I Was a Child Read online

  And maybe worst of all, it was clear she was never going to achieve her show-business dreams beyond being a pom-pom lady.

  • • •

  THERE WAS never any butter in our house. Just margarine. My parents acted like butter was lethal. I don’t think I ever saw either have one piece of butter. I would go over to friends’ houses and down sticks of butter.

  • • •

  THE ONLY TIME my mother was really relaxed was at the end of the day, when she was sitting in the living room, reading a book and smoking a Salem Light. She really earned that cigarette after a long day of having to clean, cook, and just deal with the three of us while my father was at work. She had a square glass ashtray she always flicked her ashes in. She looked so happy carrying her ashtray into the living room. I would give anything to have that ashtray now.

  • • •

  IN JUNIOR HIGH SHOP CLASS, I made an ashtray. I took a square piece of metal, pounded dents into it, then took four pennies and melted them so each penny could hold a burning cigarette. It wasn’t my idea—it was my shop teacher’s. I think he spent two decades making thousands of these ashtrays for kids to bring home to their parents.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER’S cigarette stubs always had a trace of the red lipstick she wore.

  If you weren’t looking at her, you could hear my mother smile because her lipstick cracked. I miss that sound.

  • • •

  I BELIEVE my father once told me that my mother had had one abortion before they married and one after me.

  So there could have been five of us, I suppose, which really would have driven her mad.

  • • •

  THE BENEDETTOS lived next door. Mr. Benedetto started to rebrick the steep steps to their front door and for some reason stopped. So they had a front door you couldn’t get to. There was a pile of bricks for years and years next to an empty space where steps should have been but weren’t.

  Since no one used the front door, everyone used the side door, which you could see from our living room, dining room, and den. The Benedetto daughters were older and pretty, and seemed to live a very glamorous life when they came skipping home at eight o’clock at night.

  • • •

  MY FATHER told me the facts of life when I was five or six. We were watching Julia, a half-hour TV show about a single mother played by Diahann Carroll who worked for a kindly dentist.

  My brothers kept saying she couldn’t have a kid if there was no husband. “Why not?” I said, over and over again, until finally my father took me to the back stairs off the kitchen and sat me down on the red steps. “Bruce,” my father said in his voice, which always got insanely deep when he was very serious. “When a man loves a woman, he puts his seed in her and they create a child.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Later, in second grade, I was playing at my friend Ricky Bergen’s house after school. He slept in the same bed as his much older brother, who had a girlfriend.

  Ricky took me under the picnic table in his backyard on a fall day and we sat in the leaves and he explained what his brother and girlfriend did. First, she played with his penis with her hands, which blew my mind. Then they had intercourse. He showed me what that was by taking a thin broken tree branch and putting it through the hole in the middle of the picnic table. He did it over and over again.

  That was a much more helpful explanation than my father’s.

  • • •

  WHEN YOU were sick, you stayed home and watched TV all day. Especially game shows. Sometimes a new game show would show up, then go away quickly. One I loved was called The Neighbors, on which a group of five neighbors were tested on secrets that they did or did not know about one another’s marriages.

  Another one, The Magnificent Marble Machine, featured an enormous pinball machine and that was stupid.

  The Money Maze was a strange, sad game show that was on briefly. The idea was a couple had to navigate their way through a maze to get money, but the interesting part was that only one of them was in the maze. The other was on a perch above, telling them where to turn. One was always getting mad at the other one, either for not really listening or for telling them to do something they shouldn’t. It was very, very true to life.

  • • •

  OUR HOUSE was always cold. My father never let the thermostat go above 65. It started during the energy crisis, but then after the energy crisis it never went back up. He walked around the house in a scarf and tucked his pants into his socks so his body would feel the draft less.

  My father was constantly having hot liquids, mostly tea. My mother had a lot of tea, too. Used tea bags would sit on little plates, quickly turning brown.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER was the worst cook in the world. After every single meal, my father said, “That was delicious.” He would add, “Wasn’t it, boys?” And we would say how delicious it was, too. We never ate out, except occasionally at Gary’s on Springfield Avenue, where we ate burgers. When I got to college and had my meals at the campus cafeteria every day, I discovered how delicious food could be. I loved the salad bar, which featured small cut-up raw broccoli. I don’t think I had ever tasted broccoli before, and it was amazing.

  The only vegetables in our house were carrots and peas that came from cans.

  • • •

  EVERY DINNER at our house began the same way. We were called to come in. Then we all sat at the table, while my mother scurried around doing some last-minute things to get the food ready to bring to the table. Just as she would bring what seemed to be the last dish and sit down, she would leap up remembering one more thing, like a small dish of mayonnaise. The four of us would sit there, waiting. The rule was no one was allowed to serve themselves until everyone was seated at the table.

