My Memoirs

CHAPTER TWO: 1977-1980
Three things happened in 1977 that would come to affect my life – the birth of my little sister (Sistatime!), my induction into the public school system via kindergarten and of course INXS being formed. I throw INXS in there so that years from now (Thursday) when my body is found after a rousing bout of auto-erotic asphyxiation, everyone will think “oh sure, now that makes sense – yet ANOTHER thing that Xmastime and the ridiculously good-looking, charismatic, outrageously successful singer from INXS have in common!” Spooky, I know. “Xmas had a secretary named Michael, and Michael had a secretary named Xmas. And they both died as they lived: their cold, lifeless hands wrapped around themselves while watching ‘I Fuck Stupid, Vol. VII’ through a plastic bag.”

Sistatime! was born in April 1977, and I remember the first time I laid eyes on her. My father had brought my brother and me to the hospital the day she was born, and we found ourselves standing in front of an elevator to go visit her and my mother. BING the door opened, and on the elevator was a group of nurses surrounding a little baby. Which for all I knew was the Lindbergh baby, or a football-sized pile of skin with funny marks all over it. There was no room for us to join them, so the three of us stood there dumbly for what seemed like an hour, just trying to avoid the gaze of the mute nurses staring at us until, mercifully, the doors finally closed and the elevator moved on. That’s when my dad turned to us and said “That’s your sister, boys.”

What? You…couldn’t have mentioned this while we were actually looking at this thing? I’m thinking I’m looking at a cat that’s been shaved; you could’ve mentioned at that time “Oh by the way, this came out of your mother a few hours ago and will be living from us from now on. You will not get your hands on the phone after 1986.” Thanks pop!

The one thing I did catch was what I thought were unusual spots all over my new sister’s body. Hey, that’s a normal phrase to say, right? “My new sister’s body.” I am now standing in the shower under scalding hot water...that didn’t really help, did it? Ugh. Anyways, even while knowing that a newborn baby was going to look strange, I was not prepared for the collection of splotches that greeted me on that elevator that day - certainly the most I would see in one place until I accidentally walked into the female health clinic at college (ZTA’s: shame on you!!!) In a word: yeeesh. I decided that she was afflicted with something terrible, and it was probably the Devil that had done this to her and I was gonna do what I had to do to make her normal again. I, Big Brother, was going to team up with God, the world’s greatest doubles partner, and smack the Devil down on this one. I know, I know – I’m an amazing brother!!! The three of us Wilson men went to Mass the next day – a middle of the week, midday service. Which is even creepier than normal Sunday church, what with the only person there under the age of 90 being nailed to a cross. Now, normally you couldn’t get me to speak up and say a word inside church if you tried to pay me with a pork chop slurpee, but now that I was a big brother, I knew I had a job to do and was prepared to do it. There’s a moment in every Mass where random people speak up from the…audience, I guess?...and ask everyone to pray for someone they know; e.g. “For my Aunt Doris who has a club foot and cannot do The Hustle, we pray to the Lord.” That’s the right way to do it, the “we pray to the Lord” line is the cue for everyone else to chime in and say…well, I can’t remember what the fuck you’re supposed to say, to be honest. I do know that nobody gives a shit what you actually say; we all just wait for our cue so we can get that chapter of Mass over with – your cousin Bobby with the sickle cell be damned. Actually, sickle cell here is a bad example; obviously there were no black people in my church. But whatever – the point is, I decided I was gonna step up and get all the people in the house to shoot a lil prayer up to the Big Fellah to rid my sister of those damn spots. So the moment comes, I sense a pause between “pray fors” and then step forward to speak. Actually I don’t think you step anywhere, but that’s how I think of it. In actuality I guess you’d step right into the pew directly in front of you. But guess what? We’re not IN actuality, so let it go for fuck’s sake. Anyway. It was my turn, I was ready, and I spoke up:

“Hi! My little sister’s got a bunch of stuff all over her.”

I coolly stepped back to my seat, so proud of my big brother-ness and knowing that now that I had God on my team my sister would be cured, and awaited a thunderous response from the rest of the church. Following, obviously, a lifetime of gratitude from my sister.

