A Tape Worm Teaching Moment...

In 1956, when I was 8 years old, I found myself sitting in one of my favorite places on earth, the front room of my distant great cousin, Alice Clark. A tough old Southern,Virginia, can-do kind of woman, who had buried multiple husbands and survived cancer’s best efforts to kill her. She smoked unfiltered Camels, end to end, and was wrinkled way beyond what would be expected of her 50 plus years.

Alice looked like a dark brown apple doll from Stuckey's. Ninety-eight pounds of sinew and bone, Iggy Pop in a fading house-dress.  Her voice deep, gargled in nicotine and framed by brown stained teeth interspersed with white porcelain caps.

Our mutual attention turned to the dachshund sleeping soundly to my left. Alice raised them, pups from her pups, Conversation stopped as we both focused on a glistening tapeworm segment undulating its way out of the anus of that particular dog as he lay pressed into the cushions next to me.

Bright sunshine cut like a laser through the wooden slats of her front window, slicing cleanly through drifting clouds of cigarette smoke, spotlighting our knees and that anus escapee, moist from crawling through the bowels of prison as he made his move for freedom.  

Alice got impatient, she wasn’t good at waiting for anything. Holding a smoking Camel in her left hand, she reached across my lap with her right and grabbed that tapeworm with her thumb and forefinger, pulling it free of the puckered sphincter and carrying it swiftly to the ashtray on the crowded coffee table at our knees.

There, she promptly smashed it into goo with her bare thumb. Mushed into the cigarette ashes, one small glob still moving in slow motion, winding down.

Wiping her hand clean on the dog blanket that covered the whole couch, she said: “Damn worms!” as she once again took a long draw on her cigarette.

In that moment, my world became instantly wider and more interesting. I knew with greater certainty than ever before, that if one tough old Virginia woman could throw out the rule book of what I had been raised to believe ladies were capable of, and unflinchingly pull a worm out of the ass of her dog, squashing it into finality with her bare fingers like that, for me and my life, the possibilities were suddenly endless.

I knew I could face, and do anything.

Five and One...

When asked: “How old are you?” Hannah claimed to be five while Anthony opted for one. Neither was correct. They were at that goofy age when kids just throw up some fingers and laugh, changing the number of fingers they held skyward a couple of times before the spinning carnival wheel stopped on five or one.

They were happy with anything right then, nothing else mattered when they were sitting in the basket of Ruth’s bike.

It was an adult three wheeler, bought from an old lady, winding down her last days in a trailer park two miles up the highway toward town, just past the U-Haul place.

That tricycle was better than a Disney ride, and piloted by the most entertaining driver in the business, Ruth.

Hannah idolized her sister, Anthony was in love.

Ruth was five years older at a time when five years is huge. She could have been in her twenties; it would be all the same to them. Ruth knew best…where to go, how crazy fast, how maddeningly slow.

Like a proper carny, Ruth knew how to work the ride. Shake up the passengers, spinning in the Cul-de-sac, off-balance, in and out of control, screaming.

Because Ruth and Hannah home-schooled, they were always around. Several of the kids in the hood would drop by when they could, knowing the girls would be there. But for two or three years, Anthony was always at our house.

A non-stop jabber machine that frequently made no sense at all, but was delighted as hell to have someone, anyone, to do it with.

In those pre-Ritalin years, if you could have ever gotten Anthony to hold still and think it through, which would never have happened, he would have told you that his very favorite thing in the whole wide world was to go for a fast, unbalanced, bone-jarring ride with Ruth, bouncing along in a basket next to Hannah.

 — with Ruth Haller Grubb and Hannah GypsyOn.

Happy Anniversary!

Hard to believe it’s been a year already. Beautiful wedding, no question, but more importantly, it was for one of those rare couples who couldn’t be any more perfectly matched.

I remember when you first told us about Andrew. I asked the usual Dad questions. Yes, he has a good job. No, never married, no long term baggage. Yes, he comes from a good family. No skeletons in the closet, He’s an accomplished project engineer, with Skanska for 11 years now, a young superstar. Started working there at age 24, right after he got his engineering degree.

