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Showing posts with label you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family. Show all posts
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Monday, January 12, 2009
Filth
When I was very young, that is to say when my Mom was still alive, the biggest sin you could commit in our house was to look at pictures of naked women. After she died, which happened when I was 10, and we were packed off to live with Aunt Rageholic, she was the same way. To women of their generation it was the most horrible thing in the world for young men to look upon the naked female form. And I'm not sure why that was.
I remember my brother Charlie came home one Friday afternoon while we still lived in Detroit with a copy of National Lampoon. The second he laid it down I grabbed it and looked through it. I remember being fascinated by the pictures of topless women in it. They sparked my imagination and the women looked a hell of a lot better than the topless women in National Geographic. I was happy as a lark knowing that my big brother bought a magazine that had topless women in it. Our mother however was less than pleased. As soon as she saw it she went ballistic and made Charlie take the magazine back. He was pretty steamed and I was oh so sad because those pretty topless women were leaving and I didn't know when any of them would be back. Mom sternly warned us all after the incident that it was not good to look at things like that. I disagreed wholeheartedly with her but being 10 years old I thought it prudent to keep my opinion to myself.
Aunt Rageholic felt the same way. Whenever anyone of us got caught possessing any type of magazine that contained pictures of nude women she'd scream her head off at us and she'd either use the belt on us or she'd get Uncle Adultery to give us a whipping for looking at what she described as 'filth.' Of course banning something was the quickest way to get teen aged boys to delve further into the thing that was banned and so we began smuggling in and hiding such skin mags as Playboy,
I remember my brother Charlie came home one Friday afternoon while we still lived in Detroit with a copy of National Lampoon. The second he laid it down I grabbed it and looked through it. I remember being fascinated by the pictures of topless women in it. They sparked my imagination and the women looked a hell of a lot better than the topless women in National Geographic. I was happy as a lark knowing that my big brother bought a magazine that had topless women in it. Our mother however was less than pleased. As soon as she saw it she went ballistic and made Charlie take the magazine back. He was pretty steamed and I was oh so sad because those pretty topless women were leaving and I didn't know when any of them would be back. Mom sternly warned us all after the incident that it was not good to look at things like that. I disagreed wholeheartedly with her but being 10 years old I thought it prudent to keep my opinion to myself.
Aunt Rageholic felt the same way. Whenever anyone of us got caught possessing any type of magazine that contained pictures of nude women she'd scream her head off at us and she'd either use the belt on us or she'd get Uncle Adultery to give us a whipping for looking at what she described as 'filth.' Of course banning something was the quickest way to get teen aged boys to delve further into the thing that was banned and so we began smuggling in and hiding such skin mags as Playboy,
Penthouse, Oui, and others. Back then, the mid to late '70's most all the mainstream mags were almost chaste in their pictorials and I remember being almost disappointed they did not show more. I looked at those magazines as learning tools to learn about women because I was way too shy to ever get any where with a girl at that age.
I think my mom and my crazy aunt must have thought that looking at women's naked boobies was going to turn us into sexual deviants. Or maybe they didn't want any onanism on their watches.
I recently bought some vintage Playboy magazines and I've been scanning some of the photos, the ads, and the cartoons and illustrations. They are wonderful pop culture time capsules and I was surprised by the lack of nudity in most of them. In most cases, especially in the ones from the 1960's, about the only nudity is in the centerfold photo itself and maybe one other pictorial. There's lots of shots like this:
But there's not a female pubic hair to be found in most all of the photos.
I loved the cartoons of Erich Sokol and Eldon Dedini because both men drew curvy shapely women who looked like the women I saw around me. I also loved the Vargas girl illustrations:
In most cases the Vargas girls made up for the lack of nude females in Playboy and some months they were hotter than the gal who was the centerfold model.
