Freddogg Off The Chain

A big girl led her rolling daddy around the Sam’s Club food bins yesterday as my boy was eye level with high calorie low nutrition tasty treats that turned him on like an exotic dancer at a fraternity party. This guy was not disease disabled he was just really fat. And then he barked like a Bull Walrus, ”What? No Gorgonzola!”

That just floored me like a high horse powered hall buffer. “That’s right you fat bastard. No gorgonzola! But suddenly he was fondling a cylinder of Colby cheese in a sorta sexual way and I thought, ”well of course, Sam’s Club big portion overkill, where drives one and two come together. Forget Lavitra, when gorgonzola is in the house daddy is always excited.

I was growing up and my German Aunts were fat and hard and in really good domestic shape but then they got older and into diet and weight loss but I don’t care they are and always will be my fat aunts and they hate me because of written proof that I am a smart ass who takes bow shots at them like a diving U Boat on an unprotected supply ship.

But I have class and compassion for people. Yesterday I was leaving Target with two pair of Yo Boy shorts in a plastic bag and a box of Slim Fast Cookie Dough bars and got behind a woman and her daughter both of whom were rejected from the Duke University Rice Diet weight loss center. A high school white girl named Natasha credited my debit card. We talked and hung out as I waited for these C 400’s to clear the hanger

No joke, I was once leaving Super G, how perfect a name to describe a woman so fat in an electric cart so underpowered that it wouldn't go over the little piece of aluminum threshold on the floor. I have 18 inch calves because of pushing a seven man sled at football practice when I was younger. I told her, ”hold on mam” and lowered my should and blocked her over the threshold.

I know you think this humor is somewhat cruel and you’re absolutely right but none of these people are suffering the anxieties that go with the pursuit of perfection so there is an up side.

People without restraints and absolutely no brakes just fascinate me. And someday it's going to happen where a run away cart is going to flatten and kill some skinny no butt gym bitch in a workout outfit. At least it will be listed as an accident.

Peace Freddogg

A hero will help you find good in yourself, a friend won’t forsake you for somebody else. Left standing beside you when your life ends One is your heroes and the other your friends.

Or some shit like that, I heard it in a country song.

I first meet Bret Hagar on the streets of Lewes one dark night in front of the Blacksmith Shop John The Blacksmith and I were drinking some mixed high powered alcoholic concoction from a Fleaker which is some exotic calibrated scientific glass resembling a Beaker.

Bret was part of an Ohio family that John knew. The little 15 year old was about to enter Cape as a sophomore and there was also his little toddling sister Alice. I told Bret he looked like a wrestler and he said he never wrestled. I once asked a clinically anorexic girl if she ran cross country because I have those instincts so when I asked Bret if he wrestled I had no way of knowing he was skinny because of Cystic Fibrosis.

Over the year Bret and I became tight and he was my student and laughed at my jokes and when he would go north for hospitalization so they could beat the crap out of his lungs and always called him and we laugh over the phone and then he’d come back and we’d resume where we left off.

Bret graduated from Cape in 1988 then went on to the University of Delaware. I knew he was there and that he took classes, passed tests went to parties and took regular beatings at Christiana Hospital.

One hot Saturday summer day circa 1990 I was at the Lewes Yacht Club where I was the pool manager. There were lots of privileged people moving around faster than the wind which had dropped out

Alice came up to me she was in third grade and said, “Fredman can we sit down at a table I want to tell you something.”
And so we sat at one of those round resin tables and she looked at me through her glasses and said, ”My brother died last night.”

I heard it loud and clear an didn’t do the usual “what, you’re kidding oh my god, ”routine. I just grabbed both her hands and squeezed them.

“Alice are you alright, ”I asked.
“Yes, I’m alright. My mother just wanted me to tell you because Bret was your friend. The funeral is Wednesday at Saint Peters. And just that quickly Alice was gone.

A middle aged woman in skirt bottomed bathing suit and noted pool bitch was standing as if patiently waiting for an audience and ask me if I had any tile cleaner in the pool office. ‘Sure I guess so, ”I said inside a fog sadness for Bret not me.

“Well do you ever use it!”
I am too smart to call somebody wife and the mother of three a fucking bitch but I was abruptly rude and she was stunned but you know if bitches were called out more often there would be as many of them.

That Wednesday I was at the Episcopalian service and the dreaded Karaoke open Mic Eulogy interlude began.
I desperately wanted to tell the story of how Bret was my hero and friend and I asked god for strength but he said, ”You’re on your own on this one. I gave you a chance to up your game with the tile cleaner lady but yu blew it”
I passed, because a man ain’t supposed to cry, so I’ll write it here now for the first time. Bret Hagar is still my hero!

“I’m older now ain’t got no time to cry. Ain’t got no time to look back, ain’t got no time to see, the pieces of my heart,that have been ripped away from me.” Merle Haggard

Is your plausibility structure implausible? Do you have an idea what I’m talking about? Has your mazeway been re-synthesized in your adult lifetime? You know a conversion of personality experience? What about your connections to people in your primary through tertiary equivalence structures? Are they working for you? Can you function outside the parameters of rules and do you know when parameters took the place of perimeters?

Pondering the above question is what happens when intelligent liberal arts people lose their fucking minds. I am definitely on my way.
I was in Wall mart today at 2 p.m and I saw some big guy looking at a flowered bathing suit. I was about to consider that he was some loser when I realized that there I was on his team no better or worse. I was Wall mart afternoon guy just like him and maybe I wasn’t sizing up flowed shorts but ultimately I would purchase a greasy on the outside bag of gourmet dog treats.

The theory behind plausibility structures is that we become like those around us. You hang around Wall Mart then you are Wall Mart guy. You work in a public high school you become multi lingual redneck hip hop guy. You work in a mental institution you become crazy guy.

There are these teachers who work inside a rigid system of behavior modification who prompt autistic kids for behaviors and reward them with picture stickers placed on a grid. God bless the teachers but they are all the way fucking nuts.

Born again zealots who talk to spirits are all over the place. Do you think that’s normal? People have been having conversions for thousands of years but when you begin to talk to angels who call you out by your name—Yo Freddogg!’—consider yourself all the way fucking nuts.

There’s a plausibility structure I never entered although it was logical for me to experience a mazeway re-synthesis and that is Lacrosse parent tailgater and expert. What the fuck is wrong with these people. “Yes, it’s a wonderful game, the fastest game on two feet, yes, I’m sure you wish they had the game when you were in high school. By the way, can you say, ”No black people.” But let’s leave Duke Lacrosse out of this lesson.

I’m looking for a group to help me define who I am. I could use a conversion experience. Like a lonely gypsy I’m just looking for a Happy Medium.

Peace Freddogg

STUPID RULES INSPIRE STUPID CHANCES

I was in eighth grade that “May Day May Day” sitting in a desk too small inside a sweltering building where everyone was told to ignore their thirst and to suppress their natural quest for water. “Offer it up as a sacrifice to the lord, ”Sister Saint Winifred told the eighth grade class at Our Lady of Grace Grammar School. I was sitting in aisle one and I remember my muffled comment like it was yesterday, ”This is so fucking stupid.”

And so at 1:30 p. m I hit the floor slithering as the class was immersed in a picture study assignment that seemed to elicit sexual arousal in some who attempted to think of anything other than how thirsty they were. Fat kids who didn’t sweet were turning pink. I was crawling on my hands and knees and cleared the open doorway unnoticed.

Around the corner I crawled, stood up looked down the linoleum hallway and thought, ”They must buff this bitch every five minutes! Jesus Christ this is shiny!”

I was way too big for the building at 14 being 5’11” 185 pounds as the porcelain hallway water fountain had me bending over below the midline causing the blood to rush to my head but I could see upside down what was behind me.

The Janitor’s closet was open just a crack and I wondered why because it was dark in there. This was 1960 the same year Psycho hit the movies. Everyone knew about cracked doors and the Mother Superior of Norman Bates.

Out of the closet flew 89 year old chalky white bent framed skeletal Psycho Mother Superior who moved across the glistening floor without touching it. She was on me like Mrs. Bates on Martin Balsam

The chrome piece from which a moment earlier I was sucking water was jammed under the inside of my upper lip and felt like it was going up my nose. “Bold Brazen Heathen” she screamed! I turned to plead for mercy and she cracked me with an open slap to the face her little finger catching the inside orbit of my eye socket. “What the fuck, ”I instantly said to myself, pressing the heal of my hand over my recently blinded eyeball. It was like a German prisoner of war movie. I thought they were going to shoot me and if we had been geographically isolated and the nuns had been armed they would have BUT this was Western “Civilization” so they had to settle for torture.

Today I’m not scarred and not bitter but I’m not thankful or grateful either. I’m just curiously cautious at public water fountains.

Next drink’s on me.

Freddogg

Both my parents died young and they were both saints. I never heard either one say a bad word about anyone. Don’t get me wrong they weren’t born again, oh we’re all gods’ children morons, because there are assholes on this planet, it’s just I never heard them instantly dislike someone because of physical appearance, religion or orientation.

My mother had a pretty consistent philosophy about making friends with people who weren’t exactly like you. I remember there was a midget in my first grade class and I came home and said, ”There’s a midget in my soup—I mean class.”

“Please don’t do midget jokes, ”she said. “Make a midget your friend and they’ll be your friend for life.” I don’t know whatever happened to that little guy but I went out of my way to be nice to him whenever I could find him on the baby booming playground.

Gays weren’t even discovered until the gay pride parade of 1967-I’ll never forget the placard- “Better Blatant than Latent” but years before that when I realized that Mr. Rodgers down the street was “Queer” my mother said, ”Make a queer your friend and he’ll be your friend forever.”

My father, who was in a wheel chair, laughed so long and hard I think he hurt himself, but he never said anything.

There were “Colored People” in and out of our row house and they never seemed to notice that my dad’s arms and legs would spasm and shake. They were just friends as in friends forever.

