By the fourth grade I should have known better. I should have known that I was going to take my lumps for hanging onto Santa Claus the way I did but, damn, I’m nothing if not dogged in my point of view and that pretty much brings up another associated problem at the time.

My dog was involved in the entire mythology of Santa and if I was going to still believe in Santa I was also going to have to buy into Santa’s otherworldly ability to talk to animals and that meant accepting my dad’s (father #2) assertion that my German Shepherd, Pal, spoke to Santa about me often and that I should consider that in any future behavior.

For me, the behavioral issue was no big deal but the fact that my dog spoke to Santa was a really attractive possibility and something I wanted to be true because it was cool and gave me new found respect for Pal. On television there was Mr. Ed (the talking horse) communicating with his owner, Wilbur, but this thing with Pal was the real deal and I wasn’t afraid to share it.

And, of course, I was met with resistance from two principle sources.

First, there was fourth grade classmate, Eugene, who took great umbrage with my story, feeling it necessary to debunk Santa and my dog all in one fell swoop. This only strengthened my resolve to stand behind my reality because it had to be true and the only way to cement that truth was to sell it with all the conviction I could muster. So, I sold it, sold it and sold it some more until Eugene threatened to beat me up if I kept on, which created an immediate impasse and an end to all future discussions.

Hell with it, I’d keep it to myself.

But I didn’t, because the next day at my baby sitter’s house (I stayed there during the day when my parents were at work), I let loose with the same story and everyone involved said, in other words, that I was full of shit. “Your dog can’t talk to Santa Claus!”, said her son, Gene. “Yes he can…my dad told me”, said I, and so we went around and around until Gene’s mother sided with her son and confirmed that dogs couldn’t talk to people and my dad was just telling a tale.

Now, here’s exactly what I thought and felt during all of this and I still feel pretty much the same way.

Intellectually, it seemed like a monstrous long-shot that my dog could talk to Santa Claus but I wanted to believe it, I was 9 years old and, obviously, wanted to suck every last ounce out of the legend before dull reality set in. The talking dog aspect fit the paradigm perfectly. Santa was already talking to his reindeer and they all seemed to understand what he was talking about so what would be far-fetched about Santa talking to dogs? This is Santa, and Santa carries with him some serious magic mojo so it was all working for me. If I believed in Santa, I’d have to believe that he could talk to my dog.

Now you expect kids your own age to be a little brutal with their righteous truth and I could forgive that but when Gene’s mother and other family members, as a group, shot down my story I thought, what a bunch of assholes, ripping the illusionary joy right out of my head because they had to be right.

I don’t know why someone would do that to a 9 year-old but I do know that, unlike today’s ‘fast-lane’ kids, there’s no reason to make a mad dash for the mediocrity and very un-magical reality that is adulthood. In fact, if I could put my knowledge on hold and buy into that whole Santa thing again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

When I was growing up in the ’50’s and ’60’s, environmental concerns weren’t on the average person’s radar and, in fact, Rachel Carlson’s ground breaking 1962 book, Silent Spring, was the only serious look at pollution and was primarily concerned with the use of poisonous chemicals, dispersed in the ground water supply.

So, when the fall leaves dropped to the ground by the bushel, we raked them up on the curbside into a tidy mound and set them on fire; a blazing heap that chucked out smoke like a runaway barbecue pit. Oddly, the expected acrid cloud was rather pleasant, with an aroma similar to a campfire.

Multiply that single act with designated leaf burning days and you had what amounted to a neighborhood bonfire with nearly every curbside contributing to the fog that spread across the adjacent streets and filled the air with the unmistakable smell of fall.

It’s the smell that, in the sensory memory of those who experienced it, will always be associated with the season. Leaf burning was something that brought neighbors outside to talk and kibitz with one another; a giant social event with a 5-alarm ambiance and a role for everyone to play.

Children did a lot of the raking, if for nothing else than the payoff of diving headfirst into the pile, so it was a chore of joy that was so good we had to do it repeatedly because our leafy playground would end up spread far and wide as if we’d never raked in the first place. At some juncture, the adults took over the operation and the fires commenced. Leaf herders with a constant watch over their fallen flock had to make sure the fire stayed within the confines of reasonable although me and most of my little pyromaniac friends were just prodding the herders into bigger and brighter blazes.

Before there were multiple electronic distractions to dumb down social events for kids, sanctioned fun with fire and smoke was something to look forward to. It plays into every irresistible urge kids have to control the potentially uncontrollable, so what could be better than an entire neighborhood flickering at dusk?

“Hey kids, let’s go outside and play with matches!!”

We weren’t even content with our own fires so we made the ‘flammable tour’, roaming the rest of the neighborhood to check out the fires of our buddies on other streets.

Now, to be honest, this wasn’t a risk-free activity because there was the outside chance that a pant leg might catch on fire or somebody’s house was a little too downwind but those were acceptable hazards to be dealt with if necessary. In practice, the only regular danger we encountered was leaping into the pre-burned pile only to discover some kid-maiming surprise, like a rake or other mystery object.  But that’s part of the charm of the unknown and if you were going to get squeamish about a rock in the side of the ribs or a ground steak upside the head, then leaf pile jumping wasn’t for you. We really didn’t weigh the negatives of inhaling tons of toxic fumes because, well, we just didn’t because we were as oblivious as the 1950’s sometimes were. If you didn’t consider the disasterous effects of 3 packs of Lucky Strikes a day then you were hardly phased by pile of burning leaves.

