While Single Mom was a big adjustment for us in the summer of ‘76, dealing with the novel variant known as Divorced Dad was even more unsettling.
My father went from being the overlord of our tidy, suburban kingdom, to being a hut-dwelling serf living in the low country. His new domain was the ratty Palmetto Golf Club Apartments in Perrine– a town in South Dade known only for its prevalence of streetcorner pharmaceutical reps and its backyard, bare-knuckle fights featuring Kimbo Slice. It was no place for kids.
Like any man who suddenly finds himself single in his mid-40’s, reinvention is the key to survival. If you can do this from a squalid little apartment and keep your chin up, your chances of flourishing are extremely high. Dad immediately started going to Vic Tanny’s gym three times a week, and running every other day, which was a positive start. He also took ballroom dancing lessons and went to sailing classes, which was slightly more baffling. He later told me it was his therapist who pushed him to do that stuff. Even as a kid, I remember thinking “Sheesh, Dad. Ballroom dancing?”
Pops seemed to have had some underlying confusion and insecurities that kept him from getting laid during the disco era. Social mores had changed so much. As a child of the Great Depression, Dad’s theme song in the 70’s should’ve been “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times“.
Mom was 15 years younger than Dad. She was out dating and having a blast.
Depending on the day of the week, Dad was either learning how to tie a quick rolling hitch on a boat deck or out practicing the foxtrot at Arthur Murray Studios . And then I assume, promptly going home alone to the Palmetto Golf Club apartments with its secondhand furniture and tiny black and white TV.
He was incredibly picky.
Lots of available women liked him at the Greek Orthodox Church, but he viewed them all harshly. In his eyes they were either intellectually inferior or old maids. He probably wasn’t wrong, but you have to start someplace. He was a reasonably good-looking guy. He was in shape, stood at a striking 6′-7″ tall and had a strong, philosophical mind. He was only 45, but I started noticing around that time that his reference points for everything were in the past tense. Everything was about his time in the service or buying the house when he first got married. Despite his half-hearted attempts to stay relevant, it was like he was already packing up and quitting.
Dad was a USAF Korean War-era veteran and the thing that stands out in my memory is that while he was with Mom, the hedges and trees at our house were always trimmed with military precision. When Dad bought the home in 1967, he planted Zoysia grass in the front yard–rare for South Florida at the time– which gave our lawn a distinctive, golf course appearance. We were also the only family on the block with a below-ground swimming pool— which was always bright blue and spotless. He took a lot of pride in that place. We had the best yard and house in the neighborhood. Dad swept and cleaned obsessively. We were a house without weeds, leaves on the ground, dirty dishes, crums or dirty clothes.
Once Dad left, all that abruptly changed. For everyone.
An Unexpected Melting
Part of the new custody arrangement, involved Dad picking my sister and I up on Tuesday and Thursday nights for a couple hours and then taking us all day Sunday.
Weeknight visits usually involved him taking us to eat at the Dadeland Cafeteria for dinner, surrounded by senior citizens taking advantage of the early bird special, and then somewhere to have “fun”. During Daylight Saving Time, the park was a low-effort destination for broke single parents. There was also a slightly rundown miniature golf spot on US1 in Palmetto Bay, called Sir Goony Golf and that place quickly became our default Tuesday or Thursday night hang-out. Most likely because games were only $1.50 per person and provided roughly an hour of entertainment. A much better bargain than the pinball arcade. My sister and I would putt competitively, but because I was older and had a more steady hand, I’d usually win. Without even seeing the scorecard, her female intuition would always inform her when she was losing and then in a sudden explosion, she’d hurl her golf club wildly into the dark and announce “I’m DONE!” and just start walking away– in any direction. As a result, very few games were ever properly finished. Sometimes Dad and I would finish the game alone and then go look for her. Often, she was just standing out by the car with her arms folded.
