Mark
My brother Mark had moved into a small house with a friend shortly after the house fire. He had just graduated high school and was cooking at a hotel restaurant. People thought the hotel was kind of fancy because it was on a piece of land that jutted out into the Columbia River. It was called Clover Island.
Some people still thought he had something to do with the house fire, but nothing was ever proven.
Every time I went to the new house that he lived in, it smelled of thick pot smoke and thin beer. Mark was also becoming more interested in motorcycles at this time. I thought this combination of things added up to being a Hells Angel or something. Dad didn’t like me going over there because he probably knew what was going on.
One night though, I made up some kind of story and went over there to watch a KISS concert on HBO. There were other people hanging out, most of them sitting on the floor as Mark and his roommate tried to figure out how to hook up the stereo speakers to the TV. About halfway through the concert, Gene Simmons began an ominous bass refrain between songs and then started spitting fake blood out of his mouth. But he wasn’t really spitting. It was more like he was just letting it gurgle out of his lips and down his chin. When he was done, his stuck his long tongue out and gave a devious look as the band started into “God of Thunder.” Everyone watching the concert totally loved this, except me. I thought it went too far and I was afraid I might have nightmares about the bloody face. Someone said it was a trick, that Gene kept a packet of goat’s blood in the back of his mouth until it was time to bite down on it. The person who explained this said it was easy to hide stuff in your mouth. He pulled at the corner of his mouth with a finger and showed us a wad of gum stuck to one of his stained wisdom teeth.
I always liked Paul Stanley, the star-eyed guitar player and singer, better than Gene. I liked the pucker of his lips, the androgynous superhero quality that he had. Plus he owned a certain cool quality the rest of the band lacked. He would never stoop to spewing blood.
Later on, when Peter Criss stepped out from behind the mammoth cluster of drums and sat at the edge of the stage to sweetly serenade the fans with their unlikely hit “Beth,” one of the floor sitters nodded at me and said something to Mark. “He’s cool,” Mark said. Then suddenly there was a joint being passed around.
Being “cool,” I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. I was maybe eleven or twelve and I hadn’t even puffed a cigarette yet. When the joint was offered to me I simply passed it on to the next person. By the end of the ballad, it was so small that someone had put a tiny clamp on the thing. I started to think that the whole getting stoned thing was looking pretty desperate.
Dad never found out that I went over there to watch the concert, but he did give me a disappointed shake of the head a few months later when I got a T-shirt with a KISS picture ironed on it. We were out at Skipper’s for our Friday night fish dinner and he said, “Do you know what that means? It means Kids in Satan’s Service.”
Fried fish is the only food that I liked with ketchup. I squirted the thick red goo into the little paper cups and thought about the bloody face as we waited for our dinner.
Dog Days
“Have you been having bad dreams about dogs?” Mark asked me. “Because Mom and Dad said they might have to send you to a shrink or something. So you better knock it off.” This was partially Mark’s fault anyway, since it was his roommate’s dog that bit me at their house. Three different places: leg, elbow, forearm. I shielded myself with the screen door until they got home and found me there with blood dripping on the welcome mat.
At the hospital I was given three shots. Before I left, the nurse showed me a cardboard box with little plastic toys in it. I didn’t take any.
A few months later, Mom and Dad let me pick out a puppy for myself. I chose a German shepherd with floppy ears that was just a couple months old. I took Polaroids of him for the first year and a half, documenting his quick growth in our tiny apartment. His name was Scooter. He slept in my bed and I talked to him as I fell asleep each night.
Themes
In my sixth grade Social Studies class, we often read silently out of the textbook for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. My teacher, a music fan, would let us bring tapes in and play them on the cassette player while we read. It couldn’t be too distracting, though, and most of the time it ended up being instrumental.
I had recently bought my first cassette recorder, a boom box the size of a toaster, and started recording songs off the radio. I didn’t want to get any of the DJs’ voices on my tapes so there were always clunky segues between songs. The DJs would just jabber and say dumb things before the vocals kicked in. I’d be missing the whole intro to “My Sharona” or “Heart of Glass.” Then if they started talking again at the end, I’d have to cut the song there too. But my ears got used to it because that was the only way to listen to my favorite songs over and over.
My teacher played only one of my tapes for a few songs before changing it.
I turned to another passion. Theme music. First, I mail ordered an album of music from the National Football League. Found in the back of a football magazine, the ad said it featured orchestral pieces that were used by people like Howard Cosell during the football highlights they showed at halftime on
I also perfected the art of recording my favorite theme songs from TV shows. I held the boom box up to the TV speaker and pleaded to the family to be quiet when the show was starting. I was partial to the cool, stylish themes like the ones from
Pot
Chad Crouch was my first stoner friend. He lived in a ranch house with faded green paint three blocks from our middle school. There was gravel in the front yard, so his stepdad could park on it, I guess. I sometimes went there after school.
Once he pulled a bong out of a closet and showed me how to smoke pot with it. It didn’t seem like he had this bong hidden very well in the closet, so I assumed his parents used it too. They were a whole family of stoners. Besides my stoner brother, I didn’t know much about drugs then, just that they were bad and made you want to fly through the air like Superman.
I tried to hold the smoke in like Chad showed me but it still didn’t seem to have an effect on me. Chad leaned back with half-closed eyes and said something about how high he was. He looked like a sleepy cat. I thought he was faking it.
I kept waiting for something to happen to my brain, or for my head to feel like a lost balloon, but it never happened. So I faked it a little too, just to keep him as a friend. I laughed like he laughed, at the stupidest things, so I wouldn’t be a total drag.
