Hero worship and other things...

Growing up, my take on things was that there were actually two worlds.

Really.

I thought there was the world I lived in with my mom and dad and two sisters on Chicago’s south side. And then there was the world I experienced in old television shows and old timey movies on the television. For the longest time I thought that my neighborhood and everyone and everything I knew was sort of an individual cell of the overall world. Like a single kernel on an ear of corn.

I thought that Wally and Beaver Cleaver were real. I thought that Fred and Ethyl Mertz really lived one floor up from the Ricardos. The Brady Bunch really lived in that cool house and that there really was an advertising agency in New York called McMahon and Tate.

I used to marvel at how kids lived in movies and on television. The Little Rascals had some of the coolest clubhouses ever. Wally and the Beaver may have had to share a bedroom, but they had their very own bathroom. Kids had paper routes or stocked the shelves at the local grocery to make money. All the kids, even the fat ones, could play on the school football or basketball team and they got a uniform with their name stitched on the back. Moms wore high heels and loads of jewelry while cleaning the house and cooking the dinner, and after dads got home and had time to down a few glasses of scotch and browse though the mail and the newspaper headlines, he would join his family at the dinner table, not the kitchen table, and he’d still be wearing his suit and tie.

For the longest time I thought my family, neighborhood and life were the exception to the rule—especially when it came to heroes. In old movies and on television, people, young and old, would have posters and pictures up on the walls of Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein, JFK, Martin Luther King Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, and the like.

Setting the Way-Back machine thirty-five years or so I've tried to remember who I had up on my wall.

Urmm.

Well, I remember for sure I had a little mini poster of the Groovy Ghoulies. Umm. I think for a while I had a picture of Micky Dolenz of The Monkees taped up—only because I thought he was the funniest of the four—with Mike Nesmith coming in a close second. Oh, I think I had my membership to the Archie Fan Club up over my bed.

Does this mean that I didn’t necessarily have any heroes growing up?

I guess so.

In the late 60s and early 70s astronauts were pretty popular, but there were a lot of them to keep track of. It’s not like they sent them up alone, so you’d only have one name to remember--they were shooting them up three at a time. I never had any real aspirations that I might one day be an Apollo astronaut. Even as a kid I was something of a realist and I figured they were never going to make hatches in the command modules big enough for me to squeeze through.

I was never a massive sports fan but we were a Cubs household and I grew kind of fond of Ernie Banks. I liked it when he came up to bat or snagged a fly ball out of the air. I admired him, and I guess if someone had given me an Ernie Banks poster I might have taped it up to the wall, but that never happened.

He wasn’t famous or anything, but I always kind of had heroic feelings about my best friend, Donnie Draves’ father. Donnie’s father was a carpenter who worked at the General Mills plant in Chicago. I could never fathom why a cereal company would need a carpenter. I liked Donnie’s dad so much because he built things. Most weekends he was in his garage workshop sawing and nailing something together.

Mind you, I was no stranger to carpentry. At least two of my mother’s brothers were carpenters. There was my Uncle Paul, who was a massive bear of a man who genuinely filled a room when he entered it. He had a booming voice that would scare a bulldog off a meat truck, and when he got frustrated he would breath in deeply through his mouth and then exhale through his nose and it sounded like you were in a wind tunnel. He smoked a pipe on occasion, which is, I’m only just now realizing as I’m typing this, the reason I took up the pipe at an early age. My other uncle that was a carpenter was my Uncle Beefy. His real name was Joe, but he’d been given the nickname Beefy at an early age and it stuck. He was a loud man as well, but gentle as a kitten. He was also as round as a beach ball. From any angle you looked at him he was round. My wife takes great glee at the fact that one of my mom’s other brothers is my Uncle Willie, who is a butcher. She thinks it’s hilarious that Willy was the butcher and Beefy was the carpenter.

The thing that was attractive about Donnie’s dad was that he had a massive amount of patience for us kids and he always seemed to be building stuff for us. For example, there was an empty lot on the north side of the three-story building that Donnie’s family lived in. Empty lots were a rarity in my neighborhood. These were row houses that Pullman built for the workers in his Chicago railroad factories (it used to be that if you wanted to ride the train in luxury you rode it in a Pullman car), and each butted up to the next. Scars on the sides of Donnie’s building indicated that once upon a time there might have been a house standing where the lot was, and perhaps it had been destroyed by fire or some other calamity. Fires were a rarity in that kind of housing because of the rampant use of brick construction. It wasn’t until we moved away that I learned that houses could also be made of wood.