********
Playboy, Penthouse, and others have changed a lot since those innocent days of the 1960's and early '70's, they have become more coarse to be sure. And they've cheapened themselves too in order to compete with the world of hardcore porn, which is a losing battle if you ask me. But even as the magazines have changed some things have not. My crazy aunt is still nutty when it comes to anything to do with sex. She tried reading my novel but she put it down after she found out it has lesbian characters in it. One of my cousins told me she said that it was full of 'filth' and therefore it was not worth reading. But for me to get a comment from a crazy old woman like that, one who thinks the output of Tennessee Williams is 'sordid,' it's high praise indeed.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
I'm not a family reunion guy
One of my cousins spotted me in the grocery store yesterday evening. She is the sister of the ones who ran over the local cop and then drove off. I yelped like a scalded dog when she recognized me. I said hello and then I hurried out of the store because I didn't want her to
- see what kind of car I was driving,
- or follow me to our new house,
- or hit me up for money,
- or ask me to knock over a liquor store with her.
Cruel? Maybe, but it's always better to be safe now so you're not sorry later.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The shallow end of my gene pool
It's been a while since I treated you all to a dip in my family's gene pool so here's a post about one of the black sheep in my family.
That handsome dude is my late Uncle Curtiss. I'm guessing that photo was taken some time in the mid 1950's, which would have been just before my parents got married and right about the time Curt started his criminal career.
Remember those cheesy films from the '50's about juvenile delinquents? If you do then you'll remember there was always a character who drank, smoked, and stole cars for joy rides. Well that character was my Uncle Curt. His first brushes with the law, or so I was told anyway, began with him stealing cars. He'd boost the cars and drive the shit out of them and then wreck or sell them. He was pretty good at it but the cops always caught up to him. He was in and out of the Michigan prison system quite a bit in the late '50's and early '60's. He was more in prison than he was out of it and as a result of his life of crime I never knew him when I lived in Michigan. I only heard stories about him.
People on my Dad's side of the family would always tell me what a great guy he was, and then they'd always follow it up with, "If he'd only straighten up and stop stealing and drinking so much." The folks on my Mom's side never talked about him much.
Upon getting released from one prison stay in Michigan Curt decided he'd had enough of the Wolverine state and he hightailed it to California, I'm pretty sure that was in the late 1960's. He went out there and he tried to go straight. He met and married a woman named Beverly and he had a couple of kids with her. He worked a series of dead end jobs and he took up painting after my Dad taught him the basics of it. Curt developed his own unique painting style and I remember being given some smaller paintings he had done, they subsequently ended up in the hands of my late sister and she lost or gave them away. Unfortunately for Curt's family, he also developed a taste for stealing checkbooks and forging checks. He also developed a taste for heroin as well.
Johnny Law caught up with him in sunny California and Curt was put away on forgery, theft, and drug charges. He spent most of the '70's in one California prison or another. During his time in the joint he met Merle Haggard and Charles Manson. Sometime around 1978 he got lucky and got out on parole. He was able to stay out long enough to convince my Dad to come out to live with him and his family, my Dad was going through one of the worst mental illness episodes of his life during that time. Not too long after going out to Cali, my Dad decided that life in the sun was not for him and he moved back to Ypsilanti, Michigan. And after moving back there it was not too long after that that he decided that life in general was not for him and he took his own life. For some reason he had listed Curt as his next of kin, instead of his half sister, my crazy aunt, and it was Curt they notified when they found Dad's body. It was also Curt who called us in Virginia to tell us that Dad was dead. I answered the phone when he called and he told me that my father had committed suicide. Imagine that, the first time I ever speak with the guy and he just flat out tells me my Dad offed himself. He didn't mince words or beat around the bush when he told me either. I remember thinking as I hung up the phone after that our first conversation, "Holy shit, Uncle Curt is an asshole." Then the phone rang a few minutes later and someone said it was Uncle Curt again and he wanted to speak to me. The first words out of his mouth were, "Jeez, I bet you think I'm an asshole for the way I told you about your father's death, don't you?" I told him I did and then I hung up on him. That was 1979.
Soon after that Curt got busted again for forgery. This time he took his forgery to new heights, he was forging checks, cashing them, and bankrolling other criminal ventures with the ill gotten cash. They pretty much threw the book at him this time. He served about 7 or 8 years in San Quentin for his last crime spree.
