Tom gets a dose of ironic justice

“C’mon guys; just don’t stand there! Help me!”

Tom frantically pleaded as he struggled to fix the flat tire. We just stood around and laughed.

A mile or two back on the bike trail to the lake, we’d come up behind a large, tan, extremely muscular bleach-blonde beefcake rollerblading down the trail. He was wearing nothing but his skates, a black leather thong, and a tiny black leather fanny pack that barely covered his butt crack. Even though it was a sunny autumn day with temperatures in the 60s, the guy undoubtedly was overexposed. Tom had shouted a homosexual slur over his shoulder as we sped past him on our bicycles.

Now fate had turned the tables on Tom. We watched with delight and amusement as ironic justice was served.

Tom had dragged his disabled bicycle 25 yards or so back into the surrounding woods, so he wouldn’t be seen from the trail. Still, he was sweating profusely as he fumbled unsuccessfully to change his tire.

“It’s not funny,” he said. “If that guy catches up, he’s gonna KILL us!”

We just looked around at each other, grinned, and shook our heads.

“No, Tom. He’s going to kill YOU.”

(c)2011 Thom Burns

Slipping Brian a "Mickey Fem"

“You sure they’re tranquillizers?” he asked. “I don’t feel anything.”

It had been roughly 20 minutes since Brian took the two little blue pills I’d offered him. We were lounging on the couch at his girlfriend’s house, drinking her father’s beer and eating snacks.

A Celtics basketball game played on the huge television. Her parents were out of town and she was out with her friends, leaving us to our delinquent male devices.

Brian and Leigh had started dating roughly six months earlier, shortly after the start of our junior year of high school. Brian and I had grown up just houses apart on the same street in a typical middle-class Des Moines neighborhood. Brian’s dad was an ex-Air Force captain and the head of security at a local college. Mine designed bridges for an engineering and architecture firm. A third buddy, Pete, lived across the street, halfway between Brian and me. His dad was a senior manager for the local electric power utility. The three of us frequently hung out together. On this night, however, it was just Brian and me.

Leigh’s family was relatively wealthy, and it was reflected by the upscale neighborhood, sprawling house, and luxurious furnishings. The professionally landscaped property sat on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Des Moines River. The picture window in the family room faced the back yard and afforded a panoramic view of the wooded river valley below and farm fields beyond.

Since he started dating Leigh, Brian had become increasingly “uppity.” He had accompanied her family on a ski vacation to Colorado over the holidays, and now considered himself a bona fide “ski bum.” He spoke enthusiastically of “moguls” and “back-scratchers” and “daffies.” Leigh had given him a brightly colored, absurdly expensive ski jacket for Christmas, and he wore it everywhere. The front zipper was adorned with a half dozen lift tickets.

Brian also had a steady new supply of trendy prescription drugs pinched from Leigh’s mother’s medicine cabinet. He casually dropped pharmaceutical names like “Quaalude,” “Darvocet” and “Percodan,” as if they were brands of soft drinks or candy bars.

None of this sat well with me. Prior to entering the public school system in junior high, I’d been educated at parochial schools. I still attended catechism class one night a week. While I’d been mildly corrupted by my new secular school surroundings, I was still a Catholic choir boy at heart. Deep down, Brian’s new elitist attitude and trendy prescription drug hobby pissed me off.

The third member of our neighborhood trio, Pete, had lost his father a year earlier to a sudden, unexpected heart attack. His mom, after grieving for several months, had recently begun dating again. She also must have been going through menopause, because scattered haphazardly throughout their house were pill bottles labeled “estrogen.”

Responding in anger to Brian’s aggravating new behavior, I’d concocted a sneaky, underhanded, spiteful plan. I was in the process of carrying it out.

Over the course of the previous few weeks, I’d secretly stolen twenty or so estrogen tablets from Pete’s mom’s pill bottles, a few at a time. I was gradually feeding them to Brian, telling him they were prescription downers.

“I don’t know what else they could be – Christ, they’re prescription,” I replied. “Hell, the label even said ‘Do not take with alcohol or operate motor vehicles’ and all that other drug interaction disclaimer shit.”

Brian shook his head and said, “You positive? Man, I’m not feeling even the slightest buzz.”

