On January 19, 1977, we woke up to hear that snow was in the forecast for all of South Florida. I was bundled up on the bleachers before class that Wednesday, shivering– talking about Jessica Lange to the brethren, pretending to be Gene Simmons by vomiting fountain water out of my mouth and waiting to do the pledge of allegiance so we could get the hell inside and get warm.
After the pledge and the singing of the Pinewood Acres anthem (“Three cheers for our own Pinewood Acres, the green and the white proudly wear!”) we were walking to class in a single file line. It had to be sometime around 8:30am. Suddenly, shiny fractals started falling in front of my eyes. Because I was born and raised in the tropics, my only previous reference for snow was the cartoons; where it always fell in the shape of puffy cotton balls. Sheffield announced “Boys and girls! Those are snowflakes!” The line stopped moving and we held our hands out to catch some.
In a rare moment of humanity, she allowed us to stay outside for a few minutes and play in it. She didn’t try to interrupt, either. I looked at her a few times and she seemed relaxed and content to be in the background; just smiling.
We tried to catch the whisps of frozen moisture on our tongues and gather it up from the ground, but it melted too quickly. For a few frigid moments, I forgot about the war at home; about obsessions and ancient animosities. For a handful of frames in my memory’s movie reel, all of us enjoyed pure bliss.
A Catalog of Non-Offenses
After the Valentine’s Day fiasco, I found myself getting in trouble on a consistent basis. Lest anyone think I was a budding delinquent, my trips to the principal’s office were invariably for non-offenses and absurdities.
I was sent to the office once for nervously picking at the adhesive tape on my desk’s number line.
On another occasion I got sent for smiling, after I was explicitly told to “wipe that grin off [my] face”.
Around this time, I invented a game on the tennis courts, that was a cross between volleyball and kickball. It was a blast and even the girls joined in. Michael K. and myself had strong legs and would regularly punt the ball over the back fence of the tennis court on our opening serves. In the rules of this new game, an opening volley over the fence wasn’t a foul. Conveniently, it was the equivalent of a home run. Sheffield observed me excelling at something and unilaterally instituted a new rule: NO HOME RUNS!
“Kick the ball over the fence”, she informed us, “and you will get sent to the office for direct insubordination”.
On the very day the rule was inaugurated, I went to the office.
It was that kind of stuff. Over and over.
Demons and Pirouettes
Sheffield had just finished writing a series of multiplication problems on the blackboard.
“Pop quiz!”, she declared. “Clear your desks! Get out your lined paper and your number two pencils.” A collective sigh of grievance swept across the room as papers shuffled and books closed. “You have ten minutes to turn in your quiz!” she barked.
As I was taking out my paper, a disembodied voice interrupted my grumbling and placed me in its sights.
“What does that shirt say?” it jabbed.
I glanced up to see a narrow-eyed Sheffield standing in front of me.
“What?” I asked, looking around the class in disbelief.
“I said…What. Does. Your. Shirt. Say?”
All eyes were now upon me. “Stand up!” she commanded.
I slid out from my desk and looked down at my chest, with my arms out. “Sworn to fun, loyal to none”, I muttered.
Sheffield squinted those rodent eyes and her muzzle even tighter, as she put her reading glasses back on and bent over for a closer view. “Do you realize that’s a demon on there doing something evil?” she challenged me, taking the glasses off. I shrugged my shoulders and just stared at her. “Look at it!” I refused to glance down. I knew what the shirt looked like.
“You don’t care?” she asked with a look of incredulity.
I shrugged again.
“Go to the office and get another shirt. I won’t have that in my class.”
“Fine”, I murmured. Here we go again, I thought.
Right before I hit the exit, I did a proper pirouette and the entire class started laughing. I slammed the door behind me. Halfway to the office, it opened up again. It was Sheffield.
“Because of that cute move, you can stay there for a while too!” she cackled.
“Fine!” I shot back.
The office called my Mom at work and to my utter amazement she exploded. I could hear her familiar voice screeching from the secretary’s earpiece. “There’s nothing wrong with that shirt! He’s not taking it off!”
The principal’s secretary hung up and told me I could sit on the sofa and stay the rest of the day if I wanted. Prayers answered, good fortune’s renewed! There was a stack of Highlight magazines and a few National Geographics on the coffee table, so I kicked back and buckled down for the long hall. What did I know? Maybe Jessica Lange was featured in one of those Nat Geos. At the very least, I might be able to find a random native girl.
Maybe it was time to build a new Book.
Over Spilled Milk
I made sure to distribute appropriate payback to Mary Taylor after the Valentine’s Day tragedy, usually by making background fart noises while she spoke in class or beaming her with the ball as she ran to first base on the kickball field. She used to tumble deliciously; like a sawed-off bowling pin every time that red rubber ball hit those stubby legs. Boom!
