Sleep Away

In much the same way that going to college was never on the table for my mother, it was roundly assumed with more than a modicum of certainty by my parents that offering me the option of attending a sleep away camp would not be necessary.

I've always been a homebody, for as long as I can remember, and I am no different today, though the location of my home has changed by half a mile.

"Well," my mother said to me when I was eight, with a look that might suggest she were a oncologist confronting me with a terminal diagnosis, "we've got to do something with you this summer."

"Can't I just stay at home with you?" I asked, sitting on a piece of porch furniture, my legs crossed like a girl. It seemed like a sensible question to me.

"No, honey, you can't," she said, "I'm getting a job-- I'll be working."

...................

J... ob?

Did. Not. Compute.

Mommy?

Jo.... b?

Why was she getting a job? As far as I knew, my mommy hadn't had a job since she was nineteen, when she worked leisurely hours stringing tennis rackets at a pro shop, my eldest sister playing with her stuffed animals under the store's counter. My eight-year-old brain almost imploded under the pressure of this new, unwelcome, cognitively dissonant information. She explained to me that she had gotten a job as a part-time librarian's assistant at the public library just up the street from our house. She looked at me intently, trying to discern my innermost thoughts through the windows of my eyes. I was trying to convince myself that she was serious and, simultaneously, trying not to pee in my overalls.

I think crossing my legs like a girl helped.

They sent me to a camp close by, probably in case I wigged, but I hated it. Every morning I asked if I had to go back, and the answer was always "yes", until the last day of camp, when I asked the question, just for the sake of consistency, and the answer was finally "no." The next summer, they sent me to the same camp, but enrolled me in the computer program, thinking that my newly-acquired eyeglasses must have meant that I would have some sort of aptitude for computers. Turned out, I had an aptitude for asking if I had to go back there the next day, too.

My tenth summer, they finally got it right. They took a big risk, though, because they sent me to a day camp that was approximately 45 minutes away. That was the down-side. The up-side was that it was a creative arts day camp, where awkward children flourished whilst engaging in activities such as ceramics, choir, circus arts, instrumental music lessons, and, of course, theatre. Basically, I could do whatever the hell I wanted, and I did. They mandated that you attend instructional swim, or your free swim privileges were revoked, but I reasoned with myself that I didn't give a shit about free swim, so I routinely cut instructional swim. At first, lifeguards fanned out across the camp looking for me, and I didn't bother hiding very well. Finally, they gave up, and I would go to the pool area and just hang around during the instructional swim period.

One day, three or four awkward boys between the ages of 11 and 13 were hanging around chatting in an elevated sort of tone, and, during a lull in their conversation, I randomly leaned in to them and out of my mouth popped the following gem:

"Excuse me, but did you know that John F. Kennedy had sex with Marilyn Monroe?"

Obviously, they took an immediate liking to me and accepted me into their little gang. In fact, their poolside pow-wow was actually a meeting to discuss plans to produce an original play of theirs called, "The Gang" and the most talented one of the group, a tall, bony kid with moderate acne and piercing eyes, agreed on the spot to write in a part in the show for me.

I stayed there for three summers as a camper, and returned to work there for four summers. I would still occasionally ask my mother if I had to go back, but I didn't do it every morning which, I guess, is a considerable improvement. Looking back on it now, I'm amazed that the late President Kennedy's sexual proclivities, in some circuitous way enabled me to experience my first and lasting summer friendships, but I'm grateful for that fact nonetheless. And I'm grateful that my parents didn't send me to overnight camp.

Who the hell knows what would have happened there?

See You in the Funny Pages

Remember the unequaled pleasure of sitting around on Sunday morning reading the comics as a kid? Maybe, for you, this wonderful, languid time took its place on the floor of your old family room, the newspaper spread out on top of endless acres of shag carpeting or, if you're a bit younger, berber. Perhaps you curled up in your father's favorite armchair, eating dry cereal out of a plastic Kellogg's bowl with your fingers as your youthful, unaided eyes scanned the colorful pages, taking in the latest follies of Calvin and Hobbes, or the misadventures of Dennis the Menace, or the alcohol-infused domestic violence of the Lockharts?

Seriously-- what the fuck was that kind of shit for children to read? That comic strip is singlehandedly responsible for my penchant for attending dinner parties with my tie askew, imbibing single malt liqour, insulting my wife and then punching her repeatedly in the face.

