Bright Lights, Small City

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I spent most of my childhood in Bisbee, Arizona, a small mining town tucked into the Mule Mountains 90 miles southeast of Tucson. Many people made a decent living working in the mines; some, like my father, lost their lives there. The mines closed in the mid-1970s and the miners have been replaced by hippie artist types. One can get a bumper sticker: “Bisbee, AZ. It’s Like Mayberry on Acid.”

Living in Bisbee wasn’t bad at all. We had a Safeway grocery store, a movie theater and a Dairy Queen—all hallmarks of civilization. But every so often we’d trek two hours north and west to “the big city” of Tucson to buy groceries a little cheaper or to shop for stuff at Sears. Highway 80 took us out of town, through Tombstone, St. David and Benson until it dead-ended at Interstate 10. From there we drove the modern, four-lane into Tucson.

Sometimes we’d spend the day with one of two families we knew. Barbara and Art lived in South Tucson. There was a sign propped up against the wall in Art’s garage—a cartoon worm with a bow tie, top hat and a big smile saying, “Howdy, Folks!” My sister and I would play with their three daughters, Troy, Debbie and Laura, while the adults did whatever adults do when kids aren’t bugging the crap out them. One evening, when we were getting ready to leave, I put my fingers in the wrong place and the back door closed around them. It hurt like hell and prompted a trip to Tucson Medical Center’s ER, where an x-ray showed nothing broken.

Woody and Dolores lived farther east, near the intersection of East 22nd and Wilmot Road, where the Oxford Plaza was built in 1960, making it the second largest shopping center in Tucson. The backyards of all the houses were enclosed in 6ft cinder-block walls that opened to an alley running by a drainage ditch, known as a “wash.” Pantano Wash, a couple of miles away, is a much larger canal, usually dry as a bone until monsoon season, when sudden thunderstorms beget raging torrents carrying all sorts of debris and the occasional car driven by some dumb-ass who didn’t think the water was that deep or powerful.

Their older son, Jim was in high school and starting to become rebellious. He had a poster of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet on the wall of his bedroom, the infamous Phi Zappa Krappa. Richard was closer in age to me, so we hung out together, playing in the back yard or prowling the neighborhood. My sister usually wasn’t included but I’m sure she was around since my mother would not have left her home alone.

Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time, so even in the summer it’s dark by about 7:00-7:30pm. When it was time to leave we’d pile into the back seat of our Chevy for the long trip home. I’d usually look out the window until we turned off the Interstate at Benson. There was a long house outside of town that, when the lights shone through the full-length windows looked a lot like the Wright brothers’ first airplane.

There was a lot of nothing along desert highways back then and even less traffic. Sierra Vista was a small speck of light 35 miles away—not the massive beacon it has become. I’d lay down on the back seat and listen to the soft rumble of tires on the road, interrupted only by the headlight dimmer, a small cylindrical switch in the floor near the driver’s left foot. Ka-Click. The lights would dim for an approaching car. Ka-Click. The high-beams came back on as the other car passed by. Punctuation in the ongoing conversation between the car and the asphalt that continued until we were back home.

Growing Old: A Warning

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You’re young and you pray to God it will never happen to you. Like Pete Townsend, you think “hope I die before I get old.” Well, it’s not likely, but it isn’t all that bad. How you look at things changes as you get older.