Sundays was “all day with Dad”, which involved going to the dreaded Greek Orthodox Church and then afterward to the equally-dreaded Golf Club Apartment, to sit around and draw pictures or play Skittle Pool while Dad watched football. From the very beginning, my little sister and I resented Sundays.
On one of these occasions, my sister summoned another of her elusive stomach aches and Dad had me all to himself (Side note: Stomach aches truly were the most iron clad excuse of childhood– 100% effective and impossible to disprove. My sister had a monopoly on them for almost a decade). The old man loved films and on that particular Sunday– December 19th, 1976, to be exact–he took me to go see the new King Kong movie, which had just come out that weekend.
I’d seen the original 1933 Kong on TV about a year before, and right off the bat the new one didn’t quite measure up. It lacked the prehistoric Kong Island drama and the deranged dino-battles of the first one. The original had a T-Rex being “curbed” by an angry Kong and a lava flow of Karo syrup blood, oozing out of its dismantled jaw. It’s hard to top that. There was a giant anaconda that got torn asunder in the new one, but it wasn’t the same. Even though the original used somewhat primitive stop motion effects, Kong looked a lot more captivating to me in the old one. More expressive. More fun. The new Kong never stopped being a guy in an ape suit. Something about the original’s lighting and B&W cinematography was more magical too– more evocative of the golden age of cinema. I’m saying all this now, but on that Sunday at the Suniland Theater, none of this criticism mattered.
In fact, somewhere early in the first reel of the movie, I forgot it was about a giant ape.
Somehow, I didn’t care about monsters, or squawking pterodactyls on primitive tropical islands or fighter jets taking pot shots at a primate climbing a skyscraper. I sat there instead, swallowed in the dark, my gaze fixed upon the most intoxicating creature I’d ever seen. She was blonde. She had cheekbones for days and a necklace made of white shells and bones. She had a smile that unlocked ancient mysteries and tilted feline eyes that melted me to the chair. Her name in the film was Dawn. And to hell with monster movies–I was 100% sure I’d just seen my wife.
We came back from the Christmas break and it was 1977. I remember it being cold that day, as Sheffield’s third grade boys gathered on the bleachers for our ceremonial, early morning reunion. There were six of us: Glenn, Spencer, Michael, Kevin, Mark and me— and at first the talk centered around the toys we got for Christmas or Chanukah. At some point someone remarked that they’d seen King Kong over the break. My heart jumped to attention and I took that as a signal to seize control of the conversation.
“Did anyone else notice Jessica Lange?”
To my surprise, five other third graders had—with varying degrees of passion. Since I clearly had been struck the hardest and since sovereignty seemed to be smiling on me, I became the default preacher for this fledgling fellowship of devotees. For thirty minutes we extolled the virtues of “Dawn”, which one of us had the best chance of marrying her and of course the wet shirt scene— all the while, exchanging “amens”. Sheffield arrived, with her usual plaid polyester and angst, and marshaled us to the pledge of allegiance. And that’s where most childhood conversations about movie heroines would’ve normally ended, I suppose. But not for us.
During recess, our class descended upon the Pinewood playground. The six boys instinctively huddled behind the tennis courts, which was one of those hidden enclaves at Pinewood, to address unfinished business. The Jessica Lange conversation whipped up again and became more excited and laugh-inducing than before. We were giddy.
Herr Sheffield, her alarm sensors detecting mirth and joy in her immediate vicinity, zeroed-in on our back court congregation and commanded us to disperse immediately. “Go play or else go back inside!!!”, she threatened. We quickly dropped our heads and moved to the playground.
The Keeper of the Book of Dawn
Over the following days and weeks, we held clandestine meetings before school and briefly at recess, to renew the group vows to Jessica. Conversations had to be quick, because Sheffield was hot on our trail, commanding us to keep moving or else.
Our newfound preoccupation was inadvertently affecting the classroom’s female population too. They had become conditioned to daily teasing, sarcastic jokes and mockery. And without any warning, that all just stopped. We left them alone. We were distracted to a degree that transformed us from ADHD-addled Huck Finns, into completely passive, model inmates.
