Candyman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zoot_Cat

My next door neighbors in New City were the remnants of the old Dutch/German farm families of Rockland County, and they were not happy about the changes around them. Family farms were split apart to make room for hastily-constructed tract homes, and the farm families who had long relied on those plots to make a living soon tore apart, too. Country life is significantly different than city life, as immortalized in the cartoons we watched as kids, like Tom the zoo-suited city cat who slickly tries to two-time good ole country mouse Jerry by stealing his girl. They were afraid of us, and deeply suspicious of our motives, as we were with them.

My dad got into property disputes right off the bat, and the folks up from the city were "coloreds"; just on our block alone, we had a Puerto Rican street preacher with a storefront church who never once signaled our existence to us. Not once, in all the years we lived there. The Italians next door were just as weird; Tino was a typical con artist of a jerk who hated everyone except Italians, including the black people he served pizza to in the Bronx, where he kept his store. The Evretts were African-American, and they had the last house built on our quiet country lane. They were extremely reserved as well, which only fueled the fires of our imaginations further. They kept a nanny goat in their backyard, which was so odd for the time, we joked they had "voodoo" rituals at night, hence the need for discretion and their relative distance from the rest of the pack.

There weren't many play options available for hip city kids like us, which led us to make a sometime acquaintance with the farm kids next door, though truthfully, they had a mental retardation that served more often as comic fodder for our bored country brains, rather than forming any real alliance between us. You did what you had to do. The nearest store was a mile walk away (and a hard one at that), to a tiny convenience store...sigh. So, sometimes when the country kids came a-knockin', we let 'em in, but the window was a very short one, since we'd passed them intellectually at birth. Eddie, the youngest, was so markedly effected that he couldn't speak real words, only a homemade kind of patois that his older sisters had to decode for us. "Drin" was his name for Kristine (she was the girl I played with), and "Grog" was his name for his middle sister Margaret.

He got into all sorts of trouble, the kind of trouble that retarded kids got into, like banging his head on the family tractor in their garage, causing a rush to the emergency room that only further hastened his decline of a lifelong condition that never fully cleared up. I re-connected with the sisters using social media to find out he had passed in his 30's, which didn't surprise me at all, though I expressed my condolences for our childhood friend. His nose always ran, and his eyes were either red or watery, giving his wide country face a streaked, mad appearance. They ran around without shoes or parents, which scared us, too. Who are they? Where are they? Their insular culture was only reinforced every time we saw their fat mama on the porch. She hated us on sight, preferring to team up with their uncle next door to strip our plot of its' rich topsoil, in retaliation for the humiliation of having to split up the family farm.

She was a tall, plain, fat woman with short mannish hair, who screamed at her kids to get back into their yard every time she saw them on our yard or playing with us, which freaked us out even more. The only time I heard her speak was when she came out of the old farmhouse to tell her kids that Elvis had died, and that was because my mom was in the yard with us, playing badminton with the family net we set up running parallel to their family plot. It was so odd for her to even speak to us, that I have never forgotten the event to this day. We saw her more infrequently after that, what with school and winters spent indoors. There were whispers going around that she was unhappy, and we kids just figured it was more redneck static about "city slickers" that they were expressing to our parents, because our mom and dad clammed up almost totally when we were at the kitchen table, giving each other silent adult-like looks instead.

The only other time I ever remember seeing her again was the next summer, when my mom told me she was pregnant again. I tried making out the swell of her stomach but honestly, because of her weight, cheap baggy clothes, and ugly demeanor, spying was hard, plus I really didn't care what women did with their husbands when playtime was to be had, however infrequent it was at times. After that, we waited for the baby to be born so we could see the farmer's wife at suppertime, when she opened the kitchen door to shout for her three kids, who may be anywhere in the vicinity, and we were not disappointed. Finally, one evening the screen door banged open loudly to reveal her large frame with a small swaddled bundle in her arms. The kids were in the yard with us again, with our family group playing badminton, and we were rewarded for our patience with a closer look, bolstered by the presence of my mom.

We creeped up to the line of tall bushes they planted to separate us from their view, a harsh property line to obscure the horrors of city-folk in close proximity to their sturdy farmer's stock, or so we thought. Emboldened by my nosey mom, we stood right next to the bush line to get a closer view of the baby in her arms, my mom telling us that she was indoors a lot because newborns needed a lot of attention (to explain her relative absence as a country housewife, which was weird in hindsight), to see tiny arms and feet moving. There's the baby! We've always been a child-loving family, so the sight of a newborn made us really happy, and for once, the farmers wife seemed proud to have our attention. You see, dear readers, as the baby squirmed in his blankie, he pushed down the part that was covering his face, a face that was not "white" in any way, shape, or form.

Our snobbish uptight farmer's wife had just given birth to a beautiful and obviously "black" little boy, and that was the last time we ever saw her again. My mom couldn't wait to run indoors to tell my dad, and neither could we. Gossip this good didn't break 'round there very often, and when it was as juicy as this, no one could refrain from talking about it. After all, the indiscretion was already out, right? She'd cheated on her farmer husband with a black man, and their wasn't enough land in all of New York State to cover up that fact. They moved away after that, the kids with the mom, with the father alone in the house for sometime on his own. I kept in touch with the oldest girl via "Pen Pal" letters for awhile, but given how little we had in common besides proximity, the friendship died out. None of them would attend college or attain the status that was always my destiny to reach, leaving little besides New City goings-on to message each other about, which is exactly what we did during my brief foray into common social media.

