Parade

Somewhere along the way I became the type of person who makes things more difficult than they need to be.   Ask me to empty the vacuum cleaner and five minutes later the entire thing will be disassembled on the living room floor and I’ll be in the kitchen soaking all the removable parts in a bowl of suds and scrubbing the folds of the filter with a Q-tip.  Shortcuts never seemed to interest me.  So when I was asked, in my senior year of high school, to read the Gettysburg Address at the city’s Memorial Day parade, I took this to mean: Memorize it and give it all you’ve got.    

May 23, 1989

1.  Wind Beneath My Wings, Bette Midler

2.  Through the Storm, Aretha Franklin and Elton John

3.  This Time I Know It’s For Real, Donna Summer

4.  Soldier of Love, Donny Osmond

5.  After All, Peter Cetera and Cher

6.  I Only Wanna Be with You, Samantha Fox

7.  Iko Iko, The Belle Stars

8.  We Can Last Forever, Chicago

9.  Like a Prayer, Madonna

10. Giving Up on Love, Rick Astley

Niagara Falls had three high schools, and the city would rotate asking each for its valedictorian to read an historic speech at the annual parade, and, as luck would have it, the stars aligned for me.  The vice-principal stopped me in the hallway one day and handed me a typed copy of the Gettysburg Address, asking if I’d be interested.  It never occurred to me to say no, which proves that I wasn’t nearly as smart as people thought I was.   The real clue, for anyone who’d been paying attention, came two years earlier when I’d foolishly agreed to dress up in a rabbit costume and hand out candy to the participants of the science fair held in the gym for the local grammar schools.   To be punched in the nose on a normal day is, I imagine, bad enough, but to be punched in the nose while wearing an oversized rabbit head by a sixth grader whose lopsided volcano entry merely gurgled and coughed but by no means erupted escalates you to a level of stupid reserved for a select few.    

I was required to wear a tie to school Monday through Friday, so wearing one on a Sunday afternoon was not my idea of a good time.  It was warm that day, and I sat beside the mayor in the back seat of a white Cadillac convertible as it crawled along the parade route, up Main Street to a triangular patch of grassy land opposite the post office.   The mayor and I took our seats on a portable stage along with a rabbi, other city officials, and a tiny woman who was introduced as the city’s oldest-living World War I widow.   She got applause for standing up.  

Among the gathered crowd were my mother, my grandmother, and my Great Aunt Angie, a woman convinced that anyone holding a plate covered in Reynolds Wrap is either going to or coming from a party.  “Look at that,” she’ll say, spotting some random people with aluminum foil.  “I’ll bet they had a party,” and she’ll nod and smile in approval because Aunt Angie approves of all parties.  Blinking lights.  Toothpicks.  Saran Wrap.  These things all signal potential fun, for which she is always on the lookout.  So in preparation for my reading of the Gettysburg Address, Aunt Angie, wearing a polyester pant suit, spread a blanket in the shade of a tree and used her patent-leather purse to anchor down a large, helium-filled balloon with the California Raisins on it.    

When the moment arrived I stepped to the podium and silently congratulated myself for having had the foresight to memorize the speech, because no one affiliated with the event had bothered to supply me with a copy of it.  Why I hadn’t thought to bring my own copy is further proof of my stupidity, but that was that and there I was, on my own, just me and my memory and a park full of people.  And so I began: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  One of the organizers stepped up behind me and whispered for me to move closer to the microphone.  I wanted to turn to him and say And then what?  Because I had no idea what came next.  My mind had gone blank, replaced by a white hot burning sensation that had shot its way from my stomach straight up into my head.  I stood there and stared at my hand for an inappropriate amount of time, hoping for the words, even just one of them to get me started again, and when none came I seriously considered making my next ones: Sorry, that’s all I’ve got and then walking away. 

What could they do?  They couldn’t force me to say what I couldn’t remember.  Oh sure, I might be reviled for a while, written up in the Gazette as the rain on the parade, the low point of the day, the guy who made a mockery of Abraham Lincoln right there in front of the oldest-living war widow, but I was willing to accept all that if I meant I could go sit down again.  

