NEIGHBORHOODS: Juddville, Door County, WI

It’s really no surprise that it has always been like that for me. In fact, I spent my summers on the weirdest road in Wisconsin; I guess it’s just part of my karma. When my parents decided to build a commune with 4 of their best arty friends back in 1940 (before they had me to consider), the land they bought was only $10 an acre (a bargain even then), because the road was so weird it had brought down its own real estate value. In fact, it was odd enough for me to have parents who wanted to build communes in those conformist years, and odder still that they pursued their dream right up to the end, even though we were the only ones out of the bunch to do so. It’s hard to build a commune for one, as it were, but that didn’t seem to faze my father.

My first trip to our land—and the little house creosoted black with red shutters and a new wing for me—was a month after my fourth birthday, in August of 1949. I remember a white crushed-limestone road releasing clouds of boiling white dust from behind our wheels. By standing on the back seat (until my father put an end to that practice), I could look out the tiny rear window of our 1938 Plymouth and see nothing but white smoke obscuring the view. The white dust gave us an advantage, as we lived exactly one mile from THE state highway (#42), and could anticipate the arrival of company by about ten minutes. This was especially useful as we had no phone or electricity and company tended to arrive in carloads as the mood took them.

The road itself was as idyllic as a Grant Wood painting, with cherry orchards and puffy maple woods sprinkled among pincushiony hills, and black-and-white dairy cows dotting the fields. Many of the 25-30 inhabitants of the road still lived in log cabins, as the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin was effectively an island and as such, one of the last rural places in America to be completely electrified. We illuminated our little house and cooked with kerosene power; carried 25-pound blocks of ice from the village of Fish Creek for our ice-box; and fetched our drinking water from town or a friend’s house to pour into special tanks. Washing water was collected from rainwater via gutters to tanks out in back, and we filled small washbasins from a spigot for our “cat baths”. If dad decided to add a wing to the house, he brought the generator out of the shed in back, gassed it up, and started it like an oversized lawnmower to power his saws.

Our land was divided into four ten-acre strips, each one a good twenty feet above the other. Ours was the second of the four, below the crest of the hill, yet still commanding a spectacular view from our “drive” across the valley to the bluffs beyond. Neva and Jerry, my godparents, had individually purchased the two strips above us; then married; and never left the Gold Coast highrises of Chicago again. Robey had purchased the strip below us, but had died young before he could build. Nothing in the landscape indicated the craziness of the Scandinavians who were our neighbors; it all looked fat and idyllic to the uninformed, including us.

It seems that one of the features of island life, especially an island approximately 50(?) miles long and 15 miles wide, is inbreeding or, at best, a very limited gene pool. True, the Door Peninsula is, in theory, attached to the mainland; but in reality it is bisected by a large man-made channel at Sturgeon Bay, spanned (in those days) by a single drawbridge, effectively keeping outsiders at bay. The result was a sort of mini-Appalachia on our road, many of whom were what used to be unkindly called “village idiots”. It took us awhile to catch on, as they didn’t all jump up and shout “Hi: we’re the wackos on the block: welcome to the neighborhood!”, or anything like that. In fact, they were rather shy and tended to keep to themselves.

The first house my parents built was only twelve by twelve feet, and furnished in a built-in way that made it as cute and as snug as a dollhouse. My father built everything he could out of wood, beginning with a foundation made from Mama Bach’s old pier, and including bunk beds on the back wall, a tin-lined ice-box/love seat on the west wall (he loved furniture with a hyphenated purpose), and a tiny counter and trailer sink next to the door, under the north window, that my mom furnished with a tiny red plastic toy sand pail to do the dishes in. (She removed the yellow plastic shovel before adding the green-edged beige tin plates and cups to the suds).

It was scarcely larger than our first outhouse, and surrounded by a driftwood fence, presumably to keep stray cows from knocking it over. Somewhere my dad had come up with a commercial front door with an elegant fanlight at the top, and he had painted it red to match the shutters. The floor was a multicolored-on-eggshell spattered linoleum he had scavenged from the huge photography studio where he was Director of Photography. On the east wall, there were a three-burner kerosene stove at right angles to the sink, and a built-in table with homemade benches. Between the ice-box and the door was a cupboard curtained to make a tiny closet; and in the corner where the sink met the stove, there was a large green spigoted thermos which held our precious drinking water.

