We wore fluffy down parkas that made a size-four woman resemble the Pillsbury doughboy. Snorkel jackets lined with neon orange and a gray ring of fur around the face suggested deranged bounty hunters and offered no peripheral vision. Add moon boots, ski gloves with the circumference of oven mitts, caps with earflaps that made you look like Piglet, electric socks, wool sweaters, bank-robber-style face masks with cutout eye and mouth holes, a Buffalo Sabres scarf to top it all off, and you had a winter carnival at the psych center. Astronauts appeared to be dressing pretty lightly from where we were standing.
Mitten strings and mitten clips were forced upon children. (The mittens hang from opposite ends of a piece of yarn that goes through the coat sleeves, making mittens theoretically impossible to lose. Or clips attach to the wrist of each sleeve for the same purpose.) Then there’s my dad, who is legally without memory the way some people are legally blind and became so tired of losing his gloves that he wore mitten clips until he was fifty-seven. He only retired them because he moved to New Mexico, where he now regularly misplaces his cap.
The good news is that in subzero temperatures, fashion mutations are understandably forgiven. Winter maxim: The warmer you feel, the dumber you look. It’s a place where down jackets, quilted flannel shirts, and turtlenecks will never go out of style. An entire city clomping around like mushers in search of the Iditarod, we sported the layered look long before stores like Gap and Banana Republic mass-marketed it as a fashion statement. When onetime Buffalo resident Mark Twain said that naked people have little influence on society, he didn’t have to worry about us. In fact, with almost nine months of chilly weather, Buffalonians needn’t worry about storing bulky winter clothes and coats. We didn’t even bother to move them to the back of the closet.
It’s safe to say there aren’t a lot of naturalists raised in Buffalo. However, we do know our types of snow, road salt, and tires. If it’s true that Eskimos have fifty words for snow, then Buffalonians have fifty-one. We’ve added Sisters snow, a storm that leaves a sheet of ice on which your grandma slips and breaks a hip, and winds up in Sisters Hospital.
If any out-of-work war correspondent wants to do a book on Buffalo blizzards called What They Carried, let me get you started. First are the fifty-pound sacks of kitty litter that serve double duty. They sit in the trunk and provide ballast while navigating slippery turns, but if you get stuck on ice, simply break open a bag and scatter it under the wheels for traction. Somewhere in every car there’s a blanket tucked away so you don’t freeze to death if caught in a storm. There’s also a first-aid kit. This is slightly mysterious because getting stranded in a blizzard doesn’t usually pose a health threat aside from the aforementioned freezing to death. But women knew that the plastic container housing Band-Aids and surgical tape also made a good place to pee if you were stuck in the car for hours on end. Finally, the roll of paper towels and bottle of Windex. Cars are made better now, but back then road salt corroded the windshield washer–fluid dispenser, and the slushy salt spraying up from the street turned the glass a milky gray every two or three blocks, making it impossible to see. So at every stoplight, people hopped out to swab the windshield.
After a single winter, a car showed more rust than paint, especially if you didn’t have a garage. When the salt corroded the bottom of an automobile so much that it was possible to see the pavement, cardboard was pasted over the holes and it was referred to as a Fred Flintstone car. Our shoes and boots had wavy white salt stains along the sides and over the tops, making them look as if the ocean had washed up to our laces before receding.
When we were stuck in our cars on the highway, we’d leave the heat on for a while and then, to conserve gas, turn the engine off until our faces began to go numb. If the blizzard was still raging when the motor finally conked out, we tried to get into the cars in front of or behind us. Eventually everyone would be packed into the few automobiles that could still run their heaters, like circus clowns crammed into a Volkswagen.
Every Buffalonian has a story about being stranded with strangers and the human chain stretching from a barn in search of firewood, or else being saved by the warmth of an animal, or the milk of a cow, or a clothesline leading back to the house. Women in Buffalo take Lock De-Icer wherever they go, the way folks in New York City carry around emergency Valium and Mace. Men can always unfreeze a lock by peeing into it.
For some reason known only to thermodynamic engineers, in the seventies the way-back window of a station wagon was always the last to freeze shut. Therefore, in the grocery-store parking lot you could usually spot some poor housewife rolling down the back window, squeezing through, and then climbing over the seats to open a front door using the inside handle.
The first naked people I saw were Canadians. And we weren’t on a date together. The Canadian loonie was flying high, and so the Frostbacks would slip over the border to take advantage of cheaper prices and avoid higher taxes back home. After shopping, they’d change in the mall parking lot, ripping off old clothes along with the price tags on their new ones. I’m convinced that the majority of Buffalo’s homeless population was outfitted in these Canadian castoffs, all conveniently located in and around mall parking lots. The other way to pick out Canadians, when they weren’t undressing in the mall parking lot, was to catch them in the act of pouring vinegar on their fish and french fries.
When a storm blew in, all sorts of public service announcements came over the radio—what roads and bridges were dangerous or closed; what schools, churches, and community centers were canceling classes and events. Kids would call radio stations and impersonate their principals and superintendents in an attempt to close their own schools. Unfortunately, a special code was needed. In an effort to get the superintendent to make the call, high school students with cars would drive over to his house early in the morning, purposely slam on the brakes, and do doughnuts out front in order to make the roads appear treacherous. They were hoping he’d glance out the window and make up his mind at that very moment.
