The Best Feeling In The World

Contents:

Of Mice And Monsters

Robby Riley

Milkaholic

Welcome To The Neighborhood

Rock-A-Bye Baby

Elevator to Hell

Cigar Box

Mad Dog

Air Raid

Mountain Way Gang

My Favorite Uncle

Lessons from Hell-er

G.I. Joe War

Giant Bikes

Drawing Attention

Torn

A Man On The Moon

Wingtip Shoes

Mountain Way Courtesy

Intercourse

Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog

Spit Pit

1st Base

Tape Recording

Ring of Time

Love song

Olympic Dis-spirit

Ernie D.

Football

Personal Typing

Willie Mays Tears

Defeated

The Night Of My Life

Dizzy

Hangover

Picked Off

Hangover Too

I Loved Tennis

The Last Homerun

The Baseball Pass

Drawing Attention Too

Double Major

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1

Of Mice And Monsters

We’re all gonna die! He didn’t put it like that, but the President of the United States was worried enough about atomic war that he gave a speech to the nation urging citizens, my parents included, to build bomb shelters—without delay. He was so concerned, he wrote A Message To You From President Kennedy in Life magazine, headlining a special issue on bomb shelters, he advised, …in these dangerous days…threatened we must prepare for all eventualities.

I don’t know what my parents were thinking; if they thought the end was near, or if they were too busy raising a family to notice, or if they were glass half full or half empty kinda people. They might have done well to read Mad magazine instead: they would have discovered that no matter which way they looked at it, it was still 1961. Upside down or right side up—same thing. And besides, we were renting.

My mother made stipulations on the rental agreement. No, not for a fallout shelter, but she required removal of all wallpaper, repair of all plaster, and a new ceiling in the kitchen, all pending her approval. My father signed the lease on October 29, 1961, paid the man $220 for the first month plus a month’s security, and we were set to move in on November 15th, if the repairs were done in time.

In the complimentary black and white real estate photo, labeled Your Castle, the house stares down with a stubborn, pouting face. Today it is an apartment building. 70 Orient Way, Rutherford, New Jersey. You can still see the footprint of the exact location where the house once sat, the spot marked by a storm drain, a telephone pole, and the specific way the curb bends off the straightaway where Orient Way splits off into Ettrick Terrace.

The house stood on a hill. Thick slate stairs cut through a concrete wall; a short strip of sidewalk led to another set of steps that brought you to the front door. It was a broad-shouldered house. The second story puffed out, proudly displaying three identical windows, evenly spaced across the face covered in asbestos shingles. From any window, on most days, you could see the ever-present New York City skyline, so close and distant at the same time.

I have no idea what the logistics were for getting everyone and everything to Rutherford from Toledo, Ohio (did they hire a moving van?). But, it happened, and by day’s end my parents were surely exhausted. Everything we owned hid in cardboard boxes that lined the walls of each room. They put us to bed somewhere in the giant house and they crashed with such relief I am sure they could have slept into 1962.

Us kids, we were another story. We could not sleep. We were overtired.

Hey, are you awake? I asked my brother Barry, I can’t  sleep.

Me neither.

Me three, my sister might have said, but then probably not, she was just two years old. I had just turned three and Barry was four. We were awake in the middle of the night in a strange new space, an ugly, cavernous house that was probably haunted for all we knew. Christ, we were so young I can barely remember being able to talk. We needed our parents to remind us to perform the basic functions of life, to guide us through each moment of the day: when to get up, and when to eat, and, for any of us still potty training, when to poop. Left alone, anything could happen. It might have been the first time in our toddler lives our parents were not going to get up and take care of everything; they were just too tired.

We three impish insomniacs decided to hunt down our things hidden in the boxes. It was no trouble finding our toys; we knew exactly where they were. They were the only things we kept track of during the move.

We started cracking open boxes, peeking to see what was inside. Mostly we discovered clothes, linens, and household items of little interest to strung out children marauding through the night, pillaging cardboard moving boxes. Then we struck gold, mischief’s gold. My sister reached in and plucked out a bathing suit, and then another; one by one like a magician pulling many colored scarves from a sleeve, until we had them  all.

