Thanksgiving Memories: Childhood in the 1970s Part 10

For my entire childhood and most of my teenage years I did the same thing with my parents every Thanksgiving: the three of us climbed into a wide bodied tan or burgundy station wagon or Thunderbird and drove to my best friend George's house with his two parents Olly and Betty and his sullen and shy sister Val.

As I have repeated all too often, since I am a perceptual and sensual creature, this experience at George's was rife with a plethora of memorable sights, moods, and sensations.

George himself had the greatest sense of humor and we fancied ourselves a comedy team, always trying to write our own material and pretend were on Saturday Night Live. I remember little of what we concocted because our comedy, such as it was, was overshadowed by the decor of the house and the character of his family. More literally, nobody was interested in our acts since all attention was focused on Olly and then his daughter, and lastly, my own parents and their pontificating about current events. Of course his father Olly had that droopy, elaborate handlebar mustache that so reminds me of the character Nigel, as played by Harry Shearer in Spinal Tap.

If Olly's mustache weren't enough we were treated to the spectacle of him preaching and hectoring his daughter and giving hour long disquisitions on the superior virtues of Progressive Rock, particularly less known bands like Renaissance. But Olly's stache stole the show, so distracted I was by it that I remember little of content in what he had to say.

Less pleasantly, since Olly fancied himself an amateur anthropologist, he would insist upon lecturing his daughter on the habits of tribes in other cultures. Sometimes his lectures were to be held in secret, sometimes we were invited. He felt she was the one of the two with the superior intelligence and had essentially given up on his son, who was a slow learner, however gifted with wit, leaving the two of us to explore their insane 1970s house and backyard.

George and I tried to be serious about comedy. We would listen to records of Bob And Ray and Gilda Radner and Richard Pryor and George Carlin and try and figure out how they worked. What we loved about Bob and Ray was that they were a team and most droll and absurdist in outlook. (Though we would not have known to describe it as such). I remember one bit called "write if you can get work" and we really appreciated tracing comedy back to its earlier roots - before SNL. One summer my father taught us a Shakespeare class, an early variant of home schooling you might say, and I remember my disappointment that it was mostly plays like Macbeth and Hamlet on the "syllabus" since I had hoped for some comedies too, especially As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing.

George and I rebelled against his father's taste in music and I was always attempting to go to George's room as a musical oasis where I would insist on listening to Sonny Rollins records and whatever "fusion" records George had bought. But we had little time alone to listen to jazz or finish our budding comedy act as Olly would always make sure to enter the room unannounced, to reprimand his son in front of us for not being as bright as his sister, and to talk about the bands Genesis and Renaissance as what was really "cutting edge" and ahead in music.

I had never known so many clashing and vibrant shades of pastels to coalesce in one environment. Not only was the deep shag in chocolate brown covering every inch of wall space, but there were this bright pastel fuzz - I know not what else to call it - covering appliances, especially the entire bathroom, in apple green, and powder blue, orange, canary yellow, and many others. This is to say nothing of all of the artwork - all of those heavy velvet and oil paintings of historical figures and, so we were told, obscure family members from previous centuries, the paintings that literally gave me nightmares the few times I had to endure sleeping over. (The decor and the general atmosphere there was rather unpleasant for me. I wanted to visit but not sleep, let alone ever live there).

These colors bring to mind George's mother because she always made her specialty which was a grasshopper pie and we loved that dish so much. The recipe was a secret and when we were most young we had believed there were real grasshoppers in it taken from the backyard and cooked. I was not to worry because "they tasted just like Oreo cookies". I remember that Betty wore much louder clothing than my mother. Both women loved these ugly dacron things, these shapeless tops and bottoms that you sort of just pulled on, stuff with lots of elastic. But Betty loved to be inspired by, I guess, Rhoda on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and would wear the loudest pastel checks and plaids in the largest scales.

George's mom, Betty met Olly while they were coworkers. They happened to be both postal employees, the mail carriers who rode rounds in the suburbs. Almost no mention was made of the U.S. mail nor any practical work matters at the yearly Thanksgiving. But much mention was made of how great it was that both the parents worked (!) and had good jobs they were proud of. Its equality was seen as the virtue, so in a sense, in this one respect, and in spite of some personal unhappiness that resided there, George's family was ahead of it's time.

All of this Thanksgiving celebrating was to end abruptly. Firstly, when my own parents divorced in my middle twenties, and my mother actually left "home" to move to another state in the south. Secondly George's parents divorced, a few years later. Both my family and his had been married for a good twenty or thirty years. It was rumored that George's father had a penchant for streetwalkers and other activities of the kind. Last I heard he gave up his interest in anthropology and progressive rock for Bible Study, and became a serious Christian. (Presumably the streetwalkers were also given up, considering his newer religious interests as well).

Both Olly and Betty remarried. (Olly remarried twice, his wives becoming younger I believe). So did my father. My mother never remarried. Betty married a rather handsome wealthy businessman with whom she appears happy. Valerie, her daughter, also married a businessman, albeit one with progressive interests. To this day George and I remain unmarried.

