The Power Dump Diaries

Grandpa Jim has a stroke

2006-10-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve been really caught up in “For Better or For Worse” the past few weeks. FBorFW is a secret vice of mine. I read it every day and can’t start my day without it. It’s about this family in Canada.

It’s not quite as queer as “Family Circus,” which I can’t look at without imagining an obscene punch line. The other day Billy was holding a broom and all I could think of was him shoving the broom stick up Mommy’s ass. I also like to wear Christmas sweaters, the more garish, the better.

Last week, Grandpa Jim had a stroke. Grandpa Jim has been having a lot of health problems the past few years, like Alzheimer’s. He’s also recently taken to riding a mobility scooter.

A few weeks ago Grandpa Jim and his numero uno lady, Iris, who he shacks up with in their assisted living community, went to Target. Iris was piling all kinds of shit on top of Grandpa Jim in his scooter, like towels and pillow cases. Another old codger on a mobility scooter was shopping with his wife. Pretty soon, Iris was piling shit up on the wrong husband. It was funny.

I would love to have one of those mobility scooters and am always tempted to rent one at Wal-Mart. It’s been a secret dream of mine for a long time. I don’t shop at Wal-Mart anymore because I think it’s the most fascist corporation in the entire world. But I’d love to rent one of Wal-Mart’s mobility scooters and ram into the store displays and managers.

Last week, Elly showed up at Grandpa Jim’s apartment with some prime rib, seconds after Iris found Grandpa Jim staring blankly into space and slumped over in a chair. The next day, Grandpa Jim was in the hospital getting tests. Elly’s dentist husband, John, was there, along with their youngest daughter, April.

I’m scared about this recent plot twist in FBorFW, because I think it’s going to be a drawn out, life lesson. I don’t need my favorite comic to emulate real life, because frankly I’ve been living the drama of caring for a fucked up, elderly parent for the past four years. I want sight gags about Grandpa Jim forgetting where he left his false teeth, and mobility scooters. That’s humor.

The past few days, April, who is fifteen, has been seeking solace in her developmentally disabled friend, Shannon. Shannon is in special education at their high school. Today, Shannon told April how awesome therapists were, and now April feels a little better about Grandpa Jim drooling in a stroke-ridden state in the hospital.

I’m really afraid that Grandpa Jim isn’t going to pull through. At least the Pattersons have Canada’s national health care system working for them. They don’t have to worry about losing all their assets putting Grandpa Jim in a decent nursing home, or hiding money from Medicaid like you have to do in the United States. I’m sure that Grandpa Jim will receive the finest care socialist medicine has to offer.

I think we should start a prayer circle for Grandpa Jim.

Mircale of the Big O

2006-09-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

I don’t often watch Oprah, but the past few times that I’ve caught her show, it seems like one big product placement or another commercial for one of her many media companies, like her XM satellite “Oprah and Friends” radio gig.

For example, she mentions Kodak, Chevy Impala and XM Radio every three seconds during her road trip with her best friend, Gayle King. We get the fucking picture, Oprah.

I guess Oprah had to create some kind of job for Gayle. She can’t go on being Dino to Oprah’s Frank, forever. I recall reading in the National Enquirer after Gayle’s divorce that her husband got sick of her friendship with Oprah and Oprah’s incessant phone calls.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I caught the 11 p.m. repeat of the day’s Oprah telecast. Oprah trotted out all of her buddies – Bob Greene, Dr. Robin Smith, Nate Berkus, Jean Chatzky and Dr. Mehmet Oz. (Did you ever notice that except for Gayle, all of Oprah’s friends are white?) Anyway, this crew is better than some of the other media tyrants she’s created, like Dr. Phil.

Dr. Oz was my favorite. He spent a lot of talking about poo. I have a lot of poo issues myself, dating back to when I was four years old and my father caught me running into my bedroom from the bathroom after I had just hidden one of my turds in a plastic toy teapot. I just wanted to see what it was made of, but my father, sensing that I was up to something, immediately looked inside my little teapot and flung it into the garbage.

Oprah said she didn’t need therapy because she’s talked to Gayle every night for like the past 20 years. I can see why Gayle’s husband dumped her. Oprah said she was going to tape these conversations with Gayle and replay them on “Oprah and Friends.” Gee, thanks for the warning.

Through the miracle of wire tapping, courtesy of Condoleezza Rice and the National Security Administration, here is a transcript of one of Oprah’s and Gayle’s nightly phone calls.

Ring, ring.

Oprah: Hello, girlfriend.

Gayle: Hmmm, hmmm.

Oprah: Ooo, girl, I took myself a big ol’ dump this morning.

Gayle: I did too, except it was one of those toothpaste dumps, you know, like Dr. Oz says with the jagged ends. I think I might have polyps.

Oprah: Mine was a big ol’ cobra coil, like the poisonous snakes Steve Irwin used to rassle with on "Crocodile Hunter," God rest his soul.

Gayle: Girl, do you think you could loan me some money so I can get a colonoscopy?

Oprah: I’m already puttin’ your shorties through college. What do you do with all the money I give you?

Gayle: I’ve been eating fiber and every thing. Every morning I get up and eat a big bowl of grits, and still, I keep makin’ all these toothpaste dumps.

Oprah: Mine was shaped like a “C.” Dr. Oz says I’m doing real good.

Gayle: He’s so fine.

Oprah: Except both ends joined and formed an “O” in the toilet. It was a revelation.

Gayle: I think it’s a sign that “Oprah and Friends” is going to be a huge success, just like all your other media ventures.

Oprah: I made Stedman come in and look at it. I recorded it in my gratitude journal.

Gayle: It’s too bad that when we got home from our road trip you caught Stedman in bed with that other woman.

Oprah: I wonder how the National Enquirer found out about it.

Gayle: Isn’t that a funny word, polyps? POLLLLLYYYYPPPPSSSS.

Oprah: Stop it girl, you’re makin’ me wet myself.

Gayle: POLLLLLLYYYYYYPPPPPSSSS.

Oprah: I love you, Gayle. I’m jumpin’ on my sofa right now.

Gayle: I love you too, O. I live in your light.

It’s enough to make you want to dump Sirius and Howard Stern and sign up for XM.

Lucille Ball and the war on drugs

2006-09-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hey, if TV sitcoms can take a hiatus, so can I. I'm back, tan, rested and relaxed for a new fall season in one of life's longest-running sitcoms, even longer than "My Three Fucking Sons," the "Life With Rainy Show."

Speaking of comebacks, September 20 marks the 20th anniversay of the debut of Lucille Ball's last sitcom, "Life With Lucy." Fresh from her triumph in "Stone Pillow," where Ball portrayed a cranky, elderly bag lady trying to survive on the streets, people were so happy to see their beloved Lucy back on the boob-tube, that Ball signed on for a series comeback.

I remember the fall of 1986 being particularly gloomy for me and my friend David. We moved into an apartment in Rogers Park the weekend President Reagan officially declared America's war on drugs on national television, with his lovely First Lady by his side. The electricity in our apartment had been shut off after the previous tenant moved, and somehow we had managed to break into the empty apartment across the hall and run an extension cord through the kitchen into David's bedroom, where we alternated between plugginng in a lamp or the television. It was pretty pathetic, the two of us sitting in David's bedroom watching the president speak on television using stolen electricity. We were just the sort of degenarates that the president was warning all the good Americans about.

I recall the president making particular note of "reports of marijuana shortages on the streets," as he warned freaks everywhere of a big police crackdown. The president wasn't kidding either. We were in the middle of one of the worst dry spells for weed in the history of Chicago, if not America itself. Nobody had weed, and we were trying not to climb the walls as we unpacked dishes and dreaded returning to our shitty, office-temp jobs on Monday morning, after spending an exhausting weeked moving our garbage-picked furniture, milk crates and 300-pound boxes of albums into our new pad in the middle of gangbanger land.

Outside, it was as if the entire country heaved a collective sigh, as the president outlined his plans for stiffer penalities for selling and possessing illegal drugs, and urine testing for federal jobs. Everyone was complaining about the weed shortage, so David and I resorted to drinking a lot of beer and watching "The PTL Club" on UHF television. After five, non-stop nights of wathing Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, along their teenage, gospel-singing sensation daughter, Tammy Sue, I was feeling especially attuned to God. We both became obsessed with watching Jim and Tammy Faye, and as long as we had our quart bottles of malt liquor, we no longer cared that we didn't have electricity in our apartment or the war on drugs.

One Friday evening as I was parking my Maverick, which I eventually donated to the City of Chicago, on Jarvis Street, I noticed a baggie containing a leafy, green substance lying in the street next to my car. I couldn't really tell what it was because it was dark outside, so I picked the baggie up and brought it to show David. "I think I found a bag of weed in the street," I told him, hardly able to contain my good fortune.

It turned out to be a full quarter-ounce of pot. At first, we were afraid to smoke it. What if it was laced with poison, set out by the DEA to kill some harmless freaks or had some type of wire-tapping device hidden inside it What if it was laced with LSD? We decided to try smoking some then, so I rolled us a joint and soon we had forgetten all about just saying no, and turned on Jim and Tammy Faye.

"Praise the Lord."

"It's a fucking miracle."

"I love you, God, I love you, Jesus. I love you, Jim and Tammy Faye."

The next night, still marveling at my wondrous find and our Lord's infinite mysteries, David and I watched the premiere of "Life with Lucy." The first episode went beyond gory-hit-and-run-accident where there is a lump and a blanket lying in the middle of some intersection. It was as if we were watching the aging Ball taking a dump in her Depends as she went through her tired shtick dating back to "I Love Lucy," playing "Glow Worm" on the saxophone and getting on Gale Gordon's nerves.

Unfortunately, "Life With Lucy" bombed after eight episodes, only three of which actually aired. Ball had ruined her health during filming of "Stone Pillow," which was shot in the middle of summer on location in New York City. Ball lost 23 pounds and had to be hospitalized for dehydration from wearing heavy winter coats and other bag lady winter accessories. She died a few years later, and no one can ever say that Lucille Ball didn't go out like a pro.

As for David and I, life infinitely improved when ComEd finally got around to turning the electric power back on in our apartment. We had light and television again, and our miracle bag of weed.

So long to Aunt Flow

2006-06-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on sanitary napkins, tampons and Midol, my Aunt Flow failed to show up at the Greyhound bus station for her monthly visit, as she has done every month for the past 38 years, sometimes twice a month.

At age 49, I am officially in menopause. How do I know? Maybe the many mornings this past year when I woke up drenched in sweat as if I had participated in an all-night aerobics workout, the insomnia and the hot flashes that have me turning the air-conditioning in my house down to 55 degrees. And those pre-uterine contractions that felt like someone was wringing my uterus like a dish rag were a blast.

Aunt Flow's first surprise visit came during a Chicago Cubs-Montreal Expos game at Wrigley Field in June 1969. It was bat day, and I sat holding my Louiseville phallic symbol when I suddenly felt something amiss between my legs. I was 12-years-old and had been prepared for Aunt Flow, thanks to the many Disney sex education films starring animated, jiggerbugging sperm and eggs that the girls watched in school while the boys played kickball on the playground for two hours.

But I wasn't prepared for Aunt Flow's arrival at Wrigley Field. I remember going into the upper grandstand Ladies Room - the one with P.K. Wrigley's wicker veranda furniture from his summer home in Lake Geneva - and stuffing my pants with toilet paper to catch Aunt Flow. I couldn't exactly tell my father that my period had started, so I didn't say anything. The next morning, my mother noticed blood on my pajamas and bed sheets. She went to Jewel's and even called me from a pay phone to ask if there was anything that I needed from the store, but I was too embarrassed to confess that Aunt Flow was paying me a visit.

My mother came home from Jewel's with a gigantic box of sanitary napkins, each with its own adorable disposal bag, and a sanitary belt. I don't know who the misogynistic bastard was who invented the sanitary belt, probably the same asshole who invented women's swimming caps. For those chicks who are old enough to remember sanitary belts, it was impossible to wear one without the buckle digging into your tail bone. I still have the permanent indentation.

You wove the ends of the sanitary napkin into each buckle. The sanitary belts were not made for little girls to sit on hard chairs of school desks, church pews or the back of a Plymouth Fury station wagon zomming across South Dakota on a family vacation. I used to try padding the buckles with toilet paper, but somehow the padding always had a way of slipping off. Finally, I resorted to safety-pinning the sanitary napkins into my underwear, thinking how marvelous it would be if someone invented sanitary napkins that you could directly affix to your panties with adhesive.

My Aunt Flow wasn't some dainty broad that beat it after a few days either. No, she weighed about 400 pounds and would hang around an entire week, demanding super-plus-size accommodations. Very often she brought along her boyfriend, Uncle Cramps. When Aunt Flow first started visiting me, I used to complain about her to my mother. She told me to get used to her because, "You'll be having your period for the next 30 or 40 years."

At first my mother was sympathetic, but eventually she made me ride my bike to the convenience store to buy my own giant box of sanitary napkins. This was terribly embarrassing, because there was usually some old man at the cash register. I'd end up buying butter and French bread, so it wouldn't look like I was coming into the store just to buy sanitary napkins.

For the most part, Aunt Flow has been a real bitch, but she came in handy during high school, especially when we had swimming in P.E. Aunt Flow was always good for sitting out swimming on the life guard chair for three or four days, thus sparing me the embarrassment of having to don an oversized, black tank suit. Of course, my gym teacher, one of several lesbians at my school who taught P.E., would admonish us by saying that "if you were modern girls, you wouldn't have to miss swimming." These were the same bitches who warned us that we'd experience a lot of pain during childbirth if we didn't physically exert ourselves in gym class by getting smacked in the face with a volley ball.

I don't know how I feel about Aunt Flow not coming around anymore. I've often lamented that "I'm so sick of my fucking period" while scrubbing stains out of my pants at midnight, but I never really meant it. I feel like a dried-up, menopausal, old hag. I never had children so for most part these long monthly visits from Aunt Flow have been a waste of time. I'm going to miss her and my days of being a young woman.

Of course, just when you think Aunt Flow is gone forever, she has a habit of reappearing with a vengence. My aunt was 45 when her Aunt Flow stopped visiting, but she ended up attending her oldest son's high school graduation seven months' pregnant. (I am definitely not pregnant.)

I don't think I'm ready to bid goodbye to Aunt Flow, even though she wrecked a lot of birthdays, plus I'm stuck with all these pairs of period-panties. But I knew that this day was coming some time. All I can tell Aunt Flow is to be kind to the eleven-year-olds out there who are greeting her for the first time.

Don't worry, girls, 49 will be here before you know it.

Judy's Rainbow connection

2006-06-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

This story originally appeared in the Pioneer Press, June 23, 2005. It has been revised for publication in “The Power Dump Diaries” and is dedicated to my many wonderful friends in the GLBT community. Happy Pride Week!

It has been said that when the news broke across the Atlantic of legendary star Judy Garland’s death from an accidental drug overdose at age 47 in a London apartment on June 22, 1969, that the flags on Fire Island, a popular summer spot for Manhattan’s gay and lesbian community, were immediately lowered to half mast.

Garland enjoyed a particularly large following of gay men who were attracted to her big, belting voice and whose turbulent private life and melodramatic persona had turned her into a camp icon.

Her poignant “Over the Rainbow” from the classic 1939 MGM musical “The Wizard of Oz” had also become an anthem of sexual freedom – a place where if one had heart, courage and brains, gays and lesbians could live in a spirit of tolerance and acceptance.

At the height of Garland’s career in the 1940s and 1950s, the catchphrase, “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s” had become a code among closeted gay men, which meant, “Are you one of us?”

Garland’s death was also to spark the beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement. As 22,000 fans filed past the singer’s open casket at Campbell’s Funeral Home in New York City, more than half of them were said to be gay men.

The evening after Garland’s funeral on June 27, many of those who had traveled to New York City to pay homage to the singer had gathered at the Stonewall Inn, a popular, Greenwich Village gay bar that was owned by the mafia. Like other gay bars across the country, the Stonewall Inn was frequently raided by police who busted patrons in transgender dress or for same-sex, public displays of affection.

In the early morning hours of June 28, police raided the Stonewall that touched off three nights of rioting in New York. According to legend, a drag queen started swinging at a police officer. A lesbian patron who was being carried out to a squad car had also put up such a struggle that it encouraged gathering crowds to do the same. The crowds quickly overtook the police, using a parking meter as a battering ram to drive them off, until stunned police retreated back into the Stonewall.

“It was a hot night and people just got fed up with being pushed around,” says Suki de La Croix who has written extensively on gay Chicago history. “There was that whole thing of rebellion going on. You had Vietnam, women’s liberation, everyone was rebelling against everything.”

A year after the raid on the Stonewall Inn, gays and lesbians in cities throughout the country organized anniversary observances. Chicago’s gay and lesbian community declared June 21-28 Gay Pride Week, with the first gay pride march taking place on June 29, 1970. Some 200 people gathered in Bughouse Square across from the Newberry Library, carrying signs proclaiming “Gay Power.”

“After listening to speeches, the group marched along the sidewalks down Dearborn Street to Chicago Avenue, then east to the Water Tower, then down Michigan Avenue to the Civic Center (Richard J. Daley Plaza), where there were more speeches and some dancing,” de La Croix says.

The second anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Chicago’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community held a parade instead of a march, comprised of various GLBT-oriented civic and political groups, and a marching kazoo band.

This year, while you’re watching your own city's pride parade, you may want to think back on those brave drag queens and lesbians at the Stonewall Inn who might not have had the courage to stand up for their rights, had it not been for a little girl who sang “Over the Rainbow.”

Fighting over the potatoes

2006-06-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

There is something about planning a funeral that reduces everyone to their former rank in the family hierarchy, no matter how accomplished or successful they’ve become. When my dad passed away earlier this month, I immediately assumed my position on the lowest rung of the family ladder.

My three brothers and I immediately squared off and started arguing five minutes after my dad died. The first fight was over the choice of potatoes for my dad’s post-funeral luncheon. My dad had always been very frugal, so after finding $1,200 hidden in his sock drawer, my younger brother, Romberg, and I headed over to the nicest restaurant in town.

We immediately selected the most expensive things on the menu – prime rib, chicken Wellington, green bean almondine, chocolate mousse and twice-baked potatoes. The catering manager let us go right ahead, failing to inform either of us that the restaurant had a special discount menu for funerals, which included such typical cheap-ass selections as Salisbury steak.

My father had pre-paid for his and my mother’s funerals. Every time we drove by the place, he would point it out saying, “That’s where our funeral are being held.” When we arrived at the funeral home, my brother Garfield was there waiting for us. All we had to do was fill in the blanks. (I highly recommend pre-paid funerals.)

God forbid that my brother Garfield should not be the center of attention. He was already distraught and hysterical when we arrived, even though he had openly despised my father when he was alive for raising him badly or some shit like that. As a recovering alcoholic, Garfield has gone through the 12-step program like a million times over the past 20 years, although I don't recall him ever apologizing to me for being a misogynist.

Romberg and I asked the funeral director if the home could provide a vodka fountain, my father’s favorite beverage. Then we both thought it would be funny if we could play the theme song from “M*A*S*H” as people filed by his casket at the end of the funeral service.

During the last years of his life, my dad was obsessed with the TV series “M*A*S*H.” He loved those whacky doctors Hawkeye, Trapper John, BJ Honeycutt and Henry Blake. The show came on in Chicago every afternoon at 4 o’clock. The station would air four episodes in a row, and my father would set his VCR so he could watch it in the evenings. (“There’s nothing but crap on at night,” he would remind us again and again.)

The day before he died, he was enraged when I couldn’t find “M*A*S*H” on the television set in his hospital room, which only carried six Espanol channels and a Jesus station. “C’mon, I’m missing it,” he screamed. When I informed him that I didn’t think the channel was available in the hospital, he yelled, “I’m never staying at this goddamn hotel again!”

Given the murky details of my dad’s death, which was more or less suicide by alcohol poisoning, Garfield put his foot down and told us he thought the song was in bad taste. “It’s about suicide for Christ’s sake,” he said, breaking into another round of gut-wrenching sobs.

I suggested “The Navy Hymn,” which was played at President Kennedy’s funeral. I wanted my dad’s funeral to be as Kennedy-esque as possible, and drove to like six Border’s the next day before I finally found the CD.

The funeral director asked us if we would be holding a luncheon after the funeral. Romberg and I proudly told him how we had already made arrangements and of our menu selections that would clog the arteries of an elephant. It was then that the funeral director informed us of the pre-arranged, discounted, funeral luncheon menu that the home had worked out with the restaurant. “Really, I’m surprised they didn’t tell you about it,” he said.

Garfield demanded to see the funeral menu. It didn’t have any of the items that Romberg and I had selected. For Christ’s sake, we might as well have invited everyone back to my dad’s house and microwaved some Healthy Choice dinners because that’s how cheap it was.

My father was 80 years old, so we weren’t expecting a huge crowd at the funeral (although more than a hundred came to the wake, including several neighbors from his retirement community who immediately went downstairs and ate all the finger sandwiches).

“We already ordered the lunch,” I told Garfield.

Garfield wanted us to change it, so we got into a huge argument in the funeral director’s office.

“I want the oven-roasted potatoes,” he said.

“Those taste like shit,” I shot back.

Finally the funeral director calmly said, “Guys, c’mon.”

We ended up sticking with the original menu. Then we began fighting over the photos we wanted displayed in the room. My dad had given me a whole box of his childhood photos a few months before he died. There were pictures that we had never seen before. I wanted to put together some foam boards with old family photos.

“It’s going to look like a fifth-grade science project,” Garfield said.

“Who died and made you the queen,” I asked.

It was a really mean thing to say, because Garfield is gay and has been in the closet for most of his adult life, even though we all know about it. My father never cared that Garfield was gay because he just wanted him to be happy. Within the first five minutes of our meeting with the funeral director, Garfield mentioned that he was a gay, recovering alcoholic. Like the guy really needed to know that.

Our oldest brother, Frazier, was flying in from out of state the next evening. Frazier had missed most of the fun of caring for our elderly parents, until I rued the day that I didn’t get the hell out of Chicago 30 years ago while I still had the chance. Instead, I stuck it out as an adult caregiver, which has pretty much been my job for the last couple of years.

Frazier was all bouncy and energetic. The rest of us were exhausted from fighting with my dad’s worthless piece of shit doctor, who I fired after he yelled at me in the hospital, and making funeral arrangements. He tried to take over everything, and I wondered where the hell he was when we were driving 30 miles to my parents’ house during blizzards or cleaning my mother’s poo when she started going down the tubes from Parkinson’s.

Frazier thought we shouldn’t tell my mother, who lives in a nursing home and has dementia, that my father died. Even though my mother doesn’t recognize us anymore and sleeps most of the day, the three of us thought we should tell her at some point that my dad had passed away.

Then we started arguing about what to put into my dad’s casket. My dad had like 30 television remotes, so we decided to put one of them into the coffin, along with his U.S.S. Rockbridge hat, his windbreaker, and picture of him and my mother. I wanted to include a pair of my father’s lineman’s pliers. Garfield told me that the pliers would make the casket too heavy.

For the rest of the week, two or three of us would get together and talk about another sibling behind his or her back. We’d complain about each other, then break off into new pairs or groups and complain about the one we were just with. I’m sure they were calling me a sociopathic bitch behind my back.

I was up until three o’clock in the morning putting the foam boards together the night before my father's wake. Other than my grandmothers, it was the first funeral that I was semi responsible for arranging. I gathered all my dad’s favorite CDs, including his Dean Martin and Gene Autry records, to play during the wake.

Usually I’m the last person to show up at family functions. I try to time my arrival until about three minutes before Thanksgiving dinner is served, because I have to get really stoned before I can be with my family. But on the day of my father's wake, I showed up at the funeral home about 45 minutes early. I couldn’t believe I was the first person there.

The funeral director asked me if I wanted to wait until my brothers came. I said hell, no. I put all my stuff down, told him to put Gene Autry on the stereo, and then went over to the open casket. I thought I would freak out seeing my father dead, but it was really okay. He looked really peaceful, like he had fallen asleep in his La-Z Boy recliner watching “M*A*S*H.” I shed a few tears, then turned back to the funeral director and told him I needed every easel they had for the foam boards.

I was moving vases and shit off the tables and organ so we could put up the framed photos that we had taken from my dad’s house, in addition to the foam boards. By the time we got all the pictures and artifacts displayed, the room looked like one of those Princess Diana shrines. It looked great.

Tons of people came to the wake. I saw cousins that I hadn’t seen since the last funeral. Something about death makes you really hungry, and I ate about 20 finger sandwiches and cookies dowstairs in the basement of the funeral home. People seemed to enjoy the foam boards. My boyfriend looked at the pictures of me from ten years ago and commented on how thin I was.

“That’s it, you’re going to Curves,” he told me.

People commented that it was one of the nicest wakes they had ever been too. After the wake, we went over to Romberg’s house and ate more finger sandwiches. The next morning, I told my boyfriend that he didn't have to come to the funeral because there would be too much going on dealing with my family. He seemed relieved.

The funeral went well. My dad wasn’t religious, so we had the home arrange for a retired Catholic priest to preside over the service, even though we aren’t Catholic. The priest had a round head like a beach ball, and a gin blossom nose. He was used to being called in to do funeral services for the unchurched.

The entire service lasted about 15 minutes. My best friend came and all I could think about was smoking a joint afterward. The priest did a brilliant job adlibbing the service. I thought about writing something for him to read about my father, but frankly, I’d rather share my private thoughts with perfect strangers on a blog than with my family.

The priest was sharing some of his favorite bible passages while I was staring at a snapshot of my dad when he was three years old, dressed in a sailor suit. Just as he mentioned how the dead could become present merely by mentioning their names or remembering them, the picture I had been staring at floated off the foam board and landed on the floor.

I looked over at my sister-in-law. She also saw the picture come off the board, and we both looked at each other, like “he’s here with us.” It was something my dad would have done, and I can just imagine him flicking his finger and knocking the picture off. It was very comforting, like a little signal that he was sending to me, his “favorite daughter.”

The funeral ended with “The Navy Hymn.” It was very beautiful and Garfield broke into loud, choking sobs. He was wailing and practically crawling into the casket with my dad. My best friend, who is a professional actress, remarked afterward that the whole spectacle struck her as being somewhat phony.

One of my father’s most endearing qualities was his loathing of the Republican Party. He particularly disliked the current president. On the wall of his garage, we found a picture of Bush that he had cut out from the newspaper. He had drawn a Hitler mustache and a Swastika on Bush’s forehead, and had written “Oil Company Boss” and “President Rectum” on it.

Romberg had arranged for two sailors in their dress whites to be at the cemetery. They folded the flag while the funeral director played a tinny recording of “Taps.” It was actually quite good. They presented the flag to Romberg "on behalf of the president of the United States and the Secretary of Defense." My dad would have shit. He hated Bush, and I could practically hear him yelling, "Jag him off with a handful of broken glass," which he told bank tellers and grocery store clerks on a regular basis. I like to think that the sailors were thanking my father on behalf of Harry S Truman, my dad's favorite president when he was mustered out of the navy.

We headed over to the restaurant. My friend Karol and I were the only ones who ordered drinks. We ordered huge bloody Mary’s loaded with vodka, since we weren't allowed to have a vodka fountain. Garfield didn’t say anything about the twice-baked potatoes. It was my brothers’ turn to gang up on me after the luncheon. We had decided to go to the nursing home to tell my poor dementiated mother that my father had died.

Frazier was yelling at me that I had better bring the foam boards back to my dad’s house before we headed over to the nursing home. Instead, Karol whisked me to the nursing home which was a beehive of activity. My mother was remarkably awake and somewhat lucid when Karol and I arrived. I sat with her and waited for my brothers to arrive. Finally they showed up. I pretended that I misunderstood their plans, and we all gathered around her bedside.

Frazier started screaming in her face, “DAD IS DEAD.” At first my mother misunderstood him. She thought he was telling her that Carol Burnett had died. We hung around for awhile, explaining to her how we had taken care of the funeral, and that it was okay for her to go, that she didn’t need to hang around in her shell of a body anymore, that our father was waiting for her in heaven, handsome in his navy uniform. She mumbled that he “was with my mother.” Then we all left, en masse.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Karol was waiting in the lobby in for me. We went to her house and smoke a joint, then headed over to a Mexican restaurant where I proceeded to get bombed on Marguiritas.

I wish I could say that I felt more grief than relief over my father’s passing. After my initial hyperventilation when I thought I was having a heart attack hearing of his death, I felt incredibly relieved. In early May, I had taken him to an all-day neurological psychiatric evaluation at Northwestern Hospital, where he had been diagnosed in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, so his future was dim.

I’m glad that his suffering is over. He would have hated losing even more of his independence being cooped up in an assisted living faclity wearing an ankle bracelet so he couldn't sneak out and buy booze, having to watch Spanish-language television.

Anchors aweigh to an old sailor

2006-06-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

It has been quiet around my house. My cell phone isn’t ringing incessantly throughout the day and there are no panicked trips into the night, because my father died June 3 of geriatric alcoholism.

My dad was a good man. He was crazy about my mother, probably a little crazier for her than she was of him. In his prime, he was a stud, sharper than a box of tacks, and highly capable. He supervised dozens of electricians on extremely complex projects that involved some of the tallest skyscrapers in the United States, if not the world.

I never saw my father take a sick day, even when he threw his back out. He worked his ass off as a union electrician, or a “sparky” as they are known around the trades. Whenever I ride into the city, I can pick out a half dozen of his buildings rising from the Chicago skyline.

He had every reason to become one of those drunk, asshole fathers that beat his kids and made life miserable for everyone in the family. His own father was a practicing alcoholic, a taciturn Swede who never became literate in the English language. My dad often remarked that he had to grow up fast. It was his mother – my grandma – and her siblings, who smoothed out the turmoil caused by his father.

As a boy, he was sent up to Wisconsin in the summers, probably to get him away from his father. He stayed with a family friend who owned several cabins which she rented out to tourists. He bunked with the hired hands and did chores. In the afternoons he swam in cold lakes and fished. My grandmother sent him a dollar a week to buy milk and food.

My father had one of those “Our Gang” comedy kinds of childhoods growing up during the Great Depression. His mother, aunts and uncles were a wild, happy bunch that sang around the piano, took day trips in Model T’s, told fortunes and made bathtub gin. Gathering the pictures for the prerequisite foam boards to place around the funeral home during the wake, there was a massive group photo of my father’s family, where his uncle is hoisting a bottle of Jim Beam, and my dad is holding a gun to his aunt’s head.

He attended five public grammar schools and two high schools on Chicago’s North Side. His family moved about once a year. He told me that his father would stop paying the rent in February, then move out in the middle of the night on May 1 before they were evicted. Everyone did this, and I imagined street cars loaded down with people carrying stoves and furniture moving furtively through the night.

Toward the end my dad’s short-term memory was shot, but he could remember everything that happened to him in the navy during World War II. He was a first electrician’s mate, whatever the hell that is, serving on the U.S.S. Rockbridge. As one of the ship's original crew members he was a “plank owner.” The ship was built and commissioned in 1944 to replace some of those that were blown up in Pearl Harbor.

He volunteered for any war-time fool’s errand that was asked of him, climbing masts during Iwo Jima and typhoons to install signal lights, getting shot at or dangling precariously over a stormy sea. His ship traveled all over the South Pacific and saw a lot of action. He said he got about three hours of sleep during his whole war time experience.

My grandfather died while my dad was still on board the ship. The chaplain told him that his father committed suicide. He was discharged and came home to Chicago, tossing his duffle bag of navy gear into the Chicago River. When he got home he hooked up with some of his crazy bastard friends from high school. They got into two car accidents in one day, the second in which he broke his back.

He was in a body cast for about 10 weeks. When he recovered, he realized that he needed to find some new friends so he wouldn’t become a bum like his father. He met my mother on July 20, 1947 at Good Templar Park in Geneva, Ill., when she was 16. He fell instantly in love. Going through my mother’s old letters and scrap books, he declared his love for her by saying that she made him “the happiest boy in the world.” He must have been terribly lonely, as little boy far away from his home and family sharing a bunk house with farting hired hands, and as a young sailor in the middle of a war.

My parents got married in 1948, when my mother was 18 and my dad was 22. Like thousands of young World War II veterans, my father was able to achieve the American Dream. He provided us with a home, although it always seemed that our cousins had slightly better houses than the modest shacks we lived in. The babies started coming in the 1950s, with my brother Romberg added as a little tagalong in 1963.

As an electrician, he got well-paying, summer construction jobs for his younger cousins as well as my older brother so they could pay their way through college. One of my cousins dedicated his thesis to my father. He hated it when guys drank on the job, and once followed one of his journeymen to a bar during the morning coffee break. My dad tore into the guy and fired him on the spot. My older brother, who was working with my dad, said it was one of the most unpleasant events he ever witnessed.