“Really? I’m a little buzzed.” I tried to sound convincing. “Maybe it’s because you took them on top of all that chips and dip you ate. Here, take a couple more.” I dug around in my pocket for the bottle.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought his voice sounded a note higher than it had the previous week. As I shook a couple more pills into the palm of his outstretched hand, what I really wanted to say was, “Gee, Brian – you seem a little light in the loafers tonight. Are you feeling … pretty?”

(c)2011 Thom Burns

Don't mess with Texas

(or You can't teach an old football coach new tricks)

Celebrated, retired Iowa college athletic coaches Hayden Fry and Johnny Orr sat just feet apart, perched on stools angled slightly toward each other, illuminated by the hot glare of camera spotlights. They were positioned in front of a painted backdrop on a sound stage in the studios of Busby Productions, a film and television production company located in an old warehouse on the South side of downtown Des Moines.

Hayden had recently retired as the winningest coach in University of Iowa Hawkeye football history. He’d imported his folksy, endearing “good ol’ boy” disposition from West Texas to the Corn Belt school. Renowned for often-brutal honesty and homespun clichés delivered in his distinctive drawl, he was the inspiration for actor Craig T. Nelson’s lead character Hayden Fox on the television sit-com “Coach.”

The immensely popular figure had brought success and widespread support to a struggling athletic program. Before retiring, he’d led his squads to a string of post-season bowl games, where they’d drawn thousands of faithful fans to root for their team. He’d reestablished the Hawkeyes as a legitimate conference contender.

Johnny, the former Iowa State Cyclone men’s basketball coach, was widely credited with creating “Hilton Magic.” The term describes the raucous, fan-packed, opponent-intimidating atmosphere in Iowa State’s campus arena. His Cyclone teams played a free-wheeling, up-tempo, quick-scoring “run and gun” brand of basketball that fans and broadcasters alike found extremely entertaining.

He recruited a level of athleticism never before seen at the school, and inspired success and popularity in a program long-mired in mediocrity. His teams won conference championships and qualified for the NCAA tournament. A colorful and charismatic personality, he was as entertaining as his brand of basketball. In his relatively short stint as a Cyclone coach, he won over fans throughout the state.

The old coaches were filming a public service television spot sponsored by a Midwest grocery store chain. In it, the two 60-something personalities exchanged wry wit and playful banter. After shooting more than a dozen takes, they were starting to tire, their patience beginning to wear thin.
 
Directing the video shoot was Busby “Buzz” Berkley, the highly animated president and founder of the production company that bore his name. Like many in the industry, he had a reputation for being somewhat of an artistic “flake.” A little on the flamboyant side and in his late 50s, he wore designer jeans, expensive European loafers without socks, and silk shirts in vibrant colors. He had a tendency to gesture with his hands when he talked. His long, graying hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

As the coaches waited for direction, they scanned the crew around the set, anxiously looking for a sign that the shoot might be nearing an end. Just then, Buzz announced, “OK. Let’s do a couple more takes and then we’ll call it a day.”

He approached the ersatz actors, looked at them intently, and using his own artsy brand of industry jargon said, “This time, let’s try something a little different, OK? For these last few takes, I want you guys to jazz it up. Push the edge a little – spike the punch. Add some flavor, some texture…some SNAP, CRACKLE, POP!”

The two just stared at him, then turned and looked at each other as if to say ‘What the hell does THAT mean?’ Satisfied, Buzz stepped back, cued the camera and actors, and shouted “Action!”

Not surprisingly, the old coaches gave an uninspired effort and delivered their lines pretty much the same as they had on previous takes. Buzz yelled “Cut!”

He again stepped in and said, “Now this time I really want you to kick it up a notch. Give it the ol’ mustard. You know: Rock ‘n Roll, Mardi Gras, and je ne sais quoi. Let’s make the fat lady really SING!” He was nodding and alternately snapping his fingers, bouncing from foot to foot, eyes wide, eyebrows arched, looking at the coaches for their approval.

Johnny gave a sideways glance at Hayden. Then, barely able to contain a stifled grin, he pivoted a quarter turn on his stool so he was facing away, in an effort to keep from laughing out loud.

Hayden sat up straight, cocked his shoulders, and set his jaw. Leaning slightly forward, he looked Buzz in the eye and in his distinctive Texas drawl said:

“Son, I’m a football coach. Not a PUSSY.”

Buzz turned to the crew and said, “OK gang. That’s a wrap.”


