So, over time, I learned about people who were different from me, and like anyone else, I formed opinions not just of these people, but opinions of the kinds of people I was beginning to learn about. Most of this ended up having to do with “ethnicity” and that, in turn, was shaped mainly by complexion, hair, and other physical features, and to a lesser but not insignificant degree, religion, cuisine, and other cultural traits. I was getting my identity ducks in a row.

Some of these people tended to be friendly, some scary. Some of them were “safe” and others not (including those that seemed more likely to beat me up or mug me to take my stuff). And some of these different kinds of people seemed to be smarter than others.

When I was growing up, being “smart” was one of those things that was on the table as a matter of discussion and observation. My parents were smart, as were my siblings and I. My mother had a high school degree and my father had a B.A. and some, but not much, graduate work (but he would later teach graduate classes). Among my siblings, we were eventually to hold numerous B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.D.s. Only a few dads in the neighborhood had jobs you needed to be smart (according to cultural custom) to do, and my father was one of them. All of the moms seemed smart–it was just a question of how much smarter each mom seemed to be than each dad, with variance among the dads being the key determining factor. For my family, they were pretty equal, for the Zs down the street, Mrs. Z was clearly at least double-smart over Mr. Z. For the Across The Street Ks, it was hard to tell…Mr. K was one of the dads with a smart job, but both of them were constantly distracted with their many kids and with making ends meet. Everybody in the neighborhood was distracted with making ends meet.

There were many indicators that my siblings and I were smart. We were the go-to kids for others of our age who needed something figured out or some kind of information. We were always getting recognition in school. None of us knew what a B or a C was. I might have seemed smarter than all my siblings because I was the first kid in my family to be taken out of regular school and put in “smart kid” school. But I’m not. We’re all smart in different ways, except my sister Bunny, who is clearly smarter than all of us. (My sister Elizabeth hated when I would say that.) Anyway, smartness or lack thereof was part of the trope of the neighborhood (along with the other dimensions I mentioned above and will discuss below), especially for preteen kids. Mostly, though, it was an issue that annoyed others in the neighborhood. Like these conversations with my friend Joey, recorded here exactly as they happened (there are some things one does not forget):

Joey: “Hey, Greg. You’re a regular Walking Encyclopedia!”

Greg: “Thanks, Joey. I like to learn lots of stuff.”

Joey: “Mugrphhhmmmft.”

(Mugrphhhmmmft is the sound Joey’s fist makes giving Greg a bloody nose.)

…or this:

Joey: “Hey, Greg. What do you think that is up there?” (Pointing to the moon.)

Greg: “That’s the moon, Joey.”

Joey: “It can’t be the moon because it’s not night time. I know something you don’t know!”

Greg: “It’s the moon, Joey. You can also see it during the day.”

Joey: “My brother says it’s the other side of the Earth. You can only see the moon at night. You’re so stupid. You’re a stupid face!”

Greg: “I don’t know, Joey. Yeah, I guess if your bro…”

Joey: “Mugrphhhmmmft.”

…or this:

Joey: “Hey, Greg. You go to AP school. You must be really smart.”

Greg: “Well, not really. You could go there too, you know. I mean, yeah, it’s for smart kids, and you should go there too because you’re…”

Joey: “Mugrphhhmmmft.”

And so on. I couldn’t win with Joey.

Joey was my “friend,” but he was also the guy who gave me the most bloody lips and bloody noses. I now realize that it may have been an abusive relationship. Alas, there was no concept of such things back then. And the reason I mention Joey is because he was pretty typical of a lot of kids I knew.

Joey had a lot of friends who were like him, who looked like him and acted like him, and and it was kind of obvious that he and his friends formed a kind of racial group with similar characteristics, some physical and some behavioral. I could not possibly help but notice this because these kids–the ones like Joey–were the ones who were most likely to stop me on the street, threaten me or simply attack me, and take my spare change. I formed thoughts along these lines back then, and I look back at it and realize that these were racist thoughts. But to me, as a kid, they were about real differences. They became part of my way of defending and protecting myself. I saw kids that look like Joey, and I crossed the street. Later on in my life, I had to train myself to not do that and to avoid those thoughts.

The group Joey was a member of had a lot of families with only one parent (the mom) and a lot of kids. They all seemed to go to the same church, the kids were all pretty tough, and with only one exception, every time I got mugged or my bike got taken from me it was one of those Joey-kids that did it.

The adults also had traits that allowed them to be divided into different groups. The dads that had “smart jobs” mostly fell into one category, and those families, including the kids, were nicer, the kids would not beat me up and the families were always polite and thoughtful, and so on.

I also met a few of the people my father worked with and this, I’m now very ashamed to admit, contributed to me forming opinions of people in a categorical, and I now realize, racist, sense. As I mentioned, my father and I would have breakfast downtown at the DeWitt Clinton. There were a number of people we met up with most mornings there, and I particularly remember this one guy we would run into a lot, a kind of a “street character” that people called “the mayor” (I guess that was funny) who was in the same “racial” group as Joey (“you can only see the moon at night”) and this individual stood out as, to be honest, not all too smart, and maybe a little violent. He conformed to my expectations.

The place my dad worked had a board of directors, so even though my dad was the director, he answered to the board. We would run into them at the DeWitt Clinton and other places. They seemed not only smart but also were always well dressed, were leaders and powerful individuals, and so on. The board of directors was one style person, one skin color, one way of acting, in total contrast to the “race” that included “the mayor” and “Joey.” We would also run into dad’s main assistant, Brenda, who was in the same “race” as the board of directors, and she was really smart and could easily run the place on her own and was widely respected.

So the contrast between the Joeys and the Brendas was pretty strong. The Joeys were not too smart. They were poor. The families lacked dads. The kids and many of the adults were trouble, prone to violence, always stared at you hard. Their houses were rundown and their lawns covered with junk. The Brendas were well-dressed had more money, were smarter, nicer, better-educated, lived in nicer houses, and had nice yards. I remember as a kid thinking that the Joeys were dangerous and mean, and the Brendas were warm and welcoming. It may have helped that Brenda herself was rather hot, as I recall. And most of my dad’s bosses were of the Brenda group (race, ethnicity, whatever).

And yes, I admit it, I had race-based thoughts. I had a tendency to see someone and look at certain traits…the color of their skin and shape of their hair mainly…and assume certain things, to make certain judgments. As an adult I know that these judgments are both ethically and morally questionable and scientifically indefensible. But for me, back then, they were the reality that I lived in.

One of the strangest things about all of this was this: I could see that the Brendas were in so many ways “better” than the Joeys, but my father, my mother, my siblings, me…we were all Joeys. I was a member of the inferior race.

You see, I was an Irish kid. I lived in an “all white” neighborhood, but all of my neighbors but one (Billy R.) were either Irish or some form of Mediterranean or Eastern European, mainly Polish or Italian. The swarthy Polish and Italian people had stable families (mom and dad at home), the kids were generally well behaved, and it was among these folks that I saw fathers with professions and mothers who were housewives, often with a part time job. Among the pasty-white and freckled, red- and blond-haired Irish I saw, almost without exception, kids who were mean and not very smart, and families like Joey’s and the Ds around the block, where the kids were running especially wild and there was no father in the household. I think Joey’s mom got welfare.

