Guilt Pool Party

I’ve been thinking about my mother recently, her birthday being a few days ago, and it got me thinking about something I’ve felt guilty about even since I was a young boy. No, not THAT…whatever happens between a boy, stirrings in his young groin and Catherine Bach on the tv stays with that boy. Just to keep your mind wet, I will admit that this guilt had something to do with Barbie dolls.

My mother was incredibly down to earth, never one to put on airs. For example, one time I tagged along while she visited one of our neighbors and at the door mentioned that she had been up all night and gave my neighbor that “you know what I mean” look.
“Oh Judith, you were irregular?” my uber-Southern polite neighbor cooed. “Nah” my mom quickly said “I had the trots.”

Part of this, I always thought, was due to my mother HATING living not only in the South, but in a tiny, tiny town in the South. Both my parents were from parts of Lowell, Massachusetts, but while my father quickly adopted a Southern drawl and took to sipping iced tea while taking us from one Civil War battlefield to the next, my mother preferred to smoke her Winston 100s and pull her hair out wondering why the hell this hick town school system would shut down for a mere 8 inches of snow on the ground. “We used to go to school in a blizzard!!!” “Well, you lived in a city.” “Edmund, shut the hell up!” “I’m Xmastime!” “Whichever, you little (beep) redneck.” I always thought it was BECAUSE she hated the small-town Southern life that she clung to her accent like myself at the Pizza Hut buffet waiting for the meat pizzas to come out; she used her over-the-top Boston accent like a gun to spit at everyone, all the “natives” who turned their noses up at all the come-heres and kept them turned up no matter what. Unless you came over on the Mayflower in my hometown, you were viewed as outsiders, no matter how many generations you had been there. She took pride in being the only Yankee in a hick town, and she was the type to just not take shit from nobody - even to the point of telling Robert Kennedy to go to hell after accidently stepping on her foot. She worked at the town library, and apparently some old man redneck fuck started showing up to harass her, telling her to take her Yankee ass back home, the South will rise again, blah blah blah. She would barely pay attention to him. This went on for a coupla weeks until one day he’s standing there doing his spiel and all of a sudden he pulls a gun out and points it at her. In a library!! He says to her “Get your Yankee ass outta town or I’m gonna kill you.” Nice southern hospitality! Anyways. So my mother looks up at him slowly, takes off her glasses and says “Mister…I got four kids at home. Do your worst.” Puts her glasses on, goes back to work, and that was the last time he ever came by the library.


Not a lot of people know this, but my mother invented the phrase “If your fathah has to pull this caaahhh oveehhh, so help me Gwad.” This usually happened on long trips into Richmond for Mass, my brother and I in our suits (me – tan 150% polyester coat/pants, yellow short-sleeved button down and brown clip-on; him in the powder-blue counterpart) in the backseat clowning around like idiots. I don’t know how it could come to this in an air-conditioned car, but I don’t ever remember rolling up into the church parking lot and getting outta the car and NOT being completely drenched in sweat – shirttail out, a shoe missing, tie clipped to my neck. Anyways, now that I think of it, I don’t ever remember my father actually pulling the car over; you could tell that no matter how many times my mother would shout that threat my dad would be thinking “there’s no WAY in hell I’m stopping this car!” but the threat was always good enough to calm us down for a good minute or two. This was the same arrangement my parents had with the routine spankings – after fucking up, my mother would spend 3 hours letting me know that “when your faaathah comes home he is going to KILL you!” Of course my dad would come home from work exhausted, all he wants to do is shower and eat dinner, and he’s like “…what’d he do?...set fire to the shed, huh….” And he’d give me that glare that only fathers can give sons, that “every minute you keep me from dinner is a day BEFORE your 18th birthday I’m dropping your ass off at the Army depot” glare. But, without fail, it would be my mother running to the belt drawer to administer the beating; she always gave the daily beatings. And I was one of those kids that could NOT go sleep without getting a whuppin. I’d be in bed, trying to sleep thinking “…something’s not right, this is weird…” and my mother would be pacing the kitchen thinking “I know that kid isn’t asleep yet…” when without fail I’d find a way to rouse myself outta bed, roll into the kitchen and say something stupid enough to get the beating in before midnight. For my father to actually make the effort of beating one of us it would have to be the World Series of beatings, the kind of beating where for days after you’d make sure he saw you hand off that day’s school drawings etc to your mother with a happy “I love you!.” Or, even better, you’d cut the grass without being told. My father would beat me once a year, it was as if he’d realize his license for spanking a kid was about to expire for the year and he had to get his licks in.