As hard as the break-up had been at the time for their family, the girls enjoy (to this day) a happy, healthy relationship with their younger biracial half-brother, choosing to have a loving family instead of perpetuating the typical prejudices of the day, a rare but very beautiful ending to the beginning of this witching hour that is the start of our traditional Samhain season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain). Get ready for the real bugbears* of this world. It's Halloween.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugbear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29

Play, boy

Me and my brothers really didn't have much ideas about sex, growing up in our strict Catholic household during the 70s. We certainly had no clue how we were made, nor did my parents ever enlighten us about it, with the exception of one strange hallway conversation between me and my mom in my teens and long after Health Ed classes had already clued me in, along with my own experiences. She asked me if I had any clinical questions, because she likes to pretend that she's a doctor, which is strange enough to deter any child from inquiring.

Children were also seen as a nuisance. Over and over, the adults around us quoted the same trite sayings, like "Children should SEEN, and not heard", and if we counteracted with superior logic, they ganged up on us, sometimes physically. They often kicked us out of the house, whether we liked it or not, and locked us out of the house for hours. I suppose it was to "build character", or they needed a vacation from child rearing, because most of our parents shrugged their shoulders and said "It was the thing to do" noncommittally, when we asked them why they got married and had kids. Oh. Great answer.

They were horrible to us and often really bad company, so after awhile, we learned to stealthily avoid them whenever we could, mostly to avoid their choking cigarette smoke and nasty drunk behavior. Fine! We don't wanna be around you anyhow! And we really didn't. We could disappear for hours, without any adult interferences at all. It was freeing and also wildly dangerous, given the amount of horrors out there in the world, but I guess they figured that the country gentrification of Rockland and our close proximity to the family farm on the two surrounding lots would be enough to quell most dangers, and they were right. Heck, our street wasn't paved by the county for snow, and we had a joint mailbox at the head of the lane for the houses. We were effectively off the radar. We could walk for miles and still be nowhere.

But, there were still plenty of ways for kids to get in trouble, because we tried most of them. We tiptoed around this one rundown cottage on the block that we called "The Shack", a place perpetually darkened by the shade of some towering pine trees, and haunted by a murder of crows. We rarely saw the people who lived there, nor did we want to. Our parents told us in hushed tones that they were this thing called "renters", because they were po' white trash who moved around all the time."That's why you see their kids outside all the time, running around with bare dirty feet and their faces streaked with mud," my mom said to us in a regional accent so profoundly colloquial, people outside of her small environ in the Bronx have trouble with it.

"See?" she pointed at them one time, as we drove past slowly to the end of the land to dump some leaves, or turn around. "They're no good. That's why their mutha feeds them McDonald's all the time." The kids did indeed look down and out, morosely unwrapping their cheeseburgers on the front steps of the small house. This, from a woman who would conscript me into the workforce by signing me away to the same corporation when I was 15. But, our parents did that all the time: blatantly judgmental hypocrisy that was extremely obvious. Still, they weren't totally off base. 

We never knew who they were in school (did they even go to school?), and they never played with us, which was a really bad sign. Even the inbred farm kid who couldn't speak well from retardation rang our doorbell to play outside. They were weird. They were two dirty blond hair kids, with an unfortunate hair color that matched soiled dishwater, a boy and girl of about the same age. The girl looked glumly at us in our car, with one white skinny shoulder exposed from the slipping of her worn baggy shirt. I never even knew their names.

Which is, of course, why we found torn pages from an old Playboy magazine around their house. My grandmother was over, visiting with my mom in the kitchen, and in a rare sign of adult solidarity (she actually liked kids), she pushed us to play outside so they could talk alone. It was intriguing to us for its' rarity, which kept us in close orbit. We did a cursory circuit of the woods at the end of the lane, and snuck around the gravel driveway of "The Shack", which was devoid of rundown redneck cars during the day, for once. And there it was: water-damaged from the rain and torn into pieces, but we immediately knew what it was. It was part of a "Playboy"! No way! My dad sometimes had a magazine or two rolled up and stuffed into an old paint can in the garage, but as we got older, he got savvier and changed his hiding spots.

Anyway, we had no idea what it was, but "nudies" were coveted kid-material. We got stupid over the giddiness of violating the shanty borderlines, and did a blatantly un-kidlike thing to do with our haul: we sat out the front steps of our house, trying in vain to piece together the grainy flesh-colored pieces. It was like a bad jigsaw puzzle. What the heck is this piece? Wait! No, that goes there. What is that? I think it's a ladie's private parts, I don't know. In the midst of our find, we had let our discretion go out the window, right under the noses of two very clever and highly experienced New York City women. We were doomed. After a few minutes of shrieks, muffled giggles, and stage whispers, the totally unexpected event that made complete sense happened: my grandmother had crept down the creaky, carpeted wood stairs to surprise us with the whoosh of a front door opening. AGGGGH....

We were stone-cold busted, and we knew it, but this was grandma; the lady with the incredible meatballs and warm talcum powder hugs. We had to try, so we did. We pleaded with her not to tell mom. We gave her sad, puppy eyes, and we begged for mercy...to no avail. Each and every one of us had to stand in front of my mutha in the kitchen, while she called our friend's parents to deliver the bad news: we were caught with a porno mag, and we all got punished. Uh oh. This was bad: no allowance, no dessert after dinner, no t.v., and we're were all grounded. Fuck.

But, it wasn't all bad. To this day, I relish the touch of a human man over some photo, any day of the week. Pictures are great and all, but they ain't nuthin' like the real thing. A photo don't talk back to you when you need it, or hold you close on a cold winter's night. Only yo man does that for you, girl. Get me on this one? You can have your Photoshopped mistresses, boys. This girl's aiming for the real thing: an actual man who loves her back. Happy hunting. It's a jungle out there. Rowwwrrr!