My mother attempted to hold a Thanksgiving meeting/reunion over there many years later, after both families' divorces. Both my mother and Betty invited other women over and all husbands were out of the house, (having been expelled from the marriages), leaving in essence an all female Thanksgiving, with the notable exceptions of George and I, having to overhear the turkey conversation of that table. The spectacle of that day, especially the frank, brutal and graphic conversation of these obese, middle aged (and senior) women sitting around a table and discussing the sins of the male sex was truly of of the most disturbing experiences of my life. Gone too was the decor of that earlier period. Everything was light, airy, streamlined and tastefully bland.

I was most shocked that they would carry on like this with me and George present, as if we were not people who would be disturbed by being privy to their authentic sentiments. Even well into adulthood, I had no way to make sense of divorce, and who was to blame, and above all, I felt such a sense of loss, and our dependency as children on the vagaries and convictions of adults; and as adults, our dependency on the wills and often conflicting beliefs of other peers.

George's sister had grown into a beautiful woman with a career in accounting. I remember her telling me on that final Thanksgiving day that I had to make decisions in my life about which parent with whom to side and that she felt my father and her father were villains.

"Why would you ever want to have anything to do with your dad?" was what she bluntly asked me. She was most unhappy that I could not assent: I mistakenly insisted that it was their business and that we could never fully understand. She has never forgiven me, I think, for that statement, though on the face of it, it seemed at the time a sensible one. For Valerie was happy because she was free from her father and leading an accountant's life, and I was a confused man living as a musician in Boston and coming down to a very changed Florida and all I could remember was all of the fun George and I had as children in that crazy seventies house.

My Childhood in the 1970s Part Four

I have mentioned before in various ways that I am a creature of the senses, that, in William James' taxonomic antinomies I am perceptual rather than conceptual, however much I may conceptually dwell in the world of ideas and however hungry my brain may be for its own intellect.

When I remember my events from my past I remember snippets, shards, images. There is a story but the story is always subordinate to character, to place, and to image.

When I remember my past I remember not entire events but foreground and background. I remember Lydia, Sally and me playing in the trees and Lydia's wild curly hair that transfixed me, it didn't seem to remind me of hair I'd ever seen before, unless it was like Rita Coolidge's on television. I remember Sally's awkward and bookish glasses and her straight blonde hair. I told her she was prettier than Gloria Steinem which Lydia was not too happy to hear.

Not all of these "imagistic" memories are entirely pleasant however. Win and Jane, the hippie/"Jesus freak" couple with the VW minivan showed me religious cartoons of such horror: random and harsh pictures of the Devil with horns, swooping down to possess little children, humans not so far apart from me in age or demeanor. It looked as if these devils (it seemed plural) would have stolen my soul if I should go to sleep alone. And I had heard great forbidding rumors about the recent movie THE EXORCIST. Of course, in Win and Jan's minds they were getting me saved early through Christ by my being exposed to such comic books. But in reality, those cheap self published Christian cartoons did more to scare me than any commercial "adult" horror movie my dad took me to see. I had nightmares for days and only upon waking could I be assured that demons did not devour or infect little boys.

I felt as if I were naturally "high" as I could become engrossed in the tiniest details: the patterned carpeting, a mustache, Lydia's hair, ALL of Carla.

I felt overwhelmed by a world I barely understood but with which I was forced to cope. It would be many years, even decades before I would develop any sense of real agency in acting upon an external world. I am quite horrified when I read in psychology texts that such a sense is supposed to develop in the first years of life.

Sometimes the unpleasant memories are of a single physical trait on an other person. My best and first male friend George had a father named Olly and Olly had this mustache that simply gave me real creeps. It was long and it sort of drooped down. You could say it looked like Tony Orlando's mustache but it was not correct looking to my eyes and was somehow WORSE than any mustache I had seen. It was a little like Nigel's mustache - the bassist (played by Harry Shearer) in that classic rock mockumentary SPINAL TAP - if that helps to give a picture. Even worse this father had, shall we say, not always the best relations with his kids. Thus I was forced to witness as he sat his daughter on his knee and he lectured her in the most harsh and condescending way, drilling his budding genius daughter on historical and geographical facts. He would issue forth question after question and all the while I would stare at that, for me terrifying mustache, and then look at his daughter's blank, frightened stare as he "tutored her" in front of me and George as if we boys were invisible and didn't matter to him as much as his little girl. Olly's little girl was his genius project and wanted all of us to know how dumb we boys were in comparison to his perfect little girl, all the while twirling that damned "stache". And, just on cue, and in character, Julia would answer every question with unerring accuracy.

Sometimes when he was "done" with Julia I could see her rock back and forth for a while. She and George did not get along well and he would torture him because of his lack of intelligence, his slowness, and his banishment from her world with her daddy. But George always looked after me like an older brother, and was the only male peer with whom I could relate for my total childhood. (If you exclude my adult male friends like the stud Don or the newspaper man I befriended).

