The Summer of '66

In the summer of 1966, Lyndon Johnson was president, combat troops had been going to Vietnam for less than a year. When the news of that conflict first broke I remember going into the sun room at my parents’ house, and grabbing the globe off the top of the big console TV. What and where is this place, I wondered. Once I saw that little speck of a country on the other side of the world, my first thought was that our troops would need about two weeks to clear up whatever it was they were being sent there for. This should be quick, I thought

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and more than 2,600 others had been arrested in Selma, Ala., during demonstrations against voter-registration rules. Malcom X had been assassinated. Bill Cosby was the first African American to headline a national TV show in “I Spy.”

The movie version of The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews had made its premier, and I had just graduated from High School.

That summer I crossed paths with The Beatles, in the air.  They flew to America with their group as I flew to England with mine.

1966 marked my tenth and last year of singing with St Paul’s Episcopal Church Choir. We were one of the best examples of the English tradition of men and boys’ choirs in the States. We planned to tour the great cathedrals of England and visit our heroes, the Kings College and St Johns College choirs in Cambridge. And that’s exactly what we did.

But even though all of that was exciting, a huge cherry on top of a ten-year stint for me, the fact was that I was 18, and society was changing rapidly. It seemed like everything new and groovy was coming out of England. So it was a perfect time to visit, for many reasons other than the choir.

Mainly, I remember the pubs, a variety of great beers, lime and lager, cutting blocks overflowing with fresh cheeses and breads.  Darts were revered as a semiprofessional sport, warm camaraderie the theme of the day. Being “Yanks” carried a degree of celebrity, we rarely paid for anything.

Piccadilly Circus was bustling with flocks of pigeons that shit on our heads and clothes as well as the birds in mini-skirts that did the same thing to our young egos. As always though, money talks, so the strip show that a few of us paid for, delivered as promised. A clear case of “be careful what you ask for.” On a makeshift stage in a small, musty basement, set up like a schoolroom with wooden chairs, toothless old men sat in the front row waiting for “Little Annie Oakley” to appear on stage in her cowboy hat and fringed skirt. She wore nothing under that fake buckskin and they knew it. Her specialty was to insert and then pop out syphilitic Ping Pong balls from between her legs and lob them into the gaping mouths of her regulars, all hopelessly drunk. She squeezed out high balls to the old farts doing their best to muster sufficient equilibrium necessary to make a catch. An enduring image for me.

Another image, tattooed onto my temporal lobes right next to Annie, is more of an English Sharks Vs Jets episode. That was a movie, the Mods Vs Rockers were the British version, but real. Rebel kids in the news everywhere, riding scooters or motorcycles depending on their particular alliance.  Rockers dressed like John Travolta in “Grease” rockers were preppy, jocks.

Three of my buddies and I had been out drinking and punting on the Thames, daring each other to stand up in that narrow, swaying, clinker-built boat.  Every attempt was met with an immediate, violent shimmy that sent ripples, Mini-Tsunamis, across both sides of the River. We survived, wet from the knees down, and retreated to a nearby Pub. There we relived the afternoon. Stories became fueled and twisted by more ales and lagers in a sticky red vinyl booth.

Curfew for the dorm where we were staying was 11PM but we never made it. That night though, we decided to make a feeble attempt to show improvement in our “attitude” and reduce the ear cancer from the man who sang bass and acted as the dorm guard. His lectures to those of us who had just graduated, graduated, his volume, frequency and frustration with our inability to get in by curfew, caused him to become a pain in the ass. We found that the more he irritated us the more we needed the solace of excessive drinking late into the night. But we were sufficiently contrite that night that we decided the throw him a bone.  We started walking back in the direction of the dorms around 10:45. That would get us in before 11, at least. Wouldn’t want to actually be on time and look like a bunch of pussys though.

Shuffling, stumbling, moving forward down a dark intersection, we were suddenly confronted by a group of young men, obvious Rockers with their leather jackets hanging casually open, like they had just been pub crawling too. Twenty of them, about our age. The lead guy looked at us and simply asked “What are you boys doing here?” That was the signal for all of them to pull out knives. Cheap Italian switchblades with ill-fitted bone handles and a prominent button spring that would fire right in your pants pocked if you accidently put pressure on it. I know, because a year before, my brother and I were wrestling on the basement floor of my parents’ house when that happened. He had my cheap Italian switchblade with ill-fitted bone handles in his hip pocket. We pressed together, it fired, and I got stabbed in my upper thigh. Right then though, looking at twenty blades, pointed our way like so many double edged razors, caught our attention.

I don’t remember how we even started to answer the question, but it didn’t matter. As soon as we said two words, the switchblades disappeared with a unison shout out from the guys surrounding us: “You’re Yanks!” They had thought we were Mods cutting through their hood. Nope, we’re Yanks. Although we had been given warm welcomes most places we went, we didn’t realize the considerable degree of good feelings about yanks until those boys kept us up very late into the night. We partied at their pub, with them buying the drinks, and acting like we were movie stars.

