Growing up, I was the youngest child in my family by six years, and my 5 siblings wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. By about 1973, when I was 6 or 7 – a time when a kid is usually primed and ready for stick fights, booger wiping battles and suffocation contests with his brothers — I was mostly left to my own devices. To be clear, I wasn’t lonely, and certainly not alone. Our house was nothing if not action-packed, albeit random, impulsive, and ill-conceived action. There was a seemingly constant stream of bodies and notions entering and exiting the residence. So, by sheer benefit of distraction, I was often able to preside over my own little universe, usually under a tree in our spaciously dumpy backyard, climbing the walls of the local abandoned mansion across the street or secreted away in some improbably quiet corner of our big old house.
No doubt, I would’ve benefitted from a skosh more structure or some level-headed, hand-on-the-shoulder advice. Frankly, the whole family would’ve. This is not to point the finger at (or give it to) my parents or my siblings with charges of abandonment, just to help paint the picture that the Colton household was a living, breathing, shouting, laughing, loving embodiment of a rickety bicycle with 8 riders, each trying to steer it in a different direction as it careened down a steep hill paved with bricks. It was a ridiculous, adorable madhouse and I, as its youngest mascot, represented it proudly.
The question is, can a childhood forged, alternately, in moments of both chaos and solitude create a normally functioning adult? Don’t look at me, I’m asking you — I’ve known myself for 57 years and I still don’t have the answer. But maybe by taking a looking at the building blocks – the little moments and tableaus of a childhood – we can figure out why I’m asking the question in the first place.
We were all half Lebanese (my mom was full Lebanese, Dad was of Scot/German descent – the usual white people stuff) but my oldest brother looked at least 200% middle eastern, with rich olive skin and a head dripping with a mop of insanely tight black curls. 14 years my senior, he was always kind, matter-of-fact and patiently instructional in the early days. Unfortunately for me, he was now off in college birddogging co-eds and playing CCR licks on his guitar. He would later quit college, spend 4 years in the Army, discover the band Kansas, tell everyone about discovering the band Kansas, and return home to open a hang glider store in the heart of a Great Plains state.
My next oldest brothers were then about 20 and 19. I will refer to them by their nicknames “Dunes” and “Bag.” They Kirkwood Community College in town, so were around the house plenty. We did hang out a bit, by which I mean they enjoyed dangling me by my shoelaces from increasingly treacherous heights. I think they may have been smoking some pot in those days and were probably more bored than I was and way more imaginative, so I was kind of like their human hacky sack: when they weren’t holding me over the upstairs banister for the benefit of their bleary-eyed giggling friends, or pinning me down for a “Chinese torture” attack, they were demanding I fetch them more Cap’n Crunch or act as lookout as they sucked down Winston cigarettes in our TV room. It was all mostly good-natured and I have to admit, I probably would’ve done the same thing to me.
And, God bless her, but my 17-year-old sister Beth’s vain attempts to shield me from these two only served to make me seem like more of a wuss, to which they naturally reacted by attempting to toughen me up through increased “torture” techniques. Occasionally she would style and bobby pin my longish hair in place and parade me around the house like a little doll. This did not help my cause. However misguided Sara’s big sisterly affections were, she was sweet and kind and often laughed (out of sorrow) at my young-doofus-in-the-making attempts at humor. She placed third in the Miss Iowa contest and attended college at Southwest Minnesota State for two years before returning home to be closer to her pimply boyfriend, Dave, and his fledgling career as a semi-semi-pro basketball player.
The sibling closest to me in age, 12-year-old DJ, had no time for me, as he’d recently taken up the baritone horn and was already in full blown band dork mode — practicing his instrument day and night, unfolding and adjusting his music stand on a seemingly hourly basis, debating on the phone with bandmates on the virtues of bass clef versus treble clef, leaving sheet music everywhere, and attending to the constant barrage of weeping cold sores blossoming across his lips, apparently the result of an allergy he’d developed to the nickel-plated brass mouthpiece of his horn. Besides, he was never a big fan of mine. I was, after all, the whiny little prick who robbed him of his Baby of the Family mantel. On most days I’m sure it was all he could do not to lure me into the basement freezer and shut the door, leaving me to solidify until the following Christmas when Mom would inevitably come looking for last year’s leftover cookie dough.
As a simple matter of survival, I was best off finding a way to make my own fun. Frankly, I was bored stiff, but I was always on the lookout for new and interesting approaches to being bored. These included, but were not limited to, turning my burgeoning reading skills to the phone book to count whether there were more “Smiths” or “Johnsons” living in the greater Cedar Rapids Metropolitan Area, killing flies with said phone book, dining on small amounts of paste, hiding underneath furniture (from what or whom I don’t know — nobody was ever looking for me), sniffing the insides of whatever shoes happened to be laying around, attempting to milk our pet dachshund Greta, and tasting raw salt.
Once, in my backyard on a dreary winter Saturday, bored out of my damn mind, I crouched down and sipped the standing water from the top of a discarded car battery. I’m not lying, I did that. My dad, per usual working under the hood of our late model Oldsmobile, came running over in a panic, “What are you doing?! That could be battery acid!!” My God he was right — I suppose it could’ve been battery acid. But if I remember correctly, he simply ordered me inside to get a drink of water and he went back to work, never again mentioning the incident. To this day, whenever I get one of those sudden inexplicable pains in an eye or a knee or my belly button I still wonder whether that small dose of battery acid had any long term effects. I bet it did.