I had pretty much wrote him off for good after speaking to him those two times and I didn't think twice about it, until one day in the late '80's that is. I was living with my crazy aunt and working some dead end job and hating life in general when one day a huge Cadillac with California plates pulled into the drive way. Out stepped this balding dude who looked a little like my dad and he had a woman with him. They walked up to the porch and my crazy aunt ran out and started screaming how glad she was to see her baby brother. So there he was in the flesh, my Uncle Curt. My aunt immediately insisted they stay with her in her tiny house until they got on their feet job and money wise.
I couldn't help myself, I warmed up to Curt right away. He was funny, subversive, and fun loving. He filled in some of his back story for me during that first month he and Mary stayed there. He told me that the state of California decided that since he wasn't a violent felon and that since he had served the majority of his last sentence he could go free. Upon his release he met Mary and they hit it off. I'm not sure if Mary was born with lady parts but I'm pretty sure she had at least some of them when she and Curt hooked up. They got into heroin upon hooking up but Curt decided that he didn't want to die in prison so they decided to try to kick their habit on a cross country trip that would culminate in him meeting back up with his family. Curt still smoked pot, and so did I back then, so we shared that and we'd both take a drink of hard liquor from time to time, him way more then me. We spent the next few weeks getting high, getting to know one another, and shooting pool.
But my aunt's crazy soon kicked in and she got pissed at Curt's woman for some reason or another and she booted them out. They moved into a trailer about 30 miles from my aunt's place and I hung out with them quite a bit. Mary got a job and Curt coached her on how to get hurt on that job so she could collect a settlement, which she did in short order. He also found a job and he managed to hurt himself on it and he also collected a settlement so they both were soon off work with their bills paid. I liked hanging out with him because he made me laugh and I could talk about anything with him but I could increasingly not stand Mary. She drove me batty and I hated being around her, so I hung out with them less and less.
Around the fall of 1988 I decided that I had had enough of living around my crazy aunt and my fun loving but criminal uncle and I chucked it all moved to Roanoke, VA. While I lived up there Curt and Mary decided they had had enough of Tennessee and they up and moved to Indiana to be around her family. Curt had a heart attack soon after moving there. He and I spoke a few times after his heart attack on the phone but never for very long because Curt was so depressed over his health. Not too long after his heart attck he was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and he passed away rather quickly after being diagnosed.
I'm glad I got to know Curt towards the end of his life rather than at the start of mine. We related to each other more like friends than we did uncle and nephew. True, he was a criminal most of his life but his crimes were not violent ones and he paid his debt to society for most all of them. He was the black sheep of his family and my mentally ill Dad was the lost lamb, but without both of them I wouldn't be who I am today.
Curt is survived by a son and a daughter, who I have never met, and by his first wife Beverly, who I also never met, and by Mary, his common law wife who is still living somehwere in Indiana.
That handsome dude is my late Uncle Curtiss. I'm guessing that photo was taken some time in the mid 1950's, which would have been just before my parents got married and right about the time Curt started his criminal career.
Remember those cheesy films from the '50's about juvenile delinquents? If you do then you'll remember there was always a character who drank, smoked, and stole cars for joy rides. Well that character was my Uncle Curt. His first brushes with the law, or so I was told anyway, began with him stealing cars. He'd boost the cars and drive the shit out of them and then wreck or sell them. He was pretty good at it but the cops always caught up to him. He was in and out of the Michigan prison system quite a bit in the late '50's and early '60's. He was more in prison than he was out of it and as a result of his life of crime I never knew him when I lived in Michigan. I only heard stories about him.
People on my Dad's side of the family would always tell me what a great guy he was, and then they'd always follow it up with, "If he'd only straighten up and stop stealing and drinking so much." The folks on my Mom's side never talked about him much.
Upon getting released from one prison stay in Michigan Curt decided he'd had enough of the Wolverine state and he hightailed it to California, I'm pretty sure that was in the late 1960's. He went out there and he tried to go straight. He met and married a woman named Beverly and he had a couple of kids with her. He worked a series of dead end jobs and he took up painting after my Dad taught him the basics of it. Curt developed his own unique painting style and I remember being given some smaller paintings he had done, they subsequently ended up in the hands of my late sister and she lost or gave them away. Unfortunately for Curt's family, he also developed a taste for stealing checkbooks and forging checks. He also developed a taste for heroin as well.
