Toto and her kind

The way we got our pet dog was that one day I traded a flimsy pair of binoculars for a squirrel from a kid who it was rumored had a metal plate in his head. Word around the neighborhood was that the plate kept his skull from shrinking and squeezing his brain to death. As it turned out the squirrel was not his to trade. He didn't own it. That night the mother of the actual owner called our house to ask for the critter back. By chance the woman happened to know my mother, both of them were nurses and traveled in the same circles. Her family's dog had just given birth and she offered us the pick of the litter for return of the squirrel. (Months later while over their house we would dine on frog legs that were wrapped up in tinfoil and cooked on a grill. And, I'm here to tell you, frog tastes like chicken.)

On the night of the phone call we went over to the squirrel owner's house and picked out a black pup from the litter of mutts that were part Black Lab, possibly German Shepherd, and breeds unknown. My sister who was enamored with the Wizard of Oz got the honor of naming the pup. Thus the family pooch was christened Toto. She was a friendly and dutiful pet who as she grew came when called, heeled when ordered, and sat up when asked. She was much beloved and accompanied us on family vacations at Hampton Beach, and my father and her would go for early morning surf side runs before the arrival of bathers or dog barring officials. By the time she reached her middle years however she was a bit neurotic. She had to be sedated when left alone in the cottage. One afternoon while under the influence of her calming dose she ate her way through the front screen door and came looking for us. When she found us she bayed in unbridled joy and wagged her tail with her whole body.

During the time we got Toto I also had a pet turtle the size of a half-dollar. I kept him in a cardboard piggy-bank that was a replica of a McDonald's. It sat atop my clothes-chest and I rarely paid him any mind. One afternoon when I put him on the floor to mosey around a bit I found he was dead. It was my first encounter with death and I felt sick at heart that he had died. It was all my fault. I'd neglected him. When I told my mother what had happened she suggested a funeral at sea by way of the bathroom toilet. I flushed him down with a sad goodbye. I think his name was Sammy.

We had a parakeet for a spell around the time I was eleven. He chirpped and sang continuously. One time my father took him out of the cage and had the bird on his finger an inch away from his mouth. In what would later become family lore my father opened his mouth to the parakeet. Without warning the bird lunged into my father's mouth and headed for the depths of his throat. We watched dumbfounded as our gagging father grabbed the disappearing bird by its tail-feathers and yanked the would be avian spelunker free from reaching his esophagus and points beyond. Not too long after that we had the bird out of the cage and as we watched it walk around on the floor our family cat Smokey pounced on him and killed the parakeet before we could react. The birdcage went down into the basement and we were bird-less for evermore.

As Toto aged into the autumn of her years my father and her developed a special bond. My father who worked third shift would share the morning and early noon hours with her. She with the constantly wagging tail of delight at moments of attention rubbed up against my father's leg and was rewarded with pets and pats on her chest. In mutual affection they passed the hours together.

Over the years we also had our share of cats but not one that followed was viewed as fondly as our first cat Smokey. He could do no wrong. Later would come Morgan, Munchkin, and a small host of others. One was a stray that didn't last long enough to merit a name. He had an unlovable disposition and stayed in the basement pissing and stinking up a storm. We were quickly rid of him. Our next door neighbors a childless couple in their upper sixties who kept their lawn as pristine as a putting green fell in love with Morgan. They had a special chair for him and they fed him canned tuna and had up on their living room wall a picture of him. They were struck particularly low at his eventual passing.

Around the time I reached my cynical an uncharitable latter teens Toto could no longer control her bowels. I can see it clearly her running through the living room heading for the back door with her tail tuck up underneath her and a look on her face of utter shame as she voided against her will. In response I took up a cry, put her to sleep. A short time later in the face of the inevitable my father took Toto to the vet and held her cradled in his arms as the vet administered the lethal injection. When my father returned he stood at the kitchen window and looked out upon the back yard where Toto had played and scampered about. And my father stoic though he was broke down in tears.

Toto's demise was in its way a demarcation point for our family. My siblings and I were soon to venture forth and we had outgrown the need for a family pet to care for and rally around. We had by then concerns and visions and plans for life beyond the family home. And they did not in all their manifestations include a tag along animal, not even one that was dearly beloved.

Miami, Man.