So anyway, back to the empty lot. It was naturally a bit on the sunken side, so when winter hit Chicago like a sledgehammer and the temperatures dropped, Donnie’s father would open the garden hose in the lot and before long it was filled up with water. The next morning we had our own private ice rink. Most of us couldn’t skate so he built a wide ramp with stairs that he ran water over until it became an ice ramp sturdy enough to hold a sled full of kids.

The summers in Chicago were just as brutal as the winters, so further back in the empty lot, approximately where the garage would have been, he built a wooden form and had a concrete slab poured. Once it was dry he built a wooden platform that he erected a swimming pool on top of. The icing on the cake was when he had a truckload of sand brought down the alley and he surrounded the pool with it.

The man was very cool and I admired him a lot. Maybe too much. It wasn’t until years later that I came to realize how hard my father was working to support my family, while I was off watching Donnie’s father design and build a multi level birdhouse for the roof of the garage. As I’ve mentioned here before, my dad probably only made it through the eighth grade before he had to go out and work to support his family. As a man he worked on ice trucks, hauling hundred pound blocks of ice into stores and taverns. He also worked alongside a lot of uncles in one of Chicago’s famous meatpacking houses. Somehow, I never really learned how, he got involved with radio and television repair. He taught himself and then got an entry-level job at a shop where he learned the rest of what he knew. For a period of what must have been a year or two I never saw my dad. He was out the door before I woke and he got home after I was in bed. During that period he was working at the TV shop by day and then going and pumping gas at night. This was in an effort for us to move out of the city and out to the suburbs where my parents could finally own their own home.

In retrospect, I can’t think of a single person I admire more than my father. He never raised his voice or his hand to me. I got a little further than he did in school, but much of what makes me a moderately successful writer comes from what made him a moderately successful television repairman. It’s all about problem solving. He would take the back off the television set or radio and fiddle around inside, switching tubes and transformers around until he made it work; much the same way I hack away at a story idea, removing bits and switching things around until it works.

My father also had the unique ability to befriend anyone he would meet. I’d walk over to where he was and he’d be talking to a grocery store cashier, gas station attendant, or just someone standing in line behind him at the store like they were long lost cousins. He always had a smile on his face and a good word for anyone he met. I guess he had a right to be a happy man. He had risen up beyond his roots, raised a healthy family, and as far as I know, didn’t have a single enemy.

I’m not saying that he was the best father in the world. He didn’t wear a suit and tie to the dinner table. He never took me to a single baseball game. He snored like the whistle on a steam locomotive. Every day when he came home from work he’d have a couple of beers and a nip from the Crown Royal whisky bottle, and then nap until dinner was ready. But damn, he was a good guy.

In the mid-80s, when I couldn’t get arrested in New York, let alone sell a story, I came back to the Midwest and my dad offered me a place to stay. He had sold the house and was living a quiet life in a reasonably quiet trailer park (not the type you see on COPS). During the two years that followed my dad and I had a chance to do a lot of catching up. We would sit and talk all night long. At that point my mom had been dead a few years and he was keeping the company of a woman he’d recently met at church.

Of course, when I say church I don’t mean Church. If I’m not mistaken I think it was St. Ann’s Church on Ridge Road in Lansing, IL. St. Ann’s was technically our family church, although I can only remember going there once or twice. (We were fallen Catholics and we couldn’t get up) Maybe this happens in churches all over the world, but the evening mass at St. Ann’s was at the time something of a lonely hearts club. There were a dozen or so people, mostly retirees, who would follow along with the sermon or nap silently, and then afterwards they would head out together and hit the coffee shops or bars for a night of chewing the fat.

Anyway, my dad would go out for coffee or dinner or drinks with his lady friend and then come home to find me slumped over my IBM Selectric, my muse MIA, and starved for company. He’d pop a beer and I’d pop a Pepsi and we would talk the night away. I am so deeply grateful for those talks we had. I got to know the man who was my father.

My mom had died of cancer, so we had a heads up that her time was short. That wasn’t the case with my dad. No time for goodbyes. He had been out shopping for a birthday present for me (talk about guilt) when a young lady asked him for help starting her car. He was happy to comply, but while doing so suffered a heart attack that killed him. The kick in the ass was that he had called me at work earlier that day to talk about something, but I cut him off and told him I was kind of busy. He was all apologetic and said he’d talk to me later.

The thing was, I wasn’t busy. I just didn’t feel like talking to him at the time. Again, talk about guilt.

My sister Nancy called me at work, later that day, close to quitting time. One of the guys I worked with had just given me a birthday present. It was a Chicago street sign from Schiller Street. When Nancy called she told me that dad was hurt and that I should get to the hospital in a hurry. I had driven to work that day, so I headed out to the car with my Schiller Street sign under my arm, hoping a cop wouldn’t happen to be passing by. It was a half hour drive to the hospital and I knew deep in my heart what I would find there. My sister’s tone had said it all. I managed to hold it all together pretty well during the drive until the radio played that Bob Seeger song ‘Like a Rock’. Then the waterworks began. I was crying so hard it’s surprising that I didn’t run off the road. By the time I reached the hospital he had long since been declared dead.

