I will describe this block from one corner to the next. On one corner was a large house at the bottom of a small hill. This house had a cherry tree which I climbed once and ate so many cherries that I vomited, and to this day have not tasted anything 'cherry' . This Home had bevelled glass windows on either side of the door which I peered into and saw the base of the staircase had two golden lions and I was certain it was real gold and the house was a mansion.
Across the street from this was a small house on a steep incline, with a rock step-bed planted in ferns. It was with my Grandfather that I planted these ferns. The old woman who lived there had at vey least eight or nine cats. Next to this home was another small one that had a Japanese Maple in front. There was a boy named Larry who lived in this house. We used to play under cover of this Maple. Once while playing there Larry told me he wanted to show me something in the house. We went inside and he had me wait while he went into his Mother's bedroom. Larry told me it was okay to come in and I saw him on her bed, writhing around in her lingerie.
Across the street from this was a one story pink house. I had recently learned to ride my bike without training wheels and spent hours zipping up and down the street. At one point the resident of this house was backing out of the driveway when I hit the passenger side door at full speed, putting a large dent in it. He walked me to my house and my father cut him a check for fifty dollars, which he gave me to hand to the man, which I did in tears. Here I skip down the street to the Stouffer's house. They had a few kids with whom we played. In fact at one point I counted that twenty three kids lived on our street. My favorites were the Ryersons, Jim, his little brother Joe who had nervous tic that involved him licking his lips, causing a chaffing that gave him the look of a circus clown. They had a sister, Timi, with whom some years later I would smoke cigarettes in the church parking lot.
Once again crossing the street was the house where serial killer Jerome Brudos lived. The basement of this house had a freezer that contained the severed feet of the prostitutes he murdered, and a bathroom containing only a toilet that had raised plumbing, which he covered by building stairs, causing the toilet to resemble a throne. Next to this house was where the Roberts lived, a mid elderly couple. Mr. Roberts had a section of his head gone, making a kind of shelf supported by metal plates. It was said he lost this during a World War II battle. Ms. Roberts always wore some sort of Mumu which she would raise on occasion, revealing her overweight and naked body. They had a small dog named Blackie who one Easter Sunday attacked my brother, causing a fear of dogs he retains to this day.
The Robert's house I also remember as a place for sex. It was under their back porch that the Ryerson boys and I would masturbate to porn magazines stolen from their father. I remember one time we had a contest to see who could the most clothing from a hanger which we would hold with our erections. I also drew a pencil drawing of a cross section of sexual penetration. In an event which resembles a rape/murder scenario I had stolen one of my sister's Barbie doll, and glued dog hair to her pubis area. I was soon afraid of being caught and buried her. Soon afterwords I painted male nudes on popcycle sticks to rub together as if having sex.
This was next to our house, a three story house with a full basement. The top floor was an attic that had been remodeled as a bedroom. I spent one miserable autumn in this attic, quarantined because of having hepatitis. There was a phone up there which my uncle rigged so I could dial a certain number, hang up and it would cause the phone downstairs to ring. This is also where my parents would have guests stay. Once I remember a young man staying there. For years I thought he was being smuggled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam war. I later learned that he had committed some kind of crime and my parents were urging him to turn himself in.
Going down one flight were three bedrooms. The largest was for Mom and Dad. It had a big bed which me and my older sister would jump into with them on the weekends. At the end of a short hallway was a bathroom and two bedrooms. The small one was mine and had two windows. The window facing east cast big shadows in a full moon. Once I woke up and saw my shadow on the opposite wall. I was convinced someone was trying to break in and went to the bathroom, where I fell asleep on the floor. My father came in, and woke me, asking why I was there. Crying, I told him of the intruder and he asked to see. Showing him, he began laughing. He shook his head, saying, 'My son is afraid of his own shadow'!
Through the other window I had a view that went for miles. I used to look out this window at night, often going to sleep while watching the blinking traffic light down on Clinton Street. The central floor had three rooms. The living room had a large window looking out on to the porch and street. According to the holiday we would paint scenes on the window; snow, autumn leaves, etc… Next to this was the dining room with a very cosy wood stove. Before we had a long table we had our antique desk, which I now write this is a gorgeous affair of mahogany and ornately carved legs. Me and my older sister used to drape it with a cloth and use it as a tent. The wood stove I used to pretend was a Plantation house that the slaves had set on fire.
