The biggest enemy in life isn’t death. It’s boredom.
No one ever told me this when I was growing up. If you’re lucky, you ultimately face death just once. But when you’re a kid, you have to stare boredom in its narrow slits, every single day.
One day shortly after Halloween, Jeff and I were bored out of our skulls, and a decision was made to hit the road and try and make something happen. We used to call this “Boring Lessons”. It always helped to embark upon these “lessons” with a few coins in your pocket, in case Pancho the ice cream man made his way into the neighborhood. A BMX bike was also indispensable, in case your adventure took you off-road or you needed to escape from a bad situation quickly.
We learned early on, that all kinds of good fortune and mayhem awaited us when we hijacked our childhood boredom and just got moving. Sometimes we rode our bikes around the neighborhood and found a Playboy lying on the side of the road. On a good day, maybe a Penthouse. Sometimes we found money. Even a curious, scrap piece of metal, like the infamous Whoopin’ Stick, could provide hours of entertainment. We sometimes stumbled upon a dangerous pile of gravel at one of the many new-home construction sites in our area. Or an undiscovered hang-out spot near hidden lake.
Like a lot of children, we used to lay spare change on the railroad tracks and come back later to find them flattened. After only a few attempts, the novelty of flattened metal wore off. We quickly graduated from coins, to rolling a boulder onto the tracks. The next day, the oversized chunk of rock was flung down a hill, about a hundred feet from the tracks. Constantly upping the ante, we then dragged a massive section of a fallen tree onto the tracks. That night, as I lay in bed, my juvenile morbidity imagined a headline story in the Miami Herald the following day about a train derailing in Kendall with no survivors. In a panic, I rode my bike out to the tracks early the next morning and dragged the branch off the tracks. Calamity averted.
From about the age of 9, we started box sledding down the side of the grassy, 40° slope of the Turnpike extension near our house. This provided endless hours of exhilaration and was a tradition that continued on into our teens.
Another common Boring Lesson for me at the time, was to have fights with this girl on the next street over named Mary Drake. She was blonde-haired and freckled and towered over me at nearly 6-feet tall. She had a mouthful of braces and a cruel streak that belied her all-American, girl next door vibe. The first actual fist fight I ever had in my life was with Mary Drake– sometime around the age of six. She was about 9 or 10 years old at the time, but it seemed like she was already on the cusp of puberty. She would routinely horsewhip me and send me home red-faced and (occasionally) bleeding. I never stood a chance, but somehow the public humiliation of being dominated by a girl, kept me coming back for another round.
Once, while she had me on the ground in a headlock, she inexplicably decided to explain the facts of life to me.
“Let me out, you idiot!” I screamed.
“Did you know… that boys have hot dogs and girls have hamburgers?” she quizzed me from under her spotted, crab arms. “I bet you have a hamburger!”
“Let me OUT!!!” I hollered, my face squished tightly against her scrawny ribcage.
In the summer of 1978– minutes before one of our many scheduled brawls (e.g. “Meet me at the stop sign at 4pm– sharp!”)– Jeff coached me to roll a bunch of pennies up in black electrical tape and use it in my fist, as a kind of ghetto pair of brass knuckles. It’s inconceivable to me now, how a child Jeff’s age already knew the dirty secrets of back alley combat. I assume he learned this stuff from Jimmy Joe. Maybe Jimmy had used penny rolls on John Allen, when he tried to get my candy back.
We sat in my room, hurriedly dropping coins into my grandfather’s Lance cracker machine bank sleeves and then wrapping them in electrical tape I’d found in the toolbox in my utility room. The rolls fit nicely in my fists. I swung a few times in the air, to try them out. “Wo!” I exclaimed, feeling a new kind of Kung Fu Theater courage. “I told you!” Jeff said proudly.
I envisioned myself descending on that gigantic, freckled freak with all the power of Mighty Joe Young. For once, I would not be defeated! I practiced plowing into things around the house with my “penny knuckles”, while Jeff coached me on posture. It was an ominous portend that I punched the living room wall, in my zeal, and nearly broke my hand. Jeff assured me the impact worked differently on flesh.
