Sanctuaries

Not long ago, while watching one of the cable news channels, my wife and I discovered the Bush Administration had just deprived us of still another of our constitutional liberties, and in response we did what Democrats do in the face of authoritarian oppression: we grumbled a little and then switched the channel.

We hoped to land on something soothing.

Unfortunately, there are few sanctuaries on the cable spectrum, channels where you can rest easy and forget about all that’s bad and ugly out there, channels where you know you won’t happen upon plastic surgeries, Paris Hilton, chefs with attitude, autopsy photos, poker tables, Dr. Henry Lee, televangelists, Nancy Grace, prison cells, shrill brides, and beefy tattooed arms.

But we tried anyway. We began with the flyover channels that are halfway down the box, channels that run shows like “Mummy Makeovers” and “Cold Cabinet Files” and “World’s Most Extreme Adjectives.” Mostly what we came upon were plastic surgeries, Paris Hilton, prison cells, and beefy tattooed arms.

Soon my wife suggested I try Animal Planet. That had always been a decent recourse. But increasingly, if not perpetually, it airs “Animal Cops.” The program is not about lovable animals who happen to be sworn officers of the law, such as Deputy Dawg. Instead, it’s a real downer about trashy people who abuse animals.

At that hour, The Jeff Corwin Experience was on. Do not mistake The Jeff Corwin Experience for a rock-and-roll band that might have played the Shawnee Mission West prom in 1982. In fact, it is one of the dozen shows on Animal Planet in which the hosts traumatize reptiles and amphibians, all in the name of love.

Corwin remains a little brother to the more famous Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter). In case you live in a cave and don’t know who Irwin was, he was the guy who may have scuttled into your cave one day with a flashlight affixed to his head.

Compared to Irwin, who was larger than life and somewhat taxing on the nerves, Corwin is almost soothing, so we spent a while watching the guy canonize crocs and sonnetize snakes.

“You know, if snakes and lizards had any brains, they’d get a restraining order against that guy,” I said.

My wife said, “Spoken like a true Democrat. Protect the animals and pad the lawyers’ pockets.”

She’s a Democrat too. But sometimes we give each other playful hell about our shared political orientation. It’s one way to keep our marriage fresh. It’s not my ideal way to keep our marriage fresh. My ideal way doesn’t interest her at all.

And then I exercised this analogy: In high school I found a lot of girls to be beautiful and worthy of pursuit, but my feelings always went unrequited. Imagine if I had behaved like Corwin, stalking, chasing, and groping these girls against their pleasure, only to dump them in their habitats when I was done.

“Then you’d be the Governor of California,” she quipped.

I quickly switched the channel. “Well, now you just ruined it for me. I can no longer watch this Corwin guy because I’ll always associate him with that freakish California governor.”

What sanctuary does that leave us with?

Each other, I suppose.

Memoirs

Last fall my wife suggested a diary as a Christmas gift for our son who is seven. I told her I had mixed feelings.

When I was young I got a diary for Christmas, and I decreed it the greatest present ever because it combined my two favorite subjects: writing and me. But the gift turned out to be bittersweet because I couldn’t use it until the new year. And that remains the most agonizing week of my life. I’d hate to put our son through a week like that.

It intrigued her that I’d kept a diary, probably because she knew its contents would embarrass me. To that end, she suggested we scrounge through the junk in my mom’s basement. I told her the diary was collecting maggots in some landfill, and that even the maggots were bored with it.

Back then, any of my brothers who unlocked the diary with a toothpick were surely disappointed by the entries—and they couldn’t have expected much in the first place. With few exceptions and with minimal variations in stylistic technique, I’d recorded whether I had a headache and what I’d had for dinner.

On Fridays I noted whether the good shows aired, such as “The Brady Bunch” and “The Partridge Family.” Too often these viewing treasures were pre-empted in favor of some low-rent circus that had skittish acrobats, lazy clowns, and elephants just phoning it in. (This circus may have been the inspiration for a fake ad I co-wrote for my college newspaper in 1984. It was a full-page spread, headlined “Bargain Circus.” Highlighted acts included “The Bearded Man,” “The Heavy-Set Guy,” and “Joey the Banana Swallower.”)

Against better judgement, I disclosed to her that somewhere in my mom’s basement there exists an autobiography I wrote in the fifth grade.