Shortly after Robey Bach and dad finished building the little “shack” (as father insisted on calling it, to mother’s chagrin), Cooney Fish turned up. The Fish family had lived at the very end of the Peninsula Players Road (one road north of ours), and some of them were wrapped rather loosely, to put it politely. I have no idea how many were still left in the ‘40s, but Cooney definitely was one of them. He marched into our pasture, according to family lore, wearing Army regalia from World War I—down to puttees wrapped over his lower legs—took one look at the twelve-by-twelve house, and asked my father if we needed a caretaker. (What—to put a tea-cozy over it in winter when no one was there? To see no one had tipped it over at Halloween?).

Cooney had the last laugh, however. To give him gainful employment, he was awarded the job of “dump master”—complete with a little shack to live in—for the village of Fish Creek, five miles north of Juddville. At first, people snickered a bit about his work; then, in the ‘60s, the tourists (a.k.a. “turkeys”) from the big cities discovered antiques, and Cooney began a brisk and lucrative trade in what had formerly been known as trash.

Next to Floyd Anderson and two farms below us in the valley, there was a Mrs. Grey (pronounced “Gry”) who rounded up her cows at night with the help of her dog and a rich and vulgar vocabulary that would have produced vinegar in anyone else’s dairy products. Hers, however, seemed to be immune to the wonderfully colorful insults and vulgarities hurled at them morning and evening. In short, the neighborhood was a child’s paradise.

Across the road from her on our side of the road, was the elderly bachelor Adam Voight, who lived with his sister in an unelectrified log cabin the size of ours. They raised cows and giant, flavorful strawberries called “Jersey Belles” (presumably after Lillie Langtry), and made their freezing way to the outhouse year-round without complaining. Adam had a soft spot in his heart for my pretty mother (which lasted until we sold our land in the 1980s), and always graced our 4th-of-July table with a basket of his finest berries, free of charge.

The farm directly above our land was occupied by the Masurs, an elderly couple named Roman and Mary, respectively. Mary was the county midwife and knew everything there was to know about everybody. She was a hard worker and maintained a brood of chickens plus a small herd of dairy cows, which they pastured on our land fall, winter and spring, in exchange for paying our property taxes. She also maintained their house, apparently dusting around Roman, whose behind seemed to be permanently glued to the big rocking chair in the kitchen. He would rock and she would buzz around the kitchen, while he intoned, “Yup, we’re doing fine . . . as long as the good Lord’s willin’ and Mary’s health holds up.” After I discovered horses (my first ride was that magical summer of ‘49; I seriously became an equestrienne two years later), Mary apologized to me for selling her drays. “We wouldn’t have done it if we’d a knowed you then” she swore.

The Masurs had an electric line running into their yard from utility poles by the road and a very impressive electric pump that produced clean, eggy-tasting well water for our drinking supply. I wasn’t nuts about the taste, but it was fun to watch the pump go round, somewhat like a miniature version of those I saw years later in the petroleum fields of California.

They also had a son-in-law named Carmody who was a State Trooper. This was always useful, as some of our neighbors had a hobby of vandalizing the homes of summer residents (had they had electricity they would undoubtedly have been couch potatoes and slaves of the television, which is as good an argument for having a TV as I’ve ever heard). So it was comforting to have Carmody drop in once in awhile for a chat.

Further down the road, east of the Masurs, were the Reslers, the above-mentioned neighbors who loved to smash things. Leland (I think that was Papa’s name) drank heavily and relied on his welfare check to support his mother, Grandma Resler—who lived in the house next door—and his brood of vandals. (I met the youngest years later and was actually quite impressed by his gentle nature). They always had a dead car or two on the front lawn, just like in the movies of Appalachia, and a tire suspended from a tree branch in the side yard as a swing, although I never saw any kids playing outside.

