Every Friday afternoon, from the time I was a toddler until I turned about 13, I went to my grandparent’s house. When my sister got old enough, she and I went together. I’m not exactly sure how or why that ritual started, but it was one of the best traditions my highly dysfunctional family ever had. When I contemplate the emotional DNA of the person that I am today, the warm relationship with my grandparents inevitably figures prominently into that elixir. They were complex and fascinating people. And they loved me unconditionally.
My grandparents lived in a cozy, single-family home near Palmetto golf course course, that they’d owned since the early 1960’s. Although it sat on a busy street, it always felt like a sanctuary. It was safe (although by the 1980’s, it became less and less so), extremely clean and uncluttered, and provided the ideal environment for my sister and I to feel spoiled rotten.
At home, the sole means of cooling off our 1,600 square foot house was a single Kenmore portable A/C unit in the wall of our living room. My mom only permitted us to run that unit on Saturday afternoon (after 5pm!) until early Sunday morning– roughly 12hrs per week. On Sunday morning, the A/C was unplugged and my sister and I would keep the windows and doors closed for as long as possible, as we savored every fading whisp of cool air in the house. On those mornings, I would sometimes douse my face and arms with water from the bathroom sink, in order to stretch the illusion of cool air in the house.
The rest of the week, we endured the sweatbox torture of South Florida heat, with the help of jalousie windows, cranked wide open. Although, to prevent the intrusion of unwanted cryptids and masked serial killers, I always closed my windows at night. Tight. This made every evening in my Road Runner twin mattress sheets, one long and very sweaty Malarial dream. Mom’s solution to hundred degree temps always took on a surprisingly European ethic: “Open those God damn windows and get some L’Air du Fresh!”
However, at Grandmom’s house we were treated to the wonders of 24/7 central A/C, with a thermostat perpetually set to a frigid 72 degrees. Like the in-house intercom system that Mark Fischer had at his mansion in Kendall, Central A/C at Grandmom’s made me feel like part of the same aristocracy.
At home, snack foods were forbidden. Junk food austerity was the name of Mom’s game. “Treats” were limited to apples, bananas, miniature boxes of Sun-Maid raisins and on special occasions, Jiffy Pop popcorn.
But at Grandmom’s house, our “snack locker” co-opted an entire section of kitchen cabinet space.
Mom complained about this opulence all the time. These protests never earned a minute of traction with my grandmother. Her cupboards were a veritable candy shop, with neatly-merchandised displays for all of our favorites. Sometimes, my sister and I would fling the doors open wide on the entire row of cabinets, just to look proudly on the merchandise. Moving from left to right across the six-foot cupboard were: Potato chips, Cheetos, Cheese balls, Goldfish crackers, various lollipops (the four staples were always: Dum-dums, Charms, Blow-Pops and Tootsie pops), bags of Double Bubble gum with the comics inside, a bag of Rolo caramels, a variety pack of Milky Way and Snickers chocolate bars and at the very end of the cabinet (for when our stomachs were ready to rupture), was a little box of Andes after-dinner mints.
This display held a snack for every conceivable mood and occasion, and remained that way for at least a decade of our lives. The freezer was likewise stocked with an assortment of ice creams, frozen jelly donuts, bon bons, and other goodies. On the counter for many years, was a fresh unopened box of Sarah Lee cupcakes with the violently-coveted single lemon cupcake inside. Grandmom’s kitchen was a gastrointestinal blow-out of glorious childhood proportions.
It was so much more than all that, though.
It was the retiree world of cigarette-smoking and quiet martinis, soap operas, the Merv Griffin show and Jeopardy, all juxtaposed with crossword puzzles, embroidered housecoats and relaxing Muzak piped in from the kitchen via a set of living room speakers.
Something about the cadence of old-people life was very comforting to us as kids.
It was also the conversations we had there. Like my grandmother once meeting Jimmy Stewart in Atlantic City, or her going to the Cotton Club in Harlem in the late 1920’s or my grandfather’s stories about life during WWII or the time he narrowly missed the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst field in 1937. Or the time he had to outrun a flash fire in an open field.
