Those Quiet Moments III : Dirt

Wisconsin cornfields in very late fall are hard, unforgiving, and almost untravelable areas where if the weather had been right a few days early, webs of ice can collect, covering the grooves between the peaks of the rows, that sound like glass should your boots penetrate them. 

As a 4th grader, I had a pair of friends that lived across that field, in a dutch colonial house.  They were a couple of years younger than me, my older sister thought they were cute.  We played catch a bit, ran around barnyards and fields and talked about The Incredible Hulk and The Dukes of Hazzard the night prior on Saturdays. 

An older chap, owner of the property, had a fully functioning soda bottle machine in his office which was in a small building just behind the house.  When he pulled up, he would give us an ice cold pop, pat us on the head and send us on our way.

These two, Randy and Stevie, had a great mom with a great smile that would chat with me at the door while the two youngsters got ready to come outside, she'd offer a treat, and giggle when the three of us ran around the yard like goofs.

This short period of pleasantry was just that: fucking short.

One day, when over there, Randy and Stevie's dog (who hated me, which was an abnormality in canines) was inside his huge, flat-topped house, making loud occasional chirping noises.  It was then that I noticed the shirtless owner of the dog, father of my friends, on all fours on top of the dog house.  He was peering over the entrance, swinging his belt which caused the chirps, yelling at the poor thing to stay put.

I'm not the king of bravery, especially at 9, but I must have said something, cause homeboy here told me to "mind my own business and keep my mouth shut."  Which I did, as I was little and he was big, and I left, covering my ears, because I couldn't take the sound of the abuse any longer.

During this time in my life, which was a matter of a few months after my father's death, I kept my head down.  A real shoe-gazer.  I kept a close eye on my mom, at all times for fear of losing her too.  Everything I saw, thought, or found, I seemed to think it necessary to later report to her.

I wouldn't have a regular ride-or-die friend for a couple of years, and I liked the idea of having someone nearby I could play with.  On what must have been only my 4th visit was the dog experience which sent me home quickly.  The 5th, Randy and Stevie introduced me to a cousin who they played with, but was much bigger and faster than I and believed in being a punk.  While running around over at Randy and Stevie's house, I found a stick of smooth Oak, about 7 inches long, solid, with knots and long-ago rubbed off nubs of branches that could double as switches or buttons that gave it almost the appearance of a light saber handle.  I stuffed it in my pocket, so I could show it to my Mom later that night.

While showing it to the other youngsters, this older cousin decided he wanted to see it.  I tentatively showed it to him, but wouldn't hand it over.  This resulted in a foot race.  I made it awhile, headed toward an oasis in the middle of a cornfield with tall, high and stiff grass and a wet dirt base, that I could enter, cut one way or the other, and emerge leaving my pursuer unsure of where I was long enough to make it to my yard, and thusly safety.  Unfortunately, just as I was about to leap into the "oasis" I felt him shove me hard from behind.  I went down hard, chest first, and lost my breath and the light saber stick as it sailed from my coat pocket.  As I lay there, gasping for my breathing to return,  this kid walked around me, uttered "What have we here?", picked up my stick and flung it. To where I don't know, and disappeared from the hiding spot.  It took me several minutes to regain my breathing enough to get up, at first to my knees, then to my feet.  Dusk was quickly settling in, and I spent the rest of the day in a futile search for the stick.  I went home, shoe-gazing and empty-handed.

Visit 6, and the final one.   Randy, Stevie and I were running around in the dry field, flinging dirt chunks, watching them explode into dust clouds like Tanks in a World War II movie.  Just having fun.

Until Stevie fell.

It didn't look like much of a tumble, but he was crying pretty hard.  I rushed to his aid and found out the reason for the tears was he had gotten some dirt in his mouth and thought he was going to die.  I actually smiled, knowing this was a fear I had at one time myself, and began consoling my wounded friend.  

Then his dad came around the corner, and brought with him a hailstorm of hellfire and blame. I tried to explain what had happened but couldn't get in a word edgewise.  He shouted at me to go home.  I replied "I'm going!"

He shrieked for me to fuck myself, smartass that I was.

I never went back.  I couldn't even talk to them, something was poisoned after that and both kids spoke in a horrible way to me going forward, drawing a quizzical shrug and correction from their mom.  I felt her empathy, but their dad wore the pants in that unmarried family.  

Now as an older adult, I shudder at the thought of what went on behind closed doors in that house.  As I walked home with tears forming, I wish I knew then what I know now.  My mom had friends.  Quite a few actually;  friends capable of, lets just say "evening the score".  Hell, I had people like that in my family too, but I didn't know that then and didn't say a word. 

This was the beginning.  A quiet moment that still lingers in my memory.  The start of what my sister would years later call the era of "Rob spending a lot of time alone."  There weren't faces with smiles at school, on the bus, or even in my fucking neighborhood, it seems. Too many exchanges ended with vulgarity, shouting or violence

I kept my mouth shut and my head on a swivel.  

I wasn't the one that fell that cold afternoon, but I was the one tasting dirt.  And for years, it stayed.

Baseball as Religion: What's Left

      Neil Marshall became one of my favorite film directors with the release of his British Horror-action adrenaline feast, "Dog Soldiers".  If you've seen The Descent, Centurion, Doomsday, The Reckoning, the most recent Hellboy, or episodes of Westworld or Game of Thrones, you're familiar with the man's skillful work.  Soldiers  concerns a military unit, out on maneuvers, that encounter a hellish canine nightmare.  But Neil isn't all about werewolves, fisticuffs and gunfights, he has a heck of a knack for dialogue.  In one of cinema's all time great monologues, Sean "Albert Pennyworth from Gotham" Pertwee, unleashes a story of how one of the men in his former UK unit, deeply entrenched in Afghanistan, had decided to get a tattoo of Satan, ("Ol' Scratch himself") on his personhood.   This bloke, literally blown apart by an IED in the desert, left only one piece complete.  Yes, that "bit" with Beelzebub himself etched in his skin, remained in its entirety.  I'll leave what happens after this jolly piece of storytelling to your imagination, or your time in viewing it.  Because the exclamation point is artwork.

