Freddogg Off The Chain

VANISHING POINT

I think I was four years old lying in my single bed looking out the back window at the PSFS red letters screaming in Neon high above the streets of North Philadelphia. My brother was six and I was annoying him as usual. The house was dark back when dark meant something.

Tommy fell asleep and all I had to contemplate was the existence of a Tiger which I was pretty sure lived under my bed. I just would never look because if he was there and looked back at me there would be nothing left for the panting big headed cat to do but kill me.

I was uneasy and scared when I heard the toilet flush. I was going to call out to my mother but she was already walking away from me down the dark hallway towards the front bedroom. Her left hand was bouncing on the railing and through the black fog I could see that she was naked although I didn’t know what that meant.

Women in 1950 wore house dresses, not even pants or shorts and just never naked. There was no way an ass could be that wide and that round and why was it following my mother. This is not a repressed memory because I’ve been putting it back inside the drawer of inappropriate images my entire life. My eyes were mesmerized and traumatized but the imprinted image memorized.

Now that I’ve become my own grandfather I had to calculate my mother’s age on that night so I did it by adding years to her birth date. My god, my mother was 24 years old walking naked in the dark down an upstairs hallway of a North Philadelphia row house. She was a babe and naked for a reason the same reason my old ass is sitting here today.