One morning, Kevin changed the entire game by bringing in a folded color photo of Ms. Lange, cut-out from a Cosmopolitan article. It elicited a collective gasp. The coveted image passed hands quickly, as we shot nervous glances over our shoulders. In a fit of ambition, I forwarded the idea that we should all be on the lookout for photos, magazine articles or advertisements that featured our heroine and that all collateral should be collected and compiled in a group scrapbook. All agreed.
And thus began the Book of Dawn— an unlabeled, black three ring binder with paper dividers and pockets.
During the next two months, I was the full-time custodian of the sacred Book, keeping it in my khaki green Pinewood Acres tote bag. Tithes and offerings trickled in from our ragamuffin fellowship— in the form of small magazine photos or badly-creased newspaper cutouts of Jessica. All of them painstakingly contributing to the canon.
Mark Fischer contributed three apocryphal additions– one, a full color, topless cut-out of an African tribeswoman from National Geographic (known affectionately to us as “Pointy”) and two others were see-through Spiegel catalog lingerie pics. Borderline smut. Those pics weren’t technically “holy writ”, but I allowed their inclusion in order to spice things up. We kept them on the back pages. The Book now had nudity and was officially the kind of thing that could get a kid suspended from private school.
As I recall, we lovingly filled about eleven pages that winter before tragedy finally struck.
Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Ignored
Valentine’s Day 1977.
The standard grade school tradition at the time was that every kid brought in cards for each one of their classmates, simply scribbled our name on them and then placed them in the classroom mailboxes. There was nothing personal in this transaction whatsoever– nothing remotely “Valentine”. Teachers simply wanted every kid to get some candy and receive an equal number of cards. Nothing complicated. No one left out.
Except, while shuffling through my stack of signed cards and shoving them into the brown paper bag provided by Sheffield, I noticed one with writing on it. It was a Ziggy card with a hippie sunrise in the shape of a heart and a puppy at his feet. I still have the card. It was from Mary Taylor.
Mary was a chubby faced tomboy who was notorious for causing me grief. Pulling her hair, flicking boogers at the back of her head during class and beaming the red rubber kickball at her legs during her clumsy run from home plate to first base, had previously been a source of tremendous joy for me. But times were changing. I barely noticed her anymore. Or anyone else, for that matter. I was a man on a mission. Above her name, in round, girly print, it read: “I know about JESSICA and I know about the BOOK. Happy Valentine’s Day. This means NOTHING”.
My blood turned to black ice. We’d been found out! I looked around the room and everyone was blissfully distracted with their goodies, enjoying the proceedings. I glanced at Mary and she seemed as happy as a clam, yucking it up with her friends. In a panic, I disassociated and the room seemed to fall silent around me. Such a thing seems silly now, but when you’re eight years old and threatened with the possibility of expulsion, it feels as if doomsday is breathing down your back. I possessed SMUT in my bag and a sworn enemy knew all about it!
Once when I was about five, my best friend Jeff and I took a red wagon across the street to a construction site (Yes— five year olds did this kinda thing unsupervised, back then). The site was filled with stones and gravel from an excavation and we piled a good thirty pounds of fill onto my wagon and wheeled it back to the house. Jeff had this spontaneous idea that we could fill up the toy chest in my closet, entirely with stones. What a stupendous idea! We removed all my toys from the chest and began filling it up with the gravel and stone from the site. To avoid Mom’s guard tower, we brought the rocks into the house by hand, through the jalousie windows in my bedroom. In total we made about three or four trips to the construction site, undiscovered — I’m guessing about 100lbs of rock, total— and completely topped off the toy chest. My mom came in, hours after this operation began and screamed at me to clean my room and put my “crap” back inside the toy chest. Of course, I couldn’t because I was housing half a landfill in that thing! For about a year I had a truckload of rocks in my closet and my Mom never knew. That whole time, I lived on high alert, scared to death of Mom going into that toy chest.
