Upside Down

August 22, 2003
(I posted this elsewhere, but wanted it hear as well.)



The fingers of a stoned bassist wrapped around my ankles, toying with me like a rag doll. One slip and I plunge face first to the ground twenty feet below. Urgent and trifling thoughts swim around my head at supersonic speed: Will he actually drop me (by accident or design)? Why is he doing this? He is an adult; adults don’t do stuff like this. During that dirt bomb fight my older brother Peter and I had when he got me in the neck and I picked up a rock to throw at him, did I throw it? If this idiot lets go, can I flip 180 degrees and land feet first like a cat? Are there any big rocks or broken glass in those bushes? Why are all these people going on like nothing out of the ordinary is happening? Why don’t they notice me? I hate them. I hate them.

They are laughing and smoking and stuffing their faces right there, at the air vent, while my long, straight, strawberry-blond hair stands on end—rather, points in the direction gravity wants it to go: down. Was my face as red as a beet or white as a ghost? Was I flailing like a maniac or frozen in fear? The large curl vent was located in the center of the tarred roof, which most often served as our private patio. Imagine a giant curved horn standing unnaturally on its mouthpiece, with a flattened bell and painted wasabe green. A serendipitous acquisition was bolted to the flattened part:　a picnic table top rescued from a premature burial at the village dump (like our dog Cookie and other sundry items). All kinds of goodies were piled on it:　cellophane packs of bar snacks and professional drink mixing supplies along side straight people stuff like burgers and dogs and buns and ketchup and potato salad and paper plates and iceberg lettuce with chunks of hothouse tomatoes and Thousand Island dressing. In the center of the smorgasbord sat Grandma and Grandpa’s antique crystal punch bowl, overflowing with sangria.

A cooler and some galvanized garbage cans stuffed with ice and bar bottles of Rheingold, Pabst, and Schlitz stood there portentously like the shrines they were. The cooler was twice the length of a normal “large” cooler, like the family car: an extra, extra long hearse-black four-door truck, custom built in Oklahoma and perfectly suited for taxiing merry pranksters and party supplies to ponds and lakes and beaches and forests and drive-in movies on hot August nights. A twenty-five gallon industrial lobster pot threatened to crush the barbecue grill it stood upright on; boiling water spiced with bottled beer and a family of lobsters shook the thing from inside out.

Uncle Denis, who to date still has the biggest, baddest stereo money can buy, was the purchasing consultant for our sound system: an elegant but ballsy unit, no frills but lots of loud crispy rock music and wood cabinetry. Yes, the tunes were loud, but not excessively (Dad, the consummate bar host, knew how to lubricate but not drown a party with music): Janis Joplin, CSNY, The James Gang, The Moody Blues, George Harrison, Canned Heat, and Dylan.

Ritchie the bearded bartender from Brentwood, Barefoot Mike, Bald Hank and Bitchy Bunny, “Lick you all over for 5¢” Mike and “Can do” Stew, Chatty Cathy, several Marys, Rat and Cat, cute little Kate and her three big sisters from Florida, Burt the Bachelor, our cats (Socrates, Friday, and Flug) and dogs, Obnoxious John, Lazy John, Big John, Kevin “Lord of the Rings” Clancy and “Little” Annie, and Saddle Rock and their groupies. The leader of the band, Jerry, would yell at his girlfriend while she shrieked like a lunatic from the apartment next door one summer, the last summer the group played at the bar. The place was indeed referred to as the band’s apartment, but later Barefoot Mike’s, Mik the Prick’s, and Montana John’s. The summer I was dangled over the side of the roof by my feet, the four or five Saddle Rock band members and their girlfriends were the ones crashing in that single room with attached bathroom. Dad erected a six-foot fence between our half of the roof and theirs (replete with swinging saloon doors), more to support the back side of the cabana (a prototype for a much grander architectural delight built several years later with hand-hewn logs and driftwood) than to provide privacy. Camping out there under the cabana, snuggled in old sleeping bags, musty throw pillows, and the ugly orange blanket that Cat crocheted for her two-year-old son and forgot at our place one night when she flopped on the couch after an evening of revelry in the bar, Peter and I would watch Creature Feature on Friday night and Saturday morning cartoons on his black and white 12-inch Zenith while munching beer nuts and potato chips with our dogs: Jimmy, Pookie, and Butterball.

On a pleasant September or October evening after playing kick ball with neighborhood friends or skateboarding or putting pennies on the tracks at the station or something like that, Barefoot Mike comes bounding into our apartment and, white-faced, bleary-eyed and shaking like he had his finger stuck in a live light bulb socket, and announces that Rat killed Cat and some guy the night before. Maybe from Mike that night or from Newsday or my mother, I learned that Rat had been drinking in my dad’s bar (just under our apartment!), then walked to his place in North Sea, got his hunting knife or a kitchen knife, came back to town to Cat’s place to her and her lover, and cut their hearts out. Rat spent six years in jail for this gruesome murder, then started hanging out at the bar again like nothing happened. A busty, hirsute woman with a provocative proboscis found him irresistible, I speculate not because of his long, stringy, greasy dirty-blond hair, his horn-rimmed glasses, or his pointed ugly rat’s face. The rest of us found him a repugnant demon. But no one wanted to be the one to ask him to leave. After a couple of months of no one (but his new girl) coming anywhere near him, he disappeared.