“I wanna watch Care Bears.”
“Yeah, well, we’re watching Adam-12.”
“I’m gonna tell Mom! I wanna watch Care Bears!”
“Really? Did your precious Care Bears arrange with God to have those ridiculous spots removed from your body?”
“I’m sorry.”

Ps – I hope it’s obvious which one of would wanna watch Care Bears, and which one wanted to watch Adam-12. Cough.

Meanwhile, back at the church, I had just delivered my big speech and…nothing. Total silence. Reverberating, even. What the fuck? I looked around at the collection of Miss Marples strewn throughout the place, all completely silent. Then I realized…DAMMIT!! I didn’t give the CUE, I didn’t say the “we pray to the Lord” bit! Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!! So after an awkward silence had passed, everybody else just carried on. I was devastated, I had fucked up the protocol and now God was gonna ignore my request. My sister would be forever afflicted with spots – and, worse, I would become known as the Freak Girl with the Spots’ Big Brother. Greeeeeeeeaaaaat. My first time ever 1) stepping up in the House of God and 2) trying to help someone whose name wasn’t “Me” and it was a total waste. Also: my only public speaking effort to date without an F-bomb. Lesson learnt, people: if you do not make the sheep go “baaaaaah,” you might as well say “fuck.”

Of course, the next day I actually got to see my sister up close and realized those weren’t spots on her body after all; what I had seen were little ducks on the blanket she was wrapped in. I guess it makes sense now…even back then, nobody just threw a newborn onto an elevator without any covering. Hey what the hell did I know? What am I, a goddam doctor? Side note: I get the feeling “what am I, a goddam doctor?” is going to make more than a few appearances throughout these memoirs. Hmm.

I don’t remember how long my mother was in the hospital after the delivery – these were the days before they tried to have you in and out in the time it takes Paula to go from “she's buzzed” to “I can’t wait til this pops up on YouTube” on an Idol episode. But it was not an easy few days for the Wilson Men…in fact, I have no idea how we even survived since apparently my father had no idea where food was stored in his own house. All we heard for days was “where does your mother keep the peanut butter?” “where does your mother keep eggs?” “really? I own a kitchen?” I do remember one morning my dad tried to make us pancakes, which had I been a court reporter would be logged thusly:

7:20am: “GODDAMMIT!!!”
7:24am: “GODDAMMIT!!!”
7:30am: “GODDAMMIT!!!”
7:34am: “GODDAMMIT!!!”

Needless to say, we had hospital pancakes that day.

After a few days in the hospital of course they brought my sister home to live with us. As I’m typing that I’m laughing…like what the hell else was she going to do? “After a few days in the hospital of course my sister found herself a nice one-bedroom studio with a skylight and utilities included…”

I dunno, I guess she just laid there and cried/ate/slept like any baby. One funny thing about Sistatime! was that from the time she could crawl, she could find anything. I swear, she was like fucking bloodhound - you’d say “Sistatime! where’s my red cap?” and she’d scurry off and come back in a minute with the fucking hat. She’d be maybe 6 months old, did not know the language, but she’d find exactly what you were looking for. Amazing. Whoever runs those Amber Alerts things should hire my sister; she’d have been kicking it at a Hardee’s with Natalee Holloway about 9 hours after being given the job. “Aruba, huh? What’s THAT like?” Unfortunately having her at my disposal at such an early age ruined me – if I can’t find something within 2 seconds of looking, if it’s not inserted inside my eyelids so I can see it right away I get completely frustrated and give up “oh, FUCK this, it’s gone!! Great, it’s fucking GONE, people!! Gone! Bye bye, G O N fucking E!!! Congratulations everybody, we managed to freaking lose it!! Kiss it (kissing hand and smacking own ass) goodbye, you sorry ass moth - oh, wait…here it is. Sorry. Found it. Sorry!”

