Bad Luck and a Very Hard Head

I certainly understand your response to that photo of Dad; I had many of the same feelings when I saw it. Though it appears to be a previously unseen picture, however, it is actually a detail from a photo that's been in the family for many years (1). Through the miracle of Photoshop, we are seeing him up close for the first time. It was taken on the day he was sworn in as Commander of the Sheehy-Palmer VFW Post (a place which will get greater coverage in future 'posts'), and is significant not just because of his handsome face, but because, one, you are in it and I'm not, and two, it captures your almost supernatural ability to appear angelic in public (2).

Aside from blatant firstborn son favoritism, though, one likely reason I'm not in it can be seen in another picture taken at that event (3). Notice the two black eyes, the ones I had for almost a year, all due to a series of unfortunate events which befell me in those dark days. This sordid tale begins, as I recall, when you pushed me into a block of ice in front of Einstein's drug store (by the way, how did he find time to run a drug store and do all of that relativity stuff? And why did he name his daughter Dodo? What a sense of humor that guy had).

Then, just as those first two shiners were fading away, I fell (or was I pushed?) off Pat Villani's front porch, thus delivering the second set. The final beauties were bestowed from on high when a towering construction of chairs and other objects collapsed under me just as my fingers reached the key hanging over the door in our apartment, apparently in a bungled escape attempt. (Had Mom locked me in for some reason?) Two things are clear, though: I had a run of bad luck, and a very hard head. This would be evident in other periods of my life as well.

The only other memory I have of the day in the photos is walking down Delaware Avenue with you, Mom and Sue, you mocking me all the way because I couldn't say Colonial, the name of the restaurant where the event was being held. A few minutes later there you were, all angelic.

One other bit of history: The building these events took place in now houses a Vietnamese restaurant named My Linh, where my daughter Nell worked for several years after graduating from Pratt Institute in New York. I'm sure she will be amused by this scene from the Brady brothers saga.

From the Heights of Age

Sitting in the loft of my house on a mountainside in central Japan, far from my childhood in much more than years, I turned on the computer and there in your previous post was Dad just as I remember him, 40 years younger than I am now, him already gone from this world 25 years-- what a shock it was, seeing his face just as I remember it from 60 years ago, his face that was exactly that way and that young for so brief a time, that John Wayne of a face that in all its handsomeness and strength came home to us from the war and walked into our living room, where you recoiled at this sudden male in our house being so familiar, you saying "Who is that?"

You were only a year or so old when Dad left for the war in Europe; I remember probably the last time he was with us before that, one icy cold morning while we lived on Southern Boulevard, when from the ground floor back door I watched with all a child's pride as Mom came gorgeously down the back stairs in her long red silver-fox-collared coat, Dad just behind her so splendid in his uniform, must have been going to some celebration before he went off to war...

I remember later in that same house Mom now and again packing boxes of special things to send to Dad somewhere in Germany, she explaining that he couldn't get these things there and would be very glad to have them, me feeling upset that she was sending jams, chocolate and other precious things away forever... (She'd later laughingly tell me so many times as a child the story of how I had one day hidden a can of peaches that she'd never been able to find...)

Seeing Dad's youthful face now in this photo that I think I've never seen before (from deep in one of Mom's collections somewhere?), that face that for 60 years I hadn't seen as it was then, I knew it at once from somewhere deep in my heart I haven't visited for a long time. I sat and stared at him over the 60 years since, from so many worlds away, remembering, seeing your face and mine in his own young one, the way I used to sometimes in the mirror, back when I was his age...

I told him of my joys, my regrets, and thanked and forgave him.

And Mick, thanks for the surprise.

One Morning After the War

I remember the Luger well. Darth Vader himself would later tap into its dark power, which was mesmerizing to us even at that tender age.

Brings to mind my memory of meeting dad for the first time when I was three years old, early one morning after the war had ended, you and I asleep on the daybed in the living room over Einstein's drug store.

In the thin morning light of my memory, the sound of knocking at the door roused us out of our sleep. We awoke to see a soldier, duffel bag on his shoulder and ribbons on his chest, standing in the doorway. "Hi, boys.", he said, and I started to cry. I was scared to death. I had no idea who this man was, but he seemed to know us. He sat down on the bed while you tried to calm me down; Mom came running into the room.

The memory fades at this point. As usual, you will have to fill in the blanks.

