Freddogg Off The Chain

The first 10 years of my life were spent in a North Philadelphia row house. It was a colorful neighborhood of young families, war veterans, corner bars and colored people. We even had ‘Aunt Jenny’ neighborhood friend, drop in cook and possibly Poppy’s girl friend and when I grew up and could dunk a basketball some thought Aunt Jenny lurked in my recessive genes.
Last Thanksgiving I covered the 39th annual Cool spring Turkey Bowl a tradition begun in a plowed over cornfield off a back country road by young black kids just something to do until dinnertime.
And now these same guys are 50 years old and serve as coaches, league commissioners, referees and videographers. There is a rules meeting before a draft and the old guys who created the rules tell story of back in the day there were no rules just played for the glory of playing.
The Reverend Debra Ryder had everyone circle and join hands for a pre game prayer a style from the Bishop Jakes School of preaching. Debra left hand clasp that of her son Morris 6’3” and over 300 pounds. The preacher’s right hand was held by an anonymous skinny white guy in hooded sweat shirt with the words ‘Big Dog’ written across the front.
The prayer ended and Peter Cox appropriately named as the father of 12, started going, “gooble, gooble, gooble.”
“Peter, we went from a spiritual moment to gooble in just seconds,” I said to him and Peter responded “that’s the way we turkeys do it.”
The game itself is tackle, two 25 minute halves on a running clock that didn’t work, lots of prolonged huddles, penalty flags but no questioning of the iconic referee Chico.
“Mr Turkey Bowl,”Peter shouted from the sidelines. “It is spoken, it is written.”
The older men involved in this event I have known for 34 years. I was their teacher and coach and we are bonded, wrapped as tightly together as friends can be. They always make me laugh and startle me with honesty. “Fredman we love you.”
If my life has been all about sliding down the ladder as I often joke then I was destined to meet my friends on this soggy day on Thanksgiving morning.
Peter sang it best doing a ham bone verse on the bus back in 1983. “Fred went to the store and forgot the bread…That’s why they call him Cabbage Head.”

Facilitated learning where the facilitator guides the finger of a non speaking person who communicates with a level of prose like none spoken in their presence ever. It was the breakthrough in Autism and you can’t blame parents for grabbing on but sorry to say all double blind tests proved it to be total bullshit.
And now the news heads want to report a story that 23 years in coma brain injured guy has been listening all this time and now he is telling us by typing rapidly with one finger on a keyboard he doesn’t need to look at and he doesn’t need to use the muscle in his arms which never contract. His facilitator just rocks his hand like a "Luigi board" which was the name of my beagle and he was pretty dam smart once building a bomb shelter in 1957 during the cold war.
Can I get a witness! Will somebody sound the Caucasian Please alert? Have we all lost our minds? Whatever happened to critical thinking? Critical does not mean cynical as personally I have nothing against bullshit claims just don’t expect me to support or report them as facts.

I have a recurring dream of driving a runaway car stuck in reverse with no brakes and pedal stuck to the floor. I never die and make it through lots of intersections. I usually end up spinning across a dirt field and crashing into a chain link fence which stops me as onlookers scream “dumb ass” and “freaking moron”!
Like millions with a paid up Comcast Cable bill I was forced to listed to the 911 tape of four soon to be incinerated innocents in a runaway 2009 Loaner Lexus the pedal stuck under the floor mat and the brakes loosing the match-up as the car passed one hundred miles an hour. The 45 year old driver worked for the California Highway Patrol to add insult to irony.
It’s like calling 911 when you’re drowning. And most operators are like “now calm down. How fast are you going and where are you heading?” They should be screaming-“have the passenger pull up the gas pedal-you push shifter to neutral and turn off the freaking key-look for a field now and take your chances-if all else fail go NASCAR and drive that sucker.”
I wonder “what would Sully do?”
Postscript: It turns out the floor mat was not the factory installed version. Physicists and car people say any brake system will override and stop the car. Going to low gear will slow a car doing 100 to 30. Maybe all cars should have a big red panic button?

