Freddogg Off The Chain

Before school one day, that quiet time of 7:20 a.m.when all is peaceful, the school psychologist game into my classroom. He told me a story of a middle school kid who had the lower part of his right leg amputated after bone cancer was discovered. ‘He’s cool and likes baseball and football, ”Dave said to me. “You would like him. You should meet him.”

Translation: “Maybe you could help him?”

The next school year Chris was my student. I went right to it, in front of the class. Chris, I know part of the story. Which leg? “

“The left one, ’he said. “Take it off and pass it up here.” He did.

“I asked permission to pass it around the room. There was an athletic shoe fitted on the end. Al the kids were like, ”Cool.” Everyone liked Chris and all awkwardness and avoidance of "The Titanium Leg" were gone. But I was just getting started.”

A month later I asked Chris for permission to tell his story in the newspaper. I also asked written permission from his mother. I told Chris he was an inspiration to me and could be for others and that there was nothing he could do about that.”

The day we sat down during my free period. Chris was missing math and didn't ask or inform the teacher because she was a bitch. His teacher came looking for him. We were engaged in the story. I had tears in my eyes. She looked into my room like I had violated some serious protocol. “He has a test, ”she said. “I responded, ”He already passed a test we couldn’t. Today he won’t be coming to your class. Take it up with the principal.”

Chris had a bone cancer that started as a bump on the shin, a hospital visit confirmed cancer, a quick amputation was performed to prevent it from spreading and killing him. There was chemo and rides to the hospital. Chris talked of his mother pulling the car over so he could throw up on the side of the road. He talked of his absent dead beat father who was trying to rip off the family for insurance money heading their way.

Chris has been a third baseman and a linebacker. He had that kind of toughness. He told me a story of being in the hospital after the amputation and of the kid in the next bed who also had cancer.

“My leg was paid for because although I didn’t know it the boy had told the Make A Wish Foundation that what he wanted was to give Chris a leg. But the time the leg healed from surgery and the leg was fitted and the young man’s wish was granted he had died from his illness.

I started to cry. “Jesus what the hell are you trying to do to me. Don’t ever tell me a story like that again.”

Chris smiled, ”You are crazy Fredman.”
I wrote the story and got absorbed and possessed like I sometimes do. I finished with the prospect of Chris jogging a lap of the track his senior year like he said was his goal. I wrote that the entire school would be evacuated becuase I was pulling the fire alarm and 800 students would follow Chris in a victory lap that was a triumph of the human spirit. Once again I was crying over my own keyboard.

Two years later I asked my friend and vice principal-a rare double in my world-“where’s Chris I haven’t seen him around?” I was told to report to his office after school.

I didn’t want to hear it. I was afraid of the word recurrence or worse death.

“Chris was expelled, ”he said. I said nothing, just stared back.

“I know Fredman. It wasn’t easy but he left us no choice.”

“It is never easy expelling the one legged cancer survivor, ”I cracked. “It must have been so hard for all of you.”

“He was selling Oxycontin to his friends.”

“But his family has no money and the good news is that he had a free pass for pain medication addiction and chooses entrepreneurship instead. You expelled the cancer survivor. That is priceless!”

The heroic and tragic saga of the human condition, mans humanity and inhumanity to man, no matter “who da man”.

The Greater Society offers sympathy but doesn’t grant wavers except for license plates.

Freddogg

Urban versus Country Hobo. Compare and contrast.

A light green ‘53’ Chevy station wagon roared down Lincoln Highway at Sunrise heading from Philadelphia to Washington for the funeral of John Kennedy. We were on a quest of participation inside significant history; there were bottles of cold black labels in a metal tub in the back seat covered by my grandmother’s Shaw which I gently pulled off of her on my way out of the house.
We may have been drunk by sunrise but there were no breathalyzers and no “legal limits” so who is to say? We passed on a two lane stretch but the car didn’t have a passing gear. We were hung out to dry, a head on collision seemed seconds away, we screamed and laughed and yelled “we’re dead” and maybe we did die and I’ve spent the rest of my life in heaven.
Stagger Lee was a popular song of the time as we all staggered around the capitol without a clue of an itinerary or where to stand or what was going to happen. I sat on a curb on the incline of the street leading to the Capitol rotunda. I knew the word rotunda which matched with my Aunt Rose and that’s all I knew.
I just sat and snoozed like Francis the Talking Mule in a stall. Sleep will alleviate a hangover, and I was never a longevity drinker, just a reckless beer blitzkrieg followed by napping.
A crowd seven deep flowed and filled in behind me. Somewhere close to high noon the horse wagon with the Casket rolled past my eyeballs. It stopped and I thought of the joke “anything here to stop this coffin” because that’s just how my brain works.
Then I looked slightly to the left, in through the lightly tinted back window on the right side of the black limousine. It was Jackie focused in sadness, pill box hat and black veil, she wasn’t gazing into the future or the past, she was capturing my face.
I looked back and for seconds we looked at each other, sadness is beautiful and attractive, nature’s latent message which says “go make another person, you just lost one.”
The crowd stirred, I turned around, there were people with “transistor radios” “Oswald has been shot” was shouted, “and he was most certainly dead.”
I turned back towards Jackie---she was always Jackie to me—but she was gone to grieve and she did not know what I knew about anything, or did she?

