We used to watch Mr. Peters through his window. Painting, nude, wild white hair caked with black and red, the only two colors he would use. His body streaked and splattered he looked like some wild man from Borneo, something you would see in Ripley's Believe It Or Not. We didn't understand what he was doing, dipping his hands in buckets of paint and hurling it at the canvas with primal grunts and chimp-like screams all to the beat of a strange rythmic music. Sometimes he would launch his whole body at the canvas writhing and squirming in paint until all you could see were his wild black eyes and dangerous white teeth. For us boys the novelty soon wore off, his sheer obliviousness to our peeping made it pointless, besides I think we were all a little uncomfortable watching his penis flap around, sometimes even hard, in front of the girls. Now the girls they were always interested, "I wonder what Mr. Peters in painting today?" Boys rolling eyes girls giggling except for Maryann who I swear if she had been drinking milk would have shot it through her nose like a fire hose, every time. Curiously, I mean it was curious that we followed them to the window each night even when we had stopped watching him throw paint. At some point without notice, warning or even a sign the dynamic in our little tribe had shifted, the girls were now in charge. So there we stood shuffling our feet watching the girls watch Mr. Peters' penis flailing in the air. Then one night out of the blue Alice said "That's the biggest wiener I've ever seen." Stunned silence. Except Pauli, never at a loss for words, "So tell us Alice just how many wieners have you seen?" Even in the dark we could see the blush wash over Alice's face her ears looked like they might burst into flames. "Pauli, don't be stupid. Alice has five brothers you think she never saw a wiener before?" Maryann was always ready to put a boy in his place which for her was under her thumb. Well two of Alice's brothers just looked straight at the ground but Marko, the third and oldest one there unzipped his pants pulled out his penis and waving in around like a slinky said, "Hey girls get a load of what Alice sees." Alice punched him, hard but Maryann just reached out took hold of Marko's penis, "How do you do Mr. Johnson? Nice to meet you."
Yeah something had changed. We weren't just the boys and girls anymore. There were alien forces at work in our bodies, sprouting hair and lumps, zits and body odor, cracking voices and moods swinging like the flying Walendas. And there was no where to turn for help. Who could really talk to a nun? They were too aloof and held so many secrets behind the habits even the young ones seemed impossibly old. The priest was actually old. Old enough to have forgotten anything of use he may have known. Our parents? They were just too frightened. Catatonic with fear for might happen to us or what we might become, they were incapable of doing anything for us. My mother began treating the girls like assassins and she could never leave us alone in the same room or she might find me at the end of a garrotte or hanging off the blade of a knife hidden under the dress against that firm peachfuzzed thigh. So no there wasn't any help to be had there, and my father simply opted out by taking a second job. The morons who passed for older kids in our neighborhood were hopeless. Nobody could take them seriously because they acted like an amateur cast of West Side Story. Our block was the laughing stock of the whole South Side. The other gangs just stopped beating them up because it was embarrassing to hit these rejects. So we couldn't even get street corner knowledge. Pauli and Richard seemed to have homed in on some secret knowledge but it was hard to tell. Both of them liked to show off and seem older. Well Pauli was my best friend of the lot so one day I called him on it and he agreed to show me the "sacred box". That's what he called it so of course I wanted in.
"We have to wait for Richard because technically the sacred box belongs to him, plus it's locked in his basement."
"Okay so when's he getting back?"
"He said to meet him in back of Nunzio's at 3. So it's 2 now what'd ya want to do? Let's go over to Nunzio's and lift a pack of smokes."
"Yeah I could use a butt. No menthol this time they're for pussies."
So we smoked and coughed and waited. Richard came around the corner of the alley like he was running for his life and a second later we were right behind him.
"Run it's Mikey Bannister!"
Mikey Bannister, the meanest toughest 8th grader on the whole South Side. He was hard enough to run with the Dago Reds a mixture of Italian and Irish thugs who terrorized SouthWest High School. So why was he chasing Richard and now me and Pauli? As Richard told it later he had seen Lizzy Oldani at the tennis court and she was wearing a very short tennis outfit and Richard just couldn't resist trying to make time with her. What he forgot in his hormone induced stupidity is Lizzy Oldani, the hottest girl in 3 parishes, is wearing Mikey Bannister's ring. And now we are on the run for our lives because Richard asked Lizzy Oldani is he could slip her the tongue. Lucky for us Mikey's weakness is he can't run very fast, might be why he can fight so good, so we were able to make Richard's house before he could catch us but he did stand outside the fence yelling all the things he was going to do to Richard and his two punkass little friends until one of the neighbors threatened to call the cops. That hadn't dampened my determination to get a look inside the sacred box, so the first thing I said after catching my breath, "Where is it?"
