Dad, you ever hear of The Tubes?

I always prided myself on thinking on my feet. In my family, it was a survival skill and often the result of the mercurial nature of my other three family members. 

It was a fine summer afternoon back in 1976 I was 13. Dad was firing up the grill in the backyard and turned on the radio for some summer tunes.

Unfortunately, my sister had tuned the radio to WMMS which other than being a Cleveland legend, earned it’s chops by playing music other stations wouldn’t play. 

I was up in my bedroom reading some random history of the Second World War when I heard the music start – it sounded like some kind of gothic biker anthem from the 50s.  

Oooo baby,
Move closer to me
I've had all that I can stand
Take hold of me with your hands

Ahhhhhhh, shit. 

My dad compounded the frightening embarrassment I was feeling by striking a pose with his arms spread wide pretending like he was singing to my mother – who was looking out the kitchen window at him, no doubt smiling. 

Dad obviously thought this was a forgotten oldie from his time with the greasers.

Oh baby,
You give me the chills
Whisper low in my ear
Let knows how it feels
just to know you are near

Aw, FUCK! I knew I had to get down there and distract both of them before they listened really close to the lyrics and found out what this song was really all about.

We probably wouldn’t be allowed to listen to the radio for the rest of the summer.

I flew down the steps, my fevered brain putting together a plan. I raced past mom, out the side door and must have looked like Secretariat rounding the home stretch at Belmont as I reached the backyard.

Your body gives me a thrill
as it leans against mine
I love how it feels
with your jeans against mine

“HEY DAD,” I was nearly panting out of breath. “HEY WHY DON’T YOU TAKE A DIP IN THE POOL AND I’LL GET THESE STEAKS ON FOR YOU!”

“Kid, why are you shouting,” said dad. “I’m not deaf.”

The smell of burning leather
as we hold each other tight
As our rivets rub together
flashing sparks into the night
At this moment of surrender darling
if you really care. . . 

“WHOOPS, SORRY I KNOCKED OVER THE RADIO,” I said sounding like a frenzied Kevin Arnold. “HERE, I’LL TRY TO GET THAT STATION BACK.”

My dad just looked at me. “What the Hell is wrong with you kid,” he asked.

“Sorry, just a little clumsy dad; too much reading in bed,” I said as I surreptitiously cranked the dial over to nice, safe, teeny-bopper G-98. 

“Ah, too bad that song is over, here’s another one,” I stammered. 

Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight
Gonna grab some afternoon delight. . .

I paused and my heart skipped a beat. Nah, they’ll never figure that one out.

The other song I stopped just in the nick of time? 

Gratitude

Disclaimer: these feelings of gratitude could change at any time, especially tomorrow.

I've been struggling to write lately. Tomorrow is the soon-to-be-famous Address to the Director and I was thinking about writing on that but since I've been informed that the Stasi reads the blog, why tip my hand?

The old fallback for mental health bloggers and other pitchers of woo is to do 'the gratitude column.' Of course, that's akin to singing 'Climb Every Mountain' as their shoveling dirt in your grave, but whatever.

1. I am most grateful for my wife without whom, I would not be here today. Probably. Out of 7 billion mortals, I'm convinced she's the only one who not only gets me but can take living with me. Believe me, it isn't easy.

2. My hometown Cleveland Indians are one game away from winning their first World Series since 1948. As someone who attended their first Indians game as a 10 year old and skipped class in college to catch noon games, this is a big deal.

3. Despite an absolutely atrocious diet, for some reason, all the major organs, including the heart (!) are in pretty good shape. Yes, the liver has been battered but is better than it was three years ago. I have no idea why this is happening.

4. Even though it is rapidly filling with yarn and knitting accessories (caution to anyone marrying a knitter), I love my house and especially my basement sports bar/newseum. This is the only house I have lived in in my entire life that I feel totally comfortable in. It took awhile after the police raid to get back to a point of feeling somewhat secure, but that was not the house's fault.

5. I still like my Mustang. It was not a life-transforming machine, but then no one should count on a car to do that. It's still pretty sharp and fulfills a long-held dream from young adulthood to own one. And I figured, if mommy and daddy gave me one for my birthday in high school (as did happen) I probably would have crashed it anyway.

6. Coffee. I bought a new coffee machine yesterday and can taste the difference this morning. Thank whomever for coffee. How could we live without it?

7. Fall - my favorite time of year. After a particularly difficult getting-the-yard-ready-for-winter session yesterday, I sat for awhile and watched the wind whistle through the orange, red and green trees and felt a bit of childhood come back to me. Nothing like the feel and smell of fall. And when you get to be my age, you really have to stop and savor every one. You never know.