Just before my historic first visit to our truncated commune (located 250 miles north of our suburban Chicago home), my father and my (Jewish) godfather spent part of the summer adding a wing onto the little house just for me. It was hot and sweaty work and one day they took a break, seated themselves on the woodpile in the sunshine, and indulged in a picnic lunch. (Knowing my father, a chilled thermos of white wine and some delicious Wisconsin cheddars would have been featured). Dad fancied guns (although he never took them lightly), and must have had his .38 handy at the moment a mouse ran out from one of the stacks of boards. He took a shot or two at it; missed; and resumed his lunch. At some point, he and Jerry also constructed new ladder for the bunk beds, and moved the dining table into my new room opposite my cot. Moving the ice-box to the east wall to replace the table, they cut a door where the window over the ice-box had been. One side of the window frame remained, serving as a shelf; the other side was cut from the top down to form a narrow doorway. The splintery creosoted siding remained, giving me the impression of entering the house from the outside whenever I left my room. Eventually a shiny new Aladdin kerosene lamp was placed in the old “window” next to the doorway to light our evening meals and give me a bright white reading lamp in my snug new quarters (of course, I didn’t really get into reading much until I was five or six, but by then I was addicted).

While they were adding these dazzling new features to the premises the Resler boys turned up with a shotgun and evil intentions (Leland was as yet unmarried). They broke what little they could, shot up the place, and tried to start a fire in the middle of the kitchen floor, but eventually got bored and wandered off to greener pastures. Dad and Jerry had stepped out of their way during the fracas—but dad wasn’t one to let someone get away with invading his home. He immediately went to the Masur’s, cranked up their phone, and placed a call (via the operator, who had to know all the dirt) to the sheriff, who was just out of FBI school and hot to tackle the crime. Of course, everyone in Door County knew what had taken place five minutes after it happened; there was no mystery to solve. But “Baldy” Bridenhagen was full of what he had just learned and eager to demonstrate to the peasants that he was nobody’s fool. He carefully stepped over the piles of telltale shotgun shells scattered on the kitchen floor and zoomed in on the ladder which had a different type of shell embedded in it. Borrowing a keyhole saw from my father, he carefully cut out the “evidence”, leaving a permanent indentation in the ladder, and sent it off to Washington with much fanfare. Of course, it was the shell from the potshot my father had taken at the mouse; and Baldy proudly announced that not only had he found the culprit, but dad had vandalized his own house! None of the shells from the floor were ever examined and my parents wisely let the matter drop. After all, we were the outsiders, and we needed to have a good rep with the locals, who really didn’t need us very badly.

After this episode, dad and Robey invented a neat little burglar system involving a blast of gunpowder from a blank shell placed strategically behind the shutters, intended to go off if any opening in the house were violated. The boom was meant to be heard by the Masurs up the hill, and Robey and father set out to test it one fine summer’s day. The booby trap worked perfectly, but with the usual hitch: just as the explosion rocked the little house, as gust of wind caught one of the shutters, blowing it closed. Dad and Robey hit the ground as the shutter rocketed horizontally across the pasture, narrowly failing to decapitate them. The Masurs, deaf as doorposts, heard nothing, and the alarming mechanism was prudently dismantled, to my father’s chagrin.

Further down the road was another little board house the size of ours, sitting in a tiny clearing in the woods right next to the road. No one seemed to live in it and I don’t recall seeing a car there, but apparently it was lived in as we learned the summer I turned eight. Mom and I were alone in our house (dad worked hard in the city and only came up on weekends), and mom was a little afraid of the immense solitude of our land, which bled into hundreds of acres of neighboring forest behind our house, and of the incredibly dark star-studded nights which made city slickers like us begin to believe in ghosts and monsters under the bed. So we tended to eat dinner early when it was just the two of us, enjoying the sunset on our pasture, after which we’d light the lamps, read for a couple of hours, and rise early the next day when the sun dispelled our ridiculous fears with its sparkling northern light.