Growing up, my father used to entertain us at the dinner table with stories of horrific accidents on his work sites, about guys falling off of buildings or impaling themselves on steel. He dislocated his knee, had tinnitus for a year following an explosion when he was inside a tunnel, and once took 220 volts of electricity through his arm.

My father started instituting safety measures on his job sites long before work place safety was regulated by the federal government. His projects boasted such stellar safety records, that he was brought in as a consultant when OSHA was being formed in 1971.

He was a big guy, about six foot four, and didn’t take shit from anybody. I can recall numerous times when some punk with a Napoleon complex would swagger out of a car after some minor traffic incident to take my father on. Inevitably, when my dad would exit his own vehicle, the other guy would get a look at how big my dad was, then jump back into his car and drive off like a little girl. My father didn't even have to open his mouth or swing a fist.

Cleaning out his house, which is staggering in itself, I spend a lot of time looking at his old artifacts and ancient family photos from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. My father lived a whole life before I was even born. It’s comforting to read the cards that people have been sending, mostly from cousins and the children of family friends from my generation. They recall his laughter, power, intelligence and his many talents. I need to have these memories stoked again, to remember him as he was, and not the sad, old depressed man who in many ways became my own little boy these past several years.

On the morning that my father died, his doctor told us he was going through the DTs and would probably end up becoming a vegetable. It’s still not clear to me why he had to be sedated. My brothers were hurrying to the hospital with a copy of his DNR when he died.

A nurse’s aid had been assigned to sit with him in his room because he kept ripping out his IVs. She told my brother that in the end, my father raised his arm as if grabbing something, took his last breath and passed away. Perhaps he was reaching for my grandma who was pulling him over to the other side, or maybe he was just swiping away a giant, DT-induced taradactyl. Anyway, I prefer to think it was the former.

Patty Columbo - the baddest girl in Chicago's Northwest suburbs

2006-05-10T05:58:00.000-07:00

This past weekend marked the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal murders of three members of a middle-class family in Elk Grove Village by one of their own kin. On May 4, 1976, Patricia "Patty" Columbo and her sleazeball 37-year-old boyfriend, Frank DeLuca, busted into her childhood home killing Patty's parents, Frank and Mary, in cold blood, along with Patty's little brother, Michael, who was just 13.

The murders were an embarrassment to Chicago's Northwest suburbs, long touted for their excellent schools, sprawling lawns and wholesome family values. The Columbos' neighbors refused to cooperate when police came knocking on their doors asking if they had seen or heard anything unusual the night of the murders. Instead, residents locked their doors and closed their drapes to the melange of news media, cops and police tape strung around the innocuous split-level home that Frank and Mary Columbo had purchased new in 1964, like the hundreds of thousands of other young couples fleeing the city for the good suburban life at that time. The sight of police detectives bustling in and out of the house did not even draw a crowd of curious gapers waving to the TV news cameras behind the field reporters broadcasting their live reports from the sidwalk in front of the Columbo house.

After DeLuca shot Frank, who had been killed first as he tried to escape by running up the living room stairs, Patty bludgeoned her father with a bowling trophy. Mary was found cowering in the bathroom - her favorite room in the house where she had once lovingly hand-painted each bathroom tile with gold filigrie - who had been shot dead center between the eyes. Patty or DeLuca slit her throat just in case the bullet didn't take care of her, although the Cook County medical examiner said that Mary was probably dead before she even hit the floor.

The last victim was Michael, who had slept through the initial gunshots. The two woke Michael up and stood him upright half-alseep in his bedroom while DeLuca shot him. Patty then stabbed Michael 87 times with her mother's sewing scissors. When police found Michael's body, they said on first glance it looked as if Michael had had a case of the measles, until they realized that the "measles" were dozens of tiny red gashes.

This is the detail that always amazes me. After finishing their carnage, Patty and DeLuca turned on the furnace inside the family home and set the thermostat at 97 degrees to hasten decomposition. The next morning, DeLuca showed up as usual to his job as a Walgreen's pharmacist at Elk Grove Village's "Go-Go Center" strip mall.

The bodies weren't discovered until three days later on May 7, when a village police officer showed up to inform Frank that one of the family cars had been found in a poor, black neighborhood on the city's West Side. (Patty and DeLuca wanted to stage the murders to make them look like mob hits or the work of black street gangs.) Noticing the front door ajar and undelivered newspapers piled up on the front step of the otherwise immaculately landscaped home, the patrolman pushed open the door and saw Frank's body sprawled across the living room stairs with a piece of the bowling trophy sticking out of his gashed skull, and immediately radioed for backup.

For the next eight days, Patty roamed free. (Frank would not be arrested for the murders until that July.) Police were amazed at Patty's "Frederick's of Hollywood" getup and her heavily made-up face when she was summoned to the Elk Grove Village police station to be told of her family's murders. Instead of rushing to scene after learning that her entire family had been slaughtered, Patty began helpfully offering potential leads of her father's supposed mob ties, who she claimed ran a mob chop shop for stolen cars behind the auto parts store that he managed in the city. (Frank Columbo's alleged ties to organized crime were quickly discounted by detectives, and Frank was vindicated as an honest, hardwoking, devoted family man at wit's end with his headstrong daughter.) Village detectives immediately smelled a rat.

The detectives quickly established roles for themselves to make Patty crack. Instead of "good cop, bad cop," one of the detectives described as looking like Tom Jones, assumed the role of "boyfriend." At her family's wake and funeral, Patty flirted openly with the detective, to the point where her grieving relatives thought he was the despised DeLuca who had alienated Patty from her family. (DeLuca skulked unnoticed in a corner of the funeral home.) When Patty wasn't joking, smoking or flirting, she flung herself on top of her parents' and little brother's closed caskets, wailing with grief.

A few days later, Patty was charged with three counts of first-degree, premeditated murder. The cops determined that Patty had originally set out to hire "hit men," a couple of losers she met in a motel cocktail lounge, to murder her family. She had even gone so far as to draw a map of her parents' house, along with a warning that the family's white miniature poodle was a "yapper." After the supposed "hit men" had strung Patty along, having sex with her and ripping her off of $2,000, Patty persuaded DeLuca to help her carry out the job.

For the next year, Chicagoland was riveted by lurid front-page headlines of group sex, betrayal, bestility (DeLuca had filmed Patty with an 8mm movie camera having sex with his German shepherd) and evil. The public learned of Patty's seduction when she was 16 years old, working the lunch counter at the Go-Go Center where DeLuca, a suave, 36-year-old married father of five, lured the pretty teenager who he thought was of age, into a sexually-charged affair that allowd DeLuca to fulfill all of his sick fantasies. (At one point, after Frank Columbo threw Patty out of the house, she went to live with the DeLucas. Patty would blow DeLuca while his wife and children froliced outside in the family's above-ground swimming pool.)

Patty was no angel herself. Her father was a controlling, Old World Italian whose ideas of raising a daughter meant locking her in a room until marriage. Patty had been the apple of Frank's eye, until the birth of her little brother when Patty was six. Frank's attentions soon focused on his male heir, and Patty became just another broad. While neighbors marveled and often commented on Patty's almost excessive doting on Michael, it was apparent that she had long harbored a seething hatred and jealousy for her brother, unleashed by the mutilation of his body. Patty had also been arrested for running up thousands of dollars on stolen credit cards, for which Frank made restitution. Still, Patty scorned her father by running to the arms of the despotic DeLuca.

The next summer, Patty and DeLuca were tried and convicted of the brutal murders. The public seemed fascinated by Patty in particular, who prosecutors had pegged as the violent crime's mastermind. She was beautiful, and could have been anyone's pretty daughter. Both were ordered to serve "indeterminate" life sentences of 200 to 300 years. Soon after, Patty and DeLuca broke off their ties after each was sent to a separate prison to beging serving their sentences. Since then, Patty or "Trish" as she now likes to be called, has become the first inmate in the Illinois Correctional System to earn a bachelor's degree, as well as the state's longest-serving female inmate. During the 1980s, she was busted for running a "prostitution ring" at the Dwight Correctional Center, pimping off fellow female inmates to prison guards. She has cleaned up her act, however, becoming a model prisoner and tutor for illiterate convicts.

Patty is also the subjet of two books, the laudable "Dad, Mom, Mike and Patti," and the more marginally successful but notorious, "Love's Blood" by Clark Howard, an eccentric whack-job who lives in a creepy, Addams Family-house in Uptown, and was rumored to have fallen in love with Patty while interviewing her behind bars. (Following the book's publication, Patty allegedly dumped the author, her interest mainly being in the candy bars and chips that he purchased for her from the prison's vending machines.)

In the book, Patty claims she was molested by a family friend, her "godfather." "Love's Blood" is full of raunchy, molestation scenes in the back of her godfather's candy truck. Patty also claims that she was deathly afraid of her father's temper, who she said would fly into blind rages during Cubs games at supposed strategic blunders by Cubs manager, Leo Durocher.

Patty Columbo has always intrigued me. We both attended high schools just a few miles from each other at the same time during the mid-1970s. Six months older than me, I knew a million, pretty, hot-to-trot chicks, some of them Italian American princesses just like Patty. A girl in my freshman art class who was a dead ringer for Patty, ended up becoming the barely legal mistress of a well-known pop singer whose character was recently whacked on "The Sopranos" after we graduated. Like Patty, I was 19 years old when the murders occurred, reading the grisly accounts in the Chicago Daily News while riding the bus to community college. I even had a little brother the same age as Michael Columbo, and could not imagine myself stabbing him 87 times with a pair of sewing scissors, as much as I would have liked.

I shared a lot of commonalities with Patty, growing up in the same middle-class suburbs where jet planes from O'Hare International Airport constantly screamed overhead, browsing and shoplifiting cheap earrings from the same suburban shopping malls. I immediately understood how the usurping of her family position - from doted-on little girl to undervalued female child after the birth of her brother - sewed the seeds of her pathological dysfunction, because I also grew up in such a household. With just a few flicks of the neurological connectors that prevent most of us from becoming family killers, I, or any or my friends, could have just as easily become Patty Columbo.

Patty, now a haggy 49-year-old, is up for parole on June 1. As the thirtieth anniversary of her family's murders comes to pass, Patty claims she is rehabilitated of her twisted adolescent self, during which early sexual molestation colored her view of men and the world. She says that she is full of remorse for the violent rage that granted her the three wishes she had most hoped for when she was 19, the deaths of her father, mother and little brother.

She also purports that the lead detective in the case, Ray Rose, who led a sophisticated investigation unheard of for an inexperienced suburban police force in the pre-DNA era, is as much a victim of her heinous crimes as her family, "only he survived."

It's hard to follow Patty's logic on that one. What distinguishes her upcoming parole hearing from all the rest, is that this time there is a glimmer of hope that she will be released. Given the number of stab wounds in her little brother, I don't think that Patty has even begun to serve her sentence. Before she was incarcerated, she never traveled outside of Illinois. Given the opportunity, she may have eventually broken herself free of her co-dependence on DeLuca and reconciled with her family. All that remains of Patty's short, free life are the faded 8mm images of her making it with a dog.

The Police Blotters

2006-04-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

There’s a hold-up in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights.
There’s a scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev’s due in Idyllwild,
“Car 54, where are you?”

Like the New York boroughs patrolled by flat-foots Francis Muldoon and Gunther Toody, Chicago and its suburbs are a frigging cesspool.

Hold-ups, murders, muggings, batteries, sex crimes, burglaries, shoplifting, identity theft and drunks freezing to death in their apartments because they left their windows open all night in the middle of winter – I’ve seen it all in my ten years of compiling police blotters in my glamorous job as a news stringer.

I’ve learned a lot doing the police blotters, like never arguing with a desk sergeant and how not to become a crime victim. In 2002, I successfully profiled the Washington, D.C. snipers thanks to criminal-profiling techniques I acquired covering a series of Petco armed robberies in Chicago’s north suburbs. An armed bandit was forcing Petco employees and customers to strip down to their underwear after locking them in a storage closet, then helped himself to cat toys on the way out. I even wrote a profile, pegging the bandit as a male who had most likely been sexually abused as a child (i.e., humiliating his victims by making them strip); had a decent-paying day job (i.e., he drove a nice, later-model Nissan); and owned at least two cats, one of which was probably very ill. I gave my Cat Toy Bandit profile to the village police chief, but he wasn’t interested, in fact, he pretty much regarded me as a whack job after that.

I predicted that the Washington, D.C. snipers were a father-and-son shooting team, because I figured that for two people to be responsible, one of them had to hold a particular sway over the weaker member. I fell off my chair when they arrested the bastards and learned that it was a stepfather-stepson duo.

I really enjoy doing police blotters even though most reporters consider blotters to be a dreg job that is usually assigned to newbies. It’s a lot like reading someone else’s personal mail, perusing reports of stupid criminals’ worst and lowest moments. Now I know why the Bush administration enjoys wire-tapping so much.

There is a discernable difference between suburban police reports and the urban reports. Suburban crimes are much more sublime, even absurd, like this one guy who broke into a shuttered restaurant and tried to hook up the phone line so he could make free long distance phone calls to Poland. Or the pair of heavy-set Russian women accompanied by three preschoolers who ripped off 500 pairs of Victoria’s Secret underwear at a local shopping mall.

The city police reports are a lot more violent. Most street muggings take place between 10 p.m. and 2 p.m., when yuppies are staggering home drunk from the bars, or listening to their Ipods full blast and can’t hear someone creeping up behind them before some punk shoves them face down on the pavement. Most cops include a footnote, “victim was intoxicated when crime occurred.” If this sounds like you, take a cab home.

What’s really sad, is that most offenders’ descriptions read, “male, 16-25, black and/or Hispanic.” There are a lot of lost boys out there, but yet we continue to cut afterschool programs and force parents (usually single, female heads of households), to work two or three crappy, low-paying jobs just to make rent and put Kraft mac and cheese on the table, instead of having quality time to spend with their children.

Some of the stations I go are like the Palmer House, where I work in conference rooms with wide, comfy chairs and good indoor air quality. Other stations are like walking on to the dilapidated set of “Car 54 Where Are You.” Apparently a hundred years ago, when most of the older cop shops were built, female perps must have been rare because these stations don’t have women’s restrooms. I can only assume that any hookers or husband-killers being held for bail or questioning, must have had to pee in their pants. I almost always have to pee while making my rounds of police stations, because I’ve usually consumed one or two extra-large Dunkin’ Donuts hazelnut coffees. I either have to ask some male cops to watch the door to men’s room while I pee which are disgusting, or sneak around and find a john in the police women’s locker room.

It must be fun to be a cop, because most of them are goofing off when I arrive to do my reports. They’re usually surfing the net or making long, involved personal phone calls. And God forbid, some cop should miss a Burger King run. Frankly I don’t know how any police work gets done in Chicago. Most of the cops manning the city police stations look like they’re going to keel over with a heart attack any second exerting themselves crumpling their Burger King wrappers after they’ve finished off a Whopper, let alone chasing some perp down the street.

My favorite police reports are bank robberies, or any small retail store or fast food place. For example, I noticed a definite uptick of Starbucks' robberies around the Christmas holidays. There is this one Starbucks on Wrightwood in Lake View that gets hit all the time. I like to think that the robbers are just trying to get a little money so they can buy their Baby Mamas and kids Christmas presents, but most likely the proceeds are going to buy crack. I’ve also read some incredible descriptions of ballsy business owners fighting back at the armed robbers, grabbing their wallets while fighting over $56 in the cash registers and turning the robbers' ID over to the cops.

It takes about eight burglaries per day for a crack addict to fund his or her habit, according to one cop I talked to at Dist. 20 in Chicago. Someone of the burglars will even steel the garbage and empty the contents of ash trays while robbing someone’s home. I once asked a review officer why in the world someone would do this, and he told me the perps are drug addicts looking for used syringes such as from a diabetic, and will steal cigarette butts from ashtrays to roll their own, especially if the butts are menthol

I love the exchanges between perps and victims. You couldn’t write dialogue like this if you tried. This past week, some teacher scared off a mugger by telling him that if he robbed and shot him on Easter, “you will be on freight train straight to hell.” The perp actually got back into his car and left the guy alone.

I enjoy a great rapport with the various review officers that I encounter. Usually I am allowed to just go into the files and pull out reports. I could spend hours reading them. A lot of the cops can’t spell, so I am constantly spelling words out for them, like “delinquent,” or offering TV trivia, like who played the second Darrin on “Bewitched.” As you can see, a lot of idle chit-chat goes on while the cops are watching the clock so they can fly out the door as soon as their eight-hour shifts are up.

A few weeks ago, this other reporter for a competing neighborhood rag that most of the cops on my rounds can’t stand, demanded to see my police press pass. “You mean I need a pass,” I asked her. She started ragging to the other cops that I shouldn’t be allowed in because I didn’t have a proper press pass, and how it wasn’t fair. There has never been a station where I haven’t been able to talk my way into. The cops just told me to ignore her.

I’m a very hard person to shock, but one of the most shocking police reports that I ever encountered involved an exhibitionist at the Lincoln Town Mall in Lincolnwood. This guy was caught whipping his spooey down on women’s heads from the upper level food court. He shoplifted a pillow from a Target, then cut the padding out and put it in his pants to catch his cum. He went to all these young sales associates at Carson’s, the Piercing Pagoda and J.C. Penney and had them fit him for watches and rings, while he surreptitiously masturbated himself with his other hand inside his pocket. The mall’s security was after this guy for a long time, until they finally caught him. I learned from other cops that this type of thing happens all the time, guys masturbating in plain sight without most people even noticing them. Now I can’t go to a mall without looking around for potential perverts.

Have you heard the good news?

2006-04-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

I used to think that Jesus died at exactly 3 p.m. U.S. Central Standard Time. If I happened to be in view of a clock, I’d stop whatever I was doing – riding my bike, flattening pennies on the railroad tracks, hanging out in the Kmart snack bar – and contemplate how Jesus had a really crummy weekend for our sins. This was back when my parents still celebrated Easter. They weren’t practicing Christians by any means. Their ideas about Christianity meant dumping us off at church or Sunday school and coming back a few hours later to drive us home.

Easter was a day when my grandparents would come in from the city and my mother would cook a big dinner. The dinners were usually unpalatable, leg o’ lamb, which I hated. I couldn’t bear the thought of eating an adorable baby lamb so I’d spit out the chunks of meat into one of my mother’s good napkins, or sneak into the bathroom and flush the lamb down the toilet.

To me, the most fascinating thing about Easter was Good Friday. Our church would cover its giant statue of Jesus on the altar with a black bag. We were Lutheran, so our particular statue of Jesus wasn’t some bloody, gory mess like you’d find in a Catholic church, but a fully clothed, clean Jesus in a seamless robe floating in front of the cross with his hands clasped in prayer. Otherwise, I never looked at that statue of Jesus during the rest of the year, only on Good Friday when it was stuffed inside a body bag.

For the past few years, I’ve been telling people to “Have a Good Friday.” I don’t know why I think this is so funny. It doesn’t matter who, co-workers, friends, strangers. I especially like telling non-Christians, like the Indian clerks at Dunkin’ Donuts or 7-Eleven, to “have a Good Friday.” I’m usually greeted with a wide smile and the clerks replying, “Well, you have a good Friday, too.” I know that for the rest of the day they will be telling their customers to, “Have a Good Friday” and that someone will get pissed.

Several years ago I felt compelled to rent one of those bunny costumes with a big head. The Nazis were going to march in Cicero, and I thought I’d show up in the bunny costume and try to spread a little sunshine and happiness, but the head weighed about 60 pounds and I didn’t think I’d be able to outrun the brown shirts in case they decided to stomp on me with their hobnailed boots. Instead, I ended up wearing it to my niece’s birthday party. I was a big hit among all her little friends. Everyone was having a great time at the party dancing to the Spice Girls. The head had a screen over the mouth that allowed me to see. During my appearance as the bunny, my mother kept coming over and asking which of the party guests was my sister-in-law’s psychiatrist, or if I thought my brother was gay. I couldn’t wear the rabbit head for more than five minutes without wanting to pass out. Frankly, I don’t know how those fake Easter bunnies at the shopping malls do it.

This year I am making a big ass, honey-baked ham for Easter dinner. It’s the one time of year that I can practice my extremely limited skills as a homemaker. Last year, portions of the spread were either burning off the roof of people’s mouths, or were stone cold. This year, I’m determined not to get drunk while cooking dinner and get everything to come out hot at the same time. Today when I showed up at the Honey Baked Ham store to pick up the ham, people were cued up outside of the building. I had to wait in line for 45 minutes. There was this big fat guy who weighed about 400 pounds standing ahead of me. He was so obese, that his arms wouldn’t lay flat at his sides like a normal person’s, but were bent at the elbows resting on his flab like one of those thalidomide babies with the flipper arms from the 1950s.

It was 20 minutes before we even got into the building. I felt sorry for all the workers behind the counter because people were screaming at them about how long they had to wait in line. The store had set out tiny plastic cups of food samples in an attempt to appease the angry mob. The fat guy grabbed like ten cups of the scalloped potatoes and started gobbling them down with the little plastic spoons. Then he grabbed 20 toothpicks of turkey samples and started scarfing those down. Finally I said, “Hey, Tubby, how ‘bout leaving some for the rest of us who’ve been standing in line for 45 minutes.” I’m no skinny-mini myself. I could stand to lose a few pounds, we all can. But I’m not so obese that I couldn’t walk down 56 flights of stairs in case I had to escape a high-rise building after a plane crashed into it. This guy was so fat and rude he was knocking over elderly women trying to reach the food samples. No wonder the rest of the world hates us.

Anyway, if my guests don’t want to eat the ham on Sunday, it’s okay with me. I’m not going to force them to eat it the way my parents used to force me to eat leg o’ lamb. No one has to spit it out into a napkin, or flush it down the toilet. That’s not what Easter is all about.

Vespers

2006-04-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

Things have been quiet with my father – too quiet. He’s had a busy winter: showing up drunk New Year’s Eve at the nursing home where my mother lives; getting caught cheating on the written test at the Department of Motor Vehicles; closing the living trust we had set up for him and my mother so Uncle Sugar doesn’t rape them on taxes; and arriving bombed out of his gourd at my niece’s middle-school basketball game. So quiet, that I knew we were overdue for another Dumbo-drop. Be careful what you wish for.

A week ago I was having a quiet evening at home, laying on the couch with the dog and watching some crappy Ben Afleck movie on Comcast On Demand, when the phone rang around 9:30. The caller ID read some cell phone number with an unrecognizable Illinois area code. I had no idea who the hell it was. When I answered the phone, it was some paramedic from Kane County, saying they had found my father 70 miles from home driving his car through a corn field.

“Does your father drink,” the paramedic asked. “He seems very confused and disoriented. Does he suffer from dementia?”

For those of you who have kept up with PDD, you’ve read about how my father had decided it would be a good idea to become an alcoholic at age 79. He’s had a rough couple of years and it’s taken a toll on him, being the main caregiver for my mother who is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s, until we placed her in a nursing home two years ago this month.

I didn’t want to say too much to the paramedic, because no doubt my father had decided to take a drive along with a fifth of vodka. Instead, I told the paramedic that my father had been showing signs of dementia. I could hear my father screaming “fuck you” in the background.

“Your father is very vocal,” the paramedic said.

I asked if anyone was hurt. My father was okay, except for a light pole he hit in Elgin on his way to the cornfield. The paramedic put a Kane County deputy sheriff on the phone. He said they weren’t going to charge my father with a DUI, but were going to take him to a hospital in Geneva, Ill.

“Do I need to bring bail money?”

The cop said no, they would put down the cause of the accident as dementia and low blood sugar. I’m sure that all my father had to eat that entire day was one of his favorite Healthy Choice meatloaf microwave dinners washed down with half a fifth of rot-gut vodka. I have to say that for cops, the Kane County sheriff’s police were pretty darn nice.

“Uh, you’re not going to let him drive any more, are you,” the cop asked.

I assured him that my father’s days on the road were officially over. My boyfriend let me borrow his truck and cell phone, in case my own ran out of juice, which had just enough power left to play my “Chico and The Man” ring tone. I called my younger Romberg to deliver the news: “They found dad driving through a fucking cornfield.”

I scribbled on the first of many tiny pieces of paper and backs of envelopes that would accumulate over the week with phone numbers for doctors, social workers, insurance adjustors, desk sergeants, banks, cab companies, senior care services and psychiatrists. I stopped at 7-Eleven on my way out of town and bought myself a jumbo-sized coffee, and set out for the middle of Ass Fuck, Ill., having no idea where I was going.

I got lost getting off the toll way, making a wrong turn and driving about five miles out of my way. I learned an important lesson: Mapquest sucks and is not to be trusted. I turned around in an office building’s parking lot, where another Kane County deputy sheriff was parked trying to catch speeders. He must have heard about my father driving through the corn field, because he told me I was about twenty miles away from the hospital where they had taken him.

I turned around and headed into the right direction and got lost again following some directional signs for another hospital. (Ironically, it was the hospital I was born at.) My “Chico and The Man” ring tone kept going off, and I was weaving all over the road fielding calls from my sister-in-law and the security guard who had been stationed in the emergency room to watch my old man. I got pulled over by the same cop that I had asked directions from about fifteen minutes earlier.

This cop was also really nice. He stopped traffic so I could make a U-turn and get back on the right road, heading in a southerly direction. “Just keep going. You got a long way.”

I finally made it to the hospital. When I arrived at the emergency room, I could hear my father singing at the top of his lungs, “Barnacle Bill the sailor.” I could smell the vodka when I entered the curtained exam room. “’Ey, whooge dish gurl?”

My father was wearing a hospital gown and the security guard handed me a plastic bag from the hospital gift shop containing his clothes and shoes. “He had a little accident.”

My father insisted he had no memory of driving through a corn field, or hitting the light pole in Elgin. He kept asking, “What accident? I wasn’t in a fucking accident!” And then, “I loved that car.” I told him his driving days were over, and he started screaming and swearing again.

The security guard glared at me, “I had him calmed down. He was talking about the navy.”

I looked a bit like a raving maniac myself, wearing my cheap $8 winter jacket and in dire need of an evening of beauty. I spoke to this adorable, young, emergency room doctor, who told me he was waiting for the results of a cat scan. He told me that my father was very confused. “Yeah,” I thought, “crazy like a fucking fox.”

The doctor told me my father’s brain exhibited dark spots consistent with the early stages of dementia and that he had a B/A of 2.17, which is more than twice the legal drinking limit in Illinois. Eventually, the security guard helped get my father into scrubs and skid-socks so I could take him home.

It took two security guards to pile my dad into my boyfriend’s truck. “WHAT’S THIS FUCKING CAR YOU HAVE!” Then my father insisted that we had to go back and get his car. My dad is a big guy. The security guards told me to turn around and drive him back to the hospital if he started giving me a hard time. I had asked the emergency room doctor earlier if he could sedate my father and I’d pick him up in the morning, but the doctor told me to get him the hell out.

I was going to take my dad back to my house, but he was so belligerent, I decided to drive his ass back to his own place. It was black as pitch on the country roads, and I kept getting lost. I kind of knew where I was going and relied on my Zen method of finding places, which drives most of my family and friends crazy. (“Don’t you know where the hell you’re going?”)

The moon hung in the sky like a shiny peach quarter. My father kept remarking on it. I grilled him about how he ended up in Kane County, if he was going to Good Templar Park, a Scandinavian summer retreat where his mother and my mom’s mom had owned cottages, and where my parents had first met as teenagers. I could only surmise that he was taking a trip down memory lane in his big old Chrysler Concorde which was now totaled, with Artie Shaw blasting on the CD player.

I finally found a road that I was familiar with. I asked him if he needed to use the bathroom. He insisted that he didn’t, but ten minutes later he was screaming at me to pull over to the side of the road. “IT’S RUNNING DOWN MY LEG!” I pulled over and reminded him that he was wearing scrubs and had to pull them down. “WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY PANTS?” The last thing I wanted to see was my father’s shriveled-up, 80-year-old ball sack. I told him to hurry up before another cop pulled us over.

I finally got his ass home about 2:30 a.m. While he was trying to fit his key into the lock, I removed his driver’s license and Visa from his wallet because he was talking about renting a car the next day. I got him into the house and peed for the ride back home. I was exhausted from my trip through hell and just wanted to get home, pop a beer and go to bed.

On the way home, my “Chico and The Man” ring tone went off again. It was my father. “Someone came into my house and stole my vodka!”

Since last week, I’ve spent about nine hours a day on the phone or driving the 30 miles back and forth to my father’s house. My brother and I took him to see his own doctor and we admitted him for the weekend in another hospital, where he was sedated so he could safely detox from alcohol. I’ve filled up my gas tank about five times, paying $2.78 per gallon. I’ve talked to a million doctors, including my father’s own physician, who’s about as useless as tits on a pig and looks as if he spends 90 percent of his time in a tanning booth. Between all this, I’ve done some incredible multi-tasking, writing an article about a slum lord in Rogers Park who’s been jerking around his mostly poor tenants in a covert condo conversion for the paper that I freelance for. I’m exhausted.

I spent all day with my father yesterday, who is incredibly remorseful, taking him grocery shopping, trying to line up transportation options for him for his new life without a car. Today, I called the Kane County sheriff’s office, making sure that they had cited him for reckless driving so my old man can never get another driver’s license.

I’ve arranged a play date for my father at an adult day care program at a hospital near his house next week. We’re going to try that for awhile until my brothers and I can figure out what the hell we’re going to do with him. I’m sure that within a few weeks, my father will manage to get his ass kicked out of there, too.

I drove home yesterday hating myself. It is so fucking sad. My father used to be this powerful, capable guy. He always made me feel like a princess, even when I was a fat and ugly kid. I thought about better days: my father making paper airplanes out of the Cubs’ scorecards and floating them from upper grandstand at Wrigley Field, one of them even landing once on home plate during a game at Ernie Banks’ feet when he was up to bat. Lot’s of funny, crazy stuff like that.

I thought about Vespers, how my father’s world keeps shrinking and fading, and the encroaching dusk that is darkening his mind, like vapors rising off a pond.

Random Thoughts Department - We Are the Champions

2006-03-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

I don’t know what it is like in the rest of the country, but in Chicago, St. Patrick’s Day is a week-long drunken affair. I believe that St. Paddy’s is the Irish’s revenge for being treated like shit when they first immigrated to America, when they couldn’t get jobs because they were considered “Roman” instead of European Caucasian.

My mother hated St. Patrick’s Day because she didn’t think it was fair that the Irish had their own holiday while all the other ethnic groups were left out in the cold. She didn’t think it was right that Chicago taxpayers footed the bill for Mayor Richard J. Daley’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade and forbade us from wearing green to school. Every March 17 she’d put the Swedish flag out on our front stoop and alienate our neighbors.

This year, because March 17 fell on a Friday during Lent, Cardinal Francis George said it was okay to eat meat, since he figured millions of Irish American Chicagoans would be eating corned beef that day anyway and chucking the “fish on Friday” Lent rule. Whether this eating-meat-on-Friday dispensation applied to the many Chicago Archdiocese priests who’ve recently been busted for molesting altar boys, I do not know.

I got to vote on one of those new fangled, touch screen voting machines in Illinois’ criminally negligent primary election this past week. Illinois elections are always interesting, especially when they involve Chicago and Cook County, and the mid-term primary was no exception. The primary was pretty much a shambles and they are still counting votes by hand in Chicago. Election workers could not get the touch screen and optical scan machines to merge after the polling places closed so they could count election results. The machines are manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems in California. I miss hanging chads.

Last night I went to a Queen concert at the All State Arena, formerly known as the Rosemont Horizon. A friend of mine called about 4 p.m. and invited me. Her friend won six tickets to a sky box with free food and beer by submitting a photo of his step-daughter’s ass in a “Fat Bottomed Girls” contest sponsored by a Kenosha, Wis., radio station.

I remember listening to the world debut of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1976 on the Big 89, WLS-AM. My friend Mike Mennella and I used to reenact the “Streets of San Francisco” car chase scenes after our morning classes at the local community college before reporting to our crap evening jobs. We were racing our respective parents’ cars around Mike’s subdivision when “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on. I remember thinking it was one of the most ridiculous songs I ever heard.

The skybox was behind the stage and we got to watch Paul Rodgers of Bad Company, who was singing the Freddie Mercury parts, change his shirt about ten times back stage, which was worth it. He is a sexy bastard. The skybox also came equipped with its own bathroom, which was a huge convenience because I was drinking a lot of beer. I hate standing in a crowded Ladies restroom with an urgent beer bladder, trying to get my pants down before I start pissing in my underwear.

