Show Me the Way

Manilow Madness aside, I did my best to be the manly son my father wanted.  I joined the Cub Scouts.  I played Little League and flag football.  And the thing is I liked it. I wasn't a mama's boy by nature, I was a mama's boy by nurture.

My folks got off to a rough start.  They dropped out of high school, married young, had three kids.  By the time I was ready for preschool, they'd determined that raising a family of five on a repairman's salary wasn't going to cut it.  My father went back to school - a four year degree in two and one-half years - and worked full-time.  He even took on some side work, too. 

Which is simply to say that from my earliest childhood memories, my dad was a very busy man and my mother and my sisters were my full-time family.  It was a girls' house.  They were very involved in Girl Scouts, so I tagged along to meetings, day camps, and whatever else the Girl Scouts were doing.  I made God's eyes with yarn and popsicle sticks, and weaved placemats from cattail leaves.  I learned campfire songs.

But my father, he was the measure of a man.  He was what I wanted to be.  I just didn't know how, and he didn't have the time to show me. 

I'd never been in a fight before we moved to Chicago.  Within a month of moving, I'd been in at least six.  Every boy in our new neighborhood had to fight before they could be friends.  I learned this when Bobby Cruz jumped me at the bus stop, sat on my chest and pounded me in the face.  All the other boys circled and watched.

"Do something!"  I yelled.

"What do you want us to do?"

"Say 'break it up'!"

"Break it up."  Bobby kept punching me in the face.  The next day we were buddies.

Six fights, or more specifically six instances of me coming home bloodied and sobbing, was my mother's limit.  "I wish you'd toughen up," she said, and she wiped the blood from my nose with a warm washcloth.  I didn't know how to toughen up, and I felt like I'd lost my only ally. 

Baseball was another problem.  It was the de facto sport of the neighborhood.   I couldn't throw, couldn't catch, couldn't hit.  I didn't even know the basic rules.  My father worked third shift.  He didn't have time to teach me to fight or play baseball.  He just didn't have time.

Enter the big kids.   There were three categories of kid in our suburban neighborhood:  too small to play baseball; too old to play baseball; and somewhere in the neighborhood right now playing baseball.  The kids who were too old to play wore their hair long and only came out at night.  They'd huddle beneath a street light and smoke cigarettes.  They were the older brothers and sisters of my friends, but I never saw them when I'd go to their houses to play. They were like vampires.

Except for Johnny, my next door neighbor.  Tall, handsome, cocky, a 13 year old legend in the neighborhood.  Johnny was an all-star pitcher, the one big kid who hadn't turned his back on baseball when he hit junior high.  He called himself "The Kid," and he was nice to me.  Granted, taking me under his all-star wing was a way to get close to my big sister, but nevertheless he was nice to me.

Johnny taught me to throw, catch, and hit.  He explained how the game worked and encouraged me.  Before long I was out in the street with the other kids, playing pick up games.  Johnny would never play, but now and then he'd take a couple of swings just to impress us.  He could hit the ball twice as far as any of us.

One Saturday my father took me out in the driveway for a game of catch.  I couldn't believe my luck - finally a chance to show the old man my skills.  The ball popped right into my glove's pocket, and I got it back to him in the air and somewhat on target.

"Not bad," he said.

"Johnny taught me.  He's the best baseball player in the whole neighborhood."

"Oh yeah?"

"He's on the all-stars and yesterday he hit a home run over the Kratz's house."

Back and forth went the ball.  Back and forth went my adoration for The Kid.  The more I talked, the harder my father threw.  I could hear the ball hiss before it hit my glove.  My hand was stinging.  Finally he burned one in so hard  that I took off my glove and held my reddened hand.  My eyes watered up.

"Can Johnny throw like that?" he said.  The game was over.