Anyway, I used to love reading the Sunday comics when I was a child. My sister and I would fight over them, of course, and then my father would scream at us for eating our "Cinnamon Toast Crunch" too loudly. The fighting with each other never seemed to bother him, but the loud crunching noises drove him fucking bananas. I loved when he would yell at us, because it was hilarious.

"FACKAN SHEET! VILL YOU SHAT DA FACK AHP WITH THAT CRANCHING SHEET ALREADY?!!"

Oh, Israelis... there's just nobody like them. No. body.

When you do enough of something as a kid, eventually you end up wanting to do it yourself. And I read a lot of comics growing up, and not just the comics in the paper on Sundays, I read the black-and-white ones on the weekdays, too, and, from a very early age, I made my parents buy me comic books. And I'm not talking about that fucking ginger-asshair loser Archie. The comic books I craved, for whatever reason, were Bloom County books, by Berkeley Breathed and Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau.

I was reading these books beginning in third grade, and I didn't just read one or two, I collected them. At one point, I had six Bloom County books on my bedroom shelves. Looking back on my childhood, I'm trying to think of something that I watched or read that wasn't completely age-inappropriate, and I can't really think of anything-- except for, I guess, the Dukes of Hazzard-- but I'm not particularly sure that six-year-old me should have been looking at Catherine Bach's tits as much as I did. I could have told you, at that age, exactly where the mole was on her breast, and what shape and color it was. If she had one. But she didn't.

A... mole, that is... Um...

Right, so: comics. When you read enough comics, you want to draw your own. Obvs. Now, I talk a lot on this here soapbox about my talents. You know what they are by now. Because you've never heard me talk about visually-artistic proclivities, I'm sure you've assumed that I don't have any.

YOU'RE RIGHT!

And yet, I tried. In elementary school, you'll pretty much try anything because you're generally too stupid to care very much about impending and obvious failure. Such was the case with me and comics. I don't remember what my comic strip was called (Dog Days, maybe?) but its star was a balding, middle-aged man in a shirt and tie, and I think his name was Stan. Stan was a hapless schmoe who owned a dog and a car that was perpetually breaking down (was this little me planning for the future?) and Stan worked at a dead-end desk-job and the vast majority of his non-working life consisted of taking his car into the garage. I was drawing these comics when I was maybe eight or nine. Stan's car had a habit of falling off the hydraulic lift at the mechanic's shop, which caused Stan great distress, as it tended to elevate the already steep bill exponentially.

I also drew comics of people having sex. Those were totally unrelated to the comics I drew of Stan. Stan didn't have sex, because, in my young, still-forming mind, there was no room for the concept that even luckless schmucktards still managed to, occasionally, achieve intercourse.

The comics featuring people having sex were, of course, discovered by my friend's mother during a sleepover, and were reported to my parents, who said nothing to me about them. This was the style of parenting they preferred, and I preferred it, too. It molded me into someone who detests confrontation and uncomfortable situations, and someone who still does, says, and writes pretty much whatever the hell he wants.

The drawings of Stan and his nowhere job and his falling-off-the-lift car were, of course, never discovered by anyone. Sadly, no child will ever crunch too loudly on Cinnamon Toast Crunch while reading "Dog Days"-- or whatever the fuck it was called-- while their father screams at them to "SHAT DEE FACK UP ALREADY!" and I guess I'm okay with that.

High Rise

A friend of mine-- actually, a "Friend" of mine-- posted a picture on Facebook of her driving over a rather substantial-looking, architecturally intriguing bridge. Actually, she probably wasn't driving, or maybe she was, and her passenger was taking the photograph. I like to think that anybody with whom I'm "Friends" on Facebook isn't stupid enough to drive over a large body of water whilst taking a picture of themselves doing so.

At any rate, viewing this picture made me think about bridges-- which is as good a thing as any to think about if you're not thinking about sex or food, or are trying to convince yourself that it's probably time you gave thinking about sex or food a bit of a break. For the time being.

So, bridges... Where were we?