The Miami Show or as it was otherwise known The Morrison Show came about as mostly a lark. I was at its inception living in Allston, Mass, with my fellow Cargo of Despair band mate, Scott Burland. We happened to catch an hour long documentary on the Doors in the course of which Ray Manzarek must have said "Man" four-hundred, seventy-four times, man. It was so silly it made us giddy. Soon thereafter we put on a bootleg album of excerpts from the Doors March, 1, 1969, Miami show in which authorities contended Morrison had exposed his mini Mr. Morrison. He is obviously in his cups as they used to say. He taunts the audience, "You're all a bunch fucking idiots.... How long are you going to let them push you around? You're all a bunch of slaves, a bunch of slaves...what are you gonna do about it, what are you gonna do? Hey listen I'm lonely up here. Why don't about fifty or sixty of you come up here and love my ass...Oh look. There's a whole bunch of you way back there that I didn't even notice." This show went on for an hour until Morrison turned his boozy gripes on to the Miami cops who were present. It pissed them off and they hauled Jim off the stage. End of show.

We wanted to pay homage to that night through a show that was unpredictable, mildly confrontational, and chaotic. At our next get together with the other two members of Cargo we hash together a framework for our performance. It was not an unusual approach for us. We were by nature an improvisational group who left much to chance. All we really ever needed was a small set of givens and we would make up the rest on the spot.

The performance took place one hot night in the foyer of an office building that housed both businesses and a bookstore called Primal Plunge. The bookstore featured fanzines, magazines, comic books, hardbacks of esoteric interest, and the paintings of clowns by the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy. The proprietor, Mike, organized and publicized the event and it was through him that we had that night an audience of some forty people.

On "stage" (the floor level space in front of our audience) and hanging from the ceiling was a life size black and white poster of Jim Morrison in his iconic leather wearing prime. We had cut out a square at his crotch level and replaced it with the screen of a black and white television set that was hooked up to a surveillance camera zoomed in on the bulging dungaree clad crotch of James. He was otherwise unseen and had joined our band some weeks prior after seeing a mention of us in the Phoenix newspaper. Before that he had fronted his own band called Frozen Hippo Whiplash. The reason why James' crotch was bulging was that he had in his pants a ten inch long and bulbous plastic replica of one of the giant sand worms featured in the movie Dune. To the right of the poster Scott and Huls were huddled on the floor. They had eight different cords affixed with contact microphones that were plugged into a couple amps. Steve was standing to their right. He was dressed in his Postal uniform and donning a policeman's cap and wielding a night stick. I stood at his side dressed in thigh high pants with my crotch bulging obscenely by way of a bunched together bath towel stuffed into my under-ware. A tape deck was also on stage. It was plugged into an amp.

Let the performance begin. Huls turned on the tape deck and soon a 60 second tape-loop was blasting through an amplifier. The tape featured Morrison shouting the "Come on, come on, come on..." introduction to the song Touch Me from the Door's album, The Soft Parade. The Come on, come on, come on was quickly followed by some of Morrison's ranting from the Miami show: You're all a bunch of slaves, What are you going to do about it? What are you gonna do? blah, blah, blah... It was a continuous sixty second loop that repeated over and over in the course of the performance. As this was going on Huls and Scott turned up the amps into which the contact mics were plugged. Now the thing about a contact mic is that it picks up every scrape, tap, scratch, or bump. Our original plan was to have the eight contact mics independent of one another and free for audience members to take hold of and join in the mayhem. Unfortunately however all the cords got tangle up with one another and struggle as they might to free them of one another Huls and Scott just couldn't untangle them. The amplifiers squalled with feedback and jarring amplified, scrapes, bumps, and scratches. It was Hellish. Steve meanwhile was walking through the audience while smacking the palm of his left hand with his night stick and telling folks to behave themselves and otherwise being a general nuisance. As this was going on I was tossing paper airplanes by the score into the audience. They threw them back at us and at one point someone toss one at us that was in flames.

On the television screen a hand kept playing and teasing at the zipper on the crotch in close up. I ventured into the audience and proceeded to prod people with my bulging crotch. I got a number of dirty looks. Morrison ranted on. After several minutes Steve started to badger me, telling me in classic cop speak to move along.

We were now about twenty loud and chaotic minutes into our performance. About that time the sand worm was slowly emerging from the pulled down zipper of the crotch in close up on the television screen. Steve and I were now both on our knees and back on stage. I felt we had shot our wad and I said to Steve, let's end it. He promptly punched me square on the jaw. I went tumbling on to my ass, laughing like crazy, and wondering what the hell that was about. (He would later tell me I thought you said hit me.) Scott and Huls meanwhile intuitively knew it was time to call it quits and the feedback and squalls and drunken taunting of Jim Morrison came to a silent end.

If we were paid for our performance I don't remember it. But it's not like it mattered. Cargo of Despair was never in it for the money. We were in it for the kicks and I know at least for me the hard won adoration. It was a real thrill to connect with an audience and we walked away from the Miami show with the conviction we had done what we had set out to do and along the way we had won over a good portion of our audience. The show was for the twenty odd minutes it lasted the embodiment of the compelling spirit of rock and roll that over the past couple of decades has set ministers in their pulpits to preaching against its uninhibited evils.