Not long after that I visited my friend Eric's house.  It was dirty and it smelled funny.  We traded baseball cards, played vibrating football, and then sunk into general boredom.  "We could listen to records," he said.  I liked that idea.  Eric broke out the usual suspects - John Denver, Neil Diamond, The Monkees.  "Last Train to Clarksville" was pretty cool.  He played The Jackson Five's "Rockin Robin" back to back with Silver Convention's "Fly Robin Fly," which started a lively (for eight year olds) discussion about why robins make for good lyrics.

"My older brother has a record with a talking guitar on it," Eric said.

"That's impossible."

"I'll go get it, but watch out for him.  I'm not allowed in his room." 

He came back with Frampton Comes Alive! tucked under his arm.  It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  A double album, the gatefold sleeve opened to a full length photo of Frampton.  His long blond hair was glowing purple in the stage lights, his eyes were fixed on the heavens.  And strapped across his scrawny chest was the alleged talking guitar.  He looked like one of the big kids who hung out under the street lights, but his expression conveyed The Kid's kindness. 

Woke up this morning with a wine glass in my hand
Whose wine? What wine?  Where the hell did I dine?

This was big people music.  This was music for hanging out under street lights.   I felt ten times cooler just listening to it.    It felt like I was committing a crime or something, like any minute my mother was going to walk in and demand to know why I was listening to this deranged story about champagne for breakfast and friends who had been arrested.

After the lyrics, what really jumped out at me was how different this song was.  I was a 45 kid - songs were three  minutes long, four tops.  But this just kept going.  The keyboardist got a solo.  The guitarist got a solo.  The audience got pulled in:

Do you feel like we do? [audience screams]
Do you feel like we do?  [audience screams louder]

That was it.  That was the big difference.  I didn't know that music was performed live, that it was interactive.  Before that it was a monologue, not a dialogue.  Lee Dorsey told me about his Ya-Ya; Elton described the Yellow Brick Road, and I listened while they talked to me.  But Frampton broke the wall - he asked me to participate.  I wanted to be there.  I wanted to be anywhere where a band was playing and I could be a part of the screaming crowd.  But I was eight,  it wasn't going to happen.  I couldn't wait to be a big kid like Johnny, or even better like one of those mysterious long-haired kids who lurked in the shadows of our neighborhood.

Needless to say, Eric was right.  The guitar talked.  My little brain was completely blown.  I stared at the album cover, looking for some sign of life in that black guitar.  It was some kind of miracle.

I quit the Cub Scouts after that, and I refused to get my haircut.  My father was around less and less, but it was okay.  I had the big kids now to show me the way.

When Am I Gonna Come Down?

The Montgomery Ward Bargain Basement was a frequent destination in my early childhood.  My father was a repairman for Wards at the time - one of those guys who drove a van, wore a smart uniform, and pleasantly fixed your television while your chihuahua chewed on his trouser leg.  It seemed like an awfully glamorous existence to me, getting to see the insides of all of those houses owned by rich people who could afford repairmen and frozen orange juice.

His social life overlapped with his job.  I don't remember any friends of my father's during that time who weren't Wards employees.  Most were repairmen.  They'd meet for lunch and tell funny stories about their customers.  My mother took me to meet them for lunch now and then.  With the repair vans lined up neatly in the parking lot and the uniformed men crowded around a table, it all seemed so manly and cool.  I couldn't have been prouder if my father was a cop, or a soldier.

Manliness was important to my father.  I could never quite reach the bar.  Once he caught a frog for me while we were fishing.  I named it Kermit and made him tie a piece of fishing line to its leg so that I wouldn't have to touch it.  He called me a pansy.  For my sixth birthday he took me to the Bargain Basement to buy a wristwatch.  "You can have the one with the clear face so that you can see how all of the gears work, or you can have the Mickey Mouse watch."

"I want the Mickey Mouse watch."

"That figures," he said.

Nowhere was my pansiness more apparent than during the annual showing of "The Wizard of Oz."  Annual televised events were a big deal in my childhood.  Christmas specials, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," anything Rankin-Bass, even the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon was appointment television.  We knew they were special because the networks were kind enough to put a "Special!" graphic before the show.  Oz ruled them all.  Judy Garland?  MGM Musical?  Maybe my pops had a point on the whole pansy thing.