Most organizations didn’t need passwords to announce cancellations, and so kids would call in the names of bogus groups just to see if they could get them announced on the radio—a meeting of the Rutabagas Recipe Exchange Club in the basement of Saint Benedict’s, or Saint Jim Bob’s Apple Bobbing Competition for the Left-handed. As the area was predominantly Catholic, we were pretty safe so long as we stuck the word saint in there somewhere. The downside was that the preponderance of schools and organizations beginning with saint resulted in a very long wait for those of us hoping to hear Sweet Home, the name of my school district. Saint Mary was good for about a dozen listings all on its own. The closings were followed by the usual litany of ads for plow services, tow-truck operators, and collision shops.
The other big entertainment when the snow filled the streets faster than the plows could remove it was pogeying, also known as bumper sledding. This entailed hiding behind a tree or newspaper box until a car went by, and then hitching onto the back bumper and being pulled along, your boots skating atop the icy slush. Drivers (especially those who were once Buffalo kids themselves) would be on the lookout for devotees of this treacherous sport, so you had to be ready to run if one stopped the car and jumped out to yell about how dangerous it was. Some drivers used the more Darwinian teaching technique of braking fast so that we’d slide underneath the back of the car, right between the wheels.
Oftentimes a ban on driving was issued, with the exception of emergency vehicles, including anyone involved in snow removal, police, fire, and medical services. So if I wanted to go someplace, it was necessary to sneak into my mom’s closet and cadge her student-nurse cap (she’d since graduated to the real thing). Mom worked evening or zombie shifts and slept during the day. Her car was a stadium-sized yellow Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon with simulated wood paneling that was crashed in on the left side from bow to stern. It regularly needed jump-starting, the “heater” blew arctic blasts, the gearshift was dubious, the shock abs
orbers indifferent, and the brakes unpredictable, at best. It’s doubtful the Joads would have taken it as a trade-in for their dust-bowl jalopy. The vehicle was, to quote the British writer Saki, “The one they call ‘The Envy of Sisyphus,’ because it goes quite nicely uphill if you push it.”
However, during a snowstorm the rules of the road drastically change to favor the most battered wrecks. Lights and stop signs no longer matter, because if you brake you’re likely to go into a hard-nosed skid. Thus, folks with cars in good condition must wait while the junkers briefly reign over icy streets. On the bright side, all the gargantuan potholes made by the plows and salt trucks are filled in for a few days and, for a change, you don’t have to worry about dropping your transmission.
Rarely does anyone fall asleep while driving in Buffalo. When you take into account that Catholics usually have only one hand on the wheel, since the other is being used to bless themselves, it’s just too darn exciting, like a ride at an amusement park. From a kid’s point of view, the weather was a lot like God’s will—everybody talked about it, but nobody could do anything about it.
Two
The First Event Leading Up to My Death
Unlike Chicago, which is named after an Indian word meaning “bad smell,” and Toronto, called so after the Huron tribal word for “meeting place,” how the city of Buffalo came upon its name has been much disputed. Some historians speculate that buffalo may have roamed the area centuries ago, much as repo men and antiabortionists do today. Or possibly the name was borrowed from a local creek whose Indian name meaning “beaver” was mistranslated, since the area is indeed rife with beaver.
Others say the name comes from the French, since the region was visited by French explorers in the 1700s. Beau fleuve means “beautiful river,” referring to the nearby scenic Niagara River, which flows thirty-six miles from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Obviously this hypothetical Frenchman passed through in July or August, otherwise he would have instead opted for the more appropriate beaucoup neige, meaning “much snow.”
I was born in Buffalo on October 8, 1965, under the dark architectural cloud of urban renewal, at the height of The Great Folk Music Scare. Although the chart-topping “California Dreamin’” had just been released by a newly formed group called the Mamas and the Papas, my fair complexion suggested Scandinavia, not Santa Barbara, as my latitudinal sister.
It was three in the afternoon on a Friday, exactly when school lets out. In my imagination the first words I heard were those of the obstetrician seeing this unruly mop of hair emerge and shouting, “Nurse, get me a scrunchy!” But scrunchies had not yet been invented, and so the doctor probably called for a rubber band, hairnet, or, more likely, an electric hedge trimmer.
After locating an eight-pound infant under the tangle of strawberry blond curls, the attending nurse wrote “Pumpkin” on my birth card and possibly ordered a 1500-watt hair dryer for the maternity ward. It was a stroke of luck that I ended up in the newborn nursery and not the nearby farmers market. Perhaps during my mother’s pregnancy a Buffalo Zoo poster had terrified her.
I was later informed by my parents that my birth was not an accident. However, the fact that I’m an only child was no accident either. Immediately following the delivery, my mother ensured that I was the end of the line. What did she know and when did she know it? A month earlier, the Beatles’ newly released song “Help” had quickly shot up to number one on the pop charts.
