Childhood Home

A facebook site that features my hometown asked, “What house did you grow up in?”

For me? 530 Alden Avenue, Westfield, NJ. A suburb of NYC. That’s us in 1949. “Judy, Sue, Kenny Hugh. We all love you.” Mother would sing. I was a year old when we moved into that house. Fifteen years later we moved out to a new development near the end of Lawrence Ave, in an area we used to call “Egypt Hills”. It had been a barren, open field of dry straw grass where we hunted for insects with Mr. Ferguson, the Entomologist. His son Donny and I were best friends.

I thought we were rich moving into a new, split level out there. Everything sod green where the parched earth had been. Mom bought a new cage for her sun yellow canary that came with a matching yellow cover, a sure sign to me that we had gone big time.

Dad had a law firm at #5 Broadway, Mom ferried him to and from the train station five days a week. A goodbye & hello peck on the cheek, in or out, punctuated each ride. Dad’s idea of casual was a sports jacket on weekends, his uniform for pulling crabgrass in the front lawn while swearing under his breath about the world going to hell.

Mom was in charge of us kids, Dad brought home the bacon. You could do that in those days. Mom always made us “a good breakfast” to start the day. Eggs, bacon, toast, Kippered Herring, Cod fish cakes. Dad lived on Kent cigarettes, coffee and stress. He was exempt from Mom’s breakfast rules.

I walked to and from Franklin Elementary School five days a week, memorizing the irregularities in the sidewalks, playing a game with myself of only looking down to know my location. Sycamore trees shed their bark on both sides of the streets.

Donny Ferguson lived across the street. He and I rode our bikes like a couple of maniacs, racing down to the Mountainside News Stand every Saturday when we each got our $1.00 allowance. Cards in the spokes helped up pretend they were motorcycles even though they sounded like cards in spokes. Ten 5 cent candy bars and five 10 cent comic books. We spent all afternoon on his screen porch with Superman and a sugar high.

David Callahan lived behind us on Bradford Ave. We ran the smooth dirt path between our two houses, barefoot in the summertime. At night, fat slugs squished up between our toes when they came out to cross the path in the cool dark.

We strung a telegraph line between our houses. Bedroom to Bedroom, our first e-mail.

Choir practice at St Paul’s three nights a week, Boy Scout meeting at one of the guys houses twice a month. Dad was smart. He never hosted one. I still have the plywood Santa we cut out in Robbie Rink’s basement though. We finally got to finish them even though Jimmy Siebert had said “fuck!” when a splinter went into his thumb and Mr. Rink almost had an aneurysm. He said that was the end of our meetings, no more. Where did you kids ever learn to talk like that? We met in his basement again two weeks later, finished cutting and painting our plywood Santa and no mention was ever made of the evil language.

When Joe, my sister Judy’s first boyfriend came over to our house one night, sporting a crew cut and looking like one of the Kingston Trio, he carried a huge suitcase with him. Laying it carefully down on the ottoman at the foot of Moms big living room chair, we all gathered around as he opened it up to reveal two panels of flashing electronics straight out of a Buck Rogers movie. It was the first tape recorder I had ever seen. Totally magical stuff.

Christmas days, Easter baskets full of candy, a bottle of liquid mercury from Mr. Robinson, the paint chemist who lived next door.

Our dark, musty basement had stairs with no backing. They allowed the long bony arms of the pale monster to grab my ankles if I were to only walk down, but I didn’t, I flew. Quickly throwing open the door to the furnace room, I scurried over to the lone hanging bulb and pulled the string furiously before dark creatures could grab me. The bulb was always burnt out. It never worked. I would freeze with panic, spider webs covering my face and hair, deciding my next move. All senses on full alert as I listened for shuffling feet. That’s when the huge oil furnace, covered in peeling layers of asbestos insulation like a fat grey leper with curls of dead skin hanging loose, would fire up. WHOOMP! 

When that thing lit up it seemed to jump two feet into the air. Me too. I still get a tachycardia rush from the memory.

Those were the days of Ant Farms, BB guns, white rats that got loose and colonized the entire third floor, fat tire bikes, a brand-new Ford Fairlane 500 with rocket wings…

Sister Sue wrote on the wall by her bed: “Elvis is 24!” It looked like it said that Elvis was only 4 though because the plaster wall was so spotted and damaged from a particularly wet squirt gun fight that ended with water balloons. The cream-colored wall looked like the spotted, flaking legs of my Aunt Jeedie. When she was in the old people’s home.

Elvis made his debut on Ed Sullivan

Weenie, our attack dachshund, got loose and tried to protect the entire neighborhood from the trash truck by running backwards and biting the wheels. Not a good plan. T. hat truck turned poor Weenie into a spot three feet wide and one inch thick.