Ah ha! Bathing suits. A discussion ensued until we arrived at a great idea—let’s go swimming. We put on our suits, went into the upstairs bathroom, filled the drinking cup we found there with water, then carried it to the hallway between all the bedrooms and splashed the water on the floor. As if following the most primitive instructions for how to make a swimming pool, we repeated this act until there was enough of a puddle, a suggestion of a pool, to put our bathing suits to good use. We splashed around, rolled around, and giggled ourselves senseless in our new kiddie pool. The folks never made a sound.

We wandered downstairs for further exploration, the three of us on a super-charged, hyper-tired high. Boxes were everywhere in the living room. When we grew tired of what we found in the boxes, we played with the boxes instead. We stacked them, built a fort and a chair, whatever came to mind. Before we knew it we were in a doctor’s office, the boxes stretched out like an examination table and we played out the roles. Barry became the doctor, Karen the patient, and I guess I played the nurse or another doctor. Karen protested being the patient, but we outnumbered her. She was the youngest, and she was a girl.

Lay down here, it’s time for your examination.

We played doctor. Perhaps we had found a bathrobe in a box, handy now as a doctor’s white coat in our make-believe world. We checked her heart, raised our imaginary stethoscopes to our ears, and placed the other end on her chest for a listen. Next, it was time to take the patient’s temperature and a wooden connecting stick from our cardboard can of Tinker Toys became a thermometer. I stood to the left of my sister, beside her legs as she tried to stay perched on the improvised exam table. Then a thought came to me.

I had never had a conscious thought of this kind at all, but there it was. A powerful curiosity overtook me as I suggested the game of doctor become show me yours and I’ll show you mine—only my sister was the only one doing the showing. Just as quick and unforeseen as the thought had arrived, there was the act—compelled forward I had to witness the difference between boys and girls. The shame was immediate. The badness, the badness arrived, spread across my face in a blush and stained thoughts of myself indelibly.

In the morning, my father woke, and on his way to the bathroom he stepped in our swimming pool; then he called the police on us, or a least I think he did. He picked up the phone and dialed. The three of us lined up in my parent’s bedroom like suspects.

Hello, is this the police station? I remember he said, Yes, well I have three very badly behaved children here. He continued the ruse until our frightened reactions convinced him he had made his point. Only, he may have gone a bit too far. I, for one, was convinced he had called the police and it was possible I would go to jail for what I had done. I had helped create a swimming pool on the second floor foyer (and, of course, that other thing). I got truly frightened and started to whimper. My parents did their best to calm me down.

You’re not going to jail, your dad was pretending. He didn’t really dial the police, Steven.

I was not so sure—it looked like he dialed, it sounded like he spoke to the police; it convinced me for the same reason I thought it was magic the way my folks poured clear hot water into a coffee cup and the cup filled up black.

I am certain that my father used that parenting trick on us, and I am certain that one day, if not exactly the day in question, uniformed policemen arrived at 70 Orient Way and knocked on the door as only police can knock. I can see them looking this way and that, casing the house like cops instead of robbers, framed through the old dried putty window frames in their blue hats—like in a Norman Rockwell painting.

One night in that ugly house, while everyone slept, there was a loud banging at the front door. Boom! Boom! Boom! Then quiet. Boom! Boom! Boom! Then quiet. Then add the echo of my pounding heart—the banging, loud enough to bring the slightest vibration to the house itself. I was certain a horrible robber man was trying to get in and hurt us, mess with me. It seemed to take forever for my father to get up, go to the door, and discover it was my uncle, on leave from the military.

I was not truly convinced the house was haunted, but there was something creepy about the place. It seemed cavernous. I did not feel safe in that house. My mother says I would not go in the basement or even near the basement door. I spent large amounts of time sitting alone in the middle of the couch. The place felt empty, dirty, ugly.

One day I saw a dead mouse in a mousetrap in the hallway leading to the kitchen. It felt like a stranger had come into our home and put the mouse in the pantry. I was perplexed; like, how did it get in there? I felt my parents were in on it, or at least they knew; but they hadn’t told me. Why didn’t they just tell me we had mice? Perhaps they thought it would frighten me to know about the mice. I thought hard about how a mousetrap actually kills a mouse, how a metal bar crushes little bones and internal organs just as the creature was about to enjoy his favorite food, and mine—cheese.

