Gossip and Bikes

When I was seven or eight years old, I got my first real bike. It was a blue Mongoose and it soon became an extension of me. Wherever I went, I was on that bike, no matter how short the distance.

One time, I remember someone actually came onto the estate and stole it. I saw them riding the bike down the driveway and yelled to my Dad. He ran outside and drove down the street, where a few guys were loading it into a van. Later he told me that he said to the guy, “That’s my son’s bicycle” and the lead guy just smiled and said “I’m sorry, sir, that’s my mistake” and gave it back to him. I’m sure he didn’t want the police called on him, especially in Georgetown where they would come very fast, but I was always amazed that my Dad was that brave to do that. Honestly it was the one time I felt like he stood up for me, and I don’t know what I would have done if the bike was gone at that period of my life, because my parents really didn’t have the money to just buy me another one.

When you walked out of the door of our house, there was a large driveway that led down to the main area of gardens. It was just steep enough to provide a thrill to a 7-9 year old while not being unnecessarily dangerous. The hill did have a wall that dropped precipitously down to the cemetery that bordered our property, the view of which could be quite dizzying while flying down on my bike, which only added to the fun of going down and then walking up, and going down again. I did this all the time, most days after school and the weekends whenever possible. It was muscle memory going down the hill, skidding to a stop at the bottom where a couple of cars would be parked, and the asphalt turned into stone and a large greenhouse sat where my father did a lot of his work.

One day, I was headed down the hill and started to apply my brake when suddenly, I froze for some strange reason. My feet couldn’t figure out how to engage the brake, even though I had done it hundreds of times before. I was headed straight for the greenhouse and I didn’t know what to do. For some reason, my idea to stop myself was simply to put my knees down and stop myself by skidding my knees on the asphalt. It worked, but I was immediately in horrible, horrible pain. I somehow walked back up the hill to my house and walked inside, crying.

My parents were in the kitchen, which was just inside the doorway, talking quietly but I could tell intensely. “What did you do?” My dad asked, looking me up and down.

“I hurt myself” I said and sat down on the small step between the dining room and kitchen. My mother sighed loudly and rolled up my ripped jeans to reveal extremely bloody and raw knees, bits of gravel and dirt stuck to the wound. “Jesus,” my mother said, which I knew meant she was very angry because she never said that unless she was really mad. She went into the kitchen and grabbed alcohol and paper towels. “I have to clean it, Adam,” She said in a way that made me realize this was going to hurt even worse, and I was going to get no mercy from her.

I somehow kept the screams down, biting the back of my hand as she cleaned the wound. As she worked, she kept talking to my Dad, “They said it’s cancer, but I know it’s not. It’s AIDS, you know it is, you can just look at him. He’s got all the signs. I knew from the first time I shook his hand, that marriage is a sham, he shook my hand like Tony.”

I knew Uncle Tony was her brother that lived in Seattle, across the country. He owned a hobby shop which I thought was awesome, and he lived with another man and that was why he moved so far away from the rest of the family in Tennessee.

“You don’t know that,” my father said, not very convincingly. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“Oh it matters, because they’re lying about it. Why are they lying? They don’t want anyone to know.”
“Well, they wouldn’t want anyone to know, that makes sense. If people thought it was that, that would embarrass all of them you know that.”

“I don’t think it’s right.”
“Now don’t go telling anybody.”
“I won’t, but it’s not right. You know it’s not right.”

“You’re not going to tell anyone are you?”
“I said I wouldn’t.”

I could tell my father wasn’t convinced. He just looked at her.

“I said I wouldn’t.” It was his turn to sigh. My mother turned back to my knee. I felt forgotten, did they realize this was the worst pain I had ever felt in my whole life. My mother picked out a large piece of rock and pressed the alcohol in. I couldn’t hold back that scream. “Oh hush, I’m almost finished.”

“Who has AIDS” I asked.

“None of your business,” My mother snapped. Even then I thought, then why are you talking about it around me, but I was smart enough to shut my mouth. I knew soon enough anyway when the person passed away. It’s interesting to be on the ancillary of wealth and power, and to be privy in some small way to the inner workings of that realm. Whenever someone talked about that person after that, I felt a small pain in my knee, sympathy pains to the agony that they must have gone through, no matter what the true cause of death may have been.

That was about the time that I realized what gossip was, how gross it was, and how I never wanted to be a part of it. Unfortunately, that is something I have not been as successful at that as I would have liked or thought I would have been earlier in life, but I still feel queasy when someone starts to do it, and I try my best to not be a part of those conversations, or to shut them down before they can start. To see that my mother was willing to do it about a dying man, just struck me as wrong even in third or fourth grade, and to neglect a hurting child to do it, even more so.

I gingerly walked up the stairs to my room after my mother but a plethora of Band-Aids on both knees. Not two days later, I was back on that bike zooming down that hill, just to show myself that I could do it again.

 

Millenium

 

So the millennium was a weird time in general in this country, and I imagine especially weird in Washington, DC (because everything is always weirder there), but I happened to be a junior in high school on top of all that, so the weirdness was tripled for me just for that fact. New Year ’s Eve had always been a fairly laid back affair in our house, the only thing I remember is that we ate black eyed peas on New Year’s Day, and they were disgusting. That year, for some reason and somehow, my brother had talked my parents into allowing him to have friends over at the main house in the main ball room. I have no idea how in the name of God he managed to do this, because we were never allowed over there, let alone having a party there. Not that it really was much of a party, only three or four of his friends. But there was parent facilitated drinking involved as well, and he was not even 19 yet, it was a confusing time. 

