Papillon

 Like Dorothy, who followed the yellow brick road to find Oz, my brother and younger sister and I followed the railroad tracks to the mall.  Tommy, Laura, and I figured out that the tracks paralleled a major road and we remained relatively safe as long as we walked the tracks.  Once we used the pedestrian crosswalk to get across the five lanes of busy traffic, we arrived at the mall, where trouble waited for us.  We had a lot of time on our hands, especially during the summer months when school was out, so we went to the gallery section of the mall where there was a huge reflecting pool.  Each of us took off our shoes and socks, waded into the water, and scooped up all of the coins that people had thrown in to wish for good luck.  With our new found wealth, we three children immediately bought candy and ice cream from one of the retail shops.  The mall was a huge playground for us and we abused the privilege of being unsupervised by doing stupid things like racing up and down the escalators.  

There wasn’t just one trip to the mall but many and, over the course of the years, we got into so much trouble that security had to detain us.  The officer kept us in his office, called my mother, and we had to wait for her to come and pick us up.  We had become a public nuisance.  I wasn’t done with the mall, however.  After this episode I decided to fly under the radar by walking the three miles up to Oxmoor Mall by myself because it had a movie theater.  There was no better way of killing a day in the balmy summer in Louisville than by sneaking into the movies.  It was so easy to do.  I just waited in the foyer and, when the attendant was distracted, I would dart in.  The problem was that I was ten years old in 1972 and I had no discretion as to which movie I saw and ended up seeing movies that were wildly inappropriate for my age.  As one critic recently wrote about seeing “Chinatown” when he was too young; “Nothing was explained to me.  I was left to grapple with the horrors and mysteries of the adult world alone.  The trying and failing to understand.  The not getting it.”  No one will ever  be thanked, years after the fact, for showing a movie to a child who is not ready for the adult content.

This may sounded overly dramatic but I promise you that it is not, in that the damage of seeing R rated movies at the age of ten and eleven can never be undone.  For example, I saw the Jack Lemmon film entitled “The War Between Men and Women”  with its adult themes of alcoholism and divorce.  The scene that I remember the most is when Lemmon’s character gets drunk and starts drawing on the walls of his home.  He draws a cartoon battle, which comes to life, and he single handedly takes out a tank.  The whole scene plays out in his intoxicated imagination and closes only when Lemmon wakes up with a hangover.  No one was there to explain adultery, alcoholism, and the damage done to the entire family because of Lemmon’s drinking.  In that same year of 1972 “The Poseidon Adventure,” was released and I saw it several times because of the action sequences.  One of the major characters was a former prostitute.  Ernest Borgnine played a cop who kept arresting her for selling her body until she cleaned herself up and agreed to marry him.  Of course, I was too young to understand what sex was, let alone a prostitute, and a lot of the adult themes went right over my head.

These two movies pale in comparison to the 1973 version of “Papillon,” which I snuck into see more than once.  There was a homosexual scene in it and I had no idea of what was happening.  The first time that I saw “Papillon” my brother, who was all of thirteen at the time, tried to explain homosexuality to me and he did a poor job of it.  In another graphic scene, a man was sliced open and disemboweled so that thieves could get to the cash that the man had shoved up his rectum for safe keeping.  There was violence and nudity scattered throughout the movie and it was too much for my eleven year old brain to process.  To top it all off, Steve McQueen, who played Papillon, and part of the nuance of the role was that he was a bad man who protected Dustin Hoffman’s character for money.  And yet the audience cheered him as if he was a hero.  It was a lot to take in.  

I suppose that at this point in my entry that you are looking for someone to blame for my loss of innocence but the trauma was self inflicted.  We were three kids who were bored but it was reckless of us to walk to the mall.  Further, I should not have snuck into see “Papillon” and “The Poseidon Adventure” for a second and third time having already learned that the movies were inappropriate for my age and maturity level.  There were no new lessons to be learned through repeated viewings.  Also, I didn’t get any bragging rights to my friends, nor could I claim to be sophisticated and explain the movies to others, because I didn’t understand what I saw.  The empty vessel that was my ten year old brain was being filled with sewage and, since there were no impediments to stop me, I returned to the movie theater over and over again to get more helpings.