Richard's basement is nicer than most of our houses. His dad is a carpenter so the house is full of custom made cabinets, shelves, molding and tables. The basement is the crowning jewel, it is his dad's kingdom and no one is allowed in without permission, especially kids. This would be only my second time inside Mr. Kroger's inner sanctum and it was the perfect place to find the sacred box. Richard took the key from around his neck, it was hooked on the chain with his Saint Richard medal. He slipped behind the bar and brought out a wooden box the size of a peach crate. It was a work of art with inlaid designs and glowing brass hinges and handle, like a tabernacle. The key clicked in the lock and the sacred box opened, and what I saw inside changed my life, well it livened up the summer anyway. There was a stack of picture postcards, black and white pictures of naked women and men doing things I did not, could not, had no reference to understand. And then Pauli said "Watch this". He picked up a stack of cards and flipped them with his thumb, it was a movie, a movie like I had never seen except in a strange and wonderful dream only this one was real and I could look at it over and over and over. "Shit! My dad." Richard's panic slapped me back into the world as he shut the box slipped it back into its cabinet and signaled us to get behind the bar and be quiet. "Okay it's clear. He always heads straight for the can when he gets home. Lets get out the back door.
Out in the fresh air I remembered every detail of my encounter with the sacred box. Kneeling on the floor, heads pushed together to watch the movies unfold, I could smell the cigarettes and sweat and something I could not identify but knew somehow was very important. I knelt between Pauli and Richard as they took turns showing me one stack after another. It felt like communion, the mixture of wonder, mystery and fear, the silence broken only by the hushed "Look at this one". I didn't know it then but I learned something in those moments leaning over the sacred box. Looking back I realize that the lesson of those flip cards was much more than the geometry of sex, though it's a necessary part of the equation there was something missing from the pictures, some thing not there that left a small seed of disappointment in my gut. Over the years that seed grew into a desperate longing to know what I was missing, why always the vague sense that I just did not get 'it'. Sex could be great just like they showed in the cards but in the end it was just sex and when it was over, well what next? Do it again? Do it standing up? Do the Kama Sutra? And repeat over and over until you run out of time, desire or will? And the answer was right there in the cards, in the eyes of the people in the pictures, they said sure kid this is fun but if you want the real thing you are going to have to look into some one's eyes and find it there, some particle that escapes detection, some quantum little character of a Higgs Boson that fills the last empty space in you and makes you finally, once and for all the real, full-on, karma certified self you've been looking for and brother when you find that let me tell you that's when you break into a new copy of the Kama Sutra. Yeah, all that from some cheesy old porn. Kind of amazing ain't it.
Like I said I had no capacity for that kind of understanding then. I gnawed on that bone for the next twenty years, am probably still working it today. Thought I might have caught that little particle a few times but each one was false positive. Even when I met my future wife, Victoria there seemed to be still an atom's width of space that just would not be filled. I suppose I just stopped paying attention to it and got on with living day to day, working in my dad's garage, going to school at night, learning how to write, publishing a book, then another book, getting married, having kids and all the stuff in between that holds it together, stitches in fabric or a tapestry. Then on a Tuesday morning in aisle 7, the plumbing section in the Handy Hardware I ran into Mikey Bannister. Instinctively all those years later my reaction was to turn and run but we stood there looking at each other me holding a plunger and him a clipboard.
"Find everything you need sir?"
"Uhm yes. Just need a plunger."
"That and a plumber's snake are the best tools for unstopping a drain. Much better than pouring some chemical concoction down the drain waiting for hours and still needing to plunge it or snake it anyway."
"Uhm yeah right."
"Let me know if you need anything else."
"Uhm yeah right. Say... uhm"
"Yes sir?"
"Uhm, maybe I should get a snake, you know just in case"
"Sure right over here..."
Well that's about all there was to that encounter. Just a customer and clerk talking plumbing. I don't know if he recognized me neither of us said anything like "Hey do I know you?". But something did happen to me. As I walked back the car I flashed back to that day, the run for our lives, the secrets of the sacred box, the faces and bodies in the pictures. There was something about the way he looked straight into me, not through me or past me but right into me. And I had a thought or a vision or maybe an epiphany or just a reaction to a random encounter with a nice guy. But I saw the eyes in the pictures the eyes that told me something was missing and would always be missing. And that's what I needed to learn, until I could figure how to look at someone and really see that person, that one unique individual I was going to be missing out on the meaning, the essence of what it is to be in love. I don't know how I got from A to B without figuring that out along the way, just dense. It took the meanest kid I ever knew to somehow figure it out come back and teach it to me in the plumbing aisle at Handy Hardware.
