this all smooth and baritone and almost sexy. If you didn’t know that Stu McLundy is a fat, sweaty, smelly, sexual pervert of a man, if you’ve never seen him but just heard his voice, you would think he must look like the Marlboro Man in Armani, drinking a martini, shaken not stirred. You might even fantasize about his disembodied voice. The people of Green Valley tolerate him and some even love him, because K-Tel records put out an album called The Best of Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy and he went on NPR to talk about it one day, in what was probably the most famous moment anyone in Green Valley ever had. They finished the segment by playing Stu’s signature song, the much maligned Heartbeat is a Lovebeat. It was a swell moment for Stu and all of Green Valley.

Curtis Freeman turns on the radio, annoyed that he has already missed a good twenty minutes of Scratch and Skip. He hopes he didn’t miss any Chicago or Three Dog Night. He digs into his Dinty Moore, crumbling some Saltine crackers over the stew and nods his head in time to Freda Payne’s Band of Gold. His radio is small and old, a gift from his brother nearly twenty years ago. The sound is tinny and mono and that’s alright with Curtis, because every song sounds like it did back in the days when AM radio played music. The song ends and Stu McLundy’s voice fills Curtis’s kitchen. Stu’s voice bounces off the toaster and microwave, absorbs into the ceiling, and is a warm caress around Curtis’s head, is an aural Zoloft.. Curtis sits up straighter, lets his frown turn just a bit upside down and the weight of his world on his slumped shoulders lifts a bit. He finishes his stew, cleans off his plate, turns up the radio and does an awkward sort of dance across the tiled floor as Brand New Key wafts through the kitchen. This goes on for hours, as Curtis sweeps the floor, plays two games of solitaire on his laptop, dishes out a bowl of vanilla ice cream, reads the daily comics and does his awkward dance to the pop hits of days gone by in between all of minutiae of his life.

2. You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

You don’t on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim’

Over at the KLX headquarters, Stu McLundy is stacking the final few records of the evening, carefully placing the DeFranco Family’s Heartbeat on the bottom of the pile, so he can - as always -sign off with what he believes is the greatest pop song ever recorded. At 9:35, as he’s about to drop Bobby Goldsboro on the turntable, one Marcus P. Fetterling walks into the office, trailed by two men in dark suits and somber faces.

Marcus P. Fetterling is the owner of WKLX, as well as the building WKLX sits in, as well as a wholesale tire warehouse, a decomposing tenement in the next town over and MPF’s, an establishment that seems like a good old pub from the outside, but which has several rooms in which activities that may or may not be legal take place. Marcus wears a nylon running suit that makes a swishing sound when he walks and has more than one thick, gold chain hanging around his neck. He wears yellow-tinted sunglasses, even indoors, and his dark, wiry hair always has a sheen of hasn’t been washed about it. Marcus has dreams of being in the porn business, but so far the closest he has come was when he installed a hidden video camera in the back rooms of MPF’s and compiled a stash of VHS tapes he calls “Marcus’s Greatest Hits.”

Marcus P. Fetterling has been an absentee boss for the most part, making an appearance in the station offices every few weeks or so. So when he waltzes into the studio, Stu McLundy is surprised. When it is apparent Marcus is not alone, Stu’s surprise turns to chagrin. Those fellows in their dark suits have bad news written all over them. They may as well be carrying signs that say We Are Here To Fuck You Over!

Marcus swishes his way through the obstacle course of crates of albums, empty soda bottles and piles of dirty tissues that are the victims of Dawn porn. Stu doesn’t make an attempt to rise to meet his boss; he sits there fondling his DeFranco family vinyl as Marcus bends down and shoves his hand toward Stu.

“Stu. My man. Good to see you again. How’s tricks? Wife, kids ok?” Stu slips his hand into Marcus’s grip and pumps halfheartedly. He doesn’t have a wife. Or kids. Or tricks. Before he can answer, Marcus pulls his hand away and points toward the two Fuck You Over men. “Got company, my man. Put on that long song with the guitars. Freeman? Seabird?” Stu senses a nervousness in Marcus’s voice, a shakiness that says “just pretend we have it together here, ok, my man?” Stu opts to play Donna Summer’s Love to Love You, Baby, figuring seventeen minutes of moans and disco would be enough to get him through whatever the Fuck You brothers and Marcus have to say to him.

“Stu McLundy. Bob Harrison. Mike Hamm.” Marcus says this as a way of introduction. They are in Marcus’s office, which is dark and musty and unused. Speckles of dust flit in and out of the small light the lone lamp gives off. After an exchange of handshakes, Marcus sits down and a herd of dust bunnies scamper around his chair. He pulls a bottle of Jack Daniels and four paper cups from his desk drawer. The cups are small and have riddles on them. Bob and Mike decline a drink. Stu takes his (Why did the boy throw a clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly!) and drinks it like an 18 year old frat boy. One shot, grimace, wipe mouth with sleeve.

“Stu, I’m gonna be straight with you here. Bob and Mike represent Jim.”
“Jim who?”
“Not Jim who. Jim what.”
Stu holds his Dixie cup out for another drink. He stares at the cup while Marcus pours and finally gets the joke. Time fly! Hah!
“What’s a Jimwhat?”
Bob stands up. He is broad shouldered, imposing, reminds Stu of that guy in Men in Black. Not Will Smith. The white one. Tommy Lee. Tommy Jones something.

“Jim is the new wave in radio, Mr. McLundy.”

Uh oh. Stu’s stomach does a flip-flop and he can feel the whiskey climbing up his esophagus. He swallows it back down.

Mike stands up. Except for the suit, he’s nothing like Bob. He’s a hipster, with a goatee and that dirty English boy haircut and a faint whiff of Abercrombie & Fitch lingering around him.

“Mr. McLundy - can I call you Stu? Good. Stu - WKLX has become problematic for Mr. Fetterling, in that it is no longer - if it ever has been - fiscally solvent. Therefore, it would be prudent of him to let go of the entity known as WKLX in order to bring his finances into a better place, monetarily speaking.”

“Ah, fuck.” Marcus swings his chair around, stares at Stu with what he hopes is a forlorn look. “Mrs. F. is divorcing me. Taking me for everything. I’m selling the station. Jim is taking over.” He swings the chair back around and faces Bob and Mike. “Can he go back to the studio now? Song’s almost over?”

Stu is nervous and anxious and befuddled and just a bit buzzed, and the sweat stains on his armpits have bled down to his waist and around his back. He growls. “Who the FUCK is Jim?”

3. Alone Again, Naturally

In an effort to make it clear to who
Ever what it’s like when your shattered
Left standing in the lurch, at a church
Where people ‘re saying,
“My God that’s tough, she stood him up!
No point in us remaining.
May as well go home.”
As I did on my own,
Alone again, naturally

Curtis Freeman was not always a sad man. Once, not too long ago, he was happy and in love and had a head full of thick, brown hair. It wasn’t until Sharon Weiss left him - two weeks before their scheduled wedding - that he started balding. And it was shortly after that Curtis’s shoulders began to hunch and his brows began to furrow.

Sharon left him a note on a Sunday morning in the form of a bright orange post-it slapped on his coffee machine. The message was written in Sharon’s flourished, fancy handwriting, all those curls and squiggles squeezed onto a 3X3 sheet of sticky paper.

Dear Curtis,

I am sorry to break your heart like this.
I am leaving town.
For good.
I love you still.
But not in that way.
Anymore.