At its peak, the haze just hung in the trees, like one of those World War II movie battlefields covered with artillery smoke. It completely changed the character of the neighborhood and made it, in an odd way, sort of an exotic getaway. I always loved it when the familiarity of home morphed into something else, whether it was 10 feet of snow, an ominous sky before a tornado or, as in this case, scads of little bonfires.

For environmental and safety reasons, nearly all cities have put a stop to that kind of thing and now you see the leaves raked and stuffed in those biodegradable paper bags, lined up neatly on the curb, waiting for trucks to pick them up.

It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have those back then because I’m sure we would have set the bags on fire too. Sorry, Smokey.

After years of assessing my strengths and weaknesses, there’s no doubt I’m a highly distractable person. What would that be in today’s coded vernacular…HDP? I’m sure if I were in high school now, psychologists would be breaking it all down into a neat little prescription to be filled at the pharmacy but all it really boils down to for me is an inability to focus sometimes in the midst of surrounding activity. When I’m creating something (this story for instance) and the phone rings or someone calls to me, it’s like one of those near-death accounts where, on your way to the glorious light, you come reeling back to mundane life. It’s jarring and causes an automatic restart.

It’s why my creativity has always thrived in the wee hours of the morning. I like being awake when most people aren’t. It’s like being in one of those sci-fi flicks where the guy realizes that the entire human race has been wiped off the planet and he’s the only one left and he’s got the run of the roost, but unlike the sci-fi guy I’m comforted to know that the isolation is temporary and, eventually, the rest of the world will get out of bed and I won’t die alone.

I’ve been this way since I was a kid and after this many years it is an easily definable part of my character. When I was young, if school hours permitted (and sometimes even when they didn’t) I’d be up at 2am doing virtually anything; reading, writing, making model cars, writing songs, studying the jokes on comedy albums, creating lists of anything that came into my head and sometimes I’d just sit and think of shit.

It may sound like ‘thinking of shit’ is an empty activity but that is far from true because most of my best ideas are formulated in this vacuum of uncluttered time. It’s in this time that my brain becomes well-ordered and everything makes sense in a way that the cacophony of day to day activities do not. I admire those who retain clarity while standing on a teeter board, juggling 4 balls and reciting the Gettysburg Address. I just don’t seem to be one of them since all I want to do is get really good with the teeter board and then move on to the juggling.

My wife, on the other hand, is a marvel of powerful thinking in the eye of the storm. With a teeter board under each foot and a bucket full of balls flying at her, she can quickly breakdown the situation and reign it in like Einstein herding relativity into an understandable theory. It’s amazing to watch her in full operational gear.

Now, this is not to say that I’m not quick since in my profession as an entertainer I have to stand in front of groups of people everyday and corral an audience with off the cuff comedy and a perfect flow of music. In the midst of what most people might consider a frightening chaos, I’m as clear as a laser and know exactly what to do and when to do it.

But that’s a controlled environment (when I control it) that I’ve become skilled at over 4 decades of repetition and practice and doesn’t quite have the randomness of the majority of daily encounters. That’s what separates the thinkers from the sinkers and it’s why I do my best thinking when the bats are getting their exercise. Life just sort of gets put on ‘pause’ while I get some work done.

There are only a couple of other comparable times where there is perfect clarity and that’s in the morning when I’m just coming out of my nightly coma, before I set one foot on the floor. I’m at my organizational best at that very moment…lining up the days events, assigning myself a series of necessary tasks and planning a well-appointed day. I only run into trouble when I get out of bed where the quandary of order becomes an issue. Up until that time I’m the best secretary I’ve ever had. Too bad the secretary ends up being a temp.

The other time is in the shower. The shower is like an isolation tank where your only task is to bath, which leaves it wide open for thought. Nothing but you, falling water and an open mind. I have come up with some great stuff in the shower and if I were wise I’d install a waterproof, digital recorder on the wall.

I think my DNA is hard-wired this way and as much as I struggle to make it work more like my wife’s I know it never will be. Getting older is worthless for running faster and jumping higher but for knowing what you’re good or bad at; it’s the perfect clarifier.

I am what I’ve always been; a very, very, very poor man’s Stephen Hawking, a sharp intellect that only comes out after midnight and is this close to being interviewed by Anne Rice.

When I was at the peak of my ‘Trick or Treat’ powers, primarily the grade school years, neighborhoods far and wide opened up like candy dispensaries.

It wasn’t just a particular street or area that opened up its doors but every street and nearly every door. As long as you could keep walking was how much bounty you came home with and we didn’t use conventional bags or those plastic pumpkins because that limited the size and poundage of what we could carry. Instead, the large-scale operators like myself used pillow cases. By the end of the evening, if you did your job properly, you looked more like a candy hoarding Santa Clause with a full pillow case tossed over the shoulder.