All time is real there is no elapsed time concept for certain special people. And there is no filter so what you get is unedited honesty hence the phrase brutally honest. My grandmother said, honesty is a good thing but unedited and unbridled honesty will eventually get you hurt.”
I walked into a decrepit mall yesterday emerging out a rainstorm like a wet dog invited into the house and there on a bench was a toothless black man that actually looked the same since I last saw him in 1976 with his think glasses and dirty ball cap. He was a “special student” and he is a survivor known by thousands who pull up their jackets like criminals going into court hoping not to be recognized.
I stopped and looked at him and he squirmed thinking I was crazier than he was until I said “Yo, it’s Fredman!”
And then he began to wear me out holding me personally responsible for aging 33 years in five minutes just kept looking me up and down and said "dam you went and got all big on me and how come your not wearing a hat you always wore a hat what’s the matter you don’t like hats no more.”
It went on, ”when you gonna let me clean your car, where do you stay, I’ll come around and clean you car.’ I wanted to say “I’ll pay you not to come around.” Then he said “I’m into church now, the lord is my Sheppard “, so I joked, “Really, does your Sheppard follow you to the liquor store because in all my years both slim and “all big” I’ve never seen a Sheperd follow a sheep into a liquor store.”
He responded,”I knew that was you, same old jokes. Hey man-you ever stop joking”?
“I’m not joking.”

The image of the tattooed dice on a neck Guy is sticking in my craw. Young and skinny pasty white no butt daddy in Wawa drinking his big-assed fountain poured soda as a little girl says, “Daddy can I get a blue Slurpy” and he laughs like high people do knowing his can rock his debit card because he still has $3.75 on the balance.
He tells the clerk “debit” then sweeps it backwards from the way I do it but It still works then he types in his pin headed number with the corner of the card like real fast and shit like he learned something.
This guy may be the greatest father in the world”not!” but it reinforces my version of America “All people are created equal then their parents pick them up from the hospital and that’s when the bullshit starts.”
“Nice dice daddy,”the teen-aged girl tells her dad followed by “I may come home with pierced nipples I haven’t decided but if I do I may want to borrow your gold “nostril-damas collection so the holes don’t close up and don’t eat my shortie while I’m out I’m saving it for a snack.
In the gym today I saw for the first time this young woman in gray cotton sweat pants and gray tee shirt a little overweight but definitely a clean up pretty person and she was sweating like a bitch from A 1957 no air conditioned gym class wet stains all over and I thought “what the hell is that?” and suddenly her short bald husband showed his gland drenched self and he was also soaked and stained looked the map of the western hemisphere on his back.
People who sweat like that generally don’t have gym memberships. I don’t know why they just don’t. My grandmother said, “If you start sweating profusely stop what you are doing and go look up the word.

I am freaky good at instantly naming characters from my past that spontaneously show up at places like WaWa and Food Lion Checkout lines. What’s weird are the ones who are seriously and obviously rocking an alternative if not inactive lifestyle and don’t expect or want you to notice them so they hide in plain view or behind a breakfast bagel.
Like why do I care if a girl from the eighties “came out “rocking the spiked haircut” of many colors so identifiable with same sex orientation, has eyebrow rings and has put on 60 pounds? I jump straight up in all their business.
“Hey it’s Fredman I know that’s you in there. Do you miss me? I’ll bet you never heard such good stories like you did back when you were my student. Remember the dachshund painting I commissioned you to do for my mother in law. She’s still living but the dog died in a collapsing wood pile in the backyard.”
“Really?”
“Yes I thought the dog was lost but on a frigid morning when I tried to put her in the wood stove I realized that what I thought were growing fungus's were actually ears.”
“Oh my god did that really happen?”
“Absolutely not, “I said, as a long line of attention deprived adults were riveted on my every word.
“So what’s new with you?”
“Nothing,” she said and couldn’t disappear fast enough.

There are saintly people in the world who always make the right moral decisions, people who do not envy or lust or wish their successful neighbor would step off the curb and roll an ankle. I have always perceived these individuals as having ice water not real blood flowing through their veins. There is a state of spiritual nirvana where the truly good people live. I have met a few of them and none are out to save anybody.
So many years ago as a track coach I pulled my mile relay team from the last event of a dual track meet we were leading by 100 points and put a team of much lesser talent on the track. A great race ensued, runner for runner battling, and we lost by a lean at the tape. The winning team took a victory lap and my A team wasn’t happy with me.
“Put something back into the sport you took so much out of,”I told them.
‘Fredman is fucked up,” one of them said.
“Create the illusion of class even if you have none,”I told them.
“Here he goes with his dry dumb-assed lessons of life,”said another.
“Class and sportsmanship are a reflection of self-assuredness and confidence and reflect an inner peace. All the great competitors understand that life is about processes not outcomes.”
“What the hell is he talking about now”?
I recently experienced several adults, successful and accomplished and in a position to teach these same lessons, who came up empty basically getting mad at an athletic director who offered a turf field for practice because a northeast four day storm had washed out the field of its rival.
Small minded, caddy, get off of my turf mentality and quite frankly it absolutely blew my fucking mind. I can run this issue up the community flag pole-I am the newspaper guy- prompting a public discussion where no illusion of class will prevail.
“Always come down on the side of kids and grandparents,” my grandmother said. “Too many selfish bastards in the middle!”