I went to Temple University and never before had contemplated Jewishness but the 11 story dorm was filled with Jocks on scholarship and Jewish guys from Long Island. I remember asking these two little guys in a room down the hall. “Hey, either of you guys have a stamp?” Stamps at that time cost $5 cents.

“Yea, I’ll sell you one, ”this kid said without hesitation.

I answered, ”was that a Jewish joke?”
“Trust me, it’s no joke,”he said He knew Philly Catholic boys don’t borrow stamps they take them and use them up. It’s like someone borrows a sandwich then you expect to be paid later, it just isn’t happening.

Having said all this I must cop to being a liberal lefty type political person because now that I have many Hispanic friends for life so the Bush administration decision to take focus off the war by fucking with 11 million “illegal Hispanics” rankles me slightly.

Finally, there is the whole Arab turban wearing thing and the fear they cause when on the same flight as you but right after 9/11 I was in the parking lot before a Ravens game and I saw this 6’7” Raiders of the Lost Ark muscular turban wearing Indian/ Pakistani looking mother fucker in a Ray Lewis jersey and I thought, ”Is this a great country, or what?

Thanks Mom

Big Baby Freddogg

We are a nation of infidels most of them white perhaps white zinfandels. Hey, thank god we got rid of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan so the newly installed mainstream regime can put a man on trial for his life for converting to Christianity. Does that give any of us American a sense of how most Moslems see us—as devils with fat wallets except for our allies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, or is that a basketball team in the NIT, who just look on a sigh, ”Is there a problem with fat wallets?”

I remember when I was in Catholic high school sitting in religion class and the priest saying that the final war, the war to end all wars, would be a religious conflagration and I raised my hand and said, ”I’m never fighting a war over religion because if there is a one true god he doesn’t need my help but rather let him unleash the flood and pestilence combo like he does with unscheduled regularity in the Eastern Hemisphere. Here’s a basic rule, ”The water is rising and no rich people live near the beach it’s time to start running. “If the tide is ebbing faster than the fish can catch it, start running faster.

The court in Afghanistan judged this guy to be mentally unfit based on empirical data on Western “Born Agains” but those “Monkies” who saw his face and are true believers will behead his ass first chance they get because the real world is just one extended Sopranos episode.

My mother was a convert, a Methodist who became a Catholic, and I was her cross to bear, no question about it. I’ll never forget when the New Christy Minstrel Couple moved across the street and soon they had a red convertible in the driveway and I spoke to the young wife, simply saying, ”Nice car.”
She looked back and said,” Praise the lord, Jesus found it for us. My husband Jim always wanted a red Chevy convertible with low mileage and the lord interceded and blessed us. Oh, praise god.”

“Jesus doesn’t find fucking cars, ”I said, wanting to rattle her split level brain. My mother wrote a note put it in a sealed envelope and made me give it to my religion teacher. The only stipulation was that the repressed homo was not allowed to hit me.

“You have a vocation, ’he told me in private. ‘It’s a calling. Jesus doesn’t find fucking cars. That’s a classic.”

The priests had a fleet of four door black cars parked outside the monastery. You know it was a “god likes conservative colors” thing going on.

Me I’m a Toyota guy and I see god as a little Japanese guy with no tolerance for engine knock.

Peace Brothers and Sisters

Father Freddogg

Those who stroll together roll together

How can a person not pay attention to a story about 66 heads and headless bodies being dumped around Iraq as sadism escalates or germinates or blossoms or whatever these freedom loving peoples are doing to each other?

Ironically I only read the headlines of the headless bodies or heads with their chickens cut off story. Is it sick? Do you think? Is there any situation no matter how mad you may be where you could saw the head off a live human being?

Meanwhile down along the horn of Africa the Skinnies of the Mogadishu suburbs are getting after each other in crazy “off the hook” violence but we don’t care because 15 years ago they did that Black Hawk shoot down thing so now they can just starve and kill each other forever unless they want to get up off of that beachfront property.

I read everything written about the 1968 Mai Lai Massacre in Vietnam and I remember this question posed, “Was it an aberration or an operation?”

I cannot watch a movie where innocent people are brutalized. I spoke with a woman who was one of the first women in the country to be in the Marine Corps. She said we all have that dark side, you know the old good and evil argument. I told her that I don’t have it that no matter what horrors happened to me that I couldn’t machine gun a baby in retaliation.

There is a perception that everyone on the planet it sadistically sicker than us and value life less than we do. Can you say Atomic bomb? Naplam, Carpet bomb, Smart bomb? Hell we even have complimentary expression of coolness “you are the bomb.”

I think I may submit an essay to the elitist editors of the New Yorker Magazine, ”The World is filled with Sick Bitches.” Certainly it is not a hard point to prove.

Peace
Mahatma Freddogg

What happened to it? What happened to the wooden barrel and the tongs and the brown paper to wrap it in.? It only cost 14 cents for one and was better than 14 penny candies and little black licorice people with racist names. They sure enough sold them, orange slices and nigger babies. Our country has such racist traditions many of which have been repressed but I can see them like it was yesterday behind the candy counter.

But when did the Jewish Pickle change to the Kosher Dill? And why? How racist is a freaking pickle for crying out loud?

I’ll tell you when young boys started putting the pickles up to their noses and doing Jewish jokes. And other jokes that are pickle friendly.

I grew up in a time when Sunday mornings were a four hour eating throw down but only if you first endured an hour of Catholic mass then it was time for the peaceful feast. I have listened to more unimaginative sermons in my life than any person on this temporal earth. “Speak in irrelevance and they will come.” The priest would talk about loaves and fishes but never about orange slices, nigger babies and Jewish pickles. Can you imagine this bit of turnabout racism from the 1950’s.”Happy Easter Sir! How was the prolonged purgatory of high mass this morning?” “Just great, glad it’s over. May I have two cracker bunnies, three honky Dum Dum pops and a bag of white trash marshmallows?”

Most churches don’t delve into politics even though every government action is politically charged. Churches will talk about social injustice but if you look around you usually see people of all the same color and you never see the “Work for Food” guy or the prostitute from around the corner. No, most of who you see are “safe” people who have come to give thanks that they are able to isolate themselves from the downtrodden and can afford high definition television.

Anyway I don’t want a spear I want a pickle. And who invented white chocolate and why?

Peace, love and harmony. May the music of the celestial pickle spears forever and ever ring in your heads.

Father Freddogg

HOW MUCH DO YOU WEIGH?

Real men don’t get weighed with their shoes on but they leave their socks on for almost every other type of behavior. And real men don’t care how much they weigh or worry about comparing their weight to someone else or get involved in some sick weight loss contest with loser adult buddies.
I had a “big like me” friend who lost weight and kept asking me how much I weighed and finally I say “around the same as your mother” and he was happy because he said he weighed 20 pounds less than me. And then I caught him one night taking out the garbage in his corduroy shorts. I never realized that I had never seen him in shorts but then I understood why. He looked like a fucking flamingo lawn ornament. He had big tan arms and sickly stick like white legs. He had some gall bladder messing with me.
Did you ever go for a doctor’s appointment then refuse the weigh-in by a nurse? Man, they get weird on you and if you ask them if you can take off your shoes they think its harassment because in their redneck home kitchen that’s a sign that Jim Bob is off the lawn tractor and wants sex.
I was sick as a dog about a dozen year ago and was weighed-in at the doctors office by a tall in shape dark skinned black nurse who said something like, ”Honey, you are built powerful like a Panther.” The scale said 264 and I didn’t like it. A previous record had me listed at 222.
“Honey imagining you at 222 good gracious you would be my black panther do you hear what I’m saying?”
I went and checked in at the hospital for admission now wearing the open flap butt crack formal gown. “A white country nurse said let’s go honey I have to weigh you.” I just got weighed over at the doctor’s office and I’m 264 just put that down.”
“It’s against the rules I have to weigh you.”
So we did it again and I weighed 255. “Now you see honey you just lost 9 pounds walking over here”
“I went upstairs was put in bed an i.v. was stuck in my arm and for the next day I only received antibiotics and nutrients through the portal in my vein. I was allowed to crunch on ice and that was it.
The day I was checking out they took me down the hall for the official check out weigh out. I weighed 231. And for some reason professional women who were nurses kept comparing me to jungle cats. “You built like a Tiger now but can’t be no meat eating Tiger because of that gallbladder but honey what you see here is an artichoke salad.”
You see that’s the way it goes if a rumor starts that you’re some funny guy. Everyone runs shtick on you.
Ten years passed I had a heart exam just to have one. A little Thai doctor named Doctor Budi sat on a stool looked up at me and asked, ”What size sport coat do you wear?” The he took my blood pressure and said, ”You are mildly hypertensive.”
“The fuck I am Budi Budi. Get a bigger cuff and send that one back to pediatrics.”
He re-took my blood pressure and said 112/70 you are in very good shape.” So much for science.
I had a car accident shortly thereafter when I went out the window of the car, slid on the road on my back then came back inside because I was holding onto the trolley car strap in a death grip. My motto,Fit enough to hang on and fat enough to stay inside.”
I went to a surgeon who was going to “debreed” the bear claw wound which made my back look like wide whale corduroy pants.
Step on the scale the guy said. I was frustrated didn’t argue and just left my shoes on, ”Fuck them all.”
Two hundred and twenty two he said carefully writing it down in my chart. I looked at the scale and the big weight needed to be moved over one notch or 50 pounds to the right. “What’s 50 pounds when they’re talking it away from you, ”I thought.
Peace Freddogg



