Caz and I always traded tapes, trying to turn each other on to the music we loved. I taped her the Replacements and the Ramones; she taped me Bon Jovi and Tiffany. I taped her Let It Be for her birthday. (Conscientous big brother that I am, I omitted “Gary’s Got a Boner.”) We liked each other’s music way more than we would admit. Bon Jovi’s “Wild in the Streets” stopped me dead in my tracks, a stupid-rock mall anthem to end all mall anthems, to end all anthems, to end all malls. Meanwhile, Caroline was putting the Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue” on her answering machine. Whenever we confessed how much we loved each other’s music, we each felt both flattered and disappointed at the same time.
Caroline made me a tape for my birthday that winter, when I turned twenty-three. According to the note she wrote inside the case, “This is dedicated to the men in my life—Jordan, Rob, Jon, Joe, Danny, & Donnie.” “Rob” is me. The other five are the New Kids on the Block. It’s called Rob’s Cultural Experience, and it has her narrating between the songs to explain the significance of why Bobby Brown is a genius or why Lita Ford kicks ass.
Caroline was really the only person on earth I could talk to about girls. That sounds weird, since she was only twelve, but she was always braver and bolder than I was, and did her best to teach me basic social skills. She could always be counted on to say, “Who needs girls? You have me.” She wore her hair pouffed up like Joan Jett in the video for “I Hate Myself for Loving You.” She wore a black leather jacket to play up her resemblance to Joan. Hell, she even took “Joan” as her confirmation name.
The New Kids were starting to blow up across the country, the way New Edition and Bobby Brown did a few years earlier. Caroline was plugged into the Catholic schoolgirl grapevine that knew exactly where they were at any given moment, allowing her to lead packs of her friends in chasing them down the street. She knew about it every time one of her friends had a friend who had a friend who saw them buying condoms at the Osco Drug in Dorchester. Her favorites were Joey and Donnie. She met Donnie once backstage and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. For months, she answered the phone, “Donnie kissed me!”
One day, Caroline was telling me Joey Mac stories and she mentioned that his nickname in high school was “Wedgie.” It only made her love him more fiercely. There was always something humble and lovable about those New Kids. They never had the disastrous post-teen-pop crash. After the hits dried up, they got on with their lives. My friend Desiree even went on a New Kids cruise last winter, where you’d call room service and Donnie or Jordan would show up at your cabin with your food.
Caroline made me another excellent tape that winter where she actually interviewed the New Kids. She did this by asking questions into the mike, and then sticking in a line from a song as the answer.
CAROLINE:
“Do you have something to tell me?”
JOEY MCINTYRE:
“Please don’t go, girl! You’re my best friend! You’re my everything!”
She orchestrates the whole tape as a news report (“This is Caroline Sheffield on WNOB, live from Dorchester”) about a rumble between the New Kids and Lita Ford, “the self-proclaimed First Lady of Rock.” Obviously, Lita kicks all their asses. The New Kids ask Lita, “What’cha Gonna Do About It?” Lita answers with a line from “Under the Gun”: “Now the time has come, it’s your turn to die.” The rumble gets messy, with rock stars from other tapes joining in: Ozzy, Poison, Public Enemy. I have to say, Caroline sure goes overboard creating all this dialogue.
AXL ROSE (from “One in a Million”):
“Hey man, won’t you cut me some slack?”
NEW KIDS (from “Hangin’ Tough”):
“We ain’t gonna cut anybody any slack!”
She even gets the Psychedelic Furs in the mix, with one word from the Pretty in Pink title song.
CAROLINE:
“Joey, what is the name of your girlfriend?”
JOEY:
“Caroline.”
These days, she mostly listens to Taylor Swift, because that’s what her toddlers are into. Sydney and Jack play a game where they take turns pretending to be Taylor; one sings “White Horse” while the other cheers and claps, then they trade places. The music changes, I guess, but the fan gene is a dominant one.