Sorry,
Sharon

So Curtis did what any man in that situation would do: he used logic and reasoning to deduce where Sharon was headed, tracked her down, cornered her at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike and killed her. He then drove all the way to Roscoe, NY, the Trout Fish capital of the world, with the body of his dead ex-fiancé in the trunk of his car, slightly bludgeoned and definitely bloody. He stopped at a deserted resort area, taking a few minutes to wax nostalgic about his childhood. He thought of all the summers they would drive up to Roscoe, four kids and two let’s-pretend-to-be-happy grownups stuffed into a sedan, every turn on the slithering road throwing blankets and pillows and board games across the back seat, his sisters and brother piling on each other, squealing in fake pain. They’d pass this place with it’s rows of white cottages and southern-style porches; the vacationers - most dressed in white and navy blue - swimming, boating, laughing, trout fishing, giving the resort a vibrant, idyllic feel.

Whatever it was then, it was no more. With the empty parking lot and bare sign and a lakefront that looks like a ghost town, it just seemed, much like Curtis Freeman, sad and forlorn.

Curtis pulled up in front of one shuttered cottage, dragged Sharon’s body out of the trunk and tossed her into the man-made lake. He sat on the porch for a few minutes, remembering the ladies with their sun umbrellas and the little girls and boys in tennis clothes. He smoked a cigarette, flicked the butt into the lake that contained the stinking body of his one true love, and drove back to Green Valley, singing along to Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky on repeat the whole way.

And now, months later and not a hint of suspicion hurled at Curtis, just sympathy and maybe a few snickers, he sits in his kitchen as always, waiting for the Stu McLundy show to wind down. 9:55 and it’s closing time for Scratch and Skip. Curtis reaches for the off button before Sharon Weiss’s favorite song and Stu McLundy’s calling card, Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat, begins.

He hears it play in his head anyhow as he gets ready for bed.

When he dreams, he dreams of his wedding that never was. Sharon is radiant in her wedding gown as she twirls her way onto the dance floor. As she gets nearer, Curtis sees that there are lily pads and fishing line stuck to the hem of the gown. The lace drips with dirty lake water and Sharon’s feet squish as she walks, leaving a trail of muddy footsteps. She sits down in a chair in the middle of the dance floor, ready for the part where the best man - Curtis’s brother Hank - removes the garter from Sharon’s tanned, smooth leg and tosses it to a lucky man in the crowd that has gathered around them. As he lifts Sharon’s dress, a trout slithers out from the garter. Hank grabs the trout and throws it backward over his head. Stu McLundy is there, hands stretched out. The trout lands in his arms and he cradles it like a baby. Sharon gets up to dance with Stu. She whispers in his ear, a whisper that Curtis, being the dreamer, can hear:

Listen to my heart pound
Listen to my love sound

Curtis wakes up sweating.

Did he? Did he really kill her? Sometimes he can’t remember, he can’t tell the difference between the dream of sitting in the kitchen thinking about his murderous revenge and the reality of sitting in his kitchen fantasizing a murderous revenge. Then and now and real and fake all blur together at 3am, with the soundtrack of the DeFranco family pounding furiously in his head.

He reaches for the phone, dials Sharon’s number blindly.

“Whuuuu,” she mumbles sleepily.

Curtis hangs up. Damn dreams.

For the 52 stories thing on flickr. I am seriously lagging behind.

I cross the street and she’s there, in front of the drug store, waiting for me. She knows I had to pick up my meds and she’s there like a stalker, her eyes rimmed with the black of insomnia, her hands shoved deep inside her pockets. She’s staring straight ahead at me and I have to acknowledge her. My first instinct is to turn around and go home, go to the park, go anywhere else but to the place where she stands. But I need my meds and she knows this. She knows I’m not going anywhere but right towards her.

She at least tries to look shameful, bows her head a bit and bites her lower lip but I’ve seen it all before and I don’t let her little acts of manipulation phase me anymore. It’s old. But the mere act of pretending to be shamed tells me that at least she still has the capacity to recognize that what she’s doing is wrong. She knows she shouldn’t be here. For a split second I think about grabbing her, kissing her, pushing her hair back from her face and telling her I love her but then I remember that it’s gone, all gone and I’d be just setting myself back months if I did that.

I reach for the door to the pharmacy. Open it. Walk in. She follows behind me and stands at the counter with me while I wait. I say nothing to her. She grabs onto the sleeve of my parka and pinches it, holds just a tiny bit of fabric between her fingers, as if that’s all it would take to keep me bound to her. Maybe it is. I get my pills, sign the insurance form and walk back out the door. She’s trailing behind me like a pet, stumbling to keep up with my long strides, her fingers still gripping my parka like a lifeline.

Out in the cold air again I take a deep breath, exhale, and blow smoke rings with my winter breath. I fight off a surging nicotine craving by biting down hard on my lip. I draw blood, lick it off and savor the taste of my own blood, which alarms me. My god, I’m so fucked up. I walk east, not even bothering to step around the pools of slush, my sneakers making puckering noises in the melting ice and snow. She’s still there, still holding on and I start crying as I walk, I swear my tears are freezing up the instant they hit my cheek. I don’t care. I’m just walking and crying, walking and crying and she’s fighting to hang onto my coat.

My feet are soaked and my toes are numb and I pick up the pace because I need to shake her off. I turn around. I know better, but I do it. I slow down, baby steps over the sheets of ice in front of the school and I crane my neck and I can see her, black hair and pleading eyes and trembling lips and my heart cracks, bleeds and falls apart right there in front of the elementary school where the little kids put down their crayons and stare at the crazy man on the sidewalk, the man who is kneeling down in the wet snow, crying, screaming, all alone.

Someone comes out to help me and I let them, for the first time I let someone help. They pick me up, hands under my arms and I go limp. I don’t even turn to look for her. I know she’s gone. I. Know. She’s. Gone.

She’s gone.

52 stories

Just as they could hear the tires of the pick up truck nearing the house, his mother shooed him into the shed and told him to watch from there. He was grimy, his mother said. No place for grimy children up front.

He hadn’t meant to get dirty, but it was hot and thick outside and all the dust and blacktop and stuck to his sweat. Besides, he really didn’t want to be up front. All the commotion scared him a bit and from the way the other kids were talking, Mr. Jacob would be sitting in the back of the truck, his dead body propped up like he was still alive.

“No, Matthew. Mr. Jacob is in a box. A coffin.”
“Can he breathe in there, mom?”
“He’s dead, Matthew. Dead people don’t breathe.”

Matthew left it at that because he didn’t want to talk about what it means to be dead. That’s all his brothers and sisters were going on about and listening to them made him feel like someone was poking holes in his stomach.

He found a milk crate in the shed and shoved it over to the side window. He wouldn’t miss a thing from there. The shed - once a place where his father kept his tools and now a rotting corpse of crumbled brick - looked right down the driveway and towards the street, giving Matthew a fine a view of all his family and neighbors gathering by the roadside. He settled in and waited. For what, he wasn’t sure. But he knew from the way the older kids were talking that they had done this before and that it was a big deal to have a dead guy paraded down your street. He just wished Mr. Jacob wasn’t the one being dead today. He liked Mr. Jacob. He was the only grown up who ever smiled like he remembered what it’s like to be happy.

Yellow. Years later when Matthew would think about this day he would recall how everything was tinged in yellow. Not the yellow of daisies and crayon suns, but a brownish, dirty yellow that cast an eerie glow on the death circus he watched from the shed window.