My grandmother was a voracious reader and she would regularly talk to us about the novels she was “working on” that week, even when the subject matter was way over our heads.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues had a naked woman on the cover riding an albatross, and, of course, I immediately had to know what that was about. She gave me a heavily-sanitized version, but I remember the basic premise to this day and the fact that one character had abnormally-long thumbs. When I was intrigued by Clavell’s monstrous Shogun on the end table next to her white leather reading chair, she got into detail about 17th century Japan as if I knew exactly what she was talking about.
Neither one of my grandparents ever spoke down to us. We were expected to follow right along with their conversations and their advanced vocabulary, without any childhood handicap patronizingly offered. Sometimes we were brought into their petty disagreements too, like the ongoing debate my grandfather had with her about whether human beings could live without milk.
Friday dinners at my grandparent’s house opened up my life to something much larger than myself– namely, history. And more specifically, family history.
Reckoning with a Ghost
We respected and loved my grandparents so much. As I’ve already outlined, I was a mischievous terror at school. But at their house on Fridays, I was a little lamb.
Most of the time.
The one notable exception to this, was that time when I was about 5 years old, that I told my great grandmother (whom we called Nana and who lived with my grandparents throughout the 60’s and early 70’s), to shut her mouth.
To this day, I’m not sure what possessed me to speak like that to her. Mom told me, when she picked me up later that night, that I had to apologize or else I’d get severely throttled.
Despite the very credible threats of horse-whipping and a week’s worth of restriction in my bedroom, I dug my heels in and refused to apologize. Not sure why. The whole incident has always perplexed and troubled me in equal measure. Nana was always sweet to me.
Shortly after this, Nana passed away suddenly from a heart attack.
I carried some significant residual guilt about that as a kid, especially when I came back on Fridays to the house, which now had one conspicuously empty room. I felt like Nana went to her grave with a sustained and untreated injury from me. I refused to go to her funeral, scared of what I’d maybe caused. I still cringe about all of this, a full half century later.
According to my mother, Nana was once a real hell-raiser– before she became a teetotaler and devout Southern Baptist, towards the end of her life.
She may have been a good Christian at Perrine First Baptist, but in death it felt like her true, shit-stirrer nature came back.
I say that with deep respect. Nana began haunting her old bedroom and other areas of my grandparent’s house regularly, after she left her body.
Everyone in our family who lived through that time and who knew Nana, has a story to tell about the strange happenings that accompanied her passing.
The lamp in her bedroom would mysteriously flicker or turn on unexpectedly. In genuine “Oh, shit!” moments, I would sometimes see glimpses of movement near her bedroom, from the corner of my eye as I walked down the hallway. Other creepy, nighttime phenomena plagued me at the house for a while too. Grandmom would ask why I was breathlessly running into the living room from the bathroom and I would tell her “I just got scared”. She would dismissively wave her hand in the air, “Oh for heaven’s sake, don’t be silly!” But she knew exactly what I meant. I later found out she’d experienced her mild own hauntings. It wasn’t just my imagination!
In an effort to strike a deal with Nana’s riled-up poltergeist, I began to whisper into the stillness of her musty bedroom, “I’m sorry, Nana“. She was there. And if she was there, then she for sure could hear me.
Contrary to what adults often say, it’s never too late to make amends. I know that now because the post-mortem peace offering I made with my great grandmother, worked like magic.
The spooks calmed down and eventually were silenced altogether. Soon, I would walk confidently down the darkened hallway on Friday nights without being tormented by her playful jump-scares.
After that, I felt like she only winked at me.
We were even.
The Untold Fortunes of the Lance Sandwich Cracker Machine
One nighttime ritual at my grandparent’s house, was to help my grandfather count the money from his company’s vending machine.
Every Friday at the end of the day, he would empty the change from South Dade Nursery’s soda and cracker machines, and bring it to the house in a large brown bag. Grandpop owned the largest wholesale plant nursery in Dade County. People knew his name at restaurants and in public places. Once he was featured in a cover story in the Miami Herald, for a laboratory he had onsite, which grew genetically modified plants in a test tube.
