Tag: memories

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jkonrath@indiana.edu

I spent all of my school years with the same email address – jkonrath@indiana.edu. I didn’t always get my mail on the same machine, and I had this complex shell game of trying to get accounts on as many machines as possible so I could have all of the quota to store my email and other junk. But I had that general philosophy of having all of my files in a central place. My computer at home was always a piece of garbage, and I was too nomadic to pop all of my mail to one place. So it all lived on various ultrix machines named after metals. When I left, those accounts got tarred and zipped and came with me to Seattle.

When I got to my first job, I hoped to get the address jkonrath@shitburger.com (replace shitburger with the actual company name), but they assigned accounts by first name. In my case, it ended up being jonathan@shitburger.com. This caused great confusion on many fronts. First, everyone wanted to email me at jkonrath@shitburger.com. A lot of people still emailed me at jkonrath@indiana.edu, thinking it would still somehow magically work. I found (well, I already knew) that absolutely nobody can spell the name Jonathan. (Johnathan, Jonathon, Jkofuiw849fthan, whatever.) Also, this caused a lot of people at the new job to think I preferred the long form of my surname, when in fact I hate it. Since only my mom and law enforcement officials actually call me Jonathan, being in an office where every marketing droid called me that made me think I was ten minutes from an FBI bust or something.

I also quickly got sick of my personal and work email coming to the same mailbox. This was long before workplaces got really shitty about how proprietary email was, but it became increasingly difficult to get at my mail from home or away. And it sucked when someone was hovering over my desk and someone non-work-related sent me an email about dressing up a sorority chick in clown makeup and banging her on a pooltable. (I have weird friends.)

After about six months in Seattle, I decided to buck up and pay for a real ISP. At that time, the only place in town that offered a shell account was the Speakeasy Cafe. I think it was like ten bucks a month. Most people would go in there and sit at a computer, sipping their tea and sending emails, but I just wanted a unix machine, centrally located, a place to keep my junk, and run emacs.

Back before Speakeasy became a huge ISP, they were just a cafe. They had a big Solaris box, a bunch of terminals, and an espresso machine. The place was in Belltown, a part of Seattle filled with trendy art galleries, the kind where the walls are covered in dayglo tempra paintings of native american wolves fucking, the kind of stuff you don’t want to look at when you’re on acid. The cafe was all wood and black-spraypainted terminals, like something out of Singles, but with computers. I don’t drink coffee; they didn’t serve Pepsi or Coke, only Afri-Cola, a weird little import in a strange-shaped bottle that tastes like RC Cola at twice the price, but a penny of the cost went to the rainforests or something. They sometimes had food specials, scrawled on a chalkboard menu, free-range wok-seared something-or-other. No burgers. No BLT.

But I got that account, untarred my old bronze archive, changed three or four things, and it was running like I never left. All of my old mail was there. Emacs still ran, with the VM mail program and the BBDB address book. My web page came back to life. There were text files with lists of things I was selling six months ago, right before I left town. It was like taking everything in your house, shrinkwrapping it, and transporting it across the country into another house, so when you woke up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, you’d still find the glass on the counter.

I came to Belltown every month, to pay my tab. This was before the days of Visa-enabled online invoices; you showed up and put your cash on the counter. I think you could prepay a year in advance, but at this point, I was so tapped that all of my grocery shopping consisted of only buying the stuff in the Safeway coupon book. (And those are gone now too, thanks to those stupid cards.) But Belltown was an engram burned into my mind. Every time I came down there, I’d stop at a store filled with antique junk that was pried from houses that were gutted. Clawfoot tubs, ornate molding, wood bannisters sat on the floor, all of the pieces of last century that were yanked when some Microshit Millionaire wanted to redo their colonial house to look “zen.” I dreamed of somehow buying some land in Montana or Idaho or Wyoming or whatever and buying all of this shit and building a haunted mansion.

I never hung out at Speakeasy much, although it was the place to hang out for the hipster set. I tried to go in there once and kill a few hours on a Friday night, to see if anyone cool would be wandering around, but it was either people who already knew each other, or strangers who wanted to tunnel into their account and read the web with the lynx web browser. It wasn’t a swinging scene by any means. Later they started showing movies, having bands, but really eclectic stuff. I met Trent Harris there, when he was screening The Orkly Kid movie. And for a while, I was trying to do some kind of collaboration with a cartoonist named Daniel, and we’d meet there and then go elsewhere, where they had greasy food or cheaper drinks. (I was trying to get him onboard about filming a movie that parodied Apocalypse Now but was about trying to find a parking spot in Seattle, called A Parking Spot Now. Never happened, of course. I still have notes somewhere, though.)

Speakeasy became big and somewhat dumb, nationwide, and with DSL and wireless and whatever else. It was nice when I moved to New York, and I could keep the same service. But eventually, things got stupid, and they kept fucking up their shell accounts. Finally, I gave up, pointed my mail to my home machine, and turned on ssh so I could get to it anywhere. And the cafe, sadly, burned down. I think it’s condos now. They never reopened, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t think people can really wrap their heads around the idea of going somewhere to use the internet, unless they’re using their laptop and stealing someone else’s WiFi. Even the idea of a shell account is alien to pretty much anyone.

Bleah. Time to go read.

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general

Little Axl

I probably mentioned a few times a while ago that I was working on a book called Six Year Plan, that was a bunch of short essays and whatnot about my time in Bloomington – sort of an extension of what I did in Summer Rain. Well, that never went so well, and I’m sitting on about 100,000 words of shit, some of it good, a lot of it not so good. In mucking around, I’ve decided to pull a few pieces and put them here. These are not stories. They aren’t essays. They are just pieces. And they’re rough. Let’s start with one that I call “Little Axl.”

—

In the summer of ’91, I needed a real job, pronto. My parents were on my ass about bringing in a solid 40 hours a week at a good rate, and my computer job dried up during the summer session. I checked the classifieds and noticed the major triumphant victory in the 17-minute-long Iraq war pushed the economy into a short-term upswing. Everybody in the rich states wanted a new house or a new RV, so every factory in our shit city had a want ad in the paper. Everyone was paying at least twice as much as I made changing laser printer toner cartridges, and some were already running mandatory overtime at time and a half.

The only problem with a factory gig would be going in as a student. Most blue-collar shops didn’t like to hire young peckerwoods who were into the book learnin’, because they’d question the wise ways of those who earned union wages drilling holes in plywood 800 times a day every day. And just when the school boys started to nice and indoctrinated, they’d pick up and leave for campus in August. Most employers preferred someone local, married, with a kid or ten, and a mortgage or two. They could break in a lifer and keep them in the gallows for twenty or thirty years. A few, however, liked to bring in a crop of college kids to enslave for three months, especially if they could do it to skirt some kind of union regulation.

I ended up lucking into a job at a brass plant in Elkhart, on second shift. I worked for the same company at a different factory the year before, with my dad. The brass plant meant no commute, no early morning alarm clock, and no dad. I also somehow managed to take a morning class each summer session at IUSB. And I dated Lauren, this girl in Bloomington, and made the trip down there every other weekend. Basically, the entire summer was a long run of little sleep, lots of trucker speed, and a swimming pool or two of caffeinated beverages.