That was 51 years ago; the memory is as fresh as the bread we pulled apart and spread with soft cheese, warm in the company of our peers. At first, we sounded different when we spoke, but that distinction quickly vanished. We became mirror images of each other. Our packaging was different, but that night, we were blood brothers, all from the same family, enjoying the hell out of our new familiarity, being with each other, making memories.

White Lines...

A few years ago, when Ruth was a Nanny in Venice, she and her seven-year-old charge were driving to the grocery store comfortably tucked into her little white Prius. At the same time, they both spotted a man peddling along in the bike lane, just up ahead. He looked like a Spandex wrapped carnival ride on his three-wheel recumbent bike, his spinning flags flapping rainbow colors as nylon ribbons waved and twisted in the wind behind him. Multiple reflectors splattered dancing lights in his wake, a rolling mirror ball encircled by a rapidly shifting Pollock canvas.  You certainly couldn’t miss him, and, of course, that was the point,

Ruth said to her wide-eyed passenger: “My Dad has a bike just like that. He rides it all over the place in St Augustine, where I grew up. He has lots of stuff on his bike too.  Lights, horns, flags, all kinds of gear. I’ll bet he could live for a week on that thing, given all the junk he carries in the black bag like that guy has.”

The boy took it all in, studying the circus bike rider as they carefully swerved to avoid crowding him as he veered over the white line of his lane.

Silent, lost in thought for another mile, considering his first encounter with a three wheeled biker outfitted like a one-man band, he finally asked Ruth: “Well, do you laugh at him?”

Ruth paused only briefly before she admitted: “Well yes, as a matter of fact, Yes, yes we do!”

Satisfied that laughter was the only appropriate response when spotting such a highly adorned and obviously clown-like three wheeled display, he sat back quietly until they pulled into the Sam’s Club parking lot. Suddenly coming alive again, he began to mentally run down the isles he was planning to plunder as Ruth parked the car neatly between the white lines.

Heading toward the double glass doors sluggishly opening and closing under the “Sam’s Club” marquee while shoppers were swallowed up and spit out again, the boy took a quick glance back over his shoulder at their car, approving of the fact that it was parked properly, centered perfectly between the white lines... as everything in life should be, he thought to himself.

The blessing of a priest..

Pausing briefly, I snapped this shot of that old tree, stretching gnarled fingers out over the lake like the blessing of a priest.

An almost imperceptible breeze carried faint whispers, laughter and shouts of “look at me Dad!” from ghost images of two little girls, 26 years prior. We lived on that side of the lake then, the opposite now. Little, and everything, has changed. Only the old Cedar appears to be unaffected by time.

Tree monkeys challenged each other, and Newton’s laws. Both girls eager to climb higher, farther out, as I made dad sounds on the ground, urging caution and spinning tales of alligator gangs, lurking just below. Pure entertainment for young primates wearing bird nest hairstyles and favorite T-shirts, food stained and paw marked, that they slept in the night before.

Those girls are grown women now, off on their own.

The tree is somewhat darker this morning, less colorful, solemn with birds staring out over the water like aging snowbirds on condo balconies, gazing out to sea.

Remembering...

Home Again!

Being in San Diego for Thanksgiving, couldn’t have been any more fun. Our nightly dinners were epic. We bought live Dungeness Crabs at the Oriental market and fixed them at home. A radiant patio heater stood guard by a cozy booth at our favorite Sushi place. Uni that smelled of the ocean. Gonads have never tasted so good. Toro like butter.

Thanksgiving itself was an all-day epicurean feast. The hot tub heavenly, visits to local landmarks, super afternoon excursions. I couldn’t love my family nor enjoy wallowing in their company any more than I already do. Bright, upbeat, successful people. Funny as hell. On our last night there, we played a game on an iPhone where one person holds the phone to their forehead as it displays a word. Teammates have to get the person with the iPhone to guess the word without them actually saying it. Then the phone gets passed to a member of the opposite team. But tension is mounting as the clock is ticking and whichever team is stuck with the phone when time runs out, looses. We got to the point of throwing the phone into the lap of an opponent, just to get it out of our hands. At one point I was trying to guess the word “prostitute” while pointing accusingly at Ruth. We have a video, laughing our asses off.

Is there anything better than sharing incredible food and unending laughter with the people you love?
Sadly, perhaps, and with apologies to Ruth & Andrew, Hannah & Pablo, and my bright and funny wife, Carla, the answer is yes, yes there is something better.

Coming back home. That’s my favorite part of any vacation, you know, that end part. Not the very last part, but when it is completely over and I’m back in my own house.