South Dade Nurseries was a sprawling 52-acre complex, with enormous greenhouses and buildings housing heavy equipment. The place was bustling with dozens of employees– laborers, drivers, agricultural consultants, salespeople and office workers, including my mom. Driving from one end of the property to the other, required Grandpop’s trusty green golf cart or his tank-like Cadillac DeVille.
So for about an hour after dinner on Friday nights, I would sit with him at the kitchen table and separate and count out the change– usually about $50 bucks worth of Lance sandwich cracker and Fanta grape soda sales. We put the change into bank rolls and he would later deposit them for petty cash. With coins scattered around the kitchen table after dinner, and sometimes with me still eating my Sarah Lee cupcake, he and I would have conversations about everything under the sun. He would always slide me a couple bucks for my assistance.
One Friday night after counting the change, when I was 8, he reached into his wallet and handed me a $100 bill.
“This is a little something for always helping me”, he said holding out the money. No fanfare. No drama. Just the largest bill I’d ever seen, dangling in front of me.
My mouth hung open. A hundred dollars in 1977 was a lot of money, even for an adult. For a kid, it felt like he was handing me an armful of gold bricks.
“I… can’t take that”, I told him, fearfully.
He grabbed my hand and leaned forward in the chair, right into my face.
“Sweetie, when someone who loves you offers you money, you ALWAYS take it and say ‘thank you‘. OK?” He smiled back at me, gently.
I got a little teary-eyed, because I was unaccustomed to that level of gentle forwardness from my grandfather– or anyone. Grandmom was cleaning up in the kitchen, and without turning around, chimed in and simply said, “That’s right! Just take it!”
I took the hundred bucks and shoved it down into the pockets of my cut-off jean shorts. I never forgot that lesson.
Later that night when I showed my mother the bill, she was outraged. “How on earth did you get that?!” she screeched.
“Grandpop.”
Nothing more needed to be said.
Privilege at the Barefoot Mailman
In October 1977, with this small fortune burning a hole in my pocket, there was just one thing I wanted more than anything else : an expensive rubber mask for Halloween.
Halloween was a big deal in our house and there was an annual impulse towards one-upmanship in the costume department, even at that early age. I had been a vampire the previous year, and several older thugs in my neighborhood had said I looked like a faggot. One of those kids was a jumbotron, bib overall-wearing hillbilly named John Allen. He lived a block away and his dad had old cars up on cinder blocks, just laying around in the yard in various states of decay. He weighed about a hundred pounds more than me, and was probably 12 years old at the time. To an 8-year old, John Allen might as well have been 30. I steered clear of that old man.
Dadeland Mall had a novelty store– a precursor of sorts to Spencer’s Gifts–called the Barefoot Mailman. They had a row of professional latex masks in the back of the shop, just beyond the bongs and black light posters. They were displayed on a shelf about 10′ up, and were nothing short of awe-inspiring to me. They were several steps above the rubber masks you’d find at a costume or magic shop. I’d gone into that store countless times with my Dad and ogled at those masks, pointing to the ones I liked while squinting with one Steve Austin bionic eye. At the time, the prices were impossibly out of reach for the 8-year old son of the cheapest Greek man in the Western Hemisphere. Dad thought there was no reason why I couldn’t just wear my vampire outfit from the year before.
But I was traveling with Grandpop’s help now and Dad’s roadblocks were irrelevant.
The most expensive item on that shelf was a full Quasimodo mask with an actual, realistic-looking plastic eyeball dangling from the socket. In 1977, there just was nothing quite like it. And it was $36, the equivalent today of a couple hundred bucks.
The feeling I had that day of the clerk placing that mask in a clear plastic bag, as he handed it down to me, is something I’ll never forget. It was going to blow some minds, in my circle of friends.
On the day of Halloween, we were allowed to wear our costumes to school. The mask was every bit the homerun I thought it was going to be. The entire male population at Pinewood Acres jealously begged to “see it for a second”, which rightly interpreted, really meant take the mask from me and put it on their own sweaty, booger-encrusted face. My response, all day long, was to use a well-worn Greek alibi, frequently employed by my stingy old man: “I really want to, but I just can’t“.