Note: I checked the facts and Oswald was shot at 11:40 Central time on November 24 and the funeral procession rolled to the rotunda from the White House at 12:40 Eastern time. I was looking at Jackie when the word hit the street that Oswald was killed and there’s no way she could have known not exactly being “transistor sister.” Ironically she would spend much of the rest of her life known as Jackie O.

I was sitting in POD class the last period of the day on November 22 in 1963, tapping my pencil and singing Big Boy Pete by the Olympics which 22 years later would ironically be covered by the Grateful Dead.
http://www3.clearlight.com/~acsa/introjs.htm?/~acsa/songfile/BIGBOYP.HTM

Father Wilfred affectionately known as “Tree Truck” red hair and face and molded of hard fat busted in on the intercom which was a giant speaker hard wired and molly bolted into the side wall.

“Everybody please stand up!” Bishop Egan’s two thousand students stood without question. “The President of the United States has been shot! In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. School is dismissed!”
The class of 50 boys mostly saw the humor in the sudden, terse and stark announcement. I looked across the hall into a classroom of girls in Honors Latin. They were smart and honest and they were crying while “me and my boys” were simply perplexed.

It took only minutes once outside before the news spread that not only was President John Kennedy shot but he was already dead.

Everyone went home and watched Walter Cronkite on black and white television. Around 6 p.m.my friends picked me up and we headed into the City of Philadelphia figuring there would be plenty of tickets available to the Celtics at Warriors game at Convention Hall on 34th street. This was the era of Russell versus Chamberlain, Guy Rodgers versus Bob Cousey and trays of brownies laced with hashish.

The city was totally dark. There was very little traffic. We pulled our 1959 Plymouth up to the curb and ask a 6’9“ Colored Cop-there were no Black People in 1963- what was up with the game.

“There’s no game here tonight, ”he said. “Don’t you boys know that the President of the United States was assassinated? The entire city is closed. Go home and start praying.”

We may have been underachieving catholic boys who drank often but not from the fountain of knowledge but we we’re also street smart and knew by instinct that one rule of human behavior was constant and that was “Sleaze never Sleeps.” We headed to 10th and Arch Streets and sure enough it was bustling with flashing lights, peep shows, sidewalk barkers including prostitutes who were real dogs.

The headline on the legendary Troc Theater of Burlesque read: “One night only, Virginia Bell.” And in small letters “No one under 18 admitted without a paper bag on his lap.”

I was emphatically opposed to the immersion into the perversion of stage strippers and dirty joke tellers but Leo nicknamed “Sidge” who would later play in many movies including Donny Brasco with his three day Italian beard went up to the window and bought four tickets.

We were inside “The Troc” on the evening of November 22, 1963 sitting in the center section waiting for what we weren’t sure. I would go on to live the life of a teacher, writer and story teller and every November 22 my students would ask where I was on that day and mostly I’d say “Home” because I didn’t mind casting myself in a bad light-how can students learn from us if we all edit out the real history- but such a sleazy story seemed better left untouched, paper bag or not.

‘Cheese and Crackers’ Hagan, a legendary vaudeville and burlesque comedian told jokes that were blue and nasty and we looked at each other because although we were capable of the same jokes we had never heard an adult say such things in public. Lenny Bruce would actually be jailed the following year for telling dirty jokes on stage.

Virginia Bell was the Head liner, pun intended I’m sure. The music played, the clothes came off, and there she was, my first topless woman without electrical tape covering her eyes like in my mothers nursing books. Virginia had melons before implants and the whole performance had a sort of barnyard quality to it, like someone should get up early to milk this person.

We were all athletes and were most impressed with the finale’ which just had to be some sort of optical illusion because as Virginia rotated her shoulders backwards and her head from side to side, one breast spun clockwise and the other counter clockwise

I got home and my mother asked: “How was the game?” I told her it was an up and down affair, a performance that would spin your head around” and she said, “I know they didn’t play so what was it that went up and down and spun around?”

Jesus! Mothers ask the toughest questions! Two days later I would be in the Capital of Washington for the Presidents funeral on the far side of multiple Black Labels.

That story under separate cover.