The entire march to battle, down the sidewalk, Jeff acted like Micky Goldmill in Rocky, massaging my shoulders, “You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder!”
Mary Drake saw me walking up to the fight from her street corner and shouted immediately, “What’s in your hands, punk?!!”
Like a witless putz, I actually glanced down. In a split second maneuver–with my eyes averted to my suspiciously-clenched hands–she lunged and wrenched my little fingers apart, disarmed both of the penny rolls and proceeded to flog the living crap out of me. My coach watched in horror from the sidelines. Judging by the concerned look on his face as I limped back the house, it had been a gruesome sight.
Even my personal “Mickey” was silent after that match.
That was the last fight I had with her, but not the last fight that summer.
The Viceroys of the 108th
Trent was this younger kid who lived on the street directly behind us.
His mom was friends with mine and sometimes I got stuck hanging out with him. He wasn’t the brightest subject in our fiefdom, but he was compliant– and the older we got, the more we just avoided him. Trent saw us from his backyard, just as Jeff and I were rounding the corner on his street. “Hey guys, a bunch of us are playing hide and seek! You wanna play?” Jeff and I looked at each other. A “bunch of us” really meant him and his younger brothers and a collection of their baby friends. “Sure”, we said. Trent had a heavily forested backyard with plenty of foliage and storage areas to hide.
“Give us a second”, I said to Trent as Jeff and I opened the gate and scouted the yard for suitable hiding places. Jeff pointed silently to the 30-foot ficus tree. I shook my head. Too much work. “Why don’t we just leave quietly while he’s counting and head out of here?” I whispered to Jeff. “He’ll be looking for hours.” We smiled at each other. It was a plan.
We signaled to Trent and he began counting.
“Hey, you’ve gotta count to a hundred this time because I need time to get into my spot”, I interrupted him. “OK!”, Trent responded enthusiastically, excited that someone was finally up for the challenge. “One, two….”
By the time he reached ten, Jeff and I had already stealthily unlatched the gate and continued walking right down the street. We were a few hundred feet away and I could still here the echo of his voice from his backyard. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven…” He was going to be looking for an hour.
As we shuffled down the sidewalk with Trent’s counting voice fading behind us, we passed the Franz residence which was the house directly behind mine, diagonally. It was as if Dick was sitting by the window that afternoon waiting for us to walk in front of his house. The door burst open, just as we passed.
“Hey you!” he bolted out in his khaki Bermuda shorts, Jesus sandals and undershirt. I pointed to my chest and lowered my chin. “Actually, both of you”, he clarified. We stood still on the sidewalk as he approached us, his shoulders pulled back.
“Which one of you tied my daughter to a chair and made her listen to Satanic rock music?” he blustered.
” We didn’t tie her to a chair”, I blurted out defensively– the first in series of thick-sliced, nitrate-laden fibs.
“Who did it? It was you, wasn’t it?” he said aggressively, zeroing in on yours truly and perhaps detecting some guilt in my eyes.
“She said she liked KISS”, I said, serving another slice.
With that he pushed against my 8-year old, wiry frame with his overworked, porch-pumped chassis.
“You listen to me, young man… Your Christine’s brother, right?”
I nodded, now terrified.
Dick’s index finger, pushed against my scrawny breastbone. “Your sister is such a nice young girl. I really like her”, he said, pumping up his windbag.
“It’s a shame she has to have a brother like you.” I gulped, having no real quibble with him up to that point, other than the inherent injustice of throwing his weight around with a fourth grader. His finger poked again. “You stay away from my daughter, you hear me?” I nodded automatically and he stepped away from me, and turned back towards his door.
“And keep that Knights in Satan’s Service to yourself!” he barked over his shoulder as he walked back inside and slammed the door.
That wasn’t going to happen, but I nodded in fear anyway.
Jeff and I just stood there in his front yard, eyes locked on each other in disbelief. We resumed our stroll down the sidewalk and once we got passed his house, exploded. First with laughter. And then outrage. Who did this clown think he was?
“That guy was out of line!” Jeff protested.
“Yeah, he touched me!” I recounted.