As for my father, he probably didn’t know much of anything since he was off chain-smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes in the waiting room. I was a southpaw born of two solid righties, and so perhaps there was talk of witchcraft.
Meantime, 450 miles away, in my nation’s capital, Lyndon B. Johnson was serving his first elected term as president following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. An escalation of troops in Vietnam had brought the number up to almost 200,000, and the war became more controversial with every body bag that appeared on the evening news. Ironically, the nightly broadcast contained the refrain “Do you know where your children are?”
Demonstrators carried daffodils and chanted “flower power,” a term coined by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to describe his nonviolent strategy of political action. Protestors held up placards that said Stop the Bombing and No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Nigger. The term politically correct had not yet been invented.
Less than a month after my birth, the Quaker pacifist Norman Morrison set himself on fire and died outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office in Washington, DC. McNamara, who witnessed the immolation, is reported to have vomited.
The early part of 1965 was also filled with unrest that could not be categorized as war related. Malcolm X had been assassinated in February, purportedly by black Muslims. The thirty-nine-year-old Black Nationalist was delivering a speech calling for a more militant prescription to furthering civil rights than Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy of passive resistance. Likewise, the newly formed, beret-wearing Black Panthers were advocating armed combat in order to gain power over the existing establishment.
The following month, some six hundred black Americans marched the fifty-four miles of US Route 80 from Selma to Alabama’s state capital of Montgomery in search of liberty and justice for all. Primary on their agenda was the right to vote, which was legal but often impossible because blacks were regularly kept from the polls. Only 65 of 15,100 local blacks were registered. A white Unitarian minister named James Reeb traveled south to support the march and was bludgeoned to death by white demonstrators.
In Los Angeles that August, riots erupted in the district known as Watts following the arrest of an African American on DWI charges and subsequent allegations of police brutality. Marvin Jackson coined the phrase “Burn, baby, burn” during five days of looting and fires that involved fifteen thousand National Guardsmen. This offered a preview of the racially charged urban uprisings to come in the latter half of the sixties. It’s still hard to believe that it took until 1967 for the Supreme Court to finally strike down bans on interracial marriages.
Despite what one saw on the nightly news, it wasn’t all riots, sit-ins, lie-ins, teach-ins, and bed-ins. Social reformer Betty Friedan had sold 3 million copies of The Feminine Mystique, thereby kick-starting the modern women’s movement. Her book highlighted the frustration of housewives who’d supposedly done everything right by marrying well and moving to the suburbs, and it outlined the gap between what women supposedly had versus the reality of what they were experiencing. Harvard University had no women MBA candidates in 1965, and most medical schools capped admissions for women at 5 percent.
On television, Barbara Walters was only permitted to interview women and cover the four Fs—food, family, fashion, and furnishings.
In Delano, California, the grape pickers had gone out on strike and were joined by César Chávez, the cofounder of the National Farm Workers Association. These migrant laborers stood out as probably the most exploited group in the country, living and working in horrible conditions, and being paid a pittance, without job security or any other benefits.
Native Americans were also organizing and protesting. The United States government had signed more than four hundred treaties with them over the years and violated practically every one. In 1965, five Native American activists landed on Alcatraz Island, off the California coast near San Francisco, which had until 1963 been used as a maximum security prison. They claimed Alcatraz as rightfully theirs, citing an 1868 treaty between the United States and the Sioux Indians stating that any surplus land would be turned over to Indians. When federal marshals arrived, the activists left willingly. However, these types of Red Power protests would continue, and many would not end as peacefully. The American Indian Movement was organized in 1968 to fight for sovereignty and the protection of rights granted by treaties, laws, and the United States Constitution.
The sixties weren’t a time of discontent only among minorities. Young people were searching for more freedom o
f expression and, thus, the counterculture was born. The San Francisco Chronicle first observed the beginnings of the hippie movement by noting that the Haight-
Ashbury section had become “a hip hangout” for beatniks. If that wasn’t evidence enough, 1965 is the year that the lava lamp was launched in the United States, The Who recorded “My Generation,” and a rock band called the Grateful Dead formed in San Francisco.
Harvard professor and drug prophet Timothy Leary, famous for popularizing “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” penned an essay called “Politics of Ecstasy,” which advocated exploring LSD and other mind-bending hallucinogenic drugs to see how they altered consciousness. Participants in the psychedelic side of the sixties like to say that if you can remember it, then you weren’t there.
The infamous motorcycle gang Hells Angels, along with Ken Kesey’s communal hippie family, the Merry Pranksters, were at the height of their notoriety. When radical reformer Abbie Hoffman wasn’t
levitating the Pentagon, penning Steal This Book, or staging human be-ins where you went to just “be,” he was tossing dollar bills from the New York Stock Exchange’s visitors’ gallery to watch the capitalists fight over them (in case you were wondering why there’s now a Plexiglas partition).
With their espousal of free love, the counterculture was more accepting of homosexuality, which was still widely classified as a
disease and shunned in polite society. Gay liberation symbolically began in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village when, in June of 1969, homosexuals assaulted police officers raiding the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. The following year people gathered for the first gay-pride parade.
Buffalo Gal Page 2