Music

    Out of the blue, my daughter, Virginia, sent me the following text.  “Every time that I hear ‘Renegade’ by Styx, I think of the four of us in the car and, wherever we were going, just singing the song at the top of our lunges.  I don’t know if you remember that but it is one of the strongest memories I have of our car rides during the summer or going to and from school.”  Music is the soundtrack of our lives and when I hear certain songs, they act as a trigger and send me back years, if not decades, into my past. 

   My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen when I was a kid and she listened to a lot of am radio from a monitor installed on the wall.  “Georgie Girl,” “Downtown,” and “The Happening” are examples of songs that I remember bellowing from the radio.  The happiest that I ever remember my father was when he sang “King of the Road,” prompted by the car radio, as we took road trips to Minnesota or Vermont.  Late in his career, my father bought a really nice stereo system for our living room so that he could calm his nerves by listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

   My sister, Cherylanne, was the one who taught me how important music could be in my life.  She had a record player in her bedroom and had quite a collection of 45s.  “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” “I’ve got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates,” and “Run, Joey, Run,” were among the hits that she collected.  I remember that she had a pink carrying case for her 45s and she treated them like a treasure.  My brother, Thomas, influenced my taste in music in that he learned a lot of songs from his week out at Camp Tall Trees.  He was so happy when he sang these songs, like “Titanic” and “The Bismarck,” that I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go to camp so that I could learn them as well.  

   In 1978 I was hired on at Camp Tall Trees to be a Blackfoot, which is another name for the kitchen help.  It was in that year that the movie “Grease” was released.  It was so popular that you couldn’t escape the soundtrack because the radio was continuously playing its songs.  The commute to Camp Tall Trees took about an hour and, to this day, when I hear a song from the soundtrack I am immediately transported back to that drive out to camp.  Similarly, Chris Wagoner, David Greenwell, and I, who spent our Blackfoot year together, spent hours cleaning the pots and pans and dishes after the campers and counselors had left the mess hall.  Chris liked to listen to classic rock and, since it was his radio, we heard “Joker” and “Money” over and over again as we scraped the plates and mopped the floors.  

   I’ll have to admit that I was moody kid throughout middle and high school because I was trying to figure myself out.  I listened to a lot of depressing music like “Cats in the Cradle” and “Seasons in the Sun” and I must have worn out my cassette tape of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”  By the time that I reached my senior year, I switched over to Disco because it had uplifting music.  “Celebrate Good Times,” for example, send me back to my cheerleading days at Xavier University.  After I graduated from Bellarmine, when I reached the depths of despair while working at a dead end job at Metal Sales, I listened to a lot of Van Halen, which helped to buck me up.

   In 1986, when Tracey and I started to date, we decided that our song should be “The Lady in Red.”  My wife taught me that not all Christmas music is bad; that you have to pick and choose which songs are uplifting, so we listened to a lot of Amy Grant.  Then, after we married and we started a family, Jimmy Buffett was constantly on our CD player.  “Jolly Man” was my favorite Buffett song because it told a good short story and I could sing it in about the same amount of time that it took to change the diapers of my children.

   Today, I still depend of music to distract me.  When I jog in the morning I like to listen to the local pop stations just so that I can keep in touch with the modern music culture.  I’ll plug in my MP3 player when I am on long bike rides and listen to Broadway musicals.  It is happy music with a narrative and I never tire of the songs.  If I need to block out distractions while I read something dense then I will YouTube classical or jazz music.  Movie soundtracks are a favorite for classical and you just cannot go wrong with the jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.

   Forgive me from becoming too personal but, often, from the deep recesses of my mind, comes my “Citizen Kane” moment.  Only for me, it is not a sled that is so important to my childhood, that keeps reappearing.  No, my “Rosebud” is a song and it goes something like this.  “Chip, chip, my little horse.  Chip, chip, again sir.  How many miles to London Town?  Four score and ten, sir!”  This song comes from the 1948 movie, “The Boy with the Green Hair.”  My brother and sisters and I would race home from Holy Trinity School to watch television and one of the local stations played old movies in the afternoon.  For some reason, this movie, and this song, is a happy memory for me and my brother.  I clearly remember laying on the floor, watching this movie, and from the deep recesses of my mind, this song reappears, like a haunt wandering through my consciousness, searching for meaning.  Thomas and I shared a bonding moment s we sung this song together.