The icing on that particular cake? The urgency of this dog to give me manic kisses. Doing her best circus jumps, greeting me again and again, room to room, every five minutes, darting her tongue out with each high jump. Doing her best to slip me some tongue that only moments before had been licking furiously at the nasty glob of dark goo on our concrete steps out back where I had accidentally stepped on a small toad last week.

It’s good to be home.

Hitting Sticks...

That’s Don on the left, he was one of the house-mates in the four story bachelor pad that we all shared. Each guy had his own floor. Don was into Gong Fu, while I was training in Tae Kwon Do in those days. We used to spar in the living room, which was too small to really let loose. Sometimes we would run around the lake, carrying weapons, in the middle of the night. We always paused down in Lake Anne Plaza, to spar.

That was in the mid 1970’s, so occasionally there would be a bunch of stoned hippy kids, about ten years younger than us, still hanging out, draped boneless over the long stairs that descended down to the water’s edge. Don and I both dressed out in full Gis, his brown, mine white, with bare feet to better help us pause and fight. The first time we came running silently into the plaza and started hitting sticks, the sound reverberated like rapid-fire shots off of the two story half circle of store-fronts that faced the lake. Those semi-comatose kids on the stairs immediately sprang to full alert, and almost shit themselves. Three AM and a white guy in a white gi was battling a black guy in brown, both in full uniform, swinging fighting sticks and seemingly trying their best to knock each other TFO. Of course we were just two friends out sparing, but those guys had no clue.

Over time, they became excited for our fairly regular appearances on warm summer nights, often giving us a round of applause that also reverberated around the plaza. Shots and applause. It sounded more like the ovation of a sick crowd at Ford’s Theater than 10 or 12 guys who were just happy to have something going on other than staring at the water for another month or two, wondering what they were going to do with themselves when the weather turned cold.

This picture was taken for an article in the local paper that highlighted the growing interest in martial arts at the time. Right after this shot, Don stood up and I busted him in the nose. It was completely my fault, failing to properly check my punch. He bled down his uniform as I repeatedly apologized for my klutziness. Don just laughed it off.

He knew that, as in life itself, when you mix it up, shit happens .

The Flemington Fair

When I was a kid growing up in Westfield, NJ, the annual Flemington Fair was a big deal. Packed with colorful rides, spinning and quaking, flashing lights and blaring calliope music…mostly run by ex-felons on some work release program. The equipment always looked abused and ready to fail. That was part of the excitement, wondering if yours was going to be the seat that would come loose in mid-air and fly off into the haunted house, three booths down the midway.

The Funnel cakes there were deep fried in oil that hadn’t been changed since the previous owner had done it more than a year prior. I ate them last, knowing that those bad boys would give me terrible stomach aches and explosive diarrhea, a carnival prize for the long ride home. With me cramping up in the back seat of my parents Ford Fairlane 500, Mom would tell dad: “We need to stop right away, pull over at that Howard Johnsons up there and let Hugh out.” She was more interested in getting me out of the car than into a rest room. I’m a dad, so I understand that. As a kid who could normally eat anything, much like a young dog, I could wolf it down, still can, but I think the Funnel Cake guy was pissed off about being the Funnel Cake guy and added a “secret” ingredient or two. I thought about a science class I’d had in 6^th grade when the teacher spoke of how things could replicate themselves by budding, like a yeast starter in beer. Since I had the same reaction two years in a row, I couldn’t help but think that the funnel cake guy may have added a little starter of his own. Something had been budding. Mainly, I knew that I was full of shit. My friends and family assure me that little has changed over the years, but only those Funnel Cakes from long ago had the ability to make me understand what nasty menstrual cramps must be like. They were ahead of their time, like young wives who make their husbands wear sympathy bellies so they would better know the joys of pregnancy. I can bond with women better now. Thanks, Funnel Cakes!

That fair crowd was something else, but I don’t know what. I didn’t quite know where they came from but they didn’t look anything like the people I grew up around in our little white-bread suburb of manicured lawns and show-parade church Sundays that I was used to. One guy drunkenly bumping shoulders in the crowd looked as if he had been cut in half lengthwise, like Bluto was always trying to do to Popeye when they worked together in a cartoon saw mill. Unfortunately, when the doctors sewed that man’s two sides back together, the zipper wasn’t properly aligned. Like a too hastily buttoned shirt, this man was askew from head to foot, one eye even higher than the other. Actually, his whole left side was higher, and he wore a corrective shoe to compensate. I thought about that man for many years afterward, wondering if he had ever worked in a sawmill.