My perpendicular neighbors

One lot over and to the right from being directly across the street from us was the green house of my childhood friends Mike and Mark Shea. Their father Jim had once served in the navy on a submarine and Mark told me one afternoon that his father on occasion while still asleep would run through the house and down into the basement yelling as he went, "Dive, dive, dive." Mr. Shea owned an older black Volks Wagon and every Saturday afternoon regardless of the season he washed, waxed, and buffed that car with an attention that bordered on the erotic. One glorious Saturday after he had serviced his bug my younger brother reached out and touched the gleaming body. Mr. Shea as if he kept constant vigil instantly burst from the kitchen door yelling, "Don't you dare." My brother retreated in tears and after Mr. Shea called my parents to complain my brother sobbed in his own defense that he could not help himself. Such was the power of that shine.

Mike and Mark shared the same birthday and were born exactly one year apart. Mark was my closest friend and when it came time for me to be confirmed in the Catholic faith I chose Mark as my confirmation name. His family was of another faith and the day in catechism class that I was informed by a nun that every one not Catholic was going to Hell to suffer for eternity I began my fall from faith and a notion of a just and loving God. How could I pray to such a deity who condemned to eternal damnation anyone unyielding to Catholic faith or the pronouncements of His representative on earth the reigning Pope?

The Sheas and I used to go to the YMCA on Saturday afternoons in the nearby city of Springfield, Mass. It was virtually our first exposure to African Americans. There was at the time only a handful of black families residing in our town and none had children attending our grade school. That would change in junior high. In the meantime however through the Y we were exposed to a culture unlike our own. And it was as if we were of two different clans. We got along somewhat wearily. But we did beyond the racial awkwardness and disharmony have a grand time. There was basketball, dodge ball, trampoline time, and free swim periods. Afterwards we would shower and Mike Shea would comb his pubic hair and pet and talk to his penis which he called by a name that escapes me now. One afternoon after a workout in the gym I was down in the boy's dressing room hurrying to get ready to go for Mrs. Shea was due in moments to pick us up. I ran over to the heavy wooden door leading to the stairwell with the intentions of calling out to the dawdling Mark. I kicked it open. The door stopped abruptly with a thump and a cry. For in kicking the door open I had cleaved Mark's forehead down his center. The gash took a dozen stitches to close.

Down the end of our street was the proverbial sand lot where we played pick up baseball games. One morning Mike diligently cleared away all the brush and sticks and other impediments to a clean playing field. Later that same day for some perverse reason as if in undue retaliation I littered the field once again with all the debris Mike had painstakingly removed. In utter confusion upon discovering my deed Mike erupted in a guttural cry. Never before had I heard such pure animal anguish.

Mrs. Shea was a heavy drinker who played piano for a local church based theatrical group. One of the three bedrooms in the Shea household had been turned into a music studio with a black upright piano and a voluminous collection of sheet music running the gamut of broadway show tunes. At one point Mrs. Shea attended an AA meeting under the misconception that the organization would teach her how to drink reasonably. She was aghast to learn that they advocated complete abstinence. She never returned. A couple years later on an afternoon when I was eleven or twelve I stood in the doorway of their backyard sheet metal tool shed with a throbbing erection. I was at that moment enticing a neighboring girl of four or five to step inside the shed and relieve me carnally in ways I did not as of yet fully understand. Mrs. Shea who happened at that very second to look out her back window let go with a horrified shriek as she called out my name. Shocked into fear the little girl ran away in tears.

It was through Mark that I learned of another power, one that was more mysterious than lust. We were down in his basement when it happened. The afternoon before a television repairman had deemed the family black and white set beyond hope. Rather than toss the television out Mr. Shea had relegated the set to family basement with the thoughts he would later prove the repairman wrong. The back of the set was off and Mark and I had plugged it in. We stared transfixed at the glowing tubes and hot wires. I had a screwdriver in my hand and Mark as if in the guise of a straight man delivered his line, "What ever you do don't touch that wire." And I completing the joke replied, "What this one?" As I said it I touched the wire with the screw driver and a jolt of electricity mule kicked me some six or seven feet through the air. From that day forward I had a reverence for all things electrical.

When Mark and I were fifteen we each took a hit of Purple Haze and the world turned fantastical. Such visions we saw. I spent the night at his house and as we lay awake listening to the plaintive calls on a radio talk show I was convinced I heard beyond those voices a spaceship land atop his house. It was a night that passed for me in religious awe.