Dick had no idea that he’d just kicked a hornet’s nest.
Hide and Go Brain Damage
One day after school on the following week, Jeff was at a Cub Scouts meeting. I was alone and I rode my bike around the neighborhood. I passed Trent’s house and he was out front again. He waived me down.
“You want to play hide and go seek?” he me asked again, unbelievably. “Only this time, you have to stay in the backyard!”
“No problem”, I responded. “You count!”
Trent balked, his short term memory sputtering back online briefly. “Oooh no! You count!”
“I’ll count next!” I reassured him.
Somehow he agreed and then opened the gate. His younger brother Garrett was also back there, ready to play.
He began the usual countdown, from his back porch area, his hands covering his eyes. This time, I told him he only had to count to twenty. I didn’t want him getting suspicious.
“No peeking, man!” I yelled.
“I’m not!” he said with a muffled voice, his hands somehow over his mouth too as he commenced countdown.
Without any stealth at all, I just slipped right back out the back gate, hopped on my Huffy bike and kept riding. I could hear his voice counting again, as I pulled away from the front of his house. “Thirteen, fourteen…”
This time I drove towards the opposite corner, away from Dick Franz’s house. I was alone now and didn’t need any more confrontations with that deranged guy. As I rounded the corner, riding back towards 108th avenue, I could see an ambulance parked in the middle of the road, next to the Gould’s house, about two blocks ahead of me. The lights flashed silently. The framerate for this memory always moves in slow motion for me.
I rode towards the commotion, tossed my bike aside and squeezed into the crowd to get a better view. Everyone in the circle was taller than me and I had to poke my head through to see anything. Two paramedics were squatting and working frantically with a figure on the ground, in the middle of the crowd. Lying on his back in the the street, was a teenager with long, curly brown hair hair and blood everywhere. To my eight year-old eyes, it looked like his brains were splattered all over the pavement. I knew him immediately as Eric, one of the older, hippie kids who lived on 107th. Above him, roughly 20 feet over the street, was a large Ficus tree branch. Teens used to sit up there on the enormous limb with their legs dangling down and smoke cigarettes over the street.
Eric was lifted up into the ambulance on a gurney, leaving behind a sinister mess, where his skull had just been. “He fell out of the tree and landed right onto his head”, I overheard someone in the crowd explaining to an adult who just walked up. Alarm, chaos and mortal dread fastened onto me and refused to let go.
I swallowed, dryly and turned back to my bike, in revulsion– all the veins in my body, like frozen little tributaries. There was no way Eric could survive with half of his brains, I surmised. I had just seen a dead teenager. For sure. I could hear some of the huddled teenagers behind me crying, as the ambulance pulled away. No siren on.
I wished I hadn’t seen that.
I wish I hadn’t played hide and seek with Trent.
If I’d only gone around the block the other way, in front of Dick’s house, I would never have witnessed the carnage on the other side of the neighborhood.
If only I’d just played hide and seek with Trent, instead of endlessly punking him, I would’ve missed the whole thing.
I went home and put the Three Stooges on—which played every afternoon on WCIX— and tried to ignore the gruesome scene that kept replaying in my head; shake that horrible, alien chill. Go just a few minutes, back in time and feel something familiar again.
I got up from the sofa and turned up the volume on our old Magnavox console set. It was coincidentally the “We Want Our Mummy” episode, with King Rootentooten where they are explorers in Egypt. I forced out a laugh from the sofa. That episode is one of Curly’s great cinematic moments. “Woop, woop, woop! N’yuk, n’yuk!”
Man, I really wish I hadn’t seen Eric on the ground.
Our Own Private Howitzer
My mother told us the details of this story, shortly after it happened in the early part of 1978.
All we knew about the incident, was that Mom was hanging up bedsheets on our clothesline. My sister was playing in the Franz’s neatly-trimmed backyard, which had an unobstructed line of sight from our own. My sister’s only friend in the neighborhood was Veronica and the sound of children’s laughter in the balmy Florida outdoors, was music to my mother’s ears.