Note: This story was related to me by my brother, who for a few years after graduating with a degree in television and film production from the U of IA, worked at Busby. According to him and others on the set that day, while Buzz yelled “Cut” after the last take, the cameraman ignored the direction and kept videotaping. It’s possible that archived footage of the episode still exists in storage somewhere.

A beautiful secret

I met Peggy in Rhetoric 101. It was fall semester of my freshman year at Coe College, a small, private business school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What literally stood out about Peggy was her enormous rack: She was every boob man’s dream.

Sadly, any fantasy I had of experiencing first-hand her magnificent orbs quickly evaporated when I discovered she was dating Pedro – a pint-sized Puerto Rican and standout goalie on the men’s soccer team. Lucky bastard. It was clear that Peggy and her splendid sweater puppies were strictly off limits, at least for my foreseeable future.

Then Peggy approached me one day after class. The Coe football team was scheduled to play its annual game against our arch rival in Ripon, Wisconsin, the upcoming Saturday. It seemed that Peggy was from a neighboring town, Green Lake (the birthplace of waterskiing she pointed out). She had a proposition.

Now as it so happened, I was a rare commodity on the Coe campus in those days: a freshman with a car. Her proposal was this: If I would drive her and her best friend Darcy home for the weekend, she’d cover all my expenses, including gas, meals, lodging at her parents’ house, and most importantly, unlimited beer and schnapps.
After confirming that Pedro wouldn’t be making the trip, I said “Sure, what the heck.” Fact is, I was a lousy student and hadn’t planned on studying over the weekend. Besides, I’d have paid good money to spend a few days in the company of Peggy and her amazing twins.

We left shortly after lunch that Friday, skipping our afternoon classes. The five-hour drive from Eastern Iowa to upper Midwest Wisconsin was scenic but otherwise uneventful. After dropping Darcy off with her folks, Peggy took me to meet her family.

After dinner with the folks, the two of us took a leisurely drive around the lake. We topped off the day with a clandestine, late-night “pajama party” rendezvous for nightcaps in front of the fireplace. To my delight, Peggy wore nothing underneath her flannel top. I was in Hooter Heaven.

The next morning after breakfast, Peggy said she had a couple of people she wanted to introduce me to. A short drive later we arrived at her grandparents’ house. They welcomed us at the door of their cozy bungalow and invited us inside.

We were seated in matching overstuffed wing chairs in the small, tidy living room. Her grandparents sat together on the couch across the coffee table from us. On the table were a plate of freshly baked cookies and steaming mugs of hot chocolate. We made small talk, sipped cocoa, and ate gingersnaps. I answered questions about where I was from, my family, my college major, and so on.

As we chatted, I couldn’t help but notice how Peggy’s grandparents carried on together. They were in their 90s, with clear, piercing blue eyes that sparkled when they looked at each other. They sat there on the couch, holding hands like a couple of teenaged school children. Yet Peggy had said they’d been married for more than 70 years. It didn’t make sense to me – never once had I witnessed my parents acting that way.

At a lull in the conversation, I took the opportunity to pose the question gnawing inside me. After pointing out their long years of marriage and obvious undiminished affection for each other, I paused, cleared my throat, and asked: “So what’s your secret?”

They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. He squeezed her hand. After a moment she turned to me and said, “Well… we make the bed together every morning.”

Huh? That’s it? I wasn’t sure if I should take her seriously, but she just sat there looking at me, a sweet little smile on her face.

Before I could respond, she got up and took our mugs into the kitchen to refill them. The conversation quickly turned to other topics. Soon it was time to leave.

We stopped to pick up Darcy and drove to Ripon for the football game. Coe lost, but neither Peggy nor Darcy seemed to care. After the game we headed downtown for some “college cheer” and the typical post-game festivities. The next morning we departed to make our way back to Cedar Rapids.

I didn’t think about my visit with Peggy’s grandparents again until a few weeks later when she showed up at my dorm room door one afternoon, crying. I invited her in.

She hugged me and said she’d just got off the phone with her grandmother, who’d broken the news that her grandfather had passed away. I asked how her grandmother was taking it. She chuckled as she wiped away some tears and said, “Better than I am.” We sat on the edge of the bed and talked.

She shared that her grandparents had never been apart during their 70-plus years of marriage. Not even for one day. Her grandmother had confided to her over the phone that they had made love every single day, including that very morning. I imagined what “making love” meant to two 90-somethings. It probably didn’t resemble the clinical definition of the term. But I guessed that really didn’t matter.

