On the advanced end of parental surveillance, I was never bothered about homework, ordered to study, or asked about my grades. When a dinner guest used a word that began with a k, my parents never turned to me and asked, “What other words do we know that start with a k?”
My parents were not ones for insisting that I attend school or church, even if my reason for not going was simply that I didn’t feel like it or preferred to sleep late. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I’d started skipping four days a week, but I often said that I’d headed to the racetrack, gone to the home of an elderly neighbor for a day of gin rummy, or just stayed inside to read, and they didn’t seem concerned. During high school, I became quite taken with the novels of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. What teenager isn’t entranced by the duality of human existence and alienation? Had I possessed any musical ability, I’m convinced that some truly horrid punk rock songs could have emerged from this period.
Sometimes I rode my bike downtown and watched Dad work in a courtroom. It was fascinating to observe real-life trials starring prostitutes in short skirts, lawyers in shiny three-piece suits, policemen wearing uniforms and badges, and the gavel-banging judge in his black robe on the bench high above me—just like in a movie.
Seeing the judicial system up close, particularly in this hotbed of ethnic politics, also squelched any desire I might have had to pursue legal work. However, the smooth marble floors and long staircases of the courthouse did much to improve my skateboarding. Through the protracted snowy winters, I could bring my board to Erie County Hall, and, after everyone cleared out at five o’clock, the place was ideally suited to whizzing around pillars and hanging ten while Dad typed transcripts of the day’s proceedings. The bull pen where all the court reporters had their desks and lockers was a perfect place for jumping metal garbage cans.
Although the other twenty or so reporters must have wondered why my particular public school had so many days off, I was given special dispensation to monkey around for two reasons. The first was that I had a rubber stamp–making kit, and for the reasonable price of twenty dollars I’d print postcards for the reporters to use when billing for transcript copies, thus saving them a substantial amount of time handwriting invoices and envelopes. (It was Dad’s idea.) The second was that the reporters liked my dad; not only was he friendly, funny, and kind, but his desk was a veritable Woolworth’s, containing everything from stationery to plumbing supplies. Dad had pens, markers, scissors, hole punchers (single, double, and triple), chalk, caulk, hole reinforcements, a stapler, paper towels, silverware, and several varieties of tape including masking, strapping, double-sided, gaffer, and duct. Most of these were chained to his desk like bank pens so that people could enjoy the items without accidentally borrowing them. He also had a large toaster oven that he allowed everyone to use. Never underestimate the value of a hot lunch in a cold clime.
Furthermore, Dad carried at least two hundred pounds of cat
litter in the trunk of his car. Between November and April, downtown Buffalo was the Boulevard of Broken Hips, and all we did on weekends was visit older relatives who’d slipped on the ice. Judges received special up-close-parking passes, but court reporters were on their own. Most had to park a half mile away and walk under an expressway viaduct to get to work. In the dead of winter, the slope became a sheet of ice. Dad would arrive with his cat litter, and people used it to keep from skidding down and then to get some traction for the climb back up. He arrived early, but occasionally people who came before him would slide down and get stuck at the bottom and have to wait for him. Even with the added traction, they sometimes had to crawl up the other side on their hands and knees. I’d hate to think what would’ve happened had Dad missed a day of work in the wintertime. There might not have been any court reporters or county clerks. But he never did. Those dutiful Scandinavians with their Viking heritage only miss work for a funeral—their own. And even then they usually call in the night before to say they’ll be dead.
It’s possible that, because I’m an only child, my parents simply forgot that I was not an adult, couldn’t drive or cook, and was legally supposed to be in school. However, they were busy with work. Around the time I turned eight, my mother went back to school, and becoming a nurse involved classes during the day and evening shifts at local hospitals. Meanwhile, my father was trying to keep up with inflation by working late into the night. He not only had to finish transcribing everything that was said that day in the courtroom, but he also had to proofread and bind the final copies. Those who could afford it hired typists.