We also had stadium seats fairly close to the stage. One thing about a Queen concert, nobody sits down. The crowd was a bizarre mix of age groups, mostly 40- and 50-year-olds screaming their heads off, while their kids sat bored and crunched in the All State Arena’s tiny seats. Before the concert, I heard one dad swearing at his kid to leave his Ipod in the car out in the parking lot.

The show was about two hours long, filled with some incredibly long drum solos and guitar riffs, during which I got up and wandered around the stadium. I talked to two adorable 25-year-old guys, thinking that one of these days I’m going to find one who might be interested in scoring with a fat, middle-aged woman twice his age. They told me they fell in love with Queen when they heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” in “Wayne’s World,” which they said they saw five times just to hear the song.

The best part of the concert was the giant, virtual Freddie Mercury beamed up on the Jumbotron screens. His band mates, or what’s left of them, played along to Freddie singing “We Are the Champions,” although I could have done without the idiot South Side Sox fans holding up White Sox banners. Anyway, I think Queen could get away with playing along to old Freddie Mercury concert clips and leave Paul Rodgers, who sang a lot of Bad Company songs, at home. The whole evening was twice the bad ‘70s TIC flashback.

I ended up falling off the weed wagon when one of the Kenosha shock jocks asked me if I wanted to smoke a doobie in the sky box john. (Hey, if you can’t fall off the weed wagon at a Queen concert, when the hell can you?) I knew I would probably never know such luxury again in a sky box at the All State Arena where WHL hockey is played. I must have had a good time, because I lost my cell phone. So, if you’re reading this and you know me, please e-mail your phone numbers so I can re-program you into my circle of love.

In the continuing saga of the Cowsills, the oldest performing Cowsill brother, Bill, died the eve of Barry’s memorial party in Rhode Island, of like a million diseases. You can’t write shit like this in Hollywood because no one would believe it.

Grief therapy, 1962

2006-03-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

It is a comforting, yet unfortunate reality that when tragedy strikes a school, counselors swarm upon students offering an outlet for their grief. The death of a classmate or teacher from illness, accident or violent act often induces a range of emotions: some students collapse, while others stumble around in shock. Others dissolve into fits of laughter. All reactions, the professionals reassure us, are appropriate.

But this always wasn't so. When I tell friends about the death of a little girl in my kindergarten class, they are shocked by the response of parents, teachers and administrators. Her death still haunts me like a bad hangover, and I often wonder if 45 years later, her parents still carry the wound.

It was the fall of 1962 and I could not wait to escape the tangle of my mother's apron strings to venture into the Big World. I insisted upon no adult chaperone as I marched triumphantly to the corner bus stop. I soon learned that kindergarten -- and independence -- weren't all that they were cracked up to be. By the time the school bus wound its way through our budding suburban landscape of spanking new subdivisions, corn fields and American Gothic farmhouses, there were no seats left on the bus. We were crammed into the aisles and forced to ride standing up the mile or so to school. I distinctly remember my feet leaving the floor as the bus driver swerved around the traffic circle, trying to get us to school before the first bell.

I also went to the wrong classroom, and remember sitting there for an hour before it occurred to the teacher that I didn't belong. I recall experiencing that first familiar, sweeping feeling of dread that I had horribly fucked up as I was unsympathetically escorted to the correct classroom and seated at a table filled with strange children, who were somehow more competent than me. Both teachers seemed to look at me, as if thinking, "Boy, we have a real stupid one, don't we." My first foray into the Big World was shaping up to be a disaster, if not a life-long pattern.

Seated at my table was a little girl named Debbie. She immediately asserted her dominance over our table of cowering four- and five-year-olds. She was chubby little girl, bossy and complicated. One minute Debbie would act like your best friend in the whole world; the next minute, she'd be broadcasting to the rest of the class how there was snot on your coat.

For the next several weeks I found kindergarten to be terribly boring and complex, as I desperately tried to learn social skills and sit still while the teacher blabbed on at the front of the classroom. Worst of all, we had to lie on the cold tile floor and "nap" at the end of the morning session, before we were loaded back on the less chaotic kindergarten bus (there were plenty of seats for everyone) and ferried home to our respective cornfield subdivisions. I might as well have been at home.

My first year of school was also interspersed with periodic bouts of tonsillitis. I missed so many days, that there was even talk of holding me back a year, but because I was the tallest and biggest kid in my class, my mother vehemently lobbied for me to continue on to first grade, lest I be pegged as "retarded."

Meanwhile, Debbie provided no end of amusement. Full of destructive character flaws, she was the only interesting thing about kindergarten. While our class feared her mercurial moods, we also marveled at her incredible balls. She even made the boys look like women, back-talking the teacher and sneaking candy during class. One morning, Debbie brought her three-year-old sister to school because her mother had a hair appointment. We watched in fascination as Debbie's little sister made a boom-boom on the floor. The teacher spent the next several minutes in the principal's office, no doubt rousing Debbie's mother from under the hair dryer at the Clip 'n Curl beauty salon, informing her that she was not running a baby-sitting service.

Debbie seemed to have it in for me in particular, criticizing my dresses, questioning the authenticy of my Show 'n Tell treasures ("That's not a real Chatty Cathy!"), or making fun of my hand-me-down boys' raincoat that had once belonged to one of my older brothers. As mean and hurtful as Debbie was, one morning she really came through for me.

We were assigned to draw pictures of houses. By then, my teacher was already in the process of switching me from a lefty to a righty, grabbing the crayon out of my left hand and jamming it into my right. My houses came out looking like missile silos, with rounded roofs. The teacher kept giving me new sheets of paper, demanding that I draw a proper house with a triangular-shaped roof, until there was a mound of crumpled paper on the floor next to my chair. When the teacher wasn't looking, Debbie grabbed the sheet of paper and drew the house for me. I was happily coloring it in when the teacher came back to our table to check our work. "Didn't Rainy draw a beautiul roof," Debbie happily crowed. Sick of me, the teacher barely acknowledged my feat. I was just happy to get her off my back, innocently unaware that Debbie and I had both cheated.

One October morning Debbie wasn't in class. We were called to sit on the carpet in front of the piano. Our teacher told us that Debbie had been involved in a horrible accident and was in the hospital. When I got home from school, my mother said that Debbie had climbed up on the stove in the kitchen where there were pots boiling, to reach some candy stowed in the upper cabinets. Her stockings caught on fire, and then her dress. The fire consumed her body and she was lying in a oxygen tent in the children's wing at Lutheran General Hospital. An appeal in the local newspaper called for blood donors. We made Debbie get-well cards in class, and today I picture them propped like tents on her small, lifeless form.

Then we forgot all about her. The world grew angry, too angry to stop for a burnt up little girl. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing. There were air-raid drills every day, where we practiced running into the halls like maniacs and curling up into little balls in front of our lockers. My father taught my brother how to shoot a .22 in the basement, instructing him to shoot even his best friend, Billy, if Billy came skulking around our basement looking to score from our five-year supply of Campbell's soup, in the event that the Ruskies dropped the big one.

But the Cuban Missile Crisis passed without the world being blown into oblivion. Our teacher read us stories about little Caroline Kennedy's pony, Macaroni. I had more bouts of tonsillitis, as my parents tried to stall my surgery until after the birth of my little brother. I stayed home from school with a head full of mucus, high on codeine cough syrup and nursing a sore butt from painful penicillin shots watching reruns of "I Love Lucy."

It was probably around December when I realized that Debbie still hadn't come back to school. Where the hell was she, I wondered. I became obsessed, until one morning in the girls' washroom during our morning potty break, I asked another girl when Debbie was coming back. "She died," the girl told me. Died? I knew that "died" meant that you became invisible and were never coming back. I didn't believe her. When we got back to the classroom, I angrily marched up to the teacher and announced loudly in front of the entire class, "DID DEBBIE DIE?"

"Yes," the teacher shot back at me. "And we're never going to talk about it again."

I remember feeling bretrayed that this information had been withheld from me. I asked my mother if Debbie had really died when I got home from school. "Yes," she said, somewhat more compassionately than my teacher, but that was the end of any further conversation about her, through the proceeding years of elementary school and all the way through high school.

I still wonder if I missed some announcement of Debbie's death during one of my many absences from school, but I doubt it. I think our parents, teachers and principal all just hoped we would forget about her, that she had even been in our class, as if erasing her short life from existence. They probably thought they were sparing us, but they were wrong.

In the ensuing years there were other deaths of classmates and teachers that were handled just as badly. During my sophomore year of high school, a boy tumbled to his death from atop the town's water tower. There were no announcements in class, just a wild rumor circulating the student body that the kid leapt to his death while high on LSD Dianne Linkletter-style, thinking he could fly. That same year, our principal died after a short illness. My friends and I responded cynically, laughing through the school-wide memorial and thrilled with the gift of an unplanned day off from school.

In the summer of 1973, three students in the senior class died. One boy from an undetected heart birth defect; the second boy from drowning while swimming in a quarry; and the third, a girl in my art class, died of the same cancer that had plagued Ted Kennedy's son. She, too, just disappeared from class one day. For some reason, my journalism teacher assigned me the task of writing their obituaries for the school newspaper. I remember feeling terribly embarrassed sending copies of the paper to their parents, which I stuffed into envelopes with no accompanying note of explanation or condelence.

But none of these deaths hit me as profoundly as Debbie's. Maybe because she was the first. I'm glad she helped me cheat in kindergarten, because it gave me a reason to like her, instead of being burdened with the added guilt that I had somehow been responsible for her death all those other times I hated her for being a selfish brat. I'm sure that most of us have a "Debbie" in our childhood pasts. If you're like me, you're probably still looking for closure.

It takes a village idiot

2006-02-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a funeral for a 27-year-old woman. Her name was Donna. I met Donna when she was 14 while volunteering for a neighborhood tutoring program in the ghetto where we both lived. Uptown wasn’t the hardcore ghetto, like Cabrini Green, but an ungentrified neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood was full of gangbangers and urban pioneers like me. I lived there because the rent was cheap and my apartment was a block from the lake front. Now, I could barely afford to move back there.

Every time I stepped out of my apartment I was treated to a free show. Someone was always going crazy in the street. I didn’t need cable television because all I had to do was look out my window to watch people having sex on the school playground behind my building, or getting shot. One summer afternoon I saw an old black man wearing nothing but leopard-print bikini underwear and an Indian headdress walking down Sheridan Road.

I moved to Uptown during the first Bush Administration in 1991. The neighborhood literally straddled the two Americas and I was caught somewhere in the middle. On my way to one of the four jobs I held during the five years that I lived there, I’d drive past lines of people waiting for the Uptown Lutheran Church food pantry to open, then settle down at work where I’d listen to people bitch about how much noise the recycling collectors made clanging the bottles and cans together. I wanted to shout at my suburbanite co-workers to get fucked. For every basket case in the neighborhood, there were ten people living below the poverty line trying to make an honorable go of it. The neighborhood was one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States, at least according to the 1990 U.S. Census. For the most part, everyone got along.

I started volunteering as a tutor and youth mentor for elementary school-aged children at the height of the Hillary Clinton-It Takes A Village To Raise A Child craze. I wasn’t exactly the best role model for children in 1992. I pretty much lived like a child myself and was a veracious pot head. I had a lot of crazy ideas about the government and life in general. I was more like the village idiot. When children visited my house I didn’t care what they did, as long as they didn’t play with matches. That was my only rule. But I like kids and thought I could give one evening a week to helping neighborhood children with their homework, instead of flopping down in front of the television every night like I usually did.

The tutoring program was sponsored by a Methodist Church that was founded to help children at Goudy Elementary School. President Reagan’s education czar, William Bennett, had visited Goudy in 1985, when he declared Chicago as having the worst public school system in the country. When I arrived at the church to volunteer that first evening, the kids were having a huge fight with one of the neighbors. Apparently on the way to tutoring, the kids rang the man’s doorbell and ran away before he answered it. The program director, an urban Methodist missionary named Beth, was standing between the man and the kids, trying to keep them both separated. I thought the guy was a real dick and overreacting. I remember him getting pissed off at me when I started smirking, thinking it was kind of funny that kids still engaged in the classic game of “Ding Dong & Ditch.”

Eventually things quieted down, and I was assigned to help a seventh grader, Donna, with fractions. She was a tall, lanky girl with short hair and a dirty jacket, the sleeves hitting somewhere along her elbows. I didn’t have to know anything about Donna’s life story to see that my dog led a better life than she did. This was a kid who had suffered trauma, violence, neglect and abuse. Donna hung on my every word as I tried to muddle through the fractions, thinking I was the most fascinating person in the word.

Eventually I learned that Donna, her brother and two baby sisters lived with their aunt, who was paid by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to be their foster parent. Donna’s birth mother was a heroin addict who used to pimp her little brother to pedophiles to get money to buy smack. Beth told me that Donna just showed up one day at the tutoring program, and a few days later, brought her younger siblings to the program as well.

Every day Donna got her little sibs up and dressed for school. She took them to the tutoring program because there was obviously something there that she felt both she and they needed. The kids were just chattel to her aunt. Her aunt pocketed all the money she received from the state to take care of them and spent it on her own children. It was specifically because of Donna and her siblings that new laws were passed in Illinois reforming the foster care system requiring more oversight and accountability of relatives entrusted to care for wards of the state. Once I gave Donna a winter coat and soon saw one of her cousins wearing it. Another time I gave Donna a tape recorder to record her classes because she was dyslexic and her aunt immediately confiscated it for herself. I soon learned to stop giving things to Donna.

During the school year, Donna would eat the free breakfast and lunch provided to her at school. Her aunt never bothered to feed Donna and her siblings’ supper, so she would go 18 hours between her last and first meals of the day. On the nights that I tutored, I’d take Donna and her brother, Kurt, to McDonalds for a treat, since I couldn’t give them anything without their aunt swiping it. I had no idea then that the Happy Meals I bought for them were a bonus meal.

Although she was horribly neglected and abused, Donna loved school, loved to laugh and have fun. She was in eighth grade but barely read at a third grade level. She was a hard worker and never gave up on herself. She had every reason to hate the world, to go on a shooting rampage, to spit at well-meaning white people like myself, or become a terrorist. But she chose to be a forgiving and loving person.

I had a lot of funny conversations with Donna who was always full of beans. I was only in my mid-thirties then, but to Donna I was practically a senior citizen. Whenever I drove the kids in my car, I made a deal that they could listen to WGCI, an urban contemporary station, as a compromise so I wouldn’t have to listen to any god awful rap stations. Donna liked to crank up the bass. I’m sure people could hear my car coming a block away. We used to argue about it, and one day Donna turned to the rest of the kids in my car and said, “Rainy doesn’t know anything about bass.” I looked at her and said, “Kid, my generation invented bass.”

We decided to start a high school study group to continue helping kids that aged out of the elementary tutoring program. It was hard to get kids to come to the new group, but Donna eventually dragged the neighborhood’s ninth graders to our Wednesday night sessions. She was the glue that held the group together, since I spent a better part of that first year screaming at kids. They squabbled like puppies. One kid was always smacking another, or grabbing someone’s notebook or pen. But by the end of the year, the kids were actually studying and doing okay in school.

When Donna turned 16 she decided to throw herself a Sweet 16 party. She was going to hold the party in the church gym. The pastor was freaking out, and eventually, I was coerced into being the evening’s chaperone. (I had to throw out a big gangbanger. Don't ask me how I did it.) Donna overlooked no small detail in her party planning. I remember driving Donna and her friend to Aldi’s to buy pop, chips and other snacks. The girls bought baloney and bread and made up a price list. They were going to make the boys buy the food and drinks that would be served at the party. I tried to explain to her about being a gracious hostess, but Donna was determined to get some of her money back, and damned if the boys didn’t pay for the baloney sandwiches. I found the party wonderfully life affirming, that here was Donna with probably the worst life of anyone I knew, celebrating being alive with her friends.

A few months after the party, Beth called me frantic at work. A neighbor had called Beth to tell her that she saw Donna’s aunt loading the kids into a taxi with their clothes in plastic garbage bags. The aunt was always threatening to turn the kids back over to DCFS. After work, I went to the DCFS facility which was a block from where I lived. Somehow, I managed to find out that Donna and her sibs had been dumped off on the door step the day before. I told the social worker that I wasn’t going to leave until I saw the children. As I was waiting, one of the other mothers whose kids were in the tutoring program joined me, in addition to Beth. The DCFS workers were amazed to see three people from the community show up independently of each other to check up on the kids.

Donna and her brother were off on a field trip, but they did bring the little sisters in to see us. Within 24 hours, the little girls’ hair had been freshly braided with colorful bows, and they were wearing adorable, laundered dresses, cared for by a grandmotherly aide. Donna and Kurt eventually arrived, and we told Donna to hang in there, that we were going to figure out a way to keep her in the neighborhood. A wonderful woman from the church named Paula, volunteered to take Donna in. Paula had three little girls of her own. She and her husband were the live-in caretakers at the Cultural Institute on Lawrence and Sheridan, where a lot of Methodist missionaries lived. They were Christians, but not in the sense of the Christianity that’s been hijacked by the fundamentalist religious right. These were Christians who had actually read all of the New Testament and practiced “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Donna blossomed under Paula’s tender loving care. She had her own room down the hall from Paula’s family’s apartment that she decorated with knickknacks from the dollar store and pinups of rap stars. The first thing I did when Donna moved in with Paula’s family was give her a bomber jacket that didn’t fit me anymore. Donna had found a new mommy, and I used to tell Beth that it was if Donna was cramming in 16 years of a lost childhood.

Eventually Donna graduated from high school at age 19, after transferring to an alternative high school specifically designed to help students with learning disabilities. After graduating, Donna developed a drinking problem, but eventually sought treatment at a facility in Arizona, where she met her future husband. She got married and had a little boy. Paula threw Donna a wedding last year.

Donna became a stay-at-home mom and took care of her little boy up until she had a brain aneurism on Jan. 19. Around that time I started having dreams that Donna had died. I dreamt that Beth called and left a message on my voice mail telling me Donna passed away. Donna was in my thoughts a lot, and last week, when Beth called and began leaving me a message, I knew what she was going to say as soon as she mentioned Donna’s name. It was as if Donna’s soul had been communicating with me.

At her memorial service yesterday, three people, including Donna’s adoptive mother Paula, got up and paid tribute to Donna in words far more eloquent than these. Most of my friends are atheists, and I’ve since lost that line of what I thought was communication with God. But seeing the church packed with people like me from the community, her natural siblings and her adoptive sisters, I came to the conclusion that Donna was a spiritual being having a human experience. At the end of the service, we all got up and danced to James Brown.

Afterward, her family distributed the photo collage of Donna that was displayed in the church. It was good to see Donna living in a nice house in Arizona, with a family, a dog, and riding a horse. At the time of her death, Donna had taken in a family left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. She never forgot the pain of being a homeless, neglected and abused child, and was reaching out to others the way a neighborhood had once reached out to her. Eight of Donna’s organs were also donated to five people as she lay brain dead from the aneurism.

I don’t know how you tell a 19-month-old baby that his mommy is never coming back. I’m glad Donna didn’t work but stayed home to have 19 wonderful months of being a mother to her child, especially since she didn’t have the best parenting herself up until she moved in with Paula. I can’t say I was the most significant person in her life, but she taught this village idiot quite a lot about courage, overcoming adversity, and how a kind word can follow a child through her lifetime.

Donna would have turned 28 on Feb. 13.

P.S. Donna’s brother and sisters are doing okay, too.

Random Thoughts Department

2006-02-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

No, this isn’t a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed, but a cartoon of the boys’ dean of my high school that I drew for our school’s newspaper thirty-one years ago for Valentine’s Day.
When I was very young – four or five – I used to imagine God as some wise, old, platinum gentleman, the color of one of those aluminum Air Stream mobile homes, who looked vaguely like Robert Young on “Father Knows Best.”

I was dying of curiosity to know what God looked like (at that point in time I still believed that Mary and Joseph were in their eighties, retired and living in a suburb outside of Miami, mourning the death of their only son, Jesus). I used to wonder why there were never any photographs of God in our Sunday School circulars. One Sunday, I asked the teacher, some wise-acre, gum-snapping 15-year-old girl, when we were going to get to see some pictures of God. “Stupid, nobody knows what God looks like,” she replied. Thus began the steady chipping away of my faith.

As for the Muslims rioting throughout the world over a cartoon that appeared in a Danish newspaper of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, get over it. Tell us what the prophet Mohammed means to you instead of burning down embassies, and why the hell aren’t you swarming the streets in protest every time one of your brothers or sisters – in most cases deluded teenagers – shows up on a bus during rush hour with bombs strapped to their waists, or when a car bomb goes off at a street market while your mothers and grandmothers are shopping for fresh tomatoes. I don’t think we should denigrate someone else’s culture, but in most Western societies where there is free speech and where women aren’t forced to wear blankets over their heads in public, this is what it racks up to – the pearls and garbage of democracy. Like it or not, we have the right to be offensive. And if Muslims think that cartoon was bad, they ought to come to America and watch daytime television, where topics ranging from hemorrhoids to impotence are discussed freely on sleazy talk shows.

Frankly, between Christians, Jews and Muslims, I think these religions are all responsible for ruining our planet.

But back to the Valentine’s Day cartoon that appeared in my high school newspaper in 1975. I can’t believe that I actually got away with drawing the boys’ dean wearing a diaper. This was considered pretty subversive back then. Most of the stories and papers that we put together were created under the influence of pot. Our editorial staff of freaks was constantly being hauled into the assistant principal’s office for writing and publishing offensive material – to parents, that is, not the students. Everything was done manually, stories were typed on rickety typewriters with sticking keys, and drunken typesetters laid out the paper for us one led letter at a time as a favor to our school by the publisher of our local newspaper. Our man on the street columns, where students were asked questions like, “What do you think of Nixon,” or “What did you do over the holidays,” eluded to sex with hookers and buying six-packs of beer or Cold Duck with fake IDs at the local liquor store. A typical issue included reviews of Led Zepplin concerts, bizarre bodies drawn on giant heads of teachers, violent sports imagery (our school mascot was a Native American), acid poetry, crazy photo collages and as little school news as possible. With all the concerns today about the dangers of Cyberspace and our hyper-sensitive, politically correct, fundamentalist Christian culture, I don’t think kids can get away with the shit we published in our school newspaper back in the 1970s (which incidentally, was named the top high school paper in the Midwest region for that year by Quill & Scroll). There was no way that our school administration could control us, and I can only imagine how much more dangerous and subversive our paper could have been, had we had Quark, Adobe or digital photography, instead of me sitting in my basement drawing cartoons of our faculty with India ink.

Vice President Dick Cheney proved that he is once again above the law, hunting without a license and blasting one of his hunting party in Texas over the weekend. The fact that the White House tried to keep the story of our nation’s vice president shooting somebody quiet for 24 hours, makes me wonder how many other guys the draft dodger has shot.

Yesterday driving home from a gig, I was listening to a caller on a radio talk show, who said he taught a course in hunting safety. He said that Cheney violated a number of safety rules – not sticking to his own pre-agreed field of fire, not ceasing fire when one of the party stepped out of the line, and shooting behind himself which is a big hunting safety, Bozo no-no. But if you’re some old white guy who thinks the universe revolves around his shriveled up ball sack, you’re free to do whatever the fuck you want.

When I worked for an internationally known, product safety testing company, we published a safety standard for cable boxes that were required to withstand a hail of bullets. Our engineers literally called it, "the drunk hunters' test," when hunters became bored in the field and would shoot up cable boxes when they couldn't find any innocent birds to shoot.

The whole Cheney-friendly fire incident illustrates just how out of control this administration is, as if we all didn’t know that already. Bush and Cheney are their own “weapons of mass destruction.”

Don't fuck with the Big O

2006-01-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

Like the rest of the country, Chicago is all abuzz about yesterday's live telecast of the Oprah show and her public tongue lashing of James Frey, author of the best selling, controversial-exposed-as-a-lie memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

Unless you live in a cave, Frey's sensational fake memoir of his years as a criminal drug addict on the mutha of all benders was recently exposed by TheSmokingGun.com as fabrication. Last September, Oprah anointed Frey and his book as an "Oprah Book Club" selection, which automatically means instant celebrity for some poor writer whose been struggling to pay his or her rent and cell phone bill while laboring over the Great American Novel. It also means a guaranteed readership of millions who'll do anything that Oprah tells them, even jumping off the roof of the John Hancock Building.

Why Frey submitted himself to Oprah's flagellation before millions of television viewers is beyond me. Personally, I would have told her to go get fucked and then move to France next door to Roman Polanski. Then again, you don't fuck with the Big O, for there was Frey, with his greasy receding hairline, nervously downing glasses of water until I sat waiting for his bladder to burst all over Oprah's couch.

I don't regularly watch Oprah. I don't particularly like her, and have grown hardened to her happy talk, thanks to real life. I mean, it's easy to lecture some single welfare mother about gratitude and finding happiness when you have over a billion cool ones in the bank. I much prefer finding my own reading material than to jump on the Oprah Book Club bandwagon reading whatever sentimental swill that she recommends.

The only time I have seen Oprah in person was on the Jumbotron at the United Center, sitting front row and center at Tina Turner's farewell concert with Stedman, her best friend Gayle, and the rest of her sycophants. When the Jumbotron wasn't focused on Oprah, she was yawning and checking her watch, but as soon as the camera zoomed in on her, Oprah suddenly came alive; jumping out of her seat and pumping her fist in the air to beat the old Harry. I came to the conclusion that Oprah was extremely sleep-deprived when she snuck out of the concert before it was over.

Oprah as a coporation, is also not necessarily a good citizen of Chicago's philanthropic community. She doesn't support any of the philanthropic foundations which are much better equipped to address societal ills, such as the outstanding Chicago Foundation for Women which supports a majority of Chicago's women's non-profit services community. Instead, she hawks her Angel Foundation and other Oprah-branded charities that suck millions of dollars away from organizations serving women and girls, or populations most at risk of contracting HIV and AIDS (e.g., heterosexual African-American women), or support Chicago's deplorable public schools, perpetuating our broken philanthropic system. Unless something is in it for Oprah - some guest she can exploit on her show or publicity - forget it.

But last night, my friend and I paused "The Aristocrats" DVD to watch the 11 p.m. repeat of Oprah's attempts to rehabilitate her Oprah-brand and image as goddess of the soccer moms, after the earlier live telecast was pre-empted by Chimpy's presidential press conference. We spent the first several minutes commenting on Oprah's choice of wardrobe during her opening mea culpa apologizing for her half-cocked phone call to Larry King last week proclaming the brohouha over Frey's book as "much ado about nothing." The winged collar on Oprah's blouse made her appear as if she didn't have a neck. I remarked to my friend that if not an intentional choice, it was certainly subliminal, providing Oprah protection if things got dicey and she could retreat down into her blouse.

In addition to Frey, who if he were a prisoner under interrogation at Guantanomo Bay she surely would have tortured him, Oprah spanked Nan Talese, Frey's publisher and Doubleday vice president, who essentially blamed her editors for not catching the book's many discrepancies. (That's right, Nan, blame it on the workers just like every other major corporation that lays off 30,000 workers because of bad executive decision-making.) Washington Post Richard Cohen also was a guest (or plant), who praised Oprah for her courage in admitting that "you made a mistake."

It doesn't surprise me that journalists are lining up this morning to kiss Oprah's ass. I have seen Oprah's wrath against reporters - especially reporters making crap money - who dare cross her "Hineyness" up close and personal. In 1989, a Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist reported a wild rumor that was sweeping the floor of Chicago's Board of Exchange that Oprah had stabbed her boyfriend, Steadman Graham, after coming home and discovering him in bed with her male hairdresser as being essentially true. Oprah had the columnist summarily fired when she threatened to file a mega slander suit against the Sun-Times, even though it was a blind item. (This columnist now writes for a community newspaper group, but the queens sill love her and insist that Oprah did come home and catch Steddy with his cock shoved up her hairdresser's behind.)

But it wasn't until Oprah tried to get my late friend, Don Alexander, fired after he phoned in a complaint about one of her shows that I truly began to understand just how powerful Oprah was. Don was a reporter and editor in the Royko-mold, although without Royko's success. He was a brilliant writer, but unfortunately had a serious drinking problem that kept him from advancing beyond crappy $25K-a-year jobs working for neighborhood rags. Don fulfilled his own self-prophecy of not living to 50 when he died suddenly at age 48 a few years ago, alone in his apartment with the TV blasting and a warmed-over beer on the table next to his Lazy Boy recliner. The only consolation of Don dying so young was that in the final 18 months of his life, I had never seen Don happier after he moved from Chicago, where he was miserable, to Atlanta where he blossomed under the love and support of an old army buddy and his wife.

Don had spent much of his adult life in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of master sergeant. He managed to earn a degree in journalism and left the army shortly before the first Gulf War where he was stationed in Alaska. He could speak knowledgably about any subject - politics, science, religion, literature, history - and there were many late nights of slurred phone conversations about events yet to transpire that at the time, I passed off as more of Don's drunken rants, but shockingly proved to be true.

He was the greatest colleague I ever worked with. Listeing to Don's end of his personal phone calls working at the desk adjacent to his, he should have been the one to write "A Million Little Pieces," as he discussed waking up in the morning to find cops in his bedroom shoving guns in his face looking for some fugitive that had shown up at one of his many parties, or screaming at his mother, "Suck my dick," when she blew her share of the rent money playing video poker. As I pretended to be busy at work and not eavesdropping on his personal phone calls, Don would invaribly share his side of the story after he hung up and we were outside having a smoke.

While I was getting in touch with the intuitive spirits, Don would be writing seamless, one-draft, perfect columns, accurately predicting events like 9/11 years before it occurred when the country was preoccupied with President Clinton getting blow jobs by a pudgy intern. In fact, it was just a few weeks after 9/11 when Don called me at work (I had left the paper) and asked if I had heard any news stories about someone phoning in a terrorist threat against Oprah on WGN. When I asked him why, he told me he had just been released by the Chicago bureau of the FBI for leaving an angry message on the general manager of WLS, the local station that carries the Oprah show, voice mail.

Apparently, Don had been drinking heavily the night before and was watching a repeat of the day's earlier telecast. I didn't see the particular show, but Don had taken offense to something Oprah said about "what did America expect" in reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition to calling Oprah a "$500 million cunt," he left his name and work number, and his immediate supervisor's name and work number. The next morning, the Lincolnwood police showed up at the office and escorted Don to the police station, where he was interrogated for the next five hours by the FBI. Eventually, the feds released Don with a stern warning. If it hadn't been two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the station probably would have ignored Don's voice mail as just another crank call.

To the executive editor's credit, a brave young man whose name I won't mention here because I don't want him to lose his job, he refused to buckle under Oprah's demands that he terminate Don. Instead, he told Don that he didn't care if he exercised his right to free speech, but to please leave out his place of employment in any future angry calls to celebrities. For those of us who listened to Don's story, our first response was, "Well, Oprah is a cunt."

It wasn't until Don passed away a few years later that I ran into a former colleague at his memorial, actually a loud, raucous party hosted by his famly that had propped up Don's cremains on the buffet table next to the Jell-O mold. We were standing in the kitchen when I mentioned Don's terrorist threat against Oprah. To my surprise, she told me she had a copy of the police tape of the actual voice mail. We quickly made arrangements to meet for drinks the next week and she would give me the tape to make copies (I made seven).

Like "The Aristocrats," the three-minute-long, voice-mail message is one of the most vile, vitriolic verbal attacks I've ever listened too. In the message, Don threatens to take Oprah out, refers to ABC as the "other Disney channel," and uses the work "fuck" thirty times in one sentence. From what I understand, Oprah hit the roof when the cops played it for her.

At any rate, Oprah accomplished what she set out to do on her show yesterday morning. She rehabilitated her brand, but not until after she read all the angry e-mail from her fans telling her that she was wrong when she said the truth doesn't matter. She won the praise of her most vocal critics, proving that she is a sly, master manipulator by disguising her spin with tears and astonishment. This will all die down eventually, but wherever my friend Don is, I hope he's feeling vindicated and laughing his ass off. He's the only guy I know who got away with fucking with the Big O.

Who's your favorite clown?

2006-01-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

Friday the 13th turned out be even unluckier for Chicago wise guy, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo. The feds arrested Joey Friday night after he had evaded an international manhunt nine months on the lam.

Joey was a made guy who fled his West Side neighborhood shortly before the FBI showed up at his modest bungalow to arrest him last April for 18 unsolved murders dating back more than 30 years. The sting was part of a multi-year, FBI investigation called "Operation Family Secrets" that nabbed 14 aging Chicago mobsters on an assortment of RICO, extortion and murder raps.

The news of Joey's arrest was a disappointment to many Chicagoans who cheered Joey's flight from justice, hoping that he was sucking down some fruity tropical drink on a beach somewhere in South America while being fanned by topless native beauties. During his nine months on the run, Joey wrote several long amusing letters to a federal judge proclaiming his innocence and offering to take a truth serum, provided that FBI and ATF agents did the same. Full of spelling and grammatical errors, Joey apologized saying that, "Englush was neber my bist sobjeck."