I won first place in my class for Best Costume. Ms. Sinn allowed me to wear the mask in class, and I did schoolwork all day with the mask over my increasingly sweaty little face. I was in my glory.
That night, Jeff and I made the rounds through our neighborhood trick or treating. In those days, the streets were packed with hundreds of trick or treaters from the surrounding Killian Pines area. We’d been working the streets for hours and by 9pm, I was hauling a ten-pound bag of candy.
“I’m getting tired man!” I complained to Jeff as we got closer to home.
“One more trip around the block, man! One more!” he begged me, wanting to top off his bag with one last sprinkling of Now & Laters or Bub’s Daddys.
I reluctantly agreed, but the truth was I already had enough candy to last me till Christmas.
As we made our way down 108th Avenue, a few hundred feet from my house, a hulking figure in bib overalls with a pillowcase over his head, ran straight at me with all the freight train momentum of a defensive tackle, plowed over me and snatched my gigantic paper bag of Halloween candy. I sat on the ground in a neighbors yard, blinking behind my mask, not quite sure where I was. It all happened so fast.
I looked up and Jeff was stooping over me with his Incredible Melting Man makeup, mouthing words that I was too in shock to hear. Then it hit me. “Mah CANDY!!!” I howled to the heavens. “He took mah caaaaandy!!!” I wailed as if raped.
There really was something about a boy’s Halloween candy that was sacred. The previous year, my sister and I had descended into a battle royale over her so much as touching a Chick-O-Stick or piece of licorice in my stash (the two most commonly discarded items in a kids’ collection). It was a violation so egregious that it could only be reckoned with in blood. Especially living in a no-snack household.
I sat on that neighbors lawn and cried my eyes out, while parents continued checking on my well-being. “Take some of my stash”, Jeff said, comforting me. Seeing that had little effect, he had a follow-up: “Let’s go make some more trips around the block! You can make up for the stolen stuff!”
It was too late. The night was over. Halloween had ended catastrophically. Even the glory of the Quasimodo mask meant nothing to me at that point.
On the walk back to my house, Jeff said, “You know who that was, that stole your candy… right?”
I shook my head. I was still in shock and the whole event was a blur. I knew it was someone big.
“John Allen”, he said flatly.
Everybody Needs a Fixer
The following day, Jeff and I sat in his bedroom commiserating over the robbery. He offered me candy from his bag and I shook my head. The day after Halloween was always a celebratory sugar orgy for me, but not this year. He began pontificating as he chewed on a handful of apple-flavored Now & Laters, his lips and teeth already stained bright green.
“You know what the problem is?” he mumbled between chews. I shook my head silently again, still wallowing in grief. “Your problem is that you don’t have older brothers like me.”
I looked at him, puzzled.
“All you’ve got is your sister. She can’t do anything for you”, he said, still chomping away. Jeff always had a worldliness and wisdom that betrayed his years. One of those benefits of having older siblings, I suppose. He had seven of them.
“Sometimes you need an older brother to go kick someone’s ass.”
I nodded, pretending to know where this was headed. I was a lot slower on the uptake with these kinds of issues.
“Look, I’ve got my older brothers. And you’re my best friend. So, it’s almost like you have older brothers too. Kind of. You follow what I’m sayin’?”
I swear to God, Jeff talked like that at 8 or 9 years old. He already knew how stuff got done in the world. I lived in fantasyland. I just stared at him, but lights were coming on gradually. I had a lot of things Jeff didn’t. My house was nicer. I had a pool. Better toys. I also had cool grandparents. But Jeff had older brothers.
“I’m gonna tell Jimmy Joe what happened. And he’s gonna get your candy back”, he said confidently.
Jimmy Joe was Jeff’s older brother. He was 5 or 6 years our senior, had long, blonde hair and smoked cigarettes. Even though he’d probably just hit puberty, he sported peach fuzz on his upper lip, which in my eyes made Jimmy Joe look like a mountain man.