Until that time, the three of us occasionally did things together, mostly with my godparents and their five children. My dad and I enjoyed playing chess, Ping-Pong, shooting pool, and going to Mel Brooks movies. If an entertainer came to Buffalo, such as the magician Harry Blackstone Jr. or the famous Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, he’d take me to see him.
Segovia was amazing. The enormous stage of the grand old Shea’s Buffalo Theater, which was usually home to large productions of The King and I and Camelot, had only a tiny stool in the center. A small man with a guitar walked out and kept the full house captivated for three hours. Once we went to see Segovia when I was ten and experiencing a particularly bad bout of bronchitis. Thus I arrived equipped with a large supply of tissues and cough lozenges. A few minutes before the famed guitarist came out from the wings, I released a pants-wetting cough and blew phlegm chunks like a patient in the final moments of a tuberculosis death. The dowager next to me peered over her spectacles and inquired, “Will you be hacking like that throughout the performance?” I said, “No, ma’am. I’m getting it all out now.”
During the summer, my dad and I continued traveling to Long Island to visit my grandfather. My mother stopped joining us when I was eleven, which was a relief in a way because this allowed us to become the Oscar Madisons. Grandpa had been recently widowed, so he’d join us in Hampton Bays. Potato chips for dinner? Sure, why not? Make the bed? Why bother? We were just going to use it again tonight. Change clothes? What for? It was vacation, not a fashion show. The more times we could turn that T-shirt and underwear inside out, the less time we’d waste at a Laundromat when we could be at the beach, playing putt-putt, or seeing Monty Python and The Holy Grail or The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the fifth time.
By then it was understood in my family that we’d all fend for ourselves as far as food and clean clothes were concerned. As a result, I became very adept at making scrambled eggs and Kraft macaroni and cheese (the official foods of the seventies’ latchkey child) and showing up at the homes of neighbors exactly at mealtimes.
I’d never starve, since, even in a snowstorm, I could walk the half mile to the Oh Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven and eat a microwave burrito with a plastic spork. And Mom bought the basics every week. She was covered if social services ever came to visit. There was a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, some eggs, and apples. A stick of butter was left out on the kitchen table. Over the years I noticed that one person in the family scraped the butter off the top, leaving a big uneven rut in the middle. I thought it was a silly way to get butter. I always cut a hunk off the end, like normal people. After my dad moved out, the butter was still being scraped off the top, and so I naturally assumed my mom was the knife skimmer. One day she said, “Why do you scrape the butter off the top? It makes such a mess.” I replied that I didn’t scrape the butter and that in fact she was doing it. (By this point, years had gone by—one can tell how often we ate together.) We examined the scrapes more closely and found tiny ridges in them, sort of like a serrated knife, but more like a cat’s tongue. Looking down at Spaz, our cat, we realized who had been scraping the butter. Mom put a plastic cover over it.
Cooking held little interest for me, so eating at the neighbors was my first choice. I’d committed to memory the times every friend ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Depending on what day it was, I also had a good idea what the dinner menu would be—chicken, meatloaf, hambu
rgers and hotdogs, beef stew, a casserole, spaghetti (no one had heard of pasta) and meatballs, or something that involved “helper.” Combine Hamburger Helper with Tuna Helper and you had surf and turf! Lunch was peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish, or a sandwich made with Oscar Mayer cold cuts. Another afternoon staple in my neighborhood was the grilled cheese sandwich. And everyone knew that those big, pale yellow bricks of government cheese made the best grilled cheese sandwiches in the world.
In order not to be viewed as a mooch (“What a coincidence! Once again Laura arrives right as the plates hit the table”), I created a code of conduct for myself in my capacity as a professional guest. There was a horse that used to run at the Fort Erie Racetrack across the Peace Bridge in Canada named Sing For Your Supper (before I knew it was a Rodgers and Hart song), and I felt there was a lesson in that. Thus, my first rule was to assist in whatever preparation or cleanup was necessary, and of which I was capable. Unfortunately, I was never an adept helper in the kitchen given my lack of culinary knowledge, my general clumsiness, and my shaky hands, so I did more harm than good. Instead, I decided that nobody liked a boring freeloader, and so I always tried to come prepared with a few jokes or stories. This was my introduction to the Rubber Chicken Circuit, or in my case, Shake ’n Bake chicken, where I received the training that would eventually land me the class-clown award, a spot at the Improv in New York City, and an appearance on David Letterman’s show. (Though my act also got me barred from high school graduation, until I performed community service. I was that funny.)