Lastly was the small kitchen. Once after my Father had gone to work, my Mother asked me if I would like to stay home from school. Of course I said yes, and she supplied me with a sledge hammer to knock large hole in the wall to open the kitchen up. My Dad came home and just laughed. The kitchen overlooked a small backyard where we would play. Soon my folks got a waist sized swimming pool. In the winter this would freeze and I would put my dog, or the two duck we had on it and laugh as they slipped around. Poor ducks, Yacky and Daffy. Soon they were gone and later I found the corpse of one under the porch, most likely dragged in by a cat or possum.
There was also a small garage in back. Once my dad bought me a mid fifties Chevy, and he told me I could drive it one day after it was in working order. Once he had friends over as he worked on it and I heard him say, 'I have already put 500 dollars in this car' I wondered where he put it, and was convinced there was a safe under the transmission hump where he kept it. Another time he asked me what kind of car I wanted and I told him it did not matter if it had electric windows. Soon he had bought an old cadillac painted several colors of primer and electric windows! While on cars I should mention the time he bought a yellow Ford Fairlane for my mom as a present. I forget the occasion but there was also a small lapdog that went with it.
The basement had two bedrooms, one for the girls, another just for me. In this tiny room I had a deeply recessed window where I had several houseplants. In the wall of this room once I heard a crying kitten, sole survivor of the litter. I rescued this cat and named it Smokey. Speaking of animals and this room I should also mention the sparrows I had rescued when their nest was knocked down. I placed them in a box under a lamp and fed them baby food until they had all their feathers. Once I woke to find one of them on my knee. It was time to teach them to fly! I took them outside and would gently toss them to the shrine we had to Saint Francis, watching them fumble at flight, before gathering them and putting them back in the box. Another time we had visited lake on Mount Hood, and I brought home a gell nest, watching them grow from tadpoles to little frogs. They all escaped and I found dried up frogs for a month later.
Going to the front yard. It was small, and surrounded by a white picket fence. There was a large Azaeia tree with orange/pink blossoms, something a called 'The Love and Hate Tree' I loved it because of the way it smelled, but hated it because of the incredible itching it would cause. There also was a tiered rockery covered in Juniper where I would hunt lizards. Once I found a dead butterfly. I had been looking in the encyclopedia about Egypt, so I took a Jack in the Box, gutted it and lined it with satin. I placed the butterfly in there with flowers and gave it an Pharoe's burial.
The front porch had two stone ledges where me and my sister would sing songs by The Archies and the Partridge Family. We thought that B-Sides of records were cooler, so we called our 'band' The Other Side Over. The day of the Father and Daughter Dance coincided with the Catholic day of getting one's throat blessed. The priest would cross candles at your throat and say a blessing. Some of us went with Dad that morning to church for this. Later that night was the dance, during which my Dad got a sore throat, which was so bad he was going to the hospital. I remember him, still dressed for the dance, loosen his tie and tell me, 'This is the last time I'm getting my throat blessed'. H died later at the hospital. Last time, indeed.
Next to us was my Mom's childhood home. My Grandmother had married three times with two kids with each husband. The first, Jean and Joan had a father named Gilbert, who wrote a song that made the Hit Parade. It was called, 'The Shifting, Whispering Sands'. Her next husband gave her two kids, but also was a paranoid schizophrenic who spent his last days in a mental institution. With her last husband she had one kid, another from an affair with my Father's father, who was passed of as her husband's. it was on her deathbed she confessed the truth.
My Grandmother was something else. She would wear knee high boots and a mini-skirt. She would say things like, 'I can dig it'. She tried to seduce her daughter's boyfriends. Down the street was a gravel road covered in pot holes, suddenly paved. Also on her deathbed confessed to having an affair with someone on the City Council, who facilitated the project. Grammy, we called her, had a sword hung above her yellow, crushed velvet couch, covered in plastic. I asked her about it once and she told me, 'Your Grandpa chopped the head off a Jap with that'.
I used to visit my uncle who lived upstairs, in a room covered in black light posters. We would get stoned and play Frampton Comes Alive. He used to wear sweat pants outlining his crotch, the top of which would sprout pubic hair. A divergence. When the Apollo landed on the moon I waited in a convertible Corvair as my Mom was at a doctor appointment. As we listened, a shirtless guy came up to the passenger door and pulled his pants down to take a piss. My dad must have been looking the other way, because he was kind of shocked to see what was happening. Having never seen pubic hair again I asked him, 'Daddy, what's that'? His reply was, 'Son, that's a hippy', and the mystery of 'long haired hippies' was solved.
