The dearth of suitable playmates in the blocks surrounding my home was truly was breathtaking. Unsuitable playmates, however, were everywhere I turned.
Down the block at the bottom of the hill, in a small two-story frame house with a tragic front porch, was Jimmy Canton. He was the youngest of the 16th Street Cantons, who, as far as I could tell, were a ragtag band of eastern Kentucky mountain people — with their orthodontically-challenged cackling; their junked-appliance-friendly dustbowl of a front yard (I never saw their backyard but I could imagine: a doghouse fashioned entirely from old license plates? A pentagram-shaped series of crudely dug holes in the ground filled with antique dolls heads? A beauty salon chair in the middle of an inflatable baby pool filled with empty Spaghetti-O cans? This last one I only mention because I remember Jimmy smelling vaguely of dirt and Chef Boyardee sauce.); and their flimsy front screen door through which family members were constantly either sprinting or shouting threats at one another:
“Darrell, get yer ass back in here and help your dad off the couch or you can sleep in the ‘frigerator! What? No, the one in the yard! No the small one!”
The only things I ever really learned about Jimmy were that he had a curly mop of sandy brown hair, he smelled like a canned meal and he seemed perpetually surly and prepared to sock me in the kisser, kick me in the shin, or snipe me with a bottle rocket at any given moment. So whenever I had to walk past the Cannon home, I stayed on the opposite side of the street — safer distance, better view.
All the kids I really wanted to play with lived on my side of the street. Jill, and Denny, her snarling crewcut of a little brother, were the kids I played with the most. Along with their parents, Garth and Betty, and their elusive older sister Paula – a sort of adolescent Peppermint Patty, they resided in a tidy blue story-and-a-half home 4 houses down the hill from our own. To contextualize the monotony of the neighborhood architecture a bit, I was always fascinated with the screened-in breezeway between their home and garage – it was inside, but it was also outside! Jill was my age and Denny was a year younger. Whereas Jill was sweet and friendly, Denny was somewhat loud, barky and often in a pissy mood. Still, he was a living human child close to my age with whom I could sometimes connect and do things.
While I do remember us occasionally spending those hot Iowa summer afternoons doing normal little boy things like playing catch and taking bikes off of “jumps” and screaming for Denny’s mom after the inevitable injuries that followed, I recall much of our time together was spent doing things like playing two-person hide-and-seek, using long sticks to poke at the occasional decomposing animal found in the alley behind his house, and trying to dig to China in his backyard sandbox. We always quit before we got to China, but not before unearthing more than a few petrified cat turds.
My playdates with Denny were almost always impromptu and usually initiated by me. After quickly finishing dinner, I’d stroll down the hill to see if Denny was available. Rather than approaching their door, I’d gauge the situation from the sidewalk — usually catching a glimpse through their front screen door as the family sat in silhouette at their dinner table. Without fail, there was no discernible dinner conversation, just the lonely clinking of silverware to plate. Having just come from a house where supper consisted of six to eight people arguing over who was entitled to the last bottle of 7-Up while eating creamed tuna on toast at a picnic table stuffed into a kitchen nook, this funereal scene of Lutheran propriety never ceased to scare the hell out of me. So I’d keep my distance, pacing back and forth past the house until either Denny would come bounding out ready to play, or the front door would slam shut, no doubt the result of Denny testing out a new way to be disrespectful at the dinner table.
It was Denny, after all, who at lunch one day at that very table, introduced me to the ages-old rite of passage of sticking Cheetos up ones nose. He did it, I didn’t, his got stuck, I was promptly sent home. I’d say that 3 out of 4 playdates with Denny ended with me getting sent home, either because I wasn’t playing by his rules, or because he wasn’t playing by his parents’. That cloudy Saturday afternoon when we were told to play quietly in his living room, toying with his Playskool Parking Ramp while his dad was splayed out on the couch drinking a 16-ounce bottle of Pepsi and watching Hee Haw? I think Denny knocked over the Pepsi and I got shown the door. That one night in his basement when we came upon his dad crossing wires and tuning knobs and “talking to Russia” on his HAM radio? I believe Denny ran up behind him and shouted something “in Russian.” I was promptly given the boot.
And lord knows how many times Denny himself sent me home for things like me not wanting to see how many Monopoly hotels I could hold in my mouth at once. I can picture him now, stabbing a pointed forefinger at me and then in the direction of my house and shouting, “Go on, get the hell outta here!” Sweet kid. Somewhat confusingly, he’d always be ready to resume our friendship the next day as if nothing had happened. If nothing else, Denny helped introduce me, at an early age, to the dichotomy of man, and the ability to roll with the punches when occasionally presented with dickish behavior. I would face bigger buttholes in my life than Denny, and this prepared me to meet them with the kind of grace and dignity you’d usually find nowhere in the vicinity of a butthole.