So I guess you know Mikey Bannister never got the chance to wreak havoc on us. Seems he was caught setting fire to the high school and was sent to juvenile detention and from there to the Marines when he was 17. Richard never did get to slip anything to Lizzy Oldani but he should have gotten something for the effort he made like a medal or some kind of trophy. That summer between Mr. Peters and the sacred box we saw a lot of naked bodies. The tribe kept its matriarchal shape and that was really for the best. We learned a lot about how to treat girls from Alice, Maryann, Sylvia, Moony and even Lizzy Oldani. We also learned a bit about art, the artistic temperament and something called Reggae from Mr. Peters. Most important I learned about something big out there. Beyond our little block outside our neighborhood I was going to find a life I couldn't have imagined the day before, and each day seemed to bring a new lens to look through to see just a little farther ahead. And so the days came and went, they were some days indeed.
*************************************************************************
The end of that summer saw us all off to high school. Maryann's parents decided to send her away to boarding school, again the fear of what would happen, what we would become. It was like a funeral the day she left. Some of us cried and the rest tried not to. Maryann staring through the window, looked at us as the car pulled away, no tears just a small wave and a twitch of her lips that could have been suppressed sobs or an attempt at one last smile, Maryann had lately become very hard to read. She was sent to St. Ann's Preparatory Academy for Girls. A castle of a school complete with drawbridge, moat and man eating crocodiles. I don't know how they decided Maryann fit their profile but my first thought when she told us where she was going, "Wait until they get a load of her. This girl will crash your walls like a wrecking ball." At first it seemed I might be right. Three weeks into her first semester her parents were called to the school to discuss Maryann's attitude. We learned all this from the letters she sent to Alice. The nuns censored the mail but Alice had worked out a code so they could get details of daily life past the Catholic Gestapo.
Alice was like that in everything she did, a brilliant problem solver with a very wide streak of independence. Ready made for life in Post Vatican II Catholic high school. Our school, Bishop Des Peres (Da Pear), had taken the whole encyclical very much to heart. Out nuns still had their secrets but they were much closer to the surface. The priests were all young, drove fast cars and played the beach boys really loud. I remember a girl named Tina, she was dark skin, black hair and cheekbones, that's all I can recall of her. One day she just disappeared, did not show up and left no forwarding address. Two weeks later Fr. Stanley was a no show for 9 am mass. So the first rumor was that Tina was pregnant. Second it was Fr. Stanley's baby. Third and best was they had gone to Mexico to get an abortion but changed their minds and joined a commune instead and Tina gave birth to twins. Turns out the kid had mono and Fr. Stanley was taking care of his dying mother. That's pretty much it for high school.
Pauli and Richard went to Viet Nam. Pauli came home in pieces. Richard's parents got an envelope with a St. Richard medal and a key. Two of Alice's brothers went to Canada, the other three stayed home and got lucky. Alice, Sylvia, Moony, Lizzy, Maryann, Marko, Dougie, and Anthony went away to various colleges. I went to work in my dad's garage and took night classes at the Community College.
Yeah something had changed. We weren't just the boys and girls anymore. There were alien forces at work in our bodies, sprouting hair and lumps, zits and body odor, cracking voices and moods swinging like the flying Walendas. And there was no where to turn for help. Who could really talk to a nun? They were too aloof and held so many secrets behind the habits even the young ones seemed impossibly old. The priest was actually old. Old enough to have forgotten anything of use he may have known. Our parents? They were just too frightened. Catatonic with fear for might happen to us or what we might become, they were incapable of doing anything for us. My mother began treating the girls like assassins and she could never leave us alone in the same room or she might find me at the end of a garrotte or hanging off the blade of a knife hidden under the dress against that firm peachfuzzed thigh. So no there wasn't any help to be had there, and my father simply opted out by taking a second job. The morons who passed for older kids in our neighborhood were hopeless. Nobody could take them seriously because they acted like an amateur cast of West Side Story. Our block was the laughing stock of the whole South Side. The other gangs just stopped beating them up because it was embarrassing to hit these rejects. So we couldn't even get street corner knowledge. Pauli and Richard seemed to have homed in on some secret knowledge but it was hard to tell. Both of them liked to show off and seem older. Well Pauli was my best friend of the lot so one day I called him on it and he agreed to show me the "sacred box". That's what he called it so of course I wanted in.