http://www.davefredman.blogspot.com/

DELAWARE STATE TEST WRITING PROMPT

I walked into the crowded kitchen at a beer party where everybody was drunk. I pulled back the handle on the old style refrigerator to grab a Schmidt’s when the host asked me to “check the bread in the oven?”Not even questioning why a ‘ drunk punk’ with a 1.6 GPA was baking bread instead of hustling women I grabbed the chrome handle of the oven door. The lights in the Apartment started to flicker. Everyone was laughing! I couldn’t let go!Somehow I was the relay junction box between two short circuited avocado appliances. I shimmied like Boris Karloff when he was re-energized as the Frankenstein monster. Finally, a football friend forcibly blocked me in the chest area setting me free. Everyone had a good belly laugh. I swung a glass pitcher of stale beer into the side of the skull of the “Joker!” Game! Set! Match! He was out colder than Igor’s grave robbing shovel.What a learning experience for both of us!My grandmother once told me, ”Tommy. Always follow this advice. When in doubt, don’t!”“Thank’s Grandmom and by the way my name is David.”“Whatever? Listen while you’re up how about grabbing old granny an Orliebs from the meat drawer in the refrigerator.”Grandmom was right of course. She not only had the hair of Einstein but understood clearly the rudimentary laws of physical science and cause and effect. Mostly what I have learned from experience is that the very things I am good at are either illegal or least considered taboo in a highly developed culture. And of course to find out that you’re good at say “cheating and falsification of government documents along with assuming false identities (no way I’m your first cousin!) first you have to try those things out in real life. And then you learn that the straight and honest people, although not as creative, tend to be more successful and even happier. So why waste the talent and effort at being deceptive?My cousin Janet once cried out, ”Every time I look in the mirror I realize how ugly I am.”“”The don’t look in the mirror dog face!” It’s all I said. I didn’t need my father’s four older sisters hurling cheap lawn furniture at my head.“Why do you say those things, ”My brother asked, shaking his head?“Cause the bitch be needing it!” That’s why!”“I’m not feeding you anymore lines. I’m getting some potato salad.”The nuns who smacked me around in Grammar school before my antics drove them to the “Nunnery for Nut Cases” were right about one thing. “They were lesbian lovers of the night.” No, that’s my line. What they said was God would get me back with an endless series of people more crazy than I ever could have dreamed of becoming. As a “teacher” of the emotionally disturbed and character disordered I turned that prophecy around by modeling the behaviors of the socially maladjusted while remaining out of institutions and being gainfully employed.My personnel dossier says I’m occasionally abrasive, often passive-aggressive and a life long contrarian with oppositional-defiant disorder. My response: “What the freak do they know about anything?”People who don’t learn from experience can’t even find their car in the mall parking lot. They don’t know that shrimp are peeled before eaten. John Prine sang, ”I never will remember what I never did forget.”
I remembered that line because I think it’s clever. I remember lots of things almost all of them in the realm of what Bob Dylan called “useless and pointless” knowledge.
I remember at Kent State when Brooklyn Willie and I showed up in an a.m. English Lit class for the first time in four weeks. The professor and class were discussing Thoreau's "On Walden Pond"—big fucking deal!I always thought- and the guy asked, ”Can anyone tell me the philosophy explored and expounderd on by Thoreau n his book? “I believe Thoreau was expounding the philosophy of existential nihilism, ”Willie said.

“Very good Mr. ? Willie the name is Willie” Very good Mr. Willie. Now can you please tell the class what existential nihilism means?”

“I have no dam idea what it means, ”Willie said, receiving thunderous applause.
The professor was irate or Iranian or something foreign. “Tell me Mr. Willie why do you even bother to come here to this class? Why did you come here today?”
“The same reason you do, ”Willie said. “I can’t do anything else.”
Willie was kicked out and so was I and all I did was sit there and watch the academic repartee like a real student is supposed to. How did I get to be “Mr. Willie’s sorry assed friend.”

I have always made friends easily with crazy people. They like me and I don’t know why. I'm looking back on all my life experiences but I remain perplexed, befuddled and bewildered.

Peace Freddogg

I am not Rainmain so I can’t tell you the day of the week January 16, 1991 when Bush One authorized the bombing of Baghdad as Operation Desert Storm Smack Down and the CNN worldwide news network began in earnest.
I can tell you that back here in the USA the irony of bombing an ancient city on the birthday of Martin Luther King—give or take a day—was not lost on some politically astute students at Cape Henlopen High School.
The day before another Irony of “Carpet bombing people from the land of magic carpets” a chicken nugget of student activists” threatened to walk out of school at 11 a.m.to protest the inevitable hostilities.
“Fredman let me ask your advice on this,” the principal said, resourcing me only in times of crises. “Some students are going to walk out at 11 a.m.to protest the war. What do you think we should do?”
“I think nothing seems like the proper course of action. And thank god we still have students who stand for something without worrying about where they may fall if disciplined.”
“Yea , but they’ll disrupt lunches. I think what I’m going to do is dismiss everyone to go outside at 2 p.m.and that way they can protest or show support whatever they want.”
“I think that’s the dumbest idea I've ever heard. If I were going out at 11, I certainly wouldn’t be placated by your compromise, plus the right wing faction of the community will crucify you for letting these people out of captivity before the dismissal bell.”
I was right on both counts but didn’t anticipate a carpet count down so all the protesters could be accounted for and disciplined the next day.
That night it was Bernard Shaw of CNN and Peter Arnett under the Baghdad desk as bombs fell on the ancient Persian city.
The next day we were at war. Televisions were set up in the library of the school—no direct feed into classrooms at that time—so those students traumatized could watch CNN and be consoled by each other
The political activists were all in lockdown in the ISS room across the hall. I had the assignment of covering ISS period 4 which was around 11 a.m. I talked to the students about the Sixties protest crew but didn’t tell them that the SDS –Students for a Democratic Society-voted me ‘Most Dangerous Person on Campus” back in 1969 at West Chester-and The Black Panther Party voted me ‘Most Favorite White Man” not because I ever did anything but rather because I was completely non aligned with any group and would follow my beliefs regardless of consequences.
The librarian came into the room and asked if I’d keep an eye on the library while she went downstairs to use the bathroom and get a cup of coffee. In a flash the traumatized tribe in the library changed all channels to the Brady Bunch because they didn’t comprehend and didn’t give a rat’s ass about Baghdad, Kuwait, Hussein or anything else sans the icing of the military draft.
So there it was, the peaceful protesters taking their punishments like whipped puppies, while those residents from what Prine called “The Valley of the Unconcerned” petted each other and ate cheese doodles.
The following week I was doing my daily routine of writing current events on the board. I was using the Philadelphia Inquirer because computers were not yet in the rooms. I just wrote headlines and got into the stories once the students got there.
“First Delaware Valley Soldier Killed In Desert Storm” I started to read.” Captain Dr. John Gillespie 33 years old from Yeadon, Pa was killed when a jeep he was riding in overturned. I was stopped in my tracks. I just stood there.
“What’s wrong Fredman? Fredman are you O.K” students asked?
I wanted to seize the “teachable moment” and tell them that I was Dr. John Gillespie’s football coach and track coach in high school. I wanted to tell them what a funny character he was. How he mumbled all the time and that his favorite words were mother fucker. I wanted to tell them about the time I asked John, who was playing defensive end, to ask the ref how much time was left in the half and that John said, ”Hey Ref, what mother fucking time is it?” which got us a 15 yard penalty.
I wanted to tell them that when I asked this 17 year old African American what he wanted to be when he grew up, John said, ”A mother fucking Doctor” and that I said, “you already talk like a doctor writes because nobody knows what the mother fuck you are saying.”
But all this Most Dangerous Man and Black Panther Favorite White Man could do was stand there and cry. I was just whacked by the suddenness of it all. There was Dr. John and then there he wasn’t.
All I could get out finally was that John was my student, my athlete, my friend.
Kids sat in stoned silence. That’s the way they are. They wanted me to tell them what happens next. The wanted Fredman the jokester and story teller back. They didn’t like crying anymore than I did.

Peeing Outside The Box

Back in 1973 I taught at a private school for emotionally disturbed adolescents, then of course there were the parent conferences. It’s always hard to tell which is the antecedent and which is the consequence.
I kept notes for absences in a folder. I never questioned them I just kept them. There was this long haired white boy named Bill who was absent a lot and so was the black kid who was fullback on the football team. His name was Alonzo Simmons and I was his coach. I just called him Mr. Simmons because he used to just wreck preppy white boys blocking for Cubby on the tailback blast
The last full day of school I took out all the notes and tabulated absences and excuses on the board. Bill’s notes were all the same. “Please excuse Bill he was ill.” Bill was ill 45 times and we all started to call him “Ill Bill.”
Alonzo was absent 32 times and his notes were all the same. ”Please scuse Lonzo he was getting his car spected.”

I got my truck “spected” this afternoon then I stopped at the Sussex County SPCA a behavior I’ve been doing no matter where I’ve lived for 30 years. And I always make a donation.
I noticed this one indoor cat in a cage and the card said,” A great indoor cat but when new puppy arrived he started peeing outside the box so the owner got rid of him.

The there was the young male beagle very relaxed and his card read, Cute and Cuddly but owner unable to house train.”

There was an eight month old lab’ shep mix with different colored eyes. He was kept in a cage for large cats because he kept jumping free of the four foot no ceiling smelly dog run community center

Other younger dogs saw me and pretended to be asleep because I’m an older human and they were afraid they’d outlive me and be returned or worse that I’d put a sweater on them and take them to the boardwalk.

I got home and took my five year old female lab to the bay. She was fetching a tennis ball when a weeble-wobbling elderly woman and her sweatered arthritic Chihuahua came up behind us. Jesse commenced to run 400 mile and hour circles around this little dog literally kicking sand in its face. I told the woman if I threw her dog in the bay that Jesse would retrieve it using a delicate soft bite

“Leave my dog the fuck alone, ”she said, surprising me.

I’m glad I only get me car “spected” once every two years.

Peace Freddog

www.davefredman.blogspot.com

A LTTLE TOO FAT NOW! COME BACK NEXT YEAR!