“The life story of a fifth-grader?” she asked with a wry grin.

Indeed, no one so young should be so presumptuous as to write an autobiography, except King Tut.

But that hadn’t stopped me. It all began when I was in the fourth grade and learned the fifth-graders were assigned to write their autobiographies. I soon begged our English teacher, Sister Roberta, to assign the same for us.

This was 1973, a period when nuns were becoming “with it,” as defined by someone like Norman Lear. Overnight, these formidable figures discarded their black habits and gowns for denim skirts and paisley blouses, and they renounced their patriarchal religious names as well: Sister Michael Janet became Sister Trish, for instance, and Sister John became Sister Becca. Likewise, the school adopted an Age of Aquarius mentality whereby the student was always right.

So you can imagine the anguish Sister Roberta felt as she considered my request.

A couple days later, she unhappily said, “I spoke with the other teachers, and we agreed that fourth-graders haven’t had enough life experiences to write their memoirs.”

But a year later, they deemed us ready.

My autobiography was twice as long as all the others, owing to self-importance more than to any breadth of experience. Many of the adventures I wrote of were fabricated, which is why it fetched an E.

“An E?” she asked.

My school had renounced the A-to-F grading scale. It was imperialistic and demeaning. But an E was equal to an A, and so my head throbbed with pride—until a friend claimed my document was boring.

“Truth is, I’ve never fully recovered from that.”

Nodding, my wife said, “That explains a lot. Instead of a diary, let’s get the boy a basketball.”

Smoking

I recently came upon a cigarette lighter among some junk in my mother’s basement, and it put me in a nostalgic way.

It was a Zippo-styled square with the tiny, notched wheel you had to spin to ignite the fluid inside. Though dormant for thirty years, this particular lighter retained that unique fluid smell. My wife caught me sniffing it and assumed I was copping a buzz.

“The butane smell,” I began, half-dreamily. “It really takes me back. It was a smell I used to love for the first eighth of a second.”

My wife took a sniff but didn’t get nostalgic. She hadn’t grown up around cigarettes.

When I was young, every adult smoked—teachers, coaches, talk-show hosts, other kids’ moms—and they smoked everywhere. It’s possible they even smoked during mass. I think Vatican II permitted puffing up to the gospel reading, if you wished to receive communion.

My childhood home was lousy with smokers. A conversation there held more interruptions than a Charlie Rose interview does today: “Pass me that ash tray” and “Pass this ash tray on down, willya?” and “Can one of you kids empty this damn ash tray?” and “Who’s got a match?” and “I got a match: my butt and your face,” and so on.

My wife couldn’t remember the last time she even saw an ash tray.

Those days, ash trays were scattered all over the place, the way remote controls are today—and many were as difficult to figure out. The typical ash trays in the early 1970s looked like aquarium decorations. My brother Joe called them “Michael Sarrazin ash trays,” and I knew exactly what he was driving at. They were marble-based, poly-colored dugouts with smooth recesses that were much too wide and slick for the cigarettes to stay in place. These Sarrazin ash receptacles were too heavy for kids to fetch. Around our house, that’s why they were trumped by beer cans and pop bottles.

My wife asked what brand my dad had smoked.

“Luckys, then Camels, then at the end something less loaded.”

She asked about a brother. “Larks,” I said. She asked about an in-law. “Tareytons and nothing but.” She asked about a cousin. “Virginia Slims. But he was always a little flamboyant.”

She asked if I ever smoked.

I might have, I told her, except a friend in high school was under the impression that cigarettes were cool. If he found something to be cool, then it most certainly was not. The anti-tobacco ads would have been wise to feature this guy blowing smoke from his nostrils instead of showing Brooke Shields sticking cigarettes in hers.

My friend also took to calling cigarettes “toasts,” perhaps hoping the term would rival such classics as “smokes,” “fags,” and “cancer sticks.” A pack of cigarettes was a “loaf of toasts.”

This fellow didn’t get invited to very many parties.

But to answer her original question, I said I’d smoked maybe a few dozen toasts in my teens, but thankfully I never got the hang of it.

She began laughing.