Most of the people at the plant were typical factory workers: divorced, remarried, with a couple of kids, and never questioned the life laid out in front of them. There were a couple of students my age, also in for the three-month haul between college semesters, and I hung out with them at the lunch table. But one of the best guys I worked with wasn’t a regular friend, just a forklift driver I talked to here and there. I don’t even remember his real name. But in my head I called him Little Axl.

Little Axl had a mane of longish red hair that made him vaguely resemble the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, and his raspy three-packs-of-Marlboro-Red-a-day voice sounded spot-on like he was going to jump down off of his lift truck, bust into “Sweet Child of Mine” at any moment and do that stupid snakey dance . Actually, maybe he completely wouldn’t remind you of Mr. Rose, but this was 1991, and the band was ramping up to hit ubiquitousity in a few months with the Use Your Illusion albums. The guy did complete his work wardrobe with a few cut-up t-shirts of various metal bands, a red bandana, and ripped-up jeans, so I’m sure he would have appreciated the association if I ever would have told him.

Little Axl was always doing dumb shit, and the other lifers at the job were constantly harping on him about it. He was sort of like the hype man for a rap group, except he wasn’t acting like a dumbass to make Chuck D look more butch or anything; he was just legitimately off-kilter in the head. For example, one day he suddenly decided to quit smoking. A noble gesture, yes, but the main reason he quit is not because of cost (cigs were dirt cheap back then) or health (everyone in Indiana smoked, and didn’t worry much about cancer), but because he used to be on the track team back in high school, and in some Al Bundy-fueled nostalgia fit, he wanted to be able to run the mile in under six minutes or whatever the fuck he ran it a half-dozen years before. Part of his non-smoking regimen was that during lunch and at breaks, he’d run laps around the parking lot in his work clothes and steel-toed boots, trying to magically regenerate all of the lung cells he’d tarred up over the last decade. Calling this “running laps” was slightly misleading, though, because he’d manage to run about 20 yards before he’d double over and hyperventilate for a moment or two, trying to catch his breath for another quick dash, while the rest of us sat at the picnic table next to the front entrance and laughed at him. Within two days, the pack of Reds were rolled back in his shirt sleeve, and the smoking ban was long forgotten.

Here’s another story about Little Axl, although it’s also mostly about me. I was dating Lauren back in Bloomington, after hooking up with her over a Memorial Day visit. And because I racked up a $277 long distance bill one month, my parents disconnected our phone to all but local calls, which made the long distance relationship a bit more difficult. But I could get on the computer via a local dialup and send mail and chat with her when she also got online. I didn’t have a computer back then, but she loaned me her old Mac Plus and 2400 BPS external modem. I’d rush home after my shift ended at midnight, and she’d go to one of the 24-hour labs on campus, and we’d “meet” and type across the 250-mile void through the magic of primitive chat programs like bitnet and VAXPhone.

One Friday night, I ran home after work to got ready for my big VAX session, but when I pulled into the driveway, I noticed the house was dark. I walked inside, and found there was a blackout in the whole neighborhood. I suddenly realized that Lauren was probably in a computer lab, wondering where the fuck I was, and if I didn’t log in soon, she was going to get all pissed off and it would all be my fault. I couldn’t call her in the lab (no long distance, this was before the day of cell phones), and I couldn’t drive to school and sit at a computer, since the IUSB campus was 45 minutes away, and probably all locked up. Then it hit me: go back to work with the computer. I piled up the cords and keyboard in a bag, grabbed the Mac Plus by the carrying handle, and drove back to the brass plant.

I don’t know how I figured this would work, but I assumed that a place like a factory had to have some RJ-45 stapled to a baseboard somewhere with a live signal. I checked the lunch room with no luck, and then found a phone jack and a set of power cords in the long hallway that ran from the front door to the guard station and time clock. It wasn’t exactly the most ergo place in the world, but I plopped down all of my stuff on the concrete floor, ran my wires, and within a few minutes, I had dialtone, then a carrier, and I was trying to explain all of this to Lauren over a 2400 BPS connection.

The weird this is, aside from the security guard dude working at the front desk, my buddy Little Axl was also pacing back and forth by the time clock. Why? It turns out a cop was hiding in the bushes right outside of the parking lot, sniping off cars with a radar detector and hoping to peel off a DUI or two. Now that’s pretty much business as usual with the shithole Elkhart cops, but the problem was that Little Axl drove this fucked up truck that was lifted about nine inches, had no exhaust, no front grill, one headlight missing, another headlight pointed 89 degrees into the air, and probably had expired plates and insurance, not to mention that Little Axl had like 27 points on his license, two DUIs, and maybe a warrant or two. So he was freaking out, waiting for the cop to leave, and trying to get someone else to drive out there to see if the coast was clear.

Meanwhile, he found me on the floor, typing away, and was completely astounded at my piece of shit Mac Plus running the Red Ryder terminal program. I don’t think he’d ever seen a computer before, and he stared at me as if I’d set up a Star Trek teleporter room on the floor and was beaming in long-dead celebrities of the 17th century for a polo game. He looked over my shoulder at my bitnet conversation, wondering what video game I was playing, mesmerized not only that someone could run a computer, but that they could also type words into it. I don’t know if he was more astounded that a person with such scientific prestidigitation skills could work at the same factory as him packing boxes, or if I was more amazed that a person who was about my age could know so little about technology. Either way, it was a strange evening.

It’s also worth mentioning that Little Axl also went to the big Guns N’ Roses and Metallica show in Indianapolis that summer to see his namesake, and I think he vaguely invited me down there if I wanted to catch a ride too, but it seemed too weird and I probably was going down to Bloomington that weekend anyway. In retrospect, I wish I would have scraped up the $40 for tickets and went with him, since it would have been a completely fucked up story culminating with him shooting a syringe of Jim Beam into his neck and then beating his trucker-looking girlfriend with the bottle. And this was also like one or two shows before the real Axl started a riot in St. Louis.

When he came back from the show, Little Axl would not shut up about the greatness of the Guns set, and how they played so many new songs. He also got a shirt that he wore to work the next day, but it said something like GUNS AND FUCKING ROSES WILL FUCK YOU UP on the back, and one of the old guys at work got upset and told him he had to turn it inside out or get another shirt because it had the f-word on it, and this was a family factory. He had it inside out for an hour or two, then he had it back, and I wondered if the ACLU had stepped in that quickly or what, until I saw that he cleverly covered the aforementioned f-bombs with a piece of electrical tape. Sneaky.

Little Axl was one of the most interesting people I worked with, although there were others. I worked at a QA bench for a few weeks with a woman that was my parents’ age who worked with my dad at the other plant and was a recovering alcoholic. She told me all of the usual stories recovering addicts tell you, about taking a bunch of drugs, driving through traffic at 110 while fucked up, almost jumping out of windows, being pronounced dead and then coming back, and all of the others. It made the summer go by a little faster, but it still took way too long to get it done, especially since I’d be back in Bloomington in the fall.