This particular night, mom and I were alone in the house eating our hamburgers (she hated cooking and kept it simple), and listening to Alice Grey’s bull bellow its sunset serenade (we fondly called it Diesel for the quality and quantity of sound it produced). Suddenly we caught sight of two figures approaching our house from the road. Not only were they were on foot; but they were walking single file, as if forty acres was not enough space for their skinny frames. Their heads were down and they didn’t speak as they plodded along. They continued in an unwavering diagonal line, while my mother became more and more agitated. Finally, she grabbed the .38 with one hand and my collar with other, dragging us under the table, where we shivered in fear. We heard a faint bump as they struck the fence and continued to march past us unswervingly, disappearing into the sumac in Robey’s land. Needless to say, mom made sure we were in bed before lamplight that night, whispering back and forth to each other reassuringly through the doorway until we fell asleep.

The next day we were up bright and early, and made a beeline to Mary Masur’s house. The Masurs were up and happy to see us as usual. Mary patted my mother’s hand consolingly and told her there was nothing to worry about. “It’s only the Batches” she said, referring to the unmarried state of the two Shine brothers who apparently lived in the mystery outhouse down the road from the Reslers. This didn’t have the effect on my mother Mary was aiming for, but she didn’t notice and continued, “They get their verteran’s pension every month and go to drink it off at the Clark farm behind you. They’re harmless,” (mom’s eyes were as big as soup plates by this time), “and probably too drunk to even know you were there.”

After that, we always dined with the .38 on the table when dad wasn’t with us.

At the far eastern end of our road, where it met county highway A, Gardner Orsted lived on the northern side, while Mr. Ray’s cows fed on the southern pasture. Gardner became the County Road Commissioner in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s, and we suddenly found ourselves driving home on a newly black-topped road with signs at both ends identifying it as Juddville Road. We even made it onto the local road maps at the end of the ‘60s.

Mr. Ray drove his cows home seated behind the wheel of his pickup every night down our road, and if we were coming home from Ephraim off of County A, we’d always stop and exchange a few words with him. Between us, we always referred to his little black-and-white Jack Russell mix as “Patch-Eye” for the big spot over his left eye. Old Patch-Eye did all the herding work with much barking and great solemnity while Mr. Ray relaxed and followed behind, enjoying his radio and the evening breeze. Then one day, Patch-Eye wasn’t with Mr. Ray and mom and I missed his earnest presence. “Oh,” Mr. Ray languidly explained, “It’s Sunday. His day off. He never works on Sunday, you know.” And from then on, we noticed he didn’t.

In my parents’ day (the late ‘30s and ‘40s, before they were burdened with me), there also was a Seventh Day Adventist family named Ohnesorge (as in “Sans Souci”: French for “No Worries” and the name of the Prussian King Frederick I’s castle in what was East Berlin). They lived down County A—in an un-castle-like abode—not too far from us, by Wisconsin standards. The Ohnesorges sold ice cream and Aunt Jessie (who married Uncle Robey Bach) told me that they used to jump into his little blue roadster, put the top down, and careen over to buy ice cream for dinner before the sun set and the Ohnesorges ceased work for religious reasons. I never asked her why they waited till the last minute to get it; it was obvious: Robey loved to speed over the ungraded hills that we called “rollercoasters” , which would make your stomach fly into your throat as you shot over them. I loved that sport, too, and was devastated when Mr. Orsted insisted on grading everything in the ‘60s.

However, I’ve saved the best for last. Juddville Road intersected State Highway 42 at an intersection that boasted a one-room school, a gas station/convenience store, and (in the ‘60s) Mrs. Chase’s delectable farm stand featuring the best products of Door County, “America’s Cherryland”, among other things. The gas station was clad in a grayish-brownish tar paper, with a pattern vaguely resembling bricks, and was run by Eva Klingbeil, also known by the local kids as the “Mayor of Juddville”. The poor woman was actually a real hermaphrodite (hence his/her title), and apparently stocked a goodly array of pornographic material in the back of her micro-store, as a plus. (Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this last detail until long after Eva’s death, and so didn’t benefit from this tidbit).

Of course there are lots of stories if you stray a bit from Juddville. There is Jake Kodanko who used to usher in spring by madly dancing naked around Europe Lake. And old Adolph (Cap’n) Anderson, who ran the general store in Ephraim and was the only person in the county invited to the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (Apparently Mrs. Simpson had met Adolph when she was a child vacationing in Ephraim with her parents).