"We have to wait for Richard because technically the sacred box belongs to him, plus it's locked in his basement."
"Okay so when's he getting back?"
"He said to meet him in back of Nunzio's at 3. So it's 2 now what'd ya want to do? Let's go over to Nunzio's and lift a pack of smokes."
"Yeah I could use a butt. No menthol this time they're for pussies."
So we smoked and coughed and waited. Richard came around the corner of the alley like he was running for his life and a second later we were right behind him.
"Run it's Mikey Bannister!"
Mikey Bannister, the meanest toughest 8th grader on the whole South Side. He was hard enough to run with the Dago Reds a mixture of Italian and Irish thugs who terrorized SouthWest High School. So why was he chasing Richard and now me and Pauli? As Richard told it later he had seen Lizzy Oldani at the tennis court and she was wearing a very short tennis outfit and Richard just couldn't resist trying to make time with her. What he forgot in his hormone induced stupidity is Lizzy Oldani, the hottest girl in 3 parishes, is wearing Mikey Bannister's ring. And now we are on the run for our lives because Richard asked Lizzy Oldani is he could slip her the tongue. Lucky for us Mikey's weakness is he can't run very fast, might be why he can fight so good, so we were able to make Richard's house before he could catch us but he did stand outside the fence yelling all the things he was going to do to Richard and his two punkass little friends until one of the neighbors threatened to call the cops. That hadn't dampened my determination to get a look inside the sacred box, so the first thing I said after catching my breath, "Where is it?"
Richard's basement is nicer than most of our houses. His dad is a carpenter so the house is full of custom made cabinets, shelves, molding and tables. The basement is the crowning jewel, it is his dad's kingdom and no one is allowed in without permission, especially kids. This would be only my second time inside Mr. Kroger's inner sanctum and it was the perfect place to find the sacred box. Richard took the key from around his neck, it was hooked on the chain with his Saint Richard medal. He slipped behind the bar and brought out a wooden box the size of a peach crate. It was a work of art with inlaid designs and glowing brass hinges and handle, like a tabernacle. The key clicked in the lock and the sacred box opened, and what I saw inside changed my life, well it livened up the summer anyway. There was a stack of picture postcards, black and white pictures of naked women and men doing things I did not, could not, had no reference to understand. And then Pauli said "Watch this". He picked up a stack of cards and flipped them with his thumb, it was a movie, a movie like I had never seen except in a strange and wonderful dream only this one was real and I could look at it over and over and over. "Shit! My dad." Richard's panic slapped me back into the world as he shut the box slipped it back into its cabinet and signaled us to get behind the bar and be quiet. "Okay it's clear. He always heads straight for the can when he gets home. Lets get out the back door.
Out in the fresh air I remembered every detail of my encounter with the sacred box. Kneeling on the floor, heads pushed together to watch the movies unfold, I could smell the cigarettes and sweat and something I could not identify but knew somehow was very important. I knelt between Pauli and Richard as they took turns showing me one stack after another. It felt like communion, the mixture of wonder, mystery and fear, the silence broken only by the hushed "Look at this one". I didn't know it then but I learned something in those moments leaning over the sacred box. Looking back I realize that the lesson of those flip cards was much more than the geometry of sex, though it's a necessary part of the equation there was something missing from the pictures, some thing not there that left a small seed of disappointment in my gut. Over the years that seed grew into a desperate longing to know what I was missing, why always the vague sense that I just did not get 'it'. Sex could be great just like they showed in the cards but in the end it was just sex and when it was over, well what next? Do it again? Do it standing up? Do the Kama Sutra? And repeat over and over until you run out of time, desire or will? And the answer was right there in the cards, in the eyes of the people in the pictures, they said sure kid this is fun but if you want the real thing you are going to have to look into some one's eyes and find it there, some particle that escapes detection, some quantum little character of a Higgs Boson that fills the last empty space in you and makes you finally, once and for all the real, full-on, karma certified self you've been looking for and brother when you find that let me tell you that's when you break into a new copy of the Kama Sutra. Yeah, all that from some cheesy old porn. Kind of amazing ain't it.
Like I said I had no capacity for that kind of understanding then. I gnawed on that bone for the next twenty years, am probably still working it today. Thought I might have caught that little particle a few times but each one was false positive. Even when I met my future wife, Victoria there seemed to be still an atom's width of space that just would not be filled. I suppose I just stopped paying attention to it and got on with living day to day, working in my dad's garage, going to school at night, learning how to write, publishing a book, then another book, getting married, having kids and all the stuff in between that holds it together, stitches in fabric or a tapestry. Then on a Tuesday morning in aisle 7, the plumbing section in the Handy Hardware I ran into Mikey Bannister. Instinctively all those years later my reaction was to turn and run but we stood there looking at each other me holding a plunger and him a clipboard.