Two Very Live Boys

Indeed I do remember that poem and the impact on my boybrain of its paradoxes, but I only remember hearing the first four lines - from a slightly older and more worldly kid - and being enthralled by it where I stood, with pockets full of slingshot, pebbles and lizards; then sometime later I heard the two lines about the deaf policeman, which gave me a sense that the poem was somehow growing along with me; the last lines I never knew of before until I read them for the first time right here on the reunification of disjointed time that is The Blog Brothers.

What strikes me most about the poem now is how oddly predictive it was of all the death we defied over the years until finally arriving largely intact here on the elder shores of sanity. I know boys in general go through some hair-raising stunts, usually involving cars (there were a lot of those in our history too, and many friends who were suddenly no longer with us); in our case, though, the stunts involved just about everything two hyperinventive young guys could think of. Which may not be all that unusual for a couple of smartass curious males, close in age, who are pretty much let run free from childhood on.

These days, though, recollection of those moments makes me break out in a cold sweat, which is conveniently warming at my age, eases my now pointless cold feet (where were they when I needed them?) and makes all the more precious the fact that we have survived.

One very warming example is the morning we found that beautiful Luger in the attic...

Night of the Living Dead Boys

Convenient memory lapses aside, I know who tossed the monkey, and I salute you for it, brother. You're right up there with Jacques Tourneur, the French director who provided me with another favorite mental melodrama (see Post-Cinematic Stress Syndrome). I do have a question regarding one of the details in your version, though. I had always thought that the woman who lived next door saw me hanging out the window and called Mom on the phone. Hmmm. I suppose we could ask Aunt Dorothy.

Now let's see if you can verify this one:

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys began to fight.
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise
and came to save the two dead boys.
If you don't believe this story is true,
ask the blind man, he saw it too.

I don't actually remember this happening, but I tend to believe it, because it sounds like something we might do. Whaddaya think?

Confessions of a Monkey Tosser

Although I don't remember any specifics at all in re the tossed monkey caper, and although this should not be construed as an actual confession, I somehow believe it must have been me who tossed the monkey: not only because it sounds like something I'd do, and not only because you and I did such things to each other along our early way, but also because you beaned me with one of your damned alphabet blocks (those things hurt) and nobody grownup did anything about it (that I remember clearly; injustice leaves permanent scars).

The resulting window derring-do made you a family legend, in any case, for which you likely have me to thank. Good thing Aunt Dorothy came along when she did, though, to spot your tiny fingers digging into that second-story windowsill. As I say, I don't remember a thing about the monkey, though allegorically I do remember the real eggshell Humpty-Dumpty that Dad had made (before he went off to Germany, where at about that time he was taking part in the Battle of the Bulge) that was hanging on our bedroom wall... I remember so much else from that time on Mountain Street during the war years, which memories I shall delve into here from time to time as they epiphanize, for example the cranial oleomargarine escapade...

As to the tree house, some years later we had built one in the tree out back of the Post on Delaware Avenue and were so excited we begged Mom to let us stay home from school one Friday and play in it, which we did with another hookeying kid (Eddie V?), who, when he came out back to join in the aerial fun, told me that a boy had just come to our front door. I ran out there to see if it was somebody else playing hookey and found that it was goody-two-shoes John M from St. James grammar school, who had been sent by the fearsome Mother Superior Terror of God Incarnate, who devilishly suspected shenanigans on our part (both of us sick at the same time??) Actually, it was the only time we'd ever done that. We were good, if dangerous, students.

I arrived breathless at the front door just as Mom at the top of the stairs was assuring unctuous John that you and I were extremely sick in bed. There was no way smarmalot John would ever cover for us. We were doomed. That whole weekend was spent in the black depths and roiling bowels of doom. Nothing much happened on Monday, though; I'd have remembered if it had been anything like the hell I expected.

Just goes to show that even in retrospect, hookey is way more memorable than school.

screaming monkeys

Agreed, those were awfully dark thoughts being foisted upon millions of innocent souls, and sad to say, it goes on to this day. It seems, though, that we were somehow inoculated against those ideas, and were able to take the sting out of most of them through our own brand of precociousness. Consider, for instance, the image of me climbing out of my crib and through the (second story) bedroom window on Mountain Street to rescue my poor stuffed monkey, who was still lying on the sidewalk after being thrown to his death from the front porch a few minutes earlier. Hanging by my fingertips, I displayed no fear of heights, no fear that I would come tumbling down, and absolutely no understanding of the gravity of the situation. Rock-a-bye baby be damned, I was going to retrieve that monkey. The perpetrator was never apprehended, by the way, and I believe the statute of limitations has passed for first degree monkey murder, in case you are still tormented by the case.