If you grew up in Chicago, you likely have your own happy childhood memories of the Mafia, whether it was finding a gun ditched in your back yard, gaping at the gangsters' mansions in River Forest and Oak Park, or having a distant relative who was "connected." In addition to being the nation's fattest city, Chicago is the cradle of organized crime.

For example, during high school I worked at a mob-owned Dairy Queen. The mob didn't actually own the franchise, but the building and property were owned by a Mafia button-man named Tony who rigged slot machines in Vegas. The franchise owner, Dennis, was terrified of Tony who had a habit of dropping by unannounced during our busiest times when customers were lined up outside around the building. He'd take Dennis to the back of the store and shake him down. Dennis would often emerge with a black eye or blood dripping down his face, but nobody thought anything of it. We also got paid in cash and I seriously doubt if anything was deducted for social security or state taxes. Fortunately for Dennis' teenaged employees, Tony never visted at closing time after Dennis had gone home, and we'd be locking each other in the freezers or making scupltures out of the soft-serve ice cream.

Growing up in Chicago's northwest suburbs, it wasn't unusual to see some poor schmuck light on his juice loan payments sitting in the back seat of a black caddy surrounded by goons, or guys dressed in Armani suits idling by pay phones, sauntering to and from their luxury cars in the middle of the day when most kids' fathers were at work.

Joey became boss of the Chicago outfit in 1975, after Sam Giancana was whacked in his basement while cooking sausages. For years, Joey entertained us with his antics ranging from broad daylight-mob hits to cutting up in court by peering out of masks made from newspapers, earning his nickname "the Clown." Many of Joey's feats have been fictionalized in movies like "Casino."

My boyfriend grew up on Chicago's West Side just two doors down from Joey on Ohio Street. He said it wasn't uncommon for Joey to come bursting out of his house in his boxer shorts and a Dago T, shooting a .38 into the air when the neighborhood kids were making too much noise playing outside. Joey's crew would also send the kids down the street to buy "clinchers," which were big, mushy, 16-inch softballs that they'd smack 450 feet to the end of the block with baseball bats that had no doubt been used to bash guys' brains into puree. Ocassionally, Joey would drive down the street at 100 mph, park his car in front of his house, and run inside leaving the car door wide open, not to emerge for several weeks.

Once when my boyfriend was about nine, he and his friends were playing in the alley, when Joey marched out of his house in his satin bathrobe and Italian leather slippers, and held two guys at gunpoint while he made them clobber each other with bricks.

Despite these incidents, their neighborhood was safe and relatively crime free. Joey didn't tolerate any shit. When my boyfriend's uncle, Chops, a popular bartender at the neighborhood Italian joint, got into trouble with gambling and someone shot a bullet through my boyfriend's grandma's window, Joey graciously helped his grandma take out a second mortgage on her building where all her extended family lived. He put Chops on a payment plan so Joey's associates wouldn't break Chops' legs.

Poor Chops passed away at a ripe old age on New Year's Day. This past year while Chops was in a nursing home, I'd take my boyrfriend's mother to visit him. After Joey went on the lam, Rose, who is hard of hearing, would probe Chops about Joey, screaming, "DIDN'T JOEY THE CLOWN WANT TO KILL YOU ONCE," arousing the attention of the six or seven nurse's aids smoking cigarettes in the day room.

Joey served a lengthy prison sentence and vowed never to go back to the joint after the FBI showed up at his garage 18 months ago to take a DNA sample from inside his mouth. Joey has since been linked to whacking Alan Dorfman, a mob lawyer who was rumoroed to have been flipped by the feds in 1983, gunning Dorfman down in the parking lot of the Purple Hilton in Lincolnwood at 2:30 in the afternoon. Joey was also said to have been present when Vegas point man, Anthony "the Ant" Spilotro and his brother Michael, were beaten nearly to death in a basement in Bensenville in 1986, then buried alive in an Indiana cornfield in their underwear. A farmer found the shallow grave a few days later plowing his field, and the headlines of the then, Rupert Murdoch-owned Chicago Sun-Times screamed, "THE MOB BOTCHED IT."

A strand of hair found inside a discarded black ski-mask used in a 1974 mob hit on a local businessman, has since been linked to Joey through the magic of DNA. The feds had egg on their faces when they sheepishly reported that Joey was no where to be found after they showed up at his house to arrest him, claiming that they didn't have the manpower to monitor all the wiseguys under investigation in Operation Family Secrets, "24/7."

Joey was arrested sitting in the passenger seat of a friend's Lincoln in an alley in Elmwood Park, just a few miles from his Ohio Street bungalow. Since then, the feds have been acting like they caught Osama Bin Laden, who they said would have a better chance of making bail than Joey the Clown. Touting Joey's capture as a major blow to "the Outfit," they've compared Joey's hiding places to "spider holes," but I'd hardly call a house in Elmwood Park a "spider hole." He was hiding right under their noses these past nine months, while they turned the world upside down looking for him.

The FBI is just stupid and misguided, grabbing easy "popcorn" headlines by pursuing aging gangsters lucky enough to have surivived their many decades in Chicago's La Costra Nostra to become old men crapping in their Depends. Going after a dozen or so depleted gangsters who should have been put away 30 years ago for ruining thousands of mom-and-pop businesses extorting outlandish payments for waste pickup and protection, and filling chuckholes on the Kennedy Expressway with oatmeal, is a lot easier than pursuing big, mean motherfucker gangbangers whose crimes are far more brutal in their totality, with ties to international terrorism. So much for homeland security, I guess.

Joey now sits in a federal jail, a cement anvil-shaped building in downtown Chicago with slits for windows. It's too bad that Chops couldn't have hung around a few weeks longer, so he could see Joey's latest mugshot of him looking like a homeless person with long, greasy hair and a scraggly beard, unlike the reputed mob leader and sociopath that he was during his prime.

Ahey, ta da da ick

2006-01-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

Seems like every time I tried to sit down and update this blog, I had to deal with crazy elderly people or arrange a cheap cremation for an indigent friend.

The holidays were swell but I'm glad to see them end. Too many people, even strangers, kept stopping by and I don't want to consume another alcoholic beverage for the next month. It's nice to be popular, but I really am starting to get sick of my friends. They need to stay home for awhile and take down their Christmas decorations, like I've been doing for the past day and a half. My collection of Swedish candle holders and ornaments has now swelled to five plastic crates. Lugging that shit around and packing it up was almost as bad as moving.

So far 2006 is shaping up to be a year of miracles lost, starting with Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. It was shocking to see the world's oldest teenager struggling to regain his speech after suffering a debilitating stroke last year, let alone doing it on global television. Like my jingle-bell-areola-dance that I did for my boyfriend and next-door neighbor on Christmas Eve, I could have done without Dick wishing me a "Ahey, ta da da ick" after the ball was dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Do we really need to see this?

I wanted to do a "year in review" with pithy observations of important world events that took place in 2005, like the Michael Jackson child molestation trial, the tsunami, Robert Blake's murder acquittal, Terri Schaivo, Pope John Paul II, Hurricane Katrina and the appearance of Our Lady on the viaduct wall underneath the Kennedy Expressway. But I'm no pundit, and anything that has to be said about these events was said already by people much cleverer than I, like Pat Robertson.

So instead, I'll wrap up some of the ongoing sagas from 2005 PDD entries.

Rob - My ex-neighbor Rob stopped by the morning of New Year's Eve. He stayed two minutes, long enough to tell me how shitty his holidays were. He got so drunk on Christmas Eve, that one of the bartenders from Bob & Trish's New Beginnings had to drive him home and put him to bed at 6 p.m. But Rob is making progress recovering from his broken heart and his brush with a 30-year prison sentence. I told him that I hoped 2006 will be better than 2005, and that time heals all wounds in spite of yourself. He said felt ready to take back his gun collection, that includes a Thompson submachine gun, which is against the law to own. He left after one of his buddies called him on his cell phone and went to pick up his guns that his friend was holding. Rob also bought another gun last week.

Dumbo Drop - Just when I thought my father would make it through the holidays without having a meltdown, I received a call from my little brother on New Year's Eve around 7 p.m., telling me that the nursing home where my mother lives called to say that my father showed up at their New Year's Eve party drunk on vodka. I was already wearing a little hat and had had several drinks, and was in no condition to drive 40 miles to pick him up. One of my brothers who is a recovering alcoholic and devoted 12-step drama queen, who always wants to stage an intervention for one family member or another, went to pick him up. We think my father snuck back after my brother took him home and got his car. Every time we talked to my father, he gave us a whole new story, including one where the cops hid his car. I went out to see him on Jan. 2, his 80th birthday, and had to read him the riot act. We laid out a whole new set of rules, including limiting his daily visits to see my mother. So much for A.A. He told me A.A. was boring and all people did at the meetings was tell depressing stories, which I think is the whole point. He promised he wouldn't drink anymore and I laid out a schedule of activities for him, including volunteering at the local hospital and walking around the Gurnee Mills shopping mall. I told him that if he didn't cut the shit, my brother the 12-step drama queen was going to have him committed to an alcohol rehab center.

Barry Cowsill - The one day when I didn't check the Cowsill website, there was a heartbreaking announcement from one of Barry's brothers saying that Barry's body had been found on a wharf in New Orleans. Barry turned up missing in Hurricane Katrina. Information is still sketchy, but preliminary assessments from the NOLA medical examiner said that poor Barry died of storm-related causes. Reports I have read said the body was found on Dec. 28 and was identified through dental records on Jan. 3. Apparently, Barry had been deceased for quite some time. The body was recovered on a wharf not too far from the New Orleans Convention Center, where Barry was spotted alive and smoking a cigarette on CNN news video in the early days of September, when family members last heard from him from messages left on his sister's cell phone.

Pretty sad stuff. Like the miners who died in the Sago Mine, 2006 has yet to produce any miracles. The Cowsills seem like a nice family, and who among us cannot identify with or love a dysfunctional family? The news accounts I've read seem to indicate that Barry was found on a pier along the banks of the Mississippi River, and not actually in the water. I find it amazing that a body could lay on dry ground without someone noticing it being there until four fucking months later. But then, what happened to the people left behind in New Orleans who had no choice but to ride out the storm and its even more horrifying, dangerous aftermath, should happen to no American.

Whether Barry was binge drinking in NOLA all this time or simply wandered away from the Convention Center looking for a path out of the cesspool, only to be swept away in fetid flood water or clobbered over the head by thugs, we still don't know, but the Cowsills have promised to tell the whole story to their fans after they themselves get some answers. There isn't going to be a memorial, per Barry's wishes. He just wants everyone to party. You gotta love him!

What is a wharf, anyway? I know what a pier is, like Navy Pier in Chicago, and I can't imagine a body laying on Navy Pier for four months without some tourist becoming curious. If someone could tell me what the hell a wharf is, I'd appreciate it.

Now that this story has come to a sensational ending, I hope the Cowsills get some gigs and a documentary on "True Hollywood Story" that they so richly deserve.

Other than that, kids, I'm back on the weed wagon after a holiday weed binge, ready to pee into a cup so I can hopefully become unhappily employed again working some soul-sucking job!

See you in the funny papers

2005-12-18T14:38:00.000-08:00

Back when I was growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicago Tribune published the dullest, most out-of-sync comics in the world. I took everything that I read, saw on television or heard on the radio very literally as a child, and wondered why I never came across any raucous boarding houses or little girls with no eyeballs living by their wits in the street.

I read the funnies religiously every Sunday in the Trib. Aside from Dennis the Menace and Peanuts, the other strips were throwbacks to World War I. None of them really made sense in a modern world- context, and they make even less sense today.

For example, Dagwood and Blondie are still wearing the same style of clothing they wore 75 years ago, when rich, young playboy Dagwood first met flapper Blondie in some seedy New York nightclub, and was disinherited by his millionaire father after marrying the trashy, slutty Blondie.

Dagwood and Blondie are still trying to make ends meet in their tacky house on Dagwood's weekly salary of $48, and getting hassled by the Man, Mr. Dithers. Yet today, a contemporary boom-box or computer will appear out of nowhere in the strip. Do we really need to see this? Any attempt to bring Blondie and Dagwood into the 21st century still can't compensate for their same tired shtick from the Great Depression. These two should have been retired 30 years ago, when Chic Young attempted to modernize the strip by having Blondie appear in tight pants, only to have her go back to her 1930s fashions after a public outcry. They sucked during the 1970s and they still suck today.

For a long time I thought Little Orphan Annie was blind because she didn't have any eyeballs. I thought her dog, Sandy, was a seeing-eye dog, guiding his young mistress through all sorts of harrowing perils. And why the hell didn't Daddy Warbucks keep better track of Annie if he was supposed to be her guardian? Somebody call DCFS!

Another comic that I read regularly was Rick O'Shay. Rick O'Shay was the blond, freckle-faced U.S. marshal of Conniption, Montana. The strip was beautifully drawn, set against breathtaking vistas of the Montana Rockies. Each strip was set exactly 100 years before the date it actually appeared. I used to get horny over Rick O'Shay's friend Hipshot Percussion, the sociopath gunslinger. There was always an element of danger about Hipshot, like he was going to snap any minute. Some dude was always riding into Conniption to call Hipshot out for a gun duel. Stan Lynde, the comic's creator, always managed to avoid any overt violence in the strip, which was a disappointment to me, because I wanted to see Hipshot kill Rick O'Shay.

Dick Tracy also made me horny as a child. He was the first male that I was ever attracted to. I was totally ga-ga over the square-jawed, inscrutable detective in the yellow raincoat and fedora. In 1960, WGN aired a series of five-minute, poorly produced, animated shorts of Dick Tracy, on a program hosted by Ray "Sgt Pettibone" Rayner and his sidekick, talking-canine puppet Tracer, who did double duty as Beauregard Burnside III on "Garfield Goose." Dick Tracy never did any actual police work in these animated shorts, but instead assigned cases to a staff of ethically questionable detectives that pushed the envelope of racial stereotypes, such as Joe Jitsu and Go-Go Gomez. The animated cartoons followed the same violent course set by the comic strip, as the junior detectives pursued actual villains from past strips who had either been killed by Tracy or were otherwise serving sentences on Death Row. Dick Tracy motivated me to learn how to read, and his 2-way wrist radio fascinated the hell out of me, which has since been replaced by a wrist computer. I eventually grew out of my Dick Tracy fixation, especially after Junior, the 9-year-old street urchin whom Tracy adopted and saved from a life of poverty, grew up and married Sparkle Plenty, daughter of B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie.

Moon Mullins was also outdated by the time I discovered him in the Sunday comics. Supposedly, Emmy Schmaltz's boarding house was set in Chicago, where Moon, a ne'r do well prizefighter rented a room. Moon, short for "Moonshine," was first introduced in 1923 at the height of the Prohibition Era, to attract new readers who made their own illegal bathtub gin, I presume. Moon was usually shown laying around Emmy's boarding house drinking and betting on the ponies. Moon's little brother, Kayo, was introduced a few years later, who was Moon's "mini me" wearing the same bowler hat. Kayo slept in one of Moon's dresser drawers, which I found very interesting. Besides, Emmy, the ugliest woman in the comics, there was Lord Plushbottom, or "Plushie" as Moon called him. Plushie introduced whole a new level of "fish out of water" humor to the strip's low-class ruffians, as well as plenty of big bottom jokes. Emmy eventually married Plushie, becoming Lady Plushbottom, and the strip often included gags about their married life, which was hideous. Other characters included Lady Plushbottom's black cook, Mamie, and Mamie's incredibly lazy husband, Willie. Both of these characters were quietly dropped from the strip during the 1950s, as even then their racial stereotypes pushed the boundaries of good taste. If Willie were around today, I'm sure he and Moon would be smoking crack behind Lady Plushbottom's backyard outhouse.

Another pre-World War I comic was Gasoline Alley. Gasoline Alley was the first strip where the characters aged progressively. Much of the action took place around a local gas station owned by Walt Wallet, a confirmed bachelor, who found an abandoned baby on his doorstep that he named Skeezix, cowboy parlance for "motherless calf." Walt adopted Skeezix and eventually married, producing more children. The strip is still running today, though in what papers I couldn't tell you, probably Crawford, Texas. There is a Gasoline Alley website where you can still read the daily strip. A lot of the main characters have died, and Walt, who is now in his second-century and not long for this world, is being cared for by a politically-correct, African-American caregiver. During the 1990s, Walt's wife, Phyllis, passed away which was covered in weeks of gut-wrenching daily strips about her funeral and Walt's lonely, physical decline. Skeezix has since retired from the gas station business, which is now being run by his daughter Clovia's fat-ass husband, Slim. Much of the humor in today's strip revovles around Slim polishing off two or three Quiznos subs on his way home from work. The gas station has also been transformed into a min-mart, that sells beef jerky and corn nuts, and has a Cappiccino machine offering three different kinds of artificially flavored coffee. The Gasoline Alley mini-mart is the perfect setting for a mass murder shooting rampage.

By far the worse comic strip ever that I can remember growing up is Dondi. Dondi was an Italian war orphan who happened upon an Italian farmhouse occupied by U.S. soldiers at the lingering end of World War II. No one could figure out who Dondi's parents were, so he just stayed with the "Joes," shining their boots, and handwashing their dirty socks and underwear. Dondi never aged but still managed to remember details of World War II with amazing clarity, even in 1969. Dondi debuted in 1955, and much of the early strip focused on Dondi's acclimation to American society. Eventually, his origins as an adopted World War II war orphan were de-emphasized, and Dondi became just another small-town kid having adventures with the Explorers Club, comprised of his three idiot friends Eddy, the stupid one; Baldy, the scrappy one whose bangs covered his eyes; and bespectacled, bookish Web. Dondi also had a small dog named Queenie, which gives you some idea of the kind of fag Dondi really was. I could also never figure out the pronounciation of Dondi's mother's name, Katje. Was the "j" silent or did it have a soft "g" sound?

Dondi was dark and depressing, especially during his annual summer adventure with his adopted grandmother, "Grandma McGowan," a rich, society lady who took a shining to the dark-eyed lad, and would lose him places like Rio de Janeiro, forcing Dondi to sleep in rat-infested alleys. Hasbro created a Dondi board game, and a film version of Dondi starring David Janssen and six-year-old David Kory in the title role, is often credited as "the worst movie ever made." During the 1970s, almost 30 years after World War II ended, a serviceman named Jim Dante showed up claiming to be Dondi's biological father, and for several weeks, a bitter custody battle ensued. Finally, Dondi was put out of his misery in the early 1980s, after Katje returned to work and was sexually harassed by her boss, causing Dondi and Ted to come and save Katje from being raped by her lecherous boss during a business trip.

I don't read the comics anymore, with the exception of "The Family Circus." Somehow, I can't start my day without coming up with a incredibly dirty punchline to replace the cute, Christian Family-values gag, like "Billy's fisting Dolly again," or Jeffy asking his grandmother, "Are you wet yet, Grandma?" I still can't get over the uproar caused when Mommy changed her hairstyle to a short, Dorothy Hamill coif in the early 1990s. I can think of a million more bad comic strips, like "Nancy," whose spiky burrhead is still featured today, "The Wizard of Id," and "Li'l Abner," which I never understood.

The comics today are as bad as the ones I grew up with. Remembering their plot lines compared to what I know now about pedophiles, sociopaths and addiction, they're just too depressing, reopening old fears of childhood abandonment, which is probably why I read them.

Have a lutefisk

2005-12-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

As the Midwest lights up like a whorehouse on a Saturday night, with garish displays of holiday lights and inflatable Santas crammed on to front lawns the size of postage stamps, I am reminded of the Scandinavian Christmases that my family used to celebrate when I was a child.

I think the best way to describe them is the opening scene of Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” when the Ekdahl family gathers in an unnamed Swedish village to celebrate Christmas Eve in 1905. I know that Ingmar Bergman’s films are dark and dreary and Swedish, with prevailing themes of father-God struggles, but as soon as Bergman’s characters start breaking out the hardtack, I’m laughing myself silly. I grew up on the high-fiber goodness of hardtack, or what you civilians call Wasa bread. My grandparents ate it all the time, usually smothered with herring or a stick of butter. Maybe Bergman meant his films to be comedies and only Swedes get the yoke?

In the movie, Fanny and Alexander are eagerly awaiting the arrival of their philandering, larger-than-life, adventurer uncle, Gustav. The kids in the family fall upon Uncle Gustav who takes them into another room after a traditional Scandinavian Christmas supper of hardtack and lutefish, and performs a parlor trick by farting gas on to a candle flame that explodes like a blow torch. The kids make him do it over and over, until Uncle Gustav’s wife walks in and makes him stop. Then the adults in the movie get drunk on glug and the family joins hands, dancing from room to room accompanied by jolly accordion music. The rest of the film goes downhill from here, with only occasional comic relief provided by more eating of hardtack.

That’s pretty much my early childhood Christmases in a nutshell. As a second generation Swedish-American, I am the recipient of many hackneyed Scandinavian holiday customs passed down to me by my Swedish grandparents.

Our house always smelled like a Port-o-Pottie at Taste of Chicago around the holidays as my relatives consumed large amounts of lutefisk, a cod fish fermented in lye. Another holiday custom of the Swedes is to make Santa Clause into most horrible, hideous monster imaginable. This was no genial, Clay-mation Santa like on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” During my years as a believer, Santa angrily rang our doorbell on Christmas Eve and dumped our presents in the snow; prodded me awake out of a deep sleep by standing over my bed; or burst into a room scaring the shit of us until you didn’t even want to go near the motherfucker, let alone dance around the Christmas tree with him while some old Swede played “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” on the accordion.

When my niece was three, my sister-in-law and I took to her to breakfast with Santa on a Viking ship held in the basement of the Swedish-American Museum in Andersonville. The kids were happily playing beneath the bows of the Viking ship, until Santa stuck his head through a porthole and started screaming at them. My niece became hysterical, and I was overcome with having scary Santa flashbacks. My sister-in-law, who grew up believing that Santa lived in the toy department at Marshall Field’s, was unaware of the Santa-is-a-serial killer Scandinavian tradition. We took her upstairs and tried to calm her down, but she refused to return to the party and socialize with Santa. She did make me go back downstairs and get the free gift that Santa was passing out.

In Sweden, Santa is actually a pagan pixie that lives in a meteor crater in the Lapland called “Jul Tomte.” There are hundreds of “tomte gubins” as my mother used to call them, living near villages throughout Sweden, hiding underground or deep in the forests. Jul Tomte is the enthroned pixie, sort of like Prince Charles. On Christmas Eve, Jul Tomte and/or his helpers arrive in towns riding on goats or the “Jul bock” delivering baskets of presents and other goodies. They knock on doors of houses and ask, “Finns det några snälla barn här?" or “Are there any good children living here?”

The tomtems love porridge and tobacco. That’s pretty much what they sustain on. They have wars with the trolls which they always lose, because a thousand tomtems ran through the weeds, chased by one Norwegian. The trolls kill them but the tomtems keep replenishing themselves, because they are a fertile people, and clean.

In the Lapp, Christmas Eve is the scariest night of the year because of Stallo, the furry evil twin brother of the Jul Tomte. Stallo, which means “metal man,” is often dressed as an ancient astronaut or robot, harkening back to the metal armor worn by the Vikings. Stallo delights in genital mutilation of his innocent victims. He will poke his staff up the skirts of young girls. On Christmas Eve, he rides around on a sleigh pulled by lemmings – Jesus’ punishment to the idolatrous Swedes – looking for something to drink. He will sink his stake into the ground near a fresh water supply and if he doesn’t find water, he’ll bash in the head of a child and drink its blood.

According to a Lapp legend, three brothers decided to play games instead of going to church on Christmas Eve. They wanted to have some fun by gutting a reindeer, but as none were to be found, the youngest brother volunteered instead. After the boy was slaughtered and disemboweled, and the sparkling white snow splattered with blood, the two remaining brothers began to cook his flesh.

Smelling the savory aroma of roasting human flesh, Stallo leaped into action, killing one boy instantly. The other brother tried to escape. He hid in a locked chest but Stallo blew red-hot embers through the keyhole, burning the child alive.

The old Swedes enjoyed hazing us at Christmas, just as they were hazed by their own parents and grandparents growing up in smelly houses in Sweden, hearing magical Christmas tales of genital mutilation. The rest of the year, we just played bunko and drank coffee – even the 4-year-olds.

All we are saying ...

2005-12-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

So I was driving around this afternoon, doing nothing as usual and listening to Christmas songs on WLIT. WLIT’s 24-hour Christmas play-list has taken on decidedly more religious tone this year. I get sick of listening to Amy Grant belting “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and really don’t know why I listen to this 24-hour station of saccharine horseshit every holiday season.

I was wondering why WLIT wasn’t playing John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” this year when it suddenly came on the radio. If I recall correctly, seemed like the ‘LITE played Lennon’s 1971 anti-war holiday anthem every three seconds last year, which usually prompted me to call one of my friends on my cell phone and do my famous Yoko Ono imitation – which isn’t hard to do because all you have to do is sing really badly – and belt the chorus “A Velly Melly Cwistmas” on their office voice mail. (If you’re thinking that I have way too much time on my hands, you’re right.)

I pumped up the volume and rolled down the windows and was happily warbling “War is over, if you want it” to other confused drivers. Then suddenly it dawned on me: today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

What an incredible ass-fuck that was 25 years ago. I remember my friend Karol calling me around 10:30 in the evening to tell me that Howard Cosell had just announced during "Monday Night Football" that John Lennon had been shot. I immediately turned on WXRT in Chicago and Johnny Mraz was breaking the terrible news that Lennon had just died. I was 23 years old and devastated. I had just graduated from college and was living at home in a chaotic, highly dysfunctional household with an alcoholic brother and crazy parents, with no job and no real prospects, wishing I was back in Iowa City so I could get drunk and mourn with other like-minded freaks.

My father was enraged when the phone started ringing late at night with friends calling and crying. John Lennon was a huge hero of mine since I was seven and watched the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan along with the rest of the country. My life inextricably changed at that moment and I was never the same. I shared Lennon’s dark humor as a teenager even before I read in the Hunter Davies’ Beatle biography about how Lennon once drew a cartoon of Jesus on the cross with a pair of bedroom slippers sitting at the bottom while in art school. I was like, “Man, this guy is just like me,” as I was starting a Patty Hearst Fan Club for my high school friends, or drawing cartoons of people with really large lips and teeth. When I was in college, I once called the door man at the Dakota in New York who told me that John and Yoko never went out.

The next morning I was angry, and am still angry to this day. I think anyone who gets killed by a gun in this country – Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., some poor schmuck just doing his job at 7-Eleven, the students at Columbine, some innocent 9-year-old playing in her front yard on the West Side of Chicago, John Lennon – dies in vain, and will continue to die in vain because this country is just fucking hopeless when it comes to guns or anything else that’s intelligent or makes sense.

We always kill the peacemakers because it seems no one can stand a society that actually puts the interests of people first, before money, oil and corporate conglomerates. Just when things start to get better, something comes along to fuck it up.

“Happy Christmas (War is Over)” is just as relevant today as it was in 1971. Yeah, it’s queer and idealistic, but at least Lennon tried to change hearts and minds, even if it the results were embarrassing. In 2005 they’re still singing “Give Peace A Chance” at anti-war demonstrations and his anti-war songs will continue to outlive us all. I mean, try singing “Silly Love Songs” when you’re shutting down Lake Shore Drive and the police are running toward you in riot gear.

We could sure use John Lennon today. I can just picture him at 65, sitting on a panel on Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” making us wet our pants with hilarious cracks about George Bush and organizing the global village into something livable for us all.

So here’s to John Lennon. Hard to believe it has been 25 years since he’s been gone because it seems like two days. (And sorry about that stupid Broadway musical that Yoko produced about your life.)

Evening With a Princess

2005-11-29T06:52:00.000-08:00

Last night I spent the evening with a princess, a Mafia Princess that is, Antoinette Giancana. She was promoting her new book along with one of her co-authors, “JFK and Sam: The Connection Between the Giancana and Kennedy Assassinations.”

For those of you who didn’t grow up in Chicago and probably don’t have any happy childhood memories of the Mafia, Sam Giancana was the head of the Chicago crime outfit. His name shows up all over the place in Sinatra biographies and JFK assassination conspiracy theories. He also had a lot of high-profile affairs with broads like Phyllis McGuire of the famous ‘50s singing group, the McGuire Sisters. Sam, aka “Momo,” got whacked the night I graduated from high school in June 1975, while he was cooking sausages in his basement. His daughter Antoinette, aka “Toni,” wrote a best-selling book about growing up in the mob called “Mafia Princess.” The book was made into a fabulous made-for-TV movie starring Susan Lucci and Tony Curtis. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I highly recommend both.

Toni struggled with the liquor and the pills for a time as she tried to reconcile the fact that her pop was a thieving, brutal killer who ordered torture killings of his associates and enemies, such as sticking ice picks into their testicles and letting them bleed to death. Like Victoria Gotti, Toni alternately reveres and is repulsed by her father’s notoriety. Eventually, Toni settled down in Downers Grove and raised five beautiful sons, and has led a crime free life.

The book signing was held at The Book Stall in Winnetka, a hoity-toity North Shore suburb. I went with my friend Karol. Karol and I both bitterly disagree on who shot JFK and we have a lot of screaming arguments about it. The JFK assassination conspiracy was all the rage when we were in high school – that and the Eagles. Anyway, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s when all these theories started surfacing after Geraldo aired the Zapruder home-movie in its 30-second entirety for the first time on network television during an ABC special.

Since then, I’ve probably read every book and watched every hackneyed documentary about the Kennedy assassination and came to the conclusion many years ago that OSWALD ACTED ALONE. I think many Americans have a hard time accepting this fact because Oswald was such a pathetic low-life, and JFK was larger than life. But you’d think after 40-plus years that some 90-year-old ball sack on his death bed would finally ‘fess up and go on record as being one of the participants in the Kennedy assassination. Instead, we got guys doing three-hour videos deep in the bowels of prisons telling tales about how they were the hit man behind the grassy knoll in exchange for some vending machine Cheetos, a Diet Coke and a pack of cigarettes, conning a bunch of gullible writers. I mean, I’d cop to betraying Jesus Christ if I were in that situation. That’s just what these theories are – theories – and nothing credible has surfaced which changes the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated John. F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

I was a little taken aback when I met Toni. I expected to see the same hot, bouffant-haired cutie who posed for Playboy in the late 1980s, but instead was confronted by an elderly woman in her early seventies. WHERE THE HELL WAS SUSAN LUCCI, I wondered. She reminded me of one of those nuns who has given up wearing the habit, dressed plainly in black, no make-up and sporting wire-rimmed glasses. (Hey, I’m describing myself!) The only inkling of her notorious past was the diamond encrusted “Toni” pendant that she wore around her neck. She was a hell of a nice lady though, winked at us, talked about how she saved all of her chump change in a can in her pantry and then took herself out for a fancy lunch on her birthday, which is June 23. “That’s my booze and my lunch.”

The book store was packed. Everybody there, myself included, had obviously spent way too much personal time reading books about the Kennedy assassination and Chicago mob history. We were a well-versed and informed audience. Toni introduced herself as “Antoinette John-cana.” The book’s third co-author, Dr. Thomas H. Jobe, a psychiatrist, wasn’t there, which was unfortunate because we certainly could have used a psychiatrist last night. Dr. Jobe helped Toni recall deeply repressed memories that connected the dots of her father’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

In a nutshell: Momo ordered the hit on JFK. According to Toni, her father told her: “I’m going to send a message they’ll never forget.” She also recalls other statements he made, including: “Some day they are gonna get their lunch, in other words, somebody is gonna take after them and really destroy them, and it won’t just be me, it’s also going to be others that are going to lead the Kennedy demise.”