We still argue about music, because we love the argument too much to give it up. It’s always going to be one of our ways of talking to each other. She still loves the Replacements, so much that she actually buys Tommy Stinson’s solo albums, even though I urge her not to. A couple of Christmases ago, she gave me an autographed copy of Paul Westerberg’s solo album, which she got waiting in line at a Boston in-store signing. Needless to say, she was the only girl who showed up, plus the only person under thirty. It knocked me out to see her photos, posing with Paul Westerberg—two people who taught me so much about courage and not being afraid of life and going on your nerve, two soul confidants who got me through some grim times. It made me feel guilty for not liking the record, so I forced myself to play it until I liked it.
Paul Westerberg has a big crazy smile in the picture, with his arm around Caroline. He obviously didn’t get a lot of girls asking for pictures. He looks real happy to see her.
BIG DADDY KANE
“Ain’t No Half Steppin’”
1989
I was twenty-three and living with my grandfather, just because he was ninety and by himself and I wanted to spend time with him while I could. Ever since my grandmother died in 1986, he’d lived alone in the three-decker in Forest Hills, an Irish neighborhood in Boston. I would take the T home every night and he’d cook us steaks, and we’d listen to the Irish folk music on WROL as he smoked his pipe and told stories about the railroad.
He’d lived in this house since 1933, when he and Nana got married. They came over separately in 1924, after growing up on dirt farms in Ireland, and got good jobs in America, she as a maid, he as a brake inspector on the New Haven Railroad. After he retired from the railroad, he was a security guard in a department store, and then in the Gardner Museum in the Fenway. He worshipped FDR and was active in his union. Every time he tried retiring, my grandmother would send him back out to work. She was deaf, but she wasn’t that deaf. And the man could talk.
They’d courted for nine years, as she’d always dreamed she’d eventually go back to County Kerry, whereas he was determined never to go back to County Cork again. As a little kid, I asked him if he ever missed the farm, and he said, “My boy, I was so glad to be off the farm I didn’t know I was working.” He didn’t get to emigrate until he was twenty-four because he had to wait until his elder brother got married. In accordance with tradition, his brother got the farm and he got the brother’s wedding dowry, which he spent on a boat ticket to America. Those two weeks on the boat were the happiest days of his life up to that point. America had a railroad, where he only had to work sixteen hours a day. This was the life. He was terrified that any of his grandchildren might someday move back, after all the trouble it took him to get out. In the sixty-five years since he emigrated, he’d only gone back once, to settle the estate (i.e., give the farm away to the neighbors) when his brother died in 1968. He told my uncle Gerard, “There was fuck all there when I left, and there’s fuck all there now.”
Every night, when I came home from work, I would hear him halfway down Craft Place yelling at the Red Sox on his TV set. “Come on, Ellis! Do it for your ancestors!” His favorite Red Sox player was Ellis Burks, who he called “The Irishman.” He loved to yell at Ellis about the glory of his Celtic name and the tradition of Irish sportsmen. “Think it for your ancestors, Ellis! Sure they had to hit it with a hurley, but you have a bat!” Ellis Burks is black, by the way. After my grandfather died in 1991, I went to County Cork and visited the cabin where he was born, and left an Ellis Burks baseball card there.
Some of my friends, when I told them I was rooming with my grandfather, assumed I was taking care of him, helping him go to the bathroom, stuff like that. These people have never met an
old Irish guy. He wouldn’t even let me take him shopping. He would take the bus in by himself without telling me. When I got home and found out he’d been gallivanting alone on the bus at his age, I would blow a gasket and yell at him, while he sat in his easy chair laughing at me. He walked with a cane, but he just liked how it looked.
After the baseball game, he would cook us a steak and tell stories. Then we trooped out to the living room for Sanford and Son, a show we’d been watching together my entire life. He could relate to Fred Sanford. They were both cantankerous old men who wore cardigans and overalls. Both were widowers who liked to hear themselves talk. They were exiles with thick accents—Fred Sanford a St. Louis man in L.A., my grandfather a County Cork immigrant in Boston—bewildered by normal Americans. All the people around them who were at ease in the new world—these people all seemed as ridiculous as the white cop who tells Fred Sanford “right up” when he means “right on.” Being old and far from home was a joke my grandfather got.