Zarank the Russian Tank was the most ruthless scholastic coach ever to be given the go ahead to coach high school sports. During the Baby Boomer years of the 1960’s, there were two classes of high school coaches; those that were dedicated and motivated and knew exactly what they were doing and the traditional classroom teachers, who either wanted the extra money or were threatened with losing their jobs if they didn’t coach some secondary offbeat sport. Football and basketball were the only sports considered big time at Bishop Egan Catholic High outside of Philadelphia. There were no sports for girls beyond looking sexy in a canvas jumper.
Marion Zarankewitz was a big strange Russian lay teacher who taught science at Bishop Egan. Most non-Clerical teacher types at Catholic high schools were constantly abused by the middle of the road and low-level classes of boys. And class size numbered close to 50 students per section. Marion Zarankewitz could hold his own against the “lower classes” while the more sophisticated comedians like me instinctively knew to lay off “Zarank The Tank” or risk disappearing in the middle of the night. Marion was too big and strange and was himself a master of psychological persecution and cutting the weak ones loose from the herd.
The first day of baseball tryouts in the spring of my freshman year I decided to sit up on the hill behind to backstop and just watch Zarank cull the herd of wannabe major leaguers. Coach Zarank had recruited me hard because I was his outstanding player on his freshman basketball team and he heard that I was a good pitcher back in eighth grade. But I was afraid of “hard balls” ever since some 17 year old “big kid” with a left hand delivery had thrown a step off the rubber pick-off rocket to my first base glove that I cleverly caught with my face. I stayed home from school for two weeks because I looked like Lizzie the Borden Cow and I was embarrassed.
Ninety kids showed up for baseball tryouts that first day and Zarank The Tank was the only coach. And he knew absolutely nothing about baseball but he understood the science of selectivity and survival of the fittest and that natural selection and genetic inheritance made some people athletic while most were not. Zarankewitz understood all that stuff and absolutely never contemplated an individual’s burning desire to excel or the resiliency of the human spirit.
Zarank began most sentences the same way, ”O.K. Now.” “O.K. now, I want all the ninth and tenth graders to line up along the left field foul line with their gloves and all eleventh and twelfth graders along the right field line with their gloves.”
Zarank walked down the underclassmen chalk line first, asking kids what position they wanted to play. He then asked some kids to step backwards and others forward. A few were told to remain standing on the line.
“O.K .now, those of you that stepped backwards try again next year. The rest of you stay where you are.”
One freshman boy who was a star pitcher in the Levittown Little League started crying. “O.K. now, don’t act like little girls now,” Zarank said. “Just take off! ”
Zarank not only judged kids on their size and stature but if he noticed that you were carrying a flat glove with no pocket or a brand new not yet broken in or a Pep Boys model then you were way gone. That was Zarank’s scientific side kicking into gear. He knew those kids couldn’t play and in almost all cases he was right on the money.
The absolute highlight of cut down day occurred when Zarank came face to face with big Mike Gettis, a decent football player who had started at first base the year before. “O.K. now, way too fat now, career over, please step back!”
Gettis tried to argue but Zarank cut him off, ”O.K. now, don’t be a little girl now, ”Zarankewitz said. “Nice first baseman’s glove though, you might try selling it!” I noticed a sickness to this science but I didn’t mind watching it.
During freshman basketball season Zarank became quite impressed with the accuracy of my jump shot which he always referred to as a “one hander.” We had a loaded team of Grammar school all-star white boys, all well schooled and drilled on the fundamentals of basketball. And with two minutes remaining in a small dank gym in inner city Trenton, New Jersey, we were leading the Trenton Catholic freshmen, who hadn’t lost a game in six years.
Zarank called time out. “O.K. now, we’re gonna win this game now. Kerr you take the ball and dribble around until you trick at least two people to come after you. Then give the ball to Fredericks for his one hander. You other three guys just stay out of the way and don’t shoot unless you get a lay-up.”
The strategy worked as the savvy Kerr was chased for a full 90 seconds before he found me alone in the corner with an over the shoulder no look pass. I buried the jumper hitting nothing but net and Kerr and I celebrated an improbable victory while the three lay-up brothers all sulked. “O.K. now, don’t act like little girls, ”Zarank told them. “When we get a big lead in a game you can shoot all you want.”
Zarankewitz was the science teacher for the freshman class of section D 1 which was the Nineteen Sixties version of “behavior management for the emotionally disturbed.” Zarank the Tank was absolutely cutting and insulting in the classroom and he left me alone because of my one-hander. But he loved mentally beating upon Italian Stallion Rick Chevett whom Zarank sarcastically referred to as “Shovit” every time he called his name.
The day before report cards were issued Zarank played a game where he went around the room asking students what grade they think they deserved then he’d tell them the grade the got. No one argued during this session because they didn’t want to be called “Little Girls” by Zarankewitz.
“O.K.now, Fredericks?” “I don’t know, seventy-five, I guess. “O.K. now, a little modest, Eighty! “ He would say the real number loud and drawn out like ,”Ayyyyyyty!”
Zarank burned poor Rick Chevett and several others. “O.K. now, Shovit? “ “I really don’t care, ”Chevett said. “O.K. now, don’t be a little girl, Shovit. Play the game or I’ll lower your grade”!
“I really don’t know, ”Chevett said. “I’d say Seventy Five, like Fredericks should have gotten.”
“O.K.now, very generous and inflated now! Fluuunky!” There were about 10 “Flunkies” in the room and each one was funnier and the word flunky more exaggerated than the one before. The routine remains one of my more cherished high school memories.
Back on the baseball diamond Coach Zarankewitz had put together a very respectable team. I loved watching him coach third base where all coaches seem to get carried away with flashing signs to batters and runners covering a variety of scenarios.
Zarank The Tank had only one sign from his third base box,”O.K. now! My back to you—Steal!” And when Leo Rossi was thrown out at third base for the final out of an important game he unraveled on Zarackewitz. “Everybody at the ballpark knew I was stealing as soon as you turned around,” Leo said. “It’s an inside joke. It’s the only reason some people come to the games.”
The “only shoot if you got a lay-up” Rossi was having a bad Zarank year in the sports arena. “O.K. now, don’t act like a little girl,” Zarankewitz yelled at Leo.
“I ain’t no little girl, ”Rossi screamed throwing down his first baseman’s mitt he purchased from Gettis.
Coach Zarank turned his back and leveled Leo to the ground, ”Fluuuuuuunky!”

DO YOU BELIEVE IN BOSSES?

I don’t know if I have a problem with authority but I do know that I have never recognized the power of the Boss and have never considered anyone my Boss and I have never used the term “The Powers That Be.”

“Be careful the Boss is in a bad mood” in my work history has always elicited this response: ”Fuck The Boss!” No one gets to take out their personal problems on a subordinate although I don’t believe in them either.

I spent 35 years in front of a classroom and never used the word Boss. Sociologist Max Weber, in addition to discovered the best grill ever, said that all power is usurped and that the absence of power is force. Watch out here comes the boring, explaining it to morons part.

In other words, a teacher controls a classroom because the students allow him and if they decide not to play by the rules there’s not much you can do besides commencing to kill as many students as possible before they get you which they never will because an adult in a murderous frenzy will send them all sprinting in the other direction. None of them will stay back to help their friends. So I just always told them, ”Unless you have a weapon I am in charge and I must tell you that I like fighting and enjoy getting hit and if you feel the same way then please commence to attack me anytime and if you win I will not “write you up.” I actually usurped their power through humor and respect and never “writing up” which I always called “tag and release.”

I do respect earned position and I have no interest being the one in charge. In education there is little “earned position” it’s “mostly” ambitions individuals armed with meaningless credits and portfolios along with a pretty nice wardrobe.

That’s why I’m more suited to the “performance based” newspaper business. In all my years writing a cutting edge column my ultimate editor Dennis only pulled the plug once.

“Your reference to the Afro American young man not taking over the family funeral business because of the stiff competition I removed because although I thought it was funny I’m just afraid that the black community is pretty religious and sensitive about issues like death.”

That may be and in deference to all my Afro friends on my mailing list this actually did happen some years ago. I called a funeral home too early in the morning to check on the “lay-out” arrangements of a young man accidentally killed the previous night. The annoyed response to my early morning mourning query,”I don’t know, I just picked the mother fucker up last night.”
Now it’s possible the young man who was the subject of the never published joke actually answered the phone and recognized my voice and threw his own joke back at me. I could write I hope that’s what happened but in reality either way it’s funny. A good thing I didn’t tell his Boss.

Peace Freddogg

THE BOYS WHO CRIED WUFF!

