In my early 20’s I begun to suffer from terribly painful headaches. Not migraines, just painful headaches. This was around 1997 a time when I taking home about $200 week and then finding a way to pay rent, keep my car insured and eat. My primary entertainment was sitting in my studio apartment with a headache and keeping these headaches a secret from people.
By the spring of 1997 I had been suffering from headaches for about a year and had done nothing about it. When you’re broke you have to decide what is essential and what you can do without. I was almost 23 years old and my essentials included the aforementioned rent, food and car insurance. On top of that there was the cost of gas for the car, a phone for my apartment, beer and increasingly… gin. Fashion was not a priority, which explains why 90’s era photos of me look so bad and finally, health care was not a priority for me even if this meant not treating things like my terrible headaches.
Not seeking medical care was not new for me; after spending hundreds of hours with doctors in the first 8 years of my life I pretty much stopped going after that. Part of this was due to the fact that I was generally physically healthy but mostly I was afraid that going to a doctor might turn us something wrong and that would cost me a lot of money. I told nobody until finally I found myself unable to do anything for more than a few hours without having to lay down due to the headaches. This was when I finally confided to my then girlfriend that I thought I had a brain tumor and was going to die.
I considered her the sensible one in our relationship so when she told me that I might be getting headaches due to eyestrain I wanted to believe it even though I had never had eye problems in all of my years of taking the eye tests at school or when I took the eye test to get my driver’s license. She asked me to go to an optometrist just in case. I agreed to try it.
A few days later we were on our way to the optometrist and I casually mentioned, like I always did, that the street signs on Long Island were impossible to read because they were so old and faded. She ignored this comment because she had grown tired of hearing it from me. We got to the eye doctor’s office and I went in to take my exam.
I talked about the headaches, I took the eye tests and in a few minutes the doctor advised me that he had good news and bad news: The good news was that I probably didn’t have a brain tumor. The bad news, which suddenly seemed manageable, was that I had a severs astigmatism and would need glasses. He also advised me not to drive until I had glasses.
Out in the lobby I found my girlfriend in the middle of a: “Oh my god what if they find nothing and he IS going to die” style panic. After spending a selfish moment basking in the realization that hey she must really care about me to get this upset I gave her the good news and asked her to drive me home, which she did. I also asked her to drive me to and from work for the next week and she told me that this was not going to happen.
As she drove home she didn’t complain about the road signs once. I drove myself to and from work like I had been doing for a year but I didn’t drive anywhere else that week.
After a week my glasses were ready. To keep up appearances my girlfriend drove me to pick them up. When I tried them on I was amazed. Everything looked different. Because I had never worn glasses before my depth perception would be off until I adjusted to the changes but everything else was suddenly so clear. My eyesight had declined so gradually that I never realized there was anything wrong.
Since I was still adjusting to wearing glasses my girlfriend drove us home too. As she drove I said to her: “Hey while we were in there they must have replaced all of the old street signs.” She didn’t correct me. I would figure it out eventually; the road signs, my priorities and more.
Note: That girl in this story and I eventually split up but not before me and my glasses moved to LA to give it one last try. We are still friends to this day.
Nobody told us what happened inside of the building across the street before my mother rented the house in the summer of 1983. Since we moved in over a weekend it was a few days before we found out that the small white building was an industrial bread bakery. As far as we were concerned, that summer we had arrived in paradise.
Our version of paradise was a high ranch three bedroom house on a dirt lot, a few doors down from the elevated train tracks. There was one fewer door between us and the train because the house next door had burned down shortly before we moved in. The presence of a charred windowless shell of a home 15 feet away probably contributed to my single mother being able to afford the place but like I said, it was fine by us. We had spent the last four years living in basements on the edge of poverty and suddenly we had ROOMS.
Then, after the weekend, the bakery came back to life. I don’t know if you’ve ever been three doors down from THOUSANDS of loaves of bread being baked at once but it’s pretty much the best thing ever, or at least it was the best thing my brother, my sister and me had experienced to that point in our life. At nine years old I was the oldest so I led my brother and sister down towards the bakery where we saw the racks of bread cooling outside.
Unless you’ve been poor you can’t understand how amazing it is to see so much food just sitting out in the open. We just stared at it from the curb for a while unsure if it was real. There were people inside but nobody was standing by the racks. After a few minutes someone else approached the building and knocked on the door. They handed the person who answered it some money then they were handed a paper bag which they filled with bread. We had stumbled onto the black market of bread where it was just sold out of a factory back door and taken straight home to eat.