But then the words returned.  Slowly at first.  And to hide my panic that’s exactly how I said them.  Slowly.  As if the pauses were intentional.  As if I were making it all up on the spot, writing it myself.  I calmly crossed one foot over the other and took hold of the podium, as if to say I’m settling in here, folks, and you should too because this could take a while.  I gave it all I had, turning each word, each phrase, carefully out of my mouth and looking out at the crowd as if asking everyone to really listen to what I was saying.  And, clearly listening, everyone looked back at me as if asking themselves Where the hell did they get this kid?     

Years later when I was asked to do a reading at my grandmother’s funeral, the cheerful woman planning the mass gave me a copy of a passage from the Book of Deuteronomy.  I read it over once or twice and then, having learned my lesson and taking no chances that I’d find a bible in the church, folded it and slipped it into one of my pockets.  By the time the priest called me up to the podium, I’d forgotten which pocket.  With a suit on there were at least six possibilities.  As I stood there at the microphone patting myself down like a criminal, searching for the feel of crinkling paper, I felt the uncomfortable silence in the church growing longer and saw a bunch of swollen, soupy eyes staring at me, imploring me to get the show on the road.  So I began from memory.  “Four score and seven years ago...”

Oh. Canada

It was a Monday evening, around the time when we would normally eat dinner, five-thirty or so, when my mother announced to my sister and me that we were going on vacation.  Our destination was Canada, and it took us all of twelve minutes to get there.  On foot. 

1.   Papa Don’t Preach, Madonna

2.   Invisible Touch, Genesis

3.   The Glory of Love, Peter Cetera

4.   The Edge of Heaven, Wham

5.   Nasty, Janet Jackson

6.   Who’s Johnny, El DeBarge

7.   Modern Woman, Billy Joel

8.   Venus, Bananarama

9.   Dancing on the Ceiling, Lionel Richie

10. Mad About You, Belinda Carlisle

We lived in The Jefferson, a stately apartment building on Rainbow Boulevard in downtown Niagara Falls, at the Canadian border.  From our fourth-floor apartment we could see the rising mist of the Falls, which, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, would sometimes fool us into thinking it was raining.  This usually happened early in the mornings, when my sister and I would head out into the dull grey quiet to stand on the corner of Third and Rainbow and wait for the bus to take us to school.  “Shit,” she’d say, “it’s raining.”  I’d point out that, no, it wasn’t raining, it was simply the mist from the Falls.  “I don’t give a flying fuck where it’s from,” she’d say, putting up her umbrella, “it’s still water and it’s ruining my hair.”  

When my mother, my sister and I arrived at the customs booth the official looked us up and down and asked why were coming to Canada.  “For a vacation,” my mother announced cheerfully.  She seemed pleased with the way it sounded paired with the way it looked.  The three of us just standing there, empty-handed, no luggage, no maps.  She pointed back across the bridge in the general direction of our apartment building and explained that we lived “right over there” and were coming “to have some dinner and see the sights.”  She said it as if we’d never seen them before, as if we’d just discoverd this mysterious place called Canada and had decided, on a whim, to find out what it was all about.

Outside the customs booth a walkway led to a topiary park with shrubs and trees and pebbled walkways.  It was all, in my mind, very European.  Flowers were planted in measured rows and were sometimes arranged by color to spell words like “Canada” or “Welcome.”  This was in stark contrast to the grounds on the American side of the Falls, where the flowers were illiterate.  Where the trees and shrubs did whatever the hell they wanted, and weeds flourished, as did litter.    

My mother led us to a casual restaurant overlooking the Falls, and we ate cafeteria style, sliding our trays along a metal track and picking up plates of prepared food along the way.  Meatloaf.  Chicken in mystery sauce.  The Canadians may have excelled at horticulture but cuisine was another matter.  After dinner, we did some sightseeing with the other tourists, though the sights we enjoyed most were the tourists themselves.  When we’d had enough, we walked back home and talked about what a nice vacation it had been.  