As she clipped a clothespin on the line, she distractedly glanced over at my sister and Veronica playing and noticed Dick was also outside with them. She moved a little closer to the corner of the yard to see what the laughter and frivolity was about, and could see that Dick had his weightlifting bench out in the sun and was taking turns “benchpressing” the young girls over his face while he reclined on his bench. They were innocently having fun being lifted in the air, but with each rep the girl’s crotches were lowered near his greasy, smiling mug.
My mother, unlike most women in the 1970’s, could be a savage disciplinarian and was unafraid of confrontation with males.
Once, in the second grade, my classmate Glenn showed me a strange finger gesture he called a birdie. It looked funny. He said it meant “thirty days bad luck” to whomever you pointed it at. According to his sources, you were supposed to point it like a gun– typically at the face of an intended target– for maximum effect. Glenn’s sources were dubious. He was the one in first grade who told me Santa Claus wasn’t real, so how much could he really be trusted?
With just a couple minutes of practice, I was able to flash the “birdie” effortlessly and point it at unsuspecting victims on the playground. When I got home that afternoon, I gave my new foray into ancient hand magick rituals a quick test drive. Mom was folding laundry on the sofa and I stuck it in her face boldly, sending a solid month of bad luck playfully into her frowning puss.
The very next thing I remember was lying flat on our green shag rug and blinking rapidly at the ceiling of our living room– my eyes spinning like the wheels of a one-arm bandit.
I had no idea how I got there, but my jaw hurt.
Sometimes I think Mom seemed most alive when pushing back against the bullies and meanies of this world.
I have a stark recollection from that period of being startled awake one night to the sound of what can only be described as the end of the world. All of us have heard a sound so frightful that it ejects us out of our skin– maybe the sudden metal-on-metal roar of of an awful car wreck, a military jet flying over you at at the speed of sound or the violent rumble of a nearby house exploding from a homemade bomb. All of which I’d experienced at some point in my childhood.
The only thought I was able to gather in the blackness of my stifling bedroom was “Go to Mom’s room and get help– something terrible is happening!” As I scrambled towards my bedroom door, the banshee-like siren became clearer.
“You motherfuuuuuuuuucker!!! Get out of the car and try that shit with me you fucking coward! You fucking coward piece of shiiiiiiiiiit!!!”
It was that moment that I realized it was my own mother screaming.
The hair on my arms stood up. I’d heard plenty of profanity and even had my own limited playbook, which I used on the playground and around the neighborhood. But the blast from these vile incantations felt concussive, like the blowback from a Howitzer canon at close range. It seemed to strike body and soul with an almost hypersonic impact.
The entire neighborhood heard her that morning.
I walked through the darkened house to our opened front door, only to see my mother standing in the yard– still in her robe, with her fists balled up, and looking at a parked car in front of the neighbors house.
She had gone out to get the newspaper before 6am and seen the paper delivery guy parked near the front of the house in his beat-up Chevy Nova, savagely beating his girlfriend in the passenger seat. At Mom’s taunting, the car peeled into reverse and came back closer to our house. Alone in the house with two young children, Mom stood her ground and was frothing in an almost homicidal rage , as he got out of the car and she could see him, clearly. “Let’s go, pig fucker!!!” she railed with her fists up. With that, our faithful black Labrador, Samantha, burst out of the door and in a show of female solidarity began snarling at pig fucker. I stood in our doorway in sweaty pajamas, watching this deranged woman scare off a thug as she literally jumped up and down with all of the pent-up mania of the abyss, begging him “LET’S GO!!!”.
She eventually got her newspaper that morning and just a few minutes afterward, was sitting at our kitchen table calmly sipping Sanka and eating a slice of toast with Smuckers strawberry preserves. I sat across from her, just staring with equal parts fear and admiration.
So, it was no surprise that the sight of her daughter being bench pressed by a pelvis-sniffing, grinning ghoul in spandex and Roman slave sandals, sent my mother completely over the edge. She bolted to the corner of the yard, semi-hysterically and yelled over the fence, “Christine!!! I need you to come here, please!”