“The mayor” at the DeWitt Clinton was also Irish, and his silly behavior, his forgetfulness, almost clown like demeanor was in stark contrast to the demure, professional behavior of my father’s bosses–the board of directors–80% of whom were African-American. Brenda was also African-American.

Then we moved to a new neighborhood. And everything changed.

We were unusual, my family. Looking back at it, I now realize that this may have been why Joey was always beating me up. I was being “uppity.” When my father started to earn more money with his smart-person job, we moved to a nice house in a nicer, newer neighborhood and suddenly were surrounded by people different from us…by a “race” who typically had better than average jobs, had more money, were known to be smarter, than my kind. Suddenly I was going to a school with a lot more of this new kind of kid than I ever imagined existed. Eventually, as a matter of fact, I even married one of these folk (for a while). So just as my old neighborhood was structured in such a way that I came to accept races and ethnicities as real, meaningful entities, my new neighborhood taught me more of the same.

I later experienced additional transformations that refined my growing race-based thinking. At some point I started working in a very active ghetto, doing archaeology. Here, I found out that most African Americans were actually not well-dressed and seemingly well-off (or at least middle class) but were actually living in really crappy housing. The people I worked with were afraid of the African Americans, and they did steal some of my stuff. I remember feeling more comfortable on days that I worked with my friend Fred, who was an African American, because he knew everybody and was relatively famous, being the brother of an NFL pro. I found out, around the age of 13 from direct experience working every day in the ‘hood, that there was a strong correlation between poverty and skin color in my hometown, and that the Joeys were actually somewhat better off than the African Americans living on Arbor Hill or in the South End.

Another transformation had to do with school. I started out at an all-white, all-Catholic school. Then they took me out of that school and put me in a smart-kid school. There, I met my first African American fellow students and my first non-Catholic fellow students. In fact, there were exactly two of us Irish Catholics in this class, and everyone else was either a non-Catholic Christian or a Jew, and among the non-Catholic Christians were African Americans.

If I drew conclusions at that time, or experienced a refinement of my race-based thinking, I would have to say that black people filled the range from most functional, smartest, most powerful, and most respectable in behavior to least in all these same areas, with whites distributed along the in-between areas, with Jews at the higher end and Irish Catholics at the lowest end.

The move my family made reinforced this transformation. We moved from an all-white but also all-Christian neighborhood to another all-white but mainly Jewish neighborhood. This reinforced the idea of Jewish superiority, because my neighbors were pretty well off, some spoke wisely in exotic foreign accents, many were university professors, and when I went to a new school at about the same time, it was another smart-kid school with piles of Jews and a handful of black students.

Indeed, my first real conversations with a peer about race and biology were at this new school, with my friend Miles. He was very smart and he was Jewish. He used to tell me that Jews would always be smarter than Catholics. Here’s why. Catholics scour the community to find the smartest men to be their leaders and make them the priests. The priests are then not allowed to reproduce. At the same time, Jews scour the community to find the smartest men to be their leaders and make them the rabbis. Not only can the rabbis reproduce, but they are virtually bred…everyone in the community supplies them with resources to maximize their reproductive output.

According to Miles, since this had been going on for 5,000 years for the Jews and 2,000 years for the Catholics, the difference should be immense.

You know what, though? This conversation happened in eight grade, and I promise you that there was never a moment when either Miles or I believed it. We found it hysterically funny. There was never a moment when even one neuron in our brains considered this comparison to be valid. We knew intuitively that it was wrong because by that time we both had a pretty good understanding of the bankruptcy of theories about racial superiority or inferiority.

No, we did not learn this from our parents…our parents had no idea. Our parents had typical white, middle class, 1970s racist ideas, though my father not so much. (Well, I can’t speak for Miles’ mother. I don’t recall her ever uttering a racist word, but we did not have a lot of conversations.) We were not really learning this from school either. We were just two smart guys who had seen enough of the world at an early age (though with different experiences from each other) that conflicted with what society was trying to make us believe to rebel against being assimilated into the Racist Thinking Borg. It probably helped that we happened to be living in a society…in a particular city, at a particular time…that had been undergoing social and structural transformation.

I’m lucky to have had this model rather than the usual race-based model in which whites are superior in every way and blacks are inferior in every way (music, rhythm, sports, excepted), which is the model that most whites and probably many blacks grow up with. I also had the opportunity to see with my own eyes the direct correlation between circumstances and these other traits, as well as to see some pretty overt and nasty racist acts that made me realize the severity of racism as a social modality. I saw and heard things that made me cringe when I was little, and I remember that cringing…even at a very young age the racist model was there for me to absorb, but my actual experiences were telling me that it did not fit.

When I was a kid, we played war. Since we were in denial of our involvement at that time in Viet Nam, and Korea was the “forgotten war,” the war we modeled in our play was World War II. This is the reason for the importance of each dad’s involvement in The Big One. Our status as kids was usually determined in part by this fact.

My dad was in the war. He was in London and he was bombed, and he received a medal from the King of England as well as from the US Army, and it was actually possible for me to sneak kids into the house and show them the medals, which my father kept hidden away in his desk. My status could only have been improved had my father been wounded. Oh, well.

The good guys in the war were the Americans, and the bad guys were the Germans and the Japanese. But then one day I found out that I was half German. Holy crap, that made me half bad guy. This is probably why I had more than a little empathy for Billy R.

Billy R. was the one kid who had no dad but who was not Irish, or at least, as far as I know he was not Irish. His mother was Japanese and his father a Caucasian American who was in the occupation forces after World World II in Japan. Billy’s dad died right around the time he was born, so he never knew him.

Billy’s mom was different because she was Japanese and because she was a single mom. She worked, naturally, as a server and matron in a Chinese restaurant. When the first Japanese restaurant in town opened up, naturally, Billy’s mom worked there. Also, Billy’s mom maintained a garden in her back yard that was the envy of all of the moms. Especially my mom, because Billy’s back yard was over the fence from ours…we were over-the-fence neighbors with the R’s, which made for a special relationship.

Billy was my friend, and whenever any of the kids insisted that Billy be the bad guy in the P.O.W. camp because he was Japanese, I would stick up for him right up until the moment that Joey and his friends would beat both of us up. In truth, Billy mostly avoided playing with the other kids, but he and I would play together in my yard now and then (we could not play in his yard for fear of messing up the nice garden, but in my yard we had some good options).

One day, years later, when I was attending the aforementioned smart-kid school with many Jewish students, I saw Billy again. He had grown huge. He was at my school to play in a wrestling match. He had become the top high school wrestler citywide (and beyond, if memory serves). I wonder if there was a point in time where Joey started to cross the street when he saw Billy R., rather than the other way around?

There was a candy when I was a kid called N-word Babies, and a kind of nut called N-word toes. I remember the day I realized what that word meant. I had been using the word but not knowing what it meant. I found out what it meant while I was standing on the steps leading up to the front porch of my house. I remember sort of holding on to the black metal railing and moving it back and forth a little because it was getting loose (from me sliding down it and swinging from below it, most likely). I can viscerally feel these things right now as I remember this conversation. One of my sisters was there, my mother was there, and the neighbor from next door was there. We were eating N-word Babies. I asked what the word mean, found out, then I asked, wasn’t that a bad thing to say, and I was somewhat sheepishly told yes, it was. It was kind of embarrassing. My memory of this is that we didn’t get N-word Babies any more as a snack and we started calling n-word toes by their other name: Brazil nuts. We also stopped catching n-words by the toe and started catching tigers by the toe instead (while eeny-meeny-minie-moe-ing). (The strange thing was, these candies were not labeled with the n-word, that is just the term people used. I’m not sure if they ever were. But a quick and disturbing search of the Internet will reveal plenty of commercially produced products using that racist term.)