Hell, at age 24 I was still eating Play Dough.

The guy is always smiling, upbeat and cheerful. A ball of positive energy. “What is there to be down about?” he asked. Over the last year he has put in his normal 10 hour days at work and them come home and renovated your house and back yard, installing a sprinkler system, retaining walls, clearing, planting, hauling…he’s a worker. Smart. If he can Google it, he can build it.

When I asked about his interest in the new pot laws there in California, he laughed and said: “Drug free since 83”, (when he was born). Never cared about any of that stuff, he’s already high on life.

The best part? He’s crazy about you. Thinks he won the lottery. I understand.

All your life, you’ve brought us nothing but happiness and pride. I don’t remember you ever having a tantrum, no whining as a child, no teen drama. A reader, a writer, a thinker, a dog lover, the kind of girl the other girls sought out for advice.

With fifteen years as a personal assistant/nanny/girl Friday to the rich & beautiful out there in La La land, your own resume couldn’t be any more targeted for your new role. You’ve run the showplace homes, helped with the businesses, made the travel arrangements, the staff, the reservations, coordinated with the schools, counseled the children, advised the parents, and generally been a smart, stabilizing, influence for families where buying more expensive toys for the kids was not what they really needed. They needed someone to listen, someone to care.

No one does it better than you.

The fact that those jobs took you all over the globe to the best resorts and restaurants, living a high-end life of personal chefs and privilege, was perfect training. You’ve seen first-hand how little all that stuff really matters. Love matters, being a family matters, paying real attention to your kids…matters.

So Andrew will continue to enthusiastically make waves and run hard in his career. You’ll always turn the house into a home. All of that reminds him why he works so much, and what he’s working for. A home, a family, you.

Both of you have your priorities in order, you know what matters.

So happy one-year anniversary you guys. I do wish you all the best, but we both know you’ve already got that.

It’s perfect.

Taxi Driver

Somewhere in my misspent youth, I picked up the idea that there are several crucial building blocks to becoming an infamous writer. For Bukowski it was a diet of booze, women, and dead end jobs. I figured that if I drank heavily and drove a cab, at least I would have two out of three essentials covered.

Bukowski steps into Taxi Driver to shake hands with Travis Bickle.

After a year of living in a remote cabin in the deep woods of Chauncey, Ohio. Carla and I were ready to get back to civilization. We had moved there immediately after getting married, both of us enrolling in classes at Ohio University. I was just spinning my wheels in grad school though; mostly I studied Carla and the THC levels of the local sinsimilla crops.

Migrating back to Northern Virginia, and much to the disgust of my father, a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa who only spoke to me when my grades were good, so we never spoke, I launched my career as a cab driver. Even though I had recently turned 30, my emotional age was around 17. Anything that would help me put off adult employment and responsibilities for as long as possible, would be perfect. Plus, it was writer training, right?

I threaded long chains of pop tops from beer cans and strung them around our little apartment like garlands of Walmart Christmas lights, smoking a mountain of ganja while doing it. I was making all the right moves, well on my way to becoming a name writer.

A beat up black Chevy four door was my office, one of the septuplets owned by a fledgling cab company operating out of Herndon, Va. Dulles Airport to National and back were the money runs. Businessmen rushed back and forth as well as diplomats who came in from overseas. They flew into Dulles Airport with their dance cards booked, filled with dates to meet partners who played the shell game on Capitol Hill. The Washington Waltz.  All those suits and ties, seemingly gleaned from the same closet, an inbred stock of family members hanging out there with near identical profiles, all in muted colors and fabrics. Nothing too wild. Save that for after hours when the hookers and blow were flowing freely.

Those tight collar uniforms, I’ve never understood them, nor the obligatory ties that also ran a very limited gamut of colors and patterns. It was as if they thought the more boring and bland the suit and tie, the more trustworthy they appeared. Those people made for interesting passengers though and loved a good story.