My 6-year old sister begged for just a few more minutes with Veronica, but Mom was emphatic– “NOW!” She jogged across the yard whining, and Mom lifted my sister over the fence and back into the safety of our yard. Dick sat up on that weight bench, his narrow eyes darting furiously in confusion. “Come back again, soon”, Franz called over the fence, waiving his hand. Veronica stood there confused. Her only neighborhood friend whisked away.
As Mom ushered Chris inside the house, she said calmly, “Veronica can come over and play anytime you want. But you are never to set foot in that house ever again.” That was that.
The world was a lot more unfair and cruel than either Chris or I realized.
The Young Mercenary’s Handbook
Later, Mom told me privately, “I didn’t like the way he was touching your sister.”
“What was he doing?” I prodded, my curiosity riled.
“He’s a weirdo. A pervert”, she spat out. I looked at her blankly, not computing. “A bad person“, she underscored, sensing perhaps my inability to grasp the scope of the problem.
I knew it had something to do with sex. The only thing I definitively knew on that topic was based on the fuzzy intel relayed to me in the second grade by a scrappy little kid named Bill Redlus. “Sex is when two adults lay on top of each other naked”, he had informed me. At the time, the idea seemed grotesque and completely pointless. I combined this data with Mary Drake’s “hotdogs and hamburgers” reductionist breakdown. By adding both of these concepts together, I was able to reach the conclusion… that I still had no idea what was going on. “Hamburgers” sounded pretty amazing, though!
After that limited disclosure at the age of six, a bit more info trickled in by way of excerpts from Playboy or Penthouse magazines found on the side of the road or in the woods. But only a bit. It’s astounding how little I knew, even at nine years old. Which was a good thing.
Nearly four decades later, when my two oldest sons were about 7 and 9 years old, I took them for a drive in our Isuzu Trooper one night, so we could have “The Talk”. My Mom and Dad never discussed the facts of life with me or my sister and I wanted to break that pattern of passive parenting as a young father. I wanted to catch them before the corruption of the adult world snatched them away. I didn’t want them gleaning bogus intel from the Bill Redlus’ or Mary Drakes of the world.
“What do you guys know about sex?” I asked them, from behind the wheel as I turned down the radio. They both shrugged their shoulders. “Do you know what it even is?” I followed up. They shook their heads.
I felt sorry for them. Their purity and innocence was so endearing. I worried that the discussion might be a little premature for them.
We had raised them in a house without profanity and without access to the internet or PG-13 or R-rated movies. They were only allowed to play E-rated video games and we monitored their TV viewing carefully. No horror movies, no TV shows with sexual content. No cell phones. I was trying to course-correct for the missteps I had experienced when I was a kid.
“So, boys….”, I started awkwardly again, “Sex is something that happens when two adults love each other…” My words seemed to float in the silence of the SUV. This was going to be tough for them, but even more brutal for me.
My younger son, Step, looked at me and said, “You mean when a guy puts his dick inside a girl’s vagina and moves it in and out, real fast?” His nine-year old brother, Tim, immediately chimed in from the backseat, “And then he shoots white stuff into her vagina and she has a baby.” They both nodded. I had no words.
“Yeah… we know all about that, Dad”, Step said confidentally. “Have you ever heard of a blowjob?” he added, smirking, as if trying to stump me.
I drove that night on Dixie Highway, in traffic. At least I think I did. When we finally reached our destination at Baskin Robbins, I had no recollection of how I got there or how long it took us. I think I was in shock. We sat and ate ice cream on this bench outside and I just stared at these two kids as they ate their sundaes with abandon, both baby faces covered in chocolate syrup.
Franz was a demented weirdo. That much I could understand when I was 9. He was caught in the backyard trying to do creepy things to my sister and his own daughter– whatever that was. That’s all I needed to know.
I went immediately and told Jeff. We sat in his room and mulled over the options.
“He needs to be taken care of”, Jeff said.
I nodded. “For sure.”
With that, we began carefully spying on Dick from our own backyards. Watching his workouts. Observing him trimming hedges and mowing the grass. Studying his leisure time, floating around in his above-ground pool.