I dreamt Frankenstein chased me around the ugly house. I ran laps around the overgrown, tangled yard, the monster at my heels. I waited for Abbott and Costello to arrive and lighten the mood, but they never showed. I screamed for help, but help never came. The memory of that nightmare continued to scare the shit out of me even though I never had it again.

Outside the house that gave me the creeps was the big world, a world of unimaginable size and scope, almost too big to fear. But one step at a time. The backyard at 70 Orient Way stretched up another hill and blended into a wooded area known in town as The Woods, at least that’s what my friends and me came to call it. To the north was a large brownstone apartment building surrounded by a wall that wrapped around the bottom like a waterless moat. Looking down into the concrete canyon, I imagined it as an outdoor dungeon. I’d take a quick peek over the edge, just long enough to bring on a sense of vertigo, and then I’d dash back to safer ground. Scarier still was to look up at the back of the building and see something blink in one of the windows, or just imagine it.

On one rare occasion, the family went outside together to clear the brush from the yard. It was a lot of work; the yard was so overgrown, it was hard to tell where the yard ended and the woods began. We kids played as the folks struggled with the tall grass and fallen branches. Raking leaves and keeping an eye on three small children wasn’t all that easy and no doubt added tension to the task. We threw sticks into the dry moat and waited for the sound they made when they landed to come back up. Every now and then my mother called over, warning us to be careful. My father removed the ever-present cigar from his mouth and insisted, Listen to your mother, adding additional authority to her warning. I suggested a game of tag and, for the time being, parental worry relaxed. We ran loops full of laughter around the yard, chased each other, yelped and carried on, trying to avoid being it. The afternoon ended badly. My father screamed at my mother, and us, for some reason, about the yard work he didn’t want to do before he headed off to work in The City.¹

Back inside, my father showered, shaved, and dressed for work. Then all he had to do was step out onto Orient Way, virtually right in front of our house, to catch his bus. Off he’d go in a big, smoke-breathing, throat-clearing bus, grinding gears and growing smaller as it lumbered away. Then he disappeared, slipping behind the curtain of that skyline, as though it were a gigantic painted theater backdrop.

You don’t get a lot of second chances in life, but my father got at least one that I know of. Tagged by The New York Times as he came out of college, after he served in occupied Japan, my father was a copy boy getting a start in the working world, and living in a room at the YMCA. A great get in the workingman’s world of letters; but making ends meet in Manhattan was rough, so he traded the dream for the comfort of home and a few more dollars at The New Haven Register. If he hadn’t decided to get married he might have stayed there for the rest of his life; instead he moved out and stepped up to sports columnist covering the Big-10 for The Toledo Blade. It took him a few years, but he got a second look from the Gray Lady, and he jumped, moving his young family back east to the suburbs of New Jersey.

I don’t know what my father thought back then; he seemed stressed and angry almost all the time. Maybe he was angry, angry at having to raise a family in a world where the end of world seemed so possible, if not imminent. Throw in the Cuban Missile Crisis in ‘62 and Bang Zoom! Then, someone goes and shoots the President of the United States in the head. If not angry, then sad. If not sad, afraid.

Maybe my father had it all figured out, maybe he didn’t think too much about things. He certainly didn’t talk about them. Perhaps he knew, perhaps he had learned, all days are dangerous days, all times uncertain, better to get on with it. And so he did, five days a week, Saturday through Wednesday. He rode the bus into the heart of midtown, walked to the gray building at 229 West 43rd Street, and went to work. He did it for forty years. Forty years.

No, I don’t know what he made of the life he was making for himself and his family. I had no idea other than to wonder what made him so angry, and to think he was angry with me.

1 All these memories, dreams, and images have melted down into these stories I tell about myself. These little traumas about things I’m pretty sure have happened stirred in with things I am certain actually did.

2

Robby Riley

Who killed JFK? Does God exist? In a way, they are the same question, if what you want is absolute certainty; deciding for yourself is about all you can do. Lone gunman, one God, see what I’m saying? How you deal with the unknown is up to you, but keep it to yourself. Convincing others of your answers isn’t spreading truth, it’s just commerce.