The New York Post had a Sunday Headlined Story “Pussy Whipped!” I was outraged and appalled-not really- that such a crude and vulgar expression indicating an emasculated male who is bossed around by his Alpha female could appear in print on a Sunday no less. The term “whipped” says it all you don’t need a modifier but wait; what if the “pussy whipped” victims are not male- they are no less whipped.
This is a Bronx tenement story of a 10 year old house cat with a medical condition losing its mind and drinking and eating all the day long ballooning to 16 pounds which is one fat=assed cat then going carnivore making psycho noises skulking in doorways barring its teeth ready to eat the woman of the house and her 10 year old son.
These two had to hide behind a door and call 911 on a cell phone. Multiple police responded thinking an actual big cat had escaped first laughed but try extracting a homicidal cat skinning your lower leg down to the bone. The cops had to get the cat “into a bag” and in this era of non descriptive language all bystanders could say was “too funny” actually in the Bronx I believe it was “way too fucking funny-I am not worthy of such hilarity. “
If there were a fight to the death between you and the neighbors lawn cat-you have to be naked-no weapons allowed- you may win but you are going to look pretty dam silly doing it!

I was waiting at the Sam’s Club tire center counter for miss Big Hair and her head of multiple piercings to return to my ‘I’ve just got a couple of questions for you self” just please stopping counting them on your fingers.
And while I was waiting an older man, slightly bent over, touched my arm, smiled and said, “there you are I think you’re the guy who can tell me if I need a new battery.”
“You mean cold cranking amps and shit like that? I am definitely not your man. Just because I’m wearing a black shirt with white logo doesn’t mean I’m the tire guy although I am flattered if you think I can change four tires in less than four days.”
So we both waited and somehow he got in front of me and we did a history of tires banter and at one time he mentioned Baldies and during the war. I ask him what war he had been in and he said ‘Two” and I consider saying “thanks for your service” but real guys don’t talk to each other like that so I responded honestly “Holy shit man! That was the real deal. Where were you?”
He mentioned Guadalcanal and the Philippines and I was like ‘Yikes’ that’s heavy duty and he responded “yes but don’t get the wrong idea. I was attached to an artillery unit and drove a jeep. The seat belts back then could cut you in half. He told me “we were young and dumb. We were told to do something and we did it. I don’t recognize this volunteer army. We are sending 40 year old guys into stuff and they’re just too smart. You can have an army that thinks about much of anything other than following orders."
The United States recognized Philippines Independence on July 4 1946 and my Tire Center buddy was there. I was wondering how you recognize the Independence of a Sovereign nation then start building airports for your planes and stay another 50 years?
My Buddy drove a 2003 Dodge Caravan and his battery cost $79 dollars and it would take an hour and twenty minutes if he cared to wait in the food court area with a bunch or morons eating fat pizza slices from the wrong end.
I blew the opportunity and should have bought the battery for him just thanks 63 years past due.
That’s why ‘thanks for your service’ are bullshit empty words, these craggy old bent over Dodge drivers should have an “Uncle Sam’s Club” card and if your in line behind one you should be handed the check and be happy about it.
Freaking Guadalcanal ---are you kidding me?