For three days after Mr. Jacob died, the sky had been bloated with thunderstorms that wouldn’t budge. Matthew’s mother and father stood outside every morning and said “gonna be a big storm today,” but it never rained, never thundered and the sky just turned yellow and gray and brown like it was rotting. And as Mr. Jacobs’s funeral procession approached Matthew’s house, all rumbling tires and crying women, the clouds seemed to sink under the weight of the storm they were holding in and the sky felt lower, like it was pressing down on them and forcing the whole world to bathe in its weird storm-glow. The dirt road, the dry hedges, the gossiping women and stoic men and oblivious children playing by the porch - they were all tinged dirty yellow and it hurt Matthew’s eyes to look.

The pick-up rounded a corner and was headed toward Matthew’s house. Every child stopped moving. Every woman stopped talking. Matthew held his breath, afraid to make a sound and break the spell of revered quiet. There were only a few sounds; tires doing a slow turn over dirt and Mrs. Jacob, held up by Matthew’s mother and aunt, praying and crying. Her whispered sobs carried loud like echos.

Matthew, still holding his breath, watched the trick get closer and only when the noise of the wheels on dirt was enough to drown out Mrs. Jacob, he began to breathe again.

The truck was open in the back and had a makeshift wooden bench on each side of the truck bed. On each bench sat three men and between them, on the floor, was Mr. Jacob, resting comfortably dead in a wooden box. The men were all dusty boots and squinty eyes, dressed in the same hats and flannel shirts and faded work pants. Their expressions never changed as they stared into the crowd of people that followed them on foot. Their faces were worn and filled with lines like etched stone and as the wind kicked up and the hems of their pants ands cuffs of their shirts flapped and fluttered, they never flinched not even as wind-carried dirt settled on their lips and flew into their eyes. Every few seconds the long box would shift and the men would all bend down at once and push the box back.

As the truck moved right in front of Mrs. Jacob, the men all took off their hats and bowed their heads and Mrs. Jacob wailed, a sound that made Matthew’s heart feel squeezed and tight. Matthew’s mother and some other women were trying to keep the widow from running into the street, but Mrs. Jacobs’s grief carried her away from grasping arms and she ran toward the pick-up truck, trailing it, holding up her long funeral skirt as she half-ran, half-stumbled and the driver of the truck sped up just a little and later - years later - Matthew would wonder if the driver was trying to get away from Mrs. Jacob or trying to keep her from reaching the truck bed. His brother would say to him “same thing, ain’t it?” And Matthew would shake his head. “No, not at all.”

Later, when the sky finally cracked and the rain flushed the yellow from the sky, turning it black and brown, Matthew sat on his front stoop with his mother, eating a piece of pie and looking at the very spot where just this morning Mr. Jacobs passed by his house for the very last time. Matthew knew then this would be one of those things he would remember forever, that one day he’d be sitting on the porch like his father before him, telling stories about his childhood, and this would be one of them. Even if as the years went on the colors would change or the pitch of Mrs. Jacob’s cry would get louder or tiny flaws of memories would change the snapshot in some way, it would always be there, hanging like a poster in his mind.

This is an experiment, I suppose, in how much criticism I can really take. Remember, ROUGH draft.

My Right Foot (temp title)

There were thousands of stories as to how he lost his foot. They were all true stories, and even if the people who listened to them did not believe, they were still awed.
Tonight, he was telling the original story to the small crowd gathered on the street in front of him: He was the spawn of a demon father and a not-quite-human mother, neither wanted him to be born. They spoke of killing him, of burying him alive in the desert, of holding his head under the river. They spoke of these things with glee and in his mother’s womb he grew angry and resentful of these beings who created him, but did not want him. When the time came for his birth, he broke free from the womb and seized his mother’s heart in his small, demonic hands. He squeezed the heart until it burst, until he heard his father cry in anguish and until he was sure his mother was dead. As he tried to exit his mother’s body, he found that her umbilical cord was wrapped around his foot. The cord, like his mother, was not-quite-human and impenetrable, so he did what any demon baby would have done under similar circumstances; he chewed off his own foot and crawled out of his mother’s vagina.
He came into the world slimy, bloody and without a right foot. These things in and of themselves were bad enough, but he had to contend with an angry father, one who did not want him alive, and was very much angry his lover was dead. But his father, a man of god-like strength and devil-like anger, did not try to kill him. Instead, he slid his clawed, demon hand into her vagina, rooted around for a bit, and pulled out his son’s foot. He then hurled the foot into the universe, where it took flight and traveled through time, space and other worlds. As the father did this, he let loose a torrent of words unknown to the demon baby; words in languages he had yet to hear, words that shot out of his father’s mouth lit with flames and dripping venom. His father had cursed him. He did not know what the curse was, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with his airborne foot.
He soon realized that his curse was to spend his life looking for his foot. So he roamed the worlds, taking on new forms to fit into each one. At least his father’s genes had given him that much; he may not have a demon’s strength or the power to curse, but he could recreate himself to fit into whatever world he currently inhabited. Each time he changed forms, he would start out with two feet, but his father’s curse was stronger than his own demonic magic, and within minutes, something would happen where he would lose his foot again.
Once, he had been riding in a sidecar, one of the Hounds of Hell driving. They overshot their turnoff and ended up in a ditch. When he came to, the hound was gone, as well as his foot. Another time, he was in a dark forest, when he came upon some Kingsmen hunting for boar. Marksmen they were not, for they only hit his ankle when they shot, and he left his torn foot behind when he jumped off a cliff to escape. There were hunting accidents, wars, battles with otherworldy creatures, sharks, botched robberies and a spectacular game of Truth of Dare with God and the Devil himself. Each time he came away footless. Of course, it was his own foot he needed in order to finally live at peace; not the foot of a soldier or biker or warlord. He just thought it would be easier to complete his life’s mission if he wasn’t so hobbled all the time.
One night he found himself in a city; it was a small city filled with quaint shops and strange people, quite like the city in which he was born. There were no gods and demons here, just people who believed they were either. They mingled on street corners late at night, exchanging drugs, money and shared miseries. They were there during the day, too, selling handmade crafts instead of drugs, sometimes playing music in front of the stores. He noticed many of the people did not leave the streets for home; the street was their home, as well as their place of business. They slept in the same alleys and doorways in which they sold their wares or just stood around looking helpless and forlorn enough that strangers tossed money at them. At night they drank together, and huddled under blankets together.
He was intrigued enough by the city that he decided to change his form and stick around. He was a young man with a fuzzy goatee, wearing a Minor Threat t-shirt , carrying a skateboard. He waited for the inevitable and in the dark of night on a quiet street, a drunk man on a small motorbike took care of his right foot. He needed no medical attention; he was glad his father had at least given him that much. His body healed quickly and he hobbled on his newly stump-legged back to main part of the city. He sat down on corner and tried to blend in.
And then they came, inquisitive tourists and other corner dwellers like himself, asking how he lost his foot. So he told them. He told them about the wars and gods, about the demons and hell hounds, about the car accidents and angry husbands. He did this every night, and they never tired of his stories and he never ran out of tales to tell. They gave him money when he talked about his foot, mostly coins, but sometimes paper bills, and someone gave him a box into which the people could put the money. Ostensibly, the pay for his stories was to be for food, but as a demon, he needed no food to sustain him. Instead, he would go around in the middle of the night distributing his coins and bills to others sleeping on the street. He saved a few dollars for himself here and there, for he found there were woman who would sleep with a footless man if you gave them enough money. He found no pleasure in food or drink or drugs, but he was, after all, part human, and he had the human need to fuck.
He stayed longer in this body than any other; he found he liked this life and was feeling something unfamiliar to him before then, a contentment of sorts. He still had the urge to look for his foot, he supposed that was something that would never leave him, but the urge was dulled somewhat by the joy he found in telling his stories.
Then one night came when he was fast asleep in an alley, dreaming of his birth, as he did every single night since he crawled out from his mother’s womb. In his sleep, he heard a sound; a thump and jingle of coins. Someone had put something besides money in his little cardboard box. This happened before, usually it was a 40 oz of malt liquor that he would give to another lost soul in the morning. He woke himself from his dream and looked into the box. There, amid the coins and bills and half a sandwich, was a foot. It was the foot of an infant. A foot that apparently had been chewed off. His foot. He stood up, looked around for a glimpse of whomever left this gift for him. In the distance, he saw the dark shadow of a broad, clawed demon moving swiftly into a park. He saw no figure to go with this shadow, just the shadow itself, but he did hear a familiar roar as the shadow disappeared.
He knew what he was to do; a sorcerer long ago had told him. When he found his foot, he was to put it on. Just like trying on a shoe. It would fit, just like that, he would be whole again, and he could be at peace. He stared at the foot. His foot. He would not have to live this life anymore. He would no longer have to switch bodies or tell stories or search the worlds for completion.
The sun had come up; the city was coming to life. He wrapped his foot in a blanket and tucked it into his backpack. He moved his box in front of him, propping his footless leg upon it and the people came to him, all day long and he told his stories and watched their reactions and smiled as they did.
That night, he unwrapped his foot, took it to the park and buried it beneath a tree. Eventually a squirrel or other animal would unearth it, eat it and he’d never see it again. He went back to his space in the alley, slept and did not dream.

