Lessons in Daltronica.

Oh, it really did happen...

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:24:56 -0400

I hung out pacing between the neighbors houses waiting for the fire trucks to show up. The thing that really jacks with me when I think about it is that in my mad scramble to vacate the premise, I had turned the outside Christmas lights on.

So, you’ve got this house, it’s the pinnacle of festive cheer, every window and peak outlined with those fat, rainbow Christmas lights…and the inside is basically gutted from the bottom up. I’m fifteen and there’s some cop trying to question me with his little note book and black isontoner gloves, all the while there’s an endless clown car full of firefighters clomping up the stairs with their hoses and axes.

I just wanted to call my fucking parents. Eventually, some baby-faced paramedic swung in and intervened so I could keep frantically shuffling between Neighbor Rick’s car trailer and The Old Lady’s chain link fence.

I didn’t give much thought at first to the fricasseed carnage a house fire entails, I just kept reeling “What the Hell kind of guilt trip is God trying to lay on me with letting my house burn down on Christmas?”

The sucker didn’t burn down, really it burnt up. Up the vents, singing everything in our closets, collecting in the places where the ceiling meets the walls.

That night we collected ourselves in Uncle Tim’s house, abandoned for the holidays. Nobody was supposed sleep that night. Mama D ironed things she found in Uncle Tim’s linen closet, DumbBaby took off with one of her friends until things got a little less heavy, I watched an E! True Hollywood story on Divine, and in the grand style of The Dada, he turned in with “Well, ain’t nothing’s that gonna get done tonight. See you in the morning.”

The first person showed up at about 6:00 AM.

“Oh my GAWWWD! I heard all about what happened and all I could think of was ‘those girl’s don’t even have any panties! So here, here’s my new Christmas Panties. Figured you could use ‘em more than I could.”

What can you say to that?

Just “Thanks. We really don’t have panties this morning.”

Christmas just happened to show up on a Saturday which rendered us a flood of Churchies showed up around 11:00 asking us what we needed. We couldn’t go into the house, so we didn’t know.

“Thanks. We really do need help with something, we just don’t know what. Thanks just the same.”

They left a Sunday School’s worth of handmade sympathy cards, the jewel of the bunch being a snow man written in a child’s backward, washable marker scroll boldly reading:

“MY FIRNDS IM JOPESH! THANK YOU!”

The Queenbee Senior Girl called DumbBaby to say; “Uh hey, I have some old Silvers if you need some stuff.”

DumbBaby hung up to tell us “Guys, I want her Silvers but, like, I feel bad because we’re getting all new stuff anyway. There’s probably some poor people who don’t even have any Silvers.”

We met the fire marshall the afternoon of December 26, 1999. Everything in the house was either burnt or blemished with a layer of soot. Melted or ruptured in the heat.

The Dada ran around trying to wipe everything off.

“This’ll come clean! This is just a little warped! Ahhh we were going to get a new TV anyway.”

The fire marshall was a stoic, seasoned gritty old guy. Who walked in behind us and announcing “Criminy that’s some smoke damage.”

Dada still bouncing around trying to minimize popped in with a cheery:

“Yeahhhh but you’ve seen worse!”

The fire marshall took a seat on top of a noxious chair that had been our rolling vinyl dinette set. He very carefully set the scene by shimmying the chair in front of our wilted, plastic, blob of our tinseled Christmas tree and lit a cigarette.

“Nah. I ain’t ever seen worse. Everything that didn’t burn’s toxic now anyway. You’d best start all over, mister.”

I still run that moment over and over in my mind, trying to justify that maybe this was a scene from a Wes Anderson movie.

Nope. This was our life.

By the early evening, a barrage of friends from my parent’s party excursions, DumbBaby’s basketball camp buddies were over dragging all of our blackened worldly clutter on to the driveway. My (2) friend’s contribution had been whisking me away to a movie while everyone else toiled.

I came back to some Samaritan power washing my skateboard on the lawn while everyone else piled the back of trucks for dump runs.

DumbBaby was right, we made quick work of the situation we were handed and rented a new house right away and filled it with all brand new things. It happened so fast with our band of ragtag friends helping us wipe things down and bring us Christmas Panties, there wasn’t much time to sulk around bawling over a ruined collection of Babysitter’s Club books or scorched antique Fiesta ware.

It’s like it almost didn’t happen at all. Every once in a while we’ll uncover a warped and discolored family photo and think about how much Christmas sucked that year. The only concrete evidence of the whole nasty ordeal is a VHS tape someone camcordered to try to help us with an insurance claim.

The tape goes from room to devastated room, curtains ragged with burns, our teenaged bedrooms covered in blackness, even over our laundry piles on our floors. Christmas presents destroyed below the tree and the clean white outlines of foot prints through the ashes. Negative shapes from where pictures were hung on the walls.

You hear chatter from people moving all of these pieces of our collected materialisms out the front door, then Dada walking up behind the camera man to say:

“Thanks man, really, really thanks a lot. Come gimme a hand with this couch then we’ll go have a beer.”