  “Where’s Mom?” my father would say in a booming voice over and over again. “Where’s Mom?”

  She was only a few feet away, dumping mayonnaise into a dish in front of his eyes, but still he kept saying “Where’s Mom?” Something always became increasingly aggressive about his “Where’s Mom?”

  I don’t remember the three of us ever answering his rhetorical question. I’m not sure I have ever understood why rhetorical questions exist, why people say them, or why there is a name for them. They should be outlawed.

  Once my brother Michael made the mistake of helping himself to a piece of food before my mother had sat down for the last time. Maybe he couldn’t help himself because it was steak—a meat we were served rarely. Everyone acted like steak was gold. Maybe they still do.

  In any case, while my father was saying “Where’s Mom?” Michael put the piece of steak on his plate. My father, quicker than I had ever seen him move, snatched it up in a fit of anger and threw it across the room toward the little white plastic garbage can that lived in front of the dishwasher.

  He missed.

  Everyone was very upset about the whole incident—most upset were my father, Michael, and my mother, who instantly broke into tears.

  • • •

  OLD CARTOONS were on before school—Mighty Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Underdog, and Magilla Gorilla. Magilla Gorilla opened with a bouncy song while Magilla got up for the day in the store he lived in. But the store had no insides. You could see the city behind Magilla Gorilla.

  • • •

  This gave me a very creepy feeling. He seemed exposed. Anything could happen to him in that store, which was supposed to protect him.

  The Magilla Gorilla song was amazing. So many of my shows had amazing opening songs. Nanny and the Professor may have had the best one.

  On the weekend there were new cartoons like Jonny Quest or Josie and the Pussycats. At the end of the summer, there would be a nighttime half-hour preview of all the new cartoons that would be starting the
following Saturday morning, and that was thrilling. Most of the new ones didn’t last, such as Hong Kong Phooey.

  There were always cartoons about people you would see in real life, like the Jackson Five or the Brady Bunch or the Harlem Globetrotters. I watched those ones, but they made me feel weird. I was happy when the show would get canceled and the people would go back to existing in real life.

  • • •

  THERE WERE no cash machines and very few drive-through windows. You knew every single person who worked at the bank.

  • • •

  THE MUSIC TEACHER at Tuscan was a lady who came and taught us “Ta” and “Ti.” She sat in a kid’s chair and clapped her hands at us, chanting, “Ta Ta Ti Ti Ta, Ta Ta Ti Ti Ta, Ta Ta Ti Ti Ta!”

  • • •

  SOMETIMES you would be in your class and hear that there was going to be a fight after school. All day everyone would be abuzz about it. Then it would happen and be over in five seconds. Either some adult would break it up or, more often, it just ended.

  Once I was one of the two kids who were going to fight. The other was Jesse Muir, who everyone called Fissy. We couldn’t figure out where to have the fight at first. So we drifted from spot to spot, a trail of kids following us. We ended up doing it at his house. There was no front yard like everyone else had. There were just weeds and spider plants, some dead, and a lot of empty spider-plant pots. It indicated something not good to me.

  The fight began and was over in five seconds like all the others. When I came home less than two minutes later, my mother was weeping. Parents knew about this kind of thing very quickly.

  She was very, very, very upset—it was as if I would never get into college because Fissy and I had fought for five seconds.

  Oh, brother, I remember thinking. I knew in that moment that neither she nor my father could ever handle knowing the truth about anything.

  And they couldn’t. They had no idea we played at the Maplewood Country Club golf course, which was near our house. It had the greenest grass I had ever seen.

  • • •

  I ALWAYS think golf courses could be the most beautiful places in the world if you took away the golfers.

  We roamed the golf course after school, running through the giant pipes that went underground from stream to stream. My mother would die again right now if she knew.

  Anytime there was a house under construction, we played in it like it was a jungle gym when no one was there. I love the smell of sawdust, not that I would ever like to do any activity that creates sawdust.

  Nails were everywhere, but if you stepped on one, you just bled for a bit, then moved on.

  • • •

  ALL OFF-LIMITS places were explored. I loved crawl spaces under people’s houses, and still do. I wish I could crawl under your house right now.

  • • •

  THERE WAS a place we called The Forest between two streets a block away. On my street our backyards bordered other backyards on the next street over and everyone could see everything from yard to yard. The Forest was an enormous space of bushes and shrubbery between two backyards.

  We would get lost in it for hours.

  The strange thing was I went back to The Forest a few years later and I couldn’t find it. It was just gone, as if we had dreamed it.

  The day always ended the same way. I heard my name being called and ran home. My mother would ask me what I had done all afternoon. “Nothing,” I always said.

  She would purse her lips, wipe her hands on the dish towel she always carried, then go back and finish making dinner.

  • • •

  IF WE were playing in my house or yard after school, every now and then my mother would burst in, sniffing, and say, “Are you playing with matches?”