Four hundred hungry Catholic boys sprinted to the sunken cafeteria in the middle of the high school at the sound of the lunch bell. For all the stringent discipline inside the classrooms at Bishop Egan in early Sixties the hallways were freeways or as they were known by Phillt boys in those days, Super Highways.
Access to the Cafeteria with its green hardwood tables bolted to the floor and swing away round seats bolted to the tables was from the rear on opposite sides. Father Ed, the priestly alcoholic cafeteria monitor, stood caressing a fat chrome microphone like at any minute he would break into a medley of Johnny Mathis’s greatest love ballads.
“In the name of the Father and of the son…” Everybody froze in the motion of action like in a science fiction movie. “Bless us O lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty and may perpetual light shine upon them (dead thing-doesn’t belong here!) In the name of the Father da da da Amen”!
Gnarly, aptly described white haired Father Edwin and most of the time he was nice except when his hands were shaking. None of my buddies lived with a full fledged totally blossomed alcoholic so we couldn’t interpret the “Whole Lotta Shakin” behavior! Father Ed, always in need of a drink, or already had one too many we just didn’t understand his non discovered disability.
One fine day, as the song goes, Father Ed, he was Mr.Ed before he was a priest, visited our table, apparently in a jovial mood, wanting to share his jocularity with some lower middle class Catholic boys. We had all bought hoagies for lunch and orange drinks and tastycakes except for the Werewolf of Croydon Acres, Robert Duran. Duran was a poor kid and brought his lunch in a paper bag. Duran played no sports and looked spawned from peat moss but he was one of the boys. The priests at Eagan dogged the Werewolf unmercifully.
“How ya doin boys, ”Father Ed said, circling our table immediately after grace. “I see everybody is supporting the cafeteria except for you Werewolf. Did your mother sit on that sandwich boy? How did you get it to lay so flat and look so wet? I see you like your bologna with mustard.”
“It’s mayonnaise Father, ”said the congenial werewolf, not smelling out the setup.
“Son, take the top piece of bread off of that sandwich and look real close and tell me what you see.” Duran was so stupid and Father Ed was so wrong and such a punk. So there was Duran bent over about four inches from his open faced bologna with mayonnaise when Father Ed grabbed the back of the Werewolf’s mane and smashed his face into the sandwich. Duran reared up, with a bologna sandwich pasted between his eyes.
“By god son, you were right. That is mayonnaise. And the next time I’m saying grace don’t you move or I’ll shove your stupid sandwich up your nose.”
I ripped my sub in half and handed it to Duran. “You all right man?” “Yea, I’m all right Fred.” That’s good, that stupid asshole priest” Then I delivered a double forearm shiver and knocked Duran off his seat onto the floor. Cosmos stuck his sub inside his zipper, tapped the kid behind him, who turned around to find himself giving Comos a hoagie job. Joe Nolan walked by, grabbed Hank the Tank by the back of his sport coat and pulled him onto the floor. This behavior was a daily release from the pressures inside the classroom.
Every first Friday of the month the entire school went to mass. The theological dogma taught that if you attended nine first Friday’s in a row in the state of grace and went to communion that all your sins would be washed away and all accrued purgatory time expunged and you would go directly to heaven. I always thought impure thoughts during the mass itself probably jeopardized that deal.
On the way into the auditorium Duran was smiling and looking happy just to be going somewhere. I nudged him and gave a head nod towards the front door way where the Opossum was lurking in stillness and stealth silence. Father Canice was nicknamed the Opossum because he struck without warning and mostly without reason. Nobody made eye contact with the Opossum except for Duran.
“How you doin Father,” Duran said, in greeting the Opossum? “Looking forward to a great mass”?
I knew Duran meant nothing by the remark but I also knew that he was deader than a Opossum on a super highway.
“How you doing Creep,” Canice asked the Werewolf, with his James Cagney delivery.
Canice went into sadistic mode: “Listen Creep! Pick a hand! Do you want the right or the left?” Duran had no idea what he was walking into. “I’ll take the left Father.” Canice struck with blinding speed, creaming Duran’s face with a vicious open handed left. Duran looked bewildered but there was no hatred in his face as he walked into mass. I stared deep into the death trap of the Opossum’s soul. I could see he was a coward because he flinched. And I wished Duran was a real Werewolf the way Stymie wished Cotton was a watermelon.
Full moon arrived for the werewolf in the same cafeteria where Father Ed turned him into sandwich spread.
I thought of Lawrence Talbot talking to Abbot and Costello in a Frankenstein movie and pleading with them,” Please lock me in my room tonight,”Talbot begged. “When the moon is full I turn into a wolf.” Yea you and 50 million other guys,” Costello said.
We were sitting in study hall and the Opossum was a substitute. He said that he was going to lead everybody in saying the rosary. The rosary was a fate worse than death for a Catholic teenage boy. All those prayers followed by droll responses. It was just too dam long.
Canice came right to the end of our table and said the first part of the prayer. He barely moved his lips and sounded like a gangster planning a bank robbery. His routine became hysterical because we knew the first guy who laughed would be knocked silly.
Canice seemed to be mimicking himself as Duran, Kerr, Cosmos, Nolan and myself struggled not to explode into laughter. Of all the sets of eyeballs Duran’s seemed to be the happiest. I knew Canice hated the thought that The Werewolf of Croyden Acres and his bologna eating self was making sport of the Opossum.
Religion being the opiate of the masses Duran was virtually stoned following Canice’s Hail Mary’s. Maybe the bologna sandwich of the masses is a more apt expression. But somewhere after “Holy Mary Mother of God” and “Pray for us sinners” the Opossum smashed Duran with an opened handed full faced round house that put the Werewolf on the floor. It was an ugly, uncalled for assault, in the middle of a Hail Mary.
Duran arose barking! He had been transformed into a real werewolf. He barked and growled and snapped at anyone and everyone who came near him. The Opossum faded against a support column and played dead. Father Ed came rushing from an outside door and grabbed Duran by the arm. The Werewolf bit him. I asked Father Ed if he wanted some mayonnaise. The Werewolf bit him again. “How about some mustard Father Grace before meals”? And the Opossum stayed dead. And he never goes out when the moon is full. Duran became an alcoholic. Father Ed was his first drink. I became a comedian. Nobody’s laughing!

CRACKBACK MOUNTAIN

Crack backs are illegal in football but in verbal repartee they are fair game. But I am a professional and my sarcasm is a registered weapon. So I usually just absorb and figure, ”People are more fucked up than I ever dreamed.”

It is human nature to pick on weaknesses when angered. So I’m walking down the Rehoboth Boardwalk one day and Cheryl, a local celebrity who played Miss Piggy in the Muppet Movie because she’s a roller skating midget, yells something to me and I just nod then she says, ”You with the beer belly. I’m talking to you. Do you want to buy a raffle ticket?”

I mumbled to myself, “the roller skating Miss Piggy midget, a town character, whom everyone loves, is cracking on my ass. That is such a healthy adjustment to her limitations. I will leave her be but I ain’t buying no stupid ass raffle ticket from her.

Have you ever felt good about yourself and your self body image then get mistaken for someone you don’t see in the same idealized vision?

I was standing in from of Grottos on the boardwalk as a major storm was approaching. I was in the middle of a five mile walk. Working of fitness and feeling good about myself. A cute waitress came outside and walked right up to me and why shouldn’t she?

“What time are you closing the Baordwalk, ”she asked me. I knew immediately she thought I was the lifeguard captain who is a fat guy with a mustache and my friend. I told him about it and we both laughed and we're equally insulted.

Big and older white guys with mustaches get mistaken for each other all the time. And I’m never happy about it because I know that unlike them I exude a certain animal sexiness while they are outside of the rim of the breeding population looking back through Plexiglas.

Last Sunday at the gym a woman I just see around so I nod and she nods back but Sunday she came up and smiled and said, ”Now I know who you are?” And I was waiting to hear, “writer and columnist, I read your stuff all the time, you are so funny!”

But no, she drops another name and the guy is a marshmallow, never been in a gym in his life. The good news, this guy is about 13 years younger than me so at least he would be equally insulted to have me be mistaken for him.

One other rule I have is when you pass people you haven’t seen for awhile and you recognize them but they don’t recognize you to just let in go, stay quiet because the outcome is never good.

I once started talking to a 30 something young mother who was a former student. She was bubbly and cute, had the SUV and no job think going on, but she soon discovered that humorous teacher man thought she was someone else.

“Fredman I hate you! I just hate you! I can’t believe you confused me with that fat, bucket assed, no breasted woman that graduated 10 years before me.”

I’m off to the gym to get more material.

Peace Freddogg

GIVE AWAY- I was checking out the classified section in our local paper The Cape Gazette and came upon a Give Away Pet.
You know that rescue animals are all the shit right now and it’s a lot easier to lay down $500 for a good lab and avoid the criminal background check and bonding two hour visitation.

But anyway this “Give Away Pet” was a 14 year old cat. I know what you’re thinking. Who gives away some old and contented and can’t see it coming Fat Cat and worse yet who picks up the phone because the cat is offered for free?

Ring! Ring! A weak “Hello” and a muffled “meow” in the background.

“Is this the bitch giving away her lifelong companion?”

‘Excuse me?”

‘You still got the free cat I read about in the paper?”

“Yes, I do.”

‘What is it?”

“It’s a cat, that’s what I told them to put in the ad, “Cat.”

“I know it’s a dam cat! Is it male or female, what color, fat or skinny?”

‘It’s an altered Calico male and don’t start that all three colored cats are female cause this Phat Boy isn’t.”

“What are you making fun of your own cat?”

“I’m not, his name is Phat Boy. It’s hip-hop.’

“So why are you giving his sorry ass to a stranger after all these years?”

“Because he makes my granddaughter’s head swell up and her eyes water and she breaks out in hives.”

“Great does Phat Boy get along with other animals?”

“No, he don’t!”

‘Good, I’ll come get him because my cat and dog are getting on my nerves. Maybe they need an Old School Phat Boy ass whuppin?”

“Phat Boy kick some serious tail and be liken it yo! I knew I’d find him a good home. Do you have a cat carrier”?

“Does a pick up bed work?”

“Works for me!”

One last question mam. How do I get there?”

“I thought you said you had a truck?”