There were only so many small bars in the area, only so many places that would keep serving you gin and tonics even though you were so drunk you couldn’t tell a cigarette from a tampon and tried to smoke the latter. So Pearl often ended up Stickman’s Bar & Grill - also known as Sticky’s - which had more to do with the condition of the floor and seats rather than the owner’s nickname.

Sticky was good to her in all the ways she needed. He kept her glass filled, didn’t ask prying questions and discreetly called the right people to pick her up whenever she passed out in one of the famously sticky booths. There was no press at Sticky’s. No gossip columnists hanging around, waiting for a good story. They were all at the big, trendy places, the ones that changed names and themes so often that it wasn’t unusual to see a starlet type woman emerge from her limo decked out for Disco Revival Night at Xanadu to embarrassingly discover that it’s Bang Your Head Night at Hardcore’s.

Pearl had been there, done that, had the permanent bags under her eyes to prove it. Over the past year, as things with her and Chaz descended to some unknown level of hell, she had deftly moved away from that crowd. They were so self-involved they barely noticed she stopped hanging out with them and Pearl only knew what was going on in the lives of her former friends from reading Page Six.

On this particular Friday Pearl found herself in a familiar place, perched on a sticky barstool, watching hockey and staring into her sixth gin and tonic. As always, her eyes drifted from her drink to the mirror behind the bar. She stared herself down again, noting with bemusement that the gradual progression from black hair to blond had finally stripped her of the last thing of her former life she had clung to. Gone was the pasty skin, replaced by hundreds of dollars worth of bottled tan. Gone were the rosy cheeks, which had fled town along with the sparkle in her eyes, right around the same time Chaz asked for a divorce. And gone was the bird-like demeanor that once defined her - the delicate steps, the gentle chirping of her sweet voice, the flighty way in which she danced around the house while cleaning or taking care of their charges. She had become a buzzard, all sharp-beaked and cackling. No, what had Chaz called her just yesterday? A hag. She chuckled out loud. The irony of him calling her a hag was completely lost in Chaz’s simple mind.

Pearl took another sip of her drink and looked back toward the bar wall. Mirror, mirror…..No, she wouldn’t go there.
Mirror, mirror….

“Are you still hung up on that ‘fairest of all’ crap?”

She hadn’t realized she said the words out loud. She turned slowly, even though she recognized the voice and knew who was standing behind her.

“Chaz. How nice to see you.”
“Your voice betrays you, Pearl.”
“Would you like me to sing it for you, Chaz? Maybe a little ditty about how thrilled I am to see the husband who left me for some fat little bakery girl? Shall I gather the birds and the bunnies? Throw some flowers at your feet?”
“Shit, Pearl. How many drinks have you had?”
“I don’t need to be drunk to be bitter, Chaz. ”
He let out a little snort. “Don’t I know it.”

Pearl clumsily slid off her stool.

“Where are you going?”
“I don’t want to be near you.”
“I came here to talk to you, Pearl. I want to make things right.”
“Oh, look, my Prince has come to save me!” She waved her hand theatrically towards her husband and raised her voice a notch. “Oh Prince Charming, thank goodness you are here to make everything better! Kiss me now and save me from a life of treachery! ”
“Pearl…”
Sticky and the rest of the drinkers stared at the couple, eager for some prince-on-princess excitement. It had been a long time since a good domestic squabble broke out a Sticky’s.

Pearl grabbed Sticky by the arm and swung him around to meet her. She launched into an awkward waltz, dragging the barkeep across the floor with her as she sang.

Someday my Prince will come
Someday we’ll meet again
And away to his castle we’ll go

Chaz came up behind them, grabbed Pearl by her waist and dragged her back to the bar. The foosball players applauded and Pearl tried to curtsy while her husband pushed her onto the bar stool.

“Is this a regular thing, Pearl? You come in here, get drunk, tell a few good stories about our marriage?”
“Marriage. Hah. More like a business agreement.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation again, Pearl.”
“Why not? Let’s have it for the hundredth time and for the hundredth time we will resolve absolutely, fucking nothing.”
“Pearl, please. Language.”
“I’m not your child, Chaz. Stop telling my how to behave.”
“I’m just saying….”
“Oh, that’s rich. The guy who ran off with Gretel the Baker after he knocked her up  is telling me how to behave.”

“Sticky, could I get a Guinness, please? Pint?”

Chaz moved his stool closer to Pearl’s so he could talk without having to raise his voice above the clacking of the foosball table and the dance hall techno coming from the jukebox.

“Pearl, I want to apologize. I want to come back.”
“Oh, did Gretel kick you out? Is the love affair over?”
“I don’t love her. I never did. I was just trying to rectify what I did wrong.”
“Rectify a wrong? By leaving me to fend for seven incontinent, senile midgets by myself??”
“I didn’t really have it easy, Pearl. You know what happened to mine and Gretel’s baby.”
“Hey, everyone knew Hansel needed professional help. It wasn’t the first time he tried to stuff a kid in the oven. Some people never get over things that happen in their childhood, you know. They act out on them later in weird ways.”
“Yea, like trying to give your husband a poison apple?”
“It wasn’t poison, it was just a laxative. I was just trying to humiliate you.”
“Yea, well mission accomplished. My chain mail still smells like diarrhea.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each sipping their drink and thinking of what to say next. Pearl wanted to tell Chaz to leave her alone and never come back, but as soon as she opened her mouth to say as much, she shut it again, not sure if that’s what she wanted at all.

Chaz had come to Sticky’s with a prepared speech, but found himself unable to recite it. He was going to beg her forgiveness, promise to make things good again, sweep Pearl off her feet with words of romance and love. But as he watched his wife lift her drink to her mouth and miss, letting the gin and tonic dribble down her chin and neck, he remembered why he slept with Gretel in the first place.

“I’ll tell you why I slept with Gretel.”
Pearl stared at Chaz. She wasn’t sure she really cared why he did it.
“Oh, please. Regale me with your tales of justified adultery.”
“You let yourself go, Pearl.”

The foosball players stopped mid-play. Sticky, who had been washing glasses, paused and turned his head toward the prince and princess. The jukebox stopped on its own volition. Every other patron turned their head toward the couple, their mouths agape and their eyes wide in fear.