The first bridge I can ever remember going over is located approximately three miles from my house. It's not much of a bridge, really. It doesn't go over any body of water, and it doesn't even elevate traffic over a perpendicular street below. As far as I know, what's below is basically a long-ago closed off road and a lot of overgrown scrub-brush. Truthfully, I don't know what the hell's underneath it. The more that I think about it, actually-- maybe it's railroad tracks for the local line. I don't know. Anyway, what's underneath isn't finally the point. What I remember is that going over this bridge in my father's Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera or the Buick Century or whatever piece of shit it was at the time, was that I thought going over that bridge was the coolest fucking thing in the world.

If my entire family was in the car, as we often were in those days, and conversation was loud and engaging, if we were approaching that little bridge, I would immediately shout, over the din,

"SHHHH!!!!! EVERYBODY SHHHH!!! HIGH-RISE! HIGH-RISE!"

In those days, I wielded a lot of power compared to my curb weight, and everybody in the car always complied. If they didn't, I had my mother and father for back-up, but their intervention was never necessary. Everybody would shut the fuck up respectfully as we drove over the bridge. I loved the sensation of going up, not in a risky way, for I knew it wasn't very high and all the tires were staying on the street surface, but because there was grating underneath the tires when you reached the apex of the bridge, the noise underneath the car changed to a sort of soothing, buzzing sound that I was absolutely in love with.

I have no idea why I called it a "high-rise." It wasn't anything of the kind. It wasn't very high, and it didn't rise, either, like I suppose a draw-bridge does. I had never seen a draw-bridge, though-- not in person anyway-- so there's no reason to think that I thought it was, or could have been, a draw-bridge. But, for years I was fascinated with that bridge.

"HIGH-RISE! HIGH-RISE!" I would cry. High-rise.

Kids go fucking bananas about the craziest shit, and nobody knows why. If anybody'd bothered to ask me, back then, what got me so jazzed about that rinky-dink, shitty little bridge, I have no idea what I would have said in response. "I just like it," is probably the likeliest answer, but that would have clearly left the questioner wanting more. The truth is, there's probably no good reason why I loved that bridge so much, and the noise the car made as it drove over it. No good reason at all. But it stuck, to a degree. Years later, when I would drive myself to high school at some unchristly hour in the pre-dawn morning, I would go out of my way to take the route that would take me over that bridge, and I would smile as I drove over it, noting the changing sounds emanating from beneath my tires.

High-rise.

I was fifteen when my middle sister went to U-Mass. My father rented a van and we all drove her up there. He took the Tappan Zee bridge and I almost sharted myself with fear. This was no fucking high-rise. This was a real goddamned bridge, and it seemed to go on forever, and what was much worse was how close it seemed to be to the water below. I suppose, logically, driving on a bridge that is much higher up ought to be scarier, because, were you to veer off it, you'd have that long, terrifying plunge downward to your certain death, but logic doesn't often go dancing with fear. And logic certainly has less to do with a bridge than fear does, unless you're building one.

When I experience bridges now, I'm still filled with a sense of awe and fear, and often dread, too, because, when you reach the end of most of the more substantial ones, there's usually a toll to be paid. You can still cruise the old high-rise by my house for nothing, though. But you have to be quiet if I'm in the car with you.

Them's the rules.

Foodspergers

Gotta love kids.

Kids and puppies-- for most normal people, they're both too cute to kill. And that's a good thing. God knew what (S)he was doing when making kids and puppies: make them as cute as possible so only the real dregs of society will put bullets into their brains or smash their little skullettes.

On Saturday, our puppy urinated all over our couch. Fortunately, it's an Ikea couch, so it has a slipcover. Said slipcover went into the washing machine and backup slipcover was utilized in its place. Not two hours later, she let loose all over backup slipcover.

Today's Tuesday, and she's still alive because, let's face it: she's pretty fucking cute, and would look decidedly less so with all four of her legs broken, her asshole sewn up with piano wire, her ears tied together in a bow and her teeth shoved into her eye-sockets.

We don't have a kid but, when we do, I'm sure (s)he is going to raise all kinds of hell-- it's going to eat my favorite pocketwatch and shit in our bed and rearrange the t-shirts in my t-shirt drawer and vomit in my antique hats, and chances are the kid will survive relatively unscathed. Because, let's face it, discipline is just so draconian and 1950s.