Johnny Law caught up with him in sunny California and Curt was put away on forgery, theft, and drug charges. He spent most of the '70's in one California prison or another. During his time in the joint he met Merle Haggard and Charles Manson. Sometime around 1978 he got lucky and got out on parole. He was able to stay out long enough to convince my Dad to come out to live with him and his family, my Dad was going through one of the worst mental illness episodes of his life during that time. Not too long after going out to Cali, my Dad decided that life in the sun was not for him and he moved back to Ypsilanti, Michigan. And after moving back there it was not too long after that that he decided that life in general was not for him and he took his own life. For some reason he had listed Curt as his next of kin, instead of his half sister, my crazy aunt, and it was Curt they notified when they found Dad's body. It was also Curt who called us in Virginia to tell us that Dad was dead. I answered the phone when he called and he told me that my father had committed suicide. Imagine that, the first time I ever speak with the guy and he just flat out tells me my Dad offed himself. He didn't mince words or beat around the bush when he told me either. I remember thinking as I hung up the phone after that our first conversation, "Holy shit, Uncle Curt is an asshole." Then the phone rang a few minutes later and someone said it was Uncle Curt again and he wanted to speak to me. The first words out of his mouth were, "Jeez, I bet you think I'm an asshole for the way I told you about your father's death, don't you?" I told him I did and then I hung up on him. That was 1979.
Soon after that Curt got busted again for forgery. This time he took his forgery to new heights, he was forging checks, cashing them, and bankrolling other criminal ventures with the ill gotten cash. They pretty much threw the book at him this time. He served about 7 or 8 years in San Quentin for his last crime spree.
I had pretty much wrote him off for good after speaking to him those two times and I didn't think twice about it, until one day in the late '80's that is. I was living with my crazy aunt and working some dead end job and hating life in general when one day a huge Cadillac with California plates pulled into the drive way. Out stepped this balding dude who looked a little like my dad and he had a woman with him. They walked up to the porch and my crazy aunt ran out and started screaming how glad she was to see her baby brother. So there he was in the flesh, my Uncle Curt. My aunt immediately insisted they stay with her in her tiny house until they got on their feet job and money wise.
I couldn't help myself, I warmed up to Curt right away. He was funny, subversive, and fun loving. He filled in some of his back story for me during that first month he and Mary stayed there. He told me that the state of California decided that since he wasn't a violent felon and that since he had served the majority of his last sentence he could go free. Upon his release he met Mary and they hit it off. I'm not sure if Mary was born with lady parts but I'm pretty sure she had at least some of them when she and Curt hooked up. They got into heroin upon hooking up but Curt decided that he didn't want to die in prison so they decided to try to kick their habit on a cross country trip that would culminate in him meeting back up with his family. Curt still smoked pot, and so did I back then, so we shared that and we'd both take a drink of hard liquor from time to time, him way more then me. We spent the next few weeks getting high, getting to know one another, and shooting pool.
But my aunt's crazy soon kicked in and she got pissed at Curt's woman for some reason or another and she booted them out. They moved into a trailer about 30 miles from my aunt's place and I hung out with them quite a bit. Mary got a job and Curt coached her on how to get hurt on that job so she could collect a settlement, which she did in short order. He also found a job and he managed to hurt himself on it and he also collected a settlement so they both were soon off work with their bills paid. I liked hanging out with him because he made me laugh and I could talk about anything with him but I could increasingly not stand Mary. She drove me batty and I hated being around her, so I hung out with them less and less.
Around the fall of 1988 I decided that I had had enough of living around my crazy aunt and my fun loving but criminal uncle and I chucked it all moved to Roanoke, VA. While I lived up there Curt and Mary decided they had had enough of Tennessee and they up and moved to Indiana to be around her family. Curt had a heart attack soon after moving there. He and I spoke a few times after his heart attack on the phone but never for very long because Curt was so depressed over his health. Not too long after his heart attck he was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and he passed away rather quickly after being diagnosed.
