Everything That Happened

to me and sometimes to other people

Striped Shirt, 1945

I was on vacation between first and second grade. We were living at Uncle Jim’s house. One day all the grownups started acting crazy and laughing and hugging and hollering and crying. I asked them what was going on, and they said the war was over. I asked them who won, but they just ignored me. I ran up and down the front steps for a while.
I knew it was important. I had on my brown and orange striped shirt.

Before we lived there we had our own house. A few other things happened. I got hit on the head with a rock. I broke my brother’s radio and looked at a girl’s hiney hole. Italian kids moved in and came to my kindergarten. I asked my mother what a fucking cocksucker was. My father stopped coming home. My teacher made me hide my face in her lap. I had to clean the school steps with a bucket and scrub brush because I wrote on them. While I was scrubbing my mother walked by on the way to the store but she didn’t look at me. I cut off the tip of my finger slicing bread and got a red wagon for not crying too much on the way to the doctor’s.

At Uncle Jim’s house I jumped off his garage roof with an umbrella. I broke off enough roof shingles to build a fort but he made them not punish me. He had a Civil War rifle hanging on a rafter in the cellar.

When we got our own house again I used to play under our dining room table and make believe it was my fort. There was a metal lever there to pull the two halves of the table tight together and I would slide it back and forth and pretend it was the speed control on a trolley car. I wrote ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ in chalk on the underside of the table and the day the movers took the table apart to bring it to our next house they walked past my brother and me with the words facing out and he laughed, but didn’t tell anyone.

Foul footsteps

The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses, not that you’d know it from seeing any ball games. I have never heard verse 2, 3 or 4 sung in public. Verse 3 is especially interesting because it dumps all over that ‘band’ of dirty Redcoat bastards. It goes like this:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Link to all four verses

John Trumbull, “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777,” courtesy Yale University Art Gallery

Halloween haiku

The local newspaper had a Halloween haiku contest. These did not win.

when you’re a poor kid
to dress up as a hobo
you needn’t add much

loose good and plenties
jelly apple lint dusted
throw away later

new foreign neighbors
apprehending some danger
keep houselights unlit

So I’ve been told

My parents lived in Bloomfield, NJ but I was born in Saint Michael’s Hospital in Newark. My last name looks Italian (has a vowel on the end), but we are of traditional pale German-Irish stock. When the time came to bring baby Paul home from the hospital, my mother was highly indignant when “They tried to give me a little Italian baby!”. I am satisfied any other attempts also failed, for I look pretty much like my brother.

A couple of other things I was told but don’t actually remember: once I got out of the house naked and walked pretty far down Olive Street before anybody noticed. Once I pulled a chest of drawers over on myself but my brother heard it fall and got me out from under there. Thanks, bro.

Poem after a trip to Home Depot

+++++++++++Shadow
[spacer height=”14px”]I like to pee with the night light on
It makes my dick look big and long
[spacer height=”10px”]If I should lose a couple drops
I squirt some Clorox on those spots.

Musings

On comics
– Mr. Dithers is a total prick
– Dagwood seems to be a closeted bulimic

 

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