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.
Part One- Holidays in Stereo
By the fall of 1984 my parents had been separated for more than three years. While we were doing better than we had been the first two years, things were still far from easy for my mother. When Christmas came around that year mom reminded me that money was really tight and Christmas was going to be very simple. I didn’t need a reminder but I told her that I understood. Then she asked me if I would be okay with getting less because the younger two kids still believed in Santa. At 10 years old I was considered old enough to be in the know about ways of the world; after all I kissed a girl that summer and was already downing a lot of coffee every morning. It seemed reasonable and I didn’t want to be a baby. I said yes.
I’m sure it hurt her to ask me to make such a sacrifice, and she must have appreciated it because she said I could play records in her room after school. I wasn’t normally allowed to do this because her boyfriend was a dick about his records.
Between getting home from school and my mom getting home I had an hour and a half to lie on the big bed and listen to music. On the big stereo with the silver-tone finish and giant knobs I could spin my favorites at that time: The Beatles Abbey Road, Best of The Jackson 5, and The Ventures Greatest Hits. I danced around and made myself lo-fi copies of my favorite songs by holding a tape recorder up to the speakers. Those afternoons made it seem like Christmas wouldn’t be so disappointing.
As the last school day before Christmas passed, I wondered to myself “is this record deal only through Christmas or can I do this all the time?” I was afraid to ask.
Christmas morning finally came and I kept my bravest face and smiled. Mom got up and left the room while we cleaned up the boxes and wrapping paper. She came back in, thanked me for being so grown up and told me I should go to my room right away because there was a surprise waiting for me. On the floor covered by a sheet was her receiver and turntable, in all of their silver-tone and wood finished glory.
It turns out that my mother’s boyfriend had decided to buy himself a new stereo for Christmas. While I was being brave she carried her old stereo components and speakers into my room. It was the best present I had ever gotten even before she pulled out the records that went along with it.
Part Two- You’d Better Eat All Of Those Presents
In my family it has always been perfectly acceptable to give food as gifts. When I say food I don’t mean gift baskets like Hickory Farms products, I’m talking about things like a can of olives, spaghetti, some pepperoni, and maybe gum.
Now you might think that groceries make an awful gift but if you do, you’re missing out. The food giving tradition has been going on for decades but stating in the early 90’s my father turned it into something of a holiday art form.
The first year that my brother, my sister and I received foodstuffs as gifts it was our own fault. My father, who always enjoyed giving his kids gifts, had asked us many times if there was anything we wanted and we just gave him nothing to work with. A few days before Christmas, after wrapping up all of the gifts he had gotten for his kids, my dad felt it just didn’t look like enough, and so he improvised, by calling upon a family tradition. That Christmas morning we found what looked to be a Christmas miracle; we hadn’t asked for anything but there were stacks upon stacks of presents waiting for us.
Despite all three of us being at or close to adulthood we all pounced on the piles like little kids, shaking the packages and wondering what could be inside. I went first, opening that first one slowly and great with anticipation, much to my father’s amusement. I’m pretty sure it was a box of Jell-o mix inside of a bigger box, and everyone laughed until the started unwrapping cans of vegetables and boxes of crackers. Eventually we got to the real presents but we we’re still laughing over the fake ones.
Over the years the fake gift became my father’s holiday tradition. Each year he worked new items into the mix (like cake mix) and every year we laughed about it like it was the first time.
My father passed away in 2009 but it’s worth noting that a few days before Christmas in 2008 I found a package waiting for me at my home in Los Angeles. While I hadn’t asked for anything my father had mailed me a last minute gift from New York. I unwrapped it to find canned peaches, a jar of peanut butter and a note that said Merry Christmas.