DumbBaby Turns 13....(the night Mama D went batshit.)

Mon, 26 May 2008 08:49:50 -0400

In honor of DumbBaby’s 23rd birthday, I’m giving you this little gem. Chances are most of you who read this will say “Oh yeah…I forgot that happened,” because this story really did take a community to create into this solid ball of hype that still remains ten years later.

I know some of you all will remember because DumbBaby and I have some serious reoccurring characters in our lives. We have these friends we cant trick into not being our friends (this creep for example) they’ve stuck through the grade school years into the most current rendition of “Thus Far.”

Considering the piece of Daltronica I’m getting ready to spit to you, I’m surprised any of these people stuck it out through the next weekend, much less ten years later. Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I give you “The Tale of The Kahlua and Condom.”

DB’s thirteenth birthday party had Douglas Middle School a’buzzin. Soundtracking was carefully planned into mixtape renditions of KC & JoJo with smooth transition into Sugar Ray to Adina Howard, with only minimal squeals from pressing pause. DB had the advantage because she had learned from my mistakes the past year- Don’t have your party the weekend of State Any Sport or else the boys aren’t going to make it, and don’t let The Dada and Mama D make 6 pounds of Manwich.

The weeds under the deck had been mowed, the camper trailer swept out and the trampoline hosed off. This was going to be the Ultimate Backyard Bonanza of 1998, no doubt about it. An expected 25 guests out of a class of 60 not including my two friends I planned to bring to roll our eyes and make the majority uncomfortable with our toocoolitudes. The big night rolls around, novice eyeliner jobs and boys with that reddish peely skin that never quite looks right, file into the backyard.

My friends and I took about 45 minutes of scoping out the seventh graders before sneaking into my room to have a séance.. Twenty minutes into our attempt to summon Kurt Cobain, DB shows up in my bedroom. Apparently, the kingpins to the DMS 7th grade Femme Mafia showed up together. We’re talking The Artists Formerly Known as “The Group” Katie, Michelle, and Tara. These girls gave handjobs, dyed their hair and had all smoked more than one cigarette collectively. They were edgy, scary and just all encompassing tweenaged bad girl clichés. They were the girls everyone wanted to be friends with and everyone’s mother hated.

Some how “The Group” had finagled their way into staying the night at square little DB’s post party all girl camp out in the backyard. DB knew this was bad news, but couldn’t wait to tell me: “Uhhhh…Ummmm tonight, the boys are staying down the street at Brady’s and we’re sneaking out to meet them at the Camel Humps.” The Camel Humps were a series of four wheeler tracks and ruts in the field behind our house. It was no place for a prudey 13 year old to be cavorting around with loose ladies and some random boys. “I’m not telling on you, but I’m just telling you, you’re going to get caught.”

This wasn’t so much gut instinct as it was common sense that Mama D would be sleeping with her bedroom window open and making period head counts through out the ordeal this evening. “Just don’t tell on us, okay?”

And I didn’t…the phone ringing at 3 in the morning did. Mama D catches the phone in the middle of the night to the tune of:

” Beck, I got 6 drunk little boys, bet you got 6 drunk little girls.” Kids down the street caved when they went AWOL for their head count then snuck back through the back fence smelling like Robert Downey Jr. It was in those few seconds that Mama D morphed into a ball of rage so sinister that the viens in her head and neck threatened to rupture and spray green venom all over everyone. She kept her cool until she had dragged every girl out of her sleeping bag on the trampoline and lined them all up on the couch while she pilfered through caboodles carriers and pillowcases looking for booze.

When Mama D. came back into the house having produced a bottle of Kahlua and a condom wrapper, even The Group looked terrified and started to squirm. I don’t know why, but for some reason the tirade of “What the hell were you thinking?” and “Where did this even come from?” is burnt into my brain as an image of Mama D in her flowery silk pajama set and sitting on a Velosa Raptor while the girls squirted tough tears and apologized all over themselves. I know this couldn’t possibly be true, but the dinosaur may have made the scenario of veins and rasps of “CALL YOUR PARENTS” seem a little more proportionate with the offenses. True to form, The Groups parents were so used to raising such darling little gems that they were all just pawned off onto whoever’s house had a parents who would drive to pick them up in the middle of the night.

After they had left, a still sputtering Marymo, Cort and DB sat sniffling and whining about how “The Group didn’t even let us go to the Camel Humps with the boys.” The Group had used DB and her geeky little friends as patsys to try to have sex in a field full of garter snacks and stray cats and to drink shots of Kahlua. Unfortunately, DB’s 13th birthday party was the talk of the town for weeks to come. Even the Home Ec teacher got in on asking DB if she could come over for some Kahlua some time. Quite literally, the whole town knew.

Mama D wasn’t the same after that and went to exhausting legnths to make sure we never had use for condoms or booze ever again. DB, Cort and MaryMo never seeing for a second that their cool quotient had been raised by several points, only the disgrace they had brought on themselves by being associated with a big, drunk seventh grade party they thought they could never escape…I guess they still really haven’t.

So this is going to blow your mind, if you know what this...