“I….what?” Pearl’s voice was shrill and loud. Somewhere, a glass burst.
“You…you……,” Chaz stammered a bit but went on, oblivious to the fact that he was in the midst of making the worst mistake a man could ever make. Yet everyone else in Sticky’s knew it and watched the drama unfold with eager anticipation.

“You let yourself go, Pearl. What happened to the beautiful princess I found in the crystal coffin? What happened to your ebony hair and fair skin and slim figure?”

The anger that soared through Pearl’s blood could not be contained. She reached for an empty beer bottle on the counter and hurled it at Chaz’s head. In her drunken state, her aim was way off and the bottled sailed over Chaz, smashing against the wall in a clatter of broken glass and splintered wood. The patrons gasped in unison, their mouths still hanging open like cartoon characters feigning surprise.

“I let myself go? I. Let. Myself. GO?” Pearl’s voice had almost reached dog whistle levels, it was so high. “I spend all those years cooking for eight of you, cleaning up after eight of you, doing your laundry and making you fresh pies and shining your shoes and cleaning your filthy work clothes with absolutely no time left for myself and you have the nerve to say I let myself go? Where was the time for me, Prince Charming? When did I have time to exercise or get some sleep? WHEN??” She was screaming now and someone who had been shooting pool ran outside, knowing that the gossip columnists gathered next door at Xanadu would pay them handsomely for the tip off that there was a royal fight going on in Sticky’s.

The door burst open just as the fight was going into fever pitch. The pool player breathlessly led the charge of celebrity gossip mongers into the bar, pointing at Pearl and Chaz, who were all red faced and gritted teeth.

“You owed us, Pearl. If it weren’t for me and those incontinent midgets, you’d still be passed out in a glass box!”
“My god, Chaz. It’s 200 years later. Do you think I’ve maybe repaid you and those batty old men for your kindness already? How many years of slave labor do I need to do to satisfy you all?”
“Oh, please. You had your fun. How many nights a week did you go out clubbing with your friends? How many times were you on Page Six, Pearl? While I was in the mines, you were at some oxygen bar getting Botox treatments.”
“Oh, well excuse me for trying to have a life besides getting mine grime off of your tunics and entertaining the little woodland animals. It got really fucking tiring, Chaz. You try spend 200 years knee deep in dishes, with insipid little rabbits and skunks following you around all day.”
“That was your job, Pearl. Is it so fucking hard to just be a proper wife?”

Bulbs flashed. Camcorders whirred.

“You bastard. You misogynist, sexist, ungrateful bastard. Why don’t you go back to that little piggie Gretel? How can you yell at me for being out of shape when you fucked that cow? What does she have that I don’t???”
“At least she was willing to sire me a child!”
“Ohhhh. So that’s what this is about? That I didn’t want to have children? I had eight people to take care of, Chaz. Were you going to help with a baby?”
“I did. I helped Gretel. Ask her. I was a good father.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? That you changed shitty diapers and burped your bastard kid while I was home wiping piss off the toilet bowl? ”
“That’s what a wife does, Pearl. You have these ridiculous modern ideas of what a woman’s role is. That’s why I went to Gretel, because she knows a woman’s job in this land is take care of her man! Especially when her man is a PRINCE.”

The crowd that had gathered in and outside of Sticky’s held their collective breath. All you could hear was the scritching of a pencil on pad as the Page Six columnist recorded every word.

Pearl eyed a broken beer bottle on the bar and grabbed it. She menaced her husband for a few minutes, waving the bottle around like a ninja showing off his nunchucks. She charged across the room towards Chaz, arm outstretched, jagged bottle pointing towards the prince’s stomach.

A reporter snapped a picture and the flash went off, temporarily blinding Pearl. Her lunge towards her husband’s mid section struck only air and she flew off balance, landing on the parquet floor. The bottle skidded across the bar and stopped at the feet the prince. He kicked it aside and bent down to help his wife to her feet. They stared at each other for a few minutes before heading back to the bar counter.

The gossipers, realizing their story deadline was approaching, ran out of the bar. The royal spectacle had ended. Bar chatter started up again as if it never stopped, people picking up conversations where they left off before the fracas began.

Chaz pulled a stool out for Pearl and she sat down, picking up her warm gin and tonic. Chaz asked Sticky for a shot of bourbon and then changed his mind and asked for the whole bottle, which he began to gulp down in earnest. The couple sat in thick silence for a while, rehashing in their minds what just happened. Above them, Channel Five News flashed a breaking news report on the screen - Royal Couple in Bar Brawl, Film at 11!

Chaz raised his bottle to Pearl and she responded by lifting her glass towards him.

“To Happily Ever After.”
“Yea, to Happily Ever After.”

I’ve joined a flickr group called 52 stories. We’ll all tell a story a week for a year, with picture. Week 1 can be found here. Subsequent weeks will go here.
—————

My grandfather was big wine drinker. A wine connoisseur, he was not. Just a drinker. He kept his wine in jugs; glass, gallon sized jugs that he hid all over the house. My grandmother would snoop around each day, opening cabinets and moving books to see if she could spot the hidden wine. I think almost every fight they had - and we are talking daily - was over the wine. Grandpa drank it morning, noon and night. Before lunch, with dinner, sitting in the yard, watching Lawrence Welk - any occasion called for glass of hearty red wine.

Grandma hated the drinking. She hated the singing that came with the drinking. At about seven o’clock every night, you could stand on the corner of Kingston and Ramona and hear Grandpa sing “When the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie…..” followed quickly by grandma screaming something in Italian, words that I didn’t understand but my mother told me to never repeat.

Grandpa shared his love of wine with his grandchildren. He’d pour a bit into our glasses during dinner, mix it with Coke, and then whisper in our ears to never ever tell our grandmother. We drank the whole glass down each time (”whole glass” being about one ounce), and even though there was barely enough to get us the least bit tipsy, we would run around for the rest of the evening like we were drunk.

Insert some wavy lines here as we go back to the early 70’s.

We’re sitting at Grandma’s table; there’s me, my sister and six or seven cousins. Grandpa has his jug out and, per usual, pours us each a small glass of wine. Grandma walks into the kitchen and sees us sitting there, in Alla Salute! pose, ready to drink. She glares at grandpa, a long, evil stare, and you know that she’s silently damning him to hell or conjuring up evil curses.

Grandpa snickers, doesn’t even give Grandma the satisfaction of acknowledging her evil stare. He just picks up a peach and pairing knife and starts slicing. He drops one slice into each of our glasses and then looks at grandma, smiling.

“It’s just fruit. They’re just having a treat,” he says.

He gives us a nod and we all follow his lead; we dip our fingers into the glasses, pull out the wine-soaked peach slices, and slide them into our mouths as if they were the greatest treat on earth. Which they just might have been at the time.

Grandma goes ballistic.

“You dumb bastard!” And now it’s not even a matter of Grandpa giving wine to us kids, it’s that he defied her with the wine drinking at all. She lets loose with a string of unintelligible Italian curses (though I do recognize one that was loosely translated as “go fuck yourself”) and for some reason I notice that it’s 6:50 and Grandma is ten minutes ahead of her screaming schedule. Grandpa hasn’t even started singing yet! This is both shocking and unnerving. The routine of the 7:00 Sing and Yell Show is shot to hell and we all - me, my cousins and my sisters as well as two aunts who come running into the kitchen - know that this isn’t going to be an ordinary five minute tirade.

Grandma reaches across the table and grabs the jug of wine before Grandpa can react. We watch in horror-movie vision, with our hands over our eyes, peeking through the web of our fingers, not wanting to see, but having to see, just so we can tell the story to all the other cousins later.