More JFK and Sam fun facts:

- Toni referred to her father as “Sam.”
- She says her father was “assassinated” by the CIA on 6/19/75, a week before he was to testify before the Church Committee, which was convened to reopen the government's investigation into the Kennedy assassination. According to Toni, Sam was going to “drop a dime on the CIA” that contracted her father to help assassinate Castro early on in the Kennedy Administration, which included the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a plot to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. "I'm still bitter about it," she said.
- There were six black cars – a combination of CIA, FBI and Oak Park police – parked in front of her father’s house 24/7. “Usually these cars would leave one at a time to go to lunch. But during the day of 6/19/75, all the cars left at the same time for several hours, allowing enough time for the CIA hit man to enter my father’s house and hide there.”
- Toni knows the exact spot in the house where the CIA hit man probably hid throughout the day. “My father used to hide in there and jump out and scare me.”
- Sam was responsible for procuring 1,000 additional votes in Chicago's mob-controlled downtown wards during the close 1960 presidential election. I asked Toni about Mayor Richard J. Daley’s involvement in boosting Kennedy votes in city wards, Toni replied: “He was in on it, too.”
- Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s father, visited Sam in 1959 to get the mob's help in fixing the 1960 West Virginia primary and the Chicago vote.
- Toni’s ex-husband met with old Joe Kennedy who allgedly told him that his son's administration would go "easy on your operation." “But a little guy named Bobby Kennedy turned the cards," Toni said. "My father and his friends expected some respect in return. Bobby really zapped it to the mob to where it just escalated to where something had to happen.”
- When asked what would have happened if RFK lived to be elected president in 1968, Toni replied: “If I were a guy, it’d be a short stay for Bobby."
- Toni and Dr Hughes both purported that "Joe Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were as corrupt and evil as the mob." Bobby tried to whack Carlos Marcello, head of the New Orleans crime family. Dr. Hughes said that RFK deported Marcello and his attorney to Guatemala in 1961, whisking both off in a military plane. They were eventually left for dead in an El Salvadorian jungle, until they were able to find an airport after walking thirty miles through the the jungle. Marcello suffered three broken ribs and "was in great pain." “Bobby didn’t even allow Carlos to phone his wife and let her know he wasn’t coming home, or grab a toothbrush. That’s wrong.”
- Giancana's daughters hosted a party for their father at his home in Oak Park the evening of 6/19/75, after he was deported from Mexico wearing just his pajamas and slippers. When the guests left, one of Sam's daughters returned to the house to retrieve her handbag and saw one of the party guests, Butch Blasi, skulking around the door to her father's basement hideaway. Sam was discovered by his caretaker after midnight shot once in the back of the head, and six more times in a circle around his mouth.
- According to Toni, her father left the door unlocked to his basement hideaway for the convenience of his three daughters. The front and back doors to the home were always locked. “Who would be stupid enough to rob Sam Giancana’s house?”
- The co-authors claim that the government planted the gun that killed Sam, which was later found in the Thatcher Woods with with Butch Blasi’s prints on it.
- Toni shuddered and shook her head when I asked if her father knew Jack Ruby, who she said was sent "quietly sent to Dallas to look after the mob’s interests.” (Considering that Ruby left his daschund in his car while he went to the Dallas police station to finish off Oswald, I'd say that Ruby was derranged himself.)
- Following the publication of “Mafia Princess,” Toni said she received “a lot of letters from prisoners,” including one from the mysterious hit man behind the grassy knoll, who apparently is alive and well and serving a sentence in Stateville.
- Toni, Dr. Hughes and Dr. Jobe interviewed the former Giancana associate nicknamed “Dead Eye” on video for three hours in Stateville in 1994. “If you listened to the tape and saw his body language, you knew he was telling the truth.”
- “Dead Eye” is James Files, who was just 21 when he hid behind the grassy knoll and is said to have fired the shot that spewed JFK’s brains all over Jackie’s pink suit. (I plan to write to him in prison.)
- Toni also said that her father was not involved in the alleged murder of Marilyn Monroe, who o.d.’d in August 1962. “It was Bobby. My father was not involved in the Nembutal suppositories. My father cared for a lot of women. He had a soft spot for Marilyn and thought she was misunderstood, used and abused. He did not believe in abuse toward women.” (I guess Sam was just kidding around when he almost broke Shirley MacLaine’s arm twisting it behind her back, and then slapped Sammy Davis Jr. across the room when he tried to intervene.)
- Toni says that the Oak Park police need to do a reenactment of her father’s murder, “the way they did [last week's Metra] train crash in Elmwood Park.”
- Toni still works “45 hours a week” as a sales associate at Expo Design in Oak Brook.

The evening ended when Toni and I get into a heated exchange about her father's affair with Judith Exter Campbell, the mistress Sam and JFK both shared simultaneously during JFK’s presidency. Exter Campbell got pregnant by JFK in 1962, and had an abortion paid for by Giancana at Grant Hospital in Lincoln Park. Sam reportedly offered to marry her so the baby would have a last name. I’ve read in various accounts, Exter Campbell’s included, that she and Sam were “just friends.”

“No, it was sex,” Toni said. “Her bras and panties were all over my parents’ house. I still resent him for it.”

I asked her about Judith’s pregnancy and why her father offered to marry her. “Why would he do that,” she shot back.

“Well, maybe to blackmail the president, honey!”

“The baby could’ve been my father’s. They didn’t have DNA back then.”

The book signing ended abruptly. I think Toni and Dr. Hughes were both sick of me by then. I’m sure that in the future, they’re going to monitor who is sitting in the front row. I probably won’t read the book, but just give it to my neighbor, who fronted me the money to buy her a copy because she wanted the “Mafia Princess’s” autograph.

Anyway, I’m over the Kennedy Assassination.

Why is this turkey pink?

2005-11-24T22:02:00.000-08:00

For years I’ve stared at the famous Norman Rockwell painting “Freedom from Want.” You know the one, the old lady presenting a golden brown turkey to her guests, her man standing proudly beside her, and the goofy guy in the lower right hand corner smiling in anticipation. I’ve often wondered about the people in this painting. I think of a freakishly warm Thanksgiving afternoon, the old lady who’s slaved in a kitchen for eight hours making yams and fluffy dinner rolls with lard, the turkey, undercooked, and her guests lined up in front of the bathroom a few hours later saying, “Well, that’s another Thanksgiving dinner Ma’s ruined.”

Undercooked poultry has been a long-standing Thanksgiving tradition in my family. I was probably in my thirties before I realized that turkey wasn't supposed to be pink on the inside. I could never figure out why some years, I spent the entire Friday after Thanksgiving sick in bed with a belly ache and the shits. One year, I threw up in my friend’s bushes and couldn’t figure out if I was hung over, sick with the flu or had food poisoning.

In recent years, my sister-in-law, God bless her, has commandeered the turkey, and we’ve had lovely, fully-cooked poultry ever since.

Like a lot of holidays, Thanksgiving has lost its meaning over the years. It used to be day where we thought about the Pilgrims, who fled here in pursuit of puritanical religious freedom. Now, we’re too busy trying to choose which celebrity wake-up call we should get so we can be sitting in the parking lot of some big box store at 4 a.m., waiting to trample our fellow man so we can grab one of six plasma TVs for some incredibly low price. I feel sorry for all those retail employees who have to prepare dinner for their families, wash the dishes, entertain their ungrateful relatives, and get up 2 a.m. so they can be at their posts when the doors open at dawn for Black Friday, making $8 an hour waiting on assholes. Whoever came up with the idea of opening stores this early should be shot.

A few days before Congress broke for the Thanksgiving holiday, both the House and Senate voted to give themselves a raise, the same day they voted to cut food stamps and extensions for unemployment benefits for the displaced middle-class. Who cares, right? As long as Chimpy and the rest of the First Family were able to enjoy their maple-whipped mashed taters and deep-fried turkey in Crawford, Texas. I wonder if Chimpy farted after dinner?

I think the best Thanksgivings I spent were the ones where I had to work. I’m happy to work on any major holiday. Hell, I’d be happy to work on any ordinary weekday, period. During the early 1990s, I was the public relations director for a non-profit organization in Chicago that took care of the elderly. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, we held big parties for hundreds of lonely and isolated seniors, and prepared home-cooked meals for volunteers to deliver to shut-ins. The food was good, too, not institutional cafeteria food.

My job was to drum up media coverage for the events, and secure volunteers to work the parties and deliver the food. One year I made up a bunch of fake statistics about the amount of food we’d be serving the elderly, like if we piled all the dinner rolls one on top of the other, it would be as high as the Sears Tower, or lined up all the turkeys, they would cover the entire twenty mile stretch of Lake Shore Drive. The media instantly picked up all my fake statistics and incorporated them into their newscasts and newspaper stories. You think someone would have questioned their validity, but unless a Metra train wipes out 15 cars at a train crossing, or the mayor of Chicago drops dead of a heart attack the day before Thanksgiving, it’s a pretty slow news day. Of course, the newscasters and ink-stained wretches repeated my fake statistics as if they thought them up themselves. I’m surprised I didn’t get fired. But everyone was happy, and the old people were always glad to get out of their horrible substandard housing for the afternoon.

But I moved on from that job and my holidays went back to being dysfunctional. Probably the most memorable Thanksgiving I spent was in 1996. I was flying out on Thanksgiving Day to visit my brother in Denver. We were going to surprise my niece and nephew, who were 6 and 3, and didn't know I was coming out. My friend Karol gave me a ride to O’Hare and we smoked a big fattie on the way. We were so stoned that we circled the airport three times before we figured out where the departure dropoff was. I was sitting on the plane and had already polished off the American Airlines Bistro turkey sandwich lunch before we even left the terminal. As we were about to taxi out to the runway, a flight attendant got on the p.a. system and told us there was a security threat on board the aircraft and we were to evacuate immediately. She told us to leave everything behind, purses, coats, carry-on bags, and get the hell off the plane.

I always wondered how I would respond in a life-or-death situation and now I know. I freaked out. I was sitting by the window and practically trampled the person next to me trying to get off the plane. The woman in front of me was struggling with her two toddlers. She was trying to pick both of them up and carry them off the plane. No way was I going to let this bitch hold up the evacuation. I yelled at her, “Give me your kid,” and grabbed her son. I was like one of those passengers on the Titanic that grabbed stray children and pretended they were their own kids so they could get a seat on one of the lifeboats.

All of the other passengers got out of our way so we could save the lives of these precious children. The mom and I ran like hell through the pedway, which was lined with Chicago cops and mean looking dogs. They told us to keep running. The woman with the two kids actually turned out to be pretty nice. We made it back out to the terminal and I had some money in my pocket, so I asked her if I could buy her a drink. It was funny because passengers were running off the plane and we all headed immediately to the bar.

Security told us we could retrieve our belongings, which had been taken off the plane and were lined up in the terminal. The strangest thing was that my coat, carry-on bag, purse, and unwrapped Christmas presents for my niece and nephew were all placed neatly in one spot together. Like, how did they know? The pilot came out and told us that someone had phoned in a bomb threat to the Chicago police department. I called my brother in Denver to let him know the plane had been delayed. His narcissistic bitch wife answered the phone and started screaming at me about how I fucked up her dinner. I’m sure it was a lot of work pouring water into the Stove Top stuffing, like it was my fault there had been terrorist threat made against the plane.

Everybody was in the bar getting smashed when Fox News showed up. It was just one camera guy so I went up to him and told him what had happened. He asked if he could get me on camera. Fortunately, I happened to look fantastic. I was even wearing makeup and this cool hat that looked like the one Ingrid Bergman wore in “Casablanca.” I didn’t look like shit the way I usually do. Fox cut out my best sound bite, when I said, “It was scary, and I used to live in a really bad neighborhood.” Instead, the news clip had me repeating, “It was really scary,” ten times in a row, and I sounded like a retard. A bunch of my friends saw it,and said I looked stoned. My dad taped it, so it’s on my reel.

We ended up taking off a few hours later after American Airlines got us another plane. I didn’t get into Denver until 10 o’clock that night. The original plane had departed from Puerto Rico that morning, so there was some concern that the FALN was responsible for the bomb threat, but I think it was some non-custodial parent who was pissed that his or her kids were flying off for the holiday. Anyway, we were lucky the plane didn’t blow up mid air.

Norman Rockwell would have loved it.

PDD remembers Nov. 22, 1963

2005-11-22T00:11:00.000-08:00

‘Anybody here, see my old friend John …’

It is the most solemn day of the Kennedy Liturgical year. A Sacred-Bleeding-Heart-of-Jesus, calendar-square etched in black Magic Marker. It is Good Friday, Yom Kipper and Ramadan all rolled up into one big mess of a sorry sad day. Today marks the 42nd anniversary when Lee Harvey Oswald, Momo Giancanna, H.R. Haldeman or whoever the hell it was hiding behind the grassy knoll in Dealy Plaza, blasted Jack Kennedy off the planet.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, the assassination of President Kennedy was the most shocking event that Americans experienced. There was no swelling of patriotic pride such as that after 9/11. Most Americans felt ashamed and embarrassed in November 1963, to live in a country that would murder its own president in cold blood like some rouge nation.

I can still remember my own mother proclaiming: “The whole world is going think we’re a bunch of nuts.”

For those of use who were around on Nov. 22, 1963, now middle-aged baby-boomers and senior citizens, this PDD is dedicated to you. Oh, and Caroline, too.

So rev up “Camelot” on the old Victrola and read on with “vigah.”

“They put two graves in Arlington …”

According to ‘Dear Abby,’ if you were at least four years old in November of 1963, you never forgot where you were when you first heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. If you were as young as poor John-John, who turned three the day of his father’s funeral and said he had no memory of his tender salute to his father’s passing coffin, let alone of his father, you probably don’t remember a damn thing.

Besides J.D. Tippet, the Dallas police officer who was gunned down by the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald as he fled the Texas School Book Depository, there was another victim on the day that Kennedy was shot: a fast-rising comedian who plunged into automatic celebrity hasbeendom the moment the third (or fourth) bullet hammered through the president’s skull.

Vaughn Meader was a fledgling standup comic on the Greenwich Village coffee house scene when he threw out a punch line in JFK’s voice in 1961. The audience loved it, and soon Meader added some JFK-press conference schtick to his act. His star began to soar, with regular gigs on Ed Sullivan and a cover story in Newsweek. His first comedy LP, a musical spoof entitled “The First Family,” became an overnight sensation. One of the album’s cuts featured the president teaching 5-year-old Caroline the proper pronunciation of the word “vigah,” while other actors and actresses portrayed various members of the First Family.

These were heady times for young Mr. Meader, who had grown up in children’s homes in Maine. When the press asked the president what he thought of his “Myna bird,” JFK quipped that Meader “sounds more like Teddy than myself.” Jackie was less subtle, ordering JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to pen a nasty note to the comic asking him to cease and desist in mocking Caroline and baby John. (Meader claims he never received Jackie’s poison-pen letter.)

On Nov. 22, 1963, Meader had hailed a taxi in downtown Milwaukee when the cabbie asked if he “heard about Kennedy in Dallas.” Thinking it was a joke, Meader replied, “No, how does it go?” It was no joke. Meader bought a bottle of Scotch and headed back to his hotel room, his career in tatters. Meader was quickly out of work. Though he tried to revive his career in the years following Kennedy’s death, the public could not forget the comic’s old act that made fun of the martyred president, and rejected Meader’s new material. Meader dabbled in coke and smack until 1968, when he somehow pulled himself together and returned to Maine, where he became a modestly successful songwriter.

The evening after Kennedy was laid to rest on Nov. 25, 1963, Lenny Bruce told an audience, “they put two graves in Arlington Cemetery, one for John Kennedy and the other for Vaughn Meader.”

One of the most cosmic cases of bad show-biz timing ever.

The wit and wisdom of JFK

While he didn’t live long enough to write his presidential memoirs, Jack Kennedy left behind enough knee-slapping, one-liners from press conferences and rubber chicken dinners to fill a book, “The Wit and Wisdom of John F. Kennedy.”

On the Green Bay Packers – “Ladies and gentlemen, I was warned to be out here in plenty of time to permit those who are going to the Green Bay Packers game to leave,” Kennedy told a carnivorous crowd at 1960 campaign appearance in Green Bay, Wis. “I don’t mind running against Mr. Nixon, but I have the good sense not to run against the Green Bay Packers.”

On chimps in space – When announcing to assembled reporters that the United States had successfully sent a chimp into space on Nov. 29, 1961, JFK said, “This chimpanzee who is flying in space took off at 10:08. He reports that everything is going perfectly and working well.”

On children – After trying to elicit a kiss from the shy 4-year-old daughter of a friend who resisted his charms, Kennedy said: “I don’t think she quite caught that strong quality of love of children that is so much a part of the candidate’s make-up which has made him dear to the hearts of all mothers.”

No doubt had Joe Kennedy Jr. survived World War II, Jack would have been a hit in the Catskills.

Strange but true similarities between 11/22 and 9/11

Add eleven and twenty-two and you get thirty-three, divided by three which equals eleven. Add one plus nine plus six plus three, which equals nineteen. One plus nine equals ten. Now, add two plus zero plus zero plus one equaling three. Add to nine equaling twelve minus one equaling eleven. Nine plus eleven equals twenty subtracted by two, making eighteen. Add one plus eight to get nine. Twenty-two divided by two is eleven, which makes 9/11. 9/11. 11/22.

The ‘zero factor’

To this day my mother claims the only reason she voted for Nixon was because her father once told her that every U.S. president elected during a year ending in zero died in office. But does a death curse really threaten those U.S. presidents elected to office in years evenly divisible by twenty?

With the exception of Ronald Reagan, who came literally within an inch of losing his life after Jodie Foster-stalker John Hinckley’s 1980 assassination attempt, all U.S. presidents elected in years ending in zero since 1840, have either died violently or of natural causes while in office.

According to legend, Tecumseh, a famed Indian chief, put a curse on the Great White Fathers after suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Harrison, who went on to become president in 1840, died of pneumonia shortly after delivering his inauguration address coatless in sub-zero weather.

The only other president to have died in office not elected in a zero year was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 but died in 1850 of a stomach ailment. While no Indian curse has ever been documented, the coincidence of presidential fatalities is as creepy as an episode of John Edwards' "Crossing Over."

While some claim Ronald Reagan broke the chain of zero-year voodoo, others say the curse is only sleeping, which we can only hope if you catch my drift. Following is a list of the U.S. presidents who all died under the curse:

1840 – William Henry Harrison (pneumonia)
1860 – Abraham Lincoln (shot in head)
1880 – James A. Garfield (shot in back)
1900 – William McKinley (shot while shaking hands with well-wishers after making speech)
1920 – Warren G. Harding (stroke – may also have been poisoned by wife)
1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt (massive cerebral hemorrhage in fourth term while on vacation with mistress)
1960 – John F. Kennedy (shot in head)

Conspiracy or lone gunman – you decide

Take the kids on a virtual tour back to Nov. 22, 1963, including live Web cam views of Dealy Plaza from the sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the infamous grassy knoll, and video clips of local Dallas TV newsman Jay Watson chain-smoking through an interview with reluctant amateur filmmaker, Abraham Zapruder, on the Dallas News Web site.

Don’t forget to send a postcard!

By the way, OSWALD ACTED ALONE !!!

Part 2 - How I Discovered the True Meaning of Hell at The Learning Annex

2005-11-11T19:22:00.000-08:00

When we left off, I had just been trained in the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure and had deeply offended Bill Zanker, president and founder of The Learning Annex, by swearing in front of his kids. PDD continues its exploration of America's newest evil empire and the underpinnings of The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo, coming to a town near you.

I arrived fifteen minutes early for my shift on Saturday morning. The main lobby of the Stephens Convention Center was jammed with people waiting to get into The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo. Most of them had purchased day or weekend passes for $49 and $179. Those who bought $499 VIP passes had front row access to the keynote speakers and free massages in the VIP lounge, where they could get away from the wretched, Avian-flu gestating masses.

Besides Trump, who was speaking on Sunday evening, the other featured keynote speakers included such motivational hotties as Tony Robbins, the No. 1 Peak Performance Coach; "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" Robert Kiyosaki, who would reveal surprising secrets that the rich know about money that the poor and middle-class do not; and former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, who would inspire others to achieve HUGE successes in in their own lives.

I had to hand it to Bill Zanker. He certainly had his fingertips on the pulse of the paycheck-to-paycheck living middle-class. The fact that the expo was being held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center should have been a clue to those attending that the whole thing was a set-up. For years, Stephens has managed to duck several federal investigations into his alleged ties to organized crime. His self-named convention center was a perfect venue for The Learning Annex.

As if the 50,000 lemmings lined up at the gates weren't enough, the main lobby was quickly filling up with parents pushing 3,000 squalling babies in strollers the size of Buicks for a baby show that was being held in another area of the convention center. I immediately decided to get the hell out of there before I got trampled in a Tony Robbins stampede and high-tailed it to Conference Room 29 to begin my new career as a credit card assistant.

The room manager still hadn't shown up, so I assigned myself the task of standing in a pedway and directing expo attendees to the main lobby. Despite the huge directional signs pointing the way, several people still asked me for directions. Almost immediately, I got into a perky contest with a 19-year-old student from De Paul University, who was a lot more natural at it than I was. There was no way I was going to get duked any extra cash standing next to Miss Merry Sunshine. I moved down a couple hundred feet from her and continued shepherding people to the main lobby.

Eventually the room opened and I met the room manager, an extremely nice guy from The Learning Annex's San Francisco office, who treated our sales team decently the whole weekend. I asked him if he invested in real estate and he told me he had a hard enough time just trying to make his rent. He immeidately put me to work taping off the side sections of chairs, as attendees made their way in for the morning's first seminar, "How To Market, Sell (FOR BIG PROFITS) on Ebay." After I finished taping, I went back to stand outside the conference room and continued to greet people. I was relieved to see that I wouldn't have to compete with anyone else in being perky, and gave my most winning yellow-toothed smile as I welcomed people to the seminar and informed them that plenty of great seats were still available.

The first seminar went well enough. It was hosted by a guy named Lynn Alder who spoke for 90 minutes on how to quickly build wealth selling and buying real estate on Ebay with little or no money down while you sat on your ass. Every time I thought he was going to reveal some insider secrets about navigating the auction proces, he invited the audience to sign up for his seminar. Normally, the seminar cost a couple grand, but as a special favor to The Learning Annex he was offering it at a discounted rate of $795. Considering that most of the information he was dishing out is available in "Ebay for Dummies," which you can buy on Amazon for $8.99, it was an incredible bargain. Our crack team of sales assistants performed like a well-oiled machine, managing the swarm of people rushing to the back of the room to sign up for Alder's class.

My new friend Barb rolled in at 10 a.m., bursting with energy from her two-hour ride on the L. She was wearing the same pre-requisitie black pants and white-collar, button-down shirt that was the weekend's required dress code. There were hundreds of us walking around dressed like this, as if we were extras cast in a disaster flick. The second scheduled speaker was Jay Mitton, "the Father of Asset Protection." Mitton, I would later learn, had received a cease-and-desist order from the Florida attorney general's office to stop hawking his "Legal Tools for RE Investors" bootcamp. Because of "the incident in Florida," Mitton's personal assistant, Robert Bluhm, would be filling in. Barb immediately stationed herself outside the door and started greeting the next group. She had a slight speech impediment but was incredibly perky as she beckoned people to "get up close and personal with Robert Bluhm." Actually, I liked Barb and wouldn't mind running into her again some day. I felt terrible later for teasing her when I told her that everyone was looking for her after she had ducked out for one of her many snacks.

Robert Bluhm got up and began his 90-minute spiel. He actually used phrases like "tell ya what I'm gonna do," as he talked about setting up family limited partnerships and bullet-proofing your business assests against lawsuits, levies and divorces. The "Cutting Edge Strategies for Tax Reduction" bootcamps were going for just $2,599, marked down from the regular cost of $4,995. As an added bonus, those who signed up received a 100-pound suitcase of complimentary home-study materials.

It was time for lunch and my feet were killing me. The only time I had sat down the entire morning was when I went to the toilet. I bought some nachos with glow-in-the-dark cheese, the only food item left after I stood in line for 35 minutes at one of the concession stands, and sat down at a table with 20 strangers. A homeless woman who had obviously found a day pass that someone had discarded in the parking lot, was fascinated with my nachos. She kept asking me if she could have some. I finally told her to get her fucking hand out of my food, but ended up giving her the rest since they tasted like shit anyway. When I finished lunch, I ducked outside for a smoke and ended up talking to this older woman and her son who asked me where they could get a refund to the expo. "It's just an infomercial. I could have stayed home and watched this junk on TV," the woman complained. I promised to relay her comments to Bill Zanker.

The rest of the afternoon was more of the same - late night infomercial "gurus" shrieking about real estate and how we all had to protect ourselves from the Man, scaring people who had lost their jobs and scraped together the last of their money to dump on worthless classes and overproduced DVDs filled with phony testimonials from welfare moms and ministers who became millionaires in 90 days using the gurus' simple wealth-building techniques, all offered at unbelievable, one-time-only, Learning Annex discounts. The sales assistants got on each other's nerves as our asses became gridlocked behind the sales table, listening to people complain about how cold the conference rooms were, which were kept at 55 degrees, so they'd stay awake during the boring double-talk.

The final speaker of the day was Russ Whitney, king of the late night infomercials. Russ Whitney started out working in a slaughter house in upstate New York where made $5 an hour slaughtering pigs before he set out to become the youngest self-made millionaire in the country. Today, he is the founder of "a financial empire comprising many successful companies." Russ brought his own sales team, goons with sinister male balding patterns who watched the audience like hawks. The goon squad unleashed two of its top lady shylocks, Donna and Stephanie, dressed in their best Condoleezza Rice power suits, who called our team of assistants into a huddle. Our mission was to push an 8-day domestic and international land development bootcamp that would take place in Florida and Costa Rica, where no doubt Russ Whitney planned to flee from the feds. The bootcamp was $39,999, but was being offered that day for just $13,990. In addition, those who signed up would receive add-ons that included a DVD of Russ Whitney's first class, "Millionnaire University," three free teleconference calls with transcripts, and phone calls for life with a certified Whitney Education Group instructor - an incredible value of $7,000. In exchange for our help, we were each given a free Russ Whitney promotional DVD of student testimonials, and one of his books, "Millionaire Real Estate Mentor," both of which I gave to the woman minding the coat room.

The room quickly filled up with Russ Whitney groupies before I had a chance to tape it off, the only task I excelled at the entire weekend. Russ seemed to have quite the following, including a mentally retarded couple who were beside themselves with excitement at meeting an actual infomercial celebrity. The goon squad seemed to know them, Stephanie exclaiming, "There's my smiley guy." Smiley Guy was pushing his wife who must have weighed 400 pounds in a wheelchair, who was buried beneath 20 bags of sales brochures they had collected from the exhibitors' booths. I pulled away a couple of folding chairs in the back row to accommodate the woman's wheelchair, which was a big mistake because they didn't stop bugging me for the rest of the afternoon.

Smiley Guy told me they had unsuccessfully applied for subsidized housing, but because of his wife's disabilities, they were discriminated against. "The system's working against us," he said. In addition to being crippled, his wife was legally blind. I couldn't believe these two retards had money to invest in real estate. Maybe Russ Whitney was a genius after all. They showed me an article from the Chicago Tribune about housing for the handicapped. "This is going to knock Russ's socks off," they told me. Smiley Guy kept complaining to me how the crowd was "jostling my wife." I suggested that if she stayed put and quit wheeling around all over the place, people would stop bumping into her.

A few minutes before the seminar began Russ Whitney himself barrelled into the room on a Segue, almost crashing into the retarded woman in the wheelchair. He had one of those hairbrush crewcuts and a mustache that stretched over his lip like a caterpillar. I don't know if it was one of his goons or a Learning Annex executive who yelled at me to start seating the SRO crowd into the few scant seats that were available. All I can say is after listening to Russ Whitney talk for two hours, if you fall for his line of bull you need a mental health examination. I did a Google search on him and at present there are at least 50 class action lawsuits against his companies filed by unhappy consumers who lost their life savings taking one of his get-rich-quick real estate classes.

Russ had people eating out of his hand. He could have been selling road-kill and people would have happily paid $13,990 for it. One woman even brought him beer on the stage as he talked about his unhappy childhood, his wicked stepmother, and his time in prison serving an armed robbery sentence, interspersed with his simple, borderline legal techniques for generating wealth quickly. People literally ran to the back of the room when it was over to sign up for the 8-day domestic and international land development bootcamp. Even Bill Zanker showed up and started screaming at us when the credit card machines went down and we had to take imprints of people's credit and debit cards by rubbing pencils over the numbers on the sales forms. It was a fucking madhouse. Russ still had his mike on and you could hear him cajoling the little people who were lined up to get his autograph.

Sunday morning I considered not showing up for the second day. Our room manager told us we didn't have to be in the room until 9 a.m., so I blew off the first two hours of my shift. I figured I was in it this far, so I might as well go all the way. Russ Whitney was giving his seminar again, although this time, the audience was a little more skeptical than the day before. Russ was decked out in an Armani suit because it was "the Lord's Day." He kept cajoling Jesus to "strike me down if I'm lying." If ever there was a moment for a freak, baptismal electrocution accident, it was then. Toward the end of his spiel, Russ ordered us to shut the doors and not let anyone out of the room. He started screaming at the audience that he gave them two hours of his precious time, so they could give him two minutes of theirs. He told people that sooner or later they would have to take a shot at wealth and to spread a downpayment for the bootcamp over several credit cards or "take a loan out from mom and dad." He led the audience to the back of the room and started shoving sales forms in their faces as he ripped their credit cards out of their hands.

Finally it was all over at 5 p.m. and we packed up the room. I still had two hours left on my shift so we took all the cleaning supplies back to the exhibit room behind the main keynote hall where Trump was appearing. For the next two hours, I counted paper clips and clipboards with Barb, and untangled power cords from the credit card processors that the other room managers had thrown into boxes. None of the other workers I talked to had gotten duked any extra cash. It was just another one of the weekend's many lies.

By 7 p.m. I had enough. I told my room manager that I had to get home to my fictitious children. I decided to stick around and watch The Donald, who was running late. Some other scheister named Scott Scheel had been speaking on the main stage for three hours and people were starting to boo him. Thanks to my work pass, I was able to get all the way to the front of the hall behind the VIP seats. Signs for The Donald were being passed out among the audience, "You're fired," "Trump for President" and "We love you, Donald." Bill Zanker climbed up on the main stage screaming, "Thank-you, Chicago." He was creaming in his pants because he made at least $20 million off this crowd of gullible fools. Then Robert Kiyosaki got up and began his introduction of The Donald.

Everyone in the hall was on their feet. I was standing about 50 feet from the stage and have to admit, it was pretty damn exciting. All of a sudden the ceiling exploded with fake Monopoly money that rained down on the audience with pictures of The Donald's face. The FUN girls poured out on to the stage as Trump made his rock star entrance. "The Apprentice" theme, the O'Jays "For the Love of Money," blasted through the convention center. The scariest part was seing Trump's comb-over up close. It looked like the tail fin on a '57 Chevy. There was no telling where The Donald's comb-over started or ended.

I can see why The Donald is so popular. He is very funny and charismatic, although he really didn't say anything substantial. He made some cracks about the FUN girls and told them to "get out of here" and made everyone sit back down. He'll probably end up being president some day. I decided to leave before the room manager caught me and made me stay and count Learning Annex pens. As I walked out of the convention center, Trump began his talk saying how "New York is an even worse jungle than the jungles on 'Survivor' produced by the brilliant Mark Burnett, who is also producer of 'The Apprentice.'" He told the audience to "think big, really big" and advised everyone to get a pre-nup.

I learned quite a bit from my weekend with The Learning Annex. I always considered myself a hard worker, but sitting on my ass in corporate America and writing news stories for community newspapers is easy compared to how hard most people in this country have to work at low paying jobs. For example, I never even bothered asking the room manager if it was all right to take a break. I just took one. I talked to many people working at the expo who stood in the same spot for 16 hours without a break. I have a much greater appreciation now for people who work in fast food, retail, hotels and the millions of other service jobs out there. I had forgotten how easy it is to become demoralized working one of these jobs, and developing a shitty attitude.

I also learned that a majority of the real estate "gurus" who spoke at the real estate wealth expo are currently under indictment for defrauding consumers. (Gee, do you think Bill Zanker knew anything about this?) Somebody ought to look into it. Anyway, I'd rather have Russ Whitney's first job, slaughtering pigs, than work at any future events sponsored by The Learning Annex.

Part 1 - How I Discovered the True Meaning of Hell at The Learning Annex

2005-11-09T08:35:00.000-08:00

You can learn a lot at The Learning Annex: how to talk to your cat, reversing the aging process through Chinese medicine, designing fabulous floral arrangements for money, or writing and pitching a screenplay. Anything your heart desires can found in one of those ubiquitous boxes stuffed with free, urine-smelling catalogs on any street corner in America. In many instances, changing your stagnant life only costs $29.99 for a two-and-a-half hour personal growth seminar. But I never thought I would discover the true meaning of hell at The Learning Annex, and get paid $11 an hour while doing it. Following is Part 1 of PDD’s exploration of America’s newest evil empire – The Learning Annex.

It is 6:45 on a dismal, gray Saturday morning in Rosemont. Already the lines of disenfranchised dreamers are snaking through the main lobby of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center when I show up to clock in for my weekend gig as a credit card assistant at The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo, an event which promises attendees “One Weekend Can Make You A Millionaire.” Before the weekend is over, we will all be slathered in snake oil, as if partaking in some giant orgy for the desperate middle-class, presided over by the king deal-maker himself, Donald Trump.