The Jewish shopkeepers on Central Avenue kept vicious dogs behind the counters for protection. If black kids walked into the store, the swinging door allowing access through the counter was unlatched and the dog would chase the kids out. Usually the shopkeeper only needed to threaten the kids and they would leave.

We would always assemble at car accidents to watch the blood and gore. (I lived near a couple of pretty bad corners, and this was the days before seat belts and other safety features). One day there was a bad accident in which a black man was ejected from his car and splattered on the pavement, blood spewing everywhere. There was no ambulance called for him. Instead, the police took him away in a “Paddy Wagon.” I later learned that it was called a “Paddy Wagon” because it is the vehicle used to take drunk Irishmen off to jail on Saturday Nights. So don’t call them that.

Anyway, while they were taking this African American man who had not done anything wrong away in the racistly named vehicle, the conversation included things like the color of his blood (shockingly, it was the same as found in white people similarly spattered on the same pavement in earlier accidents) and his facial features (“his lips are so big…”). These were the conversations among the adults. My memory is that the kids were awestruck by the blood and guts and were mostly standing there quietly, ashen, horrified. I asked an adult…I think it was the guy who ran the dry cleaners in front of which this accident happened…why they were taking him away in a Paddy Wagon. “I don’t know. I guess because he’s a N-word,” was the answer.

My personal experiences and what society was constantly trying to teach me were almost always at odds. I was lucky to have had these contradictory experiences as a kid. This helped prepare me for what I was to encounter years later when I went to Africa for the first time. During the mid-1980s, there were several years where I spent more time each year in Africa than I did in the US. It was almost like I was living there and visiting Cambridge once a year for a truncated semester of coursework. Then, over the next several years, I spent varying amounts of time each year, most years, in Africa. Overall, I’ve spent several person-years living there, in a number of different settings.

If there was a race-based model of intelligence (and there is not), it would have to be somewhat like the model I saw developing with Irish, Black and Jewish people when I was a kid. Pygmies, for instance, not only have very large brains relative to body size, but they are also all very smart. I could argue this on the basis of four years of research with Pygmies. In contrast, the best evidence suggests that the white folks that I have lived among in various US neighborhoods and the white folks I grew up with are of below-average intelligence. Among the African villages, the farmers, there would seem to be a full range of people who really don’t seem to be very sharp at all to people who are veritable geniuses. Among the blacks I knew as I grew up, and among whom I’ve lived since moving out of my hometown and living mainly in “diverse” neighborhoods, I see a similar range of variation. My own experience supports the idea that almost all Jews are smart, just like almost all Pygmies are smart. Maybe the Jews and the Pygmies are closely related.

So there is a full range of black people and a full range of white people, and both groups have their own little special elite groups here and there. This would be the model that my experience suggests, if you absolutely must insist on a race-based model of intelligence.

This is, of course, not what I believe to be true. It is just what I would have to believe were I to force my observations into traditional race-based biological thinking. The details as to why the traditional race-based biological thinking is wrong is a subject to cover at another time.

I will end with one simple observation. There are a lot of people having a conversation about whether or not the color of one’s skin can tell you that a person is likely to be smart or not…or more precisely, if we took 20 black-skinned people and put them in a room with 20 white-skinned people, the whites would on average be smarter than the blacks right there, in that room. If we went into that room and asked for everyone’s opinion on something, we might want to give the blacks’ opinion some consideration because everyone is entitled to their opinion, but we could also know that if this opinion was about anything complex or difficult to understand, and if there was a difference of opinion between the blacks and whites, the whites’ opinion would be more likely correct.

That is what this conversation is about, right?

What strikes me is this: I don’t see any black people signing on, reading through this conversation, and going, “Hey, WTF?” Perhaps this does not happen because this is a conversation among whites who pretty much have been having this conversation among whites their whole lives.

True humanity can only form on a foundation of real experience, and reality is diverse. I feel very badly for those who have not experienced that diversity.

[D]ennis removed the top of the hamburger bun, flipped the meat out of the way, laid down catchup on both sides and reassembled the Cheeseburger Special Agnes had just laid before him as deftly as he always did. And, as expected, the new guy shyly and quietly took note of this culinary quirk, and I knew that starting soon, if he remembered having seen this today, he’d be putting the catchup on both sides of his burger too, as we all did once we saw Dennis do it. It’s just better that way. It’s not like it’s more catchup. The same amount of catchup distributed on both sides of the hamburger works better for three or four reasons, all of which anyone who tries it a few times will learn. Now that you know to do it, I think you’ll start doing it too. If you remember.

For or five of us sat squeezed into the booth at Shuluski’s Diner, internalizing a much deserved lunch following a long morning of digging trenches all over town. Waterford, New York had never had a proper modern sewer system. The entire town’s sewage, and at the time this was the most populous “village” in the state, entered an ancient pipe and vault sewer system that barely served as a septic tank as the sewage made its way fairly quickly to an outlet just below the waterline in the Mohawk River, down on Front Street. None of us will forget the day we discovered the outlet, which had never properly been mapped.

We were sitting there on the edge of the river eating our lunch, when a change of hidden currents in the murky, notoriously polluted river below our dangling feet caused several minutes of fresh effluence to rise to the surface before dispersing downstream. I guessed that it depended on the temperature of the water and the flow of currents around the nearby Erie Canal locks. Fresh human shit, wadges of recently used toilet paper, and a condom came floating by in the first batch. Being some ten feet or so below us, it didn’t smell any more than the background olfactory heaviness that followed this river for much of its course. But it did strengthen our resolve to continue with our trenching, which would ultimately lead to the installation of the most modern, cleanest, and most efficient waste water treatment system Superfund money could buy for this quaint and sleepy town on the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers.

Across the restaurant at a table were Henry and his two boys. Henry was little and tough, the boys very large and in his employ. Henry wore a wife-beater tee and a perpetual two-day-old shadow, and when he worked the levers of his backhoe, his tongue protruded from the side of his mouth to keep an eye on things. He was precise, professional, and fearless. He could pick up a shard of historic pottery from the shadowed bottom of a 15-foot trench. Most of the time, I was the crew leader and had the job of telling him where to dig, how deep, and most importantly, when to stop and when to switch from trenching to centimeter by centimeter careful archaeological excavation. This old historic village was build on amazing prehistoric and contact period sites, and a sewer pipe was going to be laid down every single street. So by the time we got half way done with the backhoe survey, looking for sites, assessing the lay of the underground historically modified landscape, tracing out areas of disturbance vs. “high potential” for sites, Henry and I had become twins connected at the bucket. My subtle hand signals guided him, but he needed little guidance. I rode the bucket into and out of the deepest trenches, and the occasional shared knowing sidelong glance would have us agreeing tacitly but firmly that a particular trench was too deep. Then, as we would watch the trench collapse with no one in it, we’d exchange another sidelong glance knowing we were right to not go in that one.