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Food indecision

I get into this phase maybe once or twice a year when I simply cannot pick out what food to eat. I mean, the clock strikes noon, I am famished, got plenty of cash on me, and it’s not shitting rain or hot enough to liquify the sidewalk or anything else, but I simply cannot decide on what kind of food I want to eat. I can’t even think of a genre, or a direction to walk. And it goes on like this, meal after meal, until I am continuously more and more fatigued with things because I haven’t had a good meal in days. Yes, I’ve had a meal, and I don’t exactly look like a UNICEF kid, it’s just I can’t find something that makes me happy. And this is probably a bigger metaphor on life, because I also can’t get any writing done, find a book I can really stick with reading, and so on. I’m sure there’s a medication for this. And I’m sure one of it’s 7492 side effects are that it causes loss of appetite.

Anyway, yesterday we went out and went to Flowers Cafe, which is a sort of hippie-esque diner a few blocks over on Grand. It’s not a hippie place in that they serve wheat grass and tofu hot dogs, it’s just a deli, but with lots of retro flower-power type murals on the walls. It’s not too overdone, and they make a good reuben, so we order there a lot. And for whatever reason, we went there for breakfast on Saturday, and I got two eggs on a roll with bacon and cheese, and it completely kicked this food neurosis thing in the ass. It was a really good sandwich, and I loved it, and I wish I could get another one right now, except they’re closed, and I just ate dinner anyway.

After a day of walking around with Sarah and her friend Dre, we ended up seeing The Devil Wears Prada, which was funny, but probably not too relatable to those who don’t live here. We also went to this diner afterward called Big Daddy’s, which was the typical shit-on-the-walls genre, but not corporate, and with the typical menu where, instead of just saying “hamburger,” it says “Daddy-o Burger.” I just wanted a hot dog, and was presented with a giant plate that had pretty much an entire pig’s entrails stuffed and tied off into a hotdog. It was excellent, but it was also like half my body weight in food. Anyway, it’s a good place to crash if you’re just north of union square. I wish it was closer to the office, but then I’d probably need some paramedics to cut me out of my apartment in a few months.

Speaking of, I was on this food nutso thing the other day, and it popped into my head that I really wanted to run for the border and hit a Taco Bell. It usually happens once a year, but there are none by my new digs (there’s actually an old one, boarded up, with the tri-stripe awning still there and the logo spraypainted out) so I did the research and found the closest one was a half mile from the office, over on West 4th. Me and a couple of coworkers planned it out like a jailbreak, since we didn’t want to spend our entire lunch break trying to get over there. And Taco Bell has a very short halflife, before it congeals and turns cold and completely inedible. (And forget about microwaving that shit.) So we decided to cut over on the subway, one stop, hit the KFC/Taco Bell, and put in our giant order for all of the other people who wanted in but were too chickenshit to make the run. We got back in 30 minutes flat, ate, and then spent the afternoon wishing for napdom, hoping the gurgling in our guts wouldn’t go bad. ‘Beller’s regret. But I was happy.

There’s something in the sauce of that Mexican Pizza that reminds me so much of when I used to work there. And when I was thinking about it, I realized – it’s been twenty damn years since the summer I spent working the drive-thru at the ‘Bell, saving up for one of those new-fangled CD players and a dual exhaust for my Camaro. Shit, I remember when I was twenty, so it makes me feel even worse to remember something twenty years ago. It’s so weird though, that tomato sauce always reminds me of buying food when I went off-shift, leaving with a big bag of taco supremes and nachos and riding home on my ten-speed. When I first had my car, I dumped an order of those cinnamon crispas under the front seat, and spent months trying to vacuum up that sugar-cinnamon dust from the crevices of the carpet. Of all of the cooking smells mixed together in the back line of a Taco Bell, the most overpowering one was the crispa smell, maybe because it was the only sweet one. I don’t think they sell those anymore, but if they did, it would be an instant time machine for me.

Crap. It’s pouring rain outside. I have to go to work tomorrow, which sucks. Then I get the 4th off. Then a 3-day week. Whole Foods had nitrite-free uncured hotdogs, and they actually taste pretty much the same, so that’s my little homage to the whole July 4th, picnic, barbeque, drunken fireworks, whatever thing. That’s all.

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My grandparents in a Steven Seagal movie

The final lasting image of my grandparents together is a Steven Seagal movie. No, my grandparents were not sixth-degree black belts, and neither of them had the 80s hip-guy ponytail. But Seagal’s first movie, Above the Law was shot in their Chicago neighborhood. So whenever the flick’s on cable TV over the weekend, I usually tune in for a few minutes to catch a look at the old neighborhood where I spent all of my Thanksgivings and Christmases, plus other holidays we loaded up the station wagon and drove two hours west to the big city.

I don’t know Chicago geography well, but the one now-gone landmark that was the nucleus of their old neighborhood was the Ludwig Drum factory. Go to the intersection of Damen and North, and then go up a couple of blocks to St. Paul Ave. That’s where my grandparents’ three-story brownstone sat, the place they bought back in 1940 for about the current cost of a new compact car. Across the street was an old brick warehouse where Ludwig made their drum kits, the kind almost every rock band used back then, or the big marching band bass drums used at football games. My mom told me when she was little, the Beatles came to the drum factory to see where Ringo’s skins were put together, and it turned into a full-scale riot. (Of course, in my mom’s stories, pretty much everything turned into a full-scale riot, so who knows.)

The big plot point in Seagal’s movie was this old church, and that was shot at Saint Mary of the Angels church. (Here it is on google maps.) I used to go to this church all the time with my grandma. She was really serious about the church, and was a Polish Catholic, which was like an order of magnitude more strict than just being a regular Catholic, although I didn’t really know how. Our church back home didn’t use any Latin, though, and this place had all kinds of songs and sayings I didn’t understand. The church got shut down because of structural problems right after the film came out. When my grandma died in 1989, the funeral was at another church; the city had slated Saint Mary for demolition. Some people got together the cash at the eleventh hour, and they rebuilt the place. So both Catholics and martial arts fans can rejoice that the landmark was saved.

The Ludwig plant fell apart, and they moved the drum production to Texas or Japan or something. Another company used the factory for a while, but in the 80s, it was used as a studio space for a few TV and film productions. The Color of Money was shot there, and allegedly, my grandfather ran into Tom Cruise, and said he was a nice guy. (I don’t know if this was before or after he turned to Scientology.) Above the Law shot a lot of indoor scenes in the old factory. Like there’s a scene where they’re going to a police evidence locker to check on some C4 explosives – that’s totally the inside of the Ludwig plant. I’ve never been in there, and I only know the place from sitting across the street and looking inside the mesh gate over the loading dock, watching the forklifts move around. But I could tell at a glance that the scene was shot there.

A lot of Above the Law reminds me of the general feel of the mid-to-late eighties Chicago, a place I just barely knew. All of the cars had those blue and white license plates, and in the background of the chase scenes, you could see the Jewel stores and gritty-looking car repair places, with red brick walls that were turned black from years of soot and pollution. The L-Train ran overhead, making that distinctive sound and looking like nothing we’d ever see back in Elkhart. All of the backgrounds in that movie of the neighborhood remind me so much of what I saw in the back of the station wagon, looking out at this giant city, where every square block housed more people than my entire high school. Watching five minutes of that film reminds me so much of that brief moment in time that it always amazes me.

