Kendall Estates was a glorious place to live in the 1970’s.
Growing up in a neighborhood teeming with kids your own age, felt like good fortune. Growing up next door to Jeff, my best friend and lifelong partner in crime, felt like fate.
Our shared suburban enclave, comprised of about 75 ranch-style homes built in 1958, was nestled on the edge of an expanse of Dade County woods and undeveloped land. At any given time, up and down our quiet street, there were children out in the front yard playing in the water hose, or racing their Big Wheels on the sidewalk or organizing a pick-up game of football in the road.
In our young minds, the safety of that little world was always contrasted by the woods and unexplored land which opened up two blocks west of our street, on the other side of a set of railroad tracks.
Beyond those tracks, was where the adventure was.
There was a mysterious “hidden lake” less than a quarter mile from my front door. It was routine to see people riding horseback down the main street and into those woods. The place was wide open for exploration.
The frontier town vibe of West Kendall in the 70’s, along with the reality that Jeff and I both lived in single-parent households, provided us with a virtually unrestricted backdrop for juvenile mayhem, treefort daydreams, and Skunk Ape search parties.
A whole generation of teens who grew up in that neighborhood during the 1960’s, had already mined and staked out every square inch of the terrain around us. But very early on, Jeff and I were strangely convinced the place was ours and that no one understood its true secrets but us.
The setting was a lot less idyllic for my younger sister, Chris.
The neighborhood had no girls her age and for most of the 70’s she was forced to either tag along with me or be at home by herself with her Barbie toys.
Between 1978-79, there was a lot less of this tagging along, as Jeff and I became more obnoxious and self-sufficient in our adventuring. It wasn’t cool to have your sister hovering around while looking for Sasquatch nests. And there were real “safety concerns” too, as I often told Mom. There were parts of those unchartered woods, where we had to walk our BMX bikes and it simply wasn’t safe for a 6-year old girl. As time went on, that was the default argument and it worked.
West Kendall’s Ugly, White Underbelly
At some point in ’77 , two girls roughly the same age as my sister, moved into our neighborhood.
One, named Carrie, moved into the dumpy corner house just a block away– right across from Commander Powell’s place. Mr. Powell’s house was manicured with Navy WWII vet precision. But the house where Carrie lived, was a dump. The house had been rented out since I was kid, with a revolving door of nameless, poor white folks making it their refuge. Chris spent a lot of time at Carrie’s house at first, celebrating that she finally had someone to play with.
Within a couple weeks though, Mom caught wind that Carrie’s mother was a stripper and that Carrie’s absentee father had once tried to kill the entire family with a shotgun before finally killing himself. I forget exactly how this nightmarish tidbit was revealed, but that was effectively the end of my sister’s visits to Carrie’s house. And soon after, the family moved away.
After this, the Cornwell family moved into the neighborhood on the next street over from us. They had a portly daughter named Jenny who was a year older than my sister. In a demented twist, Jenny told Chris that her father also had tried to kill her and that she once had to hide under the bed to escape being murdered.
Jenny’s house was then immediately declared off limits too.
This is how the universe played cards with Chris until, in late 1978, Dick Franz and his two young daughters moved into the house behind ours. Hopes were high.
I still remember the look on my sister’s face when my Mom came and told her that there was another girl her age, just over the fence.
The oldest daughter was a redhead named Veronica and she and my sister started playing together the same day the family moved in. Veronica, along with her younger sister Victoria, and their Dad, Dick, were squeaky clean. None of us ever knew what Dick Franz did for a living, but we knew that at some point he’d been a professional body builder. He had a wall full of trophies and albums full of competition snapshots to prove it.
Right away, my sister came back from their house with intel.
The Franz’s were really nice. Super duper religious, but very nice.
We didn’t use the term Evangelical back then. In our parlance, there were people who simply “went to church”–like us–and then there were “holy rollers”, as my Yankee Grandmom used to call them.
Dick Franz had a bright yellow bumper sticker on the back of his station wagon that said “I Found It”, so I guess that placed him squarely in the latter camp. They all attended church a couple times a week, studied the Bible at home and weren’t allowed to listen to non-Christian music. A house without KISS playing seemed like hell to me. The religious thing was alien to me as a kid, but for some reason the real shocker was that Veronica wasn’t even allowed to watch Laverne & Shirley on TV. For whatever reason, this sent me over the edge. “What?” I squawked, when Chris told us this at the dinner table one night. What kind of mutants were they?
My mother seemed uncharacteristically stoic. “Well, to each his own!” she declared. I think she just wanted my sister to finally have a friend in the neighborhood and she didn’t want me standing in the way.
“Let it go“, she warned me calmly, as she put our dishes in the sink.
But at 9 years old, I just couldn’t. What was so evil with Laverne & Shirley? I really needed an answer.
Veronica came to our house one day after school when Jeff and I were playing and we interrogated her.
“Not even Happy Days?” I screeched.
Nope.
“What about KISS?” I asked. “Have you ever even heard them?”
“We’re not allowed”, she said. My memory is that she made this admission with a deep undercurrent of sadness. But that may not have been the case.
Incredulous, I followed up, “What if I were to put KISS on the record player right now?”
“I would have to go home”, she said bluntly, looking down at the terrazzo floor.
Always trying to up the ante, I casually threw out– “What if we tied you to the chair and made you listen to one song? What would happen?”
She laughed. And looked at my sister for help.
I’m not proud of what I did that day. I was nine years old. It was a different time. Writing about this isn’t a good look for me. But it’s what happened. And a big part of writing is about reflecting the truth.