One thing that kids are notorious for getting away with is being picky eaters. I used to have a friend whose sister would only snack on sour cream, which she ate, right out of the container with a big wooden spoon. For the first decade-and-a-half of his life, my brother-in-law subsisted almost entirely, it seems, on any number of pasta products smothered in sauce, french fries (only from fast food establishments-- the ones cooked at home never got crispy enough) slathered in ketchup, chips and salsa (noticing the tomato theme?). According to my wife, he still eats pop-tarts schmeared with cream cheese, every day for breakfast-- a holdover from his tempestuous youth.

mMmMMMMMmMmmmMmmmMMMMMMmmm, right?

I went through phases as children do, too. For all of high school, I would eat a challah roll, cut in half, toasted, buttered, with a cup of tea for breakfast-- my Jewishness and Anglophilia meshing smartly at the breakfast table. In middle school, every Sunday, I would watch auto racing with an enormous bowl of Doritos piled up to a tenuous, pre-overflowing state. And then, immediately afterwards, there would follow another bowlful. In elementary school, the only candy bar I would eat was a "5th Avenue Bar." Once, my father went to the 7-Eleven and came home with a "Butterfinger" stating confidently that "it's the same thing, mummy." I took a bite and spat it out into the toilet. This might have been the first time I decided I didn't always trust him.

When children exhibit food quirks, it can be trying for parents, I'm sure. But it's also kind of charming. "Oh, he only eats brown bread! Isn't that cute?"

When adults exhibit food quirks, well, it's not cute anymore.

It's Foodspergers.

That's right, bitches, I coined a term. Give me money and prizes and such.

Foodspergers (n - fud/SPER/gurz) is defined as "a clinically diagnosable inflexibility displayed by certain portions of the 18+ community surrounding food that is typified by socially unacceptable requests, demands, preferences, proclivities and/or behaviors that fall outside normal, acceptable limits."

On Sunday, my wife and I were in New Hope at a small, hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. Like normal people, we picked slices of pizza from the selections that were on display at the counter. Had we desired a more fru-fru dish, we would have ordered one, you know, from the choices contained on the menu.

In front of us, I heard,

"Do you have whole wheat pasta?"

The chippy behind the counter blinked twice.

"I want whole wheat pasta. Don't you people have whole wheat pasta?" the voice insisted or, rather, whined.

The clerk looked at someone else at one of the ovens. The someone else shrugged and shook her head in the negative. The customer belonging to the whining voice looked utterly exasperated and crestfallen. She looked at her husband.

"I just don't understand how they can't have whole wheat pasta."

BECAUSE IT'S NOT ON THE CUNTFUCKING MENU!!!!!!!!!!

By the way, said customer was definitely 60 or older. An obvious sufferer of Foodspergers. You don't walk into a place and ask for something that's not on the menu, and then get all crybaby and indignant when they don't have it. You don't walk into McDonalds and order a porterhouse with garlic butter au jus and then throw a fit when they give you an Angus Assburger with some anonymous schmenksauce on it.

That is the other component of Foodspergers: the inability and/or unwillingness to adjust one's gustatory expectations to their comestible environment. Linguists might refer to this as code-switching, and most of us are facile enough at food code-switching so that we do not attempt to order a Double Mocha Java Chip Frappuccino from the bewildered Indian service attendant at the Mobil Station Grab-n-Go Snack Shack.

A while ago, Mrs. Apron and I passed a pleasant morning at a local farmer's market. You've been to a farmer's market before, right? We're talking big-shouldered Amish women with ten thumbs who gut whole chickens right in front of you with all those thumbs. We were ordering our breakfast from a greasy-spoon lunch counter type place. There is a menu, and it is very simple: any possible type of permutation you could possible desire, so long as it has to do with eggs, cheese, and/or ham, bacon, sausage, pork-roll, or scrapple (let's face it: this is Pennsylvania, motherfuckers). Standing in front of us were two gangly homosexuals, probably in their late forties. They were dressed in black, carrying designer man-purses, and the one who opened his purty little mouth to order was wearing Versace sunglasses and copious amounts of hair gel.

"Do you have faux-meat?"

The guy in the apron that looked like it had been lovingly coated in placenta stared at him.

"You know, vegetarian sausage?"

Some of the non-Foodspergian customers looked at each other with the, "Where does this guy think he is, Soho" look in their eyes. The proprietor was nonplussed.