In one deft, practiced move, Grandma swipes the jug away from the table, leans toward the sink and pours the wine down the drain. It’s like watching blood being poured from a wound and one of my aunts screams, as if it’s the blood of Jesus Christ himself being spilled, which is when I have the absurd vision of my grandfather as a martyr, hanging on a cross, sacrificing himself for Italian grandfathers everywhere who aren’t allowed to drink their wine in peace. It’s not even the loss of the wine that’s so horrifying; there are a hundred more jugs just like it hidden away in the garage. It’s the act of draining the wine from the bottle, the balls of my grandmother to take that one thing, that one joy my grandfather has and discard it like that, right in front of him, while muttering “Va fa’nculo!” in a voice that’s a close imitation of a snake hiss. We’re freaked out and Patty whispers that maybe we should make a run for it, but then Grandma stalks back to the table and turned on us.

She waves her hands at us and I focus on her skin, the way it dangles from her fingers in fleshy folds. I tune out the tirade and instead wonder if Grandma’s bones are shrinking or if her skin is growing. I tune back in just in time to hear her say:

“Now you will drink every bit of that wine in your glasses!”

Huh? Was she talking to us? After all her bitching and screaming about Grandpa giving us wine, now she’s forcing us to drink it? From the sound of Grandma’s voice, it’s supposed to be some sort of punishment and I wonder if it’s directed towards us kids or towards Grandpa, whose empty wine glass has zero chance of a refill and he’s now being forced to watch all of us drink what was left. I look to my aunts for help, but they’ve already scuttled back to the living room, away from the maddening scene.

“Now! Drink it!”

We all lift our glasses and drink the wine down, afraid of what grandma will do if we don’t follow through. You might think this is a good thing, but none of us had ever drank a full glass of wine before, with or without peaches. After three sips the wine burns my throat. One of my sisters gags and my cousin George sobs instead of drinking.

“You can’t leave the table until you are all done.” Again with the wagging skin and bones. She points a floppy finger at my grandfather.”And you, you can’t get up until they are done, either.”

I get it now. She’s punishing us for being on Grandpa’s side, for playing his little wine games and winking conspiratorially at him when he showed us how to dunk the peaches and feign nutritional content. If only I had lurched from my chair and proclaimed “Grandma’s right, wine is bad for you!” at the outset, I would be in the living room with my aunts, watching Wheel of Fortune. Instead, I swirl the wine around in my Bugs Bunny glass - formerly a Bugs Bunny jelly jar - and contemplate which grandparent should really have my loyalty in this fight. Grandma, with her loose skin and torrent of curse words and spilled blood, or Grandpa with his hanging jowls and five o’clock shadow and desire to turn his grandkids into alcoholics.

Just then, Grandpa starts singing.

When the moon hits your eye like a big-a pizza pie, that’s amore!
Patty quietly chimes in with the follow-up That’s amore!

Grandpa grins. Grandma scowls I sing:

When the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine, that’s amore!

We sing, sip our wine and watch Grandma turn a angry shade of purple. When we drain the glasses, we slam then down like cowboys in a saloon and head into the living room, feeling a little bit drunk for real this time. We leave Grandma and Grandpa alone in the kitchen, waging their wine duel.

A couple of months later, the whole fiasco is forgotten amid new family scandals and holidays. One night, my parents ask Grandpa to come over and babysit while they go see Chuck Berry at the Westbury Music Fair. Grandpa shows up at 6:00 sporting a jug of wine. What kind of parents let a man carrying a jug of wine babysit for their kids, grandfather or not?

Ten minutes after my parents leave, Grandpa and my youngest sister are sound asleep in front of the tv.

“Let’s taste the wine,” my other sister says.

Not having learned my lesson from the previous wine incident - which ended with me needing five St. Joseph’s Aspirin for Children to get rid of the ensuing headache - I agree.

Afraid that Grandpa or Lisa will wake up and spot us stealing the wine, we haul the gallon jug into the bathroom. We attempt to pour the drink into the little Dixie riddle cups (”What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence?” is a lot funnier after a few sips of homemade wine). We miss the cup often, and soon the bathroom floor is littered with used riddles and magenta puddles.

I really don’t know what happened after the fourth round of “Time to get a new fence, hahahhahh!” I’m pretty sure it involved my parents coming home to find Grandpa and Lisa still sleeping in the living room, and Jo and myself sound asleep on the bathroom floor, our pajamas stained with red spots, cups everywhere, the toilet spotted with vomit.

Of all the lessons learned through Grandpa’s drinking habit the only one that has stayed with me is that red wine will give me a headache.

Oh, and don’t let a man carrying a jug of homemade wine babysit your kids. Grandfather or not.

I make little snacks for myself and the daughter to eat while we wait for midnight. Of course, there is no way I’ll make it to midnight because I’m suffering from exhaustion, plus the only way to forget that I am so huge that I waddle instead of walk and it takes me about an hour to tie my shoes is to sleep. Forget the daughter. She’s on some mixture of antibiotics and cold medicine that knocks her out for hours at a time.

After an hour of coloring and making silly little crafts, I decide to turn the clock ahead, pretend it’s midnight, celebrate the new year with a toast of sparkling grape juice and go cry myself to sleep while thinking about the misery that is my life.

The daughter has other ideas. She decides that what she really wants to do is to vomit up a pile of medicine, snacks and chocolate milk all over the living room floor. I try not to cry as I attempt to clean up the floor, my very pregnant belly pressing against the rug as I’m on my hands and knees scraping puke from the carpet. The daughter passes out on the couch.

I pick her up while she’s sleeping - no small feat for a pregnant woman with sciatica - lay her on her bed and change her out of the vomit-covered pajamas. I wash her up and tuck her in and she never flinches, never wakes up even once and I wonder if maybe she’s gone into a coma and she’s suffering from some terrible strain of the flu or a virus that the doctor overlooked, so I stay in her room and make sure her breathing is even and that she responds - even in her sleep - to a pinch on her arm. She does. I feel bad, but love hurts sometimes, you know?

I go back to the living room and clean up the crafts. It’s only 8:00. I call my husband at his job to tell him how this night is going but he says he’s busy, can’t talk and as I go to hang up the phone I hear the sound of a merry party going on in the background and I yell into the receiver I hope you’re having fun! I slam the phone down and head to the couch to pout.

I flip through various rocking and rolling New Year’s specials. I’m bored. I’m lonely. I wonder what kind of husband Dick Clark would make. I wonder if his wife gets pissed that he’s out every New Year’s eve, but then I figure that she’s probably in the ABC green room munching on caviar and sipping champagne and saying, Yes I’m Dick Clark’s wife. I’m soooo lucky.

I fall into a light sleep, sitting up with the remote in my hand, and I start to dream about the ghost of New Year’s past, when midnight meant giant swigs of Boones Farm wine that someone stole from their father and a joint passed around with Pink Floyd playing in the background and maybe a stolen kiss, even an attempt to get under my shirt, which I respond to with a kick in the shin. If you’re not Dick Clark rockin’, don’t come knockin’. Yea, I always had a thing for Dick. Clark.

10:00 on this miserable New Year’s Eve. I decide to go to bed. I call my parents to wish them Happy New Year and I sneak in a few well-placed twinges of self-pity, hoping they’ll tell me to pack up the kid and come on over to celebrate with them. But my parents had a long-standing tradition - since all of their kids were old enough to be out without a curfew - that New Year’s Eve, being my father’s birthday, was their special night and no one was allowed to interfere with it. My father would make lobster and shrimp and he and my mother would sit in front of the fireplace and sip wine and enjoy the evening alone. We all complied with their wishes because it was our understanding that this was the only night of the year that my father was able to get some from mom. At least that’s what he told us.