So I lied. Any outrageous story I thought would entertain could work. After all, I probably would never see them again.

They loved hearing about the jail time I did as a result of the bad decisions made in my early teens. The suits were crazy about a rehab story. Or any brush with fame. My cousin, Steve McQueen was a crowd pleaser, and yes, Ali was every bit as hot in person. She even hit on me once when she and Steve were on the outs. She was drunk, but I didn’t press my luck. Stevie could fly into a jealous rage and go ballistic in a heartbeat, waving that pistol of his around like an out-of-control fire hose.

“For two years, I lived with my twin brother, Glenn Frey, in Topanga Canyon. You know, The Eagles? We used to party with Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. Those were some seriously crazy days. He doesn’t like me to talk about it now that he’s trying to be all respectable and act like none of that stuff Rolling Stone wrote about really happened, but I was there, so you can ask me anything.”

The tips were great and correlated directly to how much my passengers believed my stories. I perfected lying as an art form.

That was the high-end of cab driving. Clean, educated, antiseptic, homogenized and morally bankrupt.

The truly fun stuff came at the end of the month when the welfare checks and food stamps arrived. Everybody who didn’t own a car needed to go to the grocery store. Those people didn’t tip but were a lot more honest than the suits. They never pretended to be anything other than what they were.

There was the lady with five kids under the age of six. All had bad colds, 24-7. Mucus factories who had never been introduced to a tissue. Their hands and sleeves were fine for that. Crusty, but fine. Thick greenish snot crept down their upper lips until their tongues could cut the flow like a red slug windshield wiper.

I kept a beach towel and some spray cleaner in the trunk, just for them.

One sunny morning I got a dispatch to pick up at a local lounge. Must have been an all-nighter for the woman who staggered out and got into the back. Squeezed into a stained cocktail dress, a terrible looking mess in an outfit that was two sizes too small and older than the bar she came out of, blind drunk. My immediate goal as I took two cardboard pine-scented Christmas trees out of the glove compartment and draped them over my rear-view mirror, was to get her out of my car. She lived in apartments that were only a few blocks away, so it was a short ride, but things went from bad to worse when we got to her place. After I pulled into the parking lot and told her the fare, she leaned forward in her seat, 50-year-old breasts straining at the skimpy restraints of her dirty purple outfit, stinking of booze, cigarettes, and vomit, she croaked at me in a guttural rasp: “Would you take these in payment?” That’s when she pulled down her top, letting those heavy old mammaries drop to the floor, flaccid balloons that hung like used condoms stuffed with lumpy chicken fat, scarred by stretch marks that pulled all the way to the baseboard.

Then she promptly passed out.

She exited my cab the same way, unconscious. With my hands firmly clamped around each of her ankles, I pulled her out and up. Out of my cab and up a short flight of stairs. Dress twisted around her waist, a torn black lace rag between her legs, head banging with each step, dumped unceremoniously, blocking the main door to her apartments.

One of the regulars. I knew that I would see her again in a few days and get the fare she owed me.

After literally dropping her off, I was in dire need of immediate writer training and decided to drink and drive for the remainder of my shift.

Bukowski would have been proud.

Most of the food stamp & welfare crowd consisted of single mothers with too many children. Overweight breeding factories, an obvious history of poor dental care, the occasional black eye. They stocked up on groceries at the end of the month. Shopping carts piled high with processed foods got thrown unceremoniously into the trunk.  Huge bags of Cheetos and potato chips, cases of soda and gallons of sugar water swirling with red dye No 5, 24 pack boxes of snack cakes, cheap bakery items, candy of all shapes and sizes…all of it squashed together in grocery bags designed for lighter use.

Beer and cigarettes were top priority supplies and necessitated their own stop on the way back.

Sad, angry people living dead end lives, fueled on a diet of Cheez Whiz squirted on the top of a cracker of desperation.

Perfect fodder for an aspiring writer living in a dead end job.