Cap’n Anderson once had a problem with someone stealing precious wood from his woodpile in late winter. He loved to tell the story of how he took a log, drilled a plug out of it, filled the hole with gunpowder and then replaced the plug. Breathlessly you would wait for him to continue. Finally you couldn’t stand it any longer and would demand, “And then what happened?”

“Nothing much,” Adolph would reply. “I just got in my sleigh and drove around till I got to the house where the stove had just blown up.”

Butterfly

Twenty years ago I was not ready to see what I see now. And I am not ready to handle what I will see in the next 20 years. Life unfolds. We transform, like the caterpillar in the chrysalis. It's painful, but it is also joy unfolding.

NYC Observations

DINER CAKES:

Cakes in NY diners have a definitely architectural look. They may be encircled by ladyfingers, as if they were supporting columns. The tops are like complex white cornices; and cut-aways reveal a large number of layers, lacking only an elevator to give the viewer access to the upper stories.

Perhaps the WTC monument should be a giant NY cheesecake?

Next time you’re in a diner, take a look at the giant cakes and cast your vote for the most appropriate one.


CONTRAILS:

Spiral notebook bindings in dirty cotton yarn.


ASPHALT:

Long strips of gray rag flung on the ground with wobbly dotted white lines running parallel to their edges. Some have been carelessly patched with blacker materials which have been in turn patched with pieces of a darker or lighter gray. They bulge as if hand sewn by a beginning seamstress.

NEIGHBORHOODS: Wilmette, IL

We even lived on a weird block in Wilmette, in our whitebread, Ozzie-and-Harriet style northern suburb, where I grew up in a German Catholic area (full of unrelated Hoffmanns), and had as idyllic a childhood as anyone could hope to have. Still, there was plenty to keep me and my “alley pals” interested. For example, the Godemanns lived on the corner with their four young daughters and grandma, plus an apparently unending supply of bottled beer. The latter was enjoyed by the entire family every clear summer night, along with their alfresco dinners at their gray picnic table, flaking paint into their TV dinners.

Our lot was sliced off the back of their property, plus that of the Salvanos and the Sullivans, as our house had been a wedding gift from the developer of the neighborhood to his daughter, the grandmotherly Mrs. Hoth who babysat me when I was little. My bedroom overlooked these yards plus the alley (which also ran under our kitchen window), so I was well aware of what the Godemanns had for dinner, especially as my mom was idiotically firm about sending me to bed at 8:00, even in summer when the sun was still out.

Mr. Godemann was the head baker for Bennison’s Bakery, and created fabulous cakes with spun sugar roses built upon marischino cherries to give them volume and realism. No one could make a cake like he could, even though our doormat had, I believe, a higher IQ. He was six-foot-two and skinny as rail, in spite of his habit of putting away two or three six-packs of beer every night. His wife was short, dumpy, dumb and good-natured, and the daughters were alternately tall and reedy or short and dumpy like their parents.

Next to them were the Salvanos, a fascinating menagerie I never tired of watching from my little bedroom, which was an enclosed (by my father) sleeping porch, screened on three sides by elm branches, and facing north (Wilmette Avenue and the Godemann/Salvano Show); east (down the alley); and south (overlooking the alley and the yards of the Dormodys and the Smiths). So I had all the entertainment a television-less house could possibly ask for, and then some.

Mr. Salvano was barely five feet high, a wiry little Italian who had married a dumpling named Eleanor Doetsch, whose wealth was derived from a very large quarry on Grosse Pointe Road colorfully named Doetsch’s Pit, now a thriving municipal park. The dumpling tolerated Jake just long enough for him to completely remodel everything on the property, then tossed him out to live the life of a single mom with serial live-in boyfriends and four children: truly a woman ahead of her time.

There was a hedge between the Salvanos and the Godemanns and the two men occasionally would have a go at it with giant clippers on weekends. This was always an event. Jake would begin down by the garages, clipping as high as his five-foot frame would allow, while Herman would begin by the houses, whacking away a foot above Jake’s head. When they met in the middle there would be a loud altercation regarding who was to blame for the lopsided trim, and Linda Dormody would magically materialize at my side to take in the fireworks.