Throughout my teenage years, I basically worked full time as a wandering fool, like Feste in Twelfth Night, traveling from house to house, exchanging comedy for food and air-conditioning.
***
Mom and Dad both had an interesting habit of taking me aside and proclaiming that the other was crazy.
“Your father is out of his mind,” Mom would state matter-of-factly.
“Then why did you marry him?” I’d ask.
“He looked like President Kennedy and he’d write me these amazing letters.”
“Your mother is crazy,” Dad gently broke the news to me. “I just think you should know that.”
“So why did you marry her?” I’d ask.
“I didn’t know she was crazy then. I only found out later.”
Growing up, I spent a considerable amount of time guessing which one of them was really crazy; a parental shell game to determine under which cup sat the nut. On the other hand, in the seventies many people appeared to be three beads short of a headband, as compared to nowadays, with prescription mood modifiers so readily available.
As a result, it was hard to know who to believe. Sometimes out of the blue, Dad would ask how old I was. Just for fun I’d tack on a few years. When I was fourteen I told him I was sixteen. I waited a moment to see if this raised any questions, but he just nodded, and so I asked to borrow the car and he said okay. Heather was laughing so hard in the backseat that I thought she was going to blow our new set of wheels. I once asked Dad to attend my final soccer game when I was a senior in high school. However, on game day I couldn’t locate him on the sidelines. Was it possible that in the bright sunlight I’d missed the gray ghost, that he’d just melted into the bleachers? When I next saw him, Dad apologetically explained that he’d become lost and was unable to find the school. It was a small town, and we’d been in the same district my entire life.
The one sound I could always count on hearing late into the night at my house was not laughter or talking, but typing. Both of my parents are weapons-grade typists who back then had dueling Underwoods and backup Royalites. The old manual typewriters required a heavy touch, and at almost any hour, one could hear the clackety-clack followed by the zing of the thick metal carriage returning left, landing with a shudder, a smack, and the ding of an old-fashioned trolley car. This rhythm was occasionally punctuated by an “Oh bash!” (Dad) or “Fuckets buckets!” (Mom), followed by a short silence while correction fluid was applied and then blown upon until dry.
The century and a half between 1835 and 1985 should be known as the Carbon Age. At any given time, there was more carbon paper than toilet paper in our house. The major difference between the two was that toilet paper didn’t leave black smudges all over everyone’s hands that were easily transferred to the face, furniture, and countertop. If a person born during the epoch of the photocopy machine or word processor has had the occasion to cc folk, that’s where those cryptic letters come from—carbon copy.
Once, I used a stopwatch to time Dad as he broke the typing record in the Guinness Book of World Records. Of course I wanted to call them immediately, but Dad wouldn’t hear of such nonsense. Humorist Garrison Keillor likes to joke how Lutherans are such modest people that if you give them a gold trophy, they’ll paint it bronze.
In elementary school, I was the only student who arrived with typewritten excuses. In fact, we’re not entirely sure that Dad can write cursive at all, aside from signing his name. As for his printing, it’s come to resemble his typing, the way dogs begin to look like their owners and older couples start to look like each other. I was the only first grader who brought in for show-and-tell a typed page reading, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy red dog.” I proceeded to explain how the sentence used every letter of the alphabet and was a good way to test if all the keys on the Underwood were working.
Before I learned to type, in tenth grade, Dad was like something out of the fairy tale “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” I placed the handwritten essay outside his door, and the next morning it was sitting on my dresser, perfectly typed. Although he never revised or rewrote, he couldn’t help himself from correcting a few grammatical and punctuation errors.