After he went to bed, I’d stay up and watch Yo! MTV Raps for my fix of De La Soul and Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy. I would switch it back to the Eternal Word Network so he could get the first of his seven daily Masses. If I forgot to change the station back, we’d have the same conversation about it. “I got your jokers this morning,” he said. That meant he’d turned on the TV expecting Mass and got Club MTV or Remote Control.
When he tried watching MTV with me, he found it hilarious. The one tape of mine he liked, oddly enough, was the Smiths. His favorite was “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” He said, “At least that’s got a bit of an air to it.”
He preferred the radio in the kitchen, which would sing him the songs of the old country, even though when he was my age, he couldn’t wait to get out of the old country. The songs would remind him of other songs, and he’d sometimes close his eyes to recite. One two three, balance like me. Now you’re a fairy, you’ve got your own faults. Some of the songs were from Ireland, some were from America. Some were American pop songs about the Irish. Some were Irish songs about coming to America and getting lost. Your right foot is crazy, your left foot is lazy, but don’t be un-aizy, I’ll teach you to waltz.
Irish songs make you feel a little nostalgic for the old country, even if it wasn’t the country where you were born. When Nana was alive, she would “go to Ireland” in the evenings, just sit with the lights out for an hour or two, dreaming that she was back on the farm. Then she’d get up and do her devotions around the apartment, with a Vermont Maid bottle full of holy water. She would walk around the apartment flinging it in all directions. To the south, for Uncle Eddie in Brazil. To the other directions, where her other children lived. All over my grandfather and me. Every object in the apartment being fairly damp and extremely holy, she had done her work for the night. Now that she was gone, he and I were alone with just the songs and the time to talk. So we talked.
Or, rather, he talked. When my mom was growing up, he was a silent man, but one day in 1961, he was given the job of riding up and down the Eastern seaboard with a couple of new engineers from the Philippines. Their English wasn’t good, so his job was explaining to them patiently and in detail every aspect of the train operation. He started talking that day and never stopped. So we sat in the kitchen and listened to the radio. He would sing songs about the old country and lecture me about men he idolized (FDR, Eamon de Valera, Cardinal Cushing) and men he despised (Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Cardinal Law).
One night, I came downstairs to say goodnight. He was sitting in the kitchen with his shoes off, and he looked unusually anxious. He was holding a pair of nail clippers. His toenails were ingrown and giving him pain. “It’s the age,” he said. He couldn’t reach down and cut them himself.
I thought, no problem, and got down on my knees in front of his chair. But I was not prepared for blood. As soon as I began cutting the toenails, blood started gushing from his feet. The skin under the nail cracked. I’m usually not squeamish at the sight of blood, but this was my grandfather I was cutting up.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he kept saying. “Please keep going.”
He’d asked my uncle to do this job a couple of Christmases ago. My uncle gave it a go, but the blood freaked him out too—this was his father, after all—and he only got one foot done before he had to beg off the other one. I knew it must have mortified my grandfather to ask my uncle for help with something this intimate, and I knew he was afraid I would say no. I steeled myself and forced myself through it. I kept telling myself, “It’s just blood. My grandfather’s blood. Blood that carried him across an ocean and is in my veins too and okaaaay it’s just blood. It doesn’t hurt. His body will make more. He won’t bleed to death. Nobody dies from getting their toenails cut.”
“Keep going, boy.”
“Nobody ever has died from this. He won’t be the first. I’m totally not killing him, and if I am, I’m sure my mom will believe me when I say that it was his idea and that I ignored my own best judgment when a ninety-year-old man told me to bleed him. That’s what’s happening. I’m bleeding him and I am a fucking butcher.”