The one big regret that I have about my grandparents’ old neighborhood was that I never really tried to explore outside of the close domain of their place. My mom was 100% convinced that there were rapists with full-auto machine guns every hundred feet, and if we left the fenced confines of their back yard, we’d be on the back of a milk carton or worse. Now, I don’t think as a four-year-old I should have wandered far, but when I was 14, maybe I could have walked around the block, or down to Wicker Park, or to Osco’s to get a Coke or something. In retrospect, the place was probably as safe as the streets I walk today in New York. I really would like to have more memories of the area around there. I don’t want to live there, and a vacation in Chigago is not high on my list of things to do with limited time and money. But it’s something that interests me in some weird way.

That area is now called Bucktown, and it’s a trendy little place to be, if you’ve got the goatee and the money. The Ludwig factory got broken up into single-serve condos, and the mom-and-pop bodegas and corner bars are probably all cloned Starbucks storefronts. The neighborhood’s probably all filled with hipster doofuses, listening to Coldplay on their iPods and reading J.T. Leroy books. After my grandpa died in 1995, they sold off his building for some obscene amount of money. Looking at the place on Google Maps, I see that they’ve torn out the garden and swingset next to the building and made it into parking spots, which really pisses me off. I’ve always wanted to go back and see the place again, but I’m guessing all of the wood pocket doors and elaborate cabinetwork got kicked to the curb and replaced with Pottery Barn.

I still haven’t watched Above the Law all the way through. But one time my mom rented it, and we found a part in the church where my grandparents were extras. (They probably went because there was a free lunch or something; my grandfather could not pass up anything like that.) You can see them for a split-second on-screen, which is awesome. How many of you can say your grandparents were in a Steven Seagall flick?

Bonus: Coincidentally, Larry Falli now lives about 20 blocks south and four blocks west of where they used to live.

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general

Pee-Wee League

John Sheppard posted a nice Little League photo the other day, complete with 70s bright colors and high pants, which made me think a bit about my brief experience in Pee-Wee League back in the day. I forget when this was, but I’m guessing maybe third grade, and it was yet another one of those things where my parents really wanted me to experience different things besides the Apple II and/or determine if I was gay by forcing me to play sports. And given my lack of any hand-eye coordination or motor skills, I’m surprised they didn’t just give up and start buying me Cher albums and teaching me about flower arranging.

Pee Wee League was one of those things that not only made me feel bad about my inability to do something that so many other people could do easily, but I had kids making fun of me well into high school due to my inability to throw a ball long distances when I was a little kid. I know parents think these things will toughen up their kids, and teach them about teamwork and discipline and how to oil a leather glove. I guess one of the other things was that I was supposed to learn all about the national past-time and develop a love for the game. Honestly, I couldn’t name more than five baseball teams back then, and at the time, I was far too preoccupied memorizing random statistics about Star Wars characters than infielders and outfielders. This is probably best proven by the fact that I had about a dozen baseball cards, but I had every single one of the first two series of the Topps Empire Strikes Back Cards. (Insert speech about how I wished I sealed that shit in a vacuum-packed safe so I could put them on eBay and finance the down payment on a beachfront house, instead of randomly losing them all or accidentally covering them with peanut butter.)

Each of our Pee-Wee League teams had a corporate sponsor (if you consider “corporate” to include local car washes and septic system pumping companies) and a name of a real major league team. My assigned team was the AstroBowl Astros, sponsored by a local bowling alley, with a nod to the Houston MLB team, and featured orange hats and t-shirts. We didn’t wear the pants or the cleats or any other gear. I think there was a concerned mother freakout about wearing a cup, which happened when this kid named Skip ended up sliding into home plate ball-first and doing some damage to the yet-functioning family production units. I distinctly remember my mom’s hysterics, leading to a hand-off to my dad, who spent his childhood in the protection-free fifties, when you could still buy Jarts, M-80s, and small-caliber firearms at the local soda stand. The closest thing he knew about protection was when he got a CB radio so he could protect himself from speeding tickets on the highway. My dad grudgingly took me to Sears, where we silently walked to the athletics department and found that all of the various supporters and protectors were, at the smallest range, made for kids roughly twice my age or size. I think I could have used the smallest cup in stock as a batting helmet. Dad basically mumbled, “Son, be careful, and don’t tell your mom,” and that was that.

Somehow, I got put on a team that made the Bad News Bears look like the Yankees with a two billion dollar salary cap. Every kid who could not play was on the Astros. Most of the kids at school got onto cool teams, like the Dodgers, the Yankees, or the Cubs. (Yes, the Cubs were a good team; we were 100 miles from Wrigley Field. Despite the fact that they were a horrible team during that era, at least they were recognizable.) The only things I knew about the real Astros were Nolan Ryan, and the fact that they played in their namesake dome on their namesake artificial turf. That wasn’t much to go by.

I ended up as the catcher. When you have an adult pitching and the catcher doesn’t call pitches, this was where a coach parked their worst player, which happened to be me. I could barely throw the ball back to the pitcher. I could not infield to any extent, but it usually didn’t matter. The best strategy for the opposing team was to hit it anywhere in the outfield, and run in every single person on base while I sat and watched them cross the plate, because it would take about 45 minutes for someone to retrieve the ball and throw it home. I remember one game, against the faux Dodgers team, which had all of the jocko guys in it, when the score ended up being like 78 to 2. It was like a basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and a bunch of geriatrics who were off their meds.

I think we did win one game, and it was against one of the best teams, maybe the Yankees. It was on a day of really shitty weather, where the temperature dropped to about 45 or 50, and it was raining on and off, and extremely dark. Because it was on and off, the officials kept deciding the game would go on, and then they would change their mind, and then it would be back. We only wore t-shirts, and maybe half of the team got the idea to put on jackets under their uniform shirts. But wet denim jeans are always horrible, and your hands would be absolutely freezing. The parents on our team were pulling all of this “toughen up!” bullshit, and pretty much every kid on both teams was crying or trying not to cry, but still streaming tears down their rain-soaked faces. The only parents there on average were the mothers, who were trying to act like the fathers and overcompensating with whatever macho bullshit they caught from TV. (This was in an era when the divorce rate was like 100%, and all of the dads were probably off either getting loaded or trying to fuck the non-baseball moms.) So for whatever reason, our team could withstand the pain way more than the fake Yankees could, because we had to put up with so much bullshit under normal operating conditions, we didn’t even care that our hands were turning blue. Even the kids that couldn’t hold a bat were popping off doubles and triples, and we ended up pulling in a 12-4 win over the best team in the league.

One of the big things about Little League is that when you win (and it’s not practically snowing out), you go get ice cream. You’d think that since we had our asses handed to us on a regular basis, we’d never see any dessert action, but our coaches were sympathetic, or maybe in that “nobody’s a loser” parental mindset, so they usually found out where the other team was going, and we’d go to the other place for celebratory losing treats. There were two ice cream places in close proximity: a Dairy Queen, right next to the Taco Bell on 33 where I’d work when I was 16, and a Tastee Freeze, which was right in front of our corporate sponsor, Astrobowl.