I'm glad I got to know Curt towards the end of his life rather than at the start of mine. We related to each other more like friends than we did uncle and nephew. True, he was a criminal most of his life but his crimes were not violent ones and he paid his debt to society for most all of them. He was the black sheep of his family and my mentally ill Dad was the lost lamb, but without both of them I wouldn't be who I am today.
Curt is survived by a son and a daughter, who I have never met, and by his first wife Beverly, who I also never met, and by Mary, his common law wife who is still living somehwere in Indiana.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
Feel the pride
Here's a comment someone left at the local news website where the story of my criminal cousins is displayed:
"Those two inbreds look like something from the Island of Dr. Moreau."
The last time my cousin Dearl, pronounced "Durrell," rhymes with squirrel, talked to me was Superbowl Sunday a few years back. He called to find out the point spread on the big game and when I told him what it was he asked if I knew any bookies who would take some of his action. I told him I did not since I do not bet on sports, so his next question was did I want to bet him on the game. I reminded him I didn't bet on sports and then I reminded him that I had just told him that. He didn't care for my tone of voice so he hung up on me. That was about 6 years ago.
The last time I saw my cousin Connie she had her own business cleaning houses and she seemed to be the only sane person in her family. But I guess the lure of white trash-ism was too strong for her or perhaps she tuned into the siren song of homemade meth and that's all she could hear. Either way her life is in the crapper now. Funny thing though, she and I are the same age but she looks like she's a haggard looking 60 and I look like I'm 45, which I am.
I'm all eat up with family pride and I'm praying to the monkey gods the bore me that neither one of them calls me to be a character witness at their trials because I'll have no choice but to tell the truth about their sordid past.
And in case any of you were wondering, yes, both of them have reproduced.
"Those two inbreds look like something from the Island of Dr. Moreau."
The last time my cousin Dearl, pronounced "Durrell," rhymes with squirrel, talked to me was Superbowl Sunday a few years back. He called to find out the point spread on the big game and when I told him what it was he asked if I knew any bookies who would take some of his action. I told him I did not since I do not bet on sports, so his next question was did I want to bet him on the game. I reminded him I didn't bet on sports and then I reminded him that I had just told him that. He didn't care for my tone of voice so he hung up on me. That was about 6 years ago.
The last time I saw my cousin Connie she had her own business cleaning houses and she seemed to be the only sane person in her family. But I guess the lure of white trash-ism was too strong for her or perhaps she tuned into the siren song of homemade meth and that's all she could hear. Either way her life is in the crapper now. Funny thing though, she and I are the same age but she looks like she's a haggard looking 60 and I look like I'm 45, which I am.
I'm all eat up with family pride and I'm praying to the monkey gods the bore me that neither one of them calls me to be a character witness at their trials because I'll have no choice but to tell the truth about their sordid past.
And in case any of you were wondering, yes, both of them have reproduced.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Want to know why I avoid my father's side of the family like the plague?
A police officer here in Johnson City got hit by a car the other night and he was seriously injured, in fact, he's still in the hospital. The car that hit him did not stop, they fled the scene which led to a man hunt for the driver of car that hit him. For a few days it was all the local media here in Johnson City was talking about.
Well, the good news is they caught the people who were driving the car that hit the officer. The bad news is the people who hit him are distant cousins of mine on my Dad's side of the family. You can see them in all their glory in a local news story by clicking here.
It's times like this that I just can't hide my family pride.
Well, the good news is they caught the people who were driving the car that hit the officer. The bad news is the people who hit him are distant cousins of mine on my Dad's side of the family. You can see them in all their glory in a local news story by clicking here.
It's times like this that I just can't hide my family pride.
Monday, August 11, 2008
The most expensive thing in the world
Growing up as poor as I did when I lived in Detroit before my Mom died I never learned much about how to handle money. We never had much of it and when we did get some it usually went out as fast as it came in. Mom handled all the money and she never said much to us about how to make it, save it, or how to spend it wisely.