All of the cabbies shared a radio frequency, our dispatcher calling out unit numbers and pick-up destinations. Jimmy, the heavy African American driver who was unfailingly happy all the time, would bubble over the open air at the end of his shift each night that he was going home “to gets me a piece of pussy!” He was so delighted with himself and never considered the fact that other drivers may have passengers listening to his declarations.

I kept my own radio turned down low.

Our English driver, fresh from one of those huge British cabs in Manchester, announced over the radio one afternoon that his passenger had been explosively incontinent in his back seat. After a few moments of uncertainty, a fellow driver explained to Jimmy what that meant “Someone shit all over Burt’s cab!” The rest of us were thankful that it had been Burt’s passenger, not ours. We were helpful like that. Burt had no choice but to bring the cab back into base and hose down the entire back seat. Apparently Burt immediately found other work, as that was the last time any of us saw him. He couldn’t take it. I guess the Manchester passengers were never incontinent in the English cabs.

At night, drunks, whores, drug addicts, and fares who would ride and then quickly run off into the dark when we got to their destinations, all balanced out the prim and proper suits who shuttled between airports by day. Ultimately, the suits were more larcenous but their wrapping was their camouflage that helped to open doors.

My most memorable passenger, hands down, was a woman named Lilly. A regular end-of-the monther, we all knew where Lilly lived and hoped the dispatcher would send someone else to go get her. She wore the same faded Moo Moo every time, floral patterned, a fitting garment that didn’t fit at all. Lilly herself was rather bovine in structure and conversational ability. Constantly chewing her cud, she never spoke. Neither she, nor the stained, flowered tent she wore, had aged well.  Although the dispatcher told us where to take her, we already knew. Grocery shopping at the Safeway store on Broad Street.

The first time I was dispatched to pick-up Lilly, I was advised to bring along a roll of paper towels. It turned out that Lilly didn’t speak for a reason. She must have been taught that a lady doesn’t speak when her mouth is full. Although it was obvious, as Jimmy put it “She ain’t got no teef” the paper towels were necessary but had nothing to do with toothlessness. It was her cud that was the problem.

Lilly kept her change in her mouth.

Expert at spitting out exact change, Lilly was able to distinguish between quarters, dimes, and nickels. Bald gums and her wet tongue kept order in that rancid coin bank of hers. As we pulled up to her apartment, I would wad up five or six paper towels and hand them back to her over my right shoulder, looking straight ahead as I did so. After that first time, I couldn’t stand to watch Lilly make change again, dribbling out slime coated coins into a nest of paper towels. She would sit the damp wad on the back of my bench seat as I used more towels to grab that heavy clump and throw it into the open glove compartment. There it sat until the end of my shift, an unwrapped present for the dispatcher, with love from Lilly.

It wasn’t even the Lilly’s of the world that finally got me out of that cab though, I loved it. No, it was my dear wife who shamed and belittled me into taking a shower, putting on clean clothes, sobering up and going out and getting a real job.

She didn’t realize that she was cutting short my dead-end, down and out writer training. The fact that I don’t have books on best-seller lists today, is clearly her fault.

I do miss those easy days though. I even miss Lilly.

So now I’ve started keeping my change in a big wad of paper towels stashed away in the glove compartment of my car. 

It’s my homage to Lilly, and what was on track to be a brilliant writing career, truncated too soon by real life and a wife who apparently just didn’t understand.

Dinner at Cheapskate Bay Seafood House in Uncle George’s Suede Jacket…

Carla was pregnant with Hannah in 1986 and could never get enough to eat. She was highly selective though. Ice cream and seafood topped her list. Ruth was four and The Chesapeake Seafood House in Herndon, Va. was our favorite place to splurge. Alaskan Crab legs, AYCE for $8.99.

Hard to believe that price now.