8. Friends - I still have some. They're mostly on the Internet. Some I haven't seen in awhile (since my high school reunion) and I hope they haven't given up on me. I know I'm a pill but I'd like to think I'm not really that bad a guy. At least my wife tells me so. I still have a friend in my home town - I don't get to see him and his wife very much anymore. Most of my IRL friends are my wife's friends and I don't get to see them much at all. And all the friends I lost, I still think about and wonder how they are doing.

9. Family -- not much left here. My two boys are really my pride and joy and even though I hardly ever see them, they know I love them with every Amazon delivery. Everyone else on my side is dead or not speaking to me because of long held grudges against my mother. My family, as it were, is my wife's family and I get the impression they think I'm a weirdo but they tolerate me the times I see them once a year.

10. The Cleveland Browns -- whenever I feel like the biggest loser on Earth, a pathetic waste of human space, a damaged, despised waste of potential, I think of the Browns and then I don't feel so bad.

Ah, hell, this is degenerating into 'gratitude with conditions,' so I'll stop it here. It's already a longer list than I thought it would be.

How I Got My Parents to Buy A Color TV

I shudder to think of what could have happened.

What happened was bad enough.

Of course, you know I was a curious child, which has gotten me in trouble ever since.

And my dad, a Korean War Marine MP knew one thing – money didn’t grow on trees.

Put those things together and we have the ingredients for a combustible situation.

Speaking of combustible. . .

Some weekday morning in the summer of 1967, upon awaking, I went down to the basement with my sister to watch TV. We were one of those families where the TV was in the basement, which was something of a family room/den (not the richly appointed ones you’re probably thinking of) and not the ‘living room.’ The living room was NOT covered in plastic and used for entertaining only.

You had to cross through the living room to get anywhere in the house. In the beginning, my playpen was there but other than that, I don’t recall it being used for much else except to hold our beat-up second hand furniture my parents were gifted when they got married.

This would change.

So here we are watching a Woody Woodpecker cartoon and I notice one of those Tupperware cups we had so many of (mom gave and attended Tupperware parties – all the kitchen wear was Tupperware, everything else was from Sears). My parents had been watching the TV the night before and what ice that had been in the cup had melted, leaving about a half-inch of water in the bottom.

By the way, the TV looked exactly like this:

 

It was the BIG expense when my parents moved in to the new house in 1961. Every new home had to have a TV and they were all black and white.

By 1967, color sets, which would set you back about a month’s pay, were sweeping the nation as the latest status symbol/must have item. I became aware of the wonderful world of color watching local TV shows that broadcast in color like Captain Penny.

Captain Penny

Captain Penny was a kid’s show which starred Ron Penfound (warning: we’re going Deep Cleveland here), who would dress in an engineer’s uniform and show Three Stooges cartoons. I don’t think Penfound really enjoyed springing the Stooges on young impressionable kids. He used to say it was OK to laugh at them but don’t act like them. I think WEWS TV5 (“First in Cleveland”) got the Stooges stuff on the cheap so Penfound had to show them.

He had a cast of characters that would do various skit appearances and had ‘Jungle Larry’ (not Larry Fine) bring in exotic animals from his theme parlk, but the one thing everyone waited for was ‘Pooch Parade.’

Pooch Parade was sponsored by the Animal Protective League of Cleveland and featured dogs up for adoption from the kennel and other dogs which owners could not keep anymore. For some reason, our Springer Spaniel ‘Dutchie’ (God my dad had a way with nicknames; I won’t tell you what mine was but it was close to Dutchie) was on the show. To this day I don’t know why we had to give Dutchie away.

Man, this is getting long-winded. Stick with me, it gets better.

ANYWAY. . . Captain Penny would introduce the dog and then say, “for you folks watching at home with a black and white TV, this dog’s coloring is . . .”

Dad, why can’t we get a color TV?

“D’ya think money grows on trees, kid? Nothin’ wrong with that TV. Just be thankful ya have one.”

The resentment grew. One night, I was waiting for ‘Bonanza’ to start.

I beheld some weird psychedelic image on the screen.

This is what I saw. 

“The following program is brought to you in living color . . . on NBC.”

No, it’s not.

Dad, why is it not in color?

“Shut up you.”

One more aside, I swear, before we get to the good stuff.

I was notorious for getting in trouble by sticking things in places they shouldn’t go (stop with the dirty mind, I was four-years-old). Example: my favorite was sticking bobby pins in wall outlets. It’s a wonder I didn’t have the weirdest hair on Golden Gate Boulevard. So my parents had to buy the plastic outlet caps which I spent hours trying to pry off.