The next night, around five-thirty or so, after the summer heat had eased, we did the same thing.  Walked across the bridge, through customs, along the pebbled walkways, then pushed our plates through the cafeteria, stared at the Falls, watched the tourists, then headed home at dusk.  On Wednesday night we did the same thing again.  

By Thursday my sister had developed a permanently pissed-off look and refused to go.  “I’m sick of Canada,” she said.   I really couldn’t blame her.  I was starting to hate it myself.  The same walk, the same sights.  Even the customs official was sick of seeing us and took to just waving us through.  But my mother wasn’t budging.  “This is our summer vacation,” she said, lighting up a cigarette.  “I’m the mother and you have to do what I say.”  My sister and I argued that since we returned home every night and slept in our own beds it didn’t count as a vacation, but my mother disagreed.  “It’s whatever I say it is.”  And she was determined to vacation until the end of the week “because I am not turning on that oven.”  My sister and I realized that if we wanted food without having to cook it ourselves we’d have to go to Canada to get it.  

My mother and I, on vacation.

We bought no t-shirts, no mugs, no pieces of fudge in the shape of a maple leaf.  We had nothing to declare when we passed through customs upon our returns.  It was the only vacation we ever took together, my mother, my sister, and I.  

“What’d you bring that for?” my sister said when she saw the camera in my hand on Friday night.  “It’s our last day of vacation,” I reminded her.  I pointed the camera at her and told her to smile.  She didn’t.   

Juice

As a kid I made money by doing yard work for people.  Irene Jenkins, a crippled woman who lived across the street from my grandmother, got the ball rolling one day when she called the house to ask if I would come over and pick a green pepper from her garden.  She gave me fifteen cents.  Eventually my business expanded to picking cucumbers and tomatoes and then to cutting grass, pulling weeds, and trimming hedges for other people.  But as my junior year of high school neared its end I had decided to supplement my income with some steady summer employment and was hired to work for The City of Niagara Falls, in the Forestry Department.

May 12, 1988

1. Always on My Mind, Pet Shop Boys

2. Where Do Broken Hearts Go, Whitney Houston

3. Together Forever, Rick Astley

4. One More Try, George Michael

5. Prove Your Love, Taylor Dayne

6. Anything For You, Miami Sound Machine

7. One Good Reason, Paul Carrack

8. We Said Hello, Goodbye, Phil Collins

9. Shattered Dreams, Johnny Hates Jazz

10. Electric Blue, Icehouse

“Forestry” was just a fancy way of saying “Trees.” There were no forests in Niagara Falls. Chemical waste and plenty of tourists, but nothing that could be mistaken for a forest. Basically we trimmed and cut down trees along the city streets, and my job, as one of the seasonal workers, was to pick up the mess. I’d gather the branches, drag them into the street and then stuff them into the chipper, where they’d be chewed up and spit out into the back of a dump truck.    

Most of the time you could stand behind the branch and gently push it into the chipper, but occasionally the branches would be ten or twelve feet long, with thick, heavy trunks and a dense network of twigs and leaves. With these, you’d have to stand to the side, at the mouth of the chipper, and guide the branch in, holding it there until the rotating blades could grab hold of the wood. The rest of the branch would then follow. Quickly. The trick was to jump out of the way fast enough to avoid getting slapped and scratched as the branches and leaves swept past you.

Long before the movie Fargo showed us what it looked like for a human leg to be stuffed into a chipper, I’d always imagined getting pulled in by one of the more unruly branches, and there I’d be, scattered all over the back of the truck, shredded into a million little pieces.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Southwood,” someone would say to my mother while handing her a jar of shreds. “We’re not exactly sure if this is your son or a sycamore tree, but here you go.”

I wore jeans and a t-shirt and steel-toed boots that I bought at Thom McCann. To complete the look, I was required to wear a bright red baseball cap, which, because I have a small head, never fit right and was always blowing off. So after spending the first few days chasing it all over the city, I clamped the hat to my belt loop and wore it only when the bosses were around.