There was something so communal about the event, so many children out there with one common goal, that no one was really alone and although the youngest children still had a parent on hand, this was primarily a no-parent function where everyone watched over everybody else. Potential perpetrators, if there were any lurking, were relegated to the sidelines due to excessive foot traffic.

My friends and I used to do a geographical sweep that always involved note comparison. The protocol for running into another group of kids was an exchange of information about areas they had been in which you had not and vice versa. What were they giving out? What house had the best stuff? Was it possible to go back twice? What houses to avoid and what was just a waste of time. You ran into so many children that it was like having an advanced social networking reconnaissance.

Unlike today’s TOT environment, the most sought after and heavily traded information had to do with treats that were made by homeowners; things like popcorn balls and candy apples. The folks that usually made these things knew their craft and loved what they were doing. They’d make the stuff from scratch and the treats were, by and large, fantastic. Treats like this were coveted because any kid could walk into a store and buy a candy bar but homemade fare was a random Halloween delicacy largely unavailable but for one day a year and you had to canvas a neighborhood to find it.

I don’t remember exactly when the homemade Halloween food scare took hold but it shut down a valuable mom and pop industry that had thrived for a very long time. Exposed as an urban myth (with no documented evidence to the contrary), the ‘razor blade in the apple’ story not only stopped the flow of candy apples but, for a period of time,  it virtually put a halt to the tradition of Halloween, proving once again that we are a very skittish and hyper-reactive people.

But back when I was walking the streets (should I rephrase that?), that bag got heavier and heavier and eventually dictated how long you stayed in the game before the strain on your shoulder forced you home. Having a bag full of candy that was three times the size of your head was a much sought after accomplishment, so most of the time we suffered for our diligence.

When you finally lugged that sack of sugar into your house it was like hitting the finish line in the Boston Marathon but, unlike the Marathon, the exercise was incomplete until you dumped out everything onto the floor and took inventory. It wasn’t uncommon to have an inordinate amount of Smarties but, then again, that’s hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. Chocolate was the goal though, and you needed plenty of chocolate to call the evening a success, but what put you in the upper echelon of TOTers was the ‘homemade’ tally…lovingly referred to on our block as the ‘good crap’.

After inventory there was the customary trading portion of the event and the living room floor became the New York Stock Exchange and you might either enhance or downgrade your initial investment. In the end, though, it was win, win all around because you’d had a great night of bumping into friends, getting exorcise, half-freezing your ass off, unraveling the great neighborhood treasure map and coming home with enough candy to kill 50 kids.

It’s a shame what happened to Halloween. It was a magnificent piece of childhood entertainment, screwed up by malcontents, weirdos and wild rumor, never to be experienced the same way again. Even though it has made a modest comeback in recent years, it’s just not the same kinetic experience that had us looking forward to the night like it was Christmas Eve. Trust has leaked out of our society and parents are assuming that there are hordes of evil beings just waiting to scoop up their offspring. Beyond that, there’s an actual theory that suggests just walking around in a costume, especially a mask, increases the risk of falling down and premature death by as much as 4 times. Maybe they’re right and the scaled down version of Halloween was necessary because we live in more dangerous times, or kids are clumsier, I don’t know.

Whatever happened though, it’s a shame that children can’t experience the night with the same wild abandon that we did, in neighborhoods that looked like New York City streets at rush hour, because that was some awesome, cool, shit.

In the 1950’s, unlike today, TV broadcasts had a daily shelf life and at some time in the morning, say 3am or so, after the late movie and some nebulous local half hour show no one watched, the voice-over announcer would explain that the broadcast day had concluded and would return at such and such a time. Then they played the national anthem with the flag waiving away and then, boom, nothing but static and white noise.

When I got up around 5:30am on Saturday mornings for cartoons I deliberately got up a bit early, before the programming day began so that I could watch and listen to the test pattern. Oh yea, the test pattern. That was traditionally the precursor to actual programming that came out of the signal-absent white noise and usually displayed a low-tech calibration screen with a head-dressed Indian in the middle of it. Accompanying that image was a high, steady tone that hummed away for 30 minutes or so and it was that intoxicating hum I was after.

Perhaps it was the musician in me or the simple sonic lure but I used to sit right in front of the TV, in somewhat of a trance and hum along with it. I might have been employing some kind of yoga meditation without even knowing it.

Humming right on the tone kept it steady but moving above or below the pitch, however slight, would cause the tones to start oscillating against one another. If I was relatively close the oscillation was quick but when I moved farther off pitch, the tone would get wider and slower and I basically played with those tones for all of the time leading up to cartoons. These are all basic acoustical concepts but I had distilled the science down to pure, geeky fun.

But it wasn’t just humming fun I was attracted to. The half hour of test pattern humming went unusually quick, as if time had been suspended…another indication that I was surely on a psychological surfboard to utter serenity. Unfortunately, about the time I had reached a complete understanding of the universe (known and unknown), Heckle and Jeckle or Mighty Mouse would come on and drag me back to my childhood.

I don’t think I was a particularly odd kid but as an only-child with no distractions, something like a 400 Hertz sine wave was a perfectly viable plaything and it appears that I had inadvertently stumbled on the electronic approach to nirvana. It makes me wonder what the potential childcare application might have been if I had introduced the idea to the public and become kind of a Buddhist P.T. Barnum.