And as I said, fearless. We had a trench that would ideally be dug perpendicular to the edge of the bluff overlooking the rapids below the damn and waterfall. Henry dug the trench perfectly, backing his machine up to the point that only two of his four wheels were on the ground, the giant back left wheel dangling off the cliff with nothing but air for a hundred feet below, the smaller front right wheel hanging forward in the air like the flailing arm of some moron going down on the ice for the last time. He balanced the damn backhoe with his tongue, sticking out, watching him straighten the edge of the trench and just as the last bit of solid ground started to crack beneath him, using the bucket to drive the backhoe off to the side and to safety. Even his sons, almost pathologically emotionless as they watched their father daily work his backhoe magic, breathed a sigh of relief. And somehow I was not surprised when Henry sauntered over to me and pulled up his shirt, pointing to two bullet holes in his chest.

“I had to do almost the same exact thing in Korea once, but under fire. Today was easy!”

So as we sat munching our cheeseburger specials, Arnold sat at his habitual, perpetual, butt-worn stool at Shuluski counter, overlooking the window through which we could see Albert S. cooking up the orders transmitted to him by his wife Agnes. Arnold was a young man in an older adult’s body. A very young man, if you know what I mean. And his main job seemed to be to say, “Hello,” to every person who came into the diner and, “Goodbye,” to everybody who left the diner and, “That looks good,” to every blue-plate special Albert shoved up on the back counter for eventual delivery by Agnes to an expectant, hungry customer. And if he knew your name, he’d append that to his goodbye or his hello. So, when he said, “Goodbye, Mr. Wilson,” it was not a surprise to see Old Man Wilson, a crumpled mess of bills and change left on the table next to his empty soup bowl…oh, the soup at Shuluski’s was the best for miles around, and this was soup country…hobble, all old and shit, towards the front door of the diner. Mr. Wilson’s left arm rose in a backhand, friendly goodbye for Arnold’s benefit, but he mainly focused on keeping his balance as he maneuvered his oldness around some tables, bones creaking and joints stiff.

Munching on my double-catchup’ed cheeseburger special, about halfway done now, I watched as Old Man Wilson stopped on the sidewalk in front of the diner and cleaned his glasses, waiting for a car or two to pass on the only busy road in town. Which was not. Busy, that is.

And I thought about our afternoon. We’d go with Henry down to Front Street to continue trenching the low ground in the oldest historical part of town. In my mind, I was imagining how long it would take for us to dig each trench, how much time we had before shutting down for the afternoon. If we could get in four trenches, we’d be done with the zone and could move on to the next area. Not likely to get that many trenches in one day. The engineers were hoping we could finish here and move on because they needed clearance on on the northwest side of town for some geotechincal work they’d be doing. Yes, yes, I was thinking, we’d push to get all the trenches done this afternoon and that would make Mohan, the head engineer, happy, and my job was to respect the archaeology, abide by the regulatory law, and keep the engineers happy, all at once. With luck, this would be an easy week to do that, in case nothing went wrong….

…and as these thoughts developed and started to settle down from analysis to conclusion, I noted that Old Man Wilson had made it across Main Street and was just closing himself into his giant wood-side suburban wagon. I started going over the trenching pattern in my head again, trying to think whether there was a certain order we could do the trenches in so we could possibly rule out digging the last one…if we found evidence of disturbance, or evidence of amazing archeology. Either way, digging the fourth trench would be unnecessary.

Old Man Wilson was starting his car as I thought of the irony…if three trenches showed nothing, we could go home knowing the fourth would be of no use. Mohan would be happy, we’d move to the new area on Monday morning. If three trenches showed great amounts of early archaeological material, we would not need the fourth trench to know that much more archaeology would need to be done here. Either way, we could likely finish this afternoon if…if nothing went wrong.

And it was just at that moment that Old Man Wilson slammed his car into gear and took off in a sudden lurch. Then, as quickly as his giant wood-side suburban station wagon had lurched its first 15 feet backwards and onto the curb, in the wrong direction, Old Man Wilson stopped the big-ass car on a dime.

Unfortunately, the dime was sitting right next to a recently painted red and yellow fireplug.

The fireplug sheered off cleanly at the base. This fireplug was the second or third lowest fireplug in elevation in the whole town, I was thinking. I knew this because it was my job to know things like that. This meant that this fireplug would have a very high pressure unless there was a fire or something bleeding off the water. Which naturally there was not. The water that came out of that fireplug was enough to keep one or two tires of Old Man Wilson’s wood-side suburban wagon off the ground as the vehicle rocked back and forth and side to side and up and down, rubbing on a nearby power pole, which kind of kept the vehicle in place as it bounced up and down on the unnatural cold water geyser.

Old Man Wilson found his own personal athleticism just at that moment. He was out of that car and standing, staring back at it from the middle of the street, in a matter of seconds. And as he stared, head-scratching, and I finished off the last of my hamburger and was about to start on the french fries, the images of a dozen cartoons in which I had seen this exact event or something like it flashed before my eyes. And probably his as well.

The new guy said, “Wow, what do we do?” to no one in particular, and following this cue, we all looked over to small, tough Henry and his giant sons, who were now squarely on their feet, watching Mr. Wilson’s wood-side suburban wagon dancing on the water column across the street.

“Well,” Henry said, “we’ve got to inform the head of the public works department, call the fire chief, and have the city’s fix-it contractor get out there, turn off the water, and fix the fireplug.”

The new guy stared at Henry. Henry’s sons started to laugh. I said, “Well, I guess that means we all are going home for the day, because if I recall correctly, those three people would be you, Henry.”

Dennis, who had progressed to about the same point as I had with his french fries, all the cheeseburger specials at the table ancient history, glanced at Albert, who was standing in the cook’s window holding his patty-flipper to the ready. And he looked at Agnes who’s eyebrows were riding high over her lightly watering eyes, visibly working out something kind to say to Mr. Wilson (Agnes was nothing if not kind). Old Man Wilson himself was by this time heading back to the diner to fetch help. And as he glanced around the diner, Dennis groked the situation. And he said what we had all been thinking.

“Finally, for once we have time to get a bowl of that soup!”

And we did.

Mohan would understand, and one more day of sewage after 300 years of wanton effluence by the good people of Waterford, New York would make very little difference. That day’s soup was Minestrone.

GJ’s was a bar I lived over for a couple of years. The bar was on the first floor and I was on the top floor. Some of my most notable roommates lived with me in that apartment. I can briefly summarize. I moved there to live with my girlfriend, Amy, a girl I’ll call Junette and the niece of Henry Mancini. Junette was so loud when having sex that her boyfriend Mike wore earplugs and the police were often called by neighbors thinking there was a murder. Or wishing there was a murder. That was not her only annoying trait. Junette soon moved out and we had a huge party, playing Eric Clapton’s song “She’s Gone” over and over again. Police were once again called. Then Ms. Mancini moved out and took my girlfriend with her. The vacancies were filled by two people whom I’ll call Tashina and Ron. Tashina was a drop dead gorgeous bisexual African American model from NY with a shaved head (a bit rare in those days), and Ron was an authentic Cajun boy fresh from the Bayou near Baton Rouge.