Who knows why we had parties on the roof. The original structure of the building, built at the turn of the nineteenth century, was a perfect box, maybe 40’ X 40’ X 40’, three stories tall, with a full basement. The first floor addition, built during the 1940s, stuck out from the building, about 20 feet on the side over the bar’s “living room” and in the front and back but less on the Polish Hall side. Imagine the shape of an inverted carpenter’s T when viewed from any one side, or if you prefer three dimensional objects, think of a giant upside down mushroom with all strait lines and square corners and no curves.

Across the street was a half acre of groomed lawn　—　the natural repository for bar empties, which me and Peter exchanged Saturday on Sunday mornings at Three Finger Joe’s for pieces of Bazooka bubble gum (that is, if Frankie, the stock car driver’s son from across the street, didn’t get to them first). The spot was energized, not by the minimalist landscaping job it had received from the village land maintenance crew, but by the nature of its location: on the corner of Elm Street and Powell Avenue, pinned between the train station and three bars (cultural institutions) and smack dab in the middle of one of two routes to down town and between the walking route connecting the village’s two Black neighborhoods: The Hill and The Ave. You could play volleyball and frisbee or hide and seek there, but since it was public land, consumption of alcohol was prohibited, unlike Agawam Park down town, where locals were prohibited from playing with Frisbees or balls, but rich tourists could drink booze on Summer Jazz Nights.

Why not the back yard? That was even bigger than the triangular patch of land across the street. Well, because the part of the back yard closest to the building was a hard-packed, lumpy spent coal and broken glass parking lot; the yardage behind that was Atlas’s exercise area. Atlas was let out to pasture there behind the bar, not because he was too old or weak or small (12 years and 18 hands tall) to pull the Hansom House carriage but because his owner (i.e., Dad) could only maintain so many interests at one time; properly caring for an English riding horse was not one of them. That task was left to Peter and me, who were about as interested in shoveling horse piss barn straw, scooping oats, and filling the water trough (first breaking the ice on top) on winter mornings before school as we were in doing homework or cleaning the bathrooms in the bar on Saturday and Sunday mornings. (In all fairness, there was a bonus or two to having a horse, beyond the status he brought us as the only family in the village with a horse. After putting oats on the fence, while he was standing there munching on them, three or four or five of us kids would jump on his back. The last to fall off was the winner — usually me, if anybody wants to know. Also, the bails of hay we were supposed to feed him were great fun to make forts out of and jump onto from the barn roof.) The backyard eventually evolved into the preferred party place: a sort of English garden and volleyball park, which was developed to the extent that it once served as the venue for the Pernot Long Island Volleyball Classic, 5¢ beer nights for throngs of college students, and a few alternative mixed media events which blended fusion music, performance art, and graffiti.

Before all that, the second floor roof was the most natural spot for spontaneous summer barbecue parties. The very top roof, the third floor roof, could in theory have been an ideal location for partying: a 40’ X 40’ flat chunk of space 40 feet in the air, overlooking the entire railroad plaza. But only someone young or dumb enough to balance on the fire escape handrail long enough to sling him- or herself to the roof before plunging to the ground could make it up there. That, and there was no guardrail around the perimeter to keep party people from stumbling to the second story roof to their deaths. In fact, besides my wife an me and my buddy Bret, who clawed our way up there decked out in Halloween attire when in graduate school years later to hurl water balloons at plastered patrons in the parking lot, and besides me and my brother Peter, who went up there to sneak cigarettes when in elementary school, I don’t know anyone else who reached that altitude.

Glen, who looked like the Frank Zappa of 1969 (which I thought looked pretty cool), once consumed a libation spiked with LSD at the Mad Hatter. The things he saw, that if he knew in advance were coming, might not have had such a deleterious affect on his demeanor that summer, in as much as whatever mind he had, got turned inside out and stuck there. He was a comparatively quiet person — I think I liked him not being a loud asshole, like so many of the others¬ — who transformed into a monster before my eyes and became an expediter for an epiphanal loss of innocence experience: adults don’t know everything, the right things, or even how to act; they are just larger, hairier, more violent versions of kids; they are just as stupid, irresponsible, and selfish as kids.

I cannot say that I really knew Glen, that I had more than a superficial understanding of his personality. But, at that moment, anticipating imminent blackout, maiming, and death, I perceived (as children are want to do) what was going on inside his head: not much, and thus nothing to focus his attention on the seriousness of the situation. It was his bassist’s fingers that knew what to do; they knew that when the set is over, the guitar gets laid gently on the ground — as I was set back on the roof. The adults who witnessed the episode were laughing.