I Was a Child

by Bruce Eric Kaplan

  Often I would wake up in the middle of the night and be seized with the idea that my parents and my brothers had come up with a plan to run away. They had waited until I fell asleep, then quietly packed their things and snuck out.

  I would be very still and listen for the sounds of their breathing coming from their rooms.

  When I heard it, I could relax.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER went to a butcher once a week. Then, at a certain point, we started getting a box delivered to our house on Fridays filled with hamburger meat, roast beef, and chicken.

  We had roast beef on Friday nights. When my mother took it out of the oven, she untied the bloody string that held it together, then cut it.

  Once we ate a bum roast beef. It just didn’t taste right. The next day, I remember my mother was on the way to take my father to the train station in the morning, walking down the back stairs. Suddenly, she turned around, ran back up the stairs, and pushed me aside to run to the bathroom off the kitchen. She had diarrhea. We all got diarrhea from the bum roast beef.

  • • •

  SOMETIMES when my mother was standing at the counter, rolling up raw meat to make hamburgers, she would make a little ball and pop it in her mouth like an animal.

  • • •

  IN THE WINTERS, our radiators clanked and hissed, which is still the happiest sound in the world to me.

  • • •

  IF YOU had a school project, you needed oak tag. Plus extra oak tag for when you messed up. All the way through high school, you still needed oak tag for school projects.

  I made a lot of dioramas in elementary school, but not any in high school. Dioramas were always made out of old shoe boxes.

  My dioramas always had leaves and pipe cleaners in them. No one ever talks about how odd it is that pipe cleaners come in many colors and are somehow art supplies when they are pipe cleaners.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER had the same haircut from my earliest memory to when she died. She had the exact same haircut in her college yearbook and in her wedding photos.

  It was like it was a birthmark.

  • • •

  MY BROTHERS and I always had bad haircuts. Not one good one. There was always too much hair somewhere or too little somewhere. I don’t know why.

  • • •

  IN GENERAL at the time, there was so much hair everywhere. There was a character on Room 222 named Bernie, and his hair was crazy.

  I liked Bernie, but my favorite character on Room 222 was Jason because the actor’s name was Heshimu.

  • • •

  NEITHER OF my parents ever exercised, not once, that I know about. I didn’t know anyone who had parents that exercised.

  • • •

  MY FIRST sexual moment was with a tree. Jeffrey Van Kirk’s backyard bordered Mark Peto’s backyard. There was a fence between them and a tree in Mark Peto’s yard that abutted the middle of the fence. We would climb the fence, go over to the tree, wrap our arms around it, then rub ourselves up and down the tree. We called it “The Tree That Gives You the Funny Feeling.” When we touched the ground, we always ran to a red bucket behind their garages, and peed in it.

  • • •

  MARK PETO had an aboveground swimming pool.

  Since no one else I knew had a belowground or aboveground pool, I knew this meant he was very, very rich.

  • • •

  STORE WINDOWS were very confusing. Sometimes they would be bright and colorful and crowded. Other times, you would pass one that was sad and dusty and just had one little object, like a hat, in it. Or maybe just a hat and one faded hatbox.

  • • •

  EVERY TIME I went to the dentist I had several cavities. Today, my whole mouth is filled with lead.

  You can see it if I open really wide.

  We walked up our street to go to the dentist. His office was a few blocks away in a little house. He spoke with a foreign accent and was definitely pure evil. When Marathon Man came out, I thought to myself, I had one of those dentists.

  A trip to the dentist always ended with getting a ring from the same little dispenser. Year in, year out, there was never anything other than a ring.

  • • •

  NEAR the dentist’s house was Springfield Avenue, which had little stores and shops that were never that clean. One was a little bakery that had pastries I loved. The pastry I loved the most was a cinnamon raisin swirly thing that the bakery ladies called a “melt-away.” I have never heard of a melt-away since, but it is such a beautiful name and I think all things should melt away.

  The dirtiest store was a candy and magazine shop right off Springfield Avenue. There was dust on every little object in that place.

  The old man who sat behind the counter there was mean. It was strange that so many of the people who had jobs involving spending a lot of time with children seemed to hate children more than anything else in the world.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER thought our pediatrician Dr. Bootish was “very good-looking.” It made me uncomfortable to have my mother think someone was very good-looking.

  But I guess it was striking to see a good-looking person. There weren’t that many good-looking people around for some reason. Maybe it was New Jersey or just who we knew. We would visit my grandmother in Forest Hills, Queens, on Sundays, and those people looked worse than the ones in New Jersey.

  My father always made sure to bring a roll in the car to fortify himself during the journey to Forest Hills, which took less than an hour.

  • • •

  ONCE WE got stuck on the highway in an ugly stretch of Newark just past the airport. It was a hot day, and my mother suddenly said, “I’m dehydrating.” She started to say it over and over again, “I’m dehydrating. I need water. I’m dehydrating.” I had no idea what she meant initially, because no one ever talked about hydrating or dehydrating. We sat waiting in our Buick Skylark until finally some help came.