Cross the street again Here is Grandpa Blue's house. Grandpa Blue was an 'Outsider Artist' before such a term existed. His backyard was a grotto to creativity. He had made a pyramid of Aunt Jemima Bottles which he had repainted each empty bottle of syrup as the Virgin Mary. The rest of the yard was full of replicas of wild animals and gnomes. Grandpa Blue used to also make small cars we could ride. Many kids have these, but his were a home made variety. I recall a three wheeled thing shaped like a rocket. It had a stick with which you could steer it. Grandpa Blue was a complicated character. For sure he was a racist, I can recall him telling me not to say 'Nigger" because in a strange reversal of racist activity he said that black people would hang me if they heard me say it. Most likely he was homophobic. Who was not when it was mainstream? One time he drove his truck across a neighbor's yard, spinning cookies.
Another time the police were surrounding his house while he threw furniture all over the place. a neighbor kid said, 'That's your Grandpa', which knowing, but in an eager attempt at denial refuted the kid's claims. Grandpa had a brother Bob, who had run off with his wife. They took of to California for a bit when maybe things went sour because Uncle Bob and Pauline (Grandpa Blue's wife) asked to return and were pardoned. There is a picture in an old newspaper I am told where Grandpa Blue as a fireman was putting out a fire on a house in the dead of winter with ice cycles hanging from his head, arms and neck.
When Grandpa's family moved in, my mother watched from her front room and saw my teen aged father moving in. She told herself one day she would marry him. At 18, (dad a year younger) she told herself that one day she would marry him. And indeed before she was twenty she had delivered both my older sister and myself.
After Grandpa sold the house a young family moved in, the Pancerellis. Dorothy was the mother, Bruno was the dad, and they had a couple kids, one born with a heart defect, the other later develop multiple sclerosis. I remember Bruno was a fire fighter, like my dad was. He had a lethal cancer in his early 20s. Once Dorothy wanted to take their two tone Bronco to buy some groceries and asked my mom if someone could go and hang out with him. It must have been 73 or 74, but I went over and went inside. Bruno was a handsome guy and I think I had a crush on him WAY before I knew what such a thing was. Bruno was on the couch, and there was a hookah pipe on the coffee table. The room was full of stale weed smell. Anyway, after greeting me, Bruno ripped the IV stints from his arm, loaded his hookah and began getting stoned. We listened to the entire album of Dark Side of the Moon before his wife came back. It was my first time hearing Pink Floyd.
In the early 70s it must have been a rough neighborhood because I remember the cops patrolling by two or three times a day. Without knowing the meaning of calling cops, 'pigs', us small kids used to shout out, 'I Smell Bacon'. Next to Grammy's was a rental that always changed tenants fast. At one point a biker gang moved in. Dividing that property with the next was a tall hedge of bushes where we used to climb, and on the other side of that was the Eliot House. Now in about 73 or 74 Mr. Eliot wore a full length black coat, had long painted black, and silver hair pulled back into a pony tail. In a nook in the roof of the house every year Redtail hawks used to nest. In the spring they would nest, and by summer they would terrorize the local bird population. I can clearly remember the cries they would make while swooping in on a kill. The street was littered with the bodies they dropped as summer arrived.
Here was the other corner. There was a sewer manhole in the middle of the street where we used to fish for rats. We would hook a small chunk of cheese on string and lower it down. After a bit we would pull up the string and find the bait gone. Most likely it just fell off, but we were convinced that the crafty rats had liberated the tasty treats and gone free. On very hot days we would scrape up tar from around the manhole and press bits of it into cubes, which we would then freeze to make dice. Next them was the Clark's house, holding little, but important memory. The Clarks had a daughter, Allison. One time the parents were gone and Allison was 'entertaining' a boyfriend on her parent's bed. The parents came back early. Pop got a gun and shot the boyfriend in the back.
There you go, a tour of the block. I could do a psychological profile. First thing that come to mind is a song by The Smiths, 'Sixteen clumsy and shy, I went to London and died'. But it was not like that. Nothing is that clear, life is a swirling mess of feelings, events actions and the consequences of those actions. If it was all bleak, or ecstatic we would be mad, insane.
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