The tabula rasa--blank slate--theory of mental content and personality development goes back to John Locke, which makes perfect sense; otherwise, babies are popping out all over the earth saying, “This is the shit I be knowing.” We know what we know through experience and perception and if you don’t pay attention and assimilate experiences and adapt them to new and unanticipated realities, you run the risk of being a lifetime perpetual non-adaptive dumb ass.
Personally I’m more of an etch-a-sketch type learner, most empirical stimuli evaporating except for the grainy pebbles stuck in the corners of my piggy bank of memories.
The home town of Penndel, Pennsylvania evolved from hamlet to borough after World War Two and I, a precocious, inquisitive and investigative little boomer boy with an underdeveloped sense of a moral consciousness, snapped up snippets of war stories and re-enacted them: capturing weaker kids in the neighborhood, knocking them from their fat fender bikes by a trip wire tugged taunt across a road of ruts or launching dirt bombs like howitzer shells into backyard gatherings.
I grew up under the piercing, non-blinking eyeballs of “Death March” guy from two blocks away and two rungs down the social ladder. His hovel was a flat roof row house of clapboard crap, the best asbestos on the market. Bataan Man, who had survived the infamous march, drove a black Chrysler Imperial Crown and got a new one each year. By 1957 with the advent of the finned car, he had arrived. I loved Bataan Man and he never gave me a smile or a nod. He was burly and non expressive with a giant head and unlit stogy. He never came out of that car not to work or play or grocery shop. He drove around and watched people in a relaxed state or permanent shock.
“Life is a death march,” my grandmother always said, “otherwise, how do we know when it’s over?”
Personally my Chrysler Imperial Crown has always been a three-quarter ton pickup truck with a bench seat. I have driven around Delmarva for 35 years imagining myself as Bataan Man although I am in no way worthy. I park at the beach and observe people or cruise down to the Little League Park and watch games. I do walk long distances in the heat and call them “death marches” and I always think of those young men in 1942 in some godforsaken place and 20 thousand of them dying ugly on a 60-mile forced march.
Literature can be an escape or an embrace. I brought the hard back book “Tears in the Darkness” by Michael and Elizabeth Norman to my hip replacement surgery and rehabilitation at Beebe Hospital last July 16. I never read in detail what happened to those 75 thousand surrendered men. I simply strafed the story but now as I was cut to and from the bone, I was looking for courage from distant men who endured what I could not.
And my revelations expanded as I drove through the book like Bataan man himself reading at odd hours and caring little about history and more about endurance and toughness and the incredible cruelty people can inflict on one another.
Hospitals are insults to human dignity staffed by humanists wearing white. It is just necessary to catheterize surgical patients and ask them embarrassing questions like “Do the concept of black tarry stools mean anything to you Kingfish”?
Back in 1964 when I was taken on a walking tour of Temple University being recruited to play basketball, the Hall of Fame coach Harry Litwack said, ”You could read one book every day for the rest of your life and not read half the books in that library.”
“Right or I could not read any of them in no time at all,” I answered, then pointed to my head. “Tabula Rasa Forever.”
Bataan Man has stayed with me since he came back to my hometown after the war. He watches over me like “Garden Angel” in Philly vernacular. I knew I had to read of his plight as a 63-year old guy in a cranked up bed who just had the ball of his femur sawed off and replaced by titanium.
I am back, death march driving the back roads of Delmarva, thankful for the brave young men who made that possible. Ironically, I drive a Toyota Tundra. Tabula Rasa Forever!

A person I know through the far reaching extension network of social contacts of my long life saw me someplace and said how much they enjoy reading my stories on Face Book. Several other “trackers” have issued similar compliments.
“That’s nice,” I said. “But 420 characters over five sentences hardly constitute a story.”
I don’t “Tweet” but I do write messages in the Face Book window and occasionally wish someone a Happy Birthday. Mundane and boring are words that come to mind for most Facebook posts but perhaps friends find it interesting that someone is tired or wants the rain to stop.
Other themes are the vacuous rants from the right wing Obama haters. Like I always told my students, ’by all means have an opinion on domestic and foreign affairs but try to bolster your position with a logical presentation of facts. Now these same students are quoting Glenn Beck.”
So what about Balloon Boy and his parents? Brilliant I think to dupe most of the country. I can tell you when I first saw what looked like micro waved popcorn sailing across the sky I quickly concluded “That balloon boy bitch ain’t in there! And what’s next, scrambling jets, putting Norad on alert?
A few days ago I saw this poised 12 year old blond girl looking like an extra from Village of the Damned Two. Her clone of a mother was sitting with her on the Today Show because the kid could not stop sneezing and it was so obviously fake-no snot no watery eyes- and she doesn’t sneeze when she sleeps and will somebody please give me a freaking break. Somebody smack this kid as black cheerleaders chant “whoop upside the head whoop upside the head”!
And who the hell stands outside an arena hoping to get a dose of the H1N1 vaccine? There are thousands of fat and flaccid, smoking and hypertensive slugs, many with resting pulses over 100, waiting in line for vaccine. There should jump in the ocean and kick start their immune systems and they will be fine. That’s the way I see it and I’m proud to say no medical experts agree with me.
“Freddogg Off The Chain” is returning and sometimes it will be anecdotal and funny other times caustic and edgy but behind it all I am always happy.