just the good ol' boys......

i want to go back to the time when the only thing that mattered in life was having the perfect underoos outfit....

my weekends were spent at grandma agnes and grandpa jims house, my real fathers parents. they lived in garfield nj on a horseshoe block where everybody knew your business. johnny socha lived a few houses down and would always have a big jar of superballs that he gladly shelled out on a daily basis. my skypeck was the creepy jr high school teacher at the end of the block that would always be riding his 10 speed around the neighborhood, he also painted his nails with clear nailpolish....back then it wasnt cool to be metrosexual. mr. and mrs. yorgatus lived next door and there grandson tommy lived with them, he was my best friend from the ages 5 to 8 i guess....i remember laying on the rug in his living room watching cheech and chongs nice dreams when HBO was the only cable channel available. the guy across the street from my grandmothers house always had these industrial size bags of popcorn, i spent alot of time on his porch like a horse with a feedbag on my face. i would ride my bigwheel hard over the cracked sidewalks trying to catch a little air, and when it got too hot we would bust out the little clown that you could attatch the hose too. the water would come through the top of the clowns head raising his hat, and you had to jump through the stream of water and try not to knock the clowns hat off...i wonder if they still make those things.
the smell of fresh cut grass mixed with the thick humid new jersey air always put a smile on my face. at dusk the lawn chairs would come out on the cement walkways. and all up and down the street the old folks on the block would be watching there little black and white t.v.'s or smoking there cigars yelling at the ny yankees, or the mets in in white socks with brown leather sandals, wifebeaters with all kinds of weird long grey hairs popping out of them... a mild scent of OFF and citranella candles perfumed the neighborhood....me and tommy would be running around the house with our yellow wiffleball bats swatting the lightning bugs that cruised slowly through the sweaty factory piped air, while my grandmother smoked her marlboro 100's one after the other.
anxiously awaiting mr. softee, you could hear him from blocks away and he never got there fast enough...something that would carry on to my way later years waiting for my drug dealers.....

the mr softee song fades into the blocks to come as the ash tray on the steps slowly filled with brown filtered cigarettes, and the vanilla/chocolate swirled soft cone had dripped off my tiny little hand staining the cracked sidewalk covered in dead lightning bugs. it was just about time to wipe the gutfilled glow of the wiffleball bat clean and watch the dukes of hazzard. every friday night at 8pm on channel 2. i would run into the house barreling into the back bedroom to put my superman underoos on. i always wished i had a red cape so i could ACTUALLY BE SUPERMAN...but the red towel would just have to do for now. i would tuck the red towel into the back of my blue t-shirt with the red collar and iron on S........and flail myself onto the green pladue couch that was made of a fabric that used to scrape my skin. grandma would be in the kitchen chainsmoking, playing solitaire, talking to one of her church friends on the yellow rotary phone with the exrta long spiral chord, and making me a swansons fried chicken tv dinner.....a multi tasker she was. back in those days it took 45 minutes to an hour to eat a tv dinner, and the house would smell like fried chicken for about a half hour before it was actually ready....that shit never cooked fast enough, again...something that would carry into my later years of addiction.
after running from one end of the living room and jumping onto the couch pretending i was superman coming in for a landing for a good hour my tv dinner would be brought to me and set down on the stand up tray. i would sit in grandpas big comfy chair and put the tv dinner tray over my legs, i had to finish it before dallas came on cuz i was too young to watch that show...i would quickly empty the metal tray full of greasy fried chicken, potatoes soaked in butter, and green peas mixed with carrots, i would convince my grandmother to give me more ice cream.....she always had hersheys syrup in the can and cool whip to put on the ice cream. i would swirl my napolitan mix in the pink plastic bowl until it was all brown and almost a liquid....i would pile all that down and get into my green whinnie the pooh pajamas with the footies and make grandma read me at least three stories from the walt disney book of the month club....every month a new book would come in a brown paper bag in the mail, kinda like how porn comes to people in the mail today......weekends at grandma agnes' house are one of my favorite memories of my childhood....sometimes i will walk by a lawn that has just been cut and light a cigarette just to blend the smells and make it feel like home again.