  • You can blame being a cranky son-of-a-bitch on getting old when, really, you’ve always been a cranky son-of-a-bitch.
  • You lose all your filters and just don’t give a shit what anyone thinks. Except for your wife. You will always care about what she thinks because she is far more likely than your offspring to pick your nursing home. Be careful before you bite that hand.
  • You will finally understand that age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill and you won’t hesitate to use the latter, judiciously, of course.
  • That waitress may have bodacious ta-tas and a fine ass that make your loins stir, but she’s got Jell-O between her ears and your loins will soon be napping. Yes, she can ride you all night, but will she ride in the ambulance with you when you have a heart attack? Or will she be willing to wipe your ass when you are too old and feeble to do it yourself. The woman you’ve been married to for fifty years will do it without thinking.
  • Good sex is based on quality, not quantity, but a good night’s sleep trumps any sex every time.
  • You turned into your father when you asked your kids, “What is that crap you’re listening to?” But the music your kids and grandkids listen to really is. Whining coffee house singers pale next to Jagger, Plant, Daltry and Bowie. Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross and Grace Slick would eat alive those breathy waifs who sing as if they have chronic lung disease. So would Frank, Dino, Tony, Mel, Nat, Bobby, Sarah, Carmen, Ella and a whole bunch of guys and gals you thought you were too cool for when you were a teenager.
  • You suffer from CRS (Can’t Remember Shit) Syndrome because your brain is a sink with a broken garbage disposal. It’s filled with mostly useless crap that crowds out important stuff like: Why did I come into this room? Where’s my cell phone? Occasionally, flipping the switch stirs the garbage long enough for answers to filters through.
  • You will tell younger people stories they’ve heard several times before, even though you swore you would never do that when you got old.
  • You proudly tell everyone about your colonoscopy and think anyone who’s afraid to get one is a pussy. You really liked your colonoscopy, mostly because they gave you really great drugs and you can’t remember any of it. Kinda like living through the late ‘60s.
  • Everything has been aching for so long that you don’t notice anymore. You have little patience for people under 40 whining about a cold or a stubbed toe and growl, “Suck it up!”
  • You will look back on your youth with amazement and shame, pondering how stupid you were to think you knew everything. You’ll have far more questions than answers and discover the answers are far more elusive.

When you’re young you think you have all the time in the world. Make the most of it because the ticking gets faster and louder. You hit 35; you’ve got a mortgage, a family, and a mountain of debt. Then you blink a couple of times and find yourself on the downside of fifty, sitting on the couch watching TV, wondering what the hell happened to the last 20 years, and thinking, “Golden years,” my ass!

Less is More …More or Less

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NOTE: I left my writers group over creative differences. They demanded “more emotion” in my writing, but when I gave them the following, they didn’t like it. Be careful what you wish for.

In 1992 John Grey told us “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” This revelation did not surprise any man— most of them didn’t read the book in the first place—but it was a shock to most women. Yes, men and women are different but despite the latter’s fervent wishes to the contrary, we men are fairly simple creatures who don’t require endless analysis to understand.

Men learn quickly that women are mysterious, complex creatures but not much else. We know they have boobs. We know they possess that Holy Grail “down there,” our bumbling quest for which is eternal. And we know that saying the wrong thing however innocent will get us into a shitload of trouble. We also like to piss them off sometimes by doing something they expressly told us NOT to do, because it’s fun in an adolescent way. But we’ve reconciled never understanding the female psyche and moved on.

Women find men to be exasperating, lacking in self-awareness, and devoid of that most-coveted but rare attribute, “emotion.” That’s not entirely true. We understand and express a few emotions—anger, humor, sarcasm, lust, and the overwhelming joy that comes from vicariously crushing your buddy’s dreams in sudden-death overtime.

We bury our feelings in alcohol, drugs, work and manly pursuits like football, hunting and Call of Duty until ulcers or a heart attack grant us a reprieve from our stoicism. We don’t run naked through the forest howling at the moon, join drum circles, or pour our hearts out in embarrassing songs like “Sometimes When We Touch,” the sound of which still makes me cringe.

Men don’t want to get in touch with their inner child; we’d rather have had the opportunity to yank the little bastard out to warn him about the shit he’s gonna face in life. We do not want to wallow in, nor publicly express, the soul-searing pain most of us have experienced during our lives, having learned a long time ago that doing so invites the rebuke, “That sounds like a personal problem to me.” Or, as a woman I knew in college told me, “Nobody likes a downer,” a gut punch that said in no uncertain terms, “You’re on your own.”