Back to why I’ve been guilt-ridden all these years. In early 1979, when I was 6 years old, my mother’s brother was killed. My only memory of him was him teaching my brother and I how to swim. So of course I remembered him years later when I failed my college swimming test and had to take summer school after graduation. Thanks buddy!! Anyways, after he died I remember my mother locked herself in her room for a long time. Which, when you’re 6 years old, is probably 10 minutes. You’re not as sensitive when you’re 6, brothers and sisters have a different meaning when you’re that young. While the death of a sibling now would crush me, I’m fairly sure I spent a chunk of my childhood praying for my brother’s death, usually after another ass-whooping in the back yard or another session of “All A's again Edmund, great!...Xmastime, lets see your report card…” grrrr. So my mother’s in her bed with the lights out, I guess crying or whatever and my dad lines my brother and I up in the hallway and says that each of us is gonna go in and talk to our mother, to cheer her up a bit. Cause I guess nothing can cheer a woman up like a coupla kids who can hardly speak and are probably covered in dirt and gravel from “playing.” So my brother walks in, a few minutes go by. He comes out, and while the door was open for a second I swear I looked in and saw bright rainbow lights shining, angels singing “Allelujah! Allelujah!!” and, I'm not even kidding, cuddly cute forest animals sipping water from a brook. Greeeeat, I thought as my brother passed by, knowing His Goldenous had scored big. I knew this would be tough to top as my father instructed me to open the door and go in.

Now, when I was a young, young, YOUNG boy I was a bit of a, shall we say, dreamer. Okay, homo. No, dreamer. In the few moments when I wasn’t playing with my brother, I would dream I was, I dunno, a fucking cowboy or Luke Skywalker or whatever. Or, as we did in those pre-internet days, we’d go through the Sears catalog and dream about toys we knew we would never ever get. After the usual 6 year old boy tour of duty through all the sports stuff, my wandering eyes landed on…well, I’m at a loss but to show a picture here.



















Ah yes, the Barbie pool party set. I saw the picture in the catalog, and it just seemed so…FUN!! There was a pool, there were some people hanging round a pool, what’s the problem?!?! For hours I’d look at the picture and pretend I was playing with it, going through all kinds of scenarios, moving everybody around the pool as I saw fit. Wanna go in the pool? No problem!! Wanna hang out in deck chairs being cool? No sweat! To me, it was the end-all of toys, the end-all of even being a kid. I guess when you’re 6 years old, you actually have to have a dick in your mouth to think “You know…this might be gay…”

So I walk through the door and close it behind me and the first thing I think is “boy, is it dark..” until my eyes adjusted to the darkness, after which all I could think was “..hey…how come THEY get air conditioning??!!” To this day I’m proud that at such a young age I was the public advocate for air conditioning that I was. Finally my eyes settle on my mother, who is curled up in bed, on her side. I go to the side of the bed and I can see she’s been crying, she IS crying, and she puts her hand on my head and smiles and starts talking about…I dunno what the hell she was saying, I was just like “this is weird.” Anyway she’s talking, she loves me blah blah blah I’m so lucky to have a brother and sister blah blah blah and then, from outta nowhere, she says

“Is there a toy you’d like me to get for you?”

I snap to the moment and look up at her. Now, even at 6, you know something’s wrong, there’s nothing more unsettling than a parent crying, and you KNOW you have to step up and not be an asshole, you have to say something like oh, I just want you to not be sad, or I just wanna be a good kid (well, for a week) etc. You KNOW this, but all I hear is

“Is there a toy you’d like me to get for you?”

People, I have given tons of presentations in my lifetime, be it in school or for work, and I have never pitched an idea as fervishly as I did on that day. Before I even realize it I’ve launched into a speech about why I wanted the Barbie Pool Party set, why I needed it and all the good it would bring to the family, I mean I was like Atticus Finch, presenting my case like someone’s life depended on it. I'm Knute Rockne shouting out the "Win one for the Gipper!" speech - I’m on the bed, I’m standing on a chair, I’m pointing out the window, I’m on my knees, I'm getting "Amen!!" shouts from the Pointer Sisters in the corner. I’m surprised I didn’t whip out some charts and graphs, maybe some slides. “If you’ll look at page 17, paragraph 2ii…” Christ. Finally I stop, sweating and out of breath, and I’ll never forget that look in my mother’s eyes. I knew I had let her down, I knew I had been a complete ass, and all I could do was turn around and slowly walk out the door into the hallway. I felt guilty that day, and I’ve felt guilty ever since, even though my mother never ever mentioned it probably never thought twice of it. For one, I was a kid, and I guess she also had bigger things on her mind at the time. It would be funny to think that, as the years went by and I grew into a strapping young man (hard to believe I know), if she ever thought of that moment; if one time she was at one of my football games and after I laid some dude out on the field, as the poor dude was twitching while the trainer came onto the field to help, did she ever flash back to a distant memeory and think to herself "...did...did this kid actually ask me for a fucking Barbie Doll set? with a POOL?!! If I hafta tell his faaathah about this..."