Mom and I sat on the front stoop and cried when I got home from school that day.

We played “Ain’t no bears out tonight” after dinner on Summer nights until it was too dark to see and we all had to go back inside

.

George Harris had a pet Raccoon that bit everything and everyone. I had rats, turtles, dogs, cats, snakes, toads, fish and birds, but a biting Raccoon? No way.

One Summer when I was 10, Donny Fergusons older sister, Betty, told us to be careful, that the police were looking for a bad man who was driving around in the neighborhood with no pants on. She was 14, stopped in the middle of our street on her bike, telling us about it. I stared at one long leg sticking out of her plaid shorts, realizing that she shaved her legs up just past her knees, where her brown skin was covered with downy blond hair. I was strangely excited by that and also wondered why a man would drive around with no pants on. I felt that the two things were somehow oddly connected but had no idea how or why.

Flying June bugs on a long thread with a noose around one rear leg, catching fireflies in a jar, smearing our faces at night with luminescent war paint from sacrificial lightning bugs.

The smell of cap guns.

The whole neighborhood was excited to learn that one of our own, Jeffery Hamlet from up the street, would be on The Howdy Doody Show. After Buffalo Bob finished speaking with Mr. Bluster, the camera panned the peanut gallery. With families up and down Alden Avenue on the edge of their chairs looking to spot Jeffrey, there he was! His forefinger buried so far up his nose it looked like he must be scratching his brain. Oblivious to the camera, he slowly pulled small nose oysters out from those damp cavities, examined them closely and licked his finger clean. A proud moment for the hood. 

Hell, even I was grossed out.

On his tenth birthday, David Callahan and I watched Steve McQueen fight “The Blob” in the Rialto Theater.

Teresa Smyth pulled the top of her bathing suit down in Kerry Hill’s back yard. She was nine but it still seemed like a big deal at the time.

I regularly dragged a beat-up red wagon filled with coke bottles down to the Mountainside Drug store to recycle. Two cents each.

At a middle school dance in 1963, I was flopping around out there on the floor with a girl I didn’t know, but whose words would be forever burned into my brain: “You sure know how to Mash Potatoes!”

That was a turning point. Time to put away childish things and embrace even more childish things. I was ready for the big time, High School and a new house.

After suffering through the humiliation of riding the school bus for my entire sophomore year, much like the human equivalent of my dog wearing a clown collar, I bought a motorcycle as soon as I turned 16.

Back then I looked 14 and got stopped by every cop in town whenever I went out. In wintertime my hands were frozen into useless claws for the first three periods. Even so, a small price to pay.

New house, new ride, new school…I was cool

I assumed childhood to be in the rear-view mirror, that I was an adult by then, no clue that it would be another 20 years before I was able to legitimately carry that mantle.

Hallers

My Grandfather, John Michael Haller, died in 1940. He was 80 years old and had lived in Frederick, Md his whole life, running his popular “Dry Goods” store there. On our last visit 20 years ago, we could still make out the advertising for his store, and the corsets they sold, on the side of a crumbling old red barn.

Haller ancestors had been among the first group of German settlers who founded the town in 1745.

The family story is that on the Sunday he died, he put on a suit and went out to see a movie. When he came back home, he walked upstairs, turned on the light switch, and dropped dead.

A great way to go.

He’s buried in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery there next to his wife, my Grandmother, Jennie Haller. She was only 31 when she died in 1906 of complications that resulted from the birth of my father. Prior to marrying, she had been on the faculty of the “Women’s College” in Washington, D.C. as a teacher of elocution (The study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone.)

So, my father, Hugh Kenneth Haller, grew up with no mother but had “three maiden Aunts” to keep him in line.

Dad died in 1994, age 79. A Johns Hopkins Phi Beta Kapa and Harvard trained attorney, Dad had his own successful law practice in Manhattan for many years. In retirement, he helped to incorporate the city of Pine Knoll Shores, NC, becoming its first Mayor and hiring the police and Fire departments.

Dad was crazy about Mom, his little dogs, crossword puzzles and Lawrence Welk. Kids were down the line somewhere. No sports in our house, we never threw a ball back and forth. Grades were everything to him and I never tried to compete. Dad just didn’t know what to do with kids. We finally connected when I grew up to his level and we shared bad limericks. That did the trick.

Now I’m 71 myself and when I look in the mirror, I see these guys. I never knew Father Haller and only got close with my own father in the last 20 years of his life.

If everything really does happen for a reason, I like to think that I’ve been close with my own daughters from the start. I don’t carry the academic credentials my father had, but I’ve definitely got the Dad credentials, and I’m more than OK with that.