I think I liked Dairy Queen better at the time, and we went there more, because the winning team usually went to Tastee Freeze because it was a local institution, and I think we lost almost every single game. Dairy Queen was more of a restaurant, like McDonald’s, and it had a sit-down dining room with a solarium. It didn’t have as many ice cream types, but I always got the peanut buster parfait. Tastee Freeze didn’t have any seats, just a window where you ordered. Maybe it had some picnic benches, but I remember sitting on a curb when eating my ice cream most of the time, and I wasn’t into that as much. Looking back, I probably like the Tastee Freeze better, because the ice cream was a lot more “custom” and they added sprinkles and cremes and sauces and other toppings while you waited, instead of just pulling out plastic-wrapped, pre-extruded things made at the central office in Kansas or whatever. Tastee Freeze is more of a small-town memory to me, something I’ll never see again in the big city.

When I was in the 7th or maybe 8th grade, we had to go to AstroBowl for a couple of class periods of bowling. It was across the street from the Junior High, so this was built into the curriculum, since we all know that bowling is an important skill for finding a job and providing for your future. (It’s important to note that even to this day, you will get your name in the Elkhart newspaper if you roll a perfect 300. Bowling is a big deal in Indiana. Not as big as crystal meth or illegitimate children, but it’s probably in the top ten.) Anyway, when I went over there and made a fool of myself yet again in another sport-like activity, I saw that in the trophy case by the front door, there was a picture of my old Pee Wee League team in a frame, along with a couple of other baseball team pictures that the bowling alley apparently sponsored. I was probably eight or nine, maybe ten when I went through that experience, but even at the age of 13 or 14, it was like looking back into another world to see that picture. I don’t have a copy of said photo anymore, but whenever I think of it, I always wonder if it’s still in the trophy case, gathering dust..

Oddly enough, a quick google shows that AstroBowl is for sale. Take a look at those photos and you see that parts of Elkhart have changed absolutely zero in the 15 years since I have left. The bowling alley looked identical back in the day: 70s futuristic logo, Pepsi sign above the door, big double stripe on the side of the cinderblock building, and cracked up parking lot. I’m honestly surprised that the location hadn’t become a TGI Friday ten years ago. I don’t bowl, but it would be sad if the place got sold and became a Mexican bodega or something. Current price is $450K, if you want to relive that Ed TV show and move back to the small city.

[Note from 2020: the AstroBowl was a Mexican event center for a few years, then sat abandoned for a decade or so, until the city tore it down. It’s now a parking lot for school busses.]

My parents also made me play basketball in the 6th grade, which is an even bigger story. Maybe I’ll type that one up sometime.

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general

Surge, Vault

One of the 200-some odd reasons my writing throughput and/or quality has dropped considerably in recent years (and I’m talking reasons in my head, not real, quantifiable reasons) is that Coca-Cola stopped bottling Surge soda. For those of you who don’t remember or never experienced it, Surge is/was a citrus soda that originally was called Urge in Norway, and was bottled there to compete with Mountain Dew. (Some Coke bottlers compete with Mountain Dew with Mello Yello, which is available in some markets, but not others.) Anyway, Seattle was a test market for Surge when it showed up in 1997, and once I tried it, I was hooked. Surge basically reminded me of a carbonated version of the Hi-C Ekto-cooler drink. It was more lime than lemon, with an unnatural bright green color, carbonation, and caffeine. It had a very unique taste, and wasn’t anything like its nearest competitor, Mountain Dew. I really liked it.

This was right after the time I quit caffeine entirely, but was going back on it again. I wouldn’t drink any Coke or anything else all day, except maybe the occasional Sprite. But on the weekends, when I was busy slamming away at the text for Rumored to Exist, I would go to Safeway, buy a 2-liter of Surge, and put it in the fridge, as my fuel for the next few days. I drank a lot of the stuff as I worked on the text, and I absolutely loved it.

Of course, when I moved to New York, I couldn’t find the shit anywhere. You already know the rant about how New York grocery stores don’t stock anything of variety, so I won’t repeat it. But I could not find Surge anywhere. Sometimes on a vacation, I’d get a taste. And I think the girl I dated in Cornell back in 2000 found a few bottles at a gas station upstate somewhere once. But after that, it was gone. And that pissed me off, because writers can get really locked into habits or triggers that can set off the hard-to-channel zone of writing. Some people have strange rituals. I used to start writing at the same time every night; others need a certain chair or pillow or snack or drink. Some need certain music; others require quiet. And for whatever reason, I got myself into a situation where I needed a certain type of sugar-water that a corporation test-marketed and then decided not to make anymore.

Well, good news, maybe. Coke has decided to come out with a new drink called Vault. There were a few ads during the superbowl, and they hinted at nationwide distribution in February. Now, I interpreted that as “distribution in every place with real grocery stores that aren’t run by the mafia, so fuck you New York”, and also wondered if the stuff really tasted like Surge, and if I’d get a chance to try it the next time that I went on vacation to a place with real grocery stores. But today, when we were at K-Mart, Sarah found that they actually had the stuff! I bought a couple of 20-ounce bottles, and gave it a try. It’s similar to Surge, although maybe a little more tart, and without as distinct of a green color as the original. The bottle looks different, of course, and you’d be amazed at how much different something appears to taste when it’s in a different bottle. But it’s pretty close. I like it.

I don’t know if I’ll be stocking our fridge with the stuff or not. My writing schedule and situation have been pretty off lately, and I don’t know if the magic elixer will suddenly have me pouring out words or not. I am in that process of thinking about what I will do before I start doing anything, and that’s frustrating and takes time. But it’s getting there.

Okay, I have to figure out a movie and a dinner and make them hobbling distance from each other so it will work out okay…

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general

Wasting time with MAME

I’ve been wasting all of my free time lately reviewing CDs. I’m not sure why, because I don’t want to be in the business of having a bunch of crappy death metal bands emailing me their mp3s to review. But I have a lot of loose reviews around, and I wanted to write more long-form reviews and find a place to put them, and I’ve got it about figured out now. When I get more than about 7 reviews done, I’ll post a link. Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been writing here much. It’s far easier to write 1500 words on an old Metallica album than it is to try to come up with 500 words when nothing is going on that I want to write about, except maybe the weather. So, there you go.

But, the other day, I was digging around and found a bunch of ROMS to various stand-up arcade games I had from my old laptop. So I downloaded a MAME emulator program for the Mac, and started digging around all of these old games. I don’t know about you, but I played a lot of arcade games back in the day, and I don’t just mean the really popular Pac-Man/Donkey Kong/Centipede era. I found a lot of these games and played them, and they totally reminded me of my days in a Bally’s, wasting a couple dollars while at the mall. And video game brand loyalty is a huge thing, and it made me think about all of the different brands and games and the whole caste system of consoles, and who played what.

For example, there were certain games that I absolutely loved to play. Like there was the Star Wars vector game, the original Tetris, this Tetris plus enhancements called Bloxxed, and Roadblasters. If an arcade had all of those, it was excellent. If it had one or two of them, it was good. If an arcade (like that shitty one in Pierre Moran Mall, or maybe one in an airport or something) didn’t have any of those games, it sucked, and either I’d play nothing and go off to the Walden Books, or maybe drop a quarter on a sub-par game, just to see if maybe it was really okay. There were a lot of games that either I didn’t like or didn’t see the point of, like most of the three-button-attack quarter-eater types that came out later, or the driving games that didn’t have a good catch to them. I mean, for a buck in gas, I could drive around the parking lot of the mall in my real car and have more fun than half of the sloppy-controller stand-up drivers out there in the early 90s.