The following summer was my last one before starting school, and it’s funny to look back on how much it must’ve sucked. I either had Brothatime! or myself to play with, that was it. And by “play” I mean “wander around outside for hours on end.” Christ, today if I find myself NOT surrounded by computers and televisions and air conditioning et al I think “oh my god, how barbaric!” Yet all I can think of from summers back then are the sheer heat and dryness to everything. Baking sun as I played in dead, dried-out grass and scorching dirt. No end in sight to hot, blinding dreariness. Of course, I was only four going on five that summer, so I didn’t know how much it sucked. And my brother was no help – did I wanna help create a game to be played on tv with some fat head running around chewing up dots while being chased by ghosts? B-O-R-I-N-G! I’ll be outside, ass-eyes!! Anything remotely interesting we use every day now didn’t seem possible or even imaginable back then. Like cell phones, or cutting.

I remember my first day of kindergarten fairly vividly. I had turned five years old two months earlier and knew that if I wanted to have my Die Hard script taken seriously I would have to go through the rituals of school. My first memory is getting yelled at for pulling my pants all the way down to my ankles when I pissed. I have no idea why I did this, but that’s how I pissed back then. What the hell did I know? Hey what am I, a goddam doctor? I was standing at the john pissing, Toughskins at my ankles, when a teacher walked in and yelled at me for my pissing modus operandi. It’s very comforting to know that back then a teacher could walk in on a five year old whose pants were down at his ankles and stand there having a conversation with him. And I didn't even go to Catholic School!

Hey, does “Toughskins at my ankles” make you think of the “Calvin's in a ball on the front seat past eleven on a school night?” line from The Breakfast Club? Me too!

Mostly, I remember looking around and seeing a bunch of kids crying. Which I didn’t get; even at such an early age, I knew that the one thing any kid should want is to be out of his parents’ sight for a few hours at a time. I thought I’d show up and heeeeeey, some kids my own age, no meddlesome parents in sight, let’s do some cuttin’ up! But they were all bawling for “mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Christ. I’ve noticed this has become even more prevalent in the present generation, kids wanna be around their parents all the time. What the fuck is this? I had a woman in my office a few years ago, and she had two kids. One 13 years old, one 12. EVERY day, like clockwork, at about 3:30 the phone would ring and it’d be these two idiots, calling their mom and sniveling “when you coming home? We’re booooooooored, come home!!!” They actually wanted her to quit her job so she’d be at home all day for them!! Is this the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? “Gee, I’m bored. Hey, you know what would liven things up? Hanging out with a coupla 100 year olds…maybe they can give me some more lessons on right vs. wrong! Yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!” All my brother and I wanted when we were kids were for our parents to get the fuck outta the house. Which I would think was fairly normal. And when you’re a kid, one hour equaled approximately 4 days in adult time - nowadays if you tell me I have one hour to do anything, I just say “aw, fuck it” and sit in a chair waiting for the hour to be up. Probably thinking about Valerie Malone at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Or the generalized binomial theorem. But back then, if it was 4pm and your parents were coming back at 5pm you had plenty of time to build three forts, set up a pretend newspaper complete with printing press and editor and do a complete re-enactment of Star Wars, word for word. Mostly, you were just thrilled the adults were outta the house. We had an agreement with our parents when my brother and I were kids: they’d let us go out on our own all day long, and we wouldn’t tell them how close we had come to getting ourselves killed. Clean, simple, everyone was happy. Unlike today’s generation of pussies.

My class was the last one in my county to only go to kindergarten for a half-day…I’d watch the 700 Club, Happy Days and then head outside to catch the bus. I am not making the 700 Club part up, by the way. I guess I felt a comfort in knowing that as long as people kept sending enough money in, God would be good to us all. Of course, I also seemed to believe that a guy could snap his fingers and beautiful women would come runing, so maybe I was a fucking idiot. Now, I don’t know why they decided to go full-day the next year but, ironically, my graduating class went on to be labeled as the smartest class in the history of our high school. Lesson learnt: never do a full job when half of one will do. Oooh, somewhere an ex-girlfriend just got her wings. Also, two school buses carried us to class each afternoon. Bus 7 had about 60 kids and Bus 48, my bus, had 8. I don’t know who the wizard was behind that, but it suited me just fine. I think I was the only white kid on Bus 48, on which we had characters such as Fat Melvin, who introduced us all to the “Boy-Boob.” Joe, who would be famous for dropping dead cutting grass at St. Margaret’s a few years later. And of course Tony, Joe’s friend. All we did during the entire ride was point out different cars on the road and claim them as our own. “Mine.” “That one’s mine.” “Mine.” This actually came in handy our first trip to Porky’s, interestingly enough. It was also on Bus 48 that I made my first friend, Mark Braxton (details here.)