Thousands of little kids humming away at their sine waves, no longer acting out but completely zen and one with the kid next to them. No more ADD drugs being dispensed like candy. No more restraining orders being taken out by teachers. No more pulling hair on the playground. Nothing but meditative, spiritually attuned minors with a penchant for poppy seed muffins and virtuosity.

Ah, but with the demise of the test pattern on modern television, all that potential peace and harmony have signed off forever.

I don’t think I ever quite got the worth of Kindergarten. Back in 1956, pre-school hadn’t been created and kindergarten was the launching pad for your school years. Most of the kids in my class were discovering the wonders of their newfound social circle, while others were simply enthralled with their own boogers or the taste of white paste.

After careful examination of all the circumstances involved, I decided that kindergarten might hold some untapped value; the only question being what and how.

First of all, the teacher was well past the nurturing stage and into basic little-twerp management. So, there was nothing to be had there.

Secondly, 5 year olds are so random in there interests that I had a difficult time connecting with anybody. Why did I want or need to be there? You sat around all day dicking with insignificant whatnot and making a mess and I could do that at home. Really, nothing to be had there either.

Thirdly, my main mover, music, was commandeered by a dispassionate piano hack (hereafter referred to as Mrs. Piano Hack) who turned off her hearing aid every time she led us in song. My innate musicality found that approach highly offensive and I just wanted her to stop mauling the piano.

Finally, as a result of points one, two and three, I was painfully bored and needed a reason to hang in there long enough to make it to the 1st grade. That reason was to work on my performance skills and give my classmates a lift at the same time.

Most of the kids just banged around gormlessly but others brought their own specialties to the table. One little dweeb, Jimmy, liked to set fire to the boots in the coat closet using lighter fluid until Mrs. Piano Hack would see the smoke and have to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher. That was Jimmy’s go-to move and while temporarily exciting, the long-range consequences were potentially disastrous.

My go-to move was far less dangerous and, hopefully, a lot more memorable, although to Jimmy’s credit, burning boots are hard to forget. No, I decided that the one thing that was lacking in that boring classroom was good entertainment and I devised a plan to provide that.

The plan went thusly: At exactly the same time every day, Mrs. Piano Hack left the classroom to go down the hall to retrieve those little milk cartons for us on a metal tray. I could pretty much estimate how much time it would take for her to plod her way down there, stack the cartons and get back. As soon as she left I would leap on the table, air guitar in hand, and lay into a blistering rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. By the time I got halfway into the first verse all the kids were surrounding me, dancing and yelling as I swiveled my 5 year old hips and sang my ass off. The kids loved it and I made it a daily ritual, but there was one fatal flaw to the plan.

I had a hard time getting off stage and lingering too long on the table always led to Mrs. Piano Hack walking back in, grabbing me by the back of the shirt collar and tossing me into the hallway and its makeshift solitary confinement. I’d have to sit out there for long stretches until Mrs. Piano Hack figured I’d served my time and then she’d let me back in.

Actually, there was a flaw in her plan as well. I liked it in the hallway and I’d rather be there than in the classroom with all that chaos and bad piano playing. So, it was kind of a win, win for me because sitting out there allowed me ample time to let my mind wander and daydream all sorts of wacky things and it gave my imagination quite a workout. That imagination was atrophying in Hack’s classroom so the hallway was a blessing in disguise.

Periodically, my mother would be called down to the school to deal with my constant removals from the classroom and the first time she came to find me in the hallway, she said, “I’ll go down to the principal’s office and get you back into class”. I begged her not to do that and explained my reasoning for not wanting to return. Unfortunately, I was going to have to get back in the classroom or I was in danger of repeating kindergarten.

It was hard for me to believe that I had to go back to that soul killing kindergarten room but faced with another year of Mrs. Piano Hack, I lightened up my table show schedule and made it out of there at year’s end.

Kindergarten wasn’t a total waste because I learned some valuable lessons in show biz and public relations: size up your audience carefully and know when to stop basking in the glory and get off stage. When I finally became a professional musician, those revelations became useful in nearly every gig I’ve ever had.

Mrs. Piano Hack wasn’t much in the guidance department but her quest to squash my performance creativity helped give me that rock and roll edge.

Rock on, Mrs. Piano Hack!

My dad (father #2) loved the grandiosity of staged illusion and made it a major part of his performing repertoire. When he spoke of the history of magic and magicians it was with great reverence for the craft and he worked hard to hone his own skills so that they were a worthy contribution to the greats that came before him.

He made himself, Frederick the Great, and while that smells a little like Michael Jackson dubbing himself the “King of Pop”, my dad realized the marketability of ’sounds like’, ‘acts like’, ‘is like’. So, he was Frederick the Great and all his promotional material lauded his superior feats of prestidigitation.

My mother was his assistant and between the two of them, they cornered the market in the looks department; she, statuesque and beautiful and he, dashing and debonair. Coupling that asset with my dad’s work ethic to the act and they had a very successful regional show.

The legendary illusionist, Harry Blackstone (from the same state), was his benchmark and he carried himself with as much class as the great master, decked out in tucks and moving through his routines like a ballet dancer. He was serious about this art and meticulous with detail, and before long they were not only working locally but traveling to other cities to open for other, bigger acts.