I was curious. If I was better at math, I would have grown up to be a mad scientist.

So, here I am looking at the TV and the water in the bottom of the cup and for reasons known only to God, I wondered what would happen if I poured that bit of water down the back of the TV set?

Look, I never said I was ever mentally balanced.

My sister was curious too but I think she was just egging me on.

I don’t remember much from when I was four but I do remember this.

Remember the opening to the old Mister Magoo cartoon where Magoo lands up driving through a power plant? Remember the noises that made?

That’s pretty much the noise that was made when the water hit the vacuum tubes.

The TV went dark.

I froze in horror.

Mom came downstairs screaming at both of us. This is the part where my memory is a little cloudy as trauma tends to do that to children.

We ran from her up to our bedrooms screaming.

I remember leaning against my bedroom door, sobbing and retching, waiting for my father to get home. Because when he did, I knew, I KNEW, he was going to kill me.

It wasn’t the first time and it would not be the last.

Eventually my father came home. I was called down from upstairs (as opposed to being called up from downstairs).

I remember trembling as I came down the stairs one agonizing step at a time.

My father put his hand around my shoulder (would he crush my head?) and pointed downstairs at the dead TV and said that was something I was never to touch.

And that was it. I went back to my room believing in miracles.

It was a few years before I found out what really happened. At some dinner party at our new house, circa 1971, my dad was regaling her hosts about the time my sister broke the TV.

“Oh that wasn’t her,” I brightly said. “That was me.”

There was a moment of silence. Me and my big mouth strike again (again, not the first time, absolutely not the last).

“Wait. . . YOU?” my dad said.

My sister, hearing my screams of impending death, took pity on me for the first and last time in her life. To save me from getting my ass beat, she copped to the crime. And she got what I thought was the beating.

To this day, she has never forgiven me.

As for this revelation, the child advice columnists of the day said corporal punishment needed to be dealt out at the time of the infraction, so the child would associate the pain with the act.

It was four years later and although my father was mad for being tricked into beating the wrong child, he was not going to beat me now.

Of course, there is a bright side to this. You can tell by the title of this essay.

Originally, we were told by our parents that because of this, we would never have television again – EVER! I couldn’t fathom such an existence. Without the “Vast Wasteland,” life would be . . . a vast wasteland. My childhood would be ruined. The neighborhood kids would laugh at us.

That lasted about a week. My parents were bigger TV junkies than we were.

Dad got an estimate to fix the set. It would have cost as much as he paid for the TV originally.

Somehow, someway, dad decided to get a new TV. And it would be color. And it would be from Sears. And the only reason is because he probably got it on payments since he worked there.

I remember the day it arrived. It was YUUGE!

The photo is the 1965 model, ours was two years newer, a little longer, but still had that nifty ‘works in a drawer’ feature that refused to stay closed after a few years. It was in that ghastly ‘colonial’ style my parents loved so much. I always wanted ‘contemporary’ (being a modern, hip kid), we all hated ‘Mediterranean’ (red velvet? Really?) so we got ‘colonial.’ I had no say in the decision.

And it was placed in the living room, mostly I think so that mom and dad could make sure neither of us would approach it without being seen. It might have well been surrounded by razor wire.

It would be an entire year before I was allowed to approach King TV and only with one of my parents watching me. I always remember being allowed to switch the channel to watch ‘Flipper’ as God intended – in color.

“Everyone loves the king of the sea. . . “

I found out later that dolphins can really be bastards

Whenever I hear that theme song, I remember color TV.

But wait! There’s one more revelation – one I didn’t learn until well after my father died.

Mom knew.

“Of course I knew,” she said thirty years after the fact. “I saw you standing there with that cup in your hand and your wide eyes.”

Then why didn’t you say anything?

It came out slowly. She was afraid dad would kill me and she knew dad wouldn’t kill his little ‘peaches and cream.’ I don’t know what he did to her and I never asked.

And my mother spent the rest of her life trying to make it up to her.

So she knew it all along. As Captain Penny used to say at the end of every show:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool Mom. She's pretty nice and she's pretty smart. If you do what Mom says you won't go far wrong."

Traitor!

I’ll admit it.

I slept with a Cleveland Browns football. 

It was one of those mechanically signed cheap footballs where the older it got, the more the pebble cover flaked off. Dad got it for me in 1969 so it had the signatures of Leroy Kelly, Don Cockroft, Jim Kanicki, Milt Morin and, well, you get the picture.