Since we lived in the projects and were on welfare, got food stamps, and had Medicaid, I was pretty clueless as to how it all came in and what it went out for. All I knew was the at the first of the month we ate like kings and Mom was a little less tense than she would be at the end of the month when things were really tight. I only remember her saying something to us one about our lack of money once, when I asked why didn't we have any of the "good" cereal left, I was probably referring to the lack of sugary sweet Quisp or Cap'n Crunch, she said we were out because we kids had ate it all and she couldn't afford to buy anything but the cheap-o store brand. Somehow she ran the house and paid all the bills and took care of five rambunctious kids and my Dad, when he was not in the mental hospital that is.
When things got extra tight I remember going to eat at Grandma's house a bunch of times, she only lived a few blocks from us but to me it seemed like it was a world away because she didn't live in the projects. Also there were times when my Uncle Bob would take us kids out and also my Uncle Jerry would as well, I suspect they did it at her behest more to save her sanity than to make sure that we'd be fed. And there would be the odd time when we'd be sent off to my Aunt Carol's house for supper or to spend the night, this happened most of the time around the end of the month when the food stamps had run out and Mom's wallet was thin from lack of funds.
I didn't know I was missing out on anything, on one level I knew other people had more money and a better looking house than we did but I just figured everyone ate the same kinds of stuff we did, lots of processed foods, cheese pizzas, hot dogs wrapped in slices of white bread, store brand Twinkies, canned pudding, and other stuff that would put a scare into a modern day nutritionist. Mom kept our ship afloat but she couldn't cook worth a damn. I was almost 10 before I had a salad and I remember asking my cousins what this magical thing called "steak" was.
Mom kept our financial problems close to her vest and she kept good food out of our reach because she didn't have the knack for cooking so we ate a lot of crap food. Her one big dish was an abomination called "city chicken." Dad, when he was home and lucid, would ask, "What's for dinner?" Then I'd hear those words that chilled me to my little core, "City chicken." I hated that shit with a passion, I hated it almost as much as I hated canned asparagus, beets, cooked carrots, and Veg-All. It was many years before I found out what "city chicken" was, it turned out it was veal that was cut into chunks, rolled in bread crumbs, shoved onto skewers, and then fried with in an inch of it's life. Upon hearing that we'd be having city chicken yet again dad would say, "Ohh, goody!" And when I heard him say that I would wish that he were back in the hospital getting some Edison medicine (electro-shock treatment) or having a Coke with a Thorazine chaser. I loved my Mom and my Dad but city chicken night after night was cruel and unusual punishment for crimes I had no idea that I even committed.
But things changed all the way around for me when Mom passed away and we got sent to live with Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery.
They were more open about money but in a nutty way. They both were kids when the Great Depression hit and they both grew up dirt poor and it affected them adversely, my aunt more so than my uncle. She was, and still is, the type of person who never has enough money and there is always, always, always a financial crisis in her life. She would bitch and moan about not having enough money when I knew damn well she had cash in her purse and money in the bank, but it was never enough. She got money for being our parental guardian but she never told us about it, she would just tell us that we were one step out of the poor house and that we were lucky to have a roof over our ungrateful heads.
After my mother was killed on the operating table my mentally ill father was the only one in the family to have the presence of mind to sue the doctors and the hospital where she died. The case dragged on for years and no one knew about it until one day we got a call to come back up north, we had been moved south by this time, the mid 1970's, so we could all sign the settlement and us kids could collect our share of the malpractice settlement. We went back to Detroit, and all the way up Aunt Rageholic bitched about how much the trip was costing her, and we signed the papers and we got our money.
All of us kids, my two brothers and my sister and I, got $10,000. My Dad got the same amount as well. I was under 18 at the time and my money was supposed to be put into the bank for safekeeping. But things didn't turn out that way. My nutty angry aunt decided she needed my money to keep her failing restaurant afloat so she took it. I got to spend maybe $500 dollars of it, the rest vanished in the black hole of her soon to be belly up restaurant. Had I had that money I would not have had to take out any student loans when I got to college but alas the best laid plans oft go astray when one is related to a greedy woman who has no compunction about taking a minor's money from a malpractice suit and spending it on a failing business.
