I think back to this time with a sort of sepia tone, that highly saturated faded brown evening light cast over everything that video makers imagine.  There are shadows perhaps where my recollections are unclear filling in the gray areas of memory.  Now there are rides and crowd noises, a carousel – – though there was no carousel that I can remember.  And there is Bobby flipping burgers behind the concession stand and the priest collecting the cash. Father Hector?  No, an older priest with white hair, glasses – no beard like father Hector if I’m remembering it correctly.  I tended to avoid the priests back then. They always wanted to know my business.  I think it was father Hector actually who would set his confessional so that he could see who each sinner was when we’d leave the room.  Gradeschool.

Anyway.

The Saint Josephs annual Labor Day fair.  I’d flip burgers and dogs with Bobby and his family there every year once I’d been gone long enough to return to Lodi without too great of a contempt.  The fairs became our reunions when we grew up.  An annual touchstone of the place I came from long after all the traumas had shrunk to short colorless clips of a childhood memory – colorless but for this pair of maroon shoes I faintly recall and my 7th grade teacher Mr. Caban’s photo of his prized possession The Ruby Slippers.  Yes those Ruby Slippers.  His claim was that Judy Garland did in fact where them in the movie.  But now knowing that there were perhaps 8 or 10 pairs used in the film who knows.  

It’s incredible that my friendship with Bobby held on so long, the only friend to survive that peculiar experience which was grade school.  And I don’t know exactly why it lasted.  Perhaps he was the one boy whose spit never burned the back of my neck in choir class. 

Don’t feel bad. It makes for good writing material.  

The violence in his household was raw.  His mother would come home and beat the crap out of him and his brother right in front of me.  Never Vicki.  Just the boys.  It was something that today she’d probably be arrested for.  But to them, back then it was almost a game.  We were bad boys.  We stole, we lied, did ridiculous things.  She’d always catch us.  That or she’d find some other reason to smack little Mikey’s ass or Bobby anywhere she could get in a good one.  Before I moved down the shore there was talk of creating a red rose mafia.  Whacking someone in the community and leaving a signature calling card of a red rose on the victims chest – it was an Italian neighborhood after all.  Looking back maybe it’s a good thing my parents exercised some discretion over the films I watched.  While Halloween and Jaws seemed to slip before my preteen eyes, The Godfather never did.  And today I can happily say I’m the only boy in my graduating class who didn’t become a Guido.  On the other hand, Matt Puccio, he liked the band Wham.  I don’t think he became a Guido either.   Anyhow the red rose mafia.  I was more practical than that and new we’d never get away with it.  That and I had no particular interest in killing people, with waterguns or otherwise.  I don’t know how far the boys ended up taking that past age 13. When I picked back up with Bobby somewhere in my early twenties none of them had been in jail yet.  Most of them had cocaine habits. 

Bobby’s mom’s sort of discipline was not how it was at my house.  At my house the spankings were carried out by the old neighbor Hank, or as we kids referred to him as ‘Pop Pop.’  Maude and Pop Pop were an elderly couple who lived next door to the cabin we’d escape to in the Pocono Mountains in summer – respite from the dirty concrete stained parks of Lodi, NJ, and the crooked marble floors of Saint Josephs School.  Usually spawned by some hyped up childhood panic over my sister touching my Matchbox cars, Pop Pop would be called over to help my parents discipline us, or I should say me.  I remember him wearing light blue pants, probably polyester, and a button down white shirt.  Maybe there was the occasional pattern on the shirt, but nothing busy.  This was the early 80’s and he was maybe 80 years old himself at that time.  He had a thick mustache and thicker tinted glasses.  A whicker hat covered his big bald head.  Wow.  I haven’t thought about him in years, not how he looked anyway.  What a terrible description.  Believe it or not, I loved the guy.  He was the closest to a grandfather figure I’d ever had.  My moms dad, Pat, died shortly before my birth.  My dads dad, was a cowboy out in Montana. His drawl so slow he sounded like a record at 1/4 speed.  The one time I spoke with him on the phone at maybe 5 years of age I quickly pushed the receiver back into my dads hand questioning if the voice on the other end was human.  Sadly the desire to speak with him again never did come until I was mature enough to want to, shortly after he’d passed away from lung cancer.  So it was left to Pop Pop’s old fat tan leather belt to do the job grandpa Patrick, or my dad’s dad’s belts never would.   When he died his wife Maude gave me a red and black wooden tap dancing puppet.  The thing must be a century old, probably one of his own childhood toys.  Now I build puppets.