With detailed charts of his movements, we began a systematic, gradual policy of aggression against him– designed to aggravate and annoy, with extreme prejudice.
Pumping KISS records from Jeff’s bedroom window out towards Dick’s domain– usually during his outdoor workout sessions on his porch– was the first volley fired in our war. Lovegun and KISS Alive II both got maximum airplay across the backyard during this initial phase of bombardment. We would watch him with delight as he’d pause his reps, sit up on his bench and look around in bewliderment, as the anthemic King of the Night Time World blasted out of two crappy stereo speakers propped up in the sill of Jeff’s jalousie windows.
This was followed by after-dark bottle rocket launches at the front of his house. One night, he came out the front door just as the rocket’s red glare was bursting on his porch. By the time we heard him yelling, we were already halfway down the street on our black Huffy BMX bikes. When launching from his own front yard got too risky, we targeted him from the backyard. When that got dicey, we launched once from the roof of my house.
Then we adopted a strange obsession in this incursion, that would last us through the end of that school year and into the summer of 1978.
I’ve never been been into drugs, but this was maybe the closest I would ever come to full blown addiction.
We began throwing rocks at the aluminum storage shed on the back of his lot.
Daily.
Multiple times per day.
It started as a casual challenge– one of our countless “Boring Lessons”. I lobbed a chunk of rock one day from Jeff’s backyard and it landed on the roof of Dick’s shed with a catastrophic boom. Something about the visceral aggression of that noise in our calm suburban neighborhood, made my adrenaline spike.
Jeff and I shelled that aluminum structure, with artillery of various shapes and sizes, for the next several months, without interruption.
I would wake up in the summer, eat a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and a slice of toast, walk out to the backyard and fire off a mortar in the direction of the Dick shed. Once I heard the delightful “KA-BLAM” on the roof, I felt at peace and would go back inside, turn on the TV and watch the Price is Right or the Mike Douglas Show. At lunch, Jeff and I would go back out and launch a pair of missiles– either from his yard or mine, it didn’t matter– and then, just go about our day. After dinner was an especially intense period for bombing, under cover of the night.
The addiction was so unrelenting, that by early summer we literally ran out of rocks in Jeff’s yard and began using large, smooth stones from a landscaped area out by my pool. At various times, we also enlisted child soldiers– independent affiliates, if you will– into our war. Neighborhood kids as young as 5 or 6, were given the target, provided some ammo and told to fire as often as possible upon it. So now the Dick shed was hit from every direction. Sometimes by small children who could barely read.
With the ’round the clock shelling that the summer brought, the stakes in our personal battle became higher. Dick started lurking on his back porch, waiting for the mortar rounds to come in.
We got to a point where we started shooting stones from our front yards, over the roof and into his shed. Our calculations from hidden vantage points got pretty good. “Raise elevation 20 degrees! Hold at charge 3! Fire!!!” There would be a couple seconds of silence and then a “BLAM!” followed by a holler of Evangelical rage from the other side of the house– “Hey!!!”
In the day time, we also started launching from poolside in my yard and then slipping stealthily into the water, just as the stone exploded against the aluminum. “Bah-WAK!” The Evangelical Code, that somehow granted him grace to rape children, also forbade him from even a syllable of profanity. We could still hear him seething and murmuring in the corner of the yard, looking around for us, as we were submerged in blue waters, out of his view– our noses barely hovering above the water.
Sometimes we would hurl the stones from up in one of the tall Ficus trees in the corner of my front yard. It was a tricky maneuver– prone to misfires because of the dense tree branches– but we were a lot closer to the target than the front yard or the pool, and were completely shielded from exposure there. Our rounds would be launched up through the branches and would land on the roof of the shed with a terrible “Thwack!” Franz would wail in anger from his back porch and burst out into the yard running, hoping to see us.
This now provided Jeff and I with a double kick of adrenaline. First, the glee of the actual explosion and then secondly, the follow-up ecstasy of watching him stampede like a wild animal towards the back fence, as he scanned the horizon for culprits. Several times the joy was so intoxicating, it was difficult not to fall out of the tree with laughter.
We were winning. And there was no stopping us.