That same sustained dread was with me that Valentine’s Day.
I relayed the alarming information to the brethren, sometime during lunch. It was agreed that having the Book in class was way too risky now. A deranged plan was hatched– the logic of which still perplexes me. Some decisions from my childhood are impossible to comprehend, outside the semi-detached confines of a third grader’s brain.
It was somberly decided that we would bury the Book of Dawn out by the horse stables, which was roughly 30 yards behind the tennis court.
Bury it.
That day.
Anywhere beyond the immediate tennis court area was in Sheffield’s no-man’s land. Anyone caught back there was going immediately, without any hesitation, to the school office. The good news was, the area was completely obscured by trees. Two were assigned to the burial team– Spencer and myself– and the rest would raise a ruckus on the playground to keep Sheffield distracted. Any questions about my whereabouts during the mission would be misdirected to the bathroom, where I was known to spend substantial amounts of time after lunch.
For recess, our class lined up at the front door. I lingered at the rear. The Book Of Dawn had been hurriedly taken out of the tote bag and was behind by back, jammed underneath the elastic waistband of the back of my shorts and covered with my t-shirt. It was incredibly risky. If Sheffield were to come behind me, the outline of the notebook would be obvious. My doom would be sealed. As it happened, she stood at the front of the line and marched us to the playground where we were eventually dispersed– running wild. I lingered at the tennis courts for a few seconds, kicking pinecones while I made sure to be facing Sheffield at all times. I waited for her to turn and start talking to the second grade teacher, Ms. Anderson and then I bolted behind the fence and back through the trees for the stables. Spencer paused and then followed me.
On the west side of the corral we found a spot with lots of loose dirt, which would make for easy digging. In retrospect, it may have been a horseshit zone. I removed the Book from my pants and we both knelt and started digging furiously, both hands clawing. I severely underestimated the amount of dirt that needed to be removed in order to accommodate a three-ring binder. Several times, looking over our shoulders, I tried to plunge the Book into the crypt, but we weren’t even close. More digging! While we were scooping, Spencer said something that has stayed with me all these years: “It’s just as well… I think we’re too young to have that Book anyway.” It was an honest resignation. I looked at him and shrugged. I tried to lower the book again. Still too tight. Spencer found a branch nearby and we used that as makeshift shovel to carve a deeper purchase.
Finally the it fit, albeit at a slightly oblique angle, and we breathlessly piled the dirt on top. “Go back!” I told him, scared he would be noticed missing, “I got it!”
Spencer ran back and I used his trusty stick as bulldozer to help pile more dirt over the tomb. I was filthy now, my knees and arms covered in a dark gray patina of either corral sand or horseshit. But it was done. I ran back to the playground and felt lighter. Doomsday had granted me a reprieve.
The Book wasn’t gone, it was just resting and in our minds we could go back anytime– to unearth it and renew our vows.
About two weeks later, Mom was running late to pick me up after school and Sheffield told me to go to Aftercare, which was a program for students whose parents worked late. Aftercare was held at the same playground area near the tennis courts. It was basically a bunch of younger students in a free-for-all, monitored (poorly) by one of Pinewood’s office workers.
We’d been wondering when we would be able to go back and see it. Now, without Big Brother monitoring my every micro-movement, I could go pay tribute properly.
I slipped pass the office lady like a pro, and darted back towards the horse corral. I grabbed the same stick we’d used before and started digging in the ground. The deeper I dug, the more my heart broke. I got a top corner of the notebook free and struggled for a second before pulling the whole thing out.
“Oh noooo…”, I breathed quietly as I opened it up. The Book was now covered in black ants and horseshit dirt, with all the dividers and photos paper machéd together in wet clumps. I tried to separate one of the photos from its resting place and the whole blurred sheet of mush just ripped away, as ants spewed out across my hand. I dropped the beloved Book back in its crypt– broken. I stood up and shook the critters from my arms. “God damn it”, I whispered.
It was ruined.