My brother had a Filipino friend named Romeo, who was the only person who I really liked at this party, he showed me how to play “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” on the guitar and sounded exactly like Elvis when he sang it, which was surprising because his speaking voice was fairly high, but he could hit very low notes beautifully which created a cognitive dissonance that only added to the enjoyment of his playing. My brother had another musician friend there named Bobby, he was legally blind but could play the piano very well, especially jazz. He played some of the Peanuts Christmas music and it was awesome, especially because the ballroom had a Steinway in it, which sent him into convulsions of delight.

Anyway, shortly before midnight we all stepped outside, because it was promised that there was going to be a special firework show for New Year’s that was going to be even more spectacular than the 4^th of July. They were working on the Washington Monument at that time, so there was scaffolding all around the entire structure, which was always lit up at night. I walked out to the then familiar view of the Monument all lit up. We counted down to midnight and welcomed in the year 2000.

Then, all the lights went out on the Monument. For about twenty five seconds, I thought all of the rumors and concerns had come true, that all technology had self-destructed at midnight and we had been plunged into the dark ages again. Then, just as suddenly as it had gone out the lights came back on, accompanied by a burst of fireworks. Needless to say, I was quite relieved.

After fifteen, twenty minutes, my parents and little sister went back over to our house, my Dad issuing a warning to act right and to lock all the doors. My brother said, “Ok, Ok,” and went back to playing terrible electronic music on his turntable/cd set up (he was going to be a DJ at this point). They started drinking more, and suddenly guys were taking their shirts off and trying to wrestle each other.

I was just going to say goodbye and roll out back home, too, but I thought I would have some fun with it instead, because, well, I was the a-hole little brother anyway, right?

I broke off from everybody else and wandered around the house, a little, which was fun, especially in the dark. The house was freaking spooky, lots of old painted portraits of people that can’t seem to help but look ominous. After about ten minutes I slowly walked back into the ballroom, trying to make my face look like I was traumatized. I walked up to my brother, “hey, I’m going home.” He actually looked concerned. “Are you OK?” He asked. I nodded. “Just stay in this room, ok, stay in the lights,” I said and grabbed his wrist. He looked even more concerned. “Why?” He asked. “Just promise me,” I said. “OK, but why?” He asked.

“I saw something,” I said and started walking towards the back door. “You don’t want to see it, too.” And with that I walked out of the house and back to mine, sleeping pretty soundly.

The next day my brother told me that they were all talking about what I had seen, and they heard all kinds of noises the rest of the night. It wasn’t hard to get him or them to believe I had seen a ghost, the house was asking for it, and there were lots of genuine stories of strange goings on at the house we had heard through the years to make it especially believable. “It just freaks me out to think about what it was doing somewhere in the house while we were sitting in there,” he said, shaking his head.

I nodded, solemnly. What a great way to bring in the new year.

 

Skipping School In Honor of Christmas Eve…Eve

I consider myself to have been a relatively good teenager. I really didn’t go through much of an external “rebellious” phase. I got caught smoking cigarettes in middle school, which was exciting, but I can’t really think of any other times in my childhood where I was really in trouble for more than an hour or two, or where I had that “I hate you” and slam the door moment with my parents that we see in so many sitcoms. Actually my mother was more likely to do that to us then me to her. So when I look back at some of the things that I could have gotten in trouble for had I been caught, I realize I was lot luckier than I was good.

One very good example of this would be the number of times that I skipped school. Once I hit high school, I skipped out early fairly often. Considering the amount of security our school had, metal detectors, security guards, X-ray machines for backpacks and an onsite police officer, this was quite a feat and usually involved some manner of trickery. I knew a guy that could manufacture a pretty decent fake schedule, which turned my sophomore self into a senior with a morning only class schedule.

This came in handy especially when one of my friends and I began discussing how wrong it was to make us go to school on December 23^rd. I mean seriously, we were just sitting in class doing absolutely nothing, why did we need to be there? So, we devised and executed a plan to get the hell out of there. The plan went like this, at lunch time, we walked out the front door like we weren’t scared, and nobody questioned us. It was that easy, plus it was December 23^rd, seriously no one cared.

We took the 30 bus down to Wisconsin and M, hopped off and loitered in Barnes and Noble for a long time, somewhere around two to three hours. Long enough for people to think we worked there, long enough for us to know the answers to the questions they asked. “Where’s that new book about toddlers that eat their eyelashes?” “Oh it’s right here, sir”, that sort of thing.

I was a level of pretentious that is hard to believe at that time as well, like pulled out my own copy of “Of Mice and Men” and read it in the bookstore level of pretentious. I was always a voracious reader, but it was sophomore year that I decided I was going to be a writer, and to do so I needed to get down to reading important books and not just the latest horror novels like I had been for the past few years. So King and Koontz were replaced by Salinger and Steinbeck.

Believe it or not, one of our teachers, a favorite of ours, younger guy that taught physics actually walked by us at some point. “Why aren’t you guys in school?” He stopped and asked.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Eve man!” My friend said, gesticulating wildly.

“OK,” he said, not impressed. “But there’s school, today.”

“Then why aren’t you there?” I asked, my penchant for smart-assery boiling up.

“Touché,” he said. “I’ll see you guys next year.”

As he walked away my friend said, “I love Christmas.”