So I get on the phone and whine and cry and tell them I’m going to bed because I just want this year to end and they wish me a Happy New Year and I hang up with my bottom lip trembling as I try to keep from exploding in the biggest fit of self-pity my family has ever seen.

I put on my pajamas. I settle into bed with Dick Clark and the remote. And then I hear the sound of little feet and they aren’t pitter pattering, they are running. Full steam. And they are accompanied by the sound of a three year old girl screaming Moommy! I can’t stop the poop! It won’t stop! Oh lord.

I get up and catch her just as she’s about to slip in whatever she’s trailing behind her. Oh, yes. Diarrhea. Bad, bad diarrhea, most likely a result of the antibiotics that I assumed she lost with the vomiting episode. Her jammies are brown and drooping. It’s running down her legs. I scoop her up and run into the bathroom, throw her in the bathtub. It takes about an hour to clean up both of us, the kitchen floor and the bathroom. She falls asleep on the living floor, I just fall to the floor in tears. Dick Clark stares at me from the tv. Stop your crying, woman! Get up and make the most of what you have! Right.

I go back into the bathroom to wash my face and see that the daughter, who insisted on helping me clean the tub and the floor, threw some of the used baby wipes in the toilet. I flush without thinking. The toilet overflows. And overflows. I try to stop it. I use the plunger to no avail. I call my father. The…toilet…won’t…stop! He thinks I’ve been drinking. Or smoking. He has no idea what I’m talking about and I take his questions as a sign that he doesn’t care. I want my sisters to come take care of me so I call them. They both have plans. Sorry, you’ve got to deal with the toilet on your own, sis. There is no way I can convey the misery of my evening to them.

I call the husband while I’m cleaning up the toilet overflow (I finally got the water to stop pouring out) and he asks why I can’t take care of anything myself. I hang up. I cry again.

My mother calls to see how it’s going with the toilet. I break out into a long, wailing cry, the kind that Italian grandmothers invoke over the coffins of their husbands (whom they hated while they were alive). Nobody loves me! I’m now sobbing and my breath is coming in deep heaves. No…body….loves me! I’m all alone and the toilet won’t work and the daughter is losing her lunch from both ends and the baby is kicking me and I smell like poop and vomit and my husband is in New Jersey having the time of his life and I bet Dick Clark would never, ever do this to his wife!

When I’m finally done, my mother heaves a heavy sigh. Fine, come on over. I wrap the daughter in a heavy blanket and we walk across the street to my parent’s house. It’s 11:00. I fall asleep at 11:10. I miss Dick Clark ushering in the New Year and when I wake the house is dark and my parent’s bedroom is closed so I assume that my dad got his yearly present anyhow, which makes me want to throw up just thinking of it and thinking of throwing up makes me relive the whole sordid evening in my head. I curl up next to my daughter, in the room where I used to sleep back in the day and I wish a whispered new year greeting in her ear. I silently make some resolutions, some that take years to complete, but I do eventually complete them all.

Except for marrying Dick Clark. Who, it turns out, is really a robotron. So I hear.

When an event happens that shapes your life, or plays a significant role in it, you tend to remember every little detail of the moment it happens. Twenty-one years ago last night. December 8, 1980. I was in my bedroom, lying on the bed with the headphones on, listening to WNEW. It was Jim Morrison’s birthday, and the station was running a two hour special devoted to him. I was obsessed with Morrison at that time, and was taping the special I was listening. I know I was wearing an old Led Zeppelin t-shirt and sweat pants and I was writing a poem as I listened to the radio.

My room faced the front of the house, and the Christmas lights that hung from the roof glowed red and green and white over my bedroom window. There was a decoration hanging on the window; a big white star made out of plastic pieces melded together. The colors of the bulbs outside made the star look psychedlic. I had smoked enough pot that night to stare at the star for a length of time, imagining the colors blending into one another. My concentration would be broken every now and then by headlights beaming down the street, and I would run to the window and peer out. We were waiting for my cousin Michael, my favorite cousin, to arrive by car from Florida. I was anxious to see him and disappointed that each susbequent headlight did not belong to his car.

All the while, Jim Morrison’s life story played out in the background, and I stopped looking down the street for my cousin at some point and started paying attention to the radio. I remember it was late, probably close to 11:00. I may have drifted off at some point and I was jolted fully awake by a shaky voice announcing that someone tentatively identified as John Lennon had been shot outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City. I waited, nearly numb, hoping for more news. Soon after, it was confirmed. I went inside to tell my parents, but they already knew. I think they announced it on Monday Night Football.

I was never much of a Beatles fan. But sometime in high school I went through a hippie phase and took a liking to John Lennon and his ideas. The fact that he spoke out for peace and died so violently was one of the first things that struck me when I heard the news.

The event didn’t change my life the way it did the lives of Beatles fans. It didn’t impact me in quite the same way as someone who was mourning Lennon the man, or the music he created. I mourned something else. I think up until that point, I still had a sense of innocence about me. I was still naive about the ways of the world. I was still all about peace and love and tranquility. I assumed the rest of the world was too. I thought we could all live in harmony and love one another and make the world a better place for future generations.

Something happened to me the night John Lennon died. I lost a lot of that idealism. I couldn’t get past the fact that someone who was so fervent about living peacefully could have his life taken from him in such a way. I couldn’t fathom that something like this could happen. How did we let our world get to this point, that people could just walk around murdering one another?

It was then, that very night, that my eyes opened to a new vision of the world. When Lennon died, whatever was left of the peace movement died, too. I dropped my peace sign mentality some time after that night. I gave up and gave in and became cynical like every grown-up I knew. It wasn’t all because of Lennon; there were other things that lead up to it also. But the death of John Lennon - the murder of John Lennon sure as hell played a very significant role in shaping my psyche for the rest of my life.

That, more than anything, is why I remember every little detail of that night. Somehow I knew, I felt it in my gut the moment I heard the news. I knew that I would never be the same again. I ingrained that moment in my brain somewhere, marking it down as a “this day in history” of my meager little life.

28 years now that I’m a cranky bastard.

Our trudging through the neighborhood was not quiet at all. We were like a pack of rabid dogs who turned on each other. Lori wanted to stand in front all the time because she thought - mistakenly - that she had a beautiful singing voice. She was the only one who couldn’t hear that her whispery vocal stylings sounded more like helium escaping from a balloon than Roberta Flack (Lori’s rendition of Killing Me Softly was to die for. Literally). So Lori would run up ahead of us, trying to gain the coveted spot of bell-ringer and first soprano. The boys would pelt her with snowballs as she ran ahead and more often than not, Lori would end up face down in a foot of snow, crying that we were just jealous of her.

Our intentions were to hit at least five houses a night. We knew our neighbors weren’t that keen on carolers and instead of making us hot chocolate, they would just hand each of us a quarter - usually mid song - and give us a faint smile as they closed the door on our efforts. Which was all we wanted. A few quarters a night, pooled together, meant a trip to Murray’s and candy for everyone.

Murray was an old man who ran a small candy/cigarette/expired milk store on the corner. We would have much preferred to go to 7-11, but none of us were allowed to cross the big, bad street to get there. So we settled for Murray’s, where the Bazooka gum often had teeth marks courtesy of Murray’s snarling, vicious, child hating dog.

We once hit upon the idea of singing Christmas carols to Murray. We thought it would soften his heart, as if life were nothing but a sappy tv movie and we were writing the script. When we burst into his store singing Silent Night, Murray shrank back in horror. I had a vision of Murray as the wicked witch, melting under Dorothy’s thrown water.