Charles Carter-Farmer/Deacon/Guru

Charles Carter was many things.

Certainly, the local white community of that small country town viewed him as little more than a poor farm hand. A second-generation free slave, living and working for the man.

To his own community in town, he was a much-respected deacon at his church, and a teacher in the ramshackle black school. He was seen as a successful man, after all, he owned a house, 25 acres, and a pick-up truck.

Charles’s family roots ran as deep in local history as Jefferson’s serpentine walls.

For me, he was a good friend and all-around life guru. We were buds.

I would walk the old stagecoach road through deep woods, flanked by parallel scars that would never fully heal. They lead me to "Charles's Farm", land that Grandpa Maverick had signed over to him.

God knows he earned it.

Given to my ancient maiden aunts when he was only 12, his family believed that he would have a better life in their care, and they needed a “man” to do the manly things a farm demanded.

Those two old sisters wore long white dresses, faded yellow and smelling like a musty hamper. When I met them in 1955 the oldest one was 101, her kid sister 97. Their big house had been falling apart for years, the upper two floors closed down by the many leaks in the roof that fed the mildewed walls. The girls lived in what had once been a dining room off the kitchen. A bed unchanged since Truman first took office sat in the middle.

My grandparents inherited Charles when they bought those 325 acres of rolling hills that had been in our own family since the early 1800’s. He simply came with the land.

After the dehydrated Apple dolls that he served finally died, Charles lived in the ruins of the big Victorian house. It had been cut in half when route 29 South moved its path 275 feet North. Those ruins were his shelter until Grandpa built him a new cinder-block palace capped with a roof covered by real shingles.

A 20’ by 30’ rectangle of molded concrete and coal cinder. One room for living, one bedroom for sleeping.

He loved it.

Charles would drop whatever he was doing when I came over, he was never doing much anyway.

 We both needed time to talk and play.

Charles never stopped talking, it’s how I would find him, stand real still where the woods opened up and listen to the quiet of the valley. If he was home, I could hear him laughing, engaged in animated conversation, with himself. Charles locator GPS. I knew that on Saturday afternoons and evenings he was probably in town. “Spooning” he called it.

A square wooden table with two ladder-back chairs took up most of the space in his main room. The door- less entry to his bedroom offering a view of the metal frame bed and his “Sunday-go-to meeting” suit hung on one wall.

During one of the periodic releases that my Uncle George got from the Western State Mental Hospital where he was a long-term patient, he, my brother Kenny, Charles and I stole an outhouse for Charles. Chain smoking unfiltered Camels, George managed to squeeze his 348 pounds behind the wheel and to back his pickup to the outhouse. We threw a rope around it and pulled it up into the truck-bed. Hauled ass down the road. Charles had never had a toilet other than God’s open woods. He didn't mind that, but it bothered Grandpa. He thought Charles should have his own shithouse.

Uncle George had gotten a brief release for keeping his pain-in-the-ass ness at a minimum and was staying in the guest cottage on the East side of the property, next to the main house. He was there with "Aunt" Connie who he met in the asylum. The buttons on her blouse were never aligned. She looked like a broken zipper and rocked silently throughout dinners, grinning at some unknown joke. George held his plate high up above his bulk, near his mouth, a burning cigarette between fingers of his left hand. Smoke, shovel, smoke, shovel. Connie grinned manically at the saltshaker and rocked.  

Not long after that, Uncle George finally managed to kill himself with Thorazine and beer, but before he did, we snatched that outhouse for Charles.

I would walk over to Charles place to sit at his table, hugged by the comforting familiarity of the smoky air from his pot of beans and ham hocks that simmered eternally on the wood stove. He added beans, meat and water from the springhouse throughout the week, months and years. Like the old bottles I would pull out of what had once been a cistern over next to the ruins of the big house, there must have been things in that pot that went back too many years to count.

There were no screens on his open windows so in warm weather that bean splattered dining table was a very busy airport of landings and takeoffs. Large bottle-flies circled overhead, just below the fly strips filled with the dried exoskeletons of their ancestors. A flyswatter hanging from the back of a chair, Charles would occasionally tire of the traffic and smash ten or fifteen fatties into table goo. When the layer of dried fly guts got too thick, Charles broke out another flower-patterned plastic tablecloth. Done! At least 8 such tablecloths were in service at any given time. He owned the only three-foot square octuple decker fly sandwich in existence.

I was missing that man last night, now gone some 50 years, so I fixed a meal in his honor. Black-eyed peas with ham hocks with a side of collard greens. This morning I’ll bake fresh buttermilk biscuits from scratch. Charles did the same in a cast iron Dutch oven on top of the stove. His biscuits were crispy black on the bottom, releasing a puff of deliciously moist promise when torn apart.