Shortly thereafter my family moved to neighborhood miles away. Mark and I went through changes in temperament and we drifted apart. I went on to strike up new friendships. And on melancholy afternoons I sometimes pulled out my collection of snapshots from earlier years. In one of them the Shea brothers and several other kids and I were supporting each other while forming a human pyramid. Were you naive enough you could almost convince yourself that we had the strength to hold one another aloft forever.

six elementary snap shots

My elementary school memories are as camera clicks with only rudimentary images captured. They are few but indelible.

22 November 1963 I was seated in first grade class when the overhead oatmeal colored speaker crackled to life. President Kennedy had been shot. We were to be let out early. I hurried with putting on my coat. I had to get home to tell my mother. The president I knew was Irish and Catholic just like us.

Years later. We sat silently at our desks working on the handout of word puzzles that our fifth grade english teacher had assigned us. I really enjoyed the challenge, so when she told us to pass the handout forward I wrote across the top of the page, "This was fun." After she'd gathered all the papers she told us to open our books to chapter four and read quietly to ourselves. We hadn't been at it more than a couple minutes when she barked out,"Robert." I was the only Robert in the class. "Stand up," she said. I did so and was startled to find she was glaring at me. "What is the meaning of this?" she demanded. I had no idea what she was talking about. "What?" I stammered. "This comment on the top of your page, 'This was fun.' What did you mean by that?" For a confounding moment all that existed was her withering look. I blurted out, "It was fun. I liked it." She looked me over every which way. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck. "From now on," she said. "Keep your opinions to yourself. Now sit down." I returned as best I could to my reading assignment. But the words were swimming in myriad directions. I could not concentrate. And I knew from that day onward I would never again volunteer my secret feelings.

Some months after that in the height of spring Richard Delmonte with his sparkling eyes and dimpled chin came to school in shiny black shoes, tight fitting jeans, and a flashy white shirt with an upturned wide collar. His curly brown hair was that day slicked back in a 50's pompadour. He carried with him an acoustic guitar and was in approximation our very own Elvis. It created a buzz that swept through the school. When recess came a crowd quickly formed around him and as he strummed his instrument and warbled out a song made popular by the Memphis King the girls swooned and cried out in glee and abandon. At one point as he played on his act triggered a shrieking mania among the the girls. They pressed forward as if any distance was too far away from him. It set him fleeing. He was pursued by the girls in a trampling herd. The popular boys who had been left behind usurped by his act spoke vehemently of beating him up. I watched it all unfold as if a clinician overcome with envy and desire. (Seventeen years later I crossed paths with Richard Delmonte once again while at a tree lined park in Hartford, Connecticut. He obviously had succumbed to hard times and he told me lived in the woods of the park. His new name he proudly informed me with a glint of the old Elvis was Wolf Boy.)

In sixth grade I wrote a poem about a lion. There was talk of it being printed, perhaps in a regional magazine. Also mentioned was a prize being awarded. It was the first inkling that I might have something special. The talk was a soothing balm to my woeful sense of self.

Another day in that very year as I stood doing my business at a urinal my friend Jamie Mack kicked me in the ass to the derision and laughter of two of our classmates. It snapped something in me. Without zipping up I went after him. I got him in a choke hold and squeezed his throat. And nothing existed except for my rage. When the two other kids couldn't get me to stop with their pleas they pried my arms apart. Jamie sputtered and coughed and gasped for breath and once he founded it he cried out what the hell was wrong with me. He then challenged me to a fight after school. I fretted about it the rest of the day and by the time it came for us to battle I was my usual withdrawn self. A couple ineffectual punches were thrown before I was wrestled without resistance to the ground. The following moment I cried out, my eyes. I pretended there was sand in them and our skirmish came to a halt with concern for me. A few minutes later Jamie and I were once again friends. But I was not the same and had not been so since the incident in the bathroom when I discovered there was another darker self inside of me.

That self reared again shortly there after at recess one day when a blundering chunky kid with a questionable IQ tried to bully me. I'm not sure what happened next. But at one point as if coming out of a haze I found myself jumping up and down on his head. A teacher pulled me a way and brought me to the principal's office. Soon I was flanked by the teacher, principal, and nurse. There was a contention that I'd hit the other kid in the head with a bat. If I did I didn't remember it. The nurse stated that I might have deafened the other kid for life. The three of them needled and coddled me in a classic good cop bad cop approach. They wanted to know what made me tick. I was at a loss to shed any light. Somehow as serious as my actions were my parents were never informed or consulted. And I slipped as the saying goes through the cracks, and a few months later I left elementary school behind.