We lived in the woods in those days. Carla looked a bit like Olive Oil if Olive had swallowed an oversize watermelon, but Carla was prettier, and she could eat. I was no slouch either, regularly running a path through the woods between Reston and Herndon 4 or 5 times a week. 6 miles round trip. That, combined with regularly smoking rolled appetite enhancers, so common back in the daze, gave me the ability to really pack in the chow then too.

I could roll those babies with one hand. While driving.

Since $8.99 was the most expensive AYCE item on the menu, you could substitute anything else on the menu that was a lesser price, which was everything. Fried shrimp, oysters, flounder, trout, frog legs, clams, hush puppies, fries.

Sodas with unlimited refills were .50 cents.

Carla was our designated driver, she doesn’t drink. I do, so I would order a large pitcher of beer for $2.95.

These prices make this sound like a Grandpa “I remember when…” story. I guess it is. We called the place “Cheapskate Bay” because for us, it was.

All of us were excited to go.

Ruth got unlimited quarters to feed the video game machine. Standing tall on a wooden crate, leaning over the long glass surface, the shadows of an animated little girl surrounded by a halo of multicolored flashing lights bounced off the ceiling. Bells and whistles celebrated nonstop, as if she won a Vegas Jackpot with every move.

One particular night, I wore the green suede jacket that my Grandparents gave me after my Uncle George managed to finally kill himself in the asylum. Thorazine and beer did the trick. It was a very nice jacket. Expensive. George had worn it in just the right amount so it was soft like flannel pajamas.

I went through a mountain of crab legs and shrimp, and pretty much everything else AYCE.

Being there with my beautiful, pregnant wife, keeping Ruth supplied with quarters, nestled in a private booth in the back of the room, wrapped up in my new suede jacket, being served plate after plate of decadent fried seafood…all that should be more than enough, right?

Well, almost. The kicker for me was the pitcher of beer and the fact that the place served liquor. Vodka shots @ $1.50 per. Count me in.

My designated driver was oblivious to almost everything other than the piles of crab legs that she kept inhaling. A purest, Carla never messed with the substitutions, just more crab legs, please. She went through six refills that night.

I couldn’t keep up.

Carla would shell the crab from her last batch and slip it into a plastic bag in her purse. I gave her lectures about us getting caught, the need to do the right thing even when no one was watching, setting a good example for Ruth since she was at an age where she saw everything, personal morality and challenging her justifications for ripping off corporate America.

She would nod in agreement while slipping more crab into her purse.

I got to the point of being fat like a tick, delightfully inebriated, and impatient to leave. Carla was on refill number 5 and promised that number 6 would be her last. But I knew that then she would need yet another plate for her purse.

Wanting to expedite the larceny and go home, I started shelling crab for her, amassing a large buttery ball the size of an Acorn squash. Squeezing it into my jacket pocket, we were ready to roll.

Leaning on my pregnant but sober wife, Ruth and I staggered out to the car. Ruth was falling asleep as she walked. She and I passed out on the car ride home to our cabin in the boonies.

The next morning, I was up early, strong coffee in hand as I stepped out into the sunny front yard to say Hello to Ohio the Wonder Dog. She stood guard all night at that old house in the woods. Within five years of our moving in to that 1729 era cabin, our five acres turned into a small piece of a huge development, Ashburn Farms, just outside of Washington, D. C.

Million dollar McMansions grew like mushrooms on wet ground.

When Hannah was born, we moved to a modern house. A log home, yes, but newly built. Everything worked. It even had a thermostat on the wall and real AC. Civilized as hell.

The whole area was changing rapidly, as were we. Some things got left behind in the shuffle. I have fond, somewhat hazy, memories of our AUCE dinners at Cheapskate Bay Seafood House, a little girl who was excited to play video games all by herself without any help, a wife who went through crab legs as if she was eating for two, and a waiter who kept bringing me seafood and vodka shots, whenever I gave him a “thumbs up”.

One of the things that I have a fond memory of, albeit very brief, was Uncle George’s suede jacket. I discovered the buttered crab in the left pocket late in the afternoon the day after our dinner. The jacket had spent the night in our car, sleeping soundly like a cat draped over a sun-drenched back seat, as the inside of the car heated up like a steam room.