“I’m picturing you as a smoker, trying to get out of the driveway in the morning,” she said. “You always come back inside for something you’ve forgotten—your keys, your badge, your phone, your iced tea, your acid reducers. If you were to become responsible for cigarettes and a lighter, you might finally go mad.”

Now there’s another idea for an anti-smoking commercial.

The House Next Door

Over the years, in the house next door to the one I grew up in, at least three people have died—two of them execution style.

In my toddler years, Mrs. Mills lived in the boxy little bungalow with her adult sons, Marvin and Bud. Like most old women, Mrs. Mills was small but had a body shaped like a garbage bag stuffed with dumplings. She wore ratty slippers and flower-printed gowns that could've been mistaken for pajamas. Mrs. Mills was the first person I had ever known who died, much the way Dan Blocker was the first celebrity ever to pass away. I was probably five or six when she croaked from natural causes, inside that house next door.

Marvin, the older son, expired a couple years later, perhaps in that same house, though I cannot be sure. He'd worked at an amusement park nearby, distributing towels at the pool, back in the good old days before such jobs were outsourced to Bangalore. He was plump and had a cartoon face: sad-dog eyes, round nose, exaggerated creases on the forehead and around the eyes and mouth.

One day when I was retrieving a ball from his yard, Marvin came out and gave me a package of polish sausages. He could not eat them, he said, on account of his diabetes. A couple weeks later he was dead. I still think of him every time I bite into a kielbasa.

Bud lived in that house for many years after. Much in the fashion of his species, he wore so-called “muscle tee-shirts” and drab khakis and black suspenders. He, too, resembled a cartoon character. But while Marvin may have originated from the pen of a Warner Brothers artist, Bud looked more like a harried husband in a New Yorker cartoon. He had swirls of dark hair and wore outsized glasses. Those black glasses, in fact, dominated his appearance, in a Drew Carey sort of way.

Bud was the farthest thing from a harried husband. A confirmed bachelor, he continued to harbor warm feelings for a Filipino woman he'd met during the war. The fact that he was in the war has always puzzled me, for Bud had no peripheral vision. He wasn't allowed to drive a car, yet there he was, in the Pacific, battling the Axis Powers. At times I picture him as a prisoner of war, taunted by the Japanese: “Ah, poor silly Occidental cannot see from the corners of his eyes!”

In all the years he lived alone there, Bud never once had a guest. On occasion the old bachelor invited me inside to retrieve some magazines he was finished with. In that dark, smoky living room, his easy chair was sandwiched between identical coffee tables. On the nearer table were the magazines I’d take: Argosy and True and various Naval-themed publications. On the farther table were heaping stacks of Playboys and Penthouses. These were not proffered. At that young age, I didn’t know much, but I knew Bud had it good.

He had a good job at a print shop, but one day in the late 1970s he got sore over something and quit. He spent the next couple years traveling a lot, mostly to dude ranches in the Southwest, and he found time to become a Yahtzee aficionado. Then suddenly his passbook was bare. These were the days of stagflation, and it was difficult enough for anyone to find good work, much more so for a man of sixty with no peripheral vision. Desperate, he took a dishwashing job at an Italian restaurant nearby. He went through that position and about ten others like it until, mercifully, he reached retirement age.

Bud didn't die in that house next door, but he lost his mind there. He began suffering from Alzheimer's disease. While talking with him over the back fence, I found his sentences increasingly disjointed, as if a prankster had spliced audio tapes of his past conversations. Soon he moved to a subsidized high rise in Grandview, where by some accounts he was a big hit with the widows.

One of my brothers bought the house next door and lived in it for a while, even when it was no longer the house next door, owing to my parents’ move to a nicer part of town. The white bungalow and its neighborhood quickly reached an acute state of disrepair. My brother kept a pistol handy at all times, for he regularly heard gunshots at night. One day he came home from work and discovered new locks on the doors, a mystery that put him in the mood to shoot someone and ask questions later.

During the early 1990s, an arsonist torched a dozen or so homes in the neighborhood. Perhaps the fires and the gunplay inspired my brother to sell the place, to an outfit that converts rotten properties into Section 8 housing. About a year later, the occupants of that bungalow, a couple in their twenties, were gunned down while their young children watched. The newspaper said the male victim may have been a drug informant.

Just hours after the corpses were removed, that house was boarded up so securely that nothing but ghosts could come or go.