But the truth was, I was a little scared of her. She knew exactly what was going on with us boys. She knew our dirt. We had no idea what she was about. Or what she had planned. That’s true power. Not even Sheffield had that over me.
One day at the picnic tables during lunch, I was playing the fool and knocked over a large cup of milk , which flooded Mary’s open Little House on the Prairie lunchbox. Her bologna sandwich and chips were completely submerged. “Oops!” I declared, “I didn’t mean to!!!” But Mary took it hard and started sobbing uncontrollably.
Sheffield, hearing loud crying and seeing my face somewhere in the mix, seemed to descend from on high like a Zero dive bombing Pearl Harbor. “It was an accident!” I pleaded as she grabbed my skinny arm and yanked me away. Sheffield lifted the sopping sandwich and chips from the pool of milk in Mary’s lunchbox and tried to wring them out. Fate had different plans. Mary was going to go without lunch that day. And I was going to the principal’s office. Again.
As I was walking away with my Muppets lunchbox and half-eaten PB&J , I looked back– and I swear to God this is true– Mary Taylor was looking over at her friend Barbie Williams, next to her on the picnic table… and smiling.
Our school principal was Mr. Larry Lones the III. He was an imposing figure, nearly as tall as my Dad, except he was a ginger and had that translucent skin– like the underbelly of a fish. And with freckles. He was a dead ringer for actor Jeffrey Jones, who a decade later played the principal in Ferris Buehler’s Day Off. Jones also ended up being a pedophile. Larry Lones was no predator, but he was definitely a strange bird. He inherited the school from his father, Larry Lones II, and he talked to children as if he was lecturing a graduate psychology class.
Mr. Lones would sit behind his desk with his legs crossed– slowly twirling a pen in his fingers. Before he started his lecture, he’d clear his throat and stare at me–without blinking– for a full 60 seconds. It was one of the most unnerving experiences of my childhood. “Gregory,” he’d say while staring and barely moving, “have you ever heard the term ‘extropsective reasoning‘?”
I just shook my head. I wasn’t even sure he was speaking English.
“Wow, OK. We’re going to have to get really basic here. Let me explain it to you this way. Extrospective is a perception of things external to one’s own mind. Do you follow me, young man?”
I nodded.
The next fifteen to twenty minutes would be this kind of deranged psycho-babble on repeat. I would stare so long at the bald eagle sculpture on the desk behind him, as he rattled off in glossalia, that I would slip into a bona fide altered state. I eventually stopped hearing his voice and Lones and the entire room around him would zoom out and shrink to the size of a Micronaut action figure.
I returned about an hour later to Sheffield’s class, slightly dazed, but feeling exuberant because Lones had agreed not to call my Mom. That office visit had been “on the house”.
As I walked in, the class was eerily silent and just staring at the teacher’s desk. I stood at the threshold, hesitantly. Sheffield smashed the ice. “You’re back just in time. Sit yourself down.” I shot glances at Glenn, Mike, Spencer and the rest of the crew. Some were looking down at their desks, fidgeting with their number lines. Whatever relief I’d felt leaving the principal’s office, quickly evaporated.
“Since all of us are here now, I’d like to go over a few things”, she said, rising from her desk. “It has come to my attention that outside foolishness has been distracting some of us from learning. Some of you boys have allowed yourself to get pulled away by talk of some… movie person. I don’t know who this person is. Jessica? Is that her name?”
“Yes”, some of the girls said in unison.
My face was numb. I can’t imagine any of the boys looked her in the eye.
“I’ve also been told that some of you have brought photos to school. Material that is inappropriate for the classroom. I dare say, SMUT!”
I drew a sharp breath in surprise. Now I had to look at the old witch, because of what I feared she might be holding in her bony little fingers. Maybe she’d been to the stables and been digging around in horseshit. She moved to the front of her desk as she continued talking, and I slowly tilted my vision upward.
Her hands were empty. Thank God.
We were informed that there was to be no more discussion about Jessica Lange— particularly in class. Any Jessica Lange discussion in the classroom would be a trip to Lones’ creepy dungeon. Sheffield also warned that all magazines, comic books or photos that we had on our person, had to brought to her for approval.
And then, to add insult to injury— for no sensible reason on God’s green earth— she forbade the bringing of all KISS records. In fact from now on, all other music had to brought to her desk and pass through her ratings system.
The little classroom was airless. We had a rat in our midst. And it was no mystery to me who it was.