Jeff and I tied her to my dining room chair with jump rope and then I ran and put on Strutter from KISS Alive!
An iconic Peter Criss tom-tom fill opens the track, as if signaling the arrival of tribal leader… Punta-punta-punta-punta… Punta-punta-punta-punta… just as a blast of blatantly stolen, overdriven Stones’ chords come galloping out of the speakers.
Veronica squirmed and shrieked like Margaret Hamilton being doused with a bucket of water. I cranked the volume on the little Panasonic receiver, to the point of speaker cone damage and she burst out of the ropes and ran home.
We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first proxy shot fired in the bloody war against Dick Franz.
The Mysterious Seafoam Box
My 4th grade teacher at Pinewood Acres (1977-1978) was a former Catholic nun named Miss Sinn.
Unlike the cruel, Nurse Ratched persona I had been subjected to under Mrs. Sheffield, Miss Sinn was a true sweetheart. A saint.
She singlehandedly destroyed every childhood prejudice I had about convents and nuns. She forbade KISS to be played in the classroom, just like Sheffield had, but discussions and trading of KISS paraphernalia was freely permitted on the playground during recess. This made her instantly more reasonable. I could work with her.
The new year had essentially the same cast of characters, sans Mark Fischer as I mentioned earlier, but with the addition of a handful of kids from other schools. One of the new students was a blonde cutie pie named Andrea Luchese, who was way prettier than any classmate I’d ever had before.
Jessica Lange had been our muse during our previous year in the gulag.
But I found a new one.
The difference was, this one was real and walked in our midst, every day. I was still a feral boy, obsessed with horror movies, comic books and KISS, but Andrea introduced a new set of emotions to 4th grade life at Pinewood. She made me slightly dizzy. And she terrified me.
4th grade seemed to have a lot of these new realities to contend with.
One morning, Mom dropped Chris and I off early for school. The sun was still coming up and it felt like we were arriving there in the dark. I went to my morning bleacher and Chris went over to the first grade bleacher about 50 feet away. With no one else there but the two of us, I began my anxious habit of flicking ficus tree berries into the metal garbage can to pass the time. As the South Florida morning sun was opening on the assembly area, Bernie Bernardo’s dad dropped him off. He ran over and sat next to me on the back row.
“I know something you don’t know...” he delivered in a sing-song voice. I was distracted so he repeated the tune.
“What?” I mumbled, distracted with my target practice.
“I-cant-tell-you…” he continued in that grating lullaby cadence.
“What is it?”
This loop repeated three or four times, with my rising agitation, until he finally coughed it up.
Looking around the empty bleachers to make sure no adults were listening, he said “My Dad told me something last night that will blow your mind!” He slid in and lowered his voice, even though my sister was the only other person around, roughly 50 feet away. I looked over at her, with her Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox and book bag, just staring out at the open kickball field.
“My Dad told me that every woman in the world has a bunch of blood come out of her privates, every month.”
Even though I was only 8 years old, I had a little experience grasping foreign concepts. Once, on the show In Search Of, Leonard Nimoy talked about the Bermuda Triangle and how it swallowed airplanes and shipping vessels, whole. When I was in second grade, I learned that my great grandmother– whom I saw every week at my grandmother’s house– had died at Baptist Hospital of a heart attack. Mom told me once that Jamie Summers wasn’t really married to Steve Austin. Glenn Cutler told me in first grade that Santa was just my parents. Once in summer camp I saw that Eric Jenkins was missing a left foot. It explained why his one shoe folded over so much. The concept of amputation freaked me out, but I eventually came to grips with it.
But nothing quite prepares you for that moment you first hear that blood pours out of every woman’s crotch, monthly.
Seeing the hollow, dissociative look on my face, Bernie pushed on.
“It’s called a period. They have to use something called a Kotex, to stop the blood.”
“A Kotex?”
“Yeah, it’s really, really gross, man.”
“Not my Mom.” I resisted, defensively.
“Every woman in the world, once they turn 13.”
“Yeah, but not my Mom!” I proclaimed again, planting a flag in the ground.
Bernie moved quickly against my resistance, as if he’d already been coached on how to deal with an unbeliever.
“I can prove it!” he defied. “Look in your Mom’s bathroom or in her closet. You’re gonna see a box of Kotex pads. I bet you one hundred dollars!” He held his hand out in front of me to shake. “One. Hundred. Dollars”.
“Nuh-uh”, I sputtered, reflexively.
“Yuh-huh”, he said staring me in the eye with his weird, chewed-on fingernails still in my face .
It’s still remarkable to me how quickly my obstinate, unbelieving mind silently retraced its steps while staring right into Bernie’s cocky face. I can still picture my eyes darting back and forth as I ran the third-grade calculus, flipping from back to front through the mind’s Rolodex of useless information and came face to face with the god awful reality: My Mom had periods.
That’s what that mysterious seafoam green box was in her closet. It was jam-packed with these foot-long white… paddles. I’d seen them many times and just ignored them. Hell, I’d even seen them… in the garbage! They looked like something you put in your shoes. They were as big as my head. My mom even kept a paper bag full of them under her carseat. Those things were everywhere.
Bernie watched my face as I connected the dots. He knew he had one up on me.
Bernie had delighted in the macabre angle of this new wisdom that he’d just imparted.
I was revolted.
It was a scene straight out of a horror movie, but it wasn’t the least bit cool. It so affected me, that I was quiet and withdrawn in class that morning; almost like I was coming down with the stomach flu. I didn’t want to know these things.