The Hacienda

The other day, my wife complained there was nothing to do.

I said, “Let’s burn Myrtle.”

She gave me a strange look.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “But listening to it will give you something to do.”

So I recounted how in the mid 1950s my parents bought a house in a working-class neighborhood in what was then south Kansas City. To make some extra money, Dad converted the detached double garage to a rental space. In size and ambition, the place was like a studio apartment. The roof, ten feet off the ground, had a non-threatening pitch. Only the biggest cowards in the neighborhood were afraid to climb on it and horse around.

“What’s this have to do with burning poor Myrtle?”

I told her Myrtle rented the apartment for a while. She was like any other old lady; there was nothing especially flammable about her. When we were little kids, a cousin and I were loitering near the apartment. Looking for something to do, he said, "Let's burn Myrtle."

“Did you boys burn Myrtle?” my wife asked.

“No. We made poison instead.”

“Poison? What a couple of ghouls you were.”

The poison was an agglomeration of water from the hose, kitchen scraps, mud, cigarette butts, piss, dead bugs, and leaves. The poison was not meant for Myrtle; she was off the hook by now. We intended to feed it to some Japanese soldiers, if any happened into my back yard in 1967.

Riding a wave of momentum, I told her about others who’d rented there: loners, vagabonds, dowagers—the kinds of folks Kris Kristofferson might celebrate in song. I spent a few minutes recalling a pair of journeymen laborers named Stony and Clyde. The duo once appeared on “Gone’ Fishin,” a local show hosted by Harold Ensley, a man so gentle that if Satan were his son he'd probably never even spank him. Stony and Clyde reeled in lots of good eaters but always tossed the fish back, an act my father never could accept. Each time, it seemed to catch Dad by surprise. He'd make an anxious sound effect—a wet inhalation through clenched teeth—and say, "Stony, no! No!"

As the 1960s ended, my family had less need for the rental income and more need for the space the apartment offered. Nine of us ten kids still lived at home. For the next twenty years, one sibling or another held squatter's rights there. In the mid 1970s my brother Joe had dibs on the place, and he christened it The Hacienda, though there was nothing Spanish about it.

One of the beauties of The Hacienda was that you could live there and escape the stigma of living with your parents, though in reality our parents—and their refrigerator, medicine cabinet, and laundry facilities—were just thirty feet away. And so well into my twenties I lived in that converted garage, where I spent most of my hours pondering life’s bigger mysteries and grousing about man’s inhumanity to man. I also found time to co-write a screenplay inside those walls, called “University Times,” a rollicking adventure that chronicled the exploits of Mafia stooges, librarians with cleavage, and a zonked-out dormie named Squid.

As I slept in The Hacienda one chilly night in November of 1988, an explosion at a construction site a couple miles away killed six Kansas City firefighters. Two pumper trucks had come to the site around 4 a.m. to douse a fire in a pick-up truck. They were unaware that 25,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were stored in a semitrailer near the truck. The blast, at 4:08 a.m., killed them instantly.

The explosion broke my deep sleep, and I bolted upright, much in the style of a character rising from a nightmare in an Aaron Spelling melodrama. Those days, natural-gas leaks had caused several area homes to explode, and the enormity of this blast convinced me it had happened again. In the darkness of The Hacienda, I rushed from the bed to the big front window, which was now dislodged from its frame, and saw that my parents' home was intact. Relieved, I switched on my police scanner just as the first confused calls were crackling across. All over town, folks were claiming something had blown up in their neighborhoods. After four or five minutes, the correct location was determined: the site of the expressway under construction, near 87th Street and South 71 Highway. On another frequency, I soon heard the fire dispatcher plaintively call for someone—anyone—from the pumper trucks to respond over the air. The ensuing silence was louder than the explosion had been.

In 1989, with our neighborhood ravaged by Reaganomics, my parents bought a nicer house out south. A poor couple scraped up enough money to buy our home. To avoid legal complications, my dad disengaged The Hacienda's faulty plumbing and blocked off the pipes with cement. Before the contract was signed, Dad made sure the home buyer understood the implications of this plumbing shutdown. Still, after the deal was sealed, the buyer shook my father's hand and said, "Now you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna rent out that place and make me some money!"

My wife said, “If he did, I bet he could add a few good stories to its history.”