One day Tashina asked to speak to me privately. “Honey, what do you do to get rid of crabs. Crotch crabs. Just tell me what to do and don’t tell anyone we had this little conversation, ‘kay?” I told her what to do.

Later that same day, Ron cornered me alone in the foyer. “Hey, my man, I do dee-claire I gotta bad, bad problem. How does a guy stamp out dem little bugs, dem baby micro-scopical crawdads down in the you know where, if you get my drift?” I told him what to do.

That made me laugh.

Then one day Tashina got a job back in the city and left, and that’s when Raheem moved in. Raheem was one of my favorite people ever and we became pretty good friends. He was a fugitive from the police, so I will not provide many details. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you the most hair-raising story you’ve ever heard. Raheem eventually moved on as well, leaving a vacancy that was filled by a sequence of low-life felons and undesirables.

Eventually, The Cat moved in. Again, one of my favorite people. The Cat always wore black, had a D.A. haircut and was a full-blown bodybuilder and generally very, very scary person. His twin brother was exactly the same but not as built, and every time the two of them got together and had a few beers, they would get into a fist fight. This brings us downstairs to the first floor to GJ’s for a moment, because that is usually where that would happen. The two of them would end up out in the street about to punch each other, occasionally taking a swing but mostly posturing and dancing around each other long enough for the local detectives who were never far away to saunter over, flash a badge and separate them. Like clockwork.

Ron stopped paying his rent about two months before The Cat moved in, and after one more month of that, The Cat and I threw him out. Then another individual moved in, who was the actual nephew of Carlos Castenada. No kidding. He was a total dweeb and also forgot to pay his rent for a few months. He had a lot of cool stuff, so when we took all of that cool stuff and put it on the curb, I kept a couple of his cooking pots and utensils.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Because it is time to turn to GJ’s. The reason for the link between GJ’s and Stonewall is simply this: GJ’s was for a long time the only openly gay bar in the city. Later, a gay club opened up, and still later a few other more or less gay bars opened, but GJ’s was it for a long time. Interestingly, the bar was not owned by anyone who was gay. GJ’s became a gay bar simply because…well, it just did. The right place at the right time. Half the bartenders were gay, the other half not, more or less. And the same was roughly true of the clientele. The important thing about GJ’s is that it was a comfortable place, where everyone knows your name, where everyone was always glad you came, where everyone, gay or straight, felt their troubles were the same. Like Cheers. But almost everybody was a freak. Half the freaks were gay, half the freaks were straight and the other half were just odd.

GJ’s had a jukebox with exactly two kinds of music on it: disco and good. PJ, who always dressed as a sailor for Halloween and worked three night shifts a week in the bar, would unlock the jukebox and reuse as many quarters as the machine would take and load up the play list with pure disco. Donna Summer got a little richer every time PJ was bartending. Alternately, Steve the Biker and Tex the Cowboy would take half their pinball money and load up the play list with non-disco songs, mostly Rolling Stones. The beer was good and it was all done in good fun.

Every now and then (and don’t tell anyone this part, please) closing time would come around, and we’d pull down the shades and turn down the lights and have a private party for the next couple of hours. If a anyone had to leave, they could not come back because the doors were locked. Relatively speaking, the parties were pretty tame most of the time. It was just like having the bar open, except certain things happened that otherwise could not happen and certain things did not happen that otherwise would. I’ll let you use your imagination as to what those things were; it will probably be more interesting than the reality.

On winter afternoons, Biker Steve, Mike (the guy with the ear plugs), Marylou and Sue (new girlfriend and local sex worker, respectively) and I would hang out watching the snow fall (those were wintry years, statistically) and waiting for people to get stuck. Then we’d pile out of the bar and push them free. Over the course of a snowy afternoon, that would get sillier and sillier until finally they were pushing us out of the snow.

So what was the music we were playing in GJ’s? Offhand, I remember a few songs: “Tonight’s The Night” and other songs by Rod Stewart; “Higher And Higher,” Rita Coolidge; “Dancing Queen” by Abba; “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffet; “Hotel California,” Eagles; “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller Band (whom I just saw in concert a few months ago); “Stayin’ Alive” by The Bee Gees; “Lay Down Sally” by Eric Clapton; “Beast of Burden” by The Rolling Stone; various songs by Steely Dan; “Last Dance” by Donna Summer; and a lot of stuff by the Village People, Santana, some heavy metal and the Grateful Dead.

Those were the days. That music was kinda iffy.

[T]he reason that hanging out with a bunch of temporarily insane Viet Nam vets fresh back from combat was a new phase in my own musical experience, aside from the fact that I’m obviously using music as a ragged thread to tie together utterly unrelated themes, is the importance of music to some of those vets, and to the era that was just winding down in the early 1970s.

Music was part of the Revolution, the anti-war protests, the hippie movement, all of it. One of my coworkers, the assistant director of the place I did archaeology, was a Rolling Stones fan. This big, scary guy all tough and shot up from the war, this thuggish guy from a tough neighborhood in New York where being Jewish meant you had to learn to fight, this guy who had the swagger walk down cold and carried a crowbar in the front seat of his car and knew how to use it, once told me that he “cried and screamed like a girl” when he saw The Stones at the ball park in New York.

“You saw The Rolling Stones live?”

“I cried like a girl, no kidding.” He was getting teary-eyed again as he sat behind the desk in his office, his head covered in most spots with randomly placed and pointy tufts of flaming red hair, and his smuggish face pointing nose first at the object held above the desk in his hand. He had used the intercom to call me into his office a moment earlier and was showing me an album he had just acquired…a Rolling Stones album…and was telling me about the concert and the album at the same time. I did not fully understand why we were having this conversation.

“So take this and fill it out,” he suddenly said, thrusting a small square of paper in my general direction, a piece of paper that looked like a postcard on one side and a form to be filled in on the other. “As soon as you can. Do it right now.”

So my boss had just forced me to join the Columbia House Record Club so he could get a free album by getting someone else to join. I had to pick five albums from this list of mostly totally stupid stuff. I was able to find one to give to my mother as a birthday present, and it was an album by Jim Neighbors, the enigmatic actor/singer. Another remains today as one of my favorite albums of all time, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

So, now that I had albums coming, I had to get…a record player. So I consulted with Carl, and we managed to dig up a tuner and a record player and set it up in my room. I scavenged my parents’ old speakers from The First Stereo. I dug deep into my pockets and searched for change in the couches and got enough to buy a new needle (that’s the device that reads data off the album on the record player). And the records came and it was good.

The other benefit of the stereo was the built-in radio. Not very many months later, I moved from my parents’ house into my own place. My girlfriend at the time, Leslie, just recently told me that she thought it was SO cool that her boyfriend had his own place. Now that I think about it, that would have been pretty cool for a couple of 16-year-olds. She reminded me that we would get together and tune in the radio to listen to The Fourth Tower of Inverness…indeed, we did. Now that I think about it, holding hands with Leslie and listening to The Fourth Tower of Inverness was even better than Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Which brings me right up to the present. Since I mention my first girlfriend, I will also mention my last girlfriend, Amanda. There are a number of things that I’ve always liked but no one that I was “with” (as it were) also liked, or at least, such things were not important to them. For instance, I’ve always wanted to own a Subaru. No one I was “with” ever wanted a Subaru, so that never happened. Amanda strongly prefers Subaru. So now we have a couple of them. How cool is that?