They remained on good terms for most of their neighborly lives, however, in spite of the occasional fight that would put both sets of parents leaning precariously out of upstairs windows hollering for the whole of Wilmette’s 17,000 souls to hear; while the children (four on a side) would lean out the downstairs porch windows and loyally continue the bellowing match. All wonderful fun for the rest of us, and not even R-rated stuff, although our parents tried unsuccessfully to keep us from eavesdropping.

The Salvano kids bore a startling resemblance to one another (dark and curly). The only two who stand out in my mind were the two younger ones, who were almost a generation apart, like my half-brother and I. Holly was dark, several years older than I, and beautiful, obsessively tanning herself to a degree of black that was worrying, even in the days before we gave a thought to melanoma. Marshall was several years younger than I and spent his first years in a harness, tethered to clothesline that gave him the run of the yard. This was because, at some point, one of his older siblings (or he himself) had precipitated a headfirst fall down the concrete basement stairs, and he wasn’t quite right in the head after that. However, he made up for it in brute strength.

For example, at five, he got loose and chased Karen Godemann (who was tall and many years older) down Wilmette Avenue with an eggbeater. Later that summer he actually caught up with her and actually knocked her out with a crowbar. He then proceeded to KO the Dormody’s 12-year-old cousin, Dane, with a crowbar, as well. These events began one of the most interested shouting matches between the Godemanns and the Salvanos and, as we cowered on the back porch riveted by the spectacle, led us to believe homicide was imminent. The noise was deafening, and if noise could kill, homicide would have occurred almost immediately. It was several months (or was it years?) before the chill wore off between the two families: the Salvanos maintained that Marshall couldn’t have accomplished all that at a mere five years of age; the rest of the neighborhood sided (silently, of course) with the Godemanns.

Both families had extremely loud power mowers and Jake enjoyed listening to the baseball game mostly when the mower was running. He would crank up the volume so even the Dormodys across the alley behind us could get the score with their windows closed (a thing one didn’t like to have to do in those pre-air conditioning days). My father, who had no use for either noise or sports, nevertheless had no desire to alienate our neighbors, especially ones as volatile as the Salvanos. So he made a little radio transmitter in the basement, tuned it to the frequency of Jake’s station, and beamed it at the Salvano’s porch window whenever their radio began to blare. Jake must have replaced dozens of perfectly good radios over the years, undoubtedly earning a reputation as a nut with a host of bemused radio repairmen, without us ever having to get into fight over it. We always felt a teensy bit guilty about it, though, but not enough to stop the practice or give up the resulting peace and quiet.

Of course, we caused enough havoc to become legendary ourselves, especially one spring vacation in the early ‘60s when we took it into our heads to go to New Orleans for a week. (Whatever were we thinking?). My dad had entered his midlife crisis in style with the purchase of brand-new 1960 Corvette, just as I was going into high school. He had lovingly constructed a hideous carport for it out of corrugated aluminum and fiberglass (badly disguised by windowboxes full of geraniums), so he could pull into it after work without struggling with a garage door, as mom had to (all the heavy work, apparently, was hers, unless it involved carpentry).