I had one foot done. There was blood all over my hands. I asked permission to towel him off, and wrapped up his left foot in a dishrag. Was this normal, to do this for old people? I wouldn’t know if it was normal. I had no idea what his blood type was, or if he knew, or what I’d do if this really was a bad idea.
But it wasn’t a bad idea. “Tell me when you need me to do this again,” I said. “Don’t let them grow this long.” I figured he’d never ask again, but he did, in just a couple weeks.
He also tore an ad out from the Sunday paper to mail away for a tiny little pair of nail scissors. He wrote a check for $3.50 and asked me to drop it in the mail. “And how are the nails doing?” I asked. “Would you like me to clip them tonight?” He said, aaaah, no, which meant it was now something he wanted me to cajole him into, so he wouldn’t have to ask. It was a lonely ritual. It was the first time I ever felt I had to keep a secret from my mom about my grandfather. As soon as I mentioned blood, it would be a big deal. So I didn’t tell anyone. It was just my hands, his feet, his blood, our secret, and it would be this way from now on. Even after I moved out, every time I came to visit, I was asking him about his feet, and talking him into it, the way I had to talk him into letting me drive him to Atlas Liquors for a bit of the Jameson. The way he used to talk me into taking money when I would come visit.
Jesus, Irish men. We can’t ask for a goddamn thing, can we? Asking for help, or accepting it, we just can’t handle it, can we? What the hell is wrong with us and how did we get this way?
He kept asking about the scissors he sent away for, even though they were no different from the scissors I got at the drugstore. The only way they were any different is that when these arrived in the mail, it would mean he had gotten them on his own, with no help from me. But they didn’t arrive. He wrote the scissors people a reminder letter and asked me to mail it for him. I wrote my own letter and slipped it into the same envelope. It wasn’t as polite as my grandfather’s, because I was angry. Even as I was writing it, I could tell it was my mother writing, the furious kind of letter my mom used to write our teachers and principals. It was the letter she would have written if she’d known about the toenails or the scissors. I wrote that if they needed to steal $3.50 from an old man, they were welcome to it but they were assholes. The scissors arrived the following week.
Late at night, kneeling on my grandfather’s kitchen floor, I cut into his skin again and felt him flinch. My hands were bloody. On my knees, on the floor, doing the bloody work of love. Learning, over and over. The work of love will make you bloody and it will make you lonely.
L’TRIMM
“Cars with the Boom”
1989
The first time I watched The Wraith, I was with a girl. It was the greatest ’80s teen-trash melodrama I’d ever seen, which was probably because I was watching it with a girl. Renee was doing her reg
ular Friday night babysitting gig out in Batesville, and although I’d only been her boyfriend for a few weeks, I had graduated to the status of the boy who shows up to distract the babysitter. I’d been waiting for this a long time. Mr. and Mrs. Sorrell had a well-stocked refrigerator and cable TV, both of which were novelties for a couple of starving grad students in Charlottesville. So, as soon as little Lindsey was asleep, we killed a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, drank Rolling Rocks and watched some trashy movies. A plush couch that was bigger than my apartment? Awesome! A refrigerator full of beer? Awesome! The Wraith? Mmmm, cancel that order of awesomes.
It’s a new-wave soap opera set in a small town in Arizona, with Sherilyn Fenn as the all-American beach bunny, plus the perverse twist that she’s a beach bunny in the middle of the desert, where the swimming hole has to be dug with bulldozers. Charlie Sheen is the mysterious new kid in town, who was secretly her true love in his past life. Except he was viciously killed by this evil gang of biker pirates who rampage wildly on the highways, so he’s come back to earth from outer space to get vengeance on the bikers, claim Sherilyn for himself, and drive this really cool, huge, black Wraithmobile, which is like a spaceship on wheels. The biker pirates have leather jackets and names like Skank or Og, but they can’t handle Charlie Sheen.
“It’s a wraith!” splutters Skank, trying to explain it to the other bad guys in their underground hideout. “A wraith, man! A ghost! An evil spirit, and it ain’t cool!”
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 18