I was a skinny kid with allergies working alongside large, burly men with nicknames like T-Bone, Big Daddy, and Rope.

“Why do they call you Rope?” I asked, imagining it had something to do with his amazing skill with square knots or his talent for lassoing a tree stump from some great distance.  But no.  

“It’s because he has a big dick,” T-Bone said. I never asked why they called him T-Bone.

The job started at 7 a.m. on the dot and ended at 3. We got a half-hour coffee break at 9:30 and an hour for lunch at noon.  Sometimes, if we were in the area, Big Daddy would park the truck at the City Market, off Pine Avenue.  It was a huge parking lot with various stores and restaurants around the perimeter and a Farmers' Market at one end, stretching into the lot like a peninsula, just behind the McDonald’s. The area was always crowded in the summertime and you were sure to see someone you knew, whether you liked it or not.

Most days, to save money, I’d bring my own lunch and eat on a curb somewhere or just stay in the truck.  On one particular day I was sitting on the passenger side with my window rolled down, while another guy, Ron, was sitting beside me on the driver side. We had finished eating and were just passing the time when a man approached my window.

He had wild red hair, coarse and thick, and wore a white tank top, which, from the looks of it, doubled as a napkin. His beefy, sunburned arms hung like sausages at his sides and he walked with a bob, as if his knees were made of springs. His name was Jimmy. He worked for the city, too, on the Sidewalk Crew, laying cement. His voice was loud and full of gravel, and you would hear him coming long before you’d ever see him. It was like his voice was the lightning to his thunderous presence. People had pointed him out to me in the past, but we had never met. Until that day, when he showed up at my window.

“Hey, man, who’s your juice?” he said to me.

I stared blankly at him for a moment then said “What?” Not that I hadn’t heard him. Every farmer at the market heard him. I simply had no idea what he meant.

“Who’s your juice?” he asked again. He was getting louder.

Beside me, Ron laughed. He could see I was confused, so he interpreted: “He wants to know how you got the job.”

It was common knowledge that to get a job working for the city you had to know someone. Be connected. Have, apparently, “juice.” Tired of waiting for a response, Jimmy asked a simpler question:

“What’s your name?”

“Ian.”

“Your last name,” he shouted, as if I were an idiot.

“Southwood.”

“Southwood.” He repeated the name several times, trying to place it, then finally did. “Is your father Rick?”

“No,” I said, “he’s my uncle.”

“Aw, man, I know him. He’s head of Sanitation!” Jimmy announced.

I nodded and said “un-huh” but really I had no idea. I knew my uncle worked for the city, but the fact that he was head of something, let alone Sanitation, was news to me.

“So that’s it!” Jimmy said, and I could see that he assumed, incorrectly, that my uncle was my “juice.” In fact, it was my grandmother’s next-door neighbor, Margaret MacDonald, who had gotten me the job.

Mrs. MacDonald was a soft-spoken woman who had been the secretary at St. Teresa’s, my grammar school, before she left in 1980 to become the mayor’s secretary at City Hall. She drove a dusty-blue Impala and, while at St. Teresa’s, would often give me a lift when she saw me walking home from school. My grandmother’s house was no more than four or five blocks away, so it wasn’t a particularly grueling walk, and the point at which Mrs. MacDonald would offer me the ride was always within the final block of my walk. Always. So from the time I climbed into her car to the time she pulled into her driveway, it was ten to fifteen seconds, tops. And it’s not like she floored it; she was pretty much just coasting the rest of the way. So I could never understand why she even bothered. Did I look lost? Exhausted? Was I staggering around aimlessly?

After I’d been hired, my grandmother handed me a box of Russell Stover chocolates one day and said: “Here. Go next door and give this to Margaret MacDonald.”

“What for?” I asked.

“For getting you the job. You need to thank her.”

“But this was three dollars,” I said. “It says so on the box. It’ll look cheap.”

“Cheap? That’s good candy. She’ll love it.”