Unfortunately, in spite of a small window, the front end of the carport faced the back of our house and blocked our view of the actual car. So every night, somebody managed to sneak in and try to steal it. We knew this because dad placed a small metal bar opposite the front bumper of the ‘vette, with a plate that could activate a switch when the bumper pushed up against it. To ensure that the pressure was right, a small wedge was slipped in each night between the bumper and the plate. Inside the house, in a small jacket cupboard, was a switch that set up a Rube Goldberg-like alarm system. There was a bell and a light above the back door, the spotlight aimed directly at the window of the carport so as to blind anyone within. Another spotlight was attached to the outside wall at the top of the downstairs porch windows, aimed at the bedroom of the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan (I assume they knew about it). All this noise and flashing of lights was to scare off would-be burglars, but dad always marched outside in his pj’s, bathrobe and slippers, carrying his trusty .38 (which was otherwise carefully hidden where kids couldn’t find it). Maybe it was actually the sight of my father’s attire, his wild hair and the gun which had the sobering effect on our would-be criminals. In any event, the car remained untouched.
This alarm system also applied to our house. A small wedge inserted into the top of the back door set off the same bedlam if someone opened the door when the system was on. Assuming that burglars weren’t stupid, dad allowed them a chance to find the wedge and reinsert it before venturing further into the house (in case the neighbors failed to respond to our primitive 911 arrangement). The first curiosity point, dad reckoned, would be the darkroom door, which had a brass handle with a black kidney-shaped area painted behind it to mask the fingerprints we tended to generate. So a second wedge was placed there to set off the alarm a second time, at which point any sensible burglar would presumably split the joint.

Unfortunately, as soon as we left town, a violent thunderstorm occurred, shaking the wedge out of the back door and tripping off the first part of this crazy burglar trap. We had new neighbors occupying the Dormody’s old house who were both unaware of our eccentricities and given to barbecuing in their garage directly across the alley from our back door where they couldn’t fail to hear the uproar. They called the Wilmette police who promptly sent over a squad car to their house. Their big collie dog, Banner, unnerved by the commotion, more or less had the first cop for dinner. So a second call was made and most of the police force arrived to deal with the commotion. By this time all of our neighbors except the Sullivans were up and involved in the hullaballoo, and madder than hell at that crazy Hoffmann guy.

With everyone watching, the police made a thorough search of the house, tripping off the second alarm in the process and somehow managing to bring in the mail, as well. When they got back to the station (with nothing to show for their pains), they discovered that Encyclopedia Britannica’s headquarters—in the center of town—had been completely cleaned out while we had been entertaining them elsewhere. EB promptly pulled up stakes and left town, taking their money and their jobs to some remote location where the police were undoubtedly more responsive to their burglars.

We innocently returned home after a rather uneventful vacation to find that most of the town wasn’t speaking to us. It was some time before we determined exactly what we had done to deserve this churlish treatment, at which point my mother wisely persuaded my father to abandon his burglar alarm schemes.

NEIGHBORHOODS: New York/Chelsea

I live on the weirdest street in New York City. I don’t mean hip weird or arty weird or even touristy weird: I mean just plain w-e-i-r-d. For example, there is a nice bed-and-breakfast inn about 2 doors down that is frequented by Europeans (mostly Germans, judging by their guttural remarks when consulting their Baedekers on the sidewalk in front of the B&B). There are French windows facing the street, and (when the curtains aren’t drawn) you can look into a cozy lobby, featuring plush chairs and people reading in the ones by the window. However, in the chair closest to the left-hand window, there is a body sagging limp-armed and apparently dead, with its head touching its shoes. No one seems to notice or even mind; the Germans come and go without commenting on it, and the passersby don’t even seem to ever react. On closer inspection, one can lean over the flower boxes on the sidewalk outside the windows (concrete bunker-like planters to keep people like us at bay) and see that it is a sort of scarecrow: a stuffed dead person in an armchair. The first time I saw it I started to dial 911, before my companion realized it was a fake and stopped me in time. Why would anyone want such a lobby ornament? And why are their customers so blasé—indeed comfortable—with it? It’s just one of those Mysteries on 23rd Street that never seem to stop unfolding.

It’s even weirder when you consider that the B&B is cheek-by-jowl with a soup kitchen entrance in the basement of St. Vincent de Paul next door. The ragged old winos stagger out after a meal and hang out in front of the B&B door pretending to be tourists. It’s all a bit sad and funny at the same time. But that’s my block. Sometimes they wander over to my door and sit on the standpipe next to it, so I bump into them (literally) as I go in my door, exchanging pleasantries with the less comatose.

Some of these guys seem to have all their marbles and are polite, and even those that aren’t quite there are (mostly) tidy and mind their own business and their manners. Once in awhile I’ll encounter a fellow (they are usually men) who just seems a bit down on his luck and doesn’t appear to belong with the others. We’ll enjoy a nice one-sided conversation about his temporary predicament, and the next time I pass him, he won’t recognize me because he is engaged in a furious fight (over some real or imagined slight) with a lamppost. Then I remember that people like him can’t get their medication any more because the recently-sainted (former) Mayor Guiliani closed all the mental hospitals.