As I pondered the thought, it suddenly dawned on me. I finally understood the “secret” to their marriage.

Sure, they began every day with a shared activity – making the bed together. But it wasn’t about making the room presentable for guests who might drop by unannounced.
It was about starting each day with reverence and respect for the bed in which they consummated their love. It was about holding sacred their vows and their union, and the place where they were reinforced every single day of their life together. Making the bed was just a metaphor.

How simple. How profound. How beautiful.

That weekend, the three of us – Peggy, Darcy and I – drove back to Green Lake for the funeral. Before leaving again for Cedar Rapids, we stopped by Peggy’s grandmother’s house to say our goodbyes.

As I hugged her in the doorway, I peeked inside. I could just see, through the open bedroom door, a carefully made bed. I choked back a tear as I smiled. And I quietly said a small prayer.

(c)2011 Thom Burns

The Beaverdale Hillbillies

I should have recognized the signs from day one.

We’d just moved to Des Moines, where my dad had recently taken a job at a private architectural firm after being passed over for promotion at the Highway Commission (now the DOT) back in Ames.

Our new home was a typical 1960s two-story, four-bedroom, 1-¾ bath rectangular block with attached two-car garage. The vinyl siding was painted a drab olive green, and beige shutters complemented the first-story, tan-brick facade. It was sparsely but tastefully landscaped and had a manicured front lawn. This was July of 1969, and I was nine years old.

The neighborhood had been recently carved out of a holdout farmstead in an established part of Des Moines called Beaverdale. The area featured quaint, post-WWII homes, built on generous lots and surrounded by mature oak and cottonwood trees. They were referred to locally as “Beaverdale Bricks,” not because of their shape, but from the material used to build them. But our newer neighborhood consisted mostly of two-story, vinyl-sided houses like ours, interspersed with the occasional split-level home.

The trees in our neighborhood, like the houses, were younger and smaller than those in the surrounding area. Our new front yard was highlighted by a 20-foot pin oak that dated from the home’s construction four years earlier.

The house directly across the street was a different story.

A mirror image of our own, it was painted white with dark brown shutters and a white-speckled, puce-colored brick facade. But the similarities stopped there.

The small sapling tree in its front yard was barely 10 feet high and was missing its lower branches, which appeared to have been ripped off. Most of its leaves were missing. The juniper bushes looked trampled. There were bare strips of dirt in the lawn on either side of the double-wide driveway. One of the screens on a second-story window was torn away and hung from its frame. The open garage door revealed that half of the space was filled with boxes, clothes, toys, and other various household items: There was barely room in the two-car garage to park one vehicle.

Those indications alone should have been red flags. As it turned out, they were just the tip of a runaway trailer-trash iceberg.

In the next few weeks and over the coming years, I was to fully experience the family we disparagingly referred to as the Beaverdale Hillbillies.

I soon learned that they were transplants from St. Paul, Minn. Of course, they were rabid Twins and Vikings fans. To anyone who would listen, they rambled on (in their odd Minnesota accent) about the heroics of Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Bill Brown, Fred Cox, and the Purple People Eaters.
 
They also brought a passion for professional wrestling with them from Minnesota. Religiously, the entire family sat transfixed around the television Saturday mornings, cheering on their favorite wrestlers. None of them believed it was fake. Broken furniture and gouged walls bore witness to the wrestling holds and throws the kids practiced on each other in the house.

The father worked at IBM and drove an enormous Cadillac sedan, which he parked (mostly) on the driveway (the source of the grassless dirt strips). The two-car, one-space garage held an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser “Family Truckster” station wagon, with simulated wood-grain paneling and distinctive tinted-glass “skylights” along the upper edge of the roof line. I watched mornings as he walked to his car carrying a cup of coffee and a briefcase. He wore the typical IBM “uniform” of dark suit, white shirt, skinny conservative tie, and black wingtips. But what stood out like sore thumbs were his white socks; they were a dead giveaway to his Hillbilly genetics.

The mother – the kids affectionately called her “Minnie” – was a small, wiry, foul-mouthed woman with teased hair, dyed jet black. She was rarely without a bottle of Pepsi in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other.

There were four children in the family: a devious, conniving boy a couple years older than me; a gangly, aloof, clumsy boy my age; an athletically gifted boy a couple years younger. The youngest – a tom-boy girl who could seemingly skip rope all day long – had an attitude and potty mouth just like her mother. They all used slang and poor grammar that was out of place in our educated, middle-class neighborhood.