‘

TEMPLE HALL OF HORRORS

Gordon Leibowitz brought his brand of Long Island mischief to the campus dorm at Temple University in 1964. Johnson Hall was an 11-story hotel for wayward matriculators on North Broad Street. The mix of people was unique. Jewish kids from Long Island sprinkled among scholarship athletes, both black and white, from Philadelphia and New Jersey. There was a hidden economy at work in the dorm where certain athletes paid certain New Yorkers to facilitate their learning process by providing papers the athletes couldn’t read or by impersonating said athletes in test situations. From a distance it was rather entertaining.
One night in late October as my roommate Jonny Kerr and I lay in our single (just had to say that) narrow beds pushed against opposite walls we heard this strange hissing sound. We looked up above the closed door and there in the transom was a young Count Dracula complete with red lip stick, a chalk white face and pair of fangs.
Leibowitz had been scaring the crap out of people up and down the hallway, sliding his wooden desk chair with him. John and I were no amateurs when it came to this behavior and we were the first set of “Mischief Night Vets” from Philly Leibowitz had tried to scare. John and I looked up! There were first questioning expressions followed by smirks and then a hardback economics book that hit Count Dracula in the face and knocked him off his chair. Leibowitz was screaming out in the hallway, ”What’s the matter? You guys can’t take a joke?”
Leibowitz had started the Johnson Hall Halloween Wars and would later be named in the University’s Vampire Indictments. But no one could have predicted the Horror Show that would emerge over the next weeks that included flying devils, urban “werewuffs”, a rouge mummy, a seven-foot black zombie, several ghouls, one gay goblin and a bevy of ugly and increasingly violent vampires. And one sighting of the Psycho undead mother of Norman Bates.
Kenny Morgan and Tom Kirby steeped off the 10th floor elevator at 4 a.m.singing a selection of the Four Tops Greatest Hits. Kenny was a 6’10” basketball player from West Philly while Kirby was a 6’5” pitcher from Northern Jersey and a major league prospect. In 1964 there were no black people in America. Kenny and Tommy were a couple of lovable colored guys. Two incredibly big and strong but nevertheless cuddly and lovable guys.
Kenny tried the door handle to our room when he walked by, but we had it locked for protection from the creatures of the night. Later I heard them singing in the big shower room in the middle of the floor. I woke up the soundly sleeping Kerr. “Do you hear what I hear, John?”
“What are you, freakin’ Santa Claus? What are you talking about?”
“Kenny and Kirby in the shower. They’re singing and I think they’ve been drinking!”
“Let’s drop a Mrs. Bates in their laps. Get up and I’ll help you dress.”
Kerr was stupid like that. One minute he was sound asleep and the next he was allowing me to wrap him in a sheet and cover his face with baby powder. We constructed a fake dagger out of looseleaf paper. Kerr wanted fangs cut from an index card but I told him that was stupid cause Mrs. Bates wasn’t a fanged monster.
Kenny and Kirby were singing and snapping their fingers, drops of hard water beading over their rippling brown muscles. They looked invincible!
Kerr came around the corner with a high-pitched falsetto squeal. He raised the dagger and went right into the shower after the frozen crooners. Kenny and Kirby were hugging each other. It was A number one freaking hysterical.
A week later I came into my room around midnight and prepared for bed. Kerr was down the end of the hall watching television. I noticed a pair of size 16 sneakers sticking out of the back below Kerr’s bed. I knew it was Kenny but decided to play double agent and say nothing. Kerr later came in, put a stack of 45 oldies tunes on the record player and settled in to sleep. About 15 minutes later I heard his faint voice.
“Fre-ed! Fre-ed!” I tuned on a desk lamp to see this enormous black hand that had palmed Kerr’s freckled red face like a girl’s basketball. “Fre-e-ed”!
Morgan rolled out from underneath the bed, his hair covered with dust. Kenny was having the best time. He couldn’t stop laughing! “I got you man! I got you!”
Liebowitz dropped his Dracula costume and went werewolf on us. One night while watching television in the 10th floor lounge, Leibowitz jumped into our field of vision from the 11th floor overhang. He was incredibly authentic. He looked just like Lon Chaney Junior. He crouched low and went around the room swatting at people. It was hysterical! But Keer cuffed the ‘werewuff” upside the head and Leibowitz fell to the floor. “You ain’t funny no more, you stupid ass, ”Kerr yelled, still smarting from Morgan taking a few years off his life.
Two coinciding creature feature uncalled for events brought about 20 of us monster mashers in front of the dean for possible dismissal from the University.
Don Mauer played split end on the football team and he was one flat out ugly white boy, but at least he was incredibly strange and sociopathic. Mauer looked gaunt at 6”3” 185 pounds of muscle and his face had so many craters he must have shaved with an off road razor. Mauer had it in for these two little Jewish kids because they upped the price of writing his term papers from 10 to 25 dollars. Maurer decided they needed a visit from the Price of Darkness.
Meanwhile on the same Saturday night Kerr got dressed in a costume that made him look like a black Tom Cat. “What the heck is that, Kerr? ”I asked sarcastically.
“I’m a homicidal zombie nun, what does it look like?”
Kerr went across Broad Street, broke into some guy’s apartment and just stood in the bedroom doorway hissing. The kid, who was alone, awoke, startled and petrified and sprinted out the back door into the North Philadelphia Ghetto in just a pair of Jockey shorts. No one ever saw him again.
Back in the dorm two little intellectuals checked under their beds and locked the door before turning out of lights. Twenty minutes later the Prince of Darkness came in through the sliding floor to ceiling window. Maurer had been standing out on a 10th floor ledge for a couple of hours.
The screams went unheeded and unheralded. There were just too many people each and every night crying “Wuff!”
Maurer trashed the room and threw those frantic little guys all over the place. He never threw a punch; he just tossed the place and the people.
My mother congratulated me for allowing her to receive such a strange letter. “Did you see this registered letter from the Dean of Students at Temple, David? It says you’re on social probation. It says that if you are spotted anywhere on campus impersonating or otherwise representing yourself as a vampire, werewolf, mummy or Mrs. Bates that you will not only be expelled from the University but prosecuted to the full extent of the law. David, this is a great letter. Can I take it to work with me and show it to the other nurses? We exchange stories every night but I don’t think anyone will be able to top this one.”
“Sure mom. By the way, where’s my face?”
“Excuse me? Where’s your face? Is that a philosophical question? Don’t tell me you’re getting an education after all?”
“No, I ain’t getting no education. There’s a valuable charcoal drawing of me sketched by a top Temple art student and vampire victim on top of the television upstairs. But the face had been erased!”
“Oh, that’s where Checkers sleeps! I guess the cat stole your face. Did you know that real vampires don’t reflect in the mirror? ”my mother said. “Don’t you think it’s ironic that your face disappears the same day you receive a Vampire Indictment?”
Checkers was basking in the sun on hot concrete when ----“Up your nose with a rubber hose, cat!”
The mischief wars never stop for a Philly boy! There are only summer truces!

I am solidly middle class and so are most of the people in my world. Garth Brooks sang, ”I’ve got friends in low places except he doesn’t anymore than Chris Rock or David Chapel represent anything Ghetto.

Sit down in your family room or great or not so great room. How many color televisions are in your house? Is it enough? Is it ever enough? And for those of you who don’t own a television because you don’t watch television all I can say is that don’t mean you’re not stupid anyway.

How many phones beyond the “my cell is my lifeline” phones are in your house? Are any of them not cordless with 25 football coiled cords wrapped around an external caller i.d.machine.

Do you own a four wheel drive that is never “locked In” and do you own at least one other vehicle that you don’t need?

Now it’s multiple computers with in house routers because if you’re upstairs watching a color t.v.and recording the program with a DVD recorder you shouldn’t have to go downstairs to get on the computer even though you also have a blackberry in your pocket.

Do you have a riding mower? Please tell me you don’t! Has your riding mower evolved into an actual tractor with attachments! Please say it ain’t so!

Do you have an advanced degree from somewhere but bottom line is you don’t know shit about very much?

And do you think you weigh too much and are you always on a diet of restraint even when you’re in fat phase and do you look stupid when you run which is why you don’t do it.?

Finally go to your closet and pick out the dumbest thing you ever purchased while sober and throw it in the trash. Don’t even think of donating it to the thrift shop because they’ll send it to Somalia and it will end up on the back of a Warlord who is a syndicated owner of a 4 by 2 1983 Toyota regular cab pick up.

I have never been to IHOP of Cracker Barrel. That’s part of my diet.

Peace Freddogg

WHISKEY YOU'RE THE DEVIL

Back on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1962 I got into a hallway fight on the 80th floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City with my lifelong friend Joe whose high school nickname was Asshole and that’s way before it became cool to call everyone Asshole and even today now that Joe’s 62 he identifies himself as “The Hole!”

Joe threw an empty pint bottle of whiskey at me, expecting me to catch it, but having drunk a half pint myself, I was exactly paying attention. The bottle hit me under the right eye and I dropped like I had been shot. I woke up to a cut that probably needed stitches, a swollen and discolored check, but way beyond feeling pain.

Joe apologized and I kept reminding him of his nickname. He was a senior in high school, I was only a sophomore. We were trashed on the 80th floor inside a den of sickness that could never be believed. The entire hotel was in riot mode except everyone was laughing. I kept after Asshole then he finally got mad and told me to shut up and stop crying just because I got hit in the face with a whisky bottle traveling 60 miles and hour.

So we started to fight, rolled onto the floor and a crowd came around and they yelled for blood. That’s when we figured we were friends providing entertainment to strangers so we turned on the crowd and they ran because Joe always looked crazy and I looked like Carmen Basilio after a 12 round pummeling.

We went down to floor 60, got off the elevator and started walking down the hallway. There was a black phone on a table. My other friend Bob said, ”Phone’s for you" and ripped it out of the wall and threw it into a mirror shattering the class. Bob laughed, thinking that was the funniest thing he ever did. We went around a corner to find a guy emptying the entire contents of a room into the hallway. We helped him set up the bed. He said he didn’t know why he was doing it but probably because no one was stopping him.

Then we went to the grand lobby where the party was just crazy. It was like a co-ed Oyster Eat minus the oysters and blue grass band. In fact, it was nothing like some firehouse Oyster Eat. This was sheer decadence for its own sake. It was lawlessness not some orchestrated ‘Gone Wild: video.

A handler and his boy were working the crowd taking bets that this guy could drink an entire fifth of Seagram’s Whisky on a non stop elevator ride down from the 85th floor . People stuffed money into a top hat and the handler wrote down their names. They didn’t come near me because in the sea of insanity I was the scariest looking creature.