She did love it. But Mrs. MacDonald was like that. Polite, kind-hearted, generous. And as much as I appreciated the good word she put in for me to get me the job, I couldn’t credit her as my “juice” that day with Jimmy because he was fixated on my uncle and planning my future.

“You should have him get you into Sanitation,” he said. “They pay nine bucks an hour.”

I told him I was still in high school, but Jimmy wasn’t deterred.  “So? When you finish,” he said, and he flicked his hand at the air as if high school were a gnat, a mere nuisance on the path to Sanitation. “They got a list in the garage,” he said. “When you get back there today, put your name on it. You may not get it...but at least they’ll know you’re interested.”

I wasn’t the slightest bit interested, but he seemed so excited by his newfound role as guidance counselor, I didn’t have the heart to just blurt it out. So I gave him a head tilt, the kind that says well, that’s a possibility, then broke the news to him that I had some other options I’d been considering. Like college.

“Aw, man, fuck college,” he said. His spit flew everywhere. “I went to college. I got my college diploma. And look where I am. I’m right back where I started from.” He swept his arms up and out when he said this, presenting the pavement to me as if it were the next item up for bid on The Price Is Right. “You show these guys a college diploma, you know what they’re gonna do with it? They’re gonna wipe their fuckin’ ass with it.”

I really had no intention of showing my college diploma to anyone, much less to anyone at City Hall, but apparently that’s what Jimmy had done with his, and for the rest of the day all I could picture was that shit-stained diploma, framed and hanging on Jimmy’s bedroom wall, a constant reminder of what could have been.

I worked for The City the next two summers, three years in total. From time to time I’d see Jimmy at the market, wandering around in the same dirty shirt, talking to people, shouting hellos. But we never spoke again. I suppose, after graduating from high school and going to New York City, I was a big disappointment to him.

The Clock Radio

The idea had been mulling around in my head for maybe a month or so.

I was 12 years old and can’t imagine there was all that much up there to mull around, so why it took so long to actually sit down and start the list I have no idea. But I do know I'd been entertaining the idea for some time, and then, on May 3, 1983, a Tuesday, I started my Top Ten. An on-going list of my ten favorite songs.

I had recently gotten a clock/radio of my own, AM only, with the number panels that were on a spool and flipped down, but it was good enough for me. For the first time in my life I was in control of the songs I heard on a daily basis.

I lived in an apartment with my mother and sister, older by a year and a half, in downtown Niagara Falls, NY. We could see Canada from our dining room window. From my bedroom I could see a parking lot with a dumpster and sometimes a drunk person peeing on the dumpster.  

In earlier days, when my parents were still together and we all lived in a house, my sister and I would listen to our parents’ records. The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland and Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones were our two favorites. Those were the ones with “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I probably took to the The Stones album because it had a cake on the cover. On the reverse the cake had been destroyed, and it always bothered me. "Look at that," I'd say to myself. "A perfectly good cake. Ruined."

My parents had an 8-track player in our green Volkswagen Beetle, and The Stones’ "Angie" still reminds me of when my sister and I would fold down the back seats to make one flat surface, and we'd kneel up and hang on to the neck-rests of the two front seats, me behind my father, at the wheel, and she behind my mother. We'd end up with the lumpy impression of the textured seat-backs on our knees, and it would hurt, but somehow it never stopped us from continuing to do it.

After my parents separated in 1978, my father moved to Chicago and my mother, sister, and I moved in with my mother’s family: my grandmother, my uncle, and my great-grandfather, Frank, who was born in 1885 and was 93 years old at the time. He spoke with an Italian accent and slept on a sofa bed in the den because he couldn’t make it up or down the stairs. We spent a lot of time with him in that den, mostly because that’s where the TV was. He called me Louis when he couldn't remember my name, which was often.

For three years we lived there, and during that time my uncle, in his late-twenties, would often play music for me, mostly classical, but occasionally something contemporary like The Bee Gees or Debbie Boone. “You Light Up My Life” was a big hit at the time and I thought it was the most beautiful song ever made. 