In my hands, that jacket had an unreasonably short shelf life. The entire left side around the pocket was stained dark like the bottom of a well worn shoe. Wicking out another 6 inches from there, butter turned the green suede black. The whole jacket smelled like stale cat food. A total loss.

But we had an awesome night.

I’m sorry that I ruined your jacket though, Uncle George, but I guess you had bigger issues to worry about at the time, being recently dead and all.

Pop!

Am I increasingly aware of the human deaths around me now because I’m at more of a sensitive-to-these-things age of 70, or are there more deaths around me because my peers are mostly my age?

Chicken or the egg?

It’s much like popping corn. Silent at first, birth to 60 or so, and then the first pop among our peers. The starting gun. You think: “How can that be? Larry looked so good when we ran into him last week!” Some go earlier, bad driving, guns, drugs, or perhaps faulty construction to begin with, but in America, the average life expectancy is 78. Top of the bell curve. Most of us get to age 60 or so without much popping in our immediate age range, but of course the pace picks up. By the time we get to the middle of the timeline, all hell is breaking loose. The years between 74 and 84 are like a theatre popcorn machine right before the feature presentation. Sounds like the grand finale on the fourth of July.

By age 70, or even earlier, every time you feel a sharp pain or some physical anomaly, you think to yourself “So this is how it ends…” The same pain 30 years ago would barely register. You would pay no attention and just keep on running.

That’s what I tell myself to do.

Someone has to be last though, the final pop in any particular batch of corn. They’re the Kirk Douglas’s of the world, he’s 101. That person would be the only one left in their group left to hear it, and their hearing becomes disabled when they themselves release their own pop.

A tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.

When she was 94, my mother said: “Everyone I ever knew is dead.” More nostalgic than morbid.

Now I’m just starting to understand how that may feel when I’m also 94.

It will be even stranger if I pull a Kirk Douglas, and at 102 I’m the last silent pop among my peers, none of whom are alive to see…the last tree to fall in what used to be a huge forest.

Pop!

(Disclaimer: Carla will live to be 127. She’s too healthy, smart, and scrappy to succumb to normal human disease, but she’s 9 years younger than me and I don’t consider her to be in my age group.)

Religion, Nationalism, it’s all early childhood indoctrination and programming…

People worship over 2,500 different “gods” today. They can’t all be right so the logical assumption is that all of them are wrong.

Of course they are, they are all man made. It's fine to use them metaphorically to understand things which cannot be understood, but it's not OK to take them literally. That's exclusionary toward anyone who is not like you.

The reason people worship the particular god that they do is almost 100% a function of the family and the culture they were born into. I was born into a “Christian” family and dutifully marched into Sunday school singing “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war”, a rather odd song to align with the prince of peace, I thought. We marched in behind a boy carrying a pole with a cross on top and the figure of a man, dead and bleeding, nailed to it. Even then it seemed incongruous that my culture thought many other religious symbolisms to be barbaric.

We take on the culture, customs, and religion we are born into. Early childhood indoctrination locks us in. It’s the reason we wear the clothes we wear, eat the foods we eat, cheer for the sports we do, and parrot back the programming we learn in school. Things like the revisionist history of our own country. All about the bad “Indians” the European Americans victoriously battled to create our great country. It was one of the worst genocides in history. The blood is on our hands as we slap ourselves on the back for our wonderful deeds of land theft and murder.

It’s all early childhood indoctrination with a definite spin to favor and flatter the audience for which it is intended.

It is only when we are able to step back out of the forest and see the world as a whole, like an alien looking down from the moon, that we can make some progress. But when we are raised with religious prejudice and geographic nationalism, specific labels that divide and separate us, and we accept only those with similar gang sign, we are unable to move forward.

We are all more alike than different yet we spend most of our lives in denial of that fact, eagerly building walls that separate us from ourselves.