Two observers accompanied Whiskey Boy to the top floor. This was old school pre-digital. A brass dial pointed to number 85. The numbers were in intervals of five. Down came the elevator The crowd yelped and hollered, no one barked because human barking hadn’t been invented.
The elevator reached the lobby and the door opened. Whiskey Boy was draining the last drops from the bottle. The spotters shook their heads up and down affirming he had done it.
Everyone applauded, then Whiskey Boy got this look like Stan Laurel. It was that blend of total confusion and stark self awareness. Whiskey Boy fell forward in what looked like a staged pratfall. The crowd went berserk. Whiskey Boy was dead!

People stared to leave because young drunk people don’t like being around young dead drunk people. I stood and watched as firemen came and took Whisky Boy away. Ironically, I too was Whisky Boy and they kept looking at him then back to me.

“You know this guy, ”a fireman asked. “Whiskey Boy is all I know!”

“Yea, I bet, ”he responded, not realizing the twisted humor in his statement.







http://www.davefredman.blogspot.com/

I wrote this story a few years ago to be included in a collection I plan to call "Old Cats Don't Purr." The story appeared in a gay magazine called "Letters From Camp Rehoboth." I by the way am not gay but I do belong to Gold's Gym.

YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL TO ME! THE CASE OF THE GAY A!

By Dave Frederick

Thirty years ago in the dead of winter I slept on a slatted bed minus the slats. My mattress was thrown on the floor and a bed frame was erected around the parameter. It gave me a sense of security like a cat sleeping inside a wicker laundry basket.
My roommates, Hog Body and Pigpen, had more sense than to schedule a class in English Literature at 7 a.m. a few weeks past the winter solstice. But like Eve in the garden, I was turning over a new leaf and had decided to come out of the cerebral closet.
I stood up and rubbed my eyes turning back to look at my bedding. We had something in common. We were both unmade.
I trudged southward down Walnut Street to the campus of West Chester State. West Chester was a phys ed school and most of the women walked into daybreak carrying hockey sticks and wearing shin guards. I have a basic rule. I never mess with a woman who can throw me out trying to stretch a single into a double. I was a sort of flunky intellectual athlete moving from college to college. West Chester was whistle stop number six on the enlightenment train to spiritual nirvana and I was majoring in Psychological Anthropology.
I chose that major because I admired Professor Marshall Becker, a snippy little bearded bastard who enjoyed ripping the smiles from faces of education majors. “Dopey little education majors,” Becker called them. Back in 1968 Becker offered a grade of A to any male in the class who would wear a different dress to campus for a solid week. It was Becker’s way of making a point about cultural accoutrements.
Some round-shouldered, hairy backed, odd duck in my class wore a formal gown the following Monday. He sat in the PIG ( Purple and Gold) cafeteria, drinking coffee by himself before class. The boy showed no behaviors expressing what sociologists call “role distance” (like riding backwards on a hobby horse); the mother-humper just wore dresses for five days and got his A. But for this guy it was not cultural courage; he was just a misfit, as they say in the clothier business.
My English Literature professor was 15 minutes late the first morning of class and it was freezing and still dark outside. I slouched with my head resting in my left hand supported by my elbow. Most of the class was filled with older women side stroking back into the educational mainstream. I was an oddity, an athlete with an attitude with a distaste for the dry and mundane. I was about to receive a “rouge” awakening.
First I heard the singing and then the slipping and sliding of skipping feet. A tall angular young man in a three- piece suit and slicked back hair came skipping into the classroom and up and down each isle. And then he “pranced” out into the hallway and tippy-toed back inside. Dr. Romanelli then appeared to do this free interpretive snowflake dance around his desk while singing opera.
And then it was on to J.R.Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and some book called “The Hobbit” that was to be read first. “Have you read The Hobbit young man?” Romenelli asked with a sigh, looking directly into my face. “Hobbit Long Cassidy,” I answered with my customary smirk. “Hobbit Long Cassidy, Do Tell,”, Romanelli countered, making me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Becker was out of the blocks and sprinting down the scatological shock track one afternoon in Physical Anthropology class and I was hanging onto his every insult. “A species is simply defined as infra-fertility,” Becker said softly with an air of academic pomposity. “The only reason man and chimps are still separate may be lack of experimentation.”
Prize student Joe McCloughlin, from working class West Philly, practically flew out of his chair. “My friend Rico will experiment. Would you like his phone number?”
Becker did not hesitate. “Tell him to go over to Cheney State (black school) and practice!” Two dark skinned Afro headed women looking like Angela Davis with a lifeguard tan just bugged out their eyes but never said a word. I thought Becker was definitely an academic “bad ass.” He was a common, low down, insensitive, academic bandit. That’s why I admired him!
I found Romelli entertaining and amusing but for 1968 when the slogan was “Batter Blatant than Latent” he was way beyond gay; he was downright exuberant if not ebullient.
“I’d like to see Dr.Rominelli,” I told the office secretary one late afternoon a week before the final exam. “Just follow the opera aria, ”she said sarcastically. “Look for his head peering above one of the cubicles. He’s acting particularly silly today, even for him.”
I hadn’t been to Romanelli’s class in weeks. I had taken no tests and submitted no papers. Every dark morning I just curled up in a tight ball when the alarm went off. I could even make my head disappear like a real Tom Cat.
“Dr. Romanelli, I haven’t been to your class and I haven’t done a thing because I’m basically a prisoner of my own bad habits. So I was wondering if you would just give me a D and we’ll forget the whole experience.” I looked for a human reaction to my obnoxious and outrageous request.
“ Did you say D? Is that what you said, D? You want me to give you a D? I should just take out your computer card and pencil in the letter D? D, as in Doctor? “
“How about I as in Einstein? ”I joked. Romenelli smiled. “I am definitely not giving you a D. No way I’m giving you a D. You don’t deserve a D.”
“You’re right ,” I said. “Good luck with The Hobbit and his mythical friends!”
“I’m giving you an A! ” Romenelli screamed as I left his cubicle.
“And why would you want to give me an A?” I asked turning around.
“Because you’re beautiful, ” he said. “You are just so beautiful!”
Later I grabbed a tankard of coffee and sat down next to Joe McCloughlin and Becker at the PIG, slightly dazed from my Romenelli experience.
“See that boy in line by the cash register,” McCloughlin asked. “Don’t you think he’s biologically attractive. Forget about sexuality, I’m just talking about intra-species attractiveness.”
“Sure, I guess so. Hey Joe, do you think I’m beautiful?”
Becker spit out his coffee. The intellectual McCloughlin gave an emphatic “No!”
But I have a transcript that proves otherwise. I also bagged an A in Physical Anthropology I didn’t deserve. What was that all about? Why couldn’t my professors just like me for my mind? After all, some of them just hated me for it!

George Barnard Shaw said a pervert is a person who only knows one way of doing things. Oh, I get it!

I read another story this morning of a flasher on a New York Subway, this guy literally a strap hanger, and how an alert 15 year old took a high then low photo with her picture phone to turn over to cops not to mention upload to cyber land where she and friends can use it as a screen saver. Has our culture always been this sick? I read another story where a 25 year old broke into a house and sexually assaulted a mother and her eight year old daughter but then mom found a hammer in the junk drawer and hit the guy once in the head and the face and there is a basic rule when getting hit by a hammer and that is once hit you stay hit plus you have those hammer dimples in your head forever. Police caught this perv/perp because he dropped his wallet at the scene while fleeing for his life.

A student of mine once told me a story of “The Boy Who Rapes Dogs” and I thought it would make a good work of fiction perhaps I could get on the Ophra book club list except not only was this girl not kidding but she was dead on accurate and in her neighborhood the dogs on chains howled at the moon but often thier “yelps for help” went unheeded. Certain school personnel knew about this and I had the kid in class and he sat right next to the boy who liked sex with stuffed animals who I found out about only after he ripped the ears off both Heckle and Jeckle and I asked him why and the other kids said, “Fredman you just don’t want to know.” . Both these guys are now in prison for life where dog man seems to have formed an unnatural relationship with the in house passive drug sniffing dog.

When I was growing up every picture I saw of a human body naked had some type of hideous deformity and the subject had black tape over their eyes to conceal their identity just in case you ran into them at the ACME market. “Hey they don’t call you elephant man because you have a big nose.”

Seriously my mother was a big time nurse, very smart and she had these green hard back nursing books all over the house. She knew I read them and was just glad I was reading something. I found asymmetrical breast lady just fascinating and back then A/DD had a completely different meaning.

Parental controls on the internet are absolutely necessary to protect our children. Black tape over the eyes in still black and white glossy text book photos are one thing but there are a lot of sick puppies out there both stuffed and alive.

Freddogg---geez I may have to change my nickname

--http://davefredman.blogspot.com/

I woke up this morning with Bed Head which is exactly like Hat Head minus the hat. I looked like I had worn a bathing cap to bed or a helmet or skull cap. It was pretty ugly but no matter because I’m still such a physical specimen that gay trollers circle twice when they see me in a secluded beach parking lot.

Yes indeed ladies and gentlemen I was “creeped out” yesterday but “who knew?” as I parked in the corner of a parking lot leading to the ocean that evidently is a meeting place for straight men who have lost their minds.
Now I don’t mind telling you that if some older out of shape woman circled twice to check me out I would be equally scared and would yell something like, ”Get you fat ass back to Super G they just recharged all the electric shopping carts” or something like that.

Meanwhile today my 60th birthday I’ve elected to wear my Timberland jeans or is it genes in gay land and orange sherbet shirt which reminds me of the soda fountain days and the old guy who would come in sit down and order “choc-choc-choc-choc-Chocolate and we would all laugh because we were blue collar little dirty working class kids with no jobs.
Did you ever eat five already cooked day old hotdogs at one sitting because you’re on a diet? That’s right I didn’t say anything about rolls.

I’ve got to bounce. I’m appearing in a journalism class this morning doing a Pardon The Interruption routine. Here is one of my legitimate questions. Should a working journalist cover a three on three YMCA league for college dropouts or are those people best left ignored.