I’d been dreading the expo for weeks ever since the group interview I attended a month earlier with the event hiring manager, whose Eminem "Ass Like That" ringtone kept going off on her cell phone every two seconds. There were several job assignments to choose from: greeter, usher, registrar, sales assistant, credit card assistant, card processor and roustabout. I checked any box on the application that might assure me of some ass-sitting time so I wouldn’t have to stand on my feet for 14 hours, even if I wasn’t qualified for it. Having not worked in the low-wage job industry for over 30 years, any useful skills I may have acquired from working fast food, retail or as a Ground Round clown were quashed by the equal amount of time I had spent in corporate America getting the life-blood sucked out of me, up until which 18 months ago I was unhappily, but gainfully employed.

I indicated that I had skills in using a credit card processing machine, even though the last time I had processed any consumer’s credit card was during the 1970s as a cashier for Venture Discount using a manual card imprinter. Even then I had a hard time sliding the plate over the credit slip without ripping the carbons to shreds. After the interview, I began praying that I wouldn’t get an e-mail notifying me that I’d been hired as one of 500 expo workers so I could attend the Hollywood Collectibles Show at the Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood, which was being held the same weekend. Unfortunately, I received an e-mail a few weeks later informing me that I had been selected for an “elite work crew” and to show up for a mandatory training session the Thursday evening before the show. I was faced with an important career decision: meet Edd “Kookie” Byrnes or make $11 an hour working two 14-hour shifts so I could get the brakes fixed on my car.

When I showed up for training at the Stephens Convention Center, half of the folding chairs in the back rows of one of the expo halls had been cordoned off with masking tape. I would soon learn how important masking tape was at The Learning Annex, since I would spend most of the weekend taping off the side sections of chairs in Conference Room 29, so that the front and center rows would get filled up first for a series of seminars with catchy names like “$9K A Month Cash Flow,” “Earn $3,000 to $10,000 a Month,” “Free Money From the Government,” “Make Huge Profits With Other People’s Money,” “Effortless Wealth,” and “How To Think Like A Millionaire.” Interestingly enough, there was not one seminar being offered on ethics, but then who needed honesty or integrity when the goal was to get filthy rich with as little effort as possible.

During the training session, I began to have second thoughts about lying on the application about my prowess using a computerized credit card processor, since I have no other discernable survival skills, let alone not knowing how to add or subtract. I definitely felt on the wrong side of 40 sitting amidst a group of nubile young hotties who’d been hired to wear fishnets and tank tops with the word “FUN” emblazoned across their breast implants to rile up the mostly male crowd of horny, wannabe millionaires attending the expo.

After yelling “great” a few times, we were informed that The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo was the Most Ambitious Event of its Kind in the Entire World. Our mission was to create an Energetic, Friendly and Professional Environment. Every Learning Annex staff member was Extremely Important and we were promised the Most Exciting Weekend of Our Lives. It was going to be Hard Work, but damn it all, we were going to have FUN.

Most of the doors were locked on our tour of the Stephens Convention Center, a maze of pedways, corridors and hard concrete floors. We were directed back into the expo hall for our training on the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure. My job was to grab people’s credit cards while they were signing up for grossly overpriced home-study materials and wealth-building “bootcamps” and hand them over to the card processor before they had a chance to think about how they were being ripped off. After the card was processed, I was to hand it to the product fulfillment assistant who would check the order forms to see if they had been completed properly, and then fork over a 50-pound bag of product.

After completing our training on the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure, we were treated to a pep talk by the big man himself, Bill Zanker, president and founder of The Learning Annex, who started his personal growth empire after seeing a man with dirty hands giving back rubs in a San Francisco park while attending film school. Zanker, who’s all about incentives we were told, promised that we’d all walk out with a few extra hundred dollars in our pockets since there would be anonymous Learning Annex executives walking around duking us if we were spotted not slouching or being unfriendly to expo attendees. “If you don’t, it means you weren’t doing a good job,” Zanker said. “It’s up to you if you want to declare it.”

When Zanker finished his motivational speech, we were invited to stay and watch the evening’s episode of “The Apprentice” that was featuring a segment on The Learning Annex, which was paying $1.5 million to Donald Trump to be the expo’s keynote speaker. There was a huge television screen at the front of the room and people cheered and booed as various contestants schemed and brown nosed and accused each other of being “tight ass Jews.” I never really watched “The Apprentice” so I had no idea what was going on, my tastes in reality television running more along such sophisticated lines as “Dog Bounty Hunter” and “Growing Up Gotti.” I was sitting next to a woman named Barb, who’d I be working with on the same sales team. Barb lived way the hell out by Midway Airport and was shaped like Frosty the Snowman. She took three trains to get to the convention center. Barb was totally into “The Apprentice” and kept heckling this one contestant named Markus, to whom The Donald would utter his famous catch phrase, “You’re fired.”

Barb asked me if we should “clock out” since the training session was over and we were just sitting around watching television. I told her rather loudly, “Hell no, I was promised a two-hour training session, and I’m going to bank every fucking hour that I can working this crappy gig.” Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that Zanker was sitting right in front of us with his young children, who turned around and shot me a stare of death for swearing in front of his kids and maligning his personal growth empire.

Like the many low-end jobs I had worked in high school and college, I had already screwed up by being insubordinate, and the expo hadn’t even started yet. I was determined right then and there to make it up to Mr. Zanker. I was going to get duked some extra cash by being perky, even if it fucking killed me.

Secret recipe for my famous pumpkin seeds

2005-10-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

If you’re like me, you probably ate all the Almond Joys that were in the Halloween bowl and are constipated from the chocolate. Here’s nice salty treat to balance all the sweets you’ve been consuming before the trick-or-treaters come around. Or, if you’re a registered sex offender and are banned in your state from distributing candy to children, here’s something to take your mind off the young Ninja Turtles and princesses scurrying down your street.

Every Halloween, I make a big bowl of my famous kick-ass pumpkin seeds. There’s nothing better than a piping hot pumpkin seed straight off the cookie sheet. Pumpkin seeds are easy to make and FUN and are good for the prostate, if you’re a guy (at least according to Mel Gibson). I’m pretty obsessive compulsive about saving every seed that comes out of the gourd. I’d just as soon throw away the pumpkin after I clean it out, because carving a face on it is too much work.

First, find yourself a pumpkin that is rich in seed. I find that the heavier the pumpkin, the more likely it is to be filled on the inside with pumpkin junk. In past years, I’ve selected pumpkins that, though large and globule, felt light when I picked them up. When I got the pumpkins home and cut them open, I was bitterly disappointed with their low seed count. So you see size doesn’t matter. Try picturing the pumpkin with really large testicles.

After you get your pumpkin home, cut it open. Get a colander and throw all the guts into it, so you can separate the seeds. It’s probably a good idea not to let your 70-year-old alcoholic neighbor help you after she’s had three vodka-and-tonics, as mine did this evening, because I ended up having to fish a lot of the seeds out of the garbage while listening to her yell at me: “IT’S ONLY A FEW SEEDS! YOU SHOULD PUT THIS MUCH ENERGY INTO FINDING A FULL-TIME JOB!”

I like to think about all the Biblical references to seed because it takes my mind off of Halloween being a celebration of Satan. The Bible is just ga-ga with seed. “A farmer went out to sow his seed.” “I have given you every herb that yields seed.” “Cast your seed on fallow ground.” I never knew there was so much semen in the Bible. I like to think of these metaphors as I stick a cookie sheet full of pumpkin seeds into a 350-degree oven.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After you’ve cleaned out the inside of your pumpkin, quickly separate the seed from the pumpkin guts after you’ve sent your neighbor home to fix herself another drink and to bring you one while she’s at it, because you’re still on the weed wagon. Rinse the pumpkin seeds thoroughly in the colander, under the faucet. Cast some seed on to a cookie sheet. Blot them dry with a paper towel.

Next, spray the seeds with some of that spray-on skillet oil until they glisten. (I prefer the olive oil spray, but you can use vegetable oil spray or the fake buttered popcorn spray.) Sprinkle some salt on to the seeds. The past few years I’ve used the coarse sea salt which works great. You can also throw some red hot sauce, or nutmeg or cinnamon on the seeds, but I like the salty, greasy goodness of my recipe.

Stick the seeds into the oven. Set the timer for 10 minutes. Turn on the “700 Club” and get yourself a bag of the fun-size Hershey bars with almonds. Polish off a few of these as you think of all the people out there in television land whose warts and cancer are being cured by Pat Robertson, or how “Scooter” is a really stupid name for a grown man. Think about all the seed in the world that is being spewed in non-reproductive sex acts, but you’re saving the excess seeds by spraying them with chemically-laden cooking spray and covering them with salt so your tribe can multiply, and how it’s an excellent source of roughage, even better than candy corn!

Flip the seeds over with a spatula. I like to check the pumpkin seeds' texture by reaching into the oven and grabbing one off the cookie sheet. Re-set the oven timer for ten minutes and open another bag of candy that you’re saving for the trick-or-treaters. You can always run out and buy more on Halloween. The seeds should finish cooking between 20 and 30 minutes. When they turn brown take them out of the oven. Prepare the next batch.

Force your friends and family to sample your pumpkin seeds and listen to them exclaim, “These don’t taste like the ones you buy at the store.” As you can see from my recipe for my famous pumpkin seeds, there are dozens of lessons you can weave into their preparation with your little ones, about God, Jesus and sperm.

Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of Hurricane Katrina survivors staying up the road from me. I’m going to take them some of my famous pumpkin seeds and bring some joy into their lives.

I live for this

2005-10-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

Well, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series last night. As a Cubs fan, I don’t know what to think. You can’t be a true Chicagoan without hating one of the city’s two baseball teams. If there were a world series for marketing, then the Chicago Cubs would be a fucking dynasty. But I don’t hate the Sox, just their fans.

In all fairness to Sox fans, I probably hate Cub fans even more – or at least majority of them. The Cubs have simply become too trendy and adorable for my taste. There are too many yuppies trying to impress each other by buying up all the game tickets just so they can walk around the world’s largest outdoor beer garden talking on their cell phones and treating the game on the field as if it were an annoyance.

It’s disgusting how many idiots continue to fill Wrigley Field to capacity year after year just to watch crap, all of them professing how they are the most LOYAL and LONG-SUFFERING fans when they’ve only lived in Chicago for like two years. Unless you’ve suffered through 1969, 1984, 1989, 1998 and 2003, and sat in the stands in pouring cold rain in September when the Cubs were 23 ½ games out of first place and stinking up Lake View, you’re not a true Cubs fan.

Going to Cubs games used to be fun before they morphed into America’s team after WGN became a “Super Station” during the 1980s and America got “cableized.” It was more fun going to games in the 1970s when there’d be only a few thousand people in Wrigley Field and you could drop acid or snort TIC or Angel Dust. I remember one game in 1978 when my friend Karol and I somehow scored box seats in the first few rows off of first base. I don’t even remember how we got these tickets because they were the kind of seats that asshole celebrities or CEOs of major corporations get – not a couple of trippy 21-year-olds.

Anyway, the Cubs were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers and the big story sweeping the news that week was how Steve Garvey’s wife Cindy left him and was staying at Marvin Hamlisch’s house for some unexplained reason. We were really trashed and screaming at Garvey through the whole game, “Hey, Steve, how’s Marvin?” Garvey kept looking at us and we started yelling more things like, “Marvin must have a really big dick!” Along about the third or fourth inning, some Andy Frain usher comes over and tells us that if we don’t stop harassing Mr. Garvey, they’re going to throw us out of Wrigley Field. Well, that was a huge mistake because it just got us going even more. Garvey even made an error, missing an easy throw to first base, he was so pissed at us. I can’t believe that Garvey was so rattled by a couple of young girls. We weren’t the pretty type that ballplayers wanted to fuck. I still think Steve Garvey is a dick, especially after the Padres came back and won the 1984 NLCS when the Cubs choked after winning the first two games.

But I am a baseball fan, and I’d rather see a Chicago team in the World Series than, ho hum, New York, Boston or any team from California. I really enjoy baseball because it’s the only sport that I understand. I still haven’t figured out what a down is in football. One of the things I enjoy most about watching major league baseball games in other cities are the accoutrements that fans bring to the games with them. Like what’s up with those fucking sticks that the Angels and Astros fans kept banging together? They don’t let you bring crap like that into Wrigley Field because there have been too many incidents where fans have thrown stuff on the field. For example, on Ron Santo Precious Moment Cherished Teddy Day in 2000, they distributed vouchers to fans in the bleachers to pick up their Ron Santo Precious Moment Cherished Teddies after the game. In Chicago, they know better than put anything in the hands of fans of both baseball teams that could potentially become a flying projectile.

Aside from having to listen to South Side Shanty Irish Sox fans brag about the stupid Sox for the next 88 years, I enjoyed watching the Sox kick everyone’s asses during the playoffs. My boyfriend refused to watch any of the games and kept saying how he hoped the Sox’ plane would crash midair into Air Force I. It kind of pissed me off about the Cubs especially after their whiny, selfish attitudes these past couple of years. Why Baker didn’t get off his ass and go out and calm down Moises Alou when he was having his hissy fit after that idiot Steve Bartman interfered with a foul ball that was still in play, or tell Mark Prior to just brush it off during Game 6 of the 2003 NLDS playoffs is a mystery for the ages. I was five outs away from fulfilling my Cubs Old Style pledge by giving Ronnie Woo-Woo a blow job.

I’m jealous of the leadership and team chemistry of the 2005 Sox. I’d screw any of ‘em – Ozzie Guillen, Paul Konerko, Scott Podsednik, Jermaine Dye, Joe Crede, A.J. Pierzynski. I mean, if you wanted to screw Kerry Wood of the Cubs for example, he’d be like, “you’re hurting my arm!” Anyway, Wood hasn’t had a healthy season since he mowed down 13 Astro batters in 1998. I’m sick of the Cubs paying Kerry Wood $28 million and having him be out for a whole season after pitching one game because his fucking arm is always lame.

But there is a bright spot to all of this because I’m already seeing signs of phony, North Side Cubs fans jumping on the Sox bandwagon. I went to go watch Game 4 of the series at a bar on the North Side with some friends last night. A couple of guys walked in wearing White Sox jerseys, pretending like they’ve been Sox fans for the past 100 years. Toward the end of the game, my friends and I, all Cubs fans, were the only ones yelling or showing any enthusiasm while these guys in the Sox jerseys were sitting on their hands. I mean, if that was the Cubs up on the TV screen about to win the World Series, they would have been bringing me out a defibrillator.

I was like, “C’MON, LET’S SHOW SOME ENTHUSIASM FOR YOUR TEAM, MR. PHONY GUYS IN THE WHITE SOX JERSEYS! THIS MAY NOT HAPPEN AGAIN FOR ANOTHER 50 YEARS!” Anyway, after the Sox won, my friends and I were the only ones screaming and yelling, “LET’S SHOOT OFF OUR GUNS!” and giving Babs and ‘41’ who were sitting behind home plate wearing Astros jackets the finger. (BTW, didn’t Barbara Bush’s head look like giant cotton ball?) We thought about running down Belmont Avenue and tipping over some cars and looting, but got bored and ordered more beer instead. We did knock over a few bar stools.

At least I got see some Chicago team win a World Series. I’ve been waiting my whole fucking life. I was able to watch some quality baseball being played in my own city for a change. Anyway, let the Sox be Chicago’s team for awhile. Those guys deserve it. Let the phony yuppie Cubs fans defect to the South Side next year where they can yak on their cell phones in the aptly named U.S. Cellular Field. Have yourselves a good fucking time.

As for myself, I don’t plan on buying any Sox gear or jumping on the Sox bandwagon. I’ve been riding enough wagons lately, like the Weed Wagon, but that’s a whole other story.

Adventures with 'the Urinal'

2005-10-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

Like the waning daylight of fall, dark days have fallen upon the mean little suburb where I live next to O’Hare International Airport. Earlier this month, a 47-year-old man was brutally stabbed to death in front of his senile wife in his trailer home next to our old high school. Like a dog that bears witness to a terrible crime but cannot talk, the wife, who suffers from early onset Alzheimer disease, has been unable to provide any useful clues to the local police.

A week later, a 61-year-old man was struck and killed by a reckless driver as he attempted to cross a busy street in the downtown business district during the early morning hours. Like communities all across America, our streets and intersections are no longer pedestrian-friendly, as traffic patterns and roads are now designed to move a shitload of cars as quickly as possible. Lights are timed so that pedestrians have less than thirty seconds to cross busy intersections, as cars whip around rounded curbs. God help you if you are elderly, disabled or obese. If the light changes while you are still in the middle of the intersection, you are fucked.

These stories have been recounted in our community newspaper, the Journal, which is published every Wednesday and Friday. The Journal Topics and News is an entrenched, family-owned publishing company that ascribes to the lowest standards of journalism. It is the joke of the local journalism community, and most residents refer to the paper as ‘the Urinal.' Full of typos, grammatical errors and misspelled sensationalistic headlines, the Urinal is the rag to read if you want to find out what our Mafia-run city council is up to, or which neighbors recently got busted for growing pot.

The most popular feature in the Urinal is “Speak Out,” where local residents anonymously debate the important issues of the day, both local and global. Our city’s overdevelopment of condos (we got condos coming out the ass), troublesome squirrels, local TV news anchors who talk to fast, O’Hare runway expansion, 666, George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and immigrants who refuse to learn English and shoplift at neighborhood garage sales -- are just a few of the ongoing arguments splashed across the pages of “Speak Out.”

There are several means by which readers can voice their opinions in “Speak Out,” including calling and ranting on the Urinal’s answering machine, submitting snail mail written in crayon, and my own personal favorite, the anonymous e-mail. The comments people leave are often illiterate, unintentionally funny or are otherwise submitted by cranks.

Last summer, I had a record five crank letters published in one edition of “Speak Out.” The first suggested that instead of spending hundreds of dollars on filtering software, that our public library install booths around its public computers so that perverts could masturbate in privacy when viewing porn on the Internet, instead of violating the constitutional rights of children and the elderly. Others concerned obese people riding electric scooters in the supermarket (“I’m tired of them running over my toes”); Comcast’s emergency weather bulletins pre-empting television programming and the proliferation of bum camps in the Cook County forest preserves. After watching the large number of overweight Americans streaming past President Reagan’s casket as it lay in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, I suggested that a more fitting memorial to the late president would be for Americans to "get off their lazy, fat butts and exercise."

But the story of the 47-year-old man who was stabbed multiple times through the neck really grabbed me. Nick was a blue-collar guy who was left permanently disabled by a childhood accident. He quit his job working for a local paving company to care for his 53-year-old wife after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. According to the Urinal, police said Nick was a “known crack-cocaine user” who was most likely murdered because he owed money to drug dealers or a drug deal that went bad. He was last seen alive cashing his disability check at a local bank, and he was found with his pockets turned inside out. Police described his friends as “low-lifes,” implying that Nick was a “low life” also. His body was discovered by police during a well-being check, after his family called him at home and his wife told them that Nick had been "asleep on the floor” for the past twelve hours.

Nick’s sister, who shares my first name, said the family was hoping to air his story on “America’s Most Wanted.” She described him as a “teddy bear” and said she couldn’t understand anyone who would want to commit such a horrible act of violence on her brother. The police chief said that detectives had interviewed “40 persons of interest” and the local Crimestoppers put up a $1,000 reward for information leading to solving the murder.

I don’t know, maybe it was because I grew up with a couple hundred guys like Nick. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, but they’re good guys, always ready to help me fix my car, beat the shit out of trespassers lurking near my home, roll up my car windows when it starts to rain, buy me a beer, or give me an honest opinion. They get up at 4:30 in the morning and work long hours at jobs of hard, physical labor while many of us sit on our asses all day in front of computers in heated and air-conditioned offices. These guys may not make the best life choices or decisions, but like all of us, if they did the best they could at the moment.

Nick wasn’t some beautiful, white pregnant woman who suddenly turned up missing on Christmas Eve, but a bearded, beer-bellied, unemployed laborer with hip problems who tried to do right by his wife when she became ill. It’s the ongoing assault of the middle class, with jobs being outsourced and lifetimes of assets being wiped out when loved ones get sick. So I sent an e-mail to the editor of the Urinal asking him to pass along my contact information to Nick’s sister, offering my assistance in getting her brother’s story aired on “America’s Most Wanted.” We all attended the same high school during the ‘70s, and chances are that we passed each other in the halls, or sat waiting in the dean’s office together.

My professional skills are for the most part pretty useless. My abilities to write puff pieces for community newspapers and marketing brochures do little to help further society, other than to make some cranky white guy even richer. If I were to find myself stranded on a desert island, I’d probably starve to death or get attacked by wild animals.

About a week later, I got a call from a reporter at the Urinal. She was actually pretty cool, and I found out from her that the rest of the staff looked forward to my crank letters to “Speak Out.” It was pretty awkward, because usually I'm the one asking the really stupid questions. I wasn’t comfortable with the situation at all when she told me that the crackpot publisher wanted to do a story about my helping this family get their story on AMW. I hadn’t even talked to Nick’s sister yet, and asked for her number. I asked the reporter to please wait until we actually did something. She assured me she would.

Nick’s sister told me she was too distraught from cleaning out his trailer to meet me for coffee. I had done some research on AMW and some other organizations, and because he may have been engaged in illegal activity at the time of his death, his story probably wouldn't meet their qualifications for assistance. I had a million questions to ask Nick’s sister, plus some suggestions for putting the heat on local police and anyone else in the community who might be withholding information.

Last Wednesday, my friend Karol called me laughing her ass off. She told me to turn to page 6 in the Urinal, and I thought she was referring to my latest crank letter to “Speak Out” comparing our mayor to Johnny Sack on “The Sopranos.” I just about shit when I saw the headline: “Qwest to put murder case on AMW.”

The article was all about how I was tapping into “my extensive network of contacts in the TV industry.” Hey, I know a gay guy who works for a popular, nationally syndicated, daytime TV show in L.A.! The article got worse. Somehow, I ended up knowing Nick in high school and was vice president of media relations for some corporation. It was like reading something in the National Enquirer.

I immediately fired off an e-mail to Nick’s sister, apologizing for the article, how I never said half the shit they had me saying, and that I was in no way seeking publicity for myself. I told her I would never exploit her family’s tragedy. She wrote me back telling me not to worry about it and that the police had told her to quit talking to people about the investigation. She said she was furious with the Urinal for printing that her brother was a “known crack-cocaine user” and trying to pass off her brother’s murder as just “another druggie that no one had to worry about.” She said her brother only took drugs prescribed by his doctor, and that he had no criminal record of any kind. She wrote of her seething anger and the horrible pain that was inflicted upon her mother. She said the cops did not appreciate at all the loving tribute that a more reputable paper had written about her brother. She said when she’s ready to talk about it, I’ll be the first person she’ll call.

I sent her some numbers of some support groups for families of homicide victims. I was so angry at what the Urinal has been printing about Nick that I wanted to go over to that office and kick that weasley, self-righteous, Christian motherfucker publisher’s ass. Most likely some jerk-off cop in the police department made some offhand comment about Nick being a crack-cocaine user and this idiot bought it. Even if he was just a pothead, like half the town is, I’m tired of potheads being demonized by our hypocritical politicians and an overhyped multi-billion dollar drug testing industry. I’m sure Jeffrey Skilling passed Enron’s fucking pee test and look what a schmuck he turned out to be.

I don’t think I’ll be wasting any more of my time with the Urinal. They’re still sending me two papers a week and I haven’t renewed my subscription in over a year. The sad thing is Nick’s sister said I was the only person from our town that offered any compassion or sympathy to her family. I hope I never become a victim of a violent crime.

Fellatio, Jello Puddin' Pops and Cold Turkey

2005-10-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

Darling readers, I’m sure those of you who took bets that little Rainy’s ADD had finally kicked in and she was abandoning her blog were thinking about collecting. No, I just had a very busy week tending to the petty acts of survival and my glamorous job as an underemployed news stringer which included – killing a multimillion-dollar planned development while it was still a watercolor rendering, documenting confused Cub fans’ angst over the Sox playoff success, more zoning stories, police blotters and orthodox Jewish rabbis studying the Halacha. What a fucking exciting life I lead.

I did manage to get over to Border’s and read a good chunk of Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s new tell-all “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” while drinking some lame coffee drink in the café. The Border’s sales associates are on to me because I haven’t purchased a book there in like three years, preferring instead to speed-read almost complete tomes inside the store. It isn’t that difficult to do when you’re reading mostly crap, and I owe about a thousand dollars in overdue fines at my local public library. I’m caught up on all the new Scott Peterson books, and Lawford’s insider memoirs about growing up in the Kennedy family was next on my clandestine reading list. (Which reminds me, I still need to check out the unauthorized Michael Jackson bio, “Freak.”)

I found Lawford’s book tucked upstairs in the music department in the celebrity drug addict section. I managed to locate it easily, looking it up on the store locator. When I came back downstairs, a sales clerk asked me somewhat sarcastically as I was headed to the café, “Did you find what you were looking for?” Well, lady, if Border’s doesn't want its customers reading books in the store and returning them to shelves when they are finished looking at them, DON’T PUT IN CHAIRS OR A COFFEE SHOP FOR PEOPLE TO SIT AND READ, BITCH!

Anyway, my dissident reading habits all harken back to when I was 14. My friends and I would sprawl across the aisles in Jewel Osco, reading books like “The Happy Hooker” and “The Sensuous Woman,” after which, we’d help ourselves to grapes in the produce section and practice rolling them between our teeth without breaking the skins, a la the Sensuous Woman’s chapter on learning the fine art of fellatio.

Do we really need another book on the Kennedys? The answer to that question, darling readers, is yes. Like the smack, herb, LSD, pills, coke and booze that Christopher Lawford ingested into his body every day between the ages of 13 and 30, these regurgitations of the Kennedy Clan are an addiction that must be fed. Lawford is the son of JFK’s sister Patricia and movie star Peter Lawford, who in his prime was one of the sexist bastards of all time.

I always thought that Christopher Lawford, in his younger days, was the sexist third generation Kennedy after John-John. But at age 50, Lawford is looking a wee bit too much like Phil Spector nowadays judging from the photo on the dust jacket, with his fright-night, Spector-esque coif. Still, Chris has inherited his old man’s devilish good looks before poor Peter lost them becoming an emaciated drug addict and arranging helicopter drops of cocaine on the grounds of the Betty Ford Clinic while going through rehab with Liza Minelli.

I judge a good Kennedy book by how much new information I can glean about America’s favorite Royal Family. For example, in Seymour Hersh’s “The Darker Side of Camelot,” I was shocked to find out that JFK had a sexually transmitted disease called Chlamydia that he passed on to Jackie, which can cause premature birth and miscarriages in pregnant women. The night after he was assassinated, Bobby went to the Oval Office and expunged JFK’s medical records so the nation wouldn’t find out that its martyred president had the clap. Early on in Chris Lawford’s book, we learn that one of Bobby Kennedy’s kids took a crap in the Lawford’s swimming pool while visiting them in Malibu.

More Pat and Peter Lawford fun facts:

- Pat was the sixth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children and considered the most sophisticated of the five Kennedy sisters.

- Pat made the sign of the cross each time before she engaged in intercourse with Peter Lawford.

- Pat was a TV producer for Father Peyton’s “Family Rosary Crusade” - the program that made “the family that prays together, stays together” a household phrase.

- While newlyweds, Pat and Peter lived in a two-bedroom Malibu beach house that was once owned by Gloria Swanson.

- Pat and Peter killed a bottle of Scotch just hours after she gave birth to her first child and the first male grandchild born to a Kennedy daughter.

- Christopher Lawford never bonded with his mother through sucking.

- Pat and Peter moved out of the Malibu beach house once owned by Joe Kennedy’s mistress Gloria Swanson, and took their own digs, leaving the house to newborn Christopher and his baby nurse because they couldn't stand the smell of Christopher's stinky diapers.

- Pat was so enamored with big brother Jack that she often pimped for him when he visited her and Peter in California, hosting nude pool parties with Marilyn, Jeannie Carmen and other Hollywood starlets.

- Peter Lawford made up all that crap about Marilyn Monroe calling the night she o.d.’d saying, “Say goodbye to the president for me and say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.” Peter lied to assuage his guilt over not rushing over to Marilyn’s house as she succumbed to sleeping pills.

- Peter said Pat took everything after their divorce, including precious mementos of JFK’s presidency. After Pat relocated to Manhattan just a few blocks away from Jackie’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue, Peter sent a truck packed with five-gallon containers of water and a note that said, “Dear Pat, you forgot to drain the swimming pool.”

- Pat often got drunk on wine in front of her children, who would be confused by her sudden speech incapacity as she drilled them on geography at the dinner table.

- Pat never remarried or fully recovered from her divorce and brothers’ assassinations, settling for the company of gay male friends and dysfunctional drinking buddies.

- Pat once rented Boston Red Sox Jimmy Piersol’s house in Hyannis Port, the summer Piersol had his famous nervous breakdown during a game and climbed the backstop.

- Peter Lawford brought a prostitute as his date to RFK’s funeral.

- Hugh Hefner, feeling sorry for Peter, let him stay for free in a small guest cottage on the grounds of Hef’s Playboy Mansion during the 1970s. While visiting Hef with a "female companion" at the height of his Jello Puddin' Pop fame, Bill Cosby described Peter as "pathetic" within earshot of Christopher Lawford.

- In his later years, Peter Lawford could not achieve orgasm without getting his nipples lacerated with razor blades.

Lawford’s “Symptoms of Withdrawal” is the first Kennedy memoir since the Kennedy Spin Machine hacked out Rose’s “Times to Remember,” that totally glossed over how she disowned her daughter Kathleen for marrying a Protestant and having a husband who was a horny, cheating bastard that lobotomized their retarded daughter. Lawford is winning rave reviews for his writing, but I wouldn’t say there is anything overtly personal in his book that would cause the rest of the Kennedy family to disown him.

There’s no index, which is annoying, but I plan on putting one together as a public service when the paperback edition comes out. The Kennedys are a dynasty that never really got off the ground. I think American would have been a much different and better country today, had Jack and Bobby lived to carry out their progressive ideas of government. I mean, why the Kennedys and not the Bushes? Like the first half of Christopher Lawford’s life, something, somewhere got really screwed up and God stopped blessing America.

A Confederacy of Pussies

2005-10-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

Sooner or later, PDD is going to have to get political. I figure that most of the three or four people who regularly read this blog pretty much hate Bush already and think he is the worst president since, well, I don’t know, maybe Harding, Hoover and Nixon, and a few other dead white guys from the 19th century all rolled into one, including Judas, the disciple that betrayed Jesus, with some rotting birds from the avian flu epidemic multiplied by X squared thrown in.

I’m preaching to the choir at the Church of Our Lady of the Mattress, right? And if someone is random blogging and happens to think that George W. Bush is the second coming of Jesus, well, there’s not much I can say that’s going to change your opinion of him and visa versa.

I’m too tired to articulate my knee-jerk reactionary anger over the rapid disintegration of this country or the millions of misguided minds out there who think Jesus is directly communicating with Chimpy in the Oval Office, maybe even possibly giving him a blow job, too, who can’t see our collective quality of life going down the toilet. I've given up hope that our government will ever make a bargain with the population that doesn't put the almighty buck before the good of the American people.

I don’t think I was ever angrier or despised a president more as I did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina watching modern day genocide take place on the streets of New Orleans. I mean, it pissed me off so much that it brought on one of the worst cases of irritable bowel syndrome that I have ever experienced in my life. It got so bad that I had to go out and buy a Fleet enema. By the time I finished shooting it up my ass, my bathroom looked like the Louisiana Super Dome.

So I woke up this morning and started channel surfing, hitting the Sunday morning news shows. Seems like the big topic is the threat of a possible avian flu pandemic and how our federal government is unprepared. Gee, I find that so surprising.

Bird flu is showing up in ducks in Europe, chickens in Indonesia, Viet Nam and China, and turkeys in Turkey. U.S. health agencies are predicting the deaths of 1.9 million Americans should an avian flu pandemic sweep our land. But Idiot Boy has a plan to quell an epidemic should it hit U.S. soil, based on our federal government’s hugely successful military response to the mess down in New Orleans.

We’ll put Rumsfeld in charge of our nation’s civilian police force. Sure, it’s unprecedented and maybe even possibly unconstitutional, but Chimpy can do whatever the hell he wants because he’s CRAZY AND IN CHARGE. What's left of the U.S. military that isn't in Iraq will help enforce quarantines in areas hit by avian flu.

So does this mean we’ll be shot if we leave our homes to go to Walgreen’s or Rite Aid to buy TheraFlu? Will we get paid for time off from work if we have to spend six weeks under house arrest just because we got the flu? Will the feds pick up medical costs for the uninsured? What if there’s a biological terrorist attack and Al Qaeda puts anthrax in the nation’s supply of Healthy Choice microwave entrees while there’s an avian flu pandemic going on?