We stayed at 70 Orient Way for at least two years, arrived in the fall of 1961 and left not long after the assassination of JFK. I clearly recall living in the ugly house when that happened—the president’s funeral wiped out all TV programming for kids. I saw Oswald get shot on TV; would like to claim I watched it live (why would I like to claim that?), but can’t be sure if it was a replay or  not.

As clichéd as it is to discuss, I do have vivid recollections of the assassination as it played out on television and in the emotions of all the adults in my world at the time; it was the first time I saw my father cry, though I didn’t quite understand the JFK connection at the time.

Why is daddy crying? The question answered with childish simplicity, brevity, and nonexistent detail: Something bad happened to this man, a very important man. My father was mad about it too; it scared me when he suddenly needed to get out of the house. It was the first time I was concerned for my father. I wanted to know what was wrong. Where is he going? What is he doing? Out the door he went. Did a part of me worry he might not come back? He probably crossed the tracks to grab a beer at the Park Tavern and watch the news in the company of men, not that there was anything wrong with that.

My brother’s nightmare stepped right out in front of him on the Orient Way sidewalk one day as he headed off to first grade. It seemed to me that no one ever talked about Barry one day going to school. I only took notice of this school thing when my brother had a problem. One day he didn’t want to walk alone to school any more. I had a vague sense something was wrong, something was happening to Barry and it was happening on his walk to Pierrepont School. It was a decent walk, eight-and-a-half blocks, five blocks south, take a right, three-and-a-half blocks west. As it turned out, there was a bully in Barry’s path. A boy named Robby Riley lived right on the corner where Barry made the turn on his way to school, the northeast corner of East Pierrepont and Orient Way. Robby Riley was from out of this world. He came up on Barry, confronted him just for walking past his house, pawing at him, talking funny and grunting—scary, like a monster, like the son, or maybe the nephew, of Frankenstein. It is not politically correct to say this today, but Robby Riley was retarded. Retarded. I’m not sure if my parents used that word as they explained Robby Riley’s difference to us, but they did try to explain. What I could not understand I substituted with fear; fear of the unknown monster boy who hunted my brother as he walked to school.

My fear of Robby Riley would grow considerably despite my mother’s attempts to educate us with the softest of confrontations. I’m not sure how they resolved the bullying with Barry, perhaps they altered his route or his timing in order to avoid Robby Riley, but whatever the solution, he soon walked to school and back without incident. My mother wanted to do more than reduce our fear. She no doubt considered herself an open-minded person, compassionate to the meek and mild and disturbed, you could say; she wanted to raise her children right. She arranged an appointment with Robby Riley’s mother and me and my brother, Barry (Karen was deemed too young to receive any benefit), so that we could learn about and understand what being retarded was all about. She wanted to show us that Robby Riley’s behavior was not within his control, that he was misunderstood, that we ought to try expressing sympathy, compassion, and understanding for him rather than fear.

On the appointed day, we walked over to Robby Riley’s house to get an education. We approached. I remember walking up to the house: first three steps, then along a concrete path and to a set of four brick steps leading to double French front doors flanked by full-length sidelights. The front door opened into a large, welcoming living room that I remember I liked at first sight. To the right of the living room was another pair of interior French doors, probably leading to the dining room and then the kitchen.

My mother prepared us in advance to behave ourselves; she dressed us up a tad and told us to not say anything. We sat in the living room. I clutched at her, and used her as a shield against dealing with strangers. Barry sat quietly in a chair of his own. Mrs. Riley seemed nice enough, perhaps a little reticent about this teaching moment for a mother, blessed with two normal boys. What did Mrs. Riley think? She had invited my mother into her home; it seems she was OK with the idea of making things better for the normals, even if she didn’t think of it like that. What was in it for Mrs. Riley?

We sat awkward and still; I don’t know who spoke first. I thought, where is this Robby Riley boy? He wasn’t in the room. Mrs. Riley explained how Robby was different from other kids, something about his brain not working right. It was nothing to be afraid of, and certainly nothing to make fun of. At one point Mrs. Riley introduced her other, older, normal son; I’m not sure why, whether for good manners or to reassure my brother and me that the danger of retards was limited.