  • • •

  MY GRANDMOTHER ROSE lived in a two-bedroom apartment. The guest bedroom had a bed. That’s it—no curtains, no table, no lamp. The bed had a bumpy white bedspread that made lines on your face if you lay down on it. There was something very scary and inhumane about that room to me.

  The bed was on wheels like all beds. I never saw a bed that couldn’t roll. Or one that wasn’t covered by a bedspread.

  • • •

  MY GRANDMOTHER had different milk than we did. It was called Tivoli. On the carton it said that Tivoli was “I love it” spelled backward, but it wasn’t.

  She also had Uneeda Biscuits, which weren’t biscuits. They were actually thick crackers. “I needa biscuit,” my brothers and I would all say to one another, over and over again, every week.

  • • •

  MY GRANDMOTHER and my father spoke of Barbra Streisand in a very serious way. It was because she had ascended to enormous heights despite the bigness of her nose, and all that it represented. Neither ever bought a Barbra Streisand album or tape, but we took my grandmother to Barbra Streisand movies. I don’t remember ever taking my grandmother to a movie that didn’t have Barbra Streisand in it.

  • • •

  GRANDMA ROSE’S husband died when he was in his forties. As far as I know, she never had a date or any romantic involvement after he died. I think I asked her about it one day or was in the room when someone did, and she said, “Eh, I did that.”

  She had a lot of friends and, of course, family. Sometimes someone would call when we were there. “Hello, darling,” she would say to whoever it was, as she sat on the chair next to a table when you first entered. On the table was the heaviest black telephone in the world. The cord had black cloth to encase the wire. All old people had a table that was jus
t for the telephone.

  • • •

  ONCE on our way to visit Grandma Rose, there was too much traffic at the Holland Tunnel so my father made a turn and tried to find his way to the Lincoln Tunnel. We drove around and around, until we arrived on a desolate street that seemed unconnected to anything.

  “We’re lost!” my mother said, upset and panicked.

  A lone pedestrian appeared and my parents decided they would ask this very slow-walking man for directions.

  We drove up next to him, and my father rolled down the window. You rolled down all windows by hand, obviously.

  I looked at this man. He had a creepy hollow expression on his unwashed face, and his clothes looked like he had been wearing them for weeks. He was barefoot and was carrying a bucket of dirty dishwater.

  Clearly, this man didn’t know where anything was. No one in their right mind would ask him for guidance in any area. The only sane reaction to him would be to drive quickly away.

  Instead my father said, “Do you know how to get to the Lincoln Tunnel?”

  The man mumbled something incoherent. My father asked again. Again, the man mumbled something incoherent.

  Then, finally, we just drove away. At that moment, I realized my parents really might not know how to do anything at all.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER’S parents lived in West New York, which, oddly enough, is in New Jersey. I have a very vague memory of watching The Ed Sullivan Show in the living room of their small apartment. They kept what they called sucking candies in a thick glass bowl on the coffee table. My grandmother Fanny died when I was very young. My grandfather Abe had no teeth, not one.

  Many other people must have had dentures, because there was a commercial constantly on television for Efferdent denture cleaner, which promised you could remove stubborn denture stains in minutes just by dropping a magical blue tablet in the glass of water holding the dentures.

  • • •

  GRANDPA ABE was also very, very deaf. “Papa,” my mother would scream into the phone, when she called him. “Papa! Papa!” I don’t remember anything else she said to him other than “Papa! Papa!”

  He became increasingly forgetful. He left his car keys in his car one night, and when he woke up in the morning, the car was gone. He never got another car.

  He lived his final days in a nursing home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a town that had the worst chemical smell.

  When I was little and we needed to drive through Elizabeth, I would pinch the end of my nose.

  Then I got used to the smell. I wonder if they have figured out a way to make Elizabeth smell better now. I hope so.

  • • •

  WHENEVER we arrived home from visiting my grandparents or from anywhere at all that wasn’t nearby, we would sing a song when we turned on our street and drove up to our house.

  “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” we all sang. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here!”

  And really that was the only reason we were here.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER had one fancy dress.

  She wore it to all big occasions, which were either a cousin’s bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah or a cousin’s wedding.

  • • •

  I LOVED my mother’s L’eggs containers. I wish everything came in L’eggs.

  • • •

  OUR KITCHEN CHAIRS started breaking. So my parents decided to saw off the chair part and turned them into stools. There were two gold balls on each chair that were always coming off. My whole childhood was spent picking those gold balls up off the floor. My brother Andrew says we were told it was only going to be temporary, but it was permanent, like everything in our house.

  • • •

  EVERY stationery store had all the exact same candy, which you knew by heart, so it was very exciting when a new bar would show up.