As I say, there are a number of things like that with Amanda and me. And it turns out that even though she did not really know Joe Cocker when we first met, one of her favorite songs is “Feelin’ Alright“…the version done by Joe Cocker.

Amanda was somewhat ensaddened to learn that the song is not about feeling all right. It’s about how, “You are feeling all right because you’re an evil thoughtless person, and I’m distinctly not feeling all right at all. In fact, I feel trapped and I’m having nightmares and I dread the day you dump me for some guy with a different name, a different face” (I paraphrase).

But who cares what the song says. It’s how it makes you feel that counts.

I had turned 13 years old the week before I started working there, and it was a summer job that would turn into a volunteer position and eventually a year-round job. During this time, as was the case before and since, music was not really especially important to me, and I continued to have a very passive relationship with that particular fine art. But there were individuals who influenced my tastes. New people, whom you have yet to meet.

Since I came from a good Democratic family in a Democratic city, I was eligible to go down to City Hall that June to get a summer job. I remember going into this big room with lots of people. This guy who I later got to know pretty well, State Representative Jack McEneny (this was before he had run for any office), got up in front of the group and demanded the attention of the hundreds of 13-year-olds who were in the room.

“OK, folks. Who wants to paint fences this summer! We’ve got a lot of fences to paint.”

About half the kids raised their hands. Those who raised their hands were escorted out of the room, I suppose to go and join the fence-painting crews.

“OK, kids, now let’s see a show of hands again. Who wants to paint curbs!!! We’ve got a lot of fine curbs that need paining!” And half the remaining kids raised their hands, and were duly escorted off somewhere.

“Kids…listen! Who among you wants to paint fire plugs! We need some really good painters to paint fire plugs!” and most of the remaining 13-year-olds, figuring that they had held out for the good job, raised their hands and were taken away.

And there were six of us left. We had been herded to one corner of the room, where we sat on gray folding chairs at a tattered oblong table and stared at each other. Mike. Jane. Jack. Some other kids I don’t remember. Mike was a funny-looking kid with a strange bone disease, and he would tell everyone he met that he had only a few years to live. We were to hit it off really well. He was very short and a photographer and specialized in what he called “nostril shots.” Jane was very smart and nerdy. I totally got a crush on her. We would later do some nerdy stuff together, like hiking in the Adirondacks and going to used bookstores. I don’t really remember the other three kids very well.

As we sat there, a large, imposing, dashing but scary man…large-framed, trim and muscular, long hair tied back and a huge mustache, a loping gait and a dueling scar…came over to us. He put one foot up on a chair and stared menacingly at us, dour-mouthed and severe in countenance. I was eventually to get to know this man as well as I know anybody, and I would learn that this stance of his … the dour chair stance … always came just before a joke. Usually, the joke was entirely for his own benefit, and only rarely did anyone else get the joke.

(Indeed, as I think of it, I may have learned my own brand of obtuse humor from this man. But I digress.)

So this man, named Bob, stared at each of us kids–as we realized one by one that we had been left alone in this cavernous, now nearly empty room with this guy who looked a lot like a pirate.

And he said:

“You six. Painting fences wasn’t good enough for you? Are fireplugs beneath you?”

We all kind of looked at each other and nodded. We might have been scared of him, but this trimming down process had left him with a half dozen 13-year-olds with attitude.

“Good,” he responded. “As of right now, you’re archaeologists.”

And that was the start of my career.

And a new phase in my appreciation of music. But I’ve taken up too much of your time already. I’ll pick this thread up at a later time.

I remember the early days, when they were just learning to play together and they’d practice in my house, piping their guitars through that old stereo. They would listen to popular songs and try to figure out which notes were which so they could play them. (Apparently, sheet music was invented some time later.) I remember them learning to play “Wipe Out” by the Ventures (originally recorded by The Sufaris). As a little kid, I heard them play it over and over again so many times that I learned it. I can still play it on a guitar.

The name of the band was to become Adrenalin, and the logo was an anatomically correct heart with a fist jabbing into it.

Their contract stipulated that a) no one was allowed to go near the volume controls or to complain about the noise, and b) the band members would not leave the stage. This was a compromise that worked in the sorts of venues they played in, mainly high schools. The big fear among high school administrators was that the band members would wander around among the students snorting coke and shooting up heroin during the breaks. By remaining on stage, they would assure the school principal that this was not happening.

I only saw them play once. My friend Carl and I went out to the Berne Grange Hall, up on The Heldeberg, one evening to see them. I remember my brother, in his white lamé suit, holding up a Jimmy Hendrix album and saying, “If any of you can tell me who this is, you win the album.” (Silence.) “OK, now we’re going to play a song by this guy.” (Silence.) They play the song. No one knows. Adrenalin gets to keep the Hendrix album for one more week. At least.

Of course, that was during the eclipse of the 1960s, the period after the 1960s when people were forgetting about the classics but before the first of many revivals. Dylan, Hendrix, Joplin, The Stones were all either inactive or freshly dead and largely forgotten by 13-year-olds. But of course, that did not last.

So for seventh grade, I went to a new school, and not far into the first semester, I met Carl, who was to become my best buddy for several years, though somewhat off and on. Carl was musical. He played the guitar acceptably well and was into collecting albums.

Both he and I were working-class kids in a school where almost everyone else was noticeably better off. Many of the kids in this school had professorial or otherwise upper middle class parents. Carl’s parents were divorced, which was kind of odd in those days, and his father, with whom he lived, worked at the Motor Vehicles Department. My father had a nascent career as a civil servant that had not quite taken off yet. Carl had an older sister, who was old enough that she was never around. In fact, Carl’s home was almost always empty, and Carl had a handful of ways to get into the house even when he did not have a key (which was most of the time). So many days we’d leave school and head over to Carl’s, break into his house, and settle in for some music listening time.

Carl was into Neil Young big time and a few other musicians. Jackson Brown was pretty big for him. Over time he built, with quite a bit of help from me, a stereo made of multiple different components. We learned to solder. We built the speaker boxes in shop class. We got kits and parts from Radio Shack. Every couple of months, some component or another would be yanked out and replaced, and the old component cannibalized for parts.

Some time in there Carl and I added a new element to the mix. Beer. We would save up until we had one dollar, then we’d go to the corner store and buy four one quart bottles of Hedrick’s Beer. One gallon in total. Then we’d bring that back to Carl’s place, listen to music, and finish off the beer.

Sometimes they’d be out of Hedrick’s so we’d have to get Dobler, which was almost identical inside but two pennies more outside. If we were short on funds, we would end up with only three quarts and change.

Beer was for the bedroom, where we’d listen to music, but if we went to a concert, we’d bring wine. It was easier to transport and did not go flat after opening. Boone’s Farm. One dollar a bottle.

Ah, the memories. New Riders of the Purple Sage concert. Lebanon Valley Speedway. Three quarts of Boone’s Farm. Under the bleachers. Puking like a dog. Those were the days.