Minnie did her best to discipline her unruly, hyperactive brood, but with little success. I’d hear a door slam in time to see one of the boys racing down the front walk, Minnie trailing behind, waving a broom. As he disappeared around the corner of the house, she’d stop, shout “Wait ‘til your father gets home!” and retreat back inside, mumbling “Damn kids” under her breath while she locked the door behind her. The kid inevitably would climb up on the roof and pry the screen off a window to get back in the house. She was famous for declaring, “You kids are giving me a sick goddamn headache!” She’d deliver the line with the ever-present cigarette dangling from her mouth, Pepsi in hand.

Minnie kept a small broom closet in the kitchen stocked with several 8-packs of 10-oz. bottles of Pepsi: She limited the kids to a couple of bottles a day, but I suspected that nobody was counting. She baked every week, and there was always a dented aluminum pan of iced chocolate cake and a chipped ceramic jar of chocolate-chip cookies on the counter. The cake never survived more than a few neat slices before the kids started attacking it with their hands, and it became a crumbled chocolate mess by the end of the week. Same with the cookies: the bottom half of the jar was lined with broken, smashed pieces.

It seemed obvious why the kids were so out of control. Sadly, the correlation between sugar, caffeine and hyperactivity apparently was lost on their parents.

The inside of their home was decorated in “Early Montgomery Ward.” A huge acrylic painting of a multi-masted sailing ship on a pitching foam-green sea hung crookedly on the living room wall. It was flanked, asymmetrically, by two equally crooked plastic, fake-candle wall sconces. The couch had worn, stained cushions and scratched knotty pine arms. The walls of all the rooms were sloppily painted in mildly garish colors; paint splatters marked the stucco ceilings where they met the walls.

When they moved to Iowa, they’d left behind an “Uncle Willie” back in Minnesota. He was a character straight out of a Northwoods Dogpatch who eerily resembled Grandpa Munster. He made figurines out of wire clothes hangers and old Grain Belt beer bottle caps, and his tacky statues adorned the end tables in the living room.

I got my full indoctrination to the Beaverdale Hillbillies a few weeks after we moved in. My parents were going on a weekend church retreat and arranged for me to sleep over with our new neighbors.

That evening at dinner, as food was being passed around the Hillbilly kitchen table, the youngest girl reached into a bowl of creamed corn, grabbed a handful, and slapped the gloppy mess down on her plate, sending sauce and kernels flying. She then handed me the dripping bowl. Nobody batted an eyelash.

After dinner, all of us kids went downstairs to the basement, where they had a pool table. Of the six original pool cues, only two remained unbroken. None of the cues had tips. The soft acoustic tile ceiling over the table was peppered with dozens of blue chalk-colored divots where the kids had jammed the cues, when they weren’t using them as weapons on each other.

That night, I shared a bed with the gangly Hillbilly boy my age. I woke in the morning to discover the back of my pajamas were soaked all the way from my butt to my shoulders. At first I thought I’d peed myself. But the front of my PJs were bone dry. I climbed out of bed, grabbed my clothes, and walked down the hall to the bathroom, where I used a washcloth to wipe myself off before getting dressed. Soon, all the Hillbilly kids got up, revealing their morning ritual: After changing out of their wet clothes and stripping the sheets from their beds, they threw them in a pile in the hallway where Minnie gathered them up to haul down to the basement to launder.

Then they flipped their mattresses.

Given their steady diet of sweets and soda, it should have come as no surprise that they all wet the bed. Needless to say, I was never so happy to see my parents when they returned home from their retreat later that day.

That winter, I witnessed another Beaverdale Hillbilly phenomenon: The morning after Christmas, there stacked in a heap on the curb in front of their house, was a huge pile of broken toys.

I’m sure there are more Beaverdale Hillbilly horror stories from those days, but you get the picture. After my siblings and I eventually moved out of the house and went away to college, I think my “empty nester” parents were hoping the Hillbilly kids would do the same, leaving the neighborhood to a little much-deserved peace and quiet. Sadly, shortly after we left, their kids started having kids of their own, and frequently dropped them off with grandpa and grandma to babysit. The youngest girl was the last to move out: She got pregnant, got married, had a kid, got divorced, and moved back in, all in the span of a single year. And so the Beaverdale Hillbilly saga continued…

My parents sold their house and moved to the suburbs.

(c)2011 Thom Burns