Shortly after my mother died I was kind of hung up over the fact that I hadn’t officially told her that I loved her before she died in her hospital bed. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Our family wasn’t big in the touchy/feely/huggy department, and as a rule we didn’t use the ‘L’ word very often. A friend of mine, Patricia Nowlan (who is Nowlan-Tunberg now, I believe), was quick to set me straight. She told me that no matter what was said or wasn’t said, if I loved my mother, she knew it. Words were meaningless if there was nothing behind them.

I pretty certain that I never once told my father that I loved him, but I am one thousand percent certain that as he was stretched out on the icy parking lot pavement, with that chainsaw ripping up his left arm toward his heart, he knew his son loved him, just like I know he loved me.

I guess heroes aren’t that hard to find after all. I will die a very happy man if I wind up a fraction of the man my father was.

I know it sounds a tiny bit macabre, but whenever I end a telephone conversation, especially with someone I don’t see or talk to very often, I always let them know how I feel. Because, well, you just never know.

I must tell my daughter and my wife a hundred times a day how much I love them. I never get tired of saying it or hearing it.

In fact, it’s 3:21 in the middle of the a.m., but as soon as I’m done writing this I’m going to go wake up Dakota and Val and remind them how much I love them. They’ll probably get mad and throw something at me, but it’s worth the risk, right?

Easier than falling off a blog...

I blog because Stephen King told me to.

Well, sort of.

Years ago I read a quote by King that has stuck in my head for the past twenty years and which is more or less why I’m a writer today. To paraphrase him, “I write my stories for people to enjoy, sure, but mostly I write them just to get them out of my head. Writing down my stories keeps me from climbing up a water tower with a high-powered rifle to thin the idiots from the herd.”

I read that quote when I was in my early twenties. Back then I was a Community College dropout who was living at home and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I worked as a packaging designer for products in Sears’ kitchen and bath departments, and was a secret drinker (mild and sporadic but working my way up the ladder). One day my boss, Tom Murphy, was reading the hardcover of Stephen King’s The Stand. I asked him why he was going through all the effort of reading a fifty-pound book. He tossed me a paperback copy of King’s The Shining and later that night I understood.

I instantly connected with King because he made the effort to connect with me. He talked to me, not at me. I really liked that. For some reason I equated his writing to that of Stan Lee, the wunderkind at Marvel Comics, who helped create icons like Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and more.

When I was a wee lad the only comics we had in the house were Archies and Harvey. I had tried reading the occasional Superman or Batman comic over the years, but they always left me cold. The characters were flat and the storylines were unrealistic and had nothing to do with my life. My first encounter with Marvel Comics had the opposite effect. Stan Lee is legend for writing about characters with feet of clay. Everyday folk like you and me. Ordinary people sent flying into extraordinary situations. It could have just as easily been me that the radioactive spider bit, rather than Peter Parker. Or I could have been the one accidentally bombarded with radiation that releases the creature that lurks in all of us, if I’m pushed too far. Stan Lee and Stephen King were both on the same page, and I loved reading it.

Writers are strange folks. Or maybe they’re just ordinary, everyday folk who react to the world and what’s buzzing around in their heads in a different way. Each day I see dozens of situations or hear snippets of conversation that I think would be the basis for a good story, or at the very least a part of a good story. Or I’ll make some observation that I’ll forget about as soon as it passed through my mind, but instead of dropping into the garbage chute it keeps bouncing around inside my brain until I have to file it somewhere.

I’ll smell the neighbor firing up his backyard grill and that odor will trigger a memory I had when I was ten, when I heard the song Windy playing on the transistor radio while my dad was cooking some burgers on our charcoal grill in the backyard. The song Windy sticks in my mind because it was sung by Petula Clark, a British singer I always used to get mixed up with Lulu, the gal who sang the theme song to (as well as playing a minor role in) the ‘60s film classic, To Sir With Love. To Sir With Love will remind me of another Sidney Poitier classic, Lilies Of The Field.

I think for most people it would stop there, but not me. I’ll remember that Sidney Poitier also once stared in a movie with Tom Berenger, Shoot To Kill, and that Berenger starred in a different movie with Debra Winger called Betrayed that I saw with a friend while living in Staten Island. In the movie Winger and Berenger rob a small bank in Chicago which was the same bank I used to go to every Friday when I worked at a small printing place down the street. I slapped my friend on the leg and hissed that they were in my bank. A few years later I saw the Jodie Foster movie The Accused in the same theater. In the film she gets raped and the rapists get off pretty easily. I remember at the end of the movie when the lights came on I noticed I was the only man in the audience. All the women seemed to be glowering at me.