Charles taught me that a little can be more than enough, a smile and an eager approach, like that old stagecoach road, the best path to get to where I want to be.

He was a very wealthy man, and he celebrated that fact all day, every day.

hmh

Bacon Apple...

There was a “Bacon Apple” at the fair who called to me like a cheap hooker.

I knew it was trouble at first glance but was unable to stop obsessing about the crispy shredded bacon, pressed into a ball, wrapped in (drum roll) more bacon, deep fried.

Batter dipped, deep fried again & given the best Vlad the Impale treatment with a sharpened spear of white birch.

Served plasma hot like a glowing coal in partnership with a pleated white paper cup heavy with thick apple syrup. It all looks innocent enough but is eager to scald my lips, cheek; basically all hard and soft palates.

Throw in a nice glottis scald just for laughs.

Introduce the bacon ball to the syrup, like the Pentecostal preacher at a lakeside christening. 

Expect an epiphany.

That thing will offer a variation of cheap oral sex…but of the highest order.

Not so good for you perhaps, but hey, not their problem. For them it’s just business.

For me? I’ve got to practice moderation in all things...including moderation, of course.

We are all Animals in the Zoo...

Sitting in the shade, grateful for an empty bench among all the animal cages, I felt his eyes on me, even though there appeared to be no one else around.

No shit, Sherlock, and there he was.

On the other side of the worn wooden deck, stood a huge Marabou stork, upright and defiant, only 7 feet away.

He was staring me down.

We played the “Who’s going to blink first” game for a few minutes, until I said a silent “OK, fuck it” and engaged.

“Dude! I didn’t see you there! Whazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzsup?”  

He had been blank until then. I wanted to get him talking so I asked him to tell me his elevator story.

“You know, tell me about yourself in the time it would take to get to the 18^th floor. Where you from?

Marabou: “Africa, south of the Sahara.” He answered.

“You’re quite a bird! Huge! Can you even fly?”

That got him bragging.

Marabou: “In addition to hollow leg bones, I have hollow toe bones. That weight cut allows me to fly like a gazelle runs. It’s a beautiful thing. You should see me.”

 (I lied and told him that hollow toe bones had always been high on my wish list, which encouraged him to continue.)

Marabou: “We Marabou storks are bald-headed.” He boasted.

(He acted like that was a good thing in the Marabou world although he did have a little ball of reddish hair on the back of his noggin that reminded me of my great Aunt Jeedie when she was fresh from having her hair fried at the beauty parlor. Mainly I thought: Been there, done that, still doing that bald thing. We’re Simpatico!)

Marabou: “All us guys carry large air sacs. We have a long, reddish pouch hanging from our necks. The pouch is used in our courtship rituals. Mine is especially beautiful. Chicks love it.”

(I was thinking that human guys could have their balls transplanted to their necks and see how that works out. Fill them full of silicon to get that irresistible look of a two-foot scrotum hanging off our chins.)

Marabou: Like our cousins, those Turkey Vulture in the next pen over, we Marabou Storks defecate on our legs and feet to stay and look cool!”

(Not everyone’s cup of tea I thought but then after all, we start out in life shitting ourselves and get back to it by the time we’re almost done. No biggie, I may rather enjoy warming my feet like that on a cold day.)

I had started thinking about lunch and asked him: “What do you guys eat?”

Marabou: “All of us love a good grass fire or large burns. We march in front of the advancing flames grabbing animals that are fleeing. It’s an awesome buffet. Many of those delicious, stupid critters are already partially grilled!”

 (I couldn’t help admiring his ingenuity.)

Marabou: “I love nothing more than a nice dead elephant for din-din. I’ll eat carcasses and rotting material, anything from termites, flamingos’ small birds and mammals to human refuse and dead elephants. I may be a foodie, but I’m flexible.” 

I had to ask: “But how do you feel about being locked up and on display?”

Then he grew dark, feeling misunderstood.

Marabou: Who is on display here, who’s watching who? What do you really know? Some idiot suggested that we are lazy birds, because we spend so much of our time standing around motionless…and that’s true. But if you were always thinking about quarks, hadrons, dark matter and the stability of protons like I do, you would need a lot of private time to really concentrate too.”

“Good point” I offered. “So maybe you want me to move along?”

Marabou: “That would be best for both of us. I’m tired of you. You seem quite dull, and to be honest, I would have much more interest in you if you were dead and rotting.”

Getting up to go find the rest of my group, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Mr. Marabou was right. Humans are the ones on display on the world stage, being observed for the long haul.  We’re the ones who will eventually be running from burning buildings.

He scowled at me as I was walking away.

 We both knew that if, and when, humans run out of the fires, he and his buddies will be waiting…

hmh