Once, back in 1997, I saw a fight between a lamppost and a talking car (remember talking cars?). I was with a friend who was on a cigarette break from a café which was then located across the street from me. It was a warm night and we were watching the passing parade when suddenly an SUV parked at the curb shouted “Back off!!!” After verifying that no one was near—or even in—it, we carried on with our conversation, unimpressed by the car’s outburst, as most Manhattanites would have been. Then it began in earnest: the shouting of repeated “back offs” until we realized that they were addressed to a lamppost next to it, and not to any pedestrians. This was more interesting, and a bit of crowd gathered, most of them putting their money on the lamppost, which was maintaining an admirably aloof composure throughout the entire episode. After about 20 minutes or so, the van subsided into a sulky silence, and the crowd melted away, looking for other entertainment. We straightened up, recovered our composure (after thumping each other on the back awhile), and pretended nothing had happened, which is what one does here on a regular basis.

In the middle of my block is a huge concrete block edifice that would arguably put most of Bucharest to shame. For reasons no one can explain, it boasts a smell that could fell an ox, a combination of unwashed and rotting flesh that makes walking down the sidewalk a real chore on a hot summer day. Once the sidewalk is hosed down in the morning, the smell subsides a bit for a few more hours. On a canopy that crosses the sidewalk it announces itself as the Associated Blind building, whatever that means. Yes, a lot of blind people live here, as well as the halt, the deaf and the seriously disabled on every imaginable front. But the blind—who can’t glory in the sign on account of their disability—somehow got top billing.

It makes you think.

I remember a neighbor (who also has a wife and daughter) telling me a few years ago that he almost didn’t move into our building because he saw so many blind people on our street that he had the overwhelming impression there must be something “in the water”. “I have a daughter ...” he recalled thinking, before he looked up and saw the sign on the canopy.

They moved in the next day, and his daughter promptly dyed her hair green to match that of the transvestite across the hall.

Intro to The Roommate Chronicles

Here's what makes me an un-native-New-Yorker, even after 12+ years in the city. It's what I think of as my Chicago "accent" (the "a" must be very nasal or it isn't Chicago). It's the premise I've operated from since I was 3 or 4 — the "Blanche DuBois" syndrome, or "The Kindness of Strangers Principle":

Every stranger I meet or pass on the street anywhere on the planet is just a friend I have not yet met. [Some friends may eventually turn into enemies, of course, but for some reason that doesn't figure into the equation.]

Now, however, I am beginning to think that the word "friend" should be changed to "roommate". Some move in and some don't, but potentially any of them could be sharing space with me. My current apartment is like half-an-ark: one of every human type seems to have passed through it at one time or another, or will some time soon. The difference between me and Noah is that they don't enter in pairs; and they have all been homo sapiens. Also, I don't usually have to clean up their shit with a bucket and mop. Usually.

Forget Will and Grace, however: I'm talking the REAL world. We don't fall in love with roomies, and when we do, it doesn't have a happy ending. They rarely are mentally ill in the exact same ways I am, so of course, communication is often a bit skewed. In fact, even my relationships seem to be nothing more than a variation on a roommate theme. But isn't that the way life is, plain and simple?

I can't believe how many roomies I've had over the years. For someone who's short on living family, I seem to be long on serial flatmates. They're not interchangeable, however. No way! Some of them are seasonal, almost migratory. If they arrive in the fall or winter, they'll take flight in the spring. They can't help it: that's who they are.

When I'm traveling, I'm the migratory one. In Turkey, I shared a flat with Palestinian and Syrian students (male). In Mexico, I commuted between my house in Chiapas and my Masters program in Chicago, until I'd finished my degree. But now I'm the sedentary one.

Stay tuned: I will add additional chapters to some of the incredibly crazy roomies I've had and how glad I am they passed through my life, even when it was only like shooting stars.