Just down the street from the theater was a building that once held a discount toy store. I remember browsing through the store one day and I found some toys for an animated series called The Bionic Six. I was in running to write a comic book series based on the animated show, so I bought as many of the toys as I could and shipped them to my editor in California, Valarie Jones, who is now my wife.

I think most people have the ability to step out of the stream of conscious early on, but not me. I’ll keep slogging on until the threads no longer connect to anything else, and then I’ll continue to chew on the whole mess over and over again, pulling story ideas out and recounting funny instances. I guess my brain was pretty gunked up before I started writing.

My niece is a writer and she’s a big proponent of writing in journals. I’ve tried this off an on over the years, but they’ve mostly turned out to be a place to park chunks of ideas and funny doodles. I’ve never been able to see the benefit of writing for myself. It would be like painting a picture and then stuffing it into a closet without showing it to any one. I know a lot of people do a lot of creative things and never share them, and I just don’t get it.

Maybe it’s that I like being paid for my writing, and if I’m looking to entertain myself, hey, reading a book is a lot easier than writing one. Or maybe my ego is so overgrown that I think every string of words that I lovingly craft should be available for all to see.

I guess that’s why I’m so fortunate that blogging came to be. It’s not paying work, no, but it’s not random scribblings in an ornately bound journal, either. You are reading this and being affected in some way, so that’s okay.

Unleashing the weird and randomly strung together thoughts that clog up my brain is certainly a cathartic experience. Plus it’s always fun to write without a copy editor or project manager looking over your shoulder. This is all about me. Well, me and you.

Vice, Vice, Baby...

Last night I was flipping around the channels and happened upon an episode of Entertainment Tonight. It used to be once upon a time that I loved that show. When I was a lad I think it was on every night right before primetime and I never missed an episode.

Something changed between then and now. Either the show is different or I am, either way, these days I equate watching an episode with getting a shard of glass jammed into my eye.

The thing that made me stop last night on ET was they were doing a fluff piece on the upcoming Miami Vice movie. They showed Colin Ferrell and Jamie Foxx learning how to shoot, duck, roll, and then shoot again, just like real cops NEVER do. Anyway, I like Colin Ferrell a lot (even though he has yet to be in a movie that harnesses his somber yet feral qualities) so I watched for a few minutes.

I’m very curious how the movie is going to fare at the box office. The camera loves Ferrell and Foxx, but neither of them has been strong enough to open an action movie.

I liked Miami Vice when it premiered on television back in the early 80s. I stopped watching after a few episodes because I never bought into the brand of smarminess Don Johnson was selling, Phillip Michael Thomas was such a un-actor to me that it was like there was an empty void on screen where his character was supposed to be, and Edward James Olmos mumbled all the time (he seems to make an effort to speak more clearly these days on Battlestar Galactica). But the show did have a kick ass pilot episode full of enough visual style to choke a grown man, and had opening credits to die for.

I haven’t seen an episode in over twenty years, but I remember the opening credits featured scenes of zoomy cigarette boats skipping over the water, helicopter shots of Miami’s interesting architecture, panoramic scenes of Miami’s nightlife shot from the left rear wheel well of a car, some jai li players in action, a naturally busty bikini girl walking past the camera with her assets in motion, some shots of Rico and Tubbs in action, and I believe the sequence ended with a pair of bathing beauties walking away for the camera. All this was set to a syntho-rock chunk of music with a thundering drum line.

The creator of the show and the director of the movie really blows hot and cold for me. Collateral had its moments and Tom Cruise was fun, but the yoke of the movie was on Jamie Foxx’s shoulders and I don’t think he was up for the task. 2001’s Ali left me sort of cold and The Insider was entertaining enough but I don’t think I’d sit through it again. 1995’s Heat had all kinds of potential, but the script was too long by half (although the bank robbery sequence is worth watching all by itself). I am an outspoken fan of two of Mann’s earlier films, 1981’s Thief (with a wild choice of Tangerine Dream for the soundtrack) and 1986’s Manhunter. I love Anthony Hopkins to death, but Brian Cox will always be Hannibal Lecktor. The supporting cast rocks the house as well. Tom Noonan as Francis Dolarhyde aka The Red Dragon, Joan Allen as the blind Reba McClane, and the always sturdy Dennis Farina as Jack Crawford. Manhunter doesn’t hold us especially well twenty years later, but it remains my favorite Thomas Harris adaptation (I never bought Jodie Foster as Clarice for even half a second.)