But different people liked different games, which always made it weird when you went with other people, because people always had different allegiances to different games. It’s weird, because now, decades later, I can still remember what friends liked what games, way more than I could remember their favorite beer or band or movie. And that would be cool, but sometimes, based on the games there, it would cause problems. Like, sometimes I’d go to the Bally’s in College Mall in Bloomington with Bill, and I’d inevitably buy into some “a shitload of tokens for $20” deal before I’d remember that they had absolutely no machines I liked. I mean, the best game on the list was a Ms. Pac Man, and I could play that for about six months on $20 of change, given that I wouldn’t die of boredom. But there was some game there that he loved, and he’d play it all day, even though I was either no good at it or hated it. So you have that. Another example is that Spaceport had some pretty esoteric game machines, so if you stopped in there with someone who just wanted to play the core Atari games, they’d be screwed.

Oh, at the lowest end of the totem pole were the situations where you only had one or two games, and you had to pick one. A classic example is when you’re with your family at Pizza Hut, and there are two games, and it’s either Bust-a-Move or Robocop, and neither one are very good, but you need something to do until the breadsticks arrive or something. This also applies to dorms with a couple of stray machines, or little arcades in laundromats or whatever.

Another game I didn’t get were the sports games, like the football, hockey, and whatnot. None of my friends played these, because I think you had to like the sport in question, and none of my friends were huge soccer fans. The only sports game that was the exception to the rule was Summer Games. This – I think it came out around the time of the 84 Olympics, but wasn’t a sponsored game or anything – it was all of the track and field events, like throwing discus and running around a track and soforth. But the thing is, to run, you had to slap two buttons really fast to get your dude to run or throw or something. And for some reason, that made it different; it wasn’t about your ability to know about NFL football. It was about how fast you could slap two buttons, and dammit, you knew you could do it faster than the other guy. The sport part was secondary – it could have been monster trucks or shooting dragons or anything else, as long as it was competitive and measured your ability to pretty buttons at light-speed. I knew a lot of people who were really into that, and you could always tell when someone was playing, because it sounded like someone was bitch-slapping a keyboard. And now we wonder why so many people have RSI.

The competitive games, or more likely the collaborative ones, are the things that have so much memory to me. I’ve already written many times about how me and Ray used to play Smash TV for hours, feeding many quarters into it. I think the first game like this I remember is the original Gauntlet. When I play this now, it reminds me of Adam Pletcher, who I knew from school, and who is now more known for working on the video game Descent and a million others. We played the game a couple times at the Aladdin’s Castle in the Concord Mall, although at that point, the game was so damn popular, all four slots would be full, and the second someone ran out of change, someone else would jump in. Games like this were great, and it’s amazing how shitty some of them are when you look at them now. There’s a Simpsons game that came out in 90 or so that was the same console as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and X-Men game. Then, the graphics were mind-numbing, but now, I cannot stop laughing my ass off the images are so blocky and bad. But being able to get two or three people on a machine to all kick ass hid the poor graphics somewhat.

One of the games that I played but didn’t entirely like at first was Golden Axe. The student union had a room with maybe six or eight game machines, all of them duds, and one of them was Golden Axe. I reluctantly played the side-scroller for a while, and it really grew on me. The animations weren’t bad, but the sound effects were horrible. (When I was playing the other day, Sarah said that the dying people’s screams sounded like some kind of Crunk rap.) It’s also a collective game, although I played by myself a lot. I got the ROM and actually finished the game, which I guess is easier when you’re pressing a button instead of feeding in a coin, but it brought back so many memories of wasting time at the IMU.

Anyway, just some vague thoughts. I think if I had a lot of time and could remember more of this, I could write some kind of book or at least a good essay on greater taxonomy of video games. But, I’ve got these music reviews to write…

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general

Back on the bike

I rode my bike to work today, for the first time in a while. When I originally bought it last spring, I planned to ride it every day, but I was thrown off by cold weather, hot weather, food poisoning, vacations, and a bunch of other lame excuses. But today, I made it. Of course, I cheated a bit. I’ve been spending more and more time at Sarah’s lately, because my apartment sucks, and I’ve been gradually moving over things. First, it started with an extra deodorant and toothbrush, then a few extra pairs of unmentionables and socks, and then I started leaving books and DVDs. Now I’m moving over stuff a gym bag at a time, and on Saturday we got a limo (no, you non-New Yorkers, not a 68-foot-long stretch Caddy with a wet bar and hot tub – here limo means “non-yellow cab”) and pulled over a few hundred pounds of stuff, including my bike. So, now I will try to ride more.

It’s in my favor that my door-to-door trip is about a mile. (Okay, 1.59 – thank you mapquest.) It’s also much easier for me to get the bike in an out of the place here, since the old place involved a dozen tight turns to get out of the door. There’s no bridge to contend with. And a horrific trip through midtown is no longer needed. But, I no longer have long passages of nothing in Queens, which is kindof nice, and I have a lot of pretty testy drivers and pedestrians on my trip through Chinatown. Most of the ride is of the heavy-defensive sort, with little in the way of long cruises. So that sucks, but it’s still fun. Bicycle is about the best way to get around Manhattan, if you’re up for it. After riding a bike, I really hate walking – it seems so slow and monotonous, especially after you can cruise down a long block in a matter of seconds.

I’m glad to be back on the bike, too. There’s a real difference between your time and personal space on a train versus driving or being on a bike. I’d really want to be in a car, where you can totally cocoon yourself from the world and just have totally private time to yourself. From the second I had a license and a set of keys, I totally enjoyed being able to just put in a tape and drive loops around nowhere, to the mall and back, out on the back roads, and to friends’ houses for no reason. I always bitch about it, and even at three bucks a gallon, I miss that freedom. That’s one of the biggest problems with living in New York. (I mean, aside from the smell.)

But before I had a car, I had a bike. And I spent ALL of my time riding somewhere, or nowhere. The same people who have a hard time imagining that I used to weigh a hundred pounds less than I currently do probably wouldn’t believe that I used to ride hundreds of miles a week. I was not competitive about it; I just liked to get out and explore. Northern Indiana was set up for it, since most of the outlying area was meshed by county roads a mile apart in each direction. That made it easy to keep track of mileage: you get on CR 17 and ride from CR 26 to CR 28, and that’s a mile. CR 30, another mile. I used to have this loop from my mom’s house to Bristol and then out almost to Nappanee and back, and it was just over 25 miles. I used to ride that pretty much every day, and I’d double it on Saturdays and Sundays.

This started back when I was 15. I bought a new 10-speed, and it wasn’t anything special, just some Huffy piece of shit or something. But every time I had a couple of bucks, I’d buy some gear for it, a new helmet, some gloves, whatever. No spandex. I rode all through the fall, and rode this St. Jude’s rideathon where you did laps of a church parking lot that was a quarter mile around. I brought a walkman, extra batteries, and about 50 tapes, and spent the whole afternoon doing the same stupid lap, over and over. This was the kind of thing where kids came and rode their BMX on training wheels and made 5 laps and everyone was all happy and the money went to The Kids or whatever, and I listened to like every Rush album to date in a row and ended up doing 50 miles.

