For Whom The Bell Tolls

How on earth did people live without the internet? I mean, where did addicted Hollywood celebrities get their dirty pic fix before broadband? Where did you get yours? If you were like me, you simply stumbled onto it now and again, when you were all of ten.

On Fridays my mother did the bookkeeping for my father’s business, a towing service. During the summer, my sister and I had to go in with her. (There was no such thing as summer camp, or space camp, or soccer camp, or whatever the hell kids are sent to these days to “keep them off the streets” or “prevent Mommy or Daddy from killing them”).

We sat in the back of the office BORED out of our ever-lovin’ minds desperate for something to do. We would watch crappy television (game shows) with crappy reception, playing with the antennae every 5 minutes like it would make a difference. Man, talk about nothing being on TV: three or four channels to choose from and no cartoons in the middle of the weekday. You could watch Guiding Light or you could watch Password, or you could sit on your thumb and spin.

We entertained ourselves with office supplies, playing exciting adventure games like Store! or Filing! or Know Your Lien Sale!, while irate customers came in to pick up their cars. Perhaps ‘customers’ is an inappropriate term. They had parked in a red zone, or had been in an accident and were never happy to trudge or limp in and hand over their money to the thieves who had towed their vee-hickle. Why would my dad go into such a business? It’s so . . . confrontational. But, like proctologists, somebody’s got to do it.

I suspect these horribly imaginative games with pens and pencils and While You Were Out notepads may explain my obsession with office supplies now. I could roam around Staples all day, planning what I would do with all those forms and filing cabinets and Post-Its.

There were two desks in my dad’s office. My mom would sit at the primary desk to work while seniority ruled who got the second desk. If the other tow truck driver left, that freed up desk #2, and I was all over it pretending to work or swiveling the hell out of the chair. I was ten years old, but I’d go through the desk drawers as if conducting important work. Then one day while rifling around in the drawers, I found Polaroid pictures of a young girl with a penis in her mouth. (That's right, a detached penis. Honestly, what am I going to do with you people? No, it was attached to a man, but you didn't see much else of him.) I remember the girl (and the penis, for that matter) had very dark skin and she looked a couple of years older than I, and the penis seemed gigantic and the girl, who was wearing two or three pigtails, was staring into the camera. I wonder where she is now…

Here is a picture of an ad that my mother designed which appeared in our high school yearbook:

You can click on the pic to see a larger version and peek at the writing, the kind of stuff 1980s people wrote in yearbooks. Do not ask me who Brian is. I have no idea; maybe Susan (the one who wrote it and apparently liked some guy named Mitch) remembers. She hoped we could be friends forever. She also advised me not to lose my virginity (the 1980s alternative to "Have A Nice Summer"). What, did she think just because I was exposed to polaroid porn at such a young age that I would be so easily corrupted?

Oh wait, I remember who Brian was. He was my boyfriend from the youth band. It was a June-August romance, between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. If I recall, he was a year younger. Yeah, I was a real cougar, man. As soon as summer ended and we went back to our respective high schools, he dumped me. HE...dumped ME! Boy, I'll bet he rues this day, now that I'm a big famous author of a blog about goats and underwear. Ha ha, Brian-whatever-your-last-name-is! You lose! You loser! Lew-hew-hewwwzzzzzerrrrrrrrrr!

Speaking of penises, my dad slept in the nude. Since his towing service was a 24-hour one, he slept whenever he could. If he slept on the couch and the phone rang, you could hear the coins in his pants jingle as he got up and my sister and I would run over to check between the cushions for loose change like it was a piñata. If he took a nap in bed, he’d often sleep in his birthday suit, or just underwear. I guess I eventually got over his coming out of the bedroom to answer the phone completely naked, but it got a little embarrassing if I had friends over.

A friend and I would be watching TV and he or she would be caught off guard, staring slack-jawed and wide-eyed as my father flopped his way into the living room to answer the phone. Oh sure, it’s funny now, thirty-five years later, but if that happened today? He would have been hauled off to jail by the parents of whichever traumatized friend of mine sat on our blue, black and white tweed couch while I burned a silent but mortified shade of red.

And if you include the loud RING-RING! in the middle of the night and in the middle of dinner, I grew up to hate the sound of a ringing phone. Even in my dad’s office, the phone rang so loud, so that if someone had walked out to the storage yard, he could still hear it. The ringing phone represents disturbance in my life. On so many levels.