According to Idiot Boy’s Secretary of Health Michael Leavitt, our nation’s multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies simply can’t produce enough anti-viral vaccine in the next four months to thwart this mutated strain of bird flu. The Bush Administration doesn’t want to pay for it, you mean.

Considering that the nation’s aerospace industry produced more than 300,000 military aircraft between 1941 and 1945 – 9,000 war planes rolled off the nation’s assembly lines during March of 1944 alone – I think we could produce a shit load of Tamiflu vaccine if we really put our minds to it.

Relax, folks. Yeah, it’s possible that a whole lot of people will get sick for a few days and get over it and return to their crappy cubicle jobs, but why should this be different than any other flu season? There’ll be disgusting vomit, mucus and diarrhea oozing from every orifice of our bodies, but we’ll be okay.

A lot of us got sick during the great Asian Flu Pandemics in 1967 and 1968 and probably don’t even realize it. I came down with a hell of a flu right before Christmas vacation in 1968. My parents even left me alone sick on the couch while my whole family went to my cousin’s wedding and didn’t get home until after midnight. You can see how concerned they were about the global pandemic. I was sick as a dog right up until Santa Claus came, and by then I was too busy playing with my Spiro-Graph and Jane West Cowgirl action figure and listening to my brother’s copy of “The White Album” to even care. I recovered and spent the rest of Christmas break happily sledding and ice skating in -20 degree temperatures.

Americans have become the biggest pussies in the world. We have a pussy president and vice-president who dodged the draft during the Viet Nam War, yet they sure are quick to send a bunch of other people's kids to be IED fodder in some hellhole. Our president wasn’t even man enough to show up for national guard duty, let alone look the country in the eye while making his phony apology accepting responsibility for the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

We're so frightened of bacteria and germs you'd think we were pissing in our drinking water in this country. Now we have even more household chemicals polluting our soil and landfills with products like disinfectant wipes to wipe the spills off our smelly kitchen countertops and lots of other toxic shit designed to cut through household grit and grime. I think I’d be more worried more about all the freight trains that are rolling through our communities carrying molten sulfur.

After 9/11, we've been so eager to hand over our civil liberties that we might as well give up all of our freedom the way the Bush administration is grabbing it away from us little by little. Looking in everyone’s backpack on the subway or checking to see what books we take out of the library is not going to protect our country from terrorism. This country’s been spoiled as far as war actions on our own turf. We’re all falling apart when we should be singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” like the Brits during World War II. America isn’t going to be worth living in by the time Bush gets through wrecking it.

I couldn’t switch off the Sunday morning news shows fast enough and turn on the Chicago Marathon in time to see the winner of the wheelchair division roll across the finish line. It inspired me so much that I might enter next year’s marathon if I can ride a Rascal.

There is one encouraging sign from all these horrible events that have piled up during the past few months in addition to Bush’s plummeting poll numbers: the smirk is finally getting knocked off that smug bastard’s face and replaced by that wide-eyed look of fear we've all grown to love.

So you see. my political opinions are a mess. Aren't you glad you asked?

Injun Summer

2005-10-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

I miss the annual publication of John T. McCutcheon’s “Injun Summer” in the Chicago Tribune. The Trib used to run it every fall in the Sunday Magazine.

The illustration and poem, originally published in 1907, depict both day and night views of an old man smoking a pipe and a little boy looking out over the smoke of burning leaves into a corn field. The old man regales the little boy with tales of “Injun sperrits marchin’ along and dancin’” and all “the homesick Injuns” that come back to play. He tells the little boy not to be “skeered” as night falls and Injuns dance among the corn shocks that take on the appearance of teepees.

Nothing stoked my imagination more as a kid than “Injun Summer.” It reminds me of my own corn field subdivision in the 1960s, making forts in the farmer’s field and building pumpkin totem poles on the front lawn. I always imagined “Injun Summer” taking place beyond the reaches of my own suburban neighborhood and Indian spirits rustling in the leaves outside my bedroom window.

Then around the early 1980s, people began writing letters to the Tribune complaining how “Injun Summer” advocated the genocide of Native Americans and other minorities. I even remember the Trib printing one letter to the editor saying that what if instead of Indians, the old man was telling the young boy about “Jew sperrits hoppin’ around to beat the old harry.” Eventually, the Chicago Tribune retired “Injun Summer” and now you can only find it on the Internet.

I’ve re-read “Injun Summer” a million times looking for these references to genocide. It doesn’t say anything about white settlers and Indians murdering each other. While I admit McCutcheon’s Midwest portrait of early 20th century rural life isn’t exactly p.c. by today’s standards, it’s certainly not racist or bigoted. Rather it is full of charm and whimsy, and it’s a damn shame that it has been recast into something sinister and cynical.

To me, it’s just some old codger – maybe the kid’s grandfather or some other crazy neighborhood coot – telling scary, inappropriate stories to a child. It reminds me of the stories that my grandmother used to tell when I was growing up. She was a fantastic artist who worked a succession of crappy day jobs so she could paint, but like most talented, creative people she never made any money at it.

She used to tell all sorts of inappropriate stories to me as a child about being married to a drunk (my grandfather) and how she had to secretly move out of their apartment in the middle of the day while he was at work to another place across town. She didn’t even tell her sisters her new address because she knew he’d wheedle the information out of them and he would talk my grandmother into taking him back. Even though she loved him dearly, she was tired of being a co-dependent – and this was in the early 1940s – long before Oprah and Dr. Phil. She even wrote a song about it called “I Saw The Clouds Go Wandering By” about how if she spent another day loving a hopeless alcoholic she’d die.

Many of her stories were cautionary tales so I wouldn’t do something stupid and accidentally kill myself. For example, she had a dozen stories about kids who died or severely injured themselves playing with matches. Most of the scenarios involved her coming home work and seeing fire engines on the street, and kids being brought out on stretchers with their skin hanging off their burned bodies. The kids' mothers would invaribly show up and the firemen would explain how they found the children dead inside of closets or under their beds. The mothers would start screaming hysterically. The dads would eventually come along and start beating up the mothers for leaving the kids home alone.

My grandmother also saved a horse from being whipped to death by its owner when she was ten years old. Horses were still used to pull wagons in her day, and she was coming home from school when she saw the rag man beating his horse. The horse was old and tired and as much as it tried to get up and pull the wagon, it couldn’t. My grandmother begged the man to stop hitting the horse, but when he threatened to whip her, she ran home and got her mother – my great-Grandma Bostrom – who called the cops. Anyway, the rag man was arrested and the cops took the horse away. My grandmother said the horse was retired to a farm but this took place in 1913, so the poor horse was probably sent to a glue factory.

She also used to show me the knife that she carried in her purse in case she got attacked coming home at night from her job selling candy at the Granada Theater. I must have been really sick as a child because I used to make her run through her whole repertoire of stories. Anytime you asked her a question, she always had some twisted tale to tell to illustrate her point. Once my brother asked her what a tornado was, and she drew a picture of one sucking up some children.

I’m sure she got most of these stories out of the Chicago Daily News. When I was learning how to read, she’d make me practice reading stories out loud from the newspaper about babies being abandoned inside mailboxes. She could also make a card table spin on one leg using hyperkinetic energy in her kitchen on Albany Avenue. It scared the hell of out of me, but I thought it was normal.

My grandmother’s stories made me feel important because she trusted me. She'd recite them in a quiet "It-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night" kind of voice. She wasn't afraid to discuss forbidden topics with her young granddaughter. In 1965, my grandmother fell in the alley behind her house carrying her groceries home from Jewel's and broke her hip. She claimed she slipped on a stone but it was probably an osteo break. She never walked or painted again, but she still told stories. I haven’t heard too many since that can even compare to them.

Tomorrow, I’m going to send $10 to the Chicago Tribune and get my own reprint of “Injun Summer” to hang in my kitchen.

Rosemary Kennedy's day off

2005-10-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a little-known, near- Kennedy tragedy, when President Kennedy’s developmentally-disabled sister, Rosemary, got lost in Chicago. Rosie – as she was known to her immediate family and the nuns who cared for her at St. Coletta’s in Jefferson, Wis., for 57 years until her death last January – was an anomaly to her family.

To hear the Kennedy family spin, they embraced Rosie as a child, kept at her at home singin’ Irish drinking songs like “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and “Pretty Maid Milking the Cow” and competing in sailing races off the Cape, against the advice of Harvard University doctors who encouraged Joe and Rose to put her in an institution. In actuality, the family considered Rosemary “a disgrace.” Joe Kennedy could not tolerate losers and banned Rosie from the house.

Up until his appointment as ambassador to King James’ Court in 1939, Rosemary lived with Joe’s closest aide – Edward Moore for whom Teddy is named – afraid that Rosie would jeopardize his presidential ambitions for his oldest, anti-Semitic son, Joe, Jr., who once wrote in a letter to his father that “Hitler has some good ideas about the Jews.”

This is the first of what I hope to be many fascinating blogs about America’s Royal Family – the Kennedys.

The fall of 1975 was a season of little girls lost. The nation was still reeling from two assassination attempts in as many weeks on President Gerald Ford. The first would-be assassin, Manson family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, stepped out from a crowd gathered to hear the president speak at Capitol Park in Sacramento, Calif. Wearing a red cape and white turban, Squeaky pointed an unloaded Colt .45 at the president’s genitals and demanded that he stop the “man-made desecration of the environment.”

A few weeks later, Sara Jane Moore, a double agent for the FBI and Berkley radical underground, fired the first shots at a sitting U.S. president since Nov. 22, 1963. Patricia Campbell Hearst, kidnapped heiress turned alleged bank robber, was apprehended after 18 months on the lam with her Symbionese Liberation Army comrades-in-arms. The Hearst family proclaimed Patty’s mind to be almost gone after Patty raised her clenched, handcuffed fist in a Black Panther salute in the back of police squad car and declared her occupation to FBI agents as “urban guerilla.” Meanwhile, in Chicago, another little girl was getting lost: the beautiful and the damned Rosemary Kennedy.

Rosemary was the prettiest of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s five daughters. Her Sacred Heart-shaped face stands apart from those of her sisters in old Kennedy family photos: dazzling Kick, gawky Eunice, smoldering Pat and sulky Jean. Rosemary was the oldest Kennedy daughter and had been diagnosed as “feeble minded” by Harvard University doctors’ definition of the highest functioning level of mental retardation in the 1920s. (The other classifications were "moron" and "imbecile.")

When Rosemary was a year old, her mother observed that the freckle-faced toddler had problems managing her silver baby spoon and “porringer.” Rosemary’s natural beauty hid any outward symptoms of mental deficiencies. Outwardly, she did not appear retarded, but strangers and casual acquaintances of the Kennedys noticed that she was slow in the company of her overachieving siblings, sealing her fate as the first Kennedy tragedy.

Throughout her childhood, her family fiercely sheltered Rosemary. She was included in games, sailing races and tutored to the point of torture, learning the Catechism and how to dance, and developing an almost idiot savant acumen for sums and fractions. Eunice who always held a special fondness for her oldest sister, ensured that Rosemary enjoyed some measure of success in games such as “Duck, Duck, Goose.”

In 1939, the family left on three separate voyages across the perilous Atlantic where German U-boats had been torpedoing Allie passenger ships, to join Joe in England following his appointment as U.S. ambassador. Rosemary made her debut into society with younger sister Kick, when both were presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Rosemary tripped on her curtsey.

Eventually, 19-year-old Rosemary was enrolled in a Montessori school in the English countryside. For the first time in her life, Rosemary began to blossom away from her hyperkinetic family and the overwhelming pressure to succeed. After England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Rose and the rest of the Kennedy children left for home in Bronxville, N.Y., leaving Rosemary to fend for herself in war-torn Europe. Occasionally her father, between fulfilling his duties as ambassador and cutting deals of appeasement with Hitler, visited Rosemary in her country school as an excuse to escape the German Blitz in London. Joe spent most of those visits haranguing Rosemary about being fat.

In 1940, much to the protestations of her Montessori teachers, Rosemary returned to America with her brother Jack. Back in the Kennedy pressure-cooker, Rosemary’s frustration reached a boiling point, driving her to the brink of despair. She began lashing out angrily at family members, her mother bearing the brunt of Rosemary’s wild swipes to the face when she wasn’t in Paris shopping for six months out of the year. Throwing tantrums, storming the streets alone at night, and reeling from the hormonal rages of an unrequited, sexual maturation, Rosemary fulfilled her destiny as a liability to her father and his presidential dreams for Joe, Jr., the oldest Kennedy child and golden son.

Home from England in 1941 following his disastrous appointment as an ambassador, Joe made the darkest of his many Faustian deals, planting the seeds of bad karma that would haunt his children and his children’s children in the decades to come. Rosemary was quietly lobotomized while Rose vacationed in California with Jack and Kick, becoming the first mentally retarded person in the United States to receive a state-of-the-art frontal lobotomy. Joe consulted no one, and the results of the experimental operation were catastrophic. Rosemary was worse than before, and was exiled to a convent in Jefferson, Wis., where no one in the family was allowed to contact her.

For the next several decades, Rosemary remained an enigma. Her oldest brother, who she adored, perished when his experimental plane blew up during a top secret mission at the lingering end of World War II. Kick, who replaced Rosemary as the eldest Kennedy daughter long ago, was also killed in a plane crash along with her married Protestant lover in France during a thunderstorm.

During Jack’s early political career, who had stepped in to fill his dead brother’s shoes, the press was told that Rosemary lived a quiet life in Wisconsin doing religious work. Finally, in 1960, during Jack’s presidential campaign, Joe publicly admited in a carefully staged press conference, that the democratic presidential candidate had a sister with mental retardation.

Through the years, Rosemary was slowly drawn back into the family. The annual visits to Hyannis Port and West Palm Beach began with her nun caretakers from St. Coletta’s, the convent where Rosie lived and was ministered to. She was a strong muscular woman, almost topping out at six feet tall, dwarfing the diminutive Rose. She was barely cognizant of her family and could not be left alone. Rosemary beared an unspeakable rage to Rose, whom she saw as abandoning her some 30 years ago. In 1968, Eunice founded the Special Olympics in Rosemary’s honor.

October 5, 1975 was to have been a reunion of sorts for Rosemary and Eunice, who was in Chicago attending a fundraiser for her husband, democratic presidential candidate R. Sargeant Shriver. The Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi brought Rosemary to Chicago to meet Eunice. Eunice had a full Sunday of activities planned for Rosemary – morning mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Madison Street, lunch at the Palmer House, and then a long frenetic walk along the glorious Lake Michigan lakefront.

After the 11 o’clock mass, Rosemary was at Eunice’s side in the church vestibule when Eunice stopped to examine some religious booklets. When she looked up into the crowded vestibule, Eunice told police, Rosemary was gone. Eunice, along with the priest and two other women searched the church for a half hour. Eunice went into the street and flagged down a passing squad car. The police woman drove Eunice slowly up and down the surrounding streets, not realizing she was the wife of the 1976 democratic presidential candidate or that the person they were searching for was the retarded sister of the late President Kennedy.

Eunice finally identified herself and the policewoman notified Lt. Joseph Locallo, watch commander for the Chicago Police Department’s Central District. Fearful that Rosemary might be found by a person who could hold her for ransom or harm her, Lt. Locallo ordered 50 police officers to ride or walk the Loop streets looking for her.

Meanwhile Rosemary, dressed in a belted, puffy white coat and red pants, strolled the streets. She carried no money or identification, and because of the lobotomy that her father ordered for her decades before, she was unable to talk except to identify herself. For the first time in 24 years Rosemary was free, away from the scrutiny of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, who never gave her a moment’s peace. Downtown Chicago was unusually crowded that Sunday. Rosemary was swept away in the crowd hurrying down the sidewalks, joining the flow of life like a seasoned urbanite.

For the next five hours Rosemary was lost while a frantic Eunice rode in the back of a squad car searching for a glimpse of her sister’s red pants. Police radios broadcasted Rosemary’s description at regular intervals. Soon, the Chicago media also heard of Rosemary’s disappearance. They, too, combed the streets looking for her, not so much to find her, but to be the first to get fresh photos of President Kennedy’s retarded sister.

WGN radio reported that Sen. Ted Kennedy, the lone surviving son of Joe and Rose, had also been contacted. One can only imagine his conversation with Eunice. (“GODDAMIT, EUNICE, HOW COULD YOU LOSE HER!”) Police searched public buildings, restaurants and alleys, but no Rosemary.

Finally, Peter Nolan, a reporter for WBBM-TV, spotted Rosemary as she walked north on Michigan Avenue, looking at display windows in the Monroe Building at 104 S. Michigan Ave., about five blocks from where she disappeared. Nolan asked if she was looking Eunice. “Yes,” Rosemary replied, quickly turning back to her window shopping. Two policemen observed the encounter and took Rosemary away.

After Rosemary was reunited with Eunice at 800 S. Michigan Ave., Eunice cried, “Rosie, are you all right?” The two sisters were interviewed at the Central District station. Security was tightened to keep away the swarm of reporters, but still they managed to get pictures of Rosemary leaving the station in her snowsuit jacket with her nun caretakers and Eunice looking sheepish and embarrassed.

“Goodbye, thank you very much. You were marvelous, your whole force was,” Eunice told the district commander, clutching his hand. Eunice left with Ald. Edward Burke, a friend of the Kennedy family who was active in fundraising for the mentally retarded. Rosemary was returned to St. Coletta’s.

Investigative reports in recent years have questioned Rosemary’s diagnosis of mental retardation. The fact that she could do math problems indicated that she had an I.Q. of at least 75. Diary entries written in the late 1930s also indicate Rosemary’s ability to write, filled with sunny descriptions of teas, visits to the opera and dress fittings at Elizabeth Arden’s. At most, Rosemary had an IQ of 90 – which incidentally happens to be my own IQ and I’m writing a fucking blog – in a family where the average IQ was 130, well above the cutoff point for mental retardation, which is 75.

By 1960, however, mental retardation had become much more socially acceptable than to admit a family member suffered from mental illness or dyslexia, the latter of which plagued may third generation Kennedys, including several of Bobby’s children and John F. Kennedy, Jr., which explains that whole plane thing. Even Joe’s attorney, after an FBI background check when Jack announced his presidential candidacy, admitted to the feds that Rosemary suffered from mental illness, not retardation.

Still, I can understand the Kennedys’ denial. It must be horrible to know that your father lobotomized your sister when a little Prozac or Lithium would have cleared up her problems nicely. It’s much easier to tell the world that your sister is mentally retarded and hold yourselves up as saints of the retarded, than to admit the truth.

In her later years, Rose admitted to Kennedy family biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, that she could forgive Joe anything – even bringing his mistress Gloria Swanson home to have dinner with the wife and kiddies – but she could never forgive him for “what he did to Rosie.” Until her death, Rosemary’s brother and sisters tried to make it up to her. They brought her to the Cape, where Timothy Shriver, Eunice’s son and CEO of the Special Olympics, regaled the press with feats of Rosemary’s swimming in the frigid Atlantic waters in the middle of winter, proclaiming his aunt to be “strong as an ox.”

Today Rosemary remains my favorite Kennedy. Even though her life was trashed through no fault of her own, it stood for something. I think of her every time a retarded person bags my groceries in the supermarket, even that retarded guy at Jewel’s who dips his fingers into the sample taco dip. I like to carry the mental image of Rosemary walking the streets of Chicago on a sunny, Sunday afternoon 30 years ago, carefree and without a gray hair on her head, checking out the fall fashions on Michigan Avenue.

So let's all turn to our booklets and sing a chorus of "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" in her honor.

Bless the beasts and the serial killers

2005-10-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

I took my dog to a blessing of the animals yesterday in the parking lot of a local church. Naturally, if there were a blue ribbon awarded for the worst behaved pet, my dog would have won. Right when the priest was sprinkling her with holy water, Rosie squatted and took a power dump – her third that morning.

Tuesday is St. Francis of Assisi Day. It is also Rosh Shoshone and the first day of Ramadan. It’s going to be a messed up day but no more than usual.

The last time I went to an animal blessing ceremony was ten years ago. I took my old dog, Bijou. Bijou had one eye and weighed thirteen pounds. She smelled bad partly because she was incontinent toward the end of her life. If she had been human, she surely would have been a serial killer. She was a lot like having Aileen Wuornos for a dog. There were burrs in her beard and bugars clustered around her empty eye socket. She had no problem ripping your arm off if you tried touching her face.

A lot of my friends were afraid of her. Even gangbangers would cross the street when they saw little Bijou coming down the sidewalk. I lived in mostly bad neighborhoods in the city and she was the perfect dog for me to have at that time in my life. I’d walk her in the park and people would comment how she reminded them of Chuckie in “Child’s Play.” Then they’d run.

Bijou didn’t take shit from anybody. There was a crazy hillbilly lady that lived across the street from me in a studio apartment who owned five huskies. She eventually had to put one of her dogs to sleep because it assumed the alpha position in the pack and would attack the other dogs in her kitchen. One day this woman crossed the street with her wolf pack to say hello to the cute little doggie. Her dogs were straining their leashes to get at Bijou, when Bijou lunged at them. They yelped and ran away, dragging the crazy hillbilly lady behind them.

Another time when I was walking Bijou through a local cemetery she took off. I found her playing with a coyote. She was the ultimate ghetto dog. So I took her to this blessing of the animals. The ceremony was held inside a church. There must have been a hundred pets. All of them were well behaved. I staked out a pew. In the middle of the service, another dog came crawling beneath the pews. When it reached us, Bijou started beating the crap out of this dog in the middle of the church. The dog’s family was horrified and kids were screaming hysterically. They had to stop the ceremony so I could pull her off this other dog.

After the blessing, Bijou got into the communion bread and ate several large chunks of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s body. I thought the priest was going to shit in his pants. As far as I know, this particular church has never held another blessing of the animals. I think Bijou made them rethink the whole concept.

Bijou died in 2002 at the ripe old dog age of 15. Like Aileen Wuornos, I had Bijou put to sleep by lethal injection. During the last few years of Bijou's life she had kidney disease and I had to give her dialysis. I did it myself, but I had to find people to hold her down while I filled her up with 150 CCs of lactose ringers. My brother gave me some three-fingered asbestos gloves from work, the kind firemen wear. I would make people put them on for protection as I inserted the needle.

My friends quit coming around to my house because I would always hit them up to help me “stick the dog.” I remember talking my niece, who nine at the time, into holding Bijou down for five dollars. After I set her up with pillows and the gloves, I administered the IV. My niece decided she didn’t want the five dollars any more and started crying, “she’s biting the glove, she’s biting the glove.” Her parents weren’t too happy that I had assigned their daughter such a life-threatening task and quit asking me to babysit after that.

After Bijou died, I figured I had earned my stripes as a dedicated dog owner. I think everyone should own a defective dog or cat at least once in their life. I know some other people with a one-eyed dog that is just as crazy and neurotic as Bijou. I know enough to stay away from the dog’s blind side. But I’ll always be grateful to Bijou for the many years of protection she provided to me living in the ghetto.

I got myself a sweet dog now, but I have to admit it took some getting used to having a dog with two eyes again. I still rarely attend church, but I will go if there are animals.

Jeff Stone and Eddie Munster join in search for missing Cowsill

2005-09-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

It has been 29 days since Barry Cowsill turned up missing after Hurricane Katrina. I’ve been feeling pretty badly about my remarks last week on “Cowsill Chatter” when I suggested that maybe Barry had been medivacked to the Betty Ford Clinic and was going through heroin and cocaine withdrawal. As you may know from an earlier blog, one of his brothers justifiably posted a nasty reply.

So I decided to pitch in and help the family search for their missing brother. I didn’t have far to turn. One of my favorite Web sites – God only knows why - is Paul Petersen’s “A Minor Consideration” advocacy group for current and former child stars. Paul played Donna Reed’s son Jeff on “The Donna Reed Show.” After the show went off the air, Paul had some down years. A lot of down years, which he has faithfully documented in his many gut-wrenching interviews on Larry King, A&E, Geraldo, “True Hollywood Stories” and just about anyone else who’ll listen to his sad tale of celebrity hasbeendom.

Since Paul founded “A Minor Consideration” in 1990, he has pulled more than 500 former child stars out of the toilet and put them back on the road to sobriety. That’s pretty impressive. If it weren’t for Paul Petersen, I never would have found out about Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver’s friend “Whitey Whitney” on “Leave It To Beaver,” becoming a heroin addict, or the many “Little Rascals” tragedies. Now I can’t watch Beaver without thinking about smack.

I’ve whiled away many an afternoon fighting corporate boredom reading Paul’s open letters to MacCauley Culkin and the Olsen twins, imploring them to contact him. So I sent off an e-mail to Paul with links to the Cowsills' "Entertainment Tonight" segment. Yesterday, I received a reply from him agreeing with me that Barry’s story deserved to be spotlighted on the his Web site. Perhaps it was my e-mail pointing out the many similarities between Barry’s struggles as an adult to “Rusty Hamer, Anissa Jones and Dana Plato” – all former child stars who offed themselves – that grabbed Paul's attention.

I immediately sent him the press release that the Cowsills put out about their dickhead father, Bud, who squandered the kids’ money, alienated their business associates and forced them to grow up in a “household of fear,” leaving them with "no life skills for adulthood." It was perfect for “A Minor Consideration.” I also cut and pasted Paul's reply on “Cowsill Chatter” letting all the other fans know that “Flower Girl was on the job.”

Not to be outdone, Anne Marie, who’s been leading the online search for Barry, ignored my triumph after admitting that she couldn’t get through to Petersen’s Web site. She posted a message saying how she had been in contact with Eddie Munster – Butch Patrick – who was “talking to Paul Petersen’s people as we speak.”

Incidentally, I met Butch about 20 years ago at Tut’s in Chicago, where his band Eddie and the Monsters was opening for Peter Tork. I won a T-shirt in the “Eddie Munster Chug-A-Lug” contest by downing seven beers in 90 seconds. It’s sort of like winning a contest for taking the biggest dump, but who cares. I got to meet a celebrity, and Butch really appreciated my bringing up his obscure Disney work.

After the Cowsills’ press release appeared on his Web site, I sent Paul a short e-mail thanking him. So this morning, I got yet another e-mail from him explaining how he was trying to contact the family and that he had some people on the ground searching Houston homeless shelters where a bunch of street people from New Orleans had been evacuated. (Nice work, FEMA.) He also wanted to put the Cowsills in touch with another organization that assists families in searching for missing persons – the same group that helped put Scott Peterson in the can. He told me “A Minor Consideration” wasn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. I could hardly believe that Jeff Stone was e-mailing me – personally.

I was so proud of myself that I could not wait to share this good news on “Cowsill Chatter.” I also called the site’s Web master at 5 a.m. Pacific Time. She was pretty nice about me waking her up and promised to pass the information along to the family. I had second thoughts after I cut and pasted the second e-mail Petersen sent to me on “Cowsill Chatter.” I posted a follow-up message imploring fans not to swamp these organizations with e-mails and calls about Barry. I was really nice about it. The group was sending me “hugs” all day until this bitch named Barb posted a message saying how "Flower Girl" had insulted her and the rest of the diehard fans with my requests to respect the Cowsills’ privacy.

Unfortunately, I think Paul Petersen now believes I’m a former child star. He signed his e-mail, “Fraternally yours, Paul.” Little does he know how I would have loved to have been on television as a kid. I used to beg my mother to let me audition for a TV sitcom. I didn’t care if it was hard, unglamorous work. Even after I overheard young Darby Hinton, who played “Israel” on “Daniel Boone”, having a vicious argument with his mother about how he wanted to be home sleeping and not doing a publicity appearance at some fleabag tourist trap in Cherokee, N.C., where my family was vacationing, I still longed for the television limelight.

While I doubt I could have landed a starring role in a sitcom, I certainly could have nabbed guest spots as a mean and/or dumb fat girl who beat the crap out of Buffy or Cindy Brady; or a female, apple-chomping, Larry Mondello-type talking Chris and Tracey Partridge into pulling off some scam. I certainly would have had a shot at the Pamelyn Ferdin guest roles, the nasally whore.

One of the Cowsills posted a message shortly after my phone call saying they were now working with Paul Petersen’s organization to find Barry. If they do find him, I know they’ll give him all the credit, but I’m proud of the small role I played in the search for Barry Cowsill.

Anyway, I don’t think “Flower Girl” will be posting any more messages on “Cowsill Chatter.” I’m going to go back to my people at kennedyfamily.com. Those broads are probably wondering where I’ve been.

Won't you be my neighbor?

2005-09-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a lot of crazy neighbors over the years. Between 1978 and 2005, I have moved 15 times. I can’t say that my thousands of neighbors have evolved into any lasting friendships. Some of them were okay and amused me with their fobiles and eccentricities. Others made my living space a total hell.

I’ve listened to neighbors beat the crap out of each other in their apartments, mistreat their children and pets, and chant Buddhist incantations at 4 ‘clock in the morning (time to get up everyone!). I’ve had neighbors who cried on my shoulder with their own lunacy and psychosis when I wasn’t exactly the pillar of stability myself; try to saw their doors down when they got locked out of their apartments; botch suicide attempts and turn their homes into crack houses.

My neighbors have fueled some of my best confrontations and fights. There were Tammi and Jose in Rogers Park, who stole my roommate’s and my mail, not thinking we’d notice getting two electric bills or the $673 worth of pay phone calls they made using a bogus phone card they took out in my roommate’s name.

There was Mr. Stain in Des Plaines, who let his dog crap on my lawn and his kid play in our parking lot, who thought he was hot shit because he owned some crappy duplex while we rented. He had a carpet cleaning service and would leave his van parked in front my building.

Once, when I went over to tell him not to let his kid build a sledding hill in our parking lot during a blizzard, we got into it. He told me everyone in the neighborhood thought I was crazy. I told him that I really didn’t care what my white-trash, Christian fundamentalist neighbors thought of me. I called him a pencil-dick and said there were a few carpets that needed cat-piss removed from them. For the rest of the winter I picked up the crap that his his dog left on my lawn and heaved it into his window screens that he left outside propped against the back of his garage. (Happy spring, Mr. Stain!)

My first negative encounter with a neighbor was with Dan Tressler, who lived next door to us when I was growing up. Mr. Tressler was obsessed with his lawn. At first, he was sweet. When I was about four, he’d invite me over to his house where I spent time with him and his family. Then one day he turned on me when I cut across his grass. After that, it was war between him and my father. There was a distinct property line between our houses; his grass mowed to the nub, while ours was long and raggedy with dandelions. We learned not to cross it.

Mr. Tressler called the police whenever we played ball in the street, once ripped a whistle I was blowing out of my mouth, and manhandled various neighborhood kids. Any ball that rolled on to his property he'd confiscate. Everyone on the block hated him. My old man was great at playing subversive mind games with Mr. Tressler. Once my father threw a can of paint against his garage. He'd go out at 2 a.m. and burn crop circles into Mr. Tressler’s lawn with fertilizer. As much as Mr. Tressler tried, he couldn’t figure out why a brown circle kept appearing on his prized front lawn.

My mother would occasionally hire Mr. Tressler’s daughter, Marsha, to baby-sit us. Marsha was a 15-year-old greaser chick with a stiff bouffant and chubby, pimply chipmunk cheeks, much like Lyndie England’s. My most vivid memory of Marsha is her chasing my older brothers to bed while hitting them with a broom handle. It wasn’t uncommon to see Marsha dashing out of her house in a black, leather jacket and jump into a car with some 35-year-old guy. I’ve often looked for Marsha on my high school alumni Web site but it’s as if she's dropped off the face of the earth. I’d love to find out what happened to her.

Eventually we moved out of that neighborhood and lived next door to a wonderful older couple who were thrilled that more children were moving in, because Mr. Rosen couldn’t take his afternoon nap on his back porch in the summers without the sounds of children yelling and screaming or climbing up on the roof high on Romilar cough syrup.

Last week, I received a frantic, early morning phone call from my old neighbor, Rob. I’ve known Rob for years from my first apartment in Des Plaines. We were a small group of self-contained units who lived in adjoining buildings. We’d come home from work and have a few beers in the courtyard and vent our troubles and woes, before retreating to our respective apartments where we would continue enjoying our lives of quiet desperation.

As long as I’ve known Rob, he’s had trouble with the ladies. He’s a good looking guy who just turned 50 and is very popular in the taverns throughout Des Plaines. I can’t say he’s a close friend, but he’s up there as a casual acquaintance. I used to think that Rob had boyfriend-potential until I found out there wasn’t a living brain cell in his head. I just enjoyed his goofiness, the eye-candy, and the occasional excitement of an angry husband who came around looking to kick his ass.