"Find everything you need sir?"
"Uhm yes. Just need a plunger."
"That and a plumber's snake are the best tools for unstopping a drain. Much better than pouring some chemical concoction down the drain waiting for hours and still needing to plunge it or snake it anyway."
"Uhm yeah right."
"Let me know if you need anything else."
"Uhm yeah right. Say... uhm"
"Yes sir?"
"Uhm, maybe I should get a snake, you know just in case"
"Sure right over here..."
Well that's about all there was to that encounter. Just a customer and clerk talking plumbing. I don't know if he recognized me neither of us said anything like "Hey do I know you?". But something did happen to me. As I walked back the car I flashed back to that day, the run for our lives, the secrets of the sacred box, the faces and bodies in the pictures. There was something about the way he looked straight into me, not through me or past me but right into me. And I had a thought or a vision or maybe an epiphany or just a reaction to a random encounter with a nice guy. But I saw the eyes in the pictures the eyes that told me something was missing and would always be missing. And that's what I needed to learn, until I could figure how to look at someone and really see that person, that one unique individual I was going to be missing out on the meaning, the essence of what it is to be in love. I don't know how I got from A to B without figuring that out along the way, just dense. It took the meanest kid I ever knew to somehow figure it out come back and teach it to me in the plumbing aisle at Handy Hardware.
So I guess you know Mikey Bannister never got the chance to wreak havoc on us. Seems he was caught setting fire to the high school and was sent to juvenile detention and from there to the Marines when he was 17. Richard never did get to slip anything to Lizzy Oldani but he should have gotten something for the effort he made like a medal or some kind of trophy. That summer between Mr. Peters and the sacred box we saw a lot of naked bodies. The tribe kept its matriarchal shape and that was really for the best. We learned a lot about how to treat girls from Alice, Maryann, Sylvia, Moony and even Lizzy Oldani. We also learned a bit about art, the artistic temperament and something called Reggae from Mr. Peters. Most important I learned about something big out there. Beyond our little block outside our neighborhood I was going to find a life I couldn't have imagined the day before, and each day seemed to bring a new lens to look through to see just a little farther ahead. And so the days came and went, they were some days indeed.
*************************************************************************
The end of that summer saw us all off to high school. Maryann's parents decided to send her away to boarding school, again the fear of what would happen, what we would become. It was like a funeral the day she left. Some of us cried and the rest tried not to. Maryann staring through the window, looked at us as the car pulled away, no tears just a small wave and a twitch of her lips that could have been suppressed sobs or an attempt at one last smile, Maryann had lately become very hard to read. She was sent to St. Ann's Preparatory Academy for Girls. A castle of a school complete with drawbridge, moat and man eating crocodiles. I don't know how they decided Maryann fit their profile but my first thought when she told us where she was going, "Wait until they get a load of her. This girl will crash your walls like a wrecking ball." At first it seemed I might be right. Three weeks into her first semester her parents were called to the school to discuss Maryann's attitude. We learned all this from the letters she sent to Alice. The nuns censored the mail but Alice had worked out a code so they could get details of daily life past the Catholic Gestapo.
Alice was like that in everything she did, a brilliant problem solver with a very wide streak of independence. Ready made for life in Post Vatican II Catholic high school. Our school, Bishop Des Peres (Da Pear), had taken the whole encyclical very much to heart. Out nuns still had their secrets but they were much closer to the surface. The priests were all young, drove fast cars and played the beach boys really loud. I remember a girl named Tina, she was dark skin, black hair and cheekbones, that's all I can recall of her. One day she just disappeared, did not show up and left no forwarding address. Two weeks later Fr. Stanley was a no show for 9 am mass. So the first rumor was that Tina was pregnant. Second it was Fr. Stanley's baby. Third and best was they had gone to Mexico to get an abortion but changed their minds and joined a commune instead and Tina gave birth to twins. Turns out the kid had mono and Fr. Stanley was taking care of his dying mother. That's pretty much it for high school.
Pauli and Richard went to Viet Nam. Pauli came home in pieces. Richard's parents got an envelope with a St. Richard medal and a key. Two of Alice's brothers went to Canada, the other three stayed home and got lucky. Alice, Sylvia, Moony, Lizzy, Maryann, Marko, Dougie, and Anthony went away to various colleges. I went to work in my dad's garage and took night classes at the Community College.