That's an anachronism, though.  At least among kids, there was no hint of homosexuality in Oz. It was just a great movie, and it had the scariest witch ever.  This was the crux of my pansacity in my father's eyes.  As much as I loved the movie, I was terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West.  The sight of her guaranteed nightmares for weeks.   What to do? I didn't want to miss this once a year event due to my witch phobia.  The solution was fairly simple:  I holed up in a swivel chair and spun myself 180 degrees at the first hint of a cackle.

I don't know how many times I managed to execute the no-witch chair spin, but it must have been a lot.  Eventually my old man just couldn't take it anymore.   "Goddamnit if you're not going to watch the movie then get out of here," he said.  I didn't leave, I just manned up and stopped spinning.  A few nightmares weren't going to get in the way of lively Oz debates during tetherball tomorrow.

My favorite friend of my father's was Mr. Bryson.  He  was one of those rare adults who noticed children, not only noticed them but talked to them like human beings.  He looked like Johnny Carson, which added definite cool points.  Because Mr. Bryson ran the Montgomery Wards Bargain Basement, I was sure he was a very important man.  Visiting him was always fun, but shopping there was a little bleak.

Wards' main floor was bright, new, colorful.  The barbecues had plastic T-bones on them, just in case shoppers weren't sure what to do with a barbecue.  The canister vacuums ran continuously, their hoses hooked to the exhaust ends of the canisters and pointed toward the ceiling.  Beach balls hovered over their hoses, twirling slowly in the vacuums' exhaust.  This is where the rich people bought all of the cool stuff that they dispatched my father to fix.  Our stuff was in the basement with Mr. Bryson.

The Bargain Basement was the Island Of Misfit Toys.  This is where three-legged pants went to die.  Appliances, clothes, electronics, furniture - anything that Wards sold that was flawed, returned, or dropped off the back of a truck ended up in the Bargain Basement and could be had for a steep discount.  You could always tuck that extra pant leg into your britches,  nobody's going to know.  And Mr. Bryson always threw us an extra discount because he was friends with my dad.

All that shiny stuff upstairs.  I wanted shiny stuff, too.  I wanted something brand new that was entirely mine.  Not pre-owned, not glued together, not dented or stuffed into the shopping bag by Mr. Bryson when he was sure that his boss wasn't looking.

And so I took my birthday money with me on one of our Bargain Basement trips and I begged my mother to let me spend it upstairs.  I think she got it.  She was pretty good about picking up on these things.  My sisters went downstairs with my dad, no doubt to find a good deal on tube socks that were stitched closed at both ends, and my mother and I stayed upstairs with the plastic T-bones and the floating beach balls.  We walked the aisles, looking for anything that met my two criteria:  A birthday money price, and kid appropriate.  This left out snow tires, leisure suits, and furniture made from wine barrels.  Eventually we found our way to the record department.

This was perfect.  Not only could I afford a 45, but I would be starting my very own record collection, just like my dad's.  The only problem was that I didn't know any music made after 1965 or so  - my father's and aunt's record collections were my only musical frame of reference.  So I flipped through the singles with absolutely no idea what I was looking for other than a place to burn my money.  There it was, finally:  A black label with a rainbow streaking diagonally across it's middle, and over the rainbow the song title:  "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road."  Are you kidding me?  Oz on record?  I could listen without having to deal with that freaky witch?  Game, set, match.

On first listen I was disappointed by my purchase.  This had nothing to do with "The Wizard of Oz."  The singer didn't sound anything like the actors in the movie, and whatever he was talking about it didn't have anything to do with the story.  Regardless, it was my first record, and I was committed to making this relationship work.  It was like nothing I'd never heard before - the voice, the tempo, the instruments.  Everything was unique.  For some reason it made me think of space, or the future, or some world other than mine.  "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"  couldn't have been more different from "The Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy" or any of the other records in my father's collection.

I wasn't in Kansas anymore.