To my dad, this was show biz on a grand scale and, while I never asked my her if she really enjoyed this act, I have the feeling that my mother joined him in the small scale glory that was theirs. As good as my dad got, however, he still ran into the same road block that always seemed to arrest his dreams.

The nearby bar.

On the road or 500 feet from our house, the challenge was always the same…how to keep Frederick the Great out of the bar and going on with the show. Sometimes he just didn’t make it because he tried to mix the two worlds and they would, like a bad lab accident, create a cloud of mayhem.

They performed a large illusion surrounding a wooden coffin on wheels that my mother would lie down in and then the Great one would light the thing on fire and the audience would eventually see her skeleton ablaze, Frederick hunched maniacally over the charbroil, madly dumping more lighter fluid onto the remains. This was a real crowd pleaser and he would take bow after bow, the crowd cheering over my mother the ember.

The only problem was that, one night, in a less than sober state he had gone a little too theatrical with the lighter fluid and some had leaked into the chamber below where my mother actually was lying and her dress caught on fire. Frederick the Great wouldn’t notice this because he was still in the process of soaking up the adulation.

Fortunately for my mother, an off-stage hand saw the smoke and tore into the box, getting my mother out before she suffered additional burns and this, to my dad’s dismay, took a little of the sheen off of the illusion.

Another time, during an Elks Lodge performance, Frederick found the lounge before finding the stage and was so besotted that he, for one of the rare times, couldn’t go on. What to do? They’d already been paid, the audience was primed and so my mother, thinking quickly and taking stock of what she knew and didn’t know, assembled every trick she thought she could handle, made up a story about Frederick and went out on stage and did a show.

At this point in time, the fabulous 50’s, there were no female magicians on the circuit and her appearance got a little more attention than normal that evening. Not only that but she pulled off what she could with enough style, having watched my dad rehearse, that the show was a smashing success and the Lodge owner deliriously happy.

Several days later, the Lodge owner called our house, not to re-hire my dad but to check on my mother’s availability. This struck a mortal blow to the ego of the Great Frederick and he made my mother come up with an excuse why she couldn’t make it.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Frederick was hired to levitate a woman on top of a downtown building to celebrate the grand opening of a hardware store, my mother politely declined the gig and dad had to find another assistant for the day. She hasn’t lived a long life because of bad judgment. Yes, the fill-in survived but my mother recognized a gamble when she saw one; tall building, levitating on a  board, nearby tavern.

On those days, though, when all his brain cells were in line, for the relatively small man he was, his skill level was exceptional. His hands were so small that those tricks, like handling ping pong balls, coins or other small props, requiring such agile manipulation, were made even more impressive by the constant work he put in to making it look that good.

Although unintentional, perhaps his greatest moment was in Milwaukee at a large hall, opening for Jack Benny. He was in the middle of one of his tricks where a chaffing dish was lit on fire (a dangerous running theme), the top of the metal dish was put on to smother the flame then lifted off to reveal a live dove who would be taken out of the dish and quickly placed in a cage.

Nifty trick, except this time the dove, sensing opportunity, took off into the auditorium, eventually landing on a rafter at the top of the building. Since this wasn’t in the script, neither my dad or mother knew what to do to get the dove back to the stage.

Finally, just taking a stab in the dark, my dad pulled out his blank revolver and fired a shot in the direction of the dove. The bird jumped and, probably sensing familiarity, flew straight back to my dad and landed on his finger. The audience, amazed at Frederick’s aviary mastery, burst into tumultuous applause, thereby deifying what was essentially dumb luck.

Ah, the occasional randomness of show biz.

In later years when his lavish visions succumbed to the reality of his lack of motivation, a few cans of Stroh’s would get him to talking about putting together a traveling 1920’s style Chautauqua, complete with musicians, jugglers, magicians and other assorted entertainers and tour the countryside, moving through hundreds of little towns.

Even though he’d constantly revisit this idea when I’d go over to his house after my parents divorce, I think we both knew that it was never going to happen and the magic equipment would remain in mothballs.

In many ways it was ridiculous that he gave up so easily but he was a chain-smoking, full fledged alcoholic in a mind-deadening job and, regardless of his bravado, he would never give that up until the day he crapped out on his sofa at age 57.

If you’d seen him through my eyes when I was growing up, you’d have seen how great he really could have been. You’d have seen that his pretentious moniker had tremendous potential. He was Frederick the Great and if only he could have gotten past his own demons and not drifted into hopelessness, sky was the limit for that guy.

At various times throughout my youth I had BB Guns, pellet guns, a machete, archery gear, an array of deadly fireworks that would rival a military ammo dump, and even a .22 caliber rifle, but for all of that I just didn’t have the heart of a hunter.

Tin cans I could brutally mow down with the conscience of a mercenary. A battalion of plastic army men were gone in the blink of an M-80 blast and, hearkening back to the stone age, dirt clods were lobbed like grenades at the neighbor kids. With all of that inherent destructive DNA on my side I still didn’t have the stomach for wantonly harming animals.

But there were incidents. Wrong place, wrong time, I don’t know, but there were a couple of incidents…and they were torturous for my psyche.