Jimmy wasn’t my favorite of Jeff’s brothers. He was really mean and seemed on a perpetual mission to toughen me up. His primary method was to pound the shit out of me in our neighborhood street football games. We called it getting packed. Jimmy made sure to “pack” my candy ass at every opportune moment, even in casual conversation.
Just a few months before this, he sat Jeff and I down in Jeff’s living room and tried to lecture us about our fanatical devotion to KISS.
“KISS isn’t real rock n’ roll, you bozos”, he informed us as he pulled up a kitchen chair backwards, in true Dragnet interrogation style. Jeff and I stared at him blankly, enduring his ignorance only because he could kick our ass.
“What I’d like to do today, is show you some real rock n’ roll and let you see the difference for yourself .”
He got up from the chair and turned his back to us as he walked over to the turntable. Jeff and I shot sideways glances at each other. My eyes were pleading “What do we do?” Jeff mouthed to me silently, “It’s OK”, his hands outstretched, motioning to calm down. “Just five minutes.” Jeff knew the drill. He had to live with this asshole.
Jimmy dropped the needle on Exhibit A in the “real rock n’ roll” department. It was Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold. I rolled my eyes and I guess Jimmy saw me. “Hey Jeff’s friend (his name for me when he was getting annoyed), how many guitars does that sound like to you, bud?”
Because Smart Ass is a genetic trait in our family, I instantly chimed in, “Maybe six?”
Jeff chuckled.
“No, retard”, he clapped back, as he held up his finger. “One!” Apparently unaware of the concept of studio overdubbing, he leaned in and re-iterated, “It’s just the ‘Nuge. That’s all it is.” He walked over to us and threw down the gatefold of Double Live Gonzo which showed Ted playing his Gibson Byrdland. We nodded grudgingly as the 70’s schlock rock droned on.
“You guys like this?” he asked, beaming.
“Sounds like crap”, I answered. Jeff agreed. “Garbage”.
Jimmy pulled the needle off and swapped vinyl. Exhibit B was War Pigs by Black Sabbath. This sounded marginally better to my ears, but once the vocals came in, Jeff and I both mocked Ozzy’s nasally, almost backwoods delivery, “Generals gath-edd in thar massehhhhhhhhhs…”
Jimmy eventually pulled that off too, losing his cool with our mockery.
Then he put on what he thought was the ace up his sleeve, the 21-minute Whipping Post from Live at the Filmore East. Soon, Jeff and I closed our eyes and started cartoonishly snoring, a couple minutes into the song. Jimmy got pissed, ripped the needle off and stormed out of the room. “Faggots“, he said over his shoulder. Jeff got up and put on Lovegun and gave the volume on the receiver a gentle bump.
Victory.
What we lacked in physical intimidation, we were able to compensate for with under-your-skin annoyance and a unique brand of tag-team sarcasm. Even though he would never admit it, Jimmy knew better than to trifle with us when were together.
~
Jeff finished off the the last sleeve of apple-flavored plastic goo and tossed the wrapper onto a nightstand.
“Jimmy Joe will kick his ass”, Jeff reassured me, with a mouthful of green tar.
“He would do that?” I asked incredulously.
Jeff nodded emphatically. “He hates John Allen.”
I would learn the next day from Jeff, that John Allen was indeed confronted. Right in his own junkyard. “John Allen!” thundered Jimmy Joe, as the bibbed baboon was turning a wrench on a jalopy.
My ten pounds of stolen candy would never be recovered, but Jimmy– along with the full weight of that eternal chip on his shoulder– came down like a falling tree on that overalled yokel. The only details we got after-the-fact were that it was a real horse-whipping, tears were extracted and a broken and contrite vow was made to never get near Jeff or I again. Jimmy was not prone to histrionics, or to exaggeration and so I believed this account to be gospel.
John Allen issued no further homosexual taunts or snide comments about my Halloween costumes, ever again. We could walk the neighborhood freely, without fear of bullying. He mostly stayed in the confines of his yard, perpetually greasy and working on rusted-out Chevy’s. Even when Jimmy moved out of the house and Jeff and I eventually reached puberty, John Allen never even looked in our direction.
It was nice to be a part of a crew.