                                           

     One of the most stupid things that ever happened in the history of man was when Harry Dalton, who had built the 1982 World Series version of the Milwaukee Brewers, decided the way to fix the struggling 1983 version was to trade James "Stormin' Gorman" Thomas to the Cleveland Indians (Now the Guardians) for Rick Manning.  I still remember the news coverage of this blasphemous act, when Milwaukee News reporters found Gorman sitting in a Milwaukee pub, getting ripped, near tears, trying to dull the pain.  He, and The Brew City, were not a happy collective.

     This trade did not help the team one damn iota.  They weren't able to replace Gorman "in the aggregate" as Brad Pitt's Billy Beane puts it in Moneyball.  This is in reference to recreating the numbers of one Jason Giambi, who had been lost to the New York Yankees in free agency like everyone else in baseball who has a great final year of their contract.  (See:  Milwaukee Brewers' CC Sabathia).  Gorman's run production never came close to being consistently approached, actually.  The Brewers dovetailed into mediocrity, never to return until Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder led them out of the murk in 2008.  This card I have of Gorman,  I am pictured holding below, shows what he looked like in that bar interview, to a certain extent anyway.

        

Gorman bounced from Cleveland to Seattle, then back to Milwaukee for one final season, where he hit below .200 but flexed that legendary muscle with 10 more homers in limited at bats.  The organization and Gorman, a South Carolina native, never really separated, as Thomas is always around. He's often hanging about in front of Gorman's Grill at the former Miller Park, jawing with fans, chuckling, and signing autographs.  I did that with him myself one day.  Gorman and I had a nice conversation and he signed the bill of my Brewers cap. 

The next morning, I woke up, walked to the living room, and lying upon the floor was the decimation of that hat.  The remains of an assault from my German Shepherd puppy, was a collection of shredded blue, yellow, and gray fabric, cardboard, and plastic mesh.  

One piece remained.  About the size of a baseball, Gorman's signature fitting, in it's entirety, within that fragment. 

Neil Marshall would have been impressed.  It wasn't ol' scratch, but many pitchers of the 70's and 80's felt that Gorman Thomas and his incredible power, and ability to hit in the clutch, was the devil himself.

And Milwaukee still sees him as a baseball angel. Sort of a memory of a time when we captured, and oh, so briefly held the national baseball spotlight. 

 

The Spectrum Files: The Boogeyman

 

Uli Lommel was supposed to be a prodigy of some sort.  Working as a protege to world famous German auteur Werner Fassbender, it looked like he was off to a running start with the particularly disturbing, but respected The Tenderness of the Wolves.  This was a not so exact telling of the perverse child killer in Germany known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf, a story done much more effectively by Fritz Lang with M starring Peter Lorre. He had connections to Andy Warhol and the art scene.  Why he decided to become a slasher film-maker is beyond me. 

Effective as Lommel's  Wolves was, it didn't launch a major career, and several disturbing moments of it still linger in my mind, thanks to Spectrum.  (Film school it may have been, its sneaky intentions weren't always pure).

By the late 90's/early 2000's Lommel had been conscripted by Lionsgate to make a series of direct to DVD loose attachments to real life serial killers, of which I could only make it halfway through part of one.  Look!  It's David Hess!!  And what the fuck is P!nk doing the theme music for it for?  (These are questions someone needs to address as soon as possible).

Somewhere along the line in the late 70's, he made a slasher film that gained audience attention (and eventually a cult following) because it rode Carpenter's train.  That train grew its 350,000$ budget into 25,000,000 at the box office. This little trifle was known as "The Boogeyman".  It starts with sex, two children being treated as annoyances, then abused, then eventually a grisly murder.  A mirror captures the antagonist's death that comes as a response to his actions.  

Jump forward years later, one of these two unfortunate kids is now mute, the other living a normal life.  Being that this script is convoluted and stupid, during a psychiatrist-suggested visit to the childhood home, the previously mentioned mirror is shattered in one of the films actual scary moments. 

And of course fragments of a murderers spirit are carried  by the shards. And the slashing begins by this captured ghost; it’s like a twisted version of a furniture commercial; one for the ghost of Jason Voorhees less creative younger brother.  On occasion, people get Exorcist-style possessed by the mirror bits, and there's even a house bearing a more than passing resemblance to the Amityville dutch colonial making a ridiculous and unnecessary appearance here.

Now, as a nine year old, this movie scared the shits out of me (as always, "shits" is intentionally plural).  It affected me in such a way that I thought the very existence of evil was imprinted on every frame, like the fictional murderous movie by George Melies referenced in the faux documentary Fury of the Demon.  It scared me that much.

For some reason at this time in my life, my mom, claiming otherwise, took a shine to slashers.  I tried to warn her not to watch this one, as my experience with it had me hiding behind my sister's couch the previous summer.  

This film did have a particularly effective synth-score (a la Carpenter) that haunted me a bit, especially an opening sting just as the title card is appearing on screen.  So, Mom is watching this movie, despite a warning from me as intense as any old man's in any horror movie from the 30's to now.  I have a haunting memory of lying in bed on a Sunday Night, jaunted awake by that sting from the very beginning I described.  I lay there, eyes open in the dark, clutching for my dog Ginger, in spite of myself, visualizing what I had seen months before.  

Thanks, Mom

Thanks, Uli.