My ‘incidents’ took place in my large backyard and an undeveloped woodsy field just next to it. I’d be out back, armed with whatever was at hand (usually a BB gun), stalking my inanimate prey and then, bingo, there would be a bird or a squirrel just looking for trouble, seemingly dying to jump in my cross hairs in an effort to prove the cruelty of mankind.

Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to at least aim at the robin. What could that hurt? Aiming is alright as long as no living thing his harmed in the process but there was a breakdown and my curiosity, bolstered by the probability of a miss, got the better of me and I pulled the trigger.

Down went the robin out of the tree and, immediately, something stuck in my throat and I ran like a crazy person towards the fallen bird trying to access the damage I had done. ‘What did you shoot that bird for, dumbass?’ And by the time I got there I could see that the bird was unable to fly but still able to hop.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a bird hop but they’re not only very fast hoppers but they have more than enough energy (even wounded) to give a 12 year old boy a run for his money. As hard as I tried I couldn’t catch up to the robin and I felt like it was imperative that I do so. I had to know how badly it was wounded by the BB and I had to make sure that nothing else could hurt it while it was wounded. I had to catch that bird…I had to.

He eventually got under the fence in my yard and into the woods next door and, by that time, my buddy from a couple of doors down had joined in the chase and it went on and on and on. For the next 4 hours we tried to catch that bird and, as dusk settled in, I was worried that night time would finally end the chase and the robin would be lost and it would all be my fault. My fault! My stupid BB gun, my stupid BB gun aiming self!

Did the other animals put them up to this, like aviary Jihadists looking to enrage the animal kingdom into a counter-attack? You didn’t see that I had a BB gun and was capable of random violence? And now me and my buddy are running around like a couple of idiots trying to catch something that is traumatized and scared it will suffer more at the hands of these demons.

And then, at the point of exhaustion and the onset of night, we lucked out and caught the robin in a box and brought it back to my garage. I had an old parakeet cage that would become his temporary home and, with a pair of heavy duty gardening gloves, I held the bird in one hand while my buddy and I cleaned and dressed the wound.

It was like Doogie Howser meets Wild Kingdom. I had become hunter, tracker and nurse all in one long, grueling day.

Within a few days the robin seemed to be regaining its health and so we took it out and freed it near the original crime scene. Off it flew and I was off the hook for potential murder.

Now you’d think I’d have weened myself away from a life of destruction but, being a notoriously slow learner, I was back in the yard messing around with a bow and arrow. The arrow had a big, blunt, rubber tip that was used for whacking things. What things? I have no idea what the rubber tipped arrow was originally meant for but anything shot out of a bow is probably going to do some serious whacking.

I’m whacking this, I’m whacking that…cans, trees, old toys and then sitting in my line of sight like the profile of a buffalo nickel was…

…a squirrel.

For God’s sake wildlife, can’t you see this is a demiliterized zone? Did you just see me chase that robin around for 4 hours? And again I applied the same logic as before…very far away, it’s only a rubber arrow, I’ll probably miss by a mile, what could it hurt, and ‘thunk’…

I whacked the squirrel right in the side of the head and knocked it out cold.

“Oh no, oh no! What are you doing?”, I’m screaming all the way up there thinking I had now ended the life of an innocent fur-ball who was foolish enough to come in my yard and my heart is banging out of my chest. About the time I got within 10 feet of the relaxed rodent, he came to, jumped up and took off, scaring the shit out of me in the process. “Geez, I can’t take anymore of this.”

That would be the last time I put any animals in harm’s way, and how did I know I was cured? I went hunting about a year later. I mean REAL deer hunting, with other hunters, with real guns and bad intentions. But I went because my mother was going with her boyfriend and I was along because tin cans were said to be in the area.

The first day in camp I annihilated an entire village of Campbell cans with a Winchester .32 Special. They never had a chance and ended up labeless and full of holes.

Then came the next morning and I was supposed to go out and hunt deer, so they handed me a World War II issue 30-30 Carbine and off I went to ‘bag’ me a deer, except I just prayed (seriously, prayed) that no deer would get within a 1000 yards of me. I even walked loud and occasionally whistled and sung songs just so they’d know I was coming.

Then, as I walked out of a wooded area into a snowy meadow I caught something out of the corner of my eye and, oh shit, there was a doe standing completely still, sideways, staring at me. We were maybe a 100 feet away and I froze, never lifting my gun and just staring back at the doe until I just looked away, pretended that never happened and kept on walking.

Fortunately, there was no one else around to see my magnificent lack of hunting nerve and I went back to camp claiming  to have never seen a deer the entire time. The next day I went back to stalking soup cans and life was good again.

I never went hunting again and, to this day, when I see a spider in the house I capture it with a glass and a bar coaster, take it out on our balcony and let it free, albeit 5 floors up (did you know they float?). Whatever it is that makes me repulsed by killing something, it’s a pretty strong force.

Maybe I’m a pansy, maybe I’m a Quaker and don’t know it, but my constitution refuses to allow me to find fulfillment in hunting something that’s not hunting me.

I do, however, still get an itchy trigger finger everytime I go down the soup aisle at the grocery store.

