Freddogg Off The Chain

Vivid memories go all the way back to the beginning. You may forget where you left your car keys or the name of a person who appears to know you well but the real impressionable shit stays in there.

I was four years old sitting on the floor in a dark dinning room inside a North Philadelphia row house. Out in the kitchen the final room before the alley three soon to be dead men were sitting down to dinner in a kitchen too bright on slippery chairs pulled up to a shiny table.

There was my father Tom in a wheel chair his hands always trembling from Multiple Sclerosis, my maternal grand father Franklin who entered the world as a senile autistic and just got worse and my Uncle Frankie who was mildly retarded and was missing part of his face due to the only recorded medical case in history labeled: “Cancer of the Fucking Head.”

My father hated his father in law, my mother hated her father, my grandfather hated his son and Frankie loved mashed potatoes.

And so whatever main course slid around the table top my father couldn’t pick up, my grandfather criticized in vicious fashion but Uncle Frankie loved mashed potatoes.

The mashed potatoes arrived in a big bowl steaming hot with melted butter in the middle. Uncle Frankie loosened his belt and said, ”I’m eating all of these” and reached for the hot bowl.

Grandfather Franklin screamed a single syllable as blue vessels popped from his bald head littered with age spots. He hated to see Frankie happy.

Frankie couldn’t process the real time problem of desire too strong and bowl too hot heading towards his lap on a table too slippery. The entire bubbling bowl landed upside down on his unbuckled crotch. Frankie let out a painful yell.

My father Tom commenced to roar in laughter like a lion which increased spastic episodes in all his limbs. Grandfather Franklin called his son a stupid monstrous retard and ran from the house.

My mother cried and dutifully helped put her brother back together and then he left the house in humbled embarrassment where everyone of the PTC bus would make fun of him because the world of randomness is never ready for the reality of the hackneyed faced Frankies with a pocket full of tokens.

My dad died at our new Cape Cod home at the end of the first floor hallway in 1963 he was 43 and maybe weighed his age although I doubt it. Uncle Frankie died at 38 in a Trenton hospital bed on Christmas Eve in 1964 with his sister singing at his bedside
“O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine blätter.Du grnst nicht nur zur sommerzeit, nein auch Im winter wenn es schneit”

I remember thinking, ”All these years I’m German and only now my mother, whose maiden name was Krupp, is breaking out tearful German lullabys,it just made me mad, like ‘This is fucked up enough without the O Tannebaum sendoff.”
Grandfather Frankin died at the end of the hallway to the left in a room filled with uneaten toast at the age of 83 in 1965.
The guys from the nursing home had come to get him that morning. Luigi the beagle had blown up to the size of a dachshund show dog because Franklin had given him all his food and oh yea, one night he was standing over me in the dark in my upstairs bed with a large knife raised up over his head. The time had come and he had to go.
Franklin died before the men reached his room. His late life mantra , ”No one is putting me inside that long dark tunnel” proved to be accurate.
And Mashed potatos make me cry.

Freddpupp