My life for several years could have been characterized as having Carl as my best friend to whom I would always return between episodes of other things, periods of being linked up with other people, a girlfriend here, a marriage there, a new job now and then. And Carl’s stereo was always there, ever evolving, never being really all that good but never costing all that much, never quite working perfectly, never quite being broken. Right up until the end.

My father’s musical ability was nonexistent. When he would get a little drunk, he’d listen to his My Fair Lady album over and over. The other day we went to see My Fair Lady performed at the high school. I was afraid I was going to have a problem with that, but it was okay. No cold sweats, no feelings of doom, nothing. But I digress.

I was born into a home that had no TV or stereo. There was a period of time when there was a TV in my grandmother’s home, which luckily for me was the apartment upstairs. Then we got one downstairs eventually. But still, I’m digressing. That had nothing to do with music. I know that I was born into a home without a stereo because I remember quite well when we got the stereo. It was a big deal.

There was a stereo cabinet, which was manufactured without any holes in it for wires to go. So a hole had to be cut in it. There were to be two input devices, one a turntable and the other a tape recorder. Since this was the days before “aux,” there needed to be a pair of switches. It had to be a pair of switches and not just one, because they were mono switches, so there needed to be two of them. We’re talkin’ stereo here. These switches were mounted inside the stereo cabinet. The tape recorder was reel to reel. We also had a wire recorder, but there was no music for that, so we didn’t hook it up. (And when I say “we,” I mean my brother.) The speakers were twenty-something inches high and maybe 15 wide and very thin for speakers, no more than five or six inches, and they were positioned at either end of the Eero Saarinen-style couch.

The rug in the living room had squares as part of its pattern, 11 inches on a side. So we used the squares to locate the center between the speakers. We put a chair there, and we would take turns sitting in the chair and listening to the sound effects record.

A train coming from one side to another. A pin dropping on one side then the other. A voice coming right from the middle even though there was not a speaker right there. The voice was saying “Hey, there’s no speaker right here, but you hear my voice like there is a speaker there. Isn’t stereo amazing!” Stuff like that.

We had a total of about fifteen albums. One was a Vaughn Meader album. One was the aforementioned sound effects album. Then there was Tubby the Tuba and Mary Poppins. Those were mine. Then there was Bolero, which fascinated me because there was a semi-naked lady on the front, facing away, and I could tell but not prove she was not wearing underwear. I had no idea at the time why I found that interesting. Then there was Al Hirt and there was Hatari. I loved the front of the Hatari album. Does anyone remember that? We had an album of JFK speeches.

I cannot place the arrival of the stereo in relation to the acquisition of the JFK speech album in relation to the assassination of JFK. I have some pretty detailed early memories. I have early memories that are earlier than humans are supposed to have according to some theories of neural development, and that I can prove are not reconstructed memories (of course, some people believe that can’t be proven, but they are wrong), but I do not remember everything and some of my early memories are untethered to an accurate timeline. There was a Life magazine from the election season showing a picture of JFK sitting on a big giant drum. There was the Vaughn Meter album. There was the JFK speech album. And there is the memory of being sent home from school, everyone crying, and the specter of death and violence that accompanied that 48-hour period that stretched out to become part of our national consciousness for the next 20 years.

It was some time after the stereo, by a few years, that I acquired my very first album. The Tubby the Tuba and Mary Poppins albums were wearing quite thin, and they were not really mine. They were just among the albums that seemed to come with the stereo.

Every September the church had a “bazaar,” in which rides were operated by men with “Prisoner” or “Convict” printed on their shirts, and various gaming booths were set up. Every year I saved up seven or eight bucks to blow on the bazaar. One year I put a dime on a number for a spinning carnival wheel and won. I got to pick among three or four albums. I picked the Sonny & Cher album with “I Got You Babe” (Look at Us). When I brought it home, everyone in my family yelled at me because each of them thought I should have brought home a different album. The thing is, they each had a different opinion as to which album I should have brought home. But they were all absolutely certain that Sonny & Cher was not the one.

In retrospect, this was a traumatic event. It caused me to shun the entire musical experience for years thereafter. Now that I realize the effect this had on me, I think I’ll sue my family.

So sometime in there, probably because of this traumatic event, my personal interest in music went dormant. This is probably why I can not really play an instrument. There was a violin, briefly. Later I learned to do a bunch of riffs on the base and could accompany others as long as they were not very good. But that’s it. The stereo moved with my parents when I was 13 (and I moved with them as well), but I was not one of the kids who had a stereo or an album collection. In fact, in this way I found myself contrasted with many of my friends.

But that was okay, because I had Carl…

“What would you like, sir?”

“A BLT on Italian.”

“Would you like bacon on that, sir?”

“Yes. This is a BLT.”

“What kind of cheese?”

“No cheese. Just a BLT.”

“Toasted?” (Read: “Cooked?”)

“Ah…yes, actually, that would be good.”

Wait for a minute while the BLT is “toasting” in the preternatural rapid Subway oven.

“Lettuce?”

“Yes. B-L-T.”

“Anything else on it?”

“Ah, yes. This is a BLT, so tomato would be good. BLT.”

“Anything else on it?”

“No, just mayo. That’s all.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“BLT.”

Before I met my wife, I’d never been to a Subway. I was always afraid of them. The whole process seemed too complicated. So the first time we went, I asked her to order for me. She asked me what kind of sandwich I wanted, and I said, “BLT,” and the conversation went pretty much like the one above but with three people instead of two people.

After that first experience it took some convincing to get me back into a Subway. For the first few times, I ordered the same exact sandwich until I got the hang of it. Eventually, I started to branch out. Now I can pretty much handle anything they can throw at me.

It is not that I’m a slow learner. Rather, I’m somewhat traumatized by subway sandwiches. This is because of Mike’s Submarine Sandwiches at the corner of Washington and Central in my home town. Mike’s was in an old, red brick building sticking out at the end of a triangular junction between these two major streets, sitting right at the border between “downtown” and “uptown.” For quite some time, I went to school and/or worked “downtown” and I lived “uptown.” I made $56 a week, and my rent was $16.50 a week. A Mike’s sub with everything on it was $1.89. That was for the Italian with Everything. It was way more than a foot long. I could buy a Mike’s sub and make it last all day and do this for a few days in a row, but that would not be enough over the long term (a week). I would always be hungry, and I was always skinny. I had no transport and the buses were irregular, so I ended up walking between five and ten miles a day. I occasionally passed out from the lack of energy. (Well, two or three times.)

I don’t know whether any of my younger, studenty-type friends are as hungry today as I was then, but this is why I am always happy to buy someone dinner. This is why, when I’m in South Africa and eat out, I’ll often buy an extra meal as take out and give it to the guy who was there when I pitched up, the guy who is always there volunteering to watch the car. “Go home and share this with your daughter,” was what I said to the last such guy, who had told me when I pulled in that his daughter was home ill and starving. Lamb and potato chips and some kind of vegetables. She would like that.

When I think of a sub sandwich, and my memory lets me taste it in my mouth, I do not think of Subway’s sandwiches, even though the last uncountable number of sub sandwiches I’ve eaten were from Subway. Rather, I think of Mike’s Italian with Everything, because that is the last subway sandwich I ate when I was truly hungry, truly starving, decades ago. I’ve been that hungry since, lots of times, in Africa living with the Lese and Efe in the Ituri Forest. I have visceral, three-dimensional, palpable memories of some food items from those times as well, none of which were sub sandwiches.