In the 1980s, women said they wanted men to be like Alan Alda, comfortable with emotional intimacy. Not true! Women really wanted men who acknowledged women’s emotions, not men with their own matching set of emotional luggage. “How can you take care of me when you are sad/depressed/angry/scared/hopeless?” So, in order to successfully navigate the minefields of personal relationships, our innermost feelings stayed buried, taken out occasionally in front of a therapist for a hundred bucks an hour, or with a bartender for far less.

I spent the first forty-some years of my life wearing my emotions like a badge of desperation, an emotional train wreck. I look back on those times with a great deal of shame and humiliation. I may not live there anymore, but I remember the address. And the phone number.

All that changed when the pain of my affliction outweighed the stigma of acknowledging it and I sought absolution through Prozac, leveling out the highs and lows. I abandoned New Age music’s comforting vulnerability for jazz’s impenetrable complexity. I bade farewell to Bogie and Bergman, embracing the likes of Stallone and Stone. Disengaging from my emotional side made coping easier. I saved my soul but lost a part of me, for better or worse.

Writing may be therapeutic for many—in the past it has helped me—but I’ve achieved a balance I’m reluctant to disturb. I am neither Henry David Thoreau nor Nicholas Sparks. I do not want to “lead (a life) of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in (me).” I don’t want to resurrect demons previously banished or go back to the edge of the abyss. Mostly I don’t want the existential vulnerability of my previous life. I’ll walk down old paths carefully, breaching some walls while leaving others undisturbed, but in my own good time.

Yes, men and women are different. We have feelings but we’d rather die than admit it, so please stop asking us. Our inner child will thank you.

Roberta Joan

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Winter in the Midwest is something to be endured. After the faux joy of the holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s—January settles in like an uninvited relative who won’t leave. Mind you, it’s not the cold or the snow. It’s the continually cloudy days that turn into weeks, then months, sucking all the life out of people until they are listless, colorless and humorless. A brief warm-up turns plowed piles of soft snow into crushed ice, and melts just enough of the ground cover so the landscape is several shades of brown somewhere between dormant and dead. Spring is still light-years away.

Sometimes there’s a break just in time to prevent a complete breakdown, but it’s half-hearted. The clouds stretching to the western horizon filter the sunlight just enough to rob the clear eastern sky of that truly rejuvenating blue, making it look like a backdrop from Davey and Goliath. Occasionally it’s so warm you’d swear the seasons were running in reverse and it was mid-October again, but the dried cornstalks were harvested long ago. Days like this are meant to be savored like a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, before the slowly suffocating grey rolls back in.

It was a time like this when you discovered her and the music—that high, clear, girlish voice; the oddly tuned guitar; and the words that spoke to you. She sang about cities and taxis, seagulls and pirates, darkness and redemption, and the child she gave up. She drove your roommate crazy; he didn’t understand and just looked at you with anger and frustration. But you and she were kindred spirits.

You moved on and lived alone in a Depression-era bungalow that smelled of fresh paint and old linoleum with a tinge of the Devil’s breath from the stove’s pilot light. It was okay; she made it easy to drift into a place of comfort and solitude. At least you weren’t in a beat-up New York City flat with a clanging radiator and millions of others “leading lives of quiet desperation.”

That was before the jackals tore at her soul, leaving her wounded and bewildered. Before the string of unsatisfying paramours made her jaded and cynical about love. Before the anger that could not be assuaged, given life in an animal roar that both roused and terrified.

Her words transcended mere poetry; they were exquisite, profound. She wrote of “broken trees and elephant ivories,” and “cold blue steel and sweet fire.” She peered into your ravaged mind when she wrote:

So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean
They trickle through your leaky plans
Another dream over the dam
And you’re lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too

Time was relentless, passing ever more rapidly with each year. The wounds healed over; the scars faded. Anger, always destructive and exhausting, gave way to resolution, if not acquiescence. Both of you seemed to find a quiet peace, having lived your lives in your own ways.