Without question, my favorite attraction, the one I yearned for and pestered the folks about before they finally broke down and took me, was the freak show. Such things were still legal in those days. Several summers in a row, “Pinhead” was their main attraction. She stood just outside the main tent flap, next to a waving canvas sign that boasted of her ability to count to ten. I never heard her make it past four, but that wasn’t the point. The ads pulled me in with their claim that she had a “head the size of a baseball”. At age 11, that was just about the coolest thing I had ever heard of. These days, I guess we catch most of these kinds of things in a prenatal stage and I understand why freak shows are no longer allowed, but Pinhead really appeared to be enjoying the passing crowd as much as we enjoyed seeing her. How else could she make money now anyway? She was happy, all smiles, and seemed to really try to get her numbers in order. She was a star! Anyway, her issues left her few options. Not like the four-legged girl inside. She could do lots of other jobs. How many of us are able to count the exact number of legs on a toll booth worker or the girl selling tickets at the local movie theater? We only see them from the waist up. Hell, maybe some have seven legs...

Just inside the tent entrance sat a fat lady. Alone on a makeshift stage with only an oversize chair for company, she reigned like the queen of quantity, the opal of obese, a bulging butterball. Chunky and colorful, draped in a flowing Moo Moo, patterned with yards of red roses. She wasn’t really all that fat by today’s standards though, maybe 400 pounds. You can see the same at any midnight madness sale at Walmart these days. Scooters overflowing with flesh motoring down the chips isle. We didn’t speak as I entered but I was the last one out, so before leaving, she and I were alone, just sizing each other up. Clever boy as always, all I could come up with was “You sure are fat!”.  It was offered as a compliment. She said” “Yup!” and that was it. Our moment. My brush with stardom.

That job had to suck, how boring would it be to just sit there for hours, days, years? She’s one who could be much happier now, a computer programmer maybe, or making ads for Nutrisystem, hobnobbing with Marie Osmond.

The fat lady was just OK, as was the tattoo girl. These days just another face in the crowd, everyone has tattoos, but at least that woman had a beard too. Again though, I think Walmart has several. I know I saw a very large scooter jockey with sideburns one evening but was unable and unwilling to determine gender.

 Another super special performer though, aside from pinhead, was a guy who could pass a thin sword through his body without pain or blood. He pulled handfuls of flesh out from his legs and stomach, skewering them for the crowd. Anyone who wanted one, was given an extra-long pin with a colorful bead on one end. We were invited to push the pin right through his outstretched flesh when he pointed to a certain spot and nodded approval. My older sisters were totally grossed out by that and immediately left the tent. They gave me their pins so I stayed and eagerly skewered away, feeling lucky as hell to have three pins.  I felt like he and I bonded over that and thought of him fondly whenever I made Shish Kabob as an adult.

The snake lady was too obvious. She spent hours with her head stuck up through the top of a wooden chest that supported an “aquarium”. Inside was a huge paper-mâché snake, curled and ready to strike. You couldn’t see the woman’s neck, just her head sticking out above the coils, making faces and flicking her tongue at the crowd.

The next room was cramped, feted and damp. It smelled like the mildewed tent walls that rippled slowly with the winds outside. Shelves full of bottles lined the walls, oddities, backlit and floating in formaldehyde. Each jar challenged people to figure them out. What the hell is that? On closer inspection, most were obvious fakes. A fish with a monkey head, a baby goat with another half-goat sticking out from its back. I think the world’s biggest rat was just a fat Opossum.

Dad never went inside, he thought it was dumb. He didn’t like anything about the fair but wouldn’t let mom make the drive by herself. Mom was creeped out by the whole freak show thing and hustled quickly past Pinhead and the barker next to her to wait for me on safer ground. There really wasn’t anything at the fair for either of them. They both just wanted to get back home, their parental duty behind them, and go out for an adult dinner, alone. That's exactly how I feel after I take the dogs out for a long romp in the country.

These days of course, freak shows are a thing of the past, we’ve become more homogenized and safe. Everything is padded, and PG, no visually sharp edges to cut or entertain. Make no mistake though, there are still plenty of freaks out there, but now they look somewhat like everyone else. It's only when they open their mouths to speak that you feel the need for fight or flight. The true professional freaks even have high paying jobs on capital Hill. They dress in suits. Some of them make millions preaching on TV.

Like the packed crowds at the Flemington Fair, we keep coming back, reelecting career politicians who promise real change in each new election. We fill the collection plates of the grown descendants of snake oil salesmen. We're so desperate to be anything other than what we are. Politicians and preachers sell false hope. The freak shows sold gratitude. We were glad that our heads are larger than a baseball or that we didn't have to shave around our eyeballs to see.

Sadly, perhaps, the true, old fashioned freak shows have gone the way of Cherry bombs, lawn darts, Green stamps and phone booths. Clark Kent could get arrested for stripping in public.

That spaceship of a Ford Fairlane 500 with three flatulent kids fighting in the back seat, one with explosive diarrhea, and no seat belts anywhere in sight, is just a memory.

What of Pinhead you ask? I'm not sure, but I think I may have actually spoken with her yesterday. It appears that these days she is answering customer service phones for Comcast.