  The gum that came with baseball cards was always covered in white dust and was so brittle, unlike other gum. Sometimes you would open up the baseball cards package and the flat stick of gum would immediately break into little pieces, in which case you couldn’t really chew it.

  • • •

  OLD MOVIES were on TV at all times of the day. The first one came on at ten in the morning on Channel 7. Channel 9 had the One O’Clock Movie, which had a lot of film noirs, the movies I loved more than anything. Channel 9 had the Four O’Clock Movie, which was John Ford Westerns or romantic comedies about nothing, starring someone pert like Janet Leigh. They still had thrillers sometimes, too, though. I loved Midnight Lace with Doris Day, who thought her husband, Rex Harrison, loved her, but really he despised her and was trying to drive her crazy and then murder her. There were a lot of old movies about how the person who was supposed to love you the most actually hated you enough to want you dead—those were my favorites.

  • • •

  CHANNEL 7 had the 4:30 Movie, which had a commercial every five minutes. The 4:30 Movie ended at six, so most movies would air in two parts. Some longer movies, like The Great Escape, would play in three parts, Monday through Wednesday. The 4:30 Movie was exhausting.

  Often, the 4:30 Movie had a theme for the week, such as old strange Bette Davis week. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was on the first three days, then Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte on the next two.

  Those movies were so over the top and grotesque yet not exaggerated at all about the horrors of aging. My favorite week on the 4:30 Movie was James Coburn week. Monday and Tuesday would be Our Man Flint, Wednesday and Thursday would be In Like Flint, and Friday would be The President’s Analyst, which never made any sense, probably because it had been chopped down to forty minutes.

  I loved James Coburn because there was no one else in the world like him. He was so long. He seemed to go on forever.

  • • •

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, you could watch the Million-Dollar Movie on Channel 9, which had a lot of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, or the WPIX Eight O’Clock Movie, which had more fun, frothy things, like A Man Could Get Killed, one of the many supposedly unfunny 1960s comedies I would watch that I would think were wildly hilarious.

  Old movies played all night long on several channels. CBS had The Late Show, then The Late Late Show. Some movies would only play in the middle of the night, such as Topper. Topper was a guy who was haunted by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, who had lives that were so wonderfully glamorous, being dead couldn’t dampen them. They made being grown-up seem fun and exciting, in a way that none of the parents I knew did.

  I remember coming downstairs at four a.m. once for some reason and seeing my father watching Death Takes a Holiday. I sat down and finished it with him, as the sun came up.

  Weekends had movies all day and night, such as Creature Features, which had Godzilla or something actually scary. Sunday mornings always had an Abbott and Costello movie from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Their relationship terrified me.

  Abbott seemed like he might have a violent side and could do anything if Costello provoked him too much.

  • • •

  IF YOU saw an old movie on TV and loved it, you knew you could see it again, but you never knew when. It might show up two months later or two years later. There were a lot of movies I would wait for, checking each week to see if they were back. I never missed an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Never. I needed them. They were all different yet beautifully all the same.

  Alfred Hitchcock movies could be on any time of the day or any channel. North by Northwest would be in two parts on the 4:30 Movie on Channel 7. There was a moment where Cary Grant is in an elevator and his mother says to the two men who want to kill Cary Grant, “You’re not really trying to kill my son,” and then everyone except Cary Grant bursts into laughter. It was hil
arious, and yet it was so upsetting that his mother didn’t believe him. I could see one of my parents saying that to two hitmen who wanted to kill me.

  Marnie would show up late Sunday afternoons on Channel 11, Shadow of a Doubt would be on the Four O’Clock Movie on Channel 9, Foreign Correspondent would only be on Channel 2 in the middle of the night, and all the early British ones would be on Channel 13 on a Saturday around nine p.m.

  Saboteur aired on the One O’Clock Movie on Channel 9, so I could only see it if I was sick or had no school that day for some reason. Saboteur had the wonderful urgency of a World War II film. There was no urgency like that kind of urgency.

  Even little Bob Hope light comedies that took place during World War II had that urgency. There was one Bob Hope World War II movie that I loved and would always wait for when it would be on again. It was called They Got Me Covered and in the middle of it, something terrible happened. A beautiful woman covered in pom-poms is on stage singing a song called “Palsy Walsy.” The spies are in the audience and know they have to kill her before she can “talk.” World War II movies were always about people not being allowed to talk.

  The beautiful woman tosses pom-poms out into the audience while she sings. The spies catch one, stick a dagger in it, then throw the pom-pom back at her, stabbing her in the heart. She goes offstage and dies in Bob Hope’s arms, before she can tell him whatever the spies didn’t want her to. It was all very tragic for many reasons. The pom-pom lady had so much pathos even before she died for talking. You knew she wasn’t going to get Bob Hope because he already had Dorothy Lamour.