I kept riding into the fall and through the winter, still going to Bristol every day. The cornfields went from amber to wispy brown and then fell into husks and broken stalks, and the cold made it harder to pedal, but I could do the 25 miles in my sleep at this point. I explored the back roads and took different routes, but they were all mostly the same, identical miles of farmland, with the occasional farmhouse. I had the roads to myself for the most point, except for the occasional car that blew past at sixty. I probably averaged about ten miles an hour, sometimes faster. I usually went out for about two hours, longer on the weekends.

I thought about a lot of stuff back then, which seems stupid, as I’m more than twice as old and I have way too much stuff to think about, to the point where I wonder if I need some prescription medication to possibly think about less. But back then, I somehow needed the time away from my family and away from friends and classmates to – I don’t know what. I mean, I listened to a lot of music, and I guess at that point in your life, your favorite bands require some great amount of dissemination, whereas now you listen to stuff just to have a sound in the background that sounds nice. But when you’re 15, that Rush album Subdivisions – it means something, because that’s you. And I’m sure I thought a lot about the opposite sex, and how I’d ever talk to girls, and all of that shit, and I wish I had a record of that, because it eventually all worked itself out, but I remember burning a lot of cycles thinking I was different and I’d somehow need to escape all of this. But I also spent a lot of time thinking about my first car, and maybe how cool it would be to ride my bike across the country, like maybe by strapping a bunch of racks to the front and rear and filling them up with bottled water and snickers bars and maybe some kind of tent so I could camp between stops. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what the fuck I thought about, but I spent a lot of time doing it.

And I still remember Indiana roads, and the kinds of roadways they had there. Most county roads were this asphalt, but they were old, and weren’t black, but maybe this greyish color, like a really overdone hamburger. The roads had a decent texture, like the kind of thing you could only mold out of plastic now. And those had a lot of cracks, and gravel in a bead on the side, and cars made this humming sound from ten miles back on this kind of road. When those got really old and fucked up, and they weren’t a main road that got a lot of use, the county would spray them down with this gluey tar and then dump a fine gravel on them. This kind of road totally sucked shit for a bike, because the underpainting of glue stuck to everything on your bike and was a horrible smelling petroleum product – it was like they just dumped out a bunch of engine oil, and then covered it with coarse sand. And that sand-gravel didn’t do much good on a bike with one inch wide wheels, either. Those roads sucked, and I always avoided them. The best were the main roads, like State Road 15, which were more concrete-like, and made from real asphalt, with a good surface that made you feel like you gained five miles an hour on it.

So I rode a lot. I think the last big thing I did was this 100K bike ride sponsored by WTRC, a local country station. It ended up being closer to 80 miles, and I think I rode it in eight hours. It was total hell, and it rained all day, with huge wind gusts. I remember turning into this really long stretch, and it had a totally killer headwind, and I was pretty much ready to just put down the bike, lay in the road, and hope someone would kill me. It was an okay ride though, and it was pretty weird because it went way north into Michigan and through Edwardsburg, and I saw all of these things that normally I’d just see when hanging out with my dad, like my uncle Don’s house, the golf course, and a bunch of other little landmarks. It was fun, and I wonder how I ever had the discipline to stick out eight hours of that shit, given that now I seldom have the discipline to make a sandwich.

Anyway, a year later, I got a car, I almost never rode the bike after. I brought it to Bloomington for a year, but almost never rode it. (Tip: do not wear toe clips in a college town.) I brought it back, had to ride to the mall when my car was broken, and got a flat. Left it at Concord Mall, and forgot about it until months later, when it was gone. Oh well.

Speaking of sandwich, I’ve been writing forever, and now I’m starving. I was going to put some kind of lofty conclusion on this tying together how much I like riding my bike now and all of that stuff above about how I used to ride my bike and think about stuff, but now I’m thinking about food instead, so you’ll need to put that one together on your own. Bon appetite.

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general

Junk yard

I was watching a show last night that’s about bad jobs – it usually involves someone removing feces from subways lined with rats bigger than dogs or something, so I never watch it. But last night, it was about guys working in a junkyard, which I thought was funny. Not ha-ha funny, but because it was the kind of intellectual porn aimed at blue-staters to show them how horrible life is out in the flyover zone. But to me, it brought back the vivid memories of the wrecking yard, a place I knew well from my teenage years.

Growing up, I did not drive a new Mercedes provided by my parents on my 16th birthday, and my idea of car service went beyond self-service gas. When I was 15, my stepdad bought this totaled Camaro for $300, and along the way, it eventually became my project. By the time I got my license, a lot of major work had been done, from brakes to tune-up to tires to a new interior. A month or two later, I bolted on a new exhaust from stem to stern, while trashing three socket wrench handles in the process of wrenching off rusted bolts. But one of the biggest things I needed to fix was a badly dented fender on the front passenger side, along with a cracked fiberglass nose. I couldn’t buy those parts from the local AutoQuest, so I had to make a trip to the junkyard.

The junkyard in Elkhart, or at least the one I went to, is out on CR 10, west of the Nappanee extension. It’s way up north of town, in an isolated corner of the county, by the regional airport. It’s also coincidentally by one of Elkhart’s several EPA superfund sites, the old Himco dump site, but I didn’t know that at the time. I’d never been there before, but my stepdad used to go out there back in the 60s and 70s when he was always working on muscle cars, and I think I made a call or two out to the place.

I planned a whole day around the fender swap, a Saturday, and awoke early to find a few inches of snow on the ground. That bummed me out, but I vowed to put on an extra layer of clothes, some old boots, and forge onward. Because I didn’t have a truck, I took out the passenger seat and carefully measured the existing fender to make sure I’d have enough room. I left early enough to head across town and get to the place just as the chain-link gates were opening. When I got there, I found a big prefab metal building with a run-down front office and a set of big garage bays that could probably fit a Peterbilt semi, if they cleared out all of the junk first.

I remember getting there, and the guy in charge told me where to head for the Camaros, to pick out a donor and then come get one of the guys to wrench off the parts for me. He set me loose in this labyrinth of dead vehicles, everything dusted with a powder of snow. The white padding muffled all of the sound around me, except the crunch of my feet on the dirt path. Most of the narrow roads within the yard were heavily rutted, and muddy and wet, since the temperature hadn’t been freezing for that long.

I found a row of F-body cars, Camaros and Firebirds, along a treeline. None of them were on tires anymore, and half of them were missing engines. I could imagine someone around town driving a piece of shit Chevelle, bragging “yeah, I got me a Z-28 motor in here” for each of the engineless cars. Some of the cars were smashed in the front; others had extensive rust damage in the rear panels. A few had smashed glass in spiderweb patterns that suggested a fatal collision.