Dad’s Interrogations
On some Tuesday or Thursday nights, Mom would be putting the finishing touches on her makeup or fixing her hair, just as Dad’s silver Monte Carlo pulled into the driveway to pick us up. “Your Dad’s here!” Mom would announce, “I’m leaving!”
I would always grimace right before she opened the door, for the inevitable pyroclastic flow of adult rage that was about to billow down upon our village. I braced myself. Mom stepped out on the porch– looking good with her hair pulled back and a tight skirt on– just as Dad was exiting his car in his work clothes.
“You’re going out?!” Dad would fire at her, with this pained expression.
Mom always had one-word answers for him. The ever-handy “Yep!”– or the worst of all, “Uh-huh!”– just as she was sliding into her driver’s seat. This is where things got ugly.
“Is it such a crime to just stay home?” Dad would blast as he walked over to her door. Sometimes shouting ensued on the reverse, through a closed window. On some nights, Mom would stop and roll the window down in order to lob a passive-aggressive grenade at his feet.
The truly awful part about the nights when Mom would be out late, was that Dad would be so incapacitated from the front yard shrapnel, that he wouldn’t take us anywhere. Then we would be subjected to Downer Dad and his endless interrogations while we sat around the house. “Who do you guys love more?” and other ultra-cringey questions from the jilted parent’s abyss, would be leveled at us.
My sister was too young to care about adult feelings and she’d answer this stupidity with a kind of banzai-charge defiance– “MOM!!! FOR SURE!”
“I love you both the same“, I would follow-up as a weak consolation.
I wasn’t a very good liar.
Article 93: The Responsibility to Escape
It was around Spring Break 1977 that my Dad cracked and announced he needed a vacation.
He was going with Uncle Nick back to their childhood home in Shreveport, Louisiana and he would be gone for a week. For my sister and I this meant that we had Tuesdays and Thursdays free that coming week and would dodge Sunday’s liturgy. Freedom!
Then Mom told us she had her own secret excursion planned for the same week — with one of her rando boyfriends. We couldn’t believe it. “Who is gonna watch us?”, I complained. She could’ve sent us to our grandparents house for the week, which would’ve been heaven. Instead, she hired a live-in babysitter to monitor us– a “wonderful” older woman named Ms. Freebisch. To this day I have no clue where she found this person or what possessed her to think it was a good idea.
Freebisch came to the house for an introduction, the day before Mom left. She was in her 70’s, tanned and wrinkled like a shrunken head doll and had the kind of sandpaper voice that truck stop whores and three-pack-a-day Pall Mall smokers have. She stooped down to talk to my sister and was really warm and friendly with me. Despite her appearance and the nauseating cigs-and-sewage breath, we kinda liked her.
Until the day Mom left.
No sooner were we waiving to her from the living room window while her Pontiac pulled away and ‘ol Freebisch was sitting my sister and I down at the kitchen table to go over the “ground rules”. It was an ominous portend for how the week was going to unfold.
“First of all”, she said, lightly revving her totalitarian engine, “there’s to be NO junk food this week. I notice you guys are eating a lot of trash. That’s going to change, effective immediately”. My sister and I glanced at each other with silent panic and swallowed hard. “It will be mostly vegetables and grains!”
“What about our lunches? Mom usually makes us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!”, I interjected.
“That’s not happening this week”, she drubbed, matter of factly.
“And the other thing is”, she added, “we will all be taking three showers a day. Once in the morning, once after school and once before bed. Do you understand?”
She said a bunch of stuff after that. I know because I saw her lips moving, but I was already untethered from her shores and drifting out. Article 93 of the Geneva Convention says that prisoners of war cannot be charged with a criminal act, should they attempt to escape their confinement. In other words, a prisoner of war is obligated to try and escape. I was already weighing my options.
“Chop-chop!” Freebisch roused us from the kitchen, “Let’s start with a shower! You guys stink!”
She made me go first. She turned the shower on and told me to get crackin’. I reckoned it more expedient to comply than to expend energy resisting– at least this early in the conflict– so I gave her an affirmative nod, as she closed the door behind her. With the water running and steam building, I just stood silently next to the sink for a few minutes before reaching behind the curtains and turning the water off. I then took my clothes off and wrapped myself in a towel and emerged– conspicuously, bone dry.
Upper management was standing there, arms folded. She touched the towel. It was dry. She stormed into the bathroom and ran her hand along the bottom of the shower. The water wasn’t soapy. It was going to be a long week.
We were subjected to elixirs of various vitamin concoctions, bitter-tasting steamed veggies and burlap-like whole grain bread. As the days passed, my baby sister looked at me pleading, as if to say “You’re my older brother–aren’t you gonna do SOMETHING?” We were starving and our skin was ashy from excessive scrubbing. It was unbearable.