My sister had control of the one radio in the house, so anything I heard was filtered through her. Blondie. Pat Benatar. Stevie Nicks. Actually, I did have a radio, a transistor in the shape of Scooby Doo’s head that my grandmother had given me, but I could never get anything more than static and an oldies station on it, which, back then, meant 50s or 60s, and once the 9-volt battery went dead I never asked to have it replaced.

It wasn’t until 1979 when I heard “The Logical Song” that I wanted an album of my own. I most likely heard the song on the car radio, which was controlled by my mother and secondarily by my sister, who, being older, always had the front seat. Not that I cared. I kind of liked the solitude of the back seat, having the whole thing to myself, even if I did have to listen to songs I didn't particularly want to hear.

So my mother took me to Cavages and bought me “Breakfast in America,” Supertramp’s classic, with the cover image from an airplane window of a smiling, giddy waitress holding up a glass of orange juice on a plate as a stand-in for The Statue of Liberty with condiment bottles and boxes forming the New York City skyline behind her. To me it was simply a picture of a waitress with orange juice, which, with the album title, made perfect sense to me. Breakfast. Orange juice. I liked things that made sense.

My mother moved us to the apartment on Rainbow Boulevard in December of 1981 and it was soon after when I got the clock radio. It died eight years later, my freshman year of college, when it was old and could barely breathe, its motor coughing and wheezing with every second that passed. The clock numbers could no longer flip down, they just sort of stopped in mid-flip, as if to say “Aw fuck it, I’m too tired,” and only with a good slap to the side would they fall into place. By the end it made so much noise Ted, one of my two roommates, unplugged it in the middle of the night and threatened my life if I plugged it back in. Not knowing him all that well at the time, I decided to take him at his word and bought a new clock.

But that old one served me well. It was beside that clock/radio, on May 3, that I made my first Top Ten list. To be considered, the songs had to be current and they had to be on the radio. I had decided I would update the chart every 4 days. I was too impatient to wait a week, 6 days, or even 5, and 3 days didn't seem quite long enough for my opinion of a song to change all that much, so 4 it was.

Every 4 days I updated the list.

For 13 years.

I ended the Top Ten in April 1996, just a couple months after my grandmother, the one we had moved in with, died. It wasn't because she had died that I ended the list; it just happened that way. Unexpectedly, like her dying. The last Number 1 of the last list I made was the Mariah Carey/Boys to Men song "One Sweet Day," about a loved one no longer around. Seemed fitting. A good way to go. Besides, I was twenty-five years old and music had changed. Or maybe I had. I once read somewhere that songs leave the greatest impression on people up until the age of twenty-five, which is why we hold on to the songs from our youth.

When I look back on the songs of my youth, the ones I loved over those thirteen years, I'm sometimes, often, embarrassed for myself. Why I ever thought "Cool It Now" by New Edition was such a great song I'll never know. Same goes for "Bad Boy," a forgotten ditty by the Miami Sound Machine. But good or bad, they all bring back memories. Specific ones. Of snow storms, of school. Of my grandmother's house and how she taught me to garden. Neighbors she had. Cutting the grass. The way things smelled. Television shows. Saturday nights. Sunday dinners. Where people sat. Things that were said. Clothes I wore. Parties. Homework. And visiting my Dad in Chicago. Then Dallas. Then Chicago again.

Lionel Richie’s "Hello,” is, admittedly, sap but will always remind me of spending my seventh-grade Easter break in Chicago, in April of ‘84, alone with my Dad, when he took me to see "Footloose" and bought me a new jacket, a maroon Members Only. And I like that memory. I like them all. 

To begin, this was the first Top Ten List:

May 3, 1983

1. Beat It, Michael Jackson

2. Flashdance, Irene Cara

3. C'mon Eileen, Dexy's Midnight Runners

4. Jukebox, The Flirts

5. One on One, Hall & Oates

6. Little Red Corvette, Prince

7. Der Kommissar, After the Fire

8. She Blinded Me with Science, Thomas Dolby

9. Solitaire, Laura Branigan

10. Shadows of the Night, Pat Benatar