  Sometimes we had been. Matchbooks were around everywhere. Not only did every business have a matchbook, but also there were tons of matchbooks offering ways of improving your life. A matchbook could change everything for you.

  • • •

  CINDY SNEIDER was a girl at Tuscan who was extremely in love with me for years. It was a deep love and I did nothing to create it. Once I got slightly injured at school and Cindy Sneider wept and wept. I don’t expect to be loved that way ever again. We called her Snite Bite.

  • • •

  THERESA SERRANO was a girl who seemed to have a difficult time for one reason or another. Once she came up to the teacher and said, “My tushie’s bleeding.” This poor girl had to hear those three words over and over again for years.

  • • •

  I ALWAYS woke up excited to start the day. I am still that way. I am always excited for the next thing, whatever the next thing is—sadly, this can happen after starting what had just been the next thing moments earlier. I often start thinking about what I will have for dinner as soon as I take my first bite of lunch.

  Sunday mornings, I always woke up excited to go downstairs and watch TV before everyone else was up. Sometimes Davey and Goliath would be on, which was a very moral show. Davey would do something wrong and his dog, Goliath, would say, “DAYVeeeeeey,” in a very disappointed way. Then his parents would find out and give him a lecture with their beautiful weird claymation mouths.

  After Davey and Goliath came Wonderama, which had a host named Bob McAllister. Basically, you watched him play games with the audience of children who came to the show. Bob McAllister often seemed to be pissed that he was playing games with an audience of children.

  He had the longest microphone in the world, and you knew he wanted to hit someone with it.

  • • •

  A FEW years later came The Patchwork Family, which had a lady puppeteer. There were a lot of lady puppeteers—Kukla, Fran, and Ollie introduced movies on CBS on Saturday afternoons, and Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop were on different talk shows all the time.

  • • •

  My uncle Joel was proud that he once knew Shari Lewis. “She went to my high school,” he would say. “I know,” I would say. “You told me.”

  • • •

  THE WIZARD OF OZ was on TV once a year. It was like Halloween or Christmas. You waited for it. And then a week or two before, you knew it was coming and thought about it a lot. Our first television was black-and-white, so I never knew Oz was in color, and had no idea the horse of many colors was changing colors. It didn’t make a difference.

  Once someone called during The Wizard of Oz and we all looked at one another, thinking, Who would call during The Wizard of Oz?

  There was no voice mail, no answering machines. If you didn’t answer, you never knew who it was. “They’ll call back” was a big expression.

  And later, the next time the phone rang, you would answer and say, “Did you just call?” We had one telephone number, like everyone else we knew. There were two extensions. One was on the wall of the kitchen and the other on the night table beside my father’s bed—my parents slept in two twin beds pushed together. You always knew exactly how far each telephone cord could stretch. So if you wanted to answer the kitchen phone and still see the television, you could quickly run and get it, then pull it to the den. But you would only make it to the dining room and had to hold your head a certain way and look at the TV from there.

  Plus, you would lose your seat to whoever may have been sitting on the floor. Oftentimes, someone upstairs would answer the telephone and someone downstairs would answer it. “Hello?” one would say. “Hello?” the other one would say when they picked it up right after. Usually it was a kid for me or for my brothers, and in that case, if my father was the other person to answer, he would stay listening until you screamed, “Hang up!” You knew it was him because his breathing was so loud. Sometimes you would have to say “Hang up!” several times.

  I don’t remember my father’s mouth ever being completely clo
sed, except for split seconds when he chewed something. Otherwise it was always hanging open.

  Long-distance phone calls were only ever made after eleven p.m., when the rates changed. The only excuse for talking to someone who didn’t live locally before eleven p.m. would be a crisis of epic proportions.

  • • •

  NOT ONLY was our TV black-and-white, but certain stations didn’t come in well, so you were constantly adjusting the antenna. Someone told us to add tinfoil to the antenna, so we rolled up some and added it, but that didn’t seem to help.

  • • •

  WHEN my mother drove, it was nerve-racking. It was as though she had an eight-hundred-pound weight on her foot at all times, speeding up and screeching to a halt at every stop. If a block was short, it felt like she was speeding up and slowing down at the same time. Sometimes, even now, I still feel like I am in that car.

  When someone cut my mother off, she would say, “Oooooh—you, you dumb bunny!”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say something worse.

  • • •

  EVEN IF she wasn’t driving, it was harrowing to be with my mother. When we would walk somewhere, she would suddenly shriek, “Watch out for the dog BM!” as if you would explode if you stepped on it.

  If she didn’t shriek that, she would shriek, “You stepped in the dog BM!” with the same end-of-the-world feeling.

  My brother Andrew supposedly stepped in dog BM so much that Michael said he had “the magnetic foot.”