The freak flags are flying on “American Idol” a show I have never watched as the new trend is to find losers who will humiliate themselves in front of bigger loser judges and 60 million American losers think it’s funny.
I often discussed the elements of true humor when I taught Psychology otherwise known as “The World According to Fredman” and told students the reason Mimes were the least funny of all performers is because they didn’t make fun of people.
Now all people are quirky and easy to mark and mimic and there are sleazy street mimes in New York City that silently jump in behind losers walking down the street and mark their walks and postures in front of Wall Street brown baggers who pay cash to watch the “unsuspected” get trashed by some sneaky street mime loser with a painted face and if the French find mimes hilarious then you know by default ”them bitches ain’t funny” .
A high school hallway between classes is teeming with imperfect people with low self esteem, no self confidence and/or unrealistic idealized images, teenagers who can be leveled by a single mocking parody.
But even high school kids don’t make fun of the physically disabled, those with speech impediments, grossly obese people and those with big eyes, like lemurs who look like nocturnal arboreal tropical rainforest tree humpers-I mean huggers.
Back when I was in eighth grade a fat girl named Gertrude Charchiardi came into the co-ed self contained Catholic grammar school classroom late as everyone was seated. She sat down and I popped up in a little “cause and effect” humor. I don’t know where I got the idea-my own mother was fat- but I thought it was clever and received much acclaim from peers for my cruel sight gag.
Then for weeks every time the girl sat down, everyone popped up. It was funny if you dismissed the human emotion of empathy and forget this girl was a person. I took ownership of the joke and told the rest of them to stop because it wasn’t funny anymore but had evolved into cruelty and if that’s what they were into just go home and kerosene the kitten. Gertrude started to like me and I told her, ”Let’s not get crazy.”
I was walking down Broad Street from Temple basketball practice one late afternoon in 1964 and looked into the first floor window of a sorority house to see six sisters mimicking my walk bouncing on their toes while leaning forward walking in place. They had been waiting for me as they did everyday to make fun of my purposeful ambulation towards destination anywhere.
I felt so violated, so humiliated and I tried to lean back, and walk on my heels, but it just wasn’t me. I could have called them names but no one called women bitches before rap plus the parody was accurate so I told them “I know what you really want” and they said to please “don’t get crazy.”

Walking Like a Man

Freddogg

James Lipton host of “Inside The Actors Studio” on the Bravo channel, is the son of Lawrence Lipton, the American poet in case you didn’t know it.

Last Monday night, closing out an interview in front of his Pace University students with Martin Lawrence, Lipton solemnly asked the comedian, “What is your favorite word?”

“Motherfucker,” Martin said, and everyone laughed. Actually, Lipton pointed out, a syllable was left out, as Martin pronounced it “Mahfucker.”

Then he asked him his least favorite word and Martin said, ”Racism.” And the audience went “auh.”

Are all these mahfuckers insane or am I missing something here?

Can a black man and public figure who is a producer and director of films many people find funny expect universal respect when his admitted favorite word is ‘mahfucker?”


Personally, I don’t like deep probing questions in an interview like my answer matters. ”How does Fredman define love”?
“Love means never having to say mahfucker”
Everyday someone asked me this question “How’s retirement?”
“My favorite word is ‘mahfucker is all I know,” is the stock answer I’m going to adopt because perhaps that will get their attention otherwise people do what high school students do which is to ask a question and not stick around for the answer.

There was a teacher in her last year on the job-she had retired 10 years earlier- who would sit in the faculty dinning room eating cheese toast while her legs under the table were always spread apart-it was actually quite hideous and everyone cast their eyes away because of the imagery but also if you said, ”How’s it going," Dot went off on a monologue of disjointed personal feelings surrounding the drivel of her dryer drum life. I would always say “hello, how ‘s it going," knowing I was soon going where she arrived years earlier so I may as well get some insight into what I would be sounding like. How’s it going Dot?”

“I don’t know, my freezer died or tripped the breaker, there was a puddle in the utility room and I guess the cat died last week but it just happened for me cause I just found him and now I’m too old to get another cat who will outlive me then nobody would take him and Montgomery Ward won’t come out and look at the freezer because I didn’t buy it there and I’ve been eating Vanilla doughnuts at the B & E market on Saturday mornings for the last 30 years and when I retire I’m going to eat them every morning except they just stopped making them because the baker was killed –drowned in the canal some say it was an accident but you have to go there to fall in and he never been there before and do you know what time this lunch is over not that it matters because I’m off all the lunches so I just sit here and people come in and out but no one wants to talk to an old lady except for you.” And I stood my ground out of respect and because people are fountains of words and they are fascinating but one time Dot paused and said, “Why the hell are you just standing there? You just stand there. I talk and go on and on and you just stand there. Don’t you have to be in class? You don’t care if your late I hear because you think you’re such a big deal. So say something.”

“Don’t they have anyone else to make Vanilla doughnuts? I love those things.” Retired in Peace Freddogg