Mom would comfortably make the transition to the electric typewriter and, later, to a computer keyboard. Dad, however, was to remain pounding away on an Underwood down at Erie County Hall until his retirement in 1985 and beyond; it was our own Smithsonian exhibit, and he was always on the prowl for typewriter ribbons and cleaning fluid. He actually tried a number of electric typewriters when the other court reporters made the switch, but his fingers were so strong by then, and conditioned for slamming those heavy metal keys, that he could hardly feel the dainty plastic buttons moving underneath his calloused fingertips, so he ended up with row upon row of the same letter after a single touch.
If Dad wasn’t banging away at the typewriter keys, then I fell asleep to the constant grinding of his rock tumbler, which had two tin cans rotating twenty-four hours a day, like a brace of possum on a spit. Dad liked collecting rocks along the beach on Long Island for those two weeks during the summer and spent the rest of the year polishing them.
He said when he retired he wanted to become a beachcomber. That would certainly please Mom, I thought, with his cigarette smoke blowing out to sea rather than into the hallway.
***
Show me a mother in college, and I’ll show you a family that can cook. When my mom went back to school in 1974, she started simplifying. Until then, she had her kinky brown hair washed, set, and sprayed with hurricane-strength lacquer every week at Rocco’s beauty parlor. Finding Mom asleep with pink tape on the sides of her face and a flannel cloth around her head, it was easy to think I’d walked in on an open casket. Either she had decided there was no longer time for such indulgences, or, more likely, her hairdresser finally wore out from the battle. Thus, Mom reverted to her natural ’fro and found she got the best cuts at salons that specialized in African American hair.
Her next act of emancipation was to close down the wash, dry, and fold laundry service. Dad came up with an innovative solution and just tossed his stuff away when it became unusable. Disintegration didn’t take long with such a high concentration of trapped cigarette smoke. Meantime, I discovered that vacuuming my sheets could stave off a full wash cycle by at least several months.
In the kitchen, Mom declared that it was now every chef for himself. After warning us that letting the egg slicer
and colander become rusty would no doubt result in lockjaw, we were left to our own devices.
Even before my mother halted the regular flow of food, cuisine was never a topic of much interest at our house. We needed gas for the car, paint for the house, salt for the driveway, and food for the body. Eating was just another job.
For dinner, Mom ate an apple, cheese, and some crackers, usually in the living room while catching up on the newspapers. She hadn’t become a raw-fooder so much as a non-ovener.
My father had a different approach to meal preparation. In the
seventies, our suburb didn’t have any fast-food delivery services, no shrimp “flied lice” or Domino’s, and it was still a few years before the grocer’s freezer was stocked with latchkey child–friendly foods. It was premicrowave. In other words, one had to cook to eat. And because stuff in the freezer had to thaw out for hours, it was often necessary to plan ahead.
Dad’s kitchen philosophy was simple: don’t make anything dirty. That was it, the governing principle. The ideal meal was one where there was absolutely no cleanup. Therefore, one needed technique, a keen sense of planning, and resourcefulness.
Being of Scandinavian descent, my father comes by his utilitarianism honestly. After all, the Danes are the creators of Lego, the Eames chair, and half of Janet Reno. They also gave us physicist Niels Bohr, a father of the atomic bomb, which may explain why we never hear, “Come on over, we’re having Danish food!”
The pragmatist’s perfect food is the sandwich, Dad explained. The sandwich requires no plates, pots, pans, baking trays, whisks, ladles, tongs, or other utensils. It is the comestible equivalent of the Swiss Army knife—all in one, completely self-contained. And the perfect sandwich is the presliced meat and cheese variety, because it requires no spoon for mustard, no knife for spreading mayonnaise, no chopping of lettuce and tomato. However, Dad creatively extended the sandwich universe to include almost anything. Hankering for a banana split? Make it in a pita pocket! Want some chili? Dig out the inside of a hamburger bun and put it in there. If the menu required a saucepan, then we let that double as a plate or bowl.
Buffalo Gal Page 16
