Indulge Me

You are getting a glimpse at the White Buffalo here because I’m having a rare sentimental moment:

My cousin graduated from the Anne Arundel County Police Academy last night and I am so immeasurably proud of him. He’s more than just a regular cousin though; he’s one of my closest friends in the world. I had been counting down to last night since he went into the police academy back in December. My cousin doesn’t know this, but while he was going through all the various police agencies and all the various application processes and physical fitness tests associated with all of those agencies, I already knew exactly what I was going to get him for a graduation gift and the only person I told was LF. When he found out he was accepted to the police academy, I bought him his graduation gift that day. I couldn’t wait until his graduation to give it to him though, so I gave it to him when he started the academy. It actually made more sense to give it to him in the beginning. Here it is. It’s a pocket token of Saint Michael, the patron saint of police officers. We’re superstitious Irish Catholics…what else can I say? He’s going to keep it in a pocket in his bullet proof vest.

So as you can imagine, my heart (I think that’s what they call it) was racing all day yesterday in anticipation of his graduation ceremony. I couldn’t contain my excitement and I was bouncing off the walls like a cracked out Washington Blvd hooker. I’m sure LF appreciated the six phone calls and thirty emails from me detailing my cracked-out jitters. 7:00 p.m. could not get arrive fast enough. I don’t even remember driving to the ceremony, come to think of it.

Once we all sat down in the auditorium, my nerves leveled off a bit because I was surrounded my other cousins, my aunts and uncles, and my mom and stepdad. I know LF was relieved to have my nervous energy re-directed. Mercifully, the ceremony started right on time and when my cousin walked down the aisle in his full dress uniform, I couldn’t believe it. I had goosebumps and my eyes started welling up a bit. I looked around at my other family members and they were all doing the same thing. We’re not exactly the most emotive bunch of people you’ll ever meet, so trust me…it was a big deal getting our emotions quietly stirred up like that. When they called my cousin’s name and he walked across the stage, my entire family stood up and cheered. The commissioner pinned the badge on my cousin’s uniform, they saluted each other and then shook hands. My cousin is now a fourth generation police officer.

Imagine that - another Irish cop let loose in the world.

I’m so proud of you, cuz. You have no idea.

Fír Na Dlí

Looking Out for Me

Sometimes I can’t even process how fortunate I am to have friends who understand me so completely that they are able to anticipate my needs. If I didn’t have Mr. WPT in my life, I would have never known about this.

Bottle Rocket Blues

When we were little kids, my younger brother and I seemed to have unlimited access to fireworks and kerosene. You could say we lead a mostly unsupervised childhood. It was the 1970s - before playing outside was considered dangerous and before parents had ADHD on which to place all blame for their children behaving badly.

Because I was the only girl, I always got the bitch Star Wars action figures. By bitch action figures, I mean Yoda, Princess Leia, C-3PO, Walrus Man, Ewoks, etc. My brother was the only boy and he got Han Solo, Darth Vader, Boba Fett, stormtroopers, and all the related ships that went along with them. Neither one of us wanted Luke Skywalker though because, even as elementary school kids, we knew he was a total nelly bottom.

The relationship my brother and I had as kids was contentious at best. His passive-aggressive way of displaying his anger toward me started with him secretly switching the heads of my action figures and super-gluing them to the wrong bodies. Just imagine Yoda’s head super-glued to Princess Leia’s body and vice versa. I used to keep my action figures in my retired Star Wars lunch box. I say “retired” because my brother had gotten all Crips versus Bloods on it with his magic marker graffiti. I couldn’t take my tagged  lunch box to school anymore because I couldn’t handle the shame and embarrassment of walking though the cafeteria with it all carved up like that. When I’d come home from school, I never knew what kind of scene was waiting for me in my lunch box. It was like a Jack-in-the-box that never popped open. It’s traumatic for me to think about, even to this day.

When I pretended like it didn’t bother me that Yoda’s head was forever fused to Princess Leia’s body, it pissed my brother off even more. He would kidnap my action figures and take them up to the basketball court in the park. In the 1970s, there were no such thing as Amber Alerts - not even for prized Star Wars action figures. Once in the park, my brother would duct tape bottle rockets together and then duct tape my mutant action figures to the bottle rocket bundles. Then he’d launch the bottle rocket bundles out of one of those yellow Tonka Toy dump-trucks. The result was usually anti-climactic because the mutant action figure rockets were heavily weighted on one end and wouldn’t go very far. They’d usually hit the ground after twenty feet with the rockets still blasting the bastardized bodies until they fizzled out. Rather than have Hoth Princess Leia and generic C-3PO, I had Burn Unit Princess Leia and Burn Unit C-3PO. After several attempted launches into White Trash orbit, I was left with Torso Princess Leia and Stump C-3PO. What was I going to do? I was the big sister and I was supposed to set the example and be above such things. Besides, whenever I did tell my parents what my brother was doing to my action figures, they asked me what I did to upset him. And so it goes.