"No," he replied flatly, "we don't."

And then came the exasperated, homosexual sigh. That terse, barely restrained, almost tweeny exhalation of disappointment. I mean, are you kidding me, Renaldo?

True, we all get disappointed when we don't get what we want in this world, but, fortunately, most of us are non-syndromic enough to cope with those disappointments and put them into the proper perspective.

That said, I will never forget the day my father brought me home that fucking Butterfinger. God, I should have broken his legs and shoved that hyper-sweetened, messy-assed candy bar up his hairy Israeli orangutan ass.

Boil the Bitch

Today, I had the opportunity to overhear the culmination of a dispute between two siblings, one aged 14ish, the other aged 12ish. The fight ended extremely abruptly, and I only heard the final utterance, courtesy of the 14ish-year-old, which was shouted at a volume to ensure maximum bystander discomfort and chagrin. It followed an exasperated, enraged huff and it went just like this:

"I'M GOING TO BOIL THE BITCH!"

And I thought to myself, "What an artful turn-of-phrase from such a young, inexperienced one. Such a novice in the world of angered profanation. Such a greenhorn. A mere rookie vulgarian. And yet, I was impressed. She could just as easily have said, "I'm going to kill the bitch," but that is just so common, isn't it? There's no panache, no flair, there's just no goddamn joie de vivre about that exclamation. A 14-year-old girl, a hopelessly awkward-looking one at that, who screams out "I'M GOING TO BOIL THE BITCH!" in a public place is, to me, someone who is really sinking her teeth into the balls of life and, goshdernit, ain't lettin' go either. I wanted to go up to her and shake her hand and tell her, "Hey-- you're going to be tempted to commit suicide in high school-- but, don't. Just go goth your sophomore year and do lots of drugs, because, honey, the real world needs you. If this is the creative venom you're spewing at 14-- you've got to become at best an attorney. At worst, you'll be one fucking funny blogger."

Just how do you go about boiling your sister, I wondered. I'll bet she knows.

This little incident today got me thinking about the host of inappropriate things I said as a child. Some of them I even said to my sister. I can remember one time we were fighting outside of our house, just after dusk in the summertime. Neighbors were outside, sitting on their porches, walking their poodles (people didn't have labradoodles or goldendoodles or cockadoodles in those days) and watching the fireflies light up the Pennsylvania night as I screeched the following gem,

"WHY DON'T YOU GO DIP YOUR VAGINA IN DUCK-SAUCE!?!?!"

We must have just had Chinese food. I was ten.

At age 12, I made the mistake of singing some the lyrics to "Doo Doo Brown" by 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog at the top of my lungs in the house when I didn't know my mother was at home. That earned me a strong talking to. By the way, if you'd like to lodge a complaint on my behalf regarding the insidious corruption of minors, apparently you can reach Mr. Brown via telephone at 1-900-976-DOO DOO.

At age 6, I casually announced at dinner that I hoped my mother's pregnant friend's baby would die. Said friend was a guest at this particular meal. Though no duck sauce was present, I was wearing a three-piece suit and clip-on bowtie at the time. I suppose my parents were crossing their fingers that my aberrant behavior would confine itself to my wardrobe preferences, but, sadly, it was not to be. My mouth could not be controlled from a very early age and, obviously, it has only gotten worse as I've learned my vocabulary. In the ultimate twist of fate, I was named the child's honorary godfather.

On the subject of pregnancy, another friend of my mother's was having difficulty conceiving a child. Also eating dinner (fortunately, the this other friend was far away from our house, definitely out of hearing range) when I, busily shoveling food into my mouth asked curtly, "What is she, blocked?" Age 8.

It's a pity, isn't it, that I couldn't, as a child, perpetually shovel food in my mouth. Would have solved a lot of problems, and maybe I wouldn't still be forty pounds underweight for my height.

While I'm not particularly proud of my the behavior and total lack of consideration I showed for others during my youth, my complete absence of any kind of couth, I at least know that I was the kind of kid people who lived in a home where people probably wanted to be a fly on the wall. I want to be a fly on the wall at Boil Bitch's house. I think that would be fun. I mean, if you have to be a fly, you might as well eek out your petty little existence where you're going to hear some real gems.

Duck sauce. Jesus Christ. Kids say the darndest things.