From the ages of about 9 to 12 I used to go with my mother to visit my Great Aunt Louise at her cabin in Brainard, Minnesota. I loved Aunt Louise and looked forward to seeing her in the summer.

By the time I hit 12, two major things had changed my summer vacation plans…one being my hormones and the other being Aunt Louise’s marriage to Dan, a local farmer, so we spent part of the time at the cabin and the other at Dan’s farm which, city boy me, found charming for all sorts of odd reasons.

I liked the cows and I bought into the haircut with a bowl on my head, and I loved the hay bailer, even more so because I got to use a bailing hook to snag the bails. That bailing hook made me feel like a real roughneck because it took strength to grab those bails and haul them up on the wagon. If I could do that, I must be a tough guy, eh?

There was only one part of the farm that I just couldn’t deal with and all my good intentions at helping out Uncle Dan were no match for the reality of the silo. The silo was a repository for organic waste such as corn cobs and then, over time, it turned to compost and an effective fertilizer. What I was not prepared for was the odor.

It was stifling and the fact that we had to get inside the silo with pitch forks meant that you had to suck up that hideous methane smell the entire time you were working and stepping out of the silo to fresh air was like coming up, gasping for a breath, after an all-to-deep underwater dive.

Eventually, standing knee deep in what amounted to nature’s crap, I totally begged off the project and told Uncle Dan that I just couldn’t take it anymore and he, being sympathetic to my uncalloused urban life, let me off the hook.

Most people don’t consider the simple luxury of ‘air’ but spend some time standing in a silo and you will!

Of course, now, what to do? Aunt Louise was doing some ‘canning’ in the kitchen and Dan was braving the silo and I had squat for entertainment but things would soon get a whole lot better down on the farm.

Sitting in the front yard, contemplating the mystery of grass, my newly minted 12-year-old hormones couldn’t believe their crazy good luck when two neighboring farm girls rode up on their horses, looking like a pair of Elizabeth Taylor’s in National Velvet.

We exchanged queries about where they lived and where I came from and how old we were (they were the same age) and so on, until we agreed to hang out for the afternoon and scout out some of the nooks and crannies of Dan’s farm. Specifically, we fooled around in the barn hayloft, flinging ourselves down the mountains of hay bails and generally burning up excess energy, stopping occasionally to talk about what it was like living on a farm.

They were cute girls and, on this day, it was clear that this beat the shit out of hanging with my buddies back home. As I regaled them with my bailing hook adventures, hoping to score some ‘impress’ points, one of the girls asked if I’d like to ride her horse and so, faced with the cowboy imperative, I said, “Sure, I’ll take a spin”, spoken like I’d just finished a 13 city rodeo tour.

Naturally, as false bravado will do to a person, I was in trouble because I hadn’t a clue on how to handle a horse. The closest I’d been to anything resembling a horse was one of those Shetland pony rides that go ploddingly slow in a circle while a handler holds the reigns and the only way you could hurt yourself on one of those things would be to hurl yourself headfirst into a passing fence post.

This was not a Shetland pony and I was going to have to fake the whole thing because my new hormones expected a lot out of me and you don’t want to blow a chance to impress girls, especially on one of the first times out.

I’d seen enough Roy Rogers serials to know my first move was a foot in the stirrups but after that it got a little confusing because the horse took about 3 steps forward and threw my balance off. I didn’t recall Trigger pulling that stunt on Roy so I took another shot at it and, sure enough, the stunt horse took another 3 steps and I couldn’t get over the saddle and fell on my rear.

This was not going well but the girls seemed determined to help get me on the horse and so the prettiest one held the reigns while I launched myself into the saddle. O.K., it was seriously humiliating that she did that and my inner Roy Rogers had to have Dale Evans hold the horse still for him, but at least I was in the saddle and ready to ride.

She quickly handed me the reigns and the horse bolted like he’d been shot from one of those circus cannons and I was barely, and I mean barely hanging on to the saddle horn (I’d already dropped the reigns) as the beast headed for a low lying branch of a tree in a clear effort to dump my sorry ass off of his back. Saving him the trouble I jumped off the saddle about 2 seconds before I would have been forcibly removed and rolled about 15 feet.

Well, the girls were hysterical, laughing so hard they could barely make it over to see if I was alright and when they finally got there it was obvious from the looks on their faces that they knew the outcome of my ride even before I’d said, “yes”. The joke was on Mr. Bigshot and it had a punchline to remember.

Later that night when I was thinking about the time I’d spent with the girls and my inglorious ending, I had one of those childhood epiphanies that, if you’re paying attention, can help prepare you for the next phase of your life and my stream of consciousness went a little like this:

‘I really like girls…sometimes girls are tricky…I really liked those girls…my butt hurts…I liked those girls…I wonder why they…I like girls…this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought…why do I like these girls?…I like girls.’

Of the many experiences one can rack up over the years, sometimes it’s nature’s unexpected revelations that become the most memorable. Your first tornado, your first look at birth, your first foray into Poison Ivy, but it was the onset of puberty that gave me an unparalleled hormonal triumph that I would never forget.