Looking back it doesn’t seem like much but it was one of the most amazing things my siblings and I had ever seen up to that point. We had not only moved into a giant house but there was food just sitting around waiting for someone to come and get it. Between the three of us we had less than a dollar but that was enough to get a small paper bag from the man inside which held a fresh loaf of bread. On later trips we would learn to fill the paper bags and our pockets and eventually to just fill our pockets and run.
One morning my brother and I were on our way back from a bakery run with our pockets full of onion rolls when a car pulled up beside us. We were only about 50 feet from out front door and we were about to get busted for stealing bread…or so we thought. When the driver told us to get in the car we said nothing to one another. When he opened the car door I told my brother, under my breath to not go. He told me under his breath that he knew that. This guy in the car was trying to kidnap us.
He beckoned us towards the car through the open passenger door but we stood our ground. When he said as nicely as possible: “Get in.” My brother and I decided to see what was in it for us.
“Why should we get in?” I asked as I looked towards my house.
Everyone was still asleep inside and couldn’t see what was going on. The driver had situated his car between us and the path to our front door.
The driver reached into his bag and said: “I have a cupcake.” He pulled a single individually wrapped Hostess cupcake out and showed it to us.
My brother had a question: “Do you have a cupcake for each of us?”
Perhaps it was his first day as a kidnapper because he admitted that he only had the one cupcake. My brother and I told him that we would get in the car only if he got us a second cupcake. We told him we’d wait there, he closed the passenger door and drove away.
My brother and I debated waiting for that second cupcake for moment and then thought better of it. We ran home to eat bread and watch from the window to see if our would be kidnapper returned. He never did.
Song: Streetlife Serenader
Album: Streetlife Serenade (1974)
Over the course of the month I’ve been working on A Year of Billy Joel, five different people have contacted me to warn me about the album Streetlife Serenade. Their messages boiled down to the following warning: Streetlife…
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here because I’ve been working on this music writing project for the last few weeks. This is a story that I intended to tell here but it fit better with this other thing. Such are the dangers of having multiple projects running side by side. I promise to begin posting here again very soon. I’m just overwhelmed with work, projects and marathon training at the moment.
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As a kid I would come to the sad realization every Christmas night that it was over.
The weeks of planning and anticipation had ended with opening presents earlier that day. The food had been eaten, the relatives had been seen and by 8 PM on Christmas night there was nothing left to do but go to my room. As a kid this seemed unfair.
I often wondered why I lived in a world where Labor Day and Memorial Day were celebrated with three days of drinking but Christmas was only celebrated from the time the Yule Log was shown on TV on Christmas Eve through getting home from seeing my family on Christmas day. That was less than 24 hours.
One year, my father managed to extend the holiday spirit just a little longer. I remember riding in my father’s van on a Christmas night many years ago. I was still pretty young, maybe 9 and my brother and sister were 7 and 5.
After weeks of anticipation it was almost done; every gift had been opened every relative seen and now we were on the drive home from our great grandmother’s house.
My dad was due to drop us back at our mother’s but we weren’t going the right way, instead of going home we were going towards a part of Long Island I had never seen. The houses seemed impossibly large compared to ours and they were all fabulously lit up with holiday decorations. I was impressed but also worried about getting home on time. From the passenger seat I turned to my father to say:
“Dad, we have to go home”
He kept his eyes on the road but I could see him smile as he replied:
“Your brother and sister don’t want to go home.”
“But we have to.”
My father knew he could always count on my brother and sister to disagree with me. He looked at them in the rear view mirror and said:
“Everyone who wants to stay out and have fun looking at the Christmas lights, raise your hand.”
Then he looked at me and said:
“Raise your hand if you want to go home.”
I didn’t bother raising my hand and my father continued to drive.
This was a time when seat belts were still just a suggestion so my brother and sister stood up in the back of the van, faces pressed against the windows calling out the decorations they saw. Eventually I began to do the same from the front seat as we slowly drove past house after house calling out what we saw until well past our usual bedtime.
My dad had a dream about the family and our Christmas tree. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, he would crank up the holiday music and start setting the tree up in hopes that it would come true.
The Christmas tree dream went like this: He’d set up the tree and the lights and then we’d each take turns placing an ornament on the tree until the tree was perfect. This was designed to bring us all together but this did not work for one very simple reason: My father had many good qualities but patience was not one of them.
The first time we tried this we each hung one ornament before he started telling us that we were doing it wrong. Then, because he didn’t give us any instructions on how to do it right he got mad because we were going too slow. We had no idea there was a right and wrong way to decorate a Christmas tree.
Within minutes the would be happy family event devolved into shouting and my dad told us to put the ornaments down and get away from the tree. We then sat across the room sipping our hot chocolate as he finished the job.
A year later, the same thing happened.
The year after that we skipped the helping part and just watched my father put the tree up. It was more fun for everyone that way.