These Mike’s Italians with Everything rest in some alternative universe ready to lay themselves down on my taste buds and infiltrate my limbic system any time I think of hunger, or very long walks to Delmar to meet my girlfriend, or of counting my change five or six times to make sure that when they want to take the money from me after they make the sandwich I have enough. The lettuce was shredded a certain way, and the bread had a certain taste and texture. The stuff Mike poured out of a thin-necked bottle onto the sandwich, after the lettuce and tomato was laid down but before the meat, had a certain juiciness. Standing there, with my stomach eating itself, the change sweaty in my hands, watching the submarine sandwich getting wrapped up, knowing I’d open it right away there in the shop and eat one-fourth of it, then carefully rewrap what was left and head home. Always home. Never anywhere else. If I went anywhere else I might have to share and couldn’t do that just then. That is how you make memories stick forever. Make memories that hurt. They stick around.

Somewhere in a neighborhood near you is a Mike’s or something like a Mike’s, where the typical customer is counting her or his change to make sure there is enough when they ask for the money. Do you know someone who might need a sandwich? Your change may be something someone else can count on.

I highly recommend Mike’s Submarine Sandwiches on the triangular corner at Central and Washington. Unfortunately, the store is closed now, and probably has been for years. So don’t go there. Unless you want to rent the place.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

It was like a giant monster steadily tapping on the roof of the house, trying lazily to get my attention becuase it knew I was in there.

To escape a horrid but unspecified fate, I would have to get out of the house, and more than that, I had to make my way across the back yard to the base of the tree in the corner, where the fences met. This was the climbing tree. It was a medium-sized maple that I could climb quite high in, even as a small child. I could use it to jump into any one of three different yards (and later, as needed, retreat from said yards). I could climb into it and sit perfectly still and silent when my mother or my siblings came into the yard to do some thing, and they would finish their task and leave without ever knowing I was up there hiding. It was my escape tree, my spy tree, my safe tree. I knew I needed to get to that tree and, and then to find the hole at the base. The cage. The cage that was made out of a dug out hole at the base of the safe tree.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Louder.

There would be obstructions, things making it hard to get out of the house, like closed doors and pieces of furniture in the way. Finally I would make it to back door, and it would be held shut by the bar set across it on the angle irons. This was an impromptu security device that my brother had made last summer when we found out there was a prowler in the neighborhood. We had no locks on any of the doors. We reasoned that if a bad person was going to try to come into the house, they would come in the back door, not the front door. Only good people came in the front door. So we barred the back door by putting up these angle irons, then dropping a broom handle into them. That would stop anybody bad enough to try to get in but not bad enough to simply break the glass window on the door and remove the broom. We knew this would be sufficient because the prowler was probably Pauly’s brother, who had been seen where he should not be a few times, looking in the girl’s bedroom window.

But in this nightmare, the bar was difficult to remove. It was not just the usual broom handle, but rather a heavy iron bar that resembled the piece of railroad track we had in the basement, the bull anchor. It was a piece of railroad track cut to about two feet in length, with the hole drilled through, which in turn had a metal ring through it. It was from my grandfather’s farm, where it would have been tied to the ring in the nose of a bull to, so the could get around to feed but would be hampered from running quickly. Or so I was told.

Eventually, I would move the rail from the back door, and it would clatter to the floor, and suddenly I’d be flying outside under the sound of the thing overhead, heading for the safe tree and the cage in the ground.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Closer.

And in my dream I would tear across the back yard and fall to my knees at the cage. This was a hole in the ground with bars across it, and inside would be all of my furry and feathered pets. My current cat, and the last cat or two, who were dead in real life but seemed fine in the dream. A rodent or two, a duck, a chicken, numerous turtles and even more goldfish, and a few other critters, and Kelly the parakeet was in there as well. They were all looking up at me, alive again, wanting to be protected. They did not want to leave the cage. This cage was their safety. They were safe from anything in this cage. Anything, that is, but the thing coming closer overhead.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Right on top of me.

Just at that moment, I would turn and look overhead and there would be a monster that looked exactly like Mighty Mouse, but that I knew was not that cartoon superhero at all. He would be wearing a swastika, and he’d fire a rocket down towards the cage. When I would turn back to look at the cage, all my pets would be in there, but all of them would now be dead. Even my cat, who was not dead in real life. Squished, sometimes burned, occasionally beheaded. Always dead. The fur and feathers were always gone, and they were always stiff, with their limbs sticking out in front and behind like they were diving into a pool. Naked and burned to death. And sometimes before I turned my head to see their bodies, I’d hear them scream. The thing overhead had killed them, and now it moved off to other objectives.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Moving off.

I had that dream every few weeks during two or three summers when I was about six or seven years old.

Years later I figured out what the dream was about. Well, it was about anxiety and fear and so on and so forth. But there were elements to the dream, elements of real life, from which it was created by my childhood brain.

The cage was obvious to me even at the time. It was at the base of the tree where I regularly buried stuff I wanted to hide. It was a hiding place, and thus a safe place, and thus in this recurring nightmare, it was the safe place for my beloved pets. The dream was so real, sometimes I was surprised to find that there was not a buried cage there. And it was not the pet cemetery. That was over in the alley way, by the pile of flagstones Pauly’s brother made outside my sister’s bedroom window.

The thing overhead was Mighty Mouse, and that was simply plucked from a popular cartoon reruns of the day. The swastika came from the Nazi enemies Mighty Mouse normally battled. The burned and crushed bodies in the safe cage were based on the imagery of the holocaust that I had discovered int he basement, unbeknown to my parents. They had twenty years of old Life magazines in mildewed boxes down in the basement, and they covered the war years. I had discovered the magazines and devoured them with relish, and when I found the articles and pictures pertaining to the Holocaust, I devoured those with horror.

So most of the elements of the nightmare were explained. But what about this:

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. The sound.

That sound was real. It was a sound from real life that made the dream happen. It was not of the dream.

After having these dreams for a couple of years, I got older and I was allowed to stay up later, and that meant staying outside during the summer. We didn’t even know what air conditioning was in those days, in that neighborhood, in that life. Summer nights were for sleeping restlessly under a plain cotton sheet, unless you were older, and you could go outside and trap fireflies, using their crushed bodies to make glow in dark ornaments and hastening them towards extinction. So, when I was older, I did that. And that is when I heard it for the first time in the waking world.

Thump Thump Thump. Thump. It came from the southwest and headed to the northwest. Everyone else seemed to take it in stride, but no one failed to step out into the open and crane their necks to see it pass over head. Slowly, it emerged from behind Eva’s bakery and passed directly over the apartment buildings next to my house, then onward and out of sight.

It was the blimp. The one you’d see covering events, advertising things with it’s marquee over sporting events or fairs. It turned out hat my house was a few blocks from the temporary landing pad for the local Goodyear blimp. This was over in a big empty lot by Hoffman Park, near the Thruway. Even on nights when the blimp did not dock at that location (and I think it actually docked there very rarely), it would often fly by rather low. And the slowly turning diesel engines in the amazing flying machine sounded like this:

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to identify the connection between Mighty Mouse and the blimp.

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