You simply don’t see it coming. You’re strolling along, all little boyish, and bang, girls are suddenly on the map and life has a new complication. Pig Latin and mud pies should have been enough of a challenge but the gravitational pull of the female screwed up the calm that was my childhood ignorance and replaced it with a call to action.

If you’re going through puberty, the times, as Bob Dylan once said, “they are a changin’”. For a heterosexual boy, it’s not only your female classmates that look different, it’s every cultural and social bookmark and that definitely includes celebrities. My friend Charlie took a strong interest in young actress Haley Mills and, believe me, it had nothing to do with her thespian gifts. Personally, I was mesmerized by a television trailer for a new movie about to hit local theaters.

Gypsy

I used to go to the movie theater a lot on Saturdays, usually by myself because I’d had a rotten experience with a friend who kept getting up every 5 minutes to take a piss all through The Ten Commandments. Maybe it was the suggestibility of the Red Sea or maybe the kid had a bladder the size of a peanut, I don’t know, but it was distracting as hell and I decided that I’d be going alone from then on.

There were risks associated with that though and they came from groups of kids who thought it was hilarious to pop somebody in the back of the head with a Milk Dud or kick the back of your chair. If you were alone, then you didn’t have the power of the wolf pack so they preyed on your solidarity. I ignored their idiocy as best I could and was at least thankful that I didn’t have to deal with my ex-movie buddy, the pissing machine.

I watched that TV trailer with stealthy interest because I didn’t want my mother or anyone else to get the drift that I was heading over there on the weekend and plop down a quarter (that’s what it cost for the matinée then) to see the exciting conclusion of Natalie Wood’s stripper stroll across the stage.

I was just a boy without a complete understanding of what was going on with me sexually, and the lure of Wood’s character Gypsy Rose Lee singing “Let Me Entertain You” and possibly doffing her duds drew me like a moth to the flame. I had to get to that movie and find out what happened where the trailer tease left off!

In 1963 Natalie Wood was on the cover of every movie fan magazine around and already firmly established, in my mind, as a pubescent icon so the lure was almost bigger than Christmas except that I failed to understand just exactly what Gypsy was. From the TV ad I had it boiled down to the story of a stripper’s rise to stardom but, of course, it’s a tad more than that.

Gypsy is a musical that opened up on Broadway in 1959 and was adapted for the screen 4 years later with the aforementioned Natalie Wood and the venerable actress Rosaland Russell as her mother. Yes, Gypsy is about Ms. Rose Lee, the good girl turned legendary stripper but it’s more about the family as headed by the matriarchal ‘Rose’, played by Russell. The overriding point is, it’s a musical.

It’s about singing and dancing and drama and, for God’s sake, a lot of things that had nothing to do with the prurient interests of a 12 year-old. Still, there was Natalie Wood and, after getting there and having to wade through the ‘early years of vaudeville’, I focused on the eventual moment, as promised by the trailer, where Wood would let it all hang out and a young boy’s dreams would be realized.

I kept the troops patient but on ‘ready alert’ as the tale trudged on until that seminal moment in the story when one of the other strippers was unable to go on and there was Natalie Wood, volunteered by her own overbearing mother to come in off the bench and save the day. The anticipation was more than I could stand and the troops were antsy. It was finally going to happen.

Wood was a little hesitant but off she went and she hadn’t gotten more than 3 bars into the song when so did I.

To my complete surprise, with no encouragement, no go ahead command from the general; my troops had taken it upon themselves to charge ahead and now, as exciting as it all was, it was over in a flash…and I was left with a tricky logistical problem.

All through the remaining part of the film (yes, I stayed for the whole thing) I tried to figure out how I was going to stand up and walk out of the theater without a hundred kids pointing at the crotch of my Chinos and laughing. I couldn’t assess the extent of the visible damage in the dark but my imagination gave me cause for alarm.

It was summer so I couldn’t be helped by a winter coat and all I really had left was an empty popcorn box and a few Good n’ Plenty candies, so when the lights came up I moved quickly to the exit using the popcorn box as a shield; the rationalization being that I was taking the rest with me for the walk home (I always had to have an alibi that made sense to me and that one did).

By the time I had finally gotten in the clear, free from the groups of other kids and on my way back home I didn’t need the box anymore and it was time to try and place into context what had happened back there.

I had spent the afternoon watching a musical about a stripper but even though it wasn’t what I had expected, I had done something monumental, and I did it with no hands and a mouth full of popcorn.

I had pulled an ‘unassisted’; something rarely experienced by anyone over the age of enlightenment; something only the hormones of a crazed teen can do and while I was technically a pre-teen, it was close enough. My only concern was that I might have too loose a cannon and would this thing be going off every time a pretty girl walked by? Would I have to spend the rest of my life walking around with a popcorn box?

But that was it, a one and only unique event, never to be duplicated in my life and destined for my own mental scrapbook. The Stripper, starring Joanne Woodward, came along that same year (she even had balloons!), but it wasn’t the same, because it wasn’t Natalie Wood, whose presence I embued with almost mythical proportions for her powers to move me from the silver screen through a simple musical.

Let’s face it. You’re not supposed to be that excited about a musical that once starred Ethel Merman on Broadway, but that was Natalie Wood, master of seduction and temptress of young boys of the ’60’s.