David Campbell, You Ruin Everything!

She was my first 'real' doll. We were very, very poor and until then I'd owned only used or homemade pillow dolls. This one came from a surprise Christmas gift, and I vowed I'd never lose her.

Seventeen inches tall, molded of finely colored peachy plastic, with flowing blond hair and rooted eyelashes and beautiful blue eyes, this doll was everything I'd ever dreamed of. She came with a pair of pajamas, an undershirt with a tiny bow, and a red cheerleader outfit.

I loved that doll. I loved that red and white cheer outfit, too. It embodied everything that I was not- peppy, coordinated, popular. I named the doll Kimberly and I cherished her.

One day I was brave enough to bring her to school for show and tell. Things went fine until the bus ride home through the rolling hills of Tustin. I had changed Kimberly into her pajamas and had stored her little cheerleader outfit in the plastic baggie that had held my corn chips for lunch. I held my doll and looked out the window, content in the fact that I'd be home within ninety minutes (it was a long bus ride!).

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, David Campbell, that red-haired child of discord that was in my class, suddenly snatched the little baggie out of my hands and tossed it from the open bus window. I screamed once, flailing wildly at the window in futile desperation.

"Why did you do that?!?" I shouted at him through my tears. He merely grinned through his freckles and plopped back down in his seat. I implored the bus driver to stop so that I could find my little bag of clothes, but she was an evil woman and ignored me, rattling down the dirt roads at a good clip of 55mph. Not only did she ignore me, she punished me for yelling instead of David for stealing my belongings. Welcome to my life.

***

I can not remember how many times our bus was stopped by the side of the road while a driver waited for David to stop making trouble. For the second-to-last kid on the bus route, and one acutely