I could already read before I got to kindergarten, which blew since about 97% of the entire year was spent learning the letters of the alphabet, courtesy of inflatable letters such as “Mr. T the Toothbrush!” and Mr. A the Apple!” I was gonna use a “Mrs. Q the Queef!” joke here, but I don’t wanna ruin these memoirs for the pre-teen crowd. (Side note to my college girlfriend: yes, I heard it. And yes, that’s why we broke up.) Also, I’ve noticed that the literacy rate among children has dropped 20% over the last 25 years, so there has to be something said for teaching by way of little blow up dolls, right? Lord knows I do my part to keep "learning."

The other thing I remember about kindergarten was how we were fed. We didn’t have “normal” lunches; every day at lunchtime we’d sit down and one of the teachers would haul out a big hefty bag. “Ohhhh, what do we have today??!!” she’d coo, with all of us hanging onto our seats. She’d open it up and Oooooohhh!! Peanut butter crackers! Or rolls. Whatever if was, it was a Hefty bag filled with one thing. Very strange. Not especially flattering either, throwing food at us like we’re little pigeons. Though actually I guess we’d be big for pigeons. Huge, literate (some of us) pigeons blinging out knit shirts with sailboats. Mmmmmmm. Would been great if one day she reached into the bag and pulled out a live rabbit. "Get the boning knife, we're eating meat today!"

First and second grade kind of blend together in my mind, probably cause I had the same teacher for both, Mrs. Iovino. Who would prove to be the last TILF I ever had, unfortunately. She was also my introduction to the Golden Palace of the Himalayas – every day we’d sit on the floor around her while she read a story, and starting Day 1 I realized that a front row seat + a dress (on her) = quite the view. I was so obvious, going chapters without blinking that one day LaTonya Gaskins called me out on what I was doing. This was the same LaTonya who, after I had spent weeks sitting with her on the bus, informed me that “my mama don’t want me sitting next to white boys no more.” My first incident involving racism, and I was on the wrong end of it. Sitting down in a different seat I remember thinking “so, that was racism, huh? Hmm. That wasn’t so bad – what the hell are all these coloreds moaning and groaning about?!??!!?”

As the decade of the 70's drew to a close, looming over us was 3rd grade, which we were told was "hell." Apparently the salad days would soon be over as 3rd Grade was when you got slammed with homework every night. There was a kid on my bus, Bruce, who was in 3rd Grade and every day he'd make a big show of how many books he was lugging home every day. "Third grade is hard!" he'd warn us as we'd gape at the about 15 books he'd have in his arms. It was months later that Brothatime! had finally gotten bored with me looking like a complete idiot and reminded me that geee...HE was in 3rd Grade, and he brought home maybe one book a night, if any. Hmm. Bruce's scam was up; tho he did end up with the best arms on the whole bus. Unfortunately Bruce would become afflicted with maybe the greatest underbite known to man, leading us to call him "Trapjaw." Poor bastard, he looked like Mike the Steam Shovel. Brothatime! once claimed Bruce could eat an apple without opening his mouth.

New bus characters on the bus that year included the Altemus family: Katurah, the oldest, who looked like she was 60 years old thanks to having the two dumbest younger brothers in the world to look after. Jadian, a kid so dumb it would take him 3 tries doing the 50-yard dash to realize it was to be ran and not walked. We called him "Pocketbook" cause Katurah made him carry her pocketbook. Probably only once, and here we are thirty years later and if I saw him today I'd shout out "heeeey, Pocketbook!" Then there was younger brother Delonte, aka "Caramel" thanks to his light skin and unfortunately-timed pre-PC birth.

So the summer of 1980 was a penutimate one for me: 3rd Grade looming and, more importantly, the start of my Little League baseball career.

NEXT:
CHAPTER THREE: 1980-1984