My friend Karol and I used to do surveillance on Rob’s apartment when I lived next door to him. One night after several hours of drinking and smoking pot, we heard Rob screaming into his phone at a neighbor woman with whom he was having an affair. We turned out the lights in my kitchen and crouched beneath my window, listening to him shriek, “YOU GAVE HIM A BLOW JOB, DIDN’T YOU?” He also owns a massive gun collection and shot a Derringer off after the Chicago Bulls won their last NBA championship, which brought the entire Des Plaines SWAT team swarming his building.

A few months ago, my boyfriend and I spent a Saturday afternoon with Rob bar-hopping at various taverns around Des Plaines. It reminded us both why we no longer go to bars in Des Plaines – nicotine smelling, dank caves full of barflies and our idiot peer group from the ‘70s repeating their same old boring stories. We both agreed it was a frightening, expensive foray into Rob’s world.

For the past four or five years Rob had been dating a woman who is actually quite intelligent. We couldn’t figure out what she saw in Rob, other than what was possibly a big penis. Her name was Laura, a fresh divorcee with three teenage sons who hated Rob. I really liked her. She was a marketing manager for a playground equipment company. She inherited quite a bit of money from her parents who both died while she was dating him.

Rob was distraught when he and Laura began drifting apart. It’s true what they say about money changing people. They’d break up, get back together, and then break up again. All of this was taking a toll on him. Last winter, Rob came over to tell us that he had been thrown out of a fundraiser for Laura’s son’s school when he showed up uninvited. Apparently, Rob drove up and down Milwaukee Avenue perusing the various banquet halls until he spied an outdoor sign advertising the school’s banquet dinner, where Laura was in charge of the silent auction.

He went in drunk and started screaming at her in front of the other parents. Two burly fathers came to Laura’s aid who Rob proceeded shoving. Eventually, some old guy intervened who kindly told Rob that it wasn’t the time or place to air his grievances with Laura. Rob left peacefully, but things were pretty much over between them after that.

He told us he was going counseling for anger management and asked if we thought he and Laura would get back together again. He also turned over his gun collection, which includes a Thompson submachine gun, to a friend to hold for him. We never brought up the subject of his failed relationship, unless Rob brought it up first. We’d ask him how it was going and you could see the guy was in pain. He tried dating other women, including a girl he brought over with Crohn’s disease who stunk up our bathroom. They broke up a week later.

In the last month, we learned that Laura was bringing Rob up on stalking charges. If convicted, Rob faced a ten-year prison sentence. It was pretty serious; even Rob’s attorney was pessimistic that he’d be able to get him off. According to Rob, some of Laura’s neighbors called the police when they found him asleep in his car in front of her house. He claimed he was waiting for her to come home so he could pick up some belongings he’d left at her house.

So last Monday, he called me at 8:30 a.m., screaming that one of his character witness failed to show up at his trial. His attorney told him he needed a female witness to get up on the stand and talk about what a great guy he was. I was on deadline for my fabulous job as a freelance newspaper stringer. But I agreed to go to the Rolling Meadows courthouse and help him out.

His trial was set to start at 9 a.m. I didn’t have time to shower or anything. I put on some professional clothes and jumped into my car. I was literally spitting Listerine out the window on my way there. I was also having a really bizarre bad-hair day. I showed up at court and listened to the dirt that the prosecutors had on Rob.

One of Laura’s neighbors claimed they saw Rob peeping into their windows, which he vehemently denied. I didn’t say anything because once, while I was still living across from Rob, I caught him peeping at me. I had just gotten out of the shower and was sitting on my sofa in my apartment wrapped in a bath towel watching “Siskel and Ebert.” I figured anyone who got off watching my fat ass was pretty desperate. I’m very European and really don’t care who sees me naked.

I didn’t know what I would say if I was called to the stand. If I really thought Rob was a danger to this woman, I wouldn’t have been there at all. I always thought that Laura was stringing him along toward the end and enjoyed being a professional victim. I figured the Holy Spirit would put the right words into my mouth.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to testify. Both attorneys went into the judge’s chambers and worked out a deal after Rob’s lawyer threatened to tear a new asshole into one of Laura’s sons if he took the stand. Rob’s restraining order was extended a year and the judge told him to submit a list of belongings that are still at Laura’s house, which consist mainly of old clothes, to his lawyer. The whole trial took about 90 minutes.

I think Rob learned his lesson. I don’t think he’s going to be bothering Laura any more. He’s happy to be going back to work and having cheap, meaningless encounters with his barflies.

Anyway, I got a million neighbor stories. I can’t believe I live such a tawdry existence and that I know so many nutcases. I’m an educated woman and should be hanging out with a better class of people.

Goin' down with Hurricane Rita

2005-09-24T21:24:00.000-07:00

I’m extremely annoyed that Rita turned out to be only a Category 3 hurricane and not the Category 5 monster that the media hysterics were predicting. I was all revved up for a repeat of Katrina in this summer/fall’s hurricane reality show.

The only thing more disappointing than Rita’s anti-climatic landfall is that I still have yet to witness flying debris smack a media personality in the head. Instead, I have to settle for sand whipping into Anderson Cooper’s face.

When I was in fourth grade I wrote a letter to the National Hurricane Center with a list of suggested names for hurricanes that included my own and several of my friends. I’m glad that these many decades later the NHC took up one of my suggestions by naming the most recent storm after my mother, Rita.

It's sad that the only Rita-caused deaths occurred before the storm actually made landfall, when 24 elderly people burned to death after the bus evacuating them out of harm's way caught fire in traffic gridlock. Yellow school buses, oxygen bottles, bedridden old people - nice going, Texas!

My biggest worry was when Rita took a sudden turn away from Galveston and headed toward Port Arthur, Tx., the hometown of Janis Joplin. Pearl once remarked during an interview on "The Dick Cavett Show" that Port Arthur residents’ favorite hobby was “burning crosses on the lawns of Negroes.”

More Janis fun-facts:

- A local developer bought her childhood home on Proctor Street in Port Arthur for his daughter, a Janis fan, to save it from demolition. When his efforts to turn the home into a museum failed, the Port Arthur Housing Department tore it down in 1980. In 1995, bricks from Janis's childhood home went on sale for $40 a pop.

- Janis was voted “Ugliest Man on Campus” while attending the University of Texas in the early ‘60s.

- The original, graffiti-scarred tables from Barney's Beanery, the bar where Janis drank her last screwdriver the evening of Oct. 3, 1970, hang from the ceiling above the present tables in a weird sort of parallel universe.

- Janis left $1,200 in her estate for a post-mortem party. Two hundred guests received invitations to a memorial at Barney's that read "the drinks are on Pearl." The Grateful Dead also performed.

- Janis died in Hollywood at the Landmark Hotel at 7047 Franklin Street in room 105. When she did not show up at the recording studio to finish taping tracks for "Me & Bobby McGee" the next morning, members of her band broke into her hotel room and found her wegded between the bed and nightstand, "bottoms up."

- "Me & Bobby McGee" was Janis' first song to hit No. 1. Unfortunately, it climbed the charts posthumously.

- Strange paranormal activity is said to occur at the Landmark (now Highland Gardens) but only when Janis' name is mentioned: phone lines start ringing simultaneously, lights flicker and celebrity 8X10 glossies fly off the walls. It's the ultimate cosmic giggle.

Seems like everywhere you turn these days some organization is raising money for Hurricane Katrina relief. There are yogathons, danceathons, drinkathons, marathons, moveithons -- how much more can I give?

I'm ashamed to say to that I have yet to donate money to any of these relief efforts, except for several pairs of plus-size Capris pants that I gave to a young neighbor of mine who was collecting items for Chicago Bull Chris Duhon's Standing Tall Foundation to be shipped to Katrina evacuees in the south.

Frankly, I could use a fundraiser for myself. I think the Red Cross has enough money and it still hasn't distributed the funds it collected to families of 9/11 victims. One of the best stories I've heard lately are Katrina victims who are spending their Red Cross vouchers on $800 Louis Vuitton handbags. If you're going to start over again, you might as well get yourself a nice purse.

Barry Cowsill is still MIA. His fans have posted his name on every Katrina missing list on the Internet. With so many of these stress-eating, pudgy broads leaving their own email addresses and phone numbers for him to contact them, the poor bastard is going to get confused. No wonder he's in hiding!

I posted a message as "Flower Girl" on "Cowsill Chatter" suggesting that maybe he was medivacked to a rehab clinic for heroin and cocaine withdrawal, and received a very terse reply from his brother Bob stating that Barry's substance abuse problems were booze - not smack or snow. HEY, GODDAMIT, I WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP!

It's sad because the Cowsills can't even get arrested, let alone muster any media interest in their missing brother. "Entertainment Tonight" ran a segment (see the link below) last Thursday about Barry that was pretty heartbreaking. Still, if or when the Cowsills find him, I think it's going to be fabulous for their careers.

http://www.stellarshowcase.durham.on.ca/ET.html

All hail the Pope of Wicker Park

2005-09-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

Thax waxes poetic for indie rock bands

"To me, whether a band is good or sucks is a matter of personal taste. So it's kind of a moral issue not to set myself up in that role." Thax Douglas, The Pope of Wicker Park

There are about 2,000 crazies wearing assorted subversive T-shirts assembled on Wabansia Avenue for the Hideout's annual, end-of-summer cavalcade of Chicago indie rock bands. If they're thinking about their lousy day jobs, nobody shows it.

The 4 o'clock sun shoots down the canyon of industrial warehouses and rows of city Streets and San trucks like a shotgun. If the sun were a bullet, it would hit the City of Chicago's Department of Fleet Management. Behind the stage, the Pope of Wicker Park is scribbling abstract blessings into a red spiral notebook, oblivious to the deadline of the sound check.

"You know," someone says to the large, bearded man in a crinkled baseball cap, deep in concentration. "You ought to get one of those hats like the pope wears."

Eleventh Dream Day, another one of Chicago's many under appreciated rock bands that pre-dates the grunge movement, picks up its instruments. Waiting patiently through the hyped-up band intros, the Pope of Wicker Park strolls shyly to the edge of the stage. Hunched over, he begins his blessing of the mic:

the desert

uses its enormous

stores of sand to

build itself into a

castle -- the castle

itself will be a resource

some day, but the desert

can't imagine

for what, having

used its excess

sand for building.

The crowd roars its approval. The mic is blessed. The show goes on.

Despite a teenage "cry for attention" suicide attempt during "The MaryTyler Moore Show" in the 1970s, Thax Douglas, the Pope of Wicker Park, has been more than happy to share the spotlight, and, more happily, let it shine on others. In fact, Douglas has been turning the indie rock world on with his smile for over a decade.

With a published book of poems, "Tragic Faggot Syndrome," a CD of spoken word stylings and the subject of an upcoming film documentary, Douglas has left his blessings on all the undiscovered talent and misfits that have crossed his path. With his belief that anybody can shine on stage with a little blessing and encouragement, Douglas has found himself on the receiving end of respect, reverence and awe by the city's adoring music underground. What more could any pope ask for?

"There's a hiphop term called 'blessing the mic.' I try not to exploit the fact that some bands consider it a rite of passage for me to write a poem for them," Douglas says, eating pie and killing time at the Hollywood Grill on North and Ashland, before heading off to see the Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Metro. "I think well of myself, but I just don't like the idea of being a tastemaker. To me, whether a band is good or sucks is a matter of personal taste. So it's kind of a moral issue not to set myself up in that role."

For Douglas, who's 47, "thinking well of himself" has been a hard-fought battle. An only child, Douglas grew up a lonely, smart kid in Woodridge, one of the many isolated cornfield subdivisions that dotted Chicago's suburban landscape during the 1950s and 1960s, where he skipped several grades of elementary school.

"In 1961, it was rural," Douglas says. "I could literally walk to Downers Grove through fields. To me, the suburbs are really lonely, there are only houses and cars and not many places where people can go and gather. I wasn't able to connect with other kids in any serious way. It was devastating being two years younger than my classmates. I wish I had been one of those smart kids that went into the city."

At age 10, Douglas discovered classical music, particularly the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. "I kind of dropped out early. I only listened to classical music for seven years, so I retreated into that," he says. "I had a collection of45s, like the Beatles. That was my way of retreating from the world."

Playing the role of Murray the cop in his high school's production of"The Odd Couple," was about the only highlight of his years at Downers Grove South High School. He was known more for hanging out at the school's jazz band rehearsals, where he'd imagine he was watching one of his own compositions that mimicked a true-to-life rehearsal, complete with false starts and dropped sheets of music.

"Of course, all these people thought I was really into the jazz band, but I never went to any of the concerts, only the rehearsals," he laughs. "It was one of those artistic conceits inspired by the avant-garde composers."

It was during his first stint in college where the "smart kid" started succumbing to a then, undiagnosed condition known as "cerebral allergies" that led to Douglas's first and only suicide attempt during an episode of"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" on Oct. 26, 1974.

"Even though my parents didn't have any money, they were willing to send me to Centenary College in Shreveport, La.," he explains. "That's where it all started. I was allergic to 80 percent of all foods. All I did was listen to classical records for half a year. I never went to class. I kind of ground to a halt and then that's where I did the suicide attempt. I'd like to find out which episode of 'Mary Tyler Moore' that it was during. I can probably find it on the 'net."

In 1988, Douglas finally broke free of the suburbs where he had discovered the Top 40 while working as a newspaper distributor, dropping off bundles of papers at news carriers' homes. After moving to the city, he began going to performance art shows at the fabled Lower Links, then Links Hall. When Lower Links closed, he moved on to Lincoln Park's Lounge Ax, another legendary club that has since been shuttered. There, he began staging a variety show called "Thax After Dark," that featured a mishmash of angry standup comics, Rod McKuen crooners, Funk-Accordion acts, contortionists, bitter divorcees, and the occasional Loretta Lynn drag acts. Douglas, who emceed the shows, would keep the variety show moving and breakup the controlled chaos with his poetry.

"The big thing then was variety shows. That's how I got started," Douglas says. "People would do weird stuff, poets, local eccentrics who'd get up and babble for 14 minutes. I started doing my band poems the summer of 1997. A band would always be the last act and I started doing it as a novelty and that's the way it stayed. Gradually, I found out it suited my aesthetic needs as a poet."

Today, Douglas has written about 1,200 band poems that he's read blessing the mic for acts at the Hideout and Empty Bottle in Wicker Park, which serve as his main bases of operation, not counting the ones he lost prior to 2001 before he started recording them in spiral notebooks.

"I really love 20th century Russian poetry and writing band poems is a good way to write in that style," Douglas says. "I knew somebody who always wrote poems about her garden, so a poem would be called 'Morning, March 14.' This is the same thing, except my garden is bands instead of flowers. I write them spontaneously and thenI read them from paper. I like the instant gratification of writing a poem and reading it before an audience. I really prefer it this way than to submitting a poem to a publisher."

Chicago-based Red Walls, one of the country's hottest indie rock bands, was so grateful to Douglas that they recently flew him and recovering band groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, known for her plaster casts of famous rock stars' male anatomy, to Hollywood to be in one of its music videos.

"It was really glamorous to be flown out on Southwest Airlines and hang out in L.A. for a few days. Unfortunately, the video wasn't any good because the director was a hack. It's just [Red Walls] doing their song and me and Cynthia and all these extras bobbing our heads," he laughs. "But I'm always grateful to Red Walls. I haven't worked a regular job for eight years. People say it's a real accomplishment but I don't feel that way because I'm so poor. Fortunately, my rent's real cheap."

Although various small, indie publishers have expressed interest in publishing a book of his band poems, the offers have yet to pan out. Douglas says he winces when he reads his first collection of poetry, "TragicFaggot Syndrome." He wishes he had published a book of his band poems instead of the self-confessional stuff that dwells on the low points of his life, circa 1987 to 1991, when cerebral allergies often forced him to lie down on the floors of L cars with migraines.

"That's so not me anymore, I wince when I read it now. People come up to me and say, 'were you just trying to be offensive,'" Douglas says. "I'm a lot happier now and less insecure and self-hating. I worked hard during the '90s to make myself a more emotionally secure person. I've felt very lonely most of my life and if you don't mind my saying so, now that I'm a celebrity in Chicago, people come up to me all the time."

For more information about Thax Douglas, visit www.thaxdouglas.com.

The story above appeared in Pioneer Press' Wicker Park Booster, Sept. 21, 2005.

Another Dumbo Drop

2005-09-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

My father recently decided that it would be a good idea for him to become an alcoholic at age 79. You can’t really blame him for wanting to anesthetize himself. My mother is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease and last year we had to put her into a nursing home.

My parents have been married for 57 years. My father shows up faithfully at the home every day to feed my mother her pureed lunch. My poor mother has been lost to us since August 2003. In the months before, when she was still cognizant, she begged to die as she was slipping in the netherworld.

Last year when Ronald Reagan died, I never thought I would find myself sympathizing with the Reagan family, but I had to chuckle at Ron Jr.’s and Patti Davis’s macabre stories about their own experiences caring for a parent afflicted with some ass-fucking neurological disease. Like the Reagan children, I had developed a black humor about the whole thing. You have too, because the only other alternative is to curl up in bed in a fetal position and bawl your eyes out. I will save the big cry for when my mother passes away, which will be a blessing.

As my mother was slipping in and out of the dementia that would eventually claim her brilliant mind, she was convinced that my father was having an affair with the woman who cuts his hair at Bo-Rics. She almost had me convinced of it, and when I offered to confront the harlot, she begged me not too. My father was extremely hurt by these accusations and would make grand proclamations about how he had been faithful throughout their half-century-plus marriage. It was about this time, that he started hitting the Old Milwaukee and his current favorite, vodka in a water bottle stashed in the glove box of his Chrysler.

It was not a smooth transition into the nursing home. My mother was a breeze – I was relieved that I would get my life back and would no longer have to spend my weekends cleaning up poo – but the old man was a handful. My dad is not the most cerebral guy in the world. He is a lifetime member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. A good part of his career was spent as an electrician working on huge construction projects in downtown Chicago. Riding into the city on the Kennedy Expressway, eight of the buildings he helped build rise from the Chicago skyline.

My father, who served in the Navy during World War II, is still bitterly angry at the Japanese. It’s not uncommon for him to start loudly talking about “the dirty Japs” in restaurants or other public places where there are large numbers of Asians. Another one of his favorite stories, shouted to us in a crowded restaurant, is how he once emptied a bucket of piss off the top of the Equitable Building and laughed as it splashed the other construction workers working on the lower floors.

When my mother first moved into the nursing home, the staff thought my father was adorable. I knew it would last for only a few weeks and soon enough, we began getting calls from them telling us what a huge pain in the ass he had become. Shortly after we had admitted my mother, I got a frantic call early one Sunday morning from the nursing home. The nurses were demanding that we come get my father immediately.

According to my father, one of the Alzheimer patients had wheeled into my mother’s room while he was there visiting and was about to crash into my mother’s shins. My father grabbed the patient’s wheelchair and sent the woman careening down the hall like a Mack truck.

We had to send my father to counseling, which went in one ear and out the other, as well as meet with the nursing home’s social worker. During this meeting, I also learned that my father had been eating other residents’ unfinished lunches and was grabbing food off the food line. He was put on probation and could only visit during certain hours. If he violated the terms of his probation, we were told, my father’s visits to my mother would have to be supervised by one of his adult children. None of us wanted this to happen so we told my father we would kick his ass if there were any more incidents.

Since then, things have been going smoothly between my father and the nursing home staff. We have received only one other call, last winter, from one the CNAs who said that my father had shown up drunk and stinking of alcohol. The CNA was concerned about my father driving home. The call came during a huge snowstorm and my brother and I had to jump in our cars with our respective cell phones and go out looking for him.

We found my father waiting for us at the nursing home. He told us the reason he smelled like booze was because he had spilled Windex all over himself while cleaning his car windows earlier that day. We drove him home, but found out later that he had coerced a neighbor into driving him back to the nursing home so he could pick up his car.

We have come to refer these crises with my father as “Dumbo drops.” Lately, there have been a lot of alcohol-related “Dumbo drops.” Apparently, there was some incident at my brother’s house a few nights ago. My brother found a fifth of vodka lying on the front seat of my father’s car. My father claimed that someone from the Chrysler dealership must have put it there. It was a big mess.

For the past few days, I have been badgered with apologetic phone calls from my father. This morning, he told me he wants to stop drinking. He’s tried lately, but can’t stop. I have been on the phone all morning calling AA, trying to set him up with meetings, other alchys to talk to, etc. He told me he couldn’t go an AA meeting tonight because of severe thunderstorm forecasts.

Since my mother’s illness, it has been every man for himself in my family. It has dredged up all kinds of dysfunctional family shit from the ‘70s between me and my brothers, shit that I’ve spent thousands of dollars in psychotherapy trying to recover from. Other friends are going through similar situations with their own aging parents and I tell them it’s normal.

My father is still the foreman and the boss.

I gave him some numbers to call and he just got off the phone with a guy named Bill. He claims he’s going to an AA meeting tonight at 8 p.m. We’ll see if that happens.

The Monthly Obit List

2005-09-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite stops on the 'net these days is the monthly obit list on my high school alumni website, which is Maine West High School. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the monthly obit list, but I check it every day to see which faculty members and classmates have recently died.

I guess I just enjoy the shock value. It's hard to believe that these people from my youth are gone. Their faces are forever frozen in my mind as adolescents with their bad '70s hair and clothing. I dread the day when my own senior year picture shows up in the monthly obits, before it is consigned to the lost "Warriors" page for the class of '75, mainly because my picture is so incredibly dorky. It's not quite as dorky as my friend David's senior year picture, who looks like Ernie Douglas from "My Three Sons."

I was incredibly hung over when that picture was taken one bright summer morning in 1974. I had a big gash on the bridge of my nose from passing out the night before caused by resting my head on top of a glass when it broke. My mother was furious with me the next morning, and I told her that I got clipped in the face by someone's fingernail while dancing -- not because I injured myself passing out. The photo studio was able to touch it up. On the large 8X10 portrait, there is a large blob of flesh colored paint over the gash. This was in the days before PhotoShop. My senior year picture is the last professional studio portrait that was ever taken of me. A few years ago, I had an offer for a free studio sitting, but I used it for my dog in instead.

Still, I remember the days as adolescents when we all thought we were immortal.

For example, there is my friend Linda from junior high. I was really sad to see her show up on the list. In seventh grade she often talked about wanting to get a sex change operation.

There is my friend Steve, who I went to see the Rolling Stones' Some Girls Tour at Soldier Field with in 1978. Steve picked me up in his freak van, along with four of his guy friends. I remember my father chasing Steve's van down the street demanding that I get out the van NOW because there were no other girls going. I told Steve to floor it. We slept on the sidewalk all night in front of Soldier Field. Our little group was quite popular with the other freaks because Steve's friend Rudy opened everyone's beer bottles with his teeth. This was in the days before twist tops.

The girl who started the trend of calling me "Baby Huey" is also dead. I have to admit, I was kind of glad to see her name and dorky senior year picture appear on the list. I'm sure she had some 'splainin' to do to God about her cruelty as a teenager. I was a sensitive kid, but I should have kicked her ass in art class. If I had it to do over again, I would retailiate and not be so intimidated by my childhood enemies and their ridicule.

But as a friend of mine recently said, these people will never again enjoy a greasy burger, a power dump, or a beautiful sunset over the Wal-Mart parking lot.

A few weeks ago, I saw another guy of whom I have less than pleasant childhood memories about show up on the list. I'll call him Keith X. The Xs lived down the street from us in our isolated cornfield subdivision during the late '50s and '60s. The Xs had five kids who all went to Catholic school. My parents, lapsed Lutherans, couldn't stand the family and thought they were snotty, stuckup Catholics.

Warren, the father, was nuts. He was full of pompous lies and delusions of his own greatness. My parents used to laugh at Warren when he'd walk down the sidewalk wearing his English derby and twirling his umbrella, with the five X kids trailing behind in order of age, his wife, Pat, bringing up the rear, on their way home from mass.

Pat X, the mother, was a gorgeous woman. She used to take the garbage out to the curb wearing a short teddy and would bend over, exposing her butt crack and boobs to the garbage men. All of the neighborhoo women to whom pregnancy had not been so kind, my mother included, thought she was a slut.

My oldest brother, Marty, was good friends with Bryant, the oldest of the X kids. My mother used to compare Bryant to Eddie Haskell, who was forever complimenting my mother on her attractive house dress and Keds. Bryant was following in the bullshit footsteps of his old man, Warren. Warren was a machinist and blamed Bryant's colic as a baby for his flunking the bar exam. Warren told everyone he was a lawyer, anyway. The meanest thing Bryant ever did to me was push me into the deep end of the YMCA pool when I didn't know how to swim. Thank God, my brother was there to pull me out of the water.

Warren X never wore a shirt on hot days and would strut around his driveway in a Speedo. He was a sex maniac and had the hots for the beautiful 17-year-old redhead who lived across the street from with Xs with her parents, Rusty. Anyway, it's pretty certain that Warren and Rusty had an affair. One evening, my parents were coming home late from a movie and saw Warren and Rusty strolling hand-in-hand through the subdivision. In another scandal, one of our neighbors said she saw the Xs at a Maine West football game. Pat and the kids were sitting in one row bleachers, while Warren and Rusty were cuddled up under a blanket in the row behind them, right in front of Pat and kids.

The X kids were all pretty arrogant. I always imagined that the Kennedys were a lot like the X kids growing up. Keith was a year older than me and used to beat me up all the time. He'd sit on my face and make me smell his balls. By high school, he was a hotshot and in the upper echelons of high school popularity, with his rock star hair. I hated him.

My brother told me that a few years ago, Keith X had a kidney transplant. Like most kids who grew up in the '70s, he was a huge partyer, so I don't know if his kidney problems were caused by substance abuse or natural causes.

But all was not well in the X household. Over the years, my brother has told me some horrifying stories about incest in the X family. Once, when he was about 14, Bryant X called him into the basement and showed my brother his penis, which he had proudly wrapped in black electrical tape. According to my brother, Bryant talked of fooling around with his sister, Debbie, the only girl in the X family. Debbie was precociously beautiful and not much else is known about her. The Xs lived in a three-bedroom house and my brother said that whenever he went over there, Warren was usually walking around in his underwear.

Anyway, I have lot more empathy and understanding of Keith, and why he probably acted the way he did. I'm sure all the Xs, with the exception of Bryant, grew up to be decent human beings. Even that chick who called me Baby Huey.

Eventually, the Xs got divorced and Warren spent some time in a mental hospital. My brother says he runs into Warren occasionally, and he's still as nuts and psychotic as ever.

The Rain, The Park & Missing Cowsills

2005-09-20T17:36:00.000-07:00

Since the 24/7 Hurricane Katrina coverage, it's hard to keep up on the stories that matter -- like the Robert Blake Civil Trial. Or Phil Spector's murder trial! I have to admit, I haven't been on the CourtTV website since the Michael Jackson Trial ended.

But today, out of boredom, I did a Yahoo news search for "The Cowsills." I know that one of the singing family members - Bill - has been sick for a long time, and I wanted to see if he died. I didn't feel like wading through the Cowsills' mess of a website.

I was amazed to learn that Barry Cowsill is missing in New Orleans.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Cowsills, they were a family musical group that hit the Top 40 in 1968. They had a few snappy years up until the early '70s, when the band broke up. There was Barbara, who had a short dykey haircut that the kids called "Mini Mom" because she was so hip; some ugly older brothers Bill and Bob; Paul, the family roadie; Barry, who was a hottie; John, also a hottie; and cute little Susan Cowsill. They also had another brother, Dick, who was serving in Viet Nam. The family was managed by the old man - Bud Cowsill - who from what I have read was kind of a dick. Apparently, he refused to let Dick perform with the family because he supposedly had no musical talent, so he was exiled to Viet Nam.

I liked Barry and John because they didn't have bad teeth like their older brothers. Susan and Mini Mom were non-entities to me. I was 11 when the Cowsills debuted in 16 Magazine, and Barry and John were just a few years older. I read 16 Magazine voraciously as a preteen, mainly for stories about The Monkees and Dino, Desi & Billy.

The Cowsills were a three-hit wonder band. Their big hits were "The Rain, the Park & Other Things," "Hair" and "Indian Lake." I owned all three 45s. I never purchased their albums. Anyway, my friend Sherry Mammina and I used to make fun of the Cowsills. One fine summer day in 1970 on Sherry's front porch, we cut out like 80 pictures of Barry Cowsill's head and pasted them on poster board. We drew weird bodies on all the heads and gave each one a name that started with the letter "B" - Buriel, Biff, Bozo, Bunky, Borraine - I think you get the gist of our hilarious 7th grade humor. We weren't even stoned and we were laughing our asses off.

I guess we thought the Cowsills were conceited because they thought they were hot shit. I was secretly fascinated by any child actor or performer back then. I liked the Cowsills' lush melodies and harmonies. They were all pretty talented and I was just an untalented fat girl growing up in Des Plaines, Ill.

The Cowsills made a lot of money and their rags-to-riches story was often re-told in 16 Magazine. They were originally from Newport, R.I. and were down to their last penny before "The Rain, the Park & Other Things" became a huge hit on the Top 40. They had leigons of horny preteen fans like myself. I remember listening to "The Rain, the Park & Other Things" when I was supposed to be doing my math homework, thinking unpure thoughts.

But like most suddenly famous teeny bopper groups, the Cowsills fell out of favor. In addition to their three hit songs, the Cowsills are perhaps best known for making one of the worst career decisions in the history of show biz, when they turned down a deal to do their own TV sitcom, which eventually became "The Partridge Family."

The Cowsills became poor again, and through the years, they would occassionally turn up on those pathetic "Where are they now" features. Mini Mom and Bud got divorced, and both parents died of smoking-related diseases.

But thanks to the magic of the Internet, the Cowsills have created their own website, with a million pages and pix. They have a huge following of middle-aged female fans who communicate with each other on the "Cowsill Chatter" boards.

The Cowsills are always begging for money from their fans to finance their CD projects or one of Bill's hip replacements. The only Cowsill who's been able to make a decent living at being a professional musician is John, who sings the Carl Wilson vocals in the Beach Boys' touring band. I saw John last summer at a Beach Boys concert, and have to admit, he was damn good. Not that I'm crazy about the Beach Boys. I went because the tickets were free.

God bless, the Cowsills, though, you have to give all of them credit for playing their hearts out at flea markets and other dinky club gigs. As long as they're playing other people's songs, they're all right. I listened to some samples of John's music on their website, and it was some overproduced Jesus freak crap.

I have to say, when I saw that Barry Cowsill was missing in New Orleans, I wasn't surprised. If it wasn't a hurricane, it would have been something else. He seems to be the most disassociated with the family's website. His page hasn't been updated in like five years. What scant, new biographical information that's available about him alludes to problems with booze, pills and suicide attempts.

According to Susan Cowsill, who had moved to New Orleans six weeks before Hurricane Katrina (shit this family has bad luck), she last heard from Barry on Sept. 1, who had ridden out the storm on the secocnd floor of a warehouse in the French Quarter. The threads on Cowsill Chatter are like a million miles long, but apparently he called from a pay phone at the Convention Center. God help him. He said he didn't want to get on a bus with "murderers and dredges of society" to be evacuated out of that poor, sorry, toxic fish bowl.

Now his family and fans are frantickly looking for him. One of their fans has organized a telephone search party, with fans calling shelters, hospitals and various businesses in the French Quarter. There are numerous messages posted on the Cowsill chatter boards, about contacting someone named Anne Marie for lists of places to call in Texas, fans who can't sleep at night knowing that Barry is missing, etc. Anne Marie has been on the computer non-stop for the past three weeks trying to help the family. (Don't these broads have jobs?)

Susan went to view her apartment in NOLA, which was demolished, but did manage to find her cat. She also checked out Barry's apartment in the French Quarter and all the bars, knowing those are the first places he'd head to, but he's still a no show.

His name is posted annonymously on a "found" site, but I think it's a hoax. The dude is probably wandering through the sledge looking for some junk to shoot up, drowned or was murdered. Or he just doesn't give a fuck about contacting his family. Probably the latter.

It's always a drama with the Cowsills. They thrive on it. On top of Barry being MIA, Bill, feeling left out, had to go and break his good hip. I think the Cowsills are excitement addicts.

I do hope they find Barry, though. It's amazing to me that "True Hollywood Stories" never did a show on the Cowsills, because I think their story is perfect. I'm sure they have some horrible stories to tell about their old man squandering all their money.

For those of you who are Cowsill fans and want to post nasty comments, I think it's time to move forward. This group hasn't had a hit in 35 years, so get over it!

But I promise to keep all you updated on the whereabouts of Barry Cowsill, and if he's found. I only hope the family has some of his DNA in case they have to identify a corpse. I'd like to know what happened to him. I don't think they're going to find him for awhile, if ever.