Olly would do a show and tell of "the greatest contemporary music" which consisted mostly of the band RENAISSANCE. Now I hated this music and yet, as if Olly's mustache gave him special powers we had to defer to his taste in music and, worse, hear him engage in lengthy musicological disquisitions on the virtues of progressive rock.

Sometimes my memory was of a part of person like Olly's incessant mustache. More often, it was a piece of home or institutional decor. And no single object haunted me as much as the orange and green fuzzy, extra wide and thick deep pile rugs that covered items in the bathroom and toilet in George's home. His mother seemed possessed by such decorating and decreed it suitable for anything associated with bodily functions. I felt and feared there was nobody to whom I could express my disapproval of this kind of design. As the years passed what started off as toilet decoration moved to other rooms. Like a Chia Pet the shag seemed to grow, even including home appliances, all in shades of mustard, green, and various acidic oranges.

Still worse was a neighbor's "rainbow" carpet. I lived near three girls next door - all sisters - but before I can think of any of these girls, all of whom but one I was crazy about, I must first confront that carpet. Their mother decided to take scraps of primary colored carpet and stitch them together. I am sure today or even then the shock of color might be considered charming and fun but it genuinely frightened me. It didn't frighten me as much as the mother did however, but that is a story for a later date.

Then there are memories of people who I never got to fully know. My dad used to hang out with an old man - you might have called him an old thespian since in his young adulthood he had been an acting star in South Florida. Now as a senior he lived in a rundown trailer park. (There were so many of those in the industrial wasteland which seemed to surround our home). But it was rumored that he was a witch or warlock and my father would go visit him for great lengths of time. Sometimes I would have to sit in the hot car outside of the trailer while my father went in to speak with Noah. Only once I was invited in and his trailer was filled with occult memorabilia and ephemera. Though the material was from a point of view opposite than that of the Christian stuff Win and Jan showed me, since it was by Alistaire Crowley and others, his "books" disturbed me as much as Win and Jan's comics, perhaps because of because of their deep mystery. My mother didn't trust Noah and didn't want me associating with him, but I guess my father won that particular battle.

Noah's appearance confirmed his reputation an eccentric since he was incredibly obese with a huge mane of unkept white hair and a beard that seemed to reach practically to his navel. Because he frightened me I was only too happy to sit locked up in an unhealthily overheated wide bodied red Thunderbird - and roast. Though I wondered what my dad was doing in Noah's trailer for so long. I would spend many an afternoon in that car in a shopping mall lot, (those few times he didn't take me along with him), wondering where my father had gone or how long he would be. But on this particular day it seemed a better deal than Noah's trailer.

Since I had appeared in a play with Noah, and it was a play that required me to sit through the whole performance for a single walk on and a single line as a token little kid, I had known Noah socially. Yet nobody talked to Noah as most were afraid of him. Anyway, for long periods of time I was told he took a vow of silence. (That is, except while he was onstage).

But what I remember most about that play was that there were girls in the cast, and since I had practically two hours of nothing to do backstage we got into some trouble. Apparently, as I heard later, when I was old enough to comprehend, these girls taught me how to kiss or "neck". But since my sense memory is stronger than any "holistic" scene I remember the sheer physical joy of our mouths touching and physical closeness. I later learned that they were actually trying to distract me so I would be late to go on stage. Were they being cruel or merely friendly. In today's age, which thinks of all things in terms of Psychological Correctness, of boundaries, of appropriate and inappropriate, I wonder how this would seen. I have no idea how "innocent" it was but I know it gave me sensations that were most exciting and even comforting. How I hated for it to stop, and for the adults to pry us apart and scold the girls and for me to go on stage and deliver that one fleeting line.


As far as my stint in children's theater was concerned, I much preferred a part where I could cut loose and really improvise. My best stint in children's theater was when I got to play a drunk chef. I would study old Red Skelton routines and other bits from a time when plying drunk for laughs was more canonical in comedy, before contemporary "AA consciousness" had thoroughly overtaken the culture. Thus, the end result of such background culture and study was my act of a drunk chef and I planned to play it to the hilt.

Without telling my father - he was often the director of these "plays" - I planned to get so drunk and spill so much wine on myself that I would take a dive - a pratfall - into the front row. Rather than get worried the whole audience screamed with laughter. I felt like a child Marx Brother - Harpo to be specific - getting a whole theater to applaud like that. Though afterwards I was given some stern talking to for departing from the prescribed blocking, however safely I had planned the fall. I promised not to repeat it if they would let me slur my words and spill extra wine.

In writing these memories I hope to get some semblance of pattern. But I must start from my perceptions because as William James said:
"The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience. Here alone do we acquaint ourselves with continuity, or the immersion of one thing in another, here alone with self, with substance, with qualities, with activity in its various modes, with time, with cause, with change, with novelty, and with freedom."