But before all that happened I learned from Aunt Rageaholic about the most expensive thing in the world. She taught me about this thing in small doses. As a way to justify not letting us eat an extra slice of bacon she'd say, "No, you can't have more bacon because pound for pound it's more expensive than fee-lay min-yon. One slice of bacon is enough for you." When we'd ask for more than a thimbleful of orange juice at breakfast she deny us by saying, "Ounce for ounce orange juice is more expensive than fee-lay min-yon." If we wanted to go to McDonald's while out and about in the city she say, "Oh no. Fast food is more expensive than fee-lay min-yon."
With the limited background I had, I had no idea what fee-lay min-yon was. I figured it was like diamonds or gold or something. I figured it had to be the most precious, most expensive thing in the world if it my aunt kept going on about it. After all she knew way more than I did about money than I did. I figured there had to be fee-lay min-yon mines somewhere and that it was traded on the stock exchange and maybe it even backed our currency like gold did at one point.
One rare night when I was a teenager I got to stay over at a friend's house and he and I were talking before we went to sleep. We chatted about girls, Spiderman comic books, girls, wrasslers, school, girls, cars, girls, and then we got onto the subject of what kind of house would we live in when we finally became rich and famous. He said he'd live in a castle like the royal family in England did and I said that I was going to live in a house made out of the most expensive thing in the world, fee-lay min-yon. My friend split his sides laughing at me and when I asked why he was laughing so much he said that only an idiot would live in a house made of meat.
I said fee-lay min-yon wasn't meat it was something rare and precious. He got up and told me to follow him. We walked to his parents kitchen and he reached in to their freezer and he pulled out a small cut of beef that was wrapped in bacon.
On the package it said, "Fillet Mignon." As my face got hot with embarrassment I made a silent vow to myself to be suspicious of everything that my crazy aunt said from that day forward.
Since we lived in the projects and were on welfare, got food stamps, and had Medicaid, I was pretty clueless as to how it all came in and what it went out for. All I knew was the at the first of the month we ate like kings and Mom was a little less tense than she would be at the end of the month when things were really tight. I only remember her saying something to us one about our lack of money once, when I asked why didn't we have any of the "good" cereal left, I was probably referring to the lack of sugary sweet Quisp or Cap'n Crunch, she said we were out because we kids had ate it all and she couldn't afford to buy anything but the cheap-o store brand. Somehow she ran the house and paid all the bills and took care of five rambunctious kids and my Dad, when he was not in the mental hospital that is.
When things got extra tight I remember going to eat at Grandma's house a bunch of times, she only lived a few blocks from us but to me it seemed like it was a world away because she didn't live in the projects. Also there were times when my Uncle Bob would take us kids out and also my Uncle Jerry would as well, I suspect they did it at her behest more to save her sanity than to make sure that we'd be fed. And there would be the odd time when we'd be sent off to my Aunt Carol's house for supper or to spend the night, this happened most of the time around the end of the month when the food stamps had run out and Mom's wallet was thin from lack of funds.
I didn't know I was missing out on anything, on one level I knew other people had more money and a better looking house than we did but I just figured everyone ate the same kinds of stuff we did, lots of processed foods, cheese pizzas, hot dogs wrapped in slices of white bread, store brand Twinkies, canned pudding, and other stuff that would put a scare into a modern day nutritionist. Mom kept our ship afloat but she couldn't cook worth a damn. I was almost 10 before I had a salad and I remember asking my cousins what this magical thing called "steak" was.
Mom kept our financial problems close to her vest and she kept good food out of our reach because she didn't have the knack for cooking so we ate a lot of crap food. Her one big dish was an abomination called "city chicken." Dad, when he was home and lucid, would ask, "What's for dinner?" Then I'd hear those words that chilled me to my little core, "City chicken." I hated that shit with a passion, I hated it almost as much as I hated canned asparagus, beets, cooked carrots, and Veg-All. It was many years before I found out what "city chicken" was, it turned out it was veal that was cut into chunks, rolled in bread crumbs, shoved onto skewers, and then fried with in an inch of it's life. Upon hearing that we'd be having city chicken yet again dad would say, "Ohh, goody!" And when I heard him say that I would wish that he were back in the hospital getting some Edison medicine (electro-shock treatment) or having a Coke with a Thorazine chaser. I loved my Mom and my Dad but city chicken night after night was cruel and unusual punishment for crimes I had no idea that I even committed.