“I’m a Jew, you idiots! A Jew!” Gloria stepped forward, staring down Murray. “Yea, well, Ricki and Larry and Jews and they’re singing!” She pointed to the siblings who were now staring at the floor. “Well, they should be ashamed of themselves. Get out of my store, now!” Gloria stared at Murray defiantly. She was the oldest of all of us and moved to the suburbs straight from some crime-ridden pocket in Queens. Leader of the Pack, complete with black leather jacket. She sneered at Murray. “Face it, Murray. You just don’t like us singing because we’re happy and you’re not.” The old man stared silently at us. I immediately began forming this scenario in mind in which Murray would say that Gloria was right, he was lonely and unhappy and maybe the beautiful children of the neighborhood who had voices like golden angels and hearts filled with love and charity would look kindly upon this old man and forgive him all his transgressions, including rancid milk and dog-chewed gum. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everyone! And we’d all hug and do a rousing rendition of Dreidel, Dreidel for Murray while the neighbors poured out of their houses to join us.

Murray spat at Gloria. Spat! The wad missed her by a few inches and landed on the counter. The dog came over and licked it up. We marched out of the store in single file and everyone laughed at Murray’s lame attempt at spitting except for me. I was dejected. I wanted Murray’s heart to grow three times its size! I think that was a subtle beginning to my career as a cynic.

So we trudged on, making our way through the gray, slush snow which no longer crunched under our feet, thanks to a light drizzle and heavy local traffic. Our rubber boots went squish on the way down and sounded something like a plunger being removed from a toilet bowl on the way up. Squish. Pop. Squish. Pop. Almost in unison, a marching band of wet, freezing kids who just wanted to spread some holiday cheer and maybe make a buck or two in the process.

Lori was the one who insisted on going to Scott’s house. Scott was the grade school equivalent of the high school quarterback. King of the playground, center of the lunchroom, best looking kid in any K-6 school for miles around. Lori, who fancied herself the female version of Scott, had been trying to convince Scott that they would make a lovely couple. Scott, all of eleven years old at the time, still hadn’t made the transition from swapping baseball cards to swapping spit. Lori, meanwhile, had been queen of Spin the Bottle since third grade. It was her contention that she would make Scott her boyfriend and teach him a thing or two about what it means to be a man. Lori was a girl ahead of her time, mature in ways that were dangerous. She had grown tits before any of the girls in school. Even the sixth grade girls were jealous of Lori’s bulging shirt. Lori had a habit of wearing her coat open wide even when it was freezing out. She wore shirts that accentuated her womanhood and whispers around the fourth grade were that Lori had even gotten her period already. She was a woman. A woman! And it was only right that a woman had a man and Scott, who had the faintest hint of facial hair and whose voice was already changing, was the prime candidate.

So we headed over toward’s Scott’s house. On the way there, Lori lectured us about the caroling protocol. She would ring the bell. She would stand in front. She would sing all the key verses to Rudolph, while we did the background vocals. We were about to fight her on all issues, but Gloria silenced us with a glare. Whatever. We’d just let Lori have her way, collect a few quarters and make the mad dash across the forbidden street to 7-11, now that we were no longer welcome at Murray’s.

What happened next was really Lori’s fault. She would not shut up. She kept going on about how she deserves to be Scott’s girlfriend, that she was the prettiest and most mature girl in the school, that her voice was so much better than all of ours and we were just kids, after all (Lori had been left back in first grade, so she was a whole. year. older. than all of us, except Gloria).

We had tired of Lori. We had tired of trudging in slush that had now formed into some sort of icy glue that wouldn’t let go of our boots. We were cold and hungry and I could swear I heard my mother calling me. But I walked on.

We got to Scott’s house and, according to plan, Lori - her coat unbuttoned to reveal a tight, pale green, fake cashmere sweater - rang the bell. Scott’s mother answered the door and we immediately burst into the first chorus of Rudolph. Lori whirled around and threw a look of burning rage our way. She whispered through clenched teeth, “I told you not to sing except for the background. And we are supposed to be singing for Scott. Not his stupid mother.” We backed off and Lori turned on her sweet voice and asked Scott’s mom to fetch her son. I heard the boys behind me giggling and whispering and when I turned to see what they were up to, Steve just held a finger to his lips. Something was up. Judging from the laughter coming from the back of our group, it was going to be good.

Finally, Scott came to the door. Lori’s eyes met his and she gave him a sultry (at least a twelve year old version of sultry) smile. She launched right into her solo effort.

Rudolph the red nosed reindeer…

Each word, each syllable was sung in a throaty whisper and I just know that Lori was imagining herself in a slinky white dress, singing birthday wishes to the president. It was Christmas carol porn.

We were meant to sing the backing vocals; words that had been made up and inserted over the ages to give the song a funny (to a kid, anyhow) edge.

Lori: Had a very shiny nose
Us: Like a lightbulb!
Lori: And if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows
Us: Like Pepsodent!

I had no idea what that meant. Does Pepsodent glow? No matter, the lore of the added verses had been passed down from grade to grade and we had to do our part to carry on the tradition, even if it made no sense to us.

And on the song went, Lori doing her best Marilyn Monroe, the rest of us shouting the added lyrics in unison in a terrible cacophony of missed notes and Lori turning to glare at us every time. Finally, the last verse. Lori puffed her chest out a bit more, making sure that Scott noticed the fine, shapely lumps emerging from her sweater. She had her right hand on her hip and she used her left hand to keep flipping her hair. Her hips swayed as she sang. The combination of the tits, the hair, the hips and the swaying were, I suppose, supposed to be sexy in a twelve year old way, but made her look like more like a spazz who had to pee really bad.

Rudolph the red nose reindeer, you’ll. Go. Down. In. Hist-or-y. All breathy and teasing. That’s where we were supposed to chime in with LIKE COLUMBUS! and get a nice round of applause. But during the “reindeer games” verse, the instructions came from the back to the front. No one was supposed to say the Columbus line. Everyone just stay silent. I shrugged and went along with the game.

Lori: Rudolph the red nose reindeer, you’ll. Go. Down. In. Hist-or-y…..
Boys: LORI STUFFS!

Silence, save for a few stifled giggles from the rear of the chorus. Lori pulled the flaps of her jacket tight, turned on her heels and went running down the steps. Scott looked rather amused, while his mother looked a bit horrified. The rest of us just stood there, feeling rather awkward. As Lori maneuvered her way around us trying to high tail it out of Scott’s yard, she tripped over a cord that was haphazardly strung around a hedge at the end of Scott’s walk. She fell to the ground, pulling some of the lights from the bush down with her. And there she lay until Gloria helped her to feet, face down in the snow and silhouetted by a dozen or so big, colored lights.

I knew right then that this was the end of many things - our caroling for candy scheme; our otherwise tight knit group of misfits; Lori’s plans for to be queen to Scott’s playground king. It also meant the end of the lumps under Lori’s sweater, as everyone within five miles of our school would find out in no less than 24 hours that Lori’s tits were no more than artistically folded socks.

We didn’t see Lori for many days after that, as she chose to sequester herself in her bedroom, with only visits from a revenge-plotting Gloria to cheer her up. I heard from Lori’s brother - who was part of the “Lori stuffs” chorus, that his sister burst into tears when their grandmother gave her socks for Christmas.

Perhaps now you can see why I hold dear the tradition of oversized, colored lights. Nostalgia for the good old days, when we brought a queen-sized ego down to jester size. Every time I see a house all lit up with the colors of 60’s suburbia Christmas, I can’t help but think of Lori, laying on the ground like a forlorn toy from Misfit Island.

Good times, good times.