Peace and Harmony.

Dr. Freddogg

Don't forget there are things on the fred blog that don't appear on emails


--http://davefredman.blogspot.com/

HOT DOG DAY AFTERNOON BETWEEN THE BANKS OF LEWES

Two strapping and strongly built young black men each close to 6-5 and weighing over 200 pounds ascended the steps of the Sussex Trust bank in the middle of a July afternoon, wearing neck scarfs, bandanas and masks over their faces. Ironically, a security technician had shut down the alarm system at Sussex Trust because it was in need of tweaking.
The tellers sprung into an alternative evasive plan that involved throwing hard cold cash into the trash cans. The customers were absolutely stark frozen in their tracks, startled from fright. And across the street, where a beat up Chevy Suburban sat parked with two more masked dark men inside, the Farmers Bank had pulled the blinds closed and bolted the doors shut.
John Curtin, the manager of the Board of Public Works and a licensed NCAA track official, came to me with a proposal for a summer job back in 1977. “Coach, we have to put water meters in every home in Lewes and only have two years to do it. I want you to hire six kids from the high school to work the project and to labor at the power plant. You will be their supervisor and will answer only to me. Did you ever think you would have a job supervising hole diggers?”
And so I recruited four of my track athletes, who were black like most of their teammates and a couple of white kids I had in class. I had no idea that the Board of Public Works had never had a black employee but now the rednecks had to watch their language around the water cooler and coffee maker. Watermelon and fried chicken jokes were now on hold for the entire summer.
The meters were late arriving so we started the summer cleaning, painting and sprucing up the town owned property. The first day I left the two white boys at the Power Plant and took my athletes along with me. I just didn’t want my kids subjected to any subtle forms of racism that could be so subtle that the guys exhibiting the behavior were totally unaware of it.
Our assignment was to paint the well houses that sat upon the Lewes well field on the outskirts of town. I didn’t know such places existed and I still don’t understand how water underground gets all the way up inside that giant water tower.
These structures were just little cinderblock buildings painted white. We set up inside house number one of six and I gave the boys instructions about cutting in and rolling the walls. All four looked back at me like they knew I thought they were stupid. “Hey, if you don’t like instructions just throw the paint onto the wall directly from the bucket and smooth it with your hands. I just don’t want to see and finger prints when I get back.”
“What do you mean when you get back,” Timmy said. “Your just gonna leave us here out in this hot field, ”Bruce said? “You all knew Fredman would be getting over, ”Jay say laughing. “So like where you going while we all out here painting, ”Charlie asked.
“Look guys here’s the deal. You are making good money working directly for your track coach who is the same cool guy that lead you to a state title last month. So please don’t worry about what I’m doin. You just paint, I go to Mr. Donut and eat pastries and talk a bunch of noise to anybody who will listen. Then I’m driving to the boardwalk and drinking more coffee. And if I’m in a good mood I might bring you back some donuts. Now that’s what I’m doing! Anymore questions?
I returned to the well field at 10 a.m with a dozen donuts and some cold drinks but there was no one in sight. I parked my panel truck walked around the building that was halfway painted and then walked inside. My labor gang had erected a giant bed made of old saw horses and planks of wood and they were sleeping. Just four guys lying on their backs, stiff as boards, sawing wood. I coughed lightly because I was starved for attention. Timmy opened his eyes, the rest didn’t, but he didn’t move another muscle in his body. “The first day of work and you guys just go to sleep on me? And you don’t even bother to post a lookout or even try to wake up when I come back? What kind of disrespect is that?”
Long tall Charlie kicked out his leg and knocked an empty paint can on the floor. Bruce stretched out and knocked down a second empty can. Jay sat up and said, ”Not enough paint Fredman. We ran out an hour ago. White people just try to look busy. Black people just go to sleep.”
Later in the same week, I started knocking on the doors of the town’s lawn doctors, explaining to them that we would be digging a big hole in their front yards, shutting off the water at the curb, cutting the water line and installing a meter, then turning the water back on after filling up the hole. My young and muscular digging crew never showed the slightest look of interest or concern when homeowners whined about their lawn never looking the same.
“We’ll have it back good as new I assured them. You won’t be able to tell we were ever here.” Then I’d leave and go drink coffee while my ground breaking athletes that were the first to integrate the towns utility company would be tossing ragged sod all over the place.
One guy had a front lawn like a putting green and when we finished there was this round circle that looked like it had been cut with a cookie cutter. And we had a piece left over and none of us could ever figure out how or why? “I’m calling the town and complaining about you guys,” an elderly man screamed at Bruce and Charlie. The boys just stared him down. They didn’t like dealing with white people and their stupid lawns and neither did I. There were days when we all felt like snatching out all the shrubs around the house and throwing them into the street.
The friction between the hole diggers and town’s property owners was getting worse instead of better. Digging a hole in a manicured lawn is not the best way to break down racial barriers and meet new friends. I put the “white boys” on hole digging for a couple of weeks which meant I’d have to leave two of my black kids back at the Power Plant with the rednecks. Black Power versus Red Power a virtual human wheel of Russian roulette.
But as much as my guys didn’t like digging holes in peoples front yards they nevertheless began to think of themselves a hole digging specialists and didn’t like doing the other stupid stuff I’d assign when we ran out of water meters.
“Take a few of your guys, grab some “idiot sticks” and cut a path through this field until you come to a ditch filled with water, ”John Curtin said to me, pointing into an abyss of rolling fragmites. I should have never told Bruce and Timmy to grab two “idiot sticks” from the back of the truck because they took it personally. So I grabbed a third and told them it was just like playing par three golf and was good exercise. They of course didn’t believe that but I did and anyway I was getting tired just eating donuts.
One particular windy day, I drove my four reluctant laborers to an electrical substation that was surrounded by a rusty chain link fence. Our Mission Impossible was to paint the fence with aluminum paint a brush stroke at a time. “Stay down wind from this paint, ”I said. “It has a tendency to travel in the air.”
Three hours later I went back to the futuristic looking substation, picked up my team and took them back to the power plant, there to clean up with mineral spirits. They were all covered with specks of silver paint. “You guys look like the Oakland Raiders without the uniforms,” I said. “Maybe you should all paint numbers on your backs.”
“You look like you play for Penn State, ”Bruce said referencing the Nittany Lion’s plain white uniforms. “Casper the quarterback, ”Timmy said. “Doughboy the defensive tackle, ”Charlie joked. Everybody laughed because it was time for our one-hour lunch break.
After lunch the summer sun had produced a temperature of close to 100 degrees. And the Greenhead flies had blossomed from the great marsh to begin their carnivorous feasting of every mammal in their flight path.
We gathered around the rag barrels after lunch and the boys were in no mood for more Oakland Raider jokes or sidewalk hair washings with mineral spirits. I just stood back and marveled as my guys covered their faces and hands with rags they had found in the barrel. We jumped into my 1970 three door khaki colored- non air-conditioned Chevy Suburban and headed for the job site. We pulling down Second Street where the bank clock read 99 degrees. I parked under a tree in front of Farmers Bank across the street from the hardware store and Sussex Trust bank. “You guys wait here and I’ll be back in a minute ,”I said. “I’m going to pick up two more gallons of paint.”
I took my time in Franklin Hardware and so did they, shaking my paint cans and talking about nothing in particular. I never thought about leaving a beat up looking vehicle with four large black men in masks and bandanas parked between two banks. But the banks sure thought about it!
Farmer’s Bank just shut down immediately because my cargo carrier was right outside their window. Bruce and Charlie got tired of waiting for me in the hot truck and decided to go across to Sussex Trust and get some ice water from the fountain. They came up the steps and began to push through the glass doors when they noticed people freaking out. Both Bruce and Charlie reacted to the “manacing black men “alert and pushed back out the door and went and sat in the truck.
I came out of the hardware store with a paint bucket in each hand looking like a “scales of justice” poster boy. I heading on a 45 degree angle across the street to my truck when I heard my name screamed out loud. A very angry, bordering on hysterical women was standing on the top step of the Sussex Trust bank. Mr.Frederick! Some people may think it’s funny pretending to rob a bank but we don’t! I heard that you’re a guy who thinks all kinds of things are funny but bank robbery is not funny”!
I wondered just how funny “Shut up bitch!” would have been at the moment as a small crowd had gathered on the sidewalks and was staring at me.
I got into the Surburban with my paint and drove to the substation. Nobody said a word during the five- minute ride to the outskirts of town. I parked the truck but nobody moved or said a word.
“All right get out and don’t give me that angry black men bullshit. I figure we have five minutes until the state cops get here with guns and dogs. First and last of all, the whole stupid thing is my fault. I am capable of that kind of stupidity. I never thought about leaving you guys parked between two banks wearing masks. I’ll take the first bite when the snapping shepherds get here.”
“It’s not only your fault,” Timmy said. “Bruce and Charlie thought it would be funny to walk into the bank and get a drink. I told them it was stupid but they said that you did stupid things all the time.”
We waited for the cops but they never came. And so we painted all afternoon, even me. I had no rag protection and was covered with silver paint and greenhead welts. It was my last day on the job. I told John Curtin that supervising a crew of hole-diggers was more pressure than I needed during my summer vacation.
Two weeks later I was walking past the Savannah Road elementary school when the principal shouted my name from 30 yards away. “Mr.Frederick!” “Oh no, not again,” I thought. Mrs. Labarr cut right to the point.
“Tell me first hand about how you and four large black men dressed in trash bags pretended to rob the bank at Sussex Trust.”
“They were 50 gallon lawn and leaf bags, ”I said. “But it seems no one in this town can take a joke!”
“I thought it was funny, ”Mrs. Labarr said. “The entire town is laughing about it!”
“I know a teller that ain’t laughing, ”I said. “Not everybody was born to take a joke. She just didn’t appreciate my idiot schtick.”