The action figures are long gone and I’m not sure what happened to the Tonka Toy dump-truck, although I’m fairly certain it met with an unfortunate M-80 accident at the same basketball court. I’m pretty sure if I went to the basketball court today, I’d still see the scorch marks on the asphalt and detect the unmistakable chemical smell of charred Hasbro remains.

I think I’ll have to save the stories about kerosene for another day.

Willin’

“And if you give me
Weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign,
Then I’ll be willin’ to be movin’.”

Linda Ronstadt / “Willing” from Prisoner in Disguise
=====

All of my earliest memories have a song playing somewhere in the background. Both of my parents love music and when they split up it was the end of truly a spectacular record collection. Before I was even born, there were signs that their marriage wouldn’t last. Duane Allman’s last concert ever was at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair on 10/17/71 in Owings Mills, Maryland. My parents were there and my mother was about six months pregnant with me at the time and barely twenty years old. Just twelve days after that concert Duane was killed in a motorcycle accident. My father, an obsessive Allman Brothers Band fan, was so despondent that he insisted that I be named Duane if I was a boy or Layla if I was a girl. Thankfully, my mother stood her ground and got her way when it came to naming me.

To this day there are many songs my mom can’t listen to and most of them are Allman Brothers Band songs and Derek and the Dominos songs. It’s not that she doesn’t like the music; once upon a time she loved that music, actually. I know that now it reminds her of a different time and I think everyone’s got a song or two from their past that they just can’t bear to listen to anymore. During the years my parents were together, there was music my mom kept all for herself. These were the records she would play when she was alone or at least wanted to be.

When I was a kid, my mom went to community college during the day and waited tables at night. The couple of hours she had between classes and waiting tables were sacred to her. She never had to tell me that this time was sacred - I just understood it to be so. When I’d get home from school, I’d often find my mom sitting in a faded plastic chair in the backyard, slowly smoking a Marlboro Light and sipping Ernest & Julio Gallo white wine from a pale yellow Tupperware cup. This was her ritual. Linda Ronstadt would be there too, always in the background just over my mom’s shoulder. For a good part of the 1970’s, my mother played two albums incessantly: Heart Like a Wheel and Prisoner in Disguise, both by Linda Ronstadt. My mother - the transplant from Queens, New York - listening to country songs while sitting alone. During those in between hours, those songs were her songs and no one else’s.

Christmas Blitzkrieg

One particular Christmas, while we were visiting our grandparents in New York, it snowed. My brother and I were still little kids and we had heard songs about white Christmases, but we had yet to experience one. Since I was the only granddaughter at the time, Christmas was always a bit of a let down because my grandparents and aunts and uncles Santa insisted on giving me girly gifts. No matter how good I was all year, Santa never listened to me when I confessed my innermost Toys-R-Us desires. Instead of the cool Star Wars actions figures, I’d always get the bitch ones like Princess Leia, Yoda, C-3PO, and Walrus Man. And instead of getting the Millennium Falcon and an X-Wing Fighter, like my little brother, I got Lite Brite and a Holly Hobbie sleeping bag.

Someone forgot to tell Santa that the bulb was not included with Lite Brite and, even though I was an imaginative kid, Lite Brite without the Lite pretty much sucked. Having the Holly Hobbie sleeping bag mock me with the “Sweet Dreams Grow in a Happy Heart” platitude stitched on the front made me the most pissed off first-grader in the tri-state area. Sweet dreams may very well grow in a happy heart, but they certainly weren’t enough to make the Holly Hobbie sleeping bag grow because the sumbitch stopped at my armpits. So on this particular Christmas, snow was just the distraction I needed.

Christmas Knees

It’s funny how the holiday season forces so many of us to revisit childhood traumas.

Just before one particular Christmas arrived, when I was seven and my brother was four, my mom got us these hideous bright yellow Winnie the Poo pajamas - complete with bright red cuffs around the sleeves and ankles. I don’t know why we had these pajamas because neither one of us really gave a shit about that bitch-ass bear. We were all Star Wars all the time. I think the reason my mom humiliated us in this way was to take a bit of the pre-Christmas ADHD fight out of us, but really it just had the opposite effect. We had to overcompensate with rowdiness in order to cancel out the wholesome pajamas.

I’m digressing.

Just What the World Needs

Another Irish cop.

My cousin just found out he’s been accepted to the AACOPD academy!!

I couldn’t be more proud of him because he’s one of the good guys and he’s worked his ass off to get there. I think this makes a total four generations of police officers in the family over the years. Talk about stereotypes.

Congratulations, cuz!!!