Two houses down from Denny and Jill, brothers Wayne and Glenn had recently moved in with their divorcee mother, who was perpetually bathed in cigarette smoke and, along with a half-hearted beehive hairdo, usually wearing either a bathrobe or a dull pink waitress’s uniform. All three were lanky and decorum-challenged, but their home was always open to me. By this I mean their front door was always wide open, allowing nature and everything else to waltz right in. That said, there wasn’t much to do in there, besides take in secondhand smoke while their mother lounged on a couch sucking down Virginia Slims beneath a black velvet Elvis tapestry. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’s really the only thing I remember about the inside of their home – I’d never seen a velvet Elvis before and I’ve never seen one since such as this, in its truly natural habitat, completely devoid of kitsch or irony.
Wayne, with his sandy, overgrown Dutch boy hair, was closer to my brother DJ’s age, but Glenn was only a year or so older than me and always looking for fun. He was usually shirtless and seemed entirely unaware of the concept of shoes. He was quite literally footloose, and his long, bony specimens with their unkempt talons seemed to convey a message of caveman fellowship to anyone with a spare moment, of which I had plenty. As it turned out, Glenn was slightly intellectually disabled, but his friendly and inclusive adventurism and crooked sense of humor were far more interesting to me than his status as a special education student. In fact, at that age, his tenuous relationship with social propriety made him a damn good time.
Not so surprisingly, Glenn was obsessed with Elvis, but he was just as enamored of the long since deceased Buddy Holly, whose work I wasn’t familiar with. Thankfully Glenn, in his unbridled, unbathed and lovingly unhinged enthusiasm, was happy to bring both rock-n-roll icons to life for his one-child audience. We spent long portions of sunny summer afternoons in his damp, dark and unfinished basement – Glenn reenacting the career trajectories of both stars by the dim light of a dangling incandescent bulb. He was a one-man American Bandstand, circa 1958: he’d pop in a poorly recorded cassette of “Peggy Sue” and bring the rockers to life. (Where these secondhand recordings originated I’m afraid we’ll never know. Had his mom carried a tape recorder to her favorite bar, pressed record and held the microphone close to the jukebox as it played Elvis and Buddy songs while she swayed along, perhaps trying to woo a potential new stepdad to the boys with the lure of free cigarettes and shitty pirated rock recordings?) As the tapes played, Glenn would bang around half-assed on a stringless ukulele and warble insanely into a non-existent mic while gyrating his hips Elvis-style. Simultaneously enthralled and somewhat frightened by the insanity of the scene, I’d sit on the cold cement floor at a safe distance — giggling just enough to cover for the fact that I was constantly considering slowly backing out of the room. And while I understood that Glenn’s behavior was offbeat and borderline something-or-other, at heart I also knew he was kind and well-meaning, in addition to being one hell of an entertainer.
Over that first Summer of Glenn, the two of us survived long days tearing through the neighborhood trying to climb unclimbable trees, whittling sticks, playing two-man hide-and-seek (Glenn’s persistent lack and shirt and shoes was apparently a red flag to all parents but mine), and spending minutes at a time trying to start new bands. Yet there was always an unscalable barrier between us. I remember returning to Tyler Elementary School in the fall, where I was entering 2nd Grade and Glenn was in the Special Education wing. We’d see each other in passing and never exchange much more than a quick wave or nod. At the time I comforted myself with the thought that he was no more interested in advertising our neighborhood friendship than I was. Now, of course, I understand that I should’ve done more in those moments to reach out and be a friend. Something I’ve thought time and again with many relationships in my life. Years later, when I was living in Chicago after college, my parents – still living in the same house – would report back to me whenever they saw Glenn, usually downtown, talking to himself on a park bench or walking alone on a busy street at night.
When I was about 8 or so, Mr. Glass, the monosyllabic elderly man with Coke-bottle glasses who lived next door to us, shuffled off to the sweet hereafter, leaving behind a large 1920’s home that he’d subdivided into rental apartments that no one rented, and a steel blue 1956 Cadillac Fleetwood locked in his garage. A precocious car nerd who could name any make and model of car my older cousins would point out to me (this was back when almost everything was American-made so if I had just shouted out “Galaxie” or “Impala” every time I probably would’ve been right five times out of 10), I knew what a treasure that old mint condition Caddy was. So a couple times a week at least, for what seemed like months, I’d walk over to that garage and peak through the windows, just to make sure it was still there, hulking in the dark, untampered with, collecting dust, waiting for me to turn 16 in eight short years (I was unfamiliar with the ins and outs of estate law).
So I was crushed when one day when I peered through the garage window to find the Blue Behemoth gone; vanished, apparently in the dead of night. Had it been stolen by burglars in black eye masks? Had Mr. Glass summoned it from beyond the grave to join him up in Mediocre Landlord Heaven? Had it driven itself away? Had it been claimed by another child who’d just turned 16? Those questions were left unanswered, instead supplanted by a whole other series of more pressing questions: Why was there now a yellow F-100 pickup pulling into Mr. Glass’ driveway? Who were the two crusty-eyed, stringy- blonde-haired children sullenly staring at me from the bed of the pickup? Who on God’s green earth was the honey-haired hot mom in the driver’s seat? And finally, where was the nearest bush I could hide behind to watch and judge?
As it turned out, we had new neighbors — the Braynards.
City of Five Smells 