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:41:00 -0400

So this is going to blow your mind, if you know what this picture means…

The Dada had a larger than life poster of this very graphic hanging on the wall of his garage.

Garages are slightly foreign matter for daughters. Unless of course, you’re a daughter like me.

There was a method to all of the mayhem in Dada’s little world. Our garage was cluttered to the Nth degree but the chrome and rusted bolt litter was always laid so meticulously on a piece of cardboard from a sliced up box. The bicycle Mama D always promised she’d ride but would inevitably end up as our loaner to whatever friend crashed our basement over the weekend, hung from the rafters with the assortment of Christmas decorations balanced over the beams.

…and The Harley.

Perpetually torn down and assorted colors over the years, The Harley was The Dada’s last ditch effort of holding on to his youth and some semblence of identity over the years.

I would lurk around the cold floor begging for some reason to hang ‘round the cussing and cigar smoke while he socially wrenched and rigged. Eventually The Dada would break down and give me some random part to polish or something to organize. Despite how necessary it might’ve been, he never told me to go chase a parked car or watch tv. He always gave me a piece of this window into his world.

Years later, I learned there was another reason for bored tweens to mill around the kitty litter and saw dust floor…

On a tequila drunk evening in my early 20’s, a couple of relics from my past joined me to reminisce about growing up ‘round Windriver Drive in the 90’s.

“First set of boobs I ever saw was in an Easy Rider mag I jacked from your Dad’s garage.”

Easy Riders, usually with waving and faded covers from being left in the sun on the back porch. I never paid more than a “Well, I guess that’s sitting there” while I was in the garage. The leather babes with their bleached blonde and crusty bangs, leaned oh-so-sex across the seat of newly restored pan head. The box of them squished under the workbench was the ultimate Biker Spank Bank.

The story goes that there wasn’t a pre-teen boy in the neighborhood that hadn’t nicked one of the NC-17 mags from my Dad’s garage.

For a while, I wondered if The Dada was ever hip to the swindle. One evening a few years ago, I asked him point blank if he realized he’d kept the boys from the ‘hood in porn throughout their early adolescents.

His reply?

“Hey! Those little jerks! They don’t make those things anymore!”

"I thought tha guys gowen sit on ut!"

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:16:00 -0400

DumbBaby was a strange child.

Of course, this is a very sweeping generalization so I’m obligated to lay it down and show you why my little sister is a weirder kid than your little sister.

She was fiercely blonde, talked like a Guatemalan child with a mouthful of thumbtacks, trying to learn english as a second language. One of the charming thing about having a slightly younger crony who wanted to be just like me, was no one else could understand her.

DB was probably four years old and had just started speaking with any kind of fluidity. She wouldn’t talk to strangers, she wouldn’t make eye contact these days they would’ve just called her Autistic and been done with it. DB was four years old when something finally broke loose and proved her to be a fully functioning kid.

Mama D. played softball. Softball was no shit. Imagine “A League of Their Own” put it in Wyoming and add some trailerpark Mommy’s and lots of cheap beer and cigarettes. It was nothing for the pitcher to step off the mound, beat her kids’ ass for stealing something from the concession stand then continue business-as-usual.

DB and I loved and hated going to watch softball. The games were at the run down baseball diamonds nestled between the interstate and a handful of dirty trailers with old bath towels as window treatments. The playground was a deathpit of rusty metal and old tires bolted together. If you were going to get hurt, you’d lose a toenail at the very least, an eye if you were really playing too hard.

Anyway, DumbBaby’s 4 years old. Mama D. had a big game that night. She had made us quick sandwiches on the way out the door. She’d already learned that DB would dissect hers no matter how meticulous the filler choice or how artfully the crusts removed (DB’s cache of cheese slices in the heater vent had recently been discovered that summer) Mama D. hit Mini-Mart on the way to the field to get her soft-pack of Salem Slim Lights.

DB, our sandwiches and I, sat waiting in our seatbelts in our old S-10. DumbBaby grabs the biggest mouthful of sandwich she’d ever, in her life, taken. She starts laughing through her nose and her cheeks dimple around wads of white bread, a second later, she spits the wet blob of sandwich straight onto the window of the car parked next to us.

I sit there horrified and excited that this is all happening in front of me. Too scared to laugh, too entertained to look away as chunk after chunk of chewed up sandwich flew and stuck to the windows of the car. DumbBaby cackling and taking in deep coughing breaths.

She choked out in her broken, little talk: “I thought tha guys gowen sit on ut!”

Of course, we were busted 2 minutes later, my eyes large and embarrassed while my humiliated mother used handfuls of patterned napkins to wipe off the globs of spit and concoction from her own refrigerator. Apologizing and apologizing and apologizing…

By the time the driver’s side door shut again, DumbBaby still had not stopped her gasps and belly laughs. Mama D. couldn’t say a word to her, her jaw flopping wide and her head shaking like she was trying to wiggle free a crazy thought.

That’s when I knew DB was going to be all right. I don’t know how that made sense in my five year old mind, but it really did.