Da Weekend

I got back yesterday from a weekend with my grandmother in Long Island. Fuhgetaboutit. I went up Friday afternoon via Southworst airlines because it only takes 40 minutes from BWI to Islip/MacArthur airport. I’ve done this flight more times that I can count, but Friday’s experience was unique for me because it was the first time I’ve had an all guy flight attendant crew. These guys weren’t the wispy, lispy, queeny kind of flight attendants though. Oh no. These guys were all middle-aged and paunchy and, as best as my gaydar could tell, they were straight. They were all from Long Island and very Joey Buttafuoco-esque and I thought maybe it was some kind of halfway house work-release thing because it just seemed so odd. When Dominic, the lead flight attendant, was going over the instructions about seat belts and emergency exits, his accent was so Commack/Sunken Meadow State Pkwy that I was fairly certain that we were flying in a Boeing IROC Z28 and landing on the L.I.E. right next to the freakin’ Commack Multiplex Cinema complex. He told us there would be no drink service because the flight was going to be very turbulent the entire way to Islip and that they (the crew) would remain seated for the flight. I don’t get nervous flying, but this wasn’t something I really wanted to hear. In a strange way, I felt safer knowing that Joey Buttawipo and his associates were our cabin crew.

Family Secrets Revealed

Whenever I have a few drinks with my mom, like last night, I sometimes find myself cringing when she starts talking about my childhood and her approach to raising me. Sometime during 1973 my mom started reading The Exorcist. I was a year old and still an only child in 1973, so the kid thing was all very new for my mom and she didn’t really know what to expect. My father worked nights, which meant my mom and I were home alone in a not-so-great part of town. So while my mom was reading The Exorcist, she decided that I was scary and had potential for evil. You think she would have been more afraid living three houses down from the local methadone clinic, especially since our house had been broken into twice. Ah but no. Being home alone with a toddler while reading The Exorcist was much scarier.

My mom admitted that she was afraid to check on me at night because she was worried that I’d be speaking in tongues and projectile vomiting. She told me she would stick me in my crib with a bottle and close the door and hope I didn’t make any sounds. Apparently I had a habit of tossing my bottle across the room when I finished it, which is interesting because this is something I still do today. Anyway, my mom said that each night she would brace herself waiting to hear the *whack* of my bottle hitting the wall and that it always scared her even though she knew it was coming.

“And fuhgedaboutit. If we had had those freakin’ baby monnitduhs back then, there’s no freakin’ way I would have left yours on because I wouldn’t wanna know who you were tawlking to in there or what you were sayin’.”

I asked my mom if she ever checked on me after putting me to bed.

“Well, my sistahs were still in high school and used to come ova to the house all drunk and stoned and say ‘Let’s wake up the baby. We wanna play with the baby.’ They’d go in and wake you up and play with you until they sobered up enough to go home. So it’s not like you were totally unsupavised.”

And my mother and my aunts still wonder why I was such a cranky baby.

March 19th and Still Irish

I’m so glad the weekend has gone by and I didn’t have to get my Irish up once. I took deep cover and avoided all of the St. Patrick’s Day crap around town both Friday and Saturday. I get to be Irish everyday, so I let other people have their day of wearing plastic green bowler hats while binge drinking green Miller Lite and ordering round after round of Irish Car Bombs…you know ’cause that’s what Irish people do. We just loves us some green beer and we all think naming a trendy drink after an IRA terrorist tactic is cute…’cause terrorism in some parts of the world is funny. I bet a lot of Jews would love hearing people order rounds of Palestinian Suicide Bombs…’cause it would be equally as cute and hilarious as ordering Irish Car Bombs.

I wonder how many people visiting downtown Baltimore on St. Patrick’s Day car bombed themselves into DUIs and fights, were loaded into paddy wagons, and taken to Central Booking The Eager Street Day Spa & Resort. I wonder how many of them are still sitting there clutching their green bowler hats while waiting to see a judge. Speaking of paddy wagons, does anyone else out there find it just a bit politically incorrect that the vans used for taking people to jail are called “Paddy” wagons? Where’s the Political Correctness Police on that one? Can you imagine if we called them “Juan” wagons or “DeShawn” wagons? How many Al Sharpton tirades would we have to endure? Would we get to see Leonardo DiCRAPrio drive his Prius to the obligatory (Insert Cause of the Moment) Freedom Concert? Feckin’ double-standards. I’m hardly a political analyst, but I’d say dedicating a day to perpetuating a negative stereotype is a bit politically incorrect. Ah but then I have to remind myself that political correctness is not equally applied. The Native Americans, sorry, I meant First Nationers, apparently have a weakness for booze and, as a result, a high rate of alcoholism. Can you imagine the outcry if we had a St. Dances With Sitting Schlitz Red Bull Day where we all wore feathered headdresses and drank until we puked? Christ, we’d probably have another Al Gore documentary on our hands.