As I waited for the adults to finish their discussion, I kept looking at those French doors to the dining room and wondering if Robby Riley might come flying out. What was behind those doors? Did they keep Robby Riley in a special room, locked away? In a cage in the kitchen locked up like a large dog or a monster? I had never seen Robby Riley; I had no idea what he might look like, but I was certain he had scared the living shit out of my brother. Barry sat calmly, perhaps terrified, but he showed nothing.

When there was nothing more to say, my mother made a knowing glance at Mrs. Riley, who returned a nod, gesturing agreement on what would happen next.

Are you ready to meet Robby? my mother asked. It was not really a question, but translated it said get ready, we’re about to let the monster out of it’s cage. I tensed up at the mention of this introduction and I shifted my position more completely around behind my mother. She reached around without looking, grabbed my arm and repositioned me back to only halfway behind her; a scold made physical, conveyed through her fingertips. I snapped my attention to the French doors, my chest vibrated with my pounding heart; I looked at my brother Barry. I trembled with fear over my loss of control.

The French doors parted, and Robby Riley tripped into the living room; he tried hard to take a normal step, but as his foot rose into the air, it veered on it’s way down, and landed somewhere other than intended.

He had a square head, a crew cut, a perfect cliff of hair—a jumping off point for madness. He had a firm jaw but his mouth hung open, always; and he sounded like he was either out of breath or had trouble breathing. In that instant I burst into tears and started moaning with fright. Chemicals flooded my body, blood rushed through me, my breathing changed pace; I was in full panic. It was uncontrollable—Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Dracula, the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon—all rolled into one had just stepped into the room with one desire: to capture me and eat my flesh in gigantic bites I would feel until I bled out and died.

My mother’s mortification produced the necessary flight reflex, and as my crying reached uncontrollable levels, we got out of there fast. Barry, as bewildered as a five-year-old can get without losing it, just followed us out. My fear of Robby Riley was now branded into my brain like electroshock treatments searing gray matter forever. So complete was the trauma, it is a wonder I could ever witness another mentally disabled person without producing the same reaction. Retard. Retard. Jesus, what could I know of political correctness—Christ. There are monsters in the world!

3

Milkaholic

When you’re a baby, hunger and thirst are the same things. I had a gluttonous appetite for milk, or formula; drank so much I became allergic. My mother reports massive quantities of milk consumed; old photos back up the claim, reveal a pudgy, milk-drunk boy. I gulped the shit down. My allergies were not an easy thing to figure out, the first of many complications that would make parenting me a pleasure.

Next thing I knew, I was in a weird doctor’s office and he asked me to take off my shirt so he could scrape my skin with a few drops of a liquid from a mad scientist’s kit of stainless steel implements and many colored vials of, perhaps, poison.

I remember the day I learned I could no longer drink milk, could no longer enjoy ice cream, or chocolate, and, God save the boy, no cheese! My mother took me directly to the Grand Union super market after the doctor’s visit and we purchased apricot juice, fucking apricot juice! The doctor said it was a great milk substitute, said it had a similar viscosity as whole milk and it was good for me too, of course. Who drinks apricot juice? Have you ever had a glass of apricot juice? The half-gallon can probably had a quarter-inch of dust on it.

Skim milk was an alternative, though hard to find back then. It was easier to make your own by boiling the fat off whole milk, skim and discard fat, set to cool. I also tried drinking special powdered milk, but it had such a poor relation to the taste of real milk as to disgust me completely. When we got home, my mother started to make some DIY skim milk and then she poured me a small glass of the apricot nectar. I sat at the kitchen table; it had curved leg tops and a set of bent plywood chairs. I recall the clock high on the wall over my shoulder. I took one taste of that thick orange-brown liquid—more like chutney to a kid addicted to slugging back glass after glass of smooth, cold, pure white milk—I immediately realized my life sucked.¹ Why me? How come I can’t drink milk?

They didn’t tell me right away that ice cream was out of the question; ice cream just kind of disappeared from the house for a while. Once it sank in, going out for ice cream lost its little kid charm. When we went on vacations at Alexander’s Lake in Connecticut, and my father was in a good mood, he’d take us to the Four Corners to get ice cream (and the best freaking clam cakes ever on Earth) and I’d have to contend with my allergies. I’d ask the question every time, before we even got out of the