But things changed all the way around for me when Mom passed away and we got sent to live with Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery.
They were more open about money but in a nutty way. They both were kids when the Great Depression hit and they both grew up dirt poor and it affected them adversely, my aunt more so than my uncle. She was, and still is, the type of person who never has enough money and there is always, always, always a financial crisis in her life. She would bitch and moan about not having enough money when I knew damn well she had cash in her purse and money in the bank, but it was never enough. She got money for being our parental guardian but she never told us about it, she would just tell us that we were one step out of the poor house and that we were lucky to have a roof over our ungrateful heads.
After my mother was killed on the operating table my mentally ill father was the only one in the family to have the presence of mind to sue the doctors and the hospital where she died. The case dragged on for years and no one knew about it until one day we got a call to come back up north, we had been moved south by this time, the mid 1970's, so we could all sign the settlement and us kids could collect our share of the malpractice settlement. We went back to Detroit, and all the way up Aunt Rageholic bitched about how much the trip was costing her, and we signed the papers and we got our money.
All of us kids, my two brothers and my sister and I, got $10,000. My Dad got the same amount as well. I was under 18 at the time and my money was supposed to be put into the bank for safekeeping. But things didn't turn out that way. My nutty angry aunt decided she needed my money to keep her failing restaurant afloat so she took it. I got to spend maybe $500 dollars of it, the rest vanished in the black hole of her soon to be belly up restaurant. Had I had that money I would not have had to take out any student loans when I got to college but alas the best laid plans oft go astray when one is related to a greedy woman who has no compunction about taking a minor's money from a malpractice suit and spending it on a failing business.
But before all that happened I learned from Aunt Rageaholic about the most expensive thing in the world. She taught me about this thing in small doses. As a way to justify not letting us eat an extra slice of bacon she'd say, "No, you can't have more bacon because pound for pound it's more expensive than fee-lay min-yon. One slice of bacon is enough for you." When we'd ask for more than a thimbleful of orange juice at breakfast she deny us by saying, "Ounce for ounce orange juice is more expensive than fee-lay min-yon." If we wanted to go to McDonald's while out and about in the city she say, "Oh no. Fast food is more expensive than fee-lay min-yon."
With the limited background I had, I had no idea what fee-lay min-yon was. I figured it was like diamonds or gold or something. I figured it had to be the most precious, most expensive thing in the world if it my aunt kept going on about it. After all she knew way more than I did about money than I did. I figured there had to be fee-lay min-yon mines somewhere and that it was traded on the stock exchange and maybe it even backed our currency like gold did at one point.
One rare night when I was a teenager I got to stay over at a friend's house and he and I were talking before we went to sleep. We chatted about girls, Spiderman comic books, girls, wrasslers, school, girls, cars, girls, and then we got onto the subject of what kind of house would we live in when we finally became rich and famous. He said he'd live in a castle like the royal family in England did and I said that I was going to live in a house made out of the most expensive thing in the world, fee-lay min-yon. My friend split his sides laughing at me and when I asked why he was laughing so much he said that only an idiot would live in a house made of meat.
I said fee-lay min-yon wasn't meat it was something rare and precious. He got up and told me to follow him. We walked to his parents kitchen and he reached in to their freezer and he pulled out a small cut of beef that was wrapped in bacon.
On the package it said, "Fillet Mignon." As my face got hot with embarrassment I made a silent vow to myself to be suspicious of everything that my crazy aunt said from that day forward.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Is any one up for some cheesecake?
One of the many cheesy great photos I found in these Flicker sets. Oh how I love other people's family photos on Flickr.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Aunt Ethel got you a little something for Christmas
But you've got to give her a big kiss before you get it. I'd be careful if I was you, she's been into the Egg Nog and she may slip you the tongue when she kisses you. Isn't family great?
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