Classic Christmas Television

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Christmas shows during television’s Golden Age were different because the rules were a tad more stringent.

The National Association of Broadcasters developed the Code of Practices for
Television Broadcasters in 1951, defining ethical standards for television programming. Many of us remember seeing the Seal of Good Practice at the end of a show’s closing credits. Among those standards was that “(n)ews reporting should be factual, fair and without bias” and “should be telecast in a manner as to avoid panic and unnecessary alarm.” Ah, the good old days.

So Baby Boomers grew up with variety shows as television staples during the 1950s and 1960s. Every year we looked forward to those shows’ Christmas specials: Bing Crosby, Red Skelton, Danny Kaye, Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett, Dinah Shore,  Andy Williams, with and without The Osmond Brothers, and the somewhat bland Perry Como. Bob Hope and the USO did an annual Christmas show with the troops in Vietnam until 1972. We all sat on the national couch in the Great American living room collectively enjoying the once-a-year rituals.

But there was one quirk that really made Christmas week special.

Many people are probably unaware of an unwritten rule: no one died on prime-time television programs during Christmas week. Dramatic shows relied on comic relief—often subtle, sometimes uncharacteristic—to meet that requirement. Combat!’s 1962 Christmas night episode, The Prisoner, featured Shecky Greene as a conniving soldier whose scamming gets him paired up with a bombastic colonel played by Keenan Wynn. That was a lot different from “Newborn King,” the 2011 NCIS Christmas episode during which Gibbs delivers a baby in the back seat of a car while ZIva wastes several bad guys in a shoot-out.

Many of the classic movies and Christmas specials from my childhood appear every year, sometimes ad nauseum, as when AMC runs “White Christmas” back-to-back to back. But there are a few that have faded into obscurity.

Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951-1966). Composed by Gian Carlo Menotti and inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Adoration of the Magi, this one-act opera is about a crippled shepherd boy and his mother whom the Three Wise Men visit on their way to Bethlehem. It was done live until 1963, the first time it was videotaped, much to Menotti’s consternation.

Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962). The well-known voices of Jim Backus,
Morey Amsterdam, Jack Cassidy, Paul Frees and others came together in this animated, musical version of Dicken’s story. “All Alone in the World” is the plaintive song young Ebenezer Scrooge sings when the Ghost of Christmas Past takes old Scrooge down memory lane.

Twilight Zone: Night of the Meek (December 23, 1960). Art Carney is a department store Santa fired on Christmas Eve. He finds a bag in the street with a seemingly endless supply of gifts which he gives to the needy kids, and finds redemption. The 1985 Twilight Zone remake with Richard Mulligan and William “Richard Thornburg” Atherton just wasn’t the same.

The Story of Christmas: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Roger Wagner Chorale (1963). I described this in my last post. Tennessee Ernie Ford Enterprises finally released it on DVD in 2006. Here’s “What Child Is This,” the beginning of the Christmas Gospel according to Luke.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). I was fortunate enough to see this debut, before advertisers chopped it up into the little pieces we see now. If watching Linus explain the meaning of Christmas doesn’t choke you up, I have a load of Kingsford for your stocking.

Rich Little’s Christmas Carol (1978). Rich Little did a one-man version,
impersonating famous people for the cast: W.C. Fields as Scrooge; Paul Lynde as Bob Cratchit; Richard Nixon as Jacob Marley; Truman Capote as Tiny Tim, and many others. My favorite lines:

Marley/Nixon: Don’t you believe me???

Scrooge/W.C. Fields: No. And neither did anyone else.

The Littlest Angel (1969): I mention this one only because of the sick feeling I got watching Johnny Whitaker (Jody Patterson-Davis on Family Affair), plunge off a cliff to his death. I read the book to my kids, a much more pleasant experience.

I’d like to know if anyone else remembers seasonal and/or regional favorites growing up.