Finally, I got up the guts to stage a breakout while Freebisch was on the back patio chain smoking cigarettes. It was about 4pm. I had a Fantastic Four comic book and some contraband candy, stuffed in my pockets for the journey. I went out the front door and made my way towards the 20′-tall Ficus tree in the corner of our yard. I scaled the tree until I reached the clubhouse perch that Jeff and I discovered years before. It was a spot roughly 15′ up, where several heavy branches were clustered, forming an expansive sitting area. You could recline up there, without the slightest fear of falling– it was virtually enclosed all the way around. And when you’re young, it felt like you were 50′ up in the air. The secret spot allowed me to have an unobstructed peephole to the front of the house, while still being completely hidden.
The sunlight faded and shadows deepened quickly up in the tree. Freebisch made her first appearance on the front porch, calling my name to the empty streets, sometime around dinner. I can stay up here for a million years, you old bat! I thought to myself, grinning. As the hours wore on and my surroundings turned pitch black, she continued screaming from the porch every few minutes; her wail becoming more broken, desperate. “Oh Greg! Come home, please!” she begged.
Eventually she brought out a flashlight and started scanning the yard, hysterical. She came to the bottom of the tree a couple times and I could hear her heavy breathing. My spot was so well-concealed , she was right under me and didn’t even know it.
I did start getting hungry after a few hours. But I’d been hungry all week. This was a long-game and I had to toughen up. Maybe I could sneak food from the neighbor’s house or do some bartering with Pancho the ice cream man, who made daily trips to our street. I hadn’t eaten so much as one potato chip fragment or licked a fingertip full of Cheeto dust in four days.
I eventually stayed up there until about 10pm, but in my 8-year old brain I was out there till 3 in the morning. I started getting chilly and the secret spot just wasn’t very comfy after 6 hours. Freebisch hugged me and was crying when I walked in the door.
Upon Mom’s return, Freebisch had only one thing to say:
“I’m never watching these kids again”.
Hope Sometimes Smells Like That
It was after Spring Break when Mark Fischer brought the subject up at recess. We had been warned by Sheffield about Jessica-talk, but as a repeat offender, I had become pretty brazen. I wanted to hear something good. Anything. We gathered in the playground sand, behind this spaceship-looking slide, opposite the tennis courts.
Mark was the kind of kid who collected clumps of spittle in the corners of his mouth when he got excited. On this day, he was especially frothy. “You guys aren’t going to believe this!”, he started.
The story was, Mark had an Uncle Melvin who was a talent agent representing actors in Hollywood. None of us had any clue what a “talent agent” was and the term “representing” sounded like something my Dad would say. Mark got as far as “He works with movie actresses”, before my ears perked up.
He explained it again to us slowly, with crazy eyes and gobs of spit flying:
Uncle Mel worked in Hollywood with actors. Uncle Mel had been visiting Mark’s family for Passover. At some point Uncle Mel heard his nephew mention the name Jessica Lange. Uncle Mel said “I know Jessica Lange personally– she belongs to our agency.” Uncle Mel told Mark, “I can get you in touch with Mrs. Lange”.
About ten years ago someone explained cryptocurrency to me as an investment opportunity. The terminology and the particulars of trading on the crypto exchange were a complete enigma to me at the time, but something about my friend’s passion made me take notice. It had some of the familiar scent of pie-in-the-sky BS but at the same time it also felt vaguely hopeful and exciting. Like salvation was possibly hiding in plain sight.
That was exactly what I felt about Mark’s story that day. He was a known BS artist. But he generated such a large volume of mouth-suds during his speech, that it was difficult to dismiss him. If it was a lie, it was a much more sophisticated yarn than he was normally capable of weaving. Mind you, Mark Fischer is the same kid who told me in second grade that he had built a rocket ship in his backyard that could probably reach the moon. He invited me to come to his house so we could take a spin. Even back then, there was about 60% of my young brain that wanted to believe in magic and homemade lunar landers. There was another brooding 40% that said, “You’re just a liar and I’m gonna punch you”. For context– I had been clobbering Mark Fischer since second grade.
Still the wish to believe is always stronger. Maybe Uncle Mel was our ticket. Maybe none of this was an accident.
“OK–What do we have to do?” I asked, simultaneously electrified and resigned to being bamboozled again.
“That’s the thing”, Mark replied. “We don’t have to do anything. Uncle Mel is going back to Los Angeles this week. He has all of our names on a piece of paper. He’s going to ask Jessica Lange to send something personal to each of us.”
It was done. We arose from our huddle at the spaceship slide, ready to go the distance. My name was soon going to be on Ms. Lange’s rolodex and literally nothing else mattered.
I had come through a cold winter and spring was now in full bloom.