I should probably mention that it was not out of the ordinary for random, disused items to be found in and around our house. For as busy as she was cooking for and cleaning up after all of us, my mom always found time to be doting, affectionate and impossibly sentimental. Which is probably why when she stopped collecting children, she started collecting things.Actually the two activities overlapped for years. For starters, she never threw away anything we kids wore or read or created or played with. Same with hers and my dad’s stuff. Adorable baby booties? Yes. Torn and smelly 5th grade sneakers? Also yes. My sister’s homemade prom dress? Absolutely. Her panty hose from prom with the cigarette burn in them? You bet. Combs, brushes, bobby pins, old records, old broken records, old notebooks, unused notebooks, other peoples’ notebooks – you name it, we kept it and usually ended up tripping over it. And I won’t even get into the tools and kitchenware. Books? Of course. Magazines? Almost every single one we’d ever received. Sure, it was cool and scholarly that we had every monthly National Geographic dating back to 1950. Alternatively, we also had every Cosmopolitan going back to 1968. You have to wonder what timeless literary brilliance was lurking within the pages of all those Cosmos that none of the issues could be parted with.
We also had years worth of Redbook, Reader’s Digest and, since my dad was an aerospace engineer, Mechanix Illustrated and Scientific American. We even had stacks of long-since-perused issues of the The Cedar Rapids Gazetteand the local PennySaver (correct me if I’m wrong, but those 10-cents off coupons for Doan’s Pills have an expiration date, right?). Basically, if it had words in it, it wasn’t getting thrown out — unless, of course, it was a crucial instructions manual for how to assemble or operate something. In fact, as the years went on, the seemingly worthless far outnumbered the things we actually needed and/or used.
The good news was, if I ever wanted to play Spaceship Battle and the only toy spaceships in the house were broken (and of course they were), I could always fashion new spaceships out of a couple of the seemingly thousands of spare stainless-steel drapery hooks we had laying around the house. Seriously — we could’ve opened a drapery hook store. Other kids my age had friends, I had drapery hooks.
The thing is, my mom probably picked up most of those drapery hooks used, at garage sales. Probably by the shoebox. In fact, she may have separately purchased a used shoebox for the sole purpose of carrying the used drapery hooks.
You see, not only did my mom not throw anything away,she paid money to other people for things they should have thrown away: broken window shutters, malfunctioning transistor radios, sewing machines missing critical components, books on subjects no one needs to know about (Arc Welding for Beginners, anyone?), scratched LPs filled with music no one needs to hear (Jim Nabors’ The Lord’s Prayer), suitcases without handles, locked suitcases without keys or handles, tote bags with broken zippers.
It’s safe to say that with the money my mom paid over the years for worthless, used luggage, she could’ve purchased all new luggage and a roundtrip plane ticket to Paris to purchase worthless, used, French luggage.
As long as I’m on the subject of my mom’s serial obstruction of all clear spaces in our home, I should tell you that our house was really pretty big: a 5-bedroom colonial with a full third floor attic. So filling it with stuff to the extent that my mom did (all the way up) was a monumental undertaking — one to which she was, apparently, uniquely suited.
Having grown up during the Depression, as it was often rationalized to me, she’d never been able to tolerate parting with her possessions, no matter their real value. I suppose it would stand to reason then, that allowing other people to simply throw their stuff away was also a non-starter:
“You’re getting rid of this early era J Geils Band album featuring no discernible hits, a large scratch rendering the middle half of Side 1 unlistenable and your last name scrawled in Sharpie across the front cover? I’ll give you $1.25 for it. If you decide you want it back, it’ll be sitting on the used suitcase on top of the broken wicker chair in our middle bedroom for the next 27 years. Right underneath a Jim Nabors album. Actually, I’ll give you 2 bucks if you’ll throw in that old baby wipes container filled with typewriter ribbon.”
In fairness, having an all-access pass to a bottomless supply of dumpster-worthy miscellany did, to a certain extent, make up for my lack of friends. It may have even exacerbated my friendlessness. Why go outside trolling for playmates when I could joyfully review an old photo album chock full of timeless images of someone else’s family? “Ah yes, here’s that time they visited Strawberry Point, Iowa — Home of the World’s Largest Strawberry! Look at the size of it, would you? I bet they remember that well!”
Why try to connect with other kids when I could simply dump out the broken laundry basket filled with old, mismatched Hot Wheels tracks and connect those? Never mind that the first items lost in any Hot Wheels set were always the purple track connectors, in our house they were easily replaced with somewhat less flexible and inevitably failing cardboard shims fashioned from my mom’s world-class collection of empty shoeboxes.
Still, they’d always work well enough initially to enable me to create a continuous track stretching from the opening peak — clamped onto a living room windowsill — down to the floor and across the living room, the foyer, and into the dining room where, in theory, the rocketing car would explode through a makeshift wall of half-gnawed (dachshunds!) Tinker Toys. In practice, however, whichever “hero” car I chose — generally the one with the biggest, fattest rear tires — would leave the track halfway down the initial slope, either the victim of an unsupported track (like I couldn’t find anything laying around to support it with?), an impossibly bent rear axle or, of course, the track portions separating due to a faulty (cardboard) connector.
When I did finally venture out of our house and down the block in search of a playmate that was an actual functioning human, I did find one or two, although they were malfunctioning at best. To be honest, there were two perfectly nice, normal little girls down the street — both named Julie. But every time I had a play session with either of them, the inevitable chorus of, “Oooh, Shane’s got a girlfriend!” arose from the smoking gallery. My two teenage brothers were nothing if not consistent buzzkills, which was ironic as they were most likely high as kites any time they were in good enough moods to “engage” with me. No wonder I swore off girls until I was 12.
City of Five Smells 