I rummaged through my memory bank on the Tree House Hooky Caper and came up empty; someone else must have beaten me to that particular safe deposit box. Gimme the facts, brother.

Now I Lay Me down to Sleep

To say nothing of saying each night before you go alone into the big darkness ruled by the monster in the closet:

"If I should die before I wake..."

Teaching your otherwise healthy young self that you might die every night doesn't do much for a positive outlook. And then it's off to Catholic school in the morning.

Judging from all the cruelty and violence in the old nursery rhymes and fairy tales that kids used to be sent off into dreamland by, and the subliminal cruelty that attended childrearing of old ("Spare the rod and spoil the child," "Children should be seen and not heard " etc.) adults of yore didn't really like children very much, considered them merely undeveloped adults. Good thing in a way, Mick, you and I were given the relative freedom we had.

Though I do remember vividly that time we got caught playing hooky in our tree house...

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Speaking of scaring children, why was that baby's cradle up in the treetop? Why couldn't some responsible adult go up and rescue that poor kid before the bough broke, and, most importantly, why the hell have parents been using it to scare millions of innocents as they drift off to sleep for the past several hundred years? Someone must be held accountable for the long term damage this has done. Can't we get some sort of reparations for this?

SURVIVORS OF THE LEOPARD MAN

Mick emailed me not long ago asking if I remembered a movie we’d seen as kids, and what was the name of it, where the young girl was killed by a black panther at her mother’s door and Oh yes, I remembered it alright, having never forgotten it: I can still see those scenes.

I’d thought about that movie for years too, looked for it under various titles and later advanced search, but to no avail. And there it lay, hidden in us both all that time, though we never mentioned it again until nearly 60 years had passed. And then, through the grace of Tivo... I can still feel the little two of us trying to disappear in our big movie seats, clutching our milk duds and raisinettes as that blood trickled under the doorway... what an impression on tiny minds!

I think that movie is at the root of every movie scare of mine since then, and a few others not movie related. I later realized that it was even the root of a surreal scary story I wrote some years ago, called The Key, that began:

“You can't bear to watch in black and white as the lovely young woman prepares to enter the darkness beneath the overhead walk to retrieve the key that fell from her bag and dropped through the cracks in the boards while she was waiting to enter the theater showing the horror movie based on events that took place in this very alleyway, which looks in the movie just as it looks now; in fact the young woman herself, in her very becoming reticence, looks alarmingly like the actress who was murdered so horribly in the movie,…” in which the tale turns upon its teller who is in fact the victim, much as Mick and I in those movie seats when I was 6 or 7, he 5 or 6.

The power of the old silver screen, and the figures upon it, so much bigger than we were, so much deeper than we daily go…

Post-Cinematic Stress Syndrome

As a boy I was haunted by a dream in which a black panther was on the loose in our apartment over Einstein's drug store and had killed everyone else in the family, while I remained hidden in a clothes hamper behind the bathroom door. The dream always ended, mercifully, just as he discovered my hiding place. These scenes were somehow connected with a movie I had seen as a child, though until last week I couldn't be sure that the movie had actually existed.

In my fragmented memories of the movie, a sultry flamenco dancer performs to the haunting sound of castanets, a panther terrorizes a small village at night, and a teenage girl is stalked by the beast on her way home in the dark. When she arrives screaming at her front door, her parents, too afraid to let her in, watch in horror as her blood oozes under the door.

I had searched the movie guides for years for anything with the word 'cat' or 'panther' in it, but to no avail, little suspecting all the while that a black panther is actually a type of leopard. It wasn't until I tivo'd a movie called 'The Leopard Man' that I finally solved the mystery.

The movie turned out to be a small masterpiece, filmed in 1943 by French director Jacques Tourneur for RKO Radio Pictures. A pioneer in 'atmospheric' horror movies, he was heavily influenced by the techniques and ideas of film-noir, which explains the lasting power and undue influence of this film on my childhood psyche; he scared the be-Jesus out of me simply by suggesting the most unspeakable horror. By the way, what was I doing at that movie at that age?

So, at last I get to lift a glass of good spirits to Mr. Tourneur, in deep appreciation for his dark and lasting influence on my life. After all, without the early challenges I received from him, I may not have been prepared to deal with the even greater horrors that would occur in the years to come.