My dad was actually at the 1964 NFL Championship game where the Browns laced the Colts 27-0. It would be the last time the Browns . . . well, you know.

Dad got me a pennant. I think my ex-wife has it which means it was probably burned in a ceremony with all my other stuff I failed to take with me before the divorce.

It kinda gave me nightmares

The pennant had an angry dwarf in cleats throwing a football. 

This is what a ‘brownie’ was supposed to look like. If you want to make fun of that, take a good hard look at Steely McBeam.

Like any Cleveland youngster, I grew up pathologically hating the Steelers. And since this was the 70s, there was a lot of hate to process – until the Dawg Pound days. 

But it just didn’t matter. Yes, I froze along with everyone else at Cleveland Stadium on the day the Brian Sipe threw ‘Red Right 88’ and the Browns Super Bowl dreams into the toilet against the Oakland Raiders.

I sat through ‘The Drive’ and ‘The Fumble,’ fuming about what God had against the Browns and Cleveland in general. 

Love ya' Cleveland!

Slowly, slowly, my frustration was reaching a boiling point. That point was reached when He Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned moved the Browns to Baltimore. 

And while you're at it, shove it up your ass

I was through - finished. I had lost too many vocal cords yelling at a team that could never quite put it together and I had nothing to show for it except a nervous tic when anyone mentioned John Elway.

I was working in Illinois when the ‘new’ Browns appeared. Already kinda rooting for the Bears, I tried, I really tried to work up some enthusiasm for these strangers who wore the right colors and played just as bad. But I couldn’t. Because they stunk too.

So work brought me to Pittsburgh in December 2010. My first ex-wife’s family was all Millvale-Etna-Shaler Township denizens so, that being the only neighborhoods I knew, I got an apartment there and moved in with my wife who never fails to remind me that Big Ben is a Miami alum.

Gratuitous photo for my wife

Pittsburgh. Never thought I would find myself here, of all places.

My wife, a big hockey fan and native Clevelander, was excited to be in an NHL city so becoming Penguins fans was easy. The Pirates played in the National League so technically, I could still be an Indians fan if I wanted to but I lost interest in the featherheads pretty quickly.

Shaler Township's famous homemade fountains. Take that Etna!

But what about the first love of my sports life, the NFL? What to do?

Could I? Would I? 

So the month we moved to the ‘Burgh, the Steelers were heading for the Super Bowl. 

Now I don’t normally think of myself as a ‘front-runner,’ but it took about a week to get all the black and gold I would need for the end of the season. I turned faster than Benedict Arnold.

My wife remained a Browns fan. Needless to say, her family and my former Cleveland friends were aghast, aghast I tell you, at my treachery.

The cry of traitor! rang from one end of my Facebook to another. 

You know, I get this every time I go back too. Sheesh!

What I did to the beat-up garden shack in the backyard didn’t help either:

Stiller pride! It's priddy n'at

OK, some said. We get the ‘when in Rome’ nonsense, but seriously, you aren’t serious . . . are you?

I finally got sick of it all and wrote down some talking points for these benighted Clevelanders which I have compiled here.

Saw the Stillers beat the Browns there

First, I gave up my youth for a team that held its fans in contempt and for an owner who eventually left the city. This – is a team that has sucked and continues to suck in every obscene way imaginable. Hell, even the locals call Browns Stadium ‘the factory of sadness!’ 

I live in Pittsburgh now and I think I’ve earned the right (by suffering) to root for a franchise that has a little more than a clue about what it’s doing. If you lived here, you might feel the same way.

We let you know if we don't like you

Second, about Pittsburgh: I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to live in a city that doesn’t constantly whine every time anyone says something nasty about it. Cleveland has so many self-image problems the whole city needs a shrink. We don’t feel the need to grab visitors around the lapels and scream about a world-class orchestra or LeBron James. 

Pittsburgh has so much to offer that we take it all in stride – including the sports championships. We don’t need to constantly explain how great our city is. You like us? Fine. You don’t? Get ahta tahn. Like that? I'm still learning Pittsburghese.

The inference is intended

I used to get nostalgic for Cleveland. No more. The city wallows in its own self-pity and even if I were offered the opportunity, I’d never go back.

Three last things:

Seriously, that stuff is awful

I still won’t drink the swill that is I.C. Light. 

You have to draw a line somewhere.

I’ve gotten used to Steely McBeam even though my wife hasn’t.

 

And I still have that football. 

Yeah, I'm holding it. Xmas 1969. I will never live this down