To say that I’d spent a lot of time in my Camaro would be an understatement. I took apart and put back together so many pieces, spent Saturdays scrubbing the interior, running speaker cables under carpet, changing fluids that I’d just changed 100 miles ago, and dreaming about what parts I’d tear off and replace, when I had the cash. I memorized the Chilton’s guide for the car like it was scripture, and had a solid mental image of every part of the car, inside and out. So to look at all of these cars, at the minor differences from year to year, the missing chunks and damaged pieces, felt a little weird. It was like seeing a relative without a head, your house with the roof removed. But it was also exhilirating in a way, to think of buying a more tricked-out center console from a newer model, or a faster engine from a different car, or whatever else. Mostly it was weird to see all of these rows of cars, missing pieces, gently frosted over by that winter day.

I found a white ’77 with a front fender that looked good, and trudged back to the front gate. When I got there and said I found it, a guy that was maybe in his early 20s waved me over to the most motley car I’d ever seen, an old Suburban or some sort of pre-SUV truck, but with half of its parts missing. It had no hood, half of its glass gone, no front lights or bumpers, little interior, but the back held a set of welding tanks and a haphazard bucket of tools. The dude, who looked like Alice Cooper but no makeup or anything, told me to hop in, and we creaked across the lot. The truck rocked and swayed so much, the windshield was flexing and I was sure it would explode at any moment, but we got there.

It took the guy a few minutes, and I carefully watched what screws he took out to extricate the sheet metal from the old car. I also got a rear-view mirror for the side door (and unfortunately, broke it before I got it back on my car – oh well, five bucks.) The fender, still wet from the snow, just barely fit in the car, and I got a baggie full of hardware to bring with me for the transplant. It felt so weird, driving across town, listening to Iron Maiden or whatever I was into that week, with no passenger seat and a huge chunk of metal taking up half the cockpit.

There’s not much else to the story, except that it’s a bitch to work on old metal that’s rusty, with concealed little sheet metal screws in hard-to-reach areas. I had to take off the hood, and spent an hour or two playing the “I think all the screws are off but maybe there’s one more” game. I had a 5:00 shift to work that night, and almost entertained the idea of driving to work with no hood on, but I got everything set up, and made it to the mall in my red and also white car.

I went back a few more times for a few more cars, and I always liked the whole idea. Every car there tells a story, and it’s sad to see them dead like that, but it’s also cool to know they will be recycled, and other cars will live longer lives with all of the parts. It’s a weird little bit of midwestern culture, and a pleasant memory, even if more of my cars ended up in the junkyard than not.

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general

Procter and Gamble picnics

As always, I was playing around on google yesterday, trying to scouring my brain for a tiny clue to something from my childhood, to see if anyone more afflicted than myself had any related pages on the web. I’m not sure how I found the link, but I managed to find enough info to find a name, a town, and even some pictures, which is a victory in my book. Okay, here’s the story.

When I was a kid – probably in the late 70s/early 80s, I used to go to Procter and Gamble’s huge corporate picnic there, which was held at this place just outside of Chicago called Hillcrest Park. My grandfather and my aunt both worked for P&G, and it was a big deal for everyone to attend the picnic every year. To me and my sisters and all of the other cousins that were my age, this was the chance to ride rides and eat tons of ice cream and other junk food and have a lot of fun. At that time, we lived in Elkhart, which was a couple of hours east of Chicago, so this meant a trip to the big city, and a chance to hang out with all of my cousins, who were infinitely cooler than me.

Back then, P&G corporate was in Chicago, and I think they also made soap and other stuff there, because we’d go to the factory, and the place would smell horrid. The only other thing I remember about the factory was that they had an automat, which is another lost concept in American culture and a pretty nifty idea. Anyway, we never hung out there for long; they’d load us up into a bunch of chartered busses that drove us to the park.

The park was about 60 acres, so it was no King’s Island or anything, but they only did these corporate picnics, so it was just people from the company there. Inside, the grounds were wooded, with pavilions and picnic tables, and a couple of buildings, like a food court, and some restrooms. The elders usually sat around the pavilions and formed these enclaves, where people watched over the little kids and everyone’s stuff, as everyone else wandered around. My Grandpa worked for P&G basically his whole adult life, so he knew a lot of old-timers, and he’d wander around running into those guys and trading complaints about their latest health problems or whatever. My mom usually spent time with all of my aunts, her sisters, trading their stories or whatever. That left us kids to go on the rides, and to eat food.

One of the rides I remember more than others was the railroad. I was really into trains as a kid, and the train was also the ride that you could go on with adults and little kids. The park ran this narrow-gauge train with a real steam locomotive that chugged around the perimeter of the place, through the woods and around the fields. It gave you a good view of the whole park, and passed the sports grounds, which featured a huge outdoor pool that at any time was filled with about 10,000 kids. The train also looped back around and ran right next to the roller coaster before it came back to the station. It was always neat when the timing was right and you were chugging along and the coaster’s cars whipped past right next to you. The train was pretty slow and not exactly a thrill ride, but I always liked to ride it at least once per trip, just to get the lay of the land.

There were some other rides grouped right by the coaster, in a little promenade area. They had a merry-go-round (which we considered lame, but me and my cousins were all like 10-12 years old at the time, so you get that) and a whip-a-round type thing that was marginally fun once or twice, but repeat rides did not reap any rewards. A set of electric bumper cars, the kind with the scraper bar that went across the ceiling, were a fun opportunity for some bumps and always had a long line. There were a couple of coin-op games, a rifle game where you shot at various targets like a piano player, and maybe a skee-ball game. We never played those because I could never shake down the change from my mom and the cost wasn’t included in the picnic.

The big show was the roller coaster, called The Little Dipper. It was a wooden coaster, painted white, with a figure-8 pattern that pulled up 16 riders with a clicky chain and a creaky first hill that dropped off and gave a huge rush, even though now I found out the stats, and it’s only like a 20-foot drop that gets you up to what a car’s first gear does. But the Little Dipper was my first coaster ever, though, so I have fond memories of it. It was a little rough, but at the time it seemed like the fastest, most brutal thing ever. I was reluctant to ride it at first, but then I wanted to get back in line and ride it all afternoon. Once we did get there early enough that we got through the lines three or four times really fast before a crowd built up, and that was absolute paradise.

I have a lot of other good memories of that park, too. I think they had some kind of paper ticket system for the food, and we’d always end up eating an endless supply of hot dogs, hamburgers, and ice cream. P&G was pretty good to their people, and always had random drawings that somebody in our big extended family would always win, which consisted of huge bags of P&G products.

I was sad to hear this place closed, though! I always expected it to be long gone, because even back then, it was pretty weathered and beat. But I guess they pulled through until 2003, when less companies were spending the money on picnics, and that 60 acres of real estate was worth more than their draw. The rides were auctioned off, and I am glad to hear that the coaster made the transition to another park. I don’t know what happened to the other rides. Lemont, Illinois will now have a new warehouse, but that doesn’t really make up for losing the park.

I guess I’ve rode a lot of roller coasters since then, but that’s not why the memory stuck in my head. I guess it was a combination of the food (which probably wasn’t that good, come to think of it), seeing all of my cousins, being in Chicago, and just being able to see everything in the park. For whatever reason, this was like my Christmas in the summer, one of those things that really stuck with me.

Anyway, another distant memory solved by google. Now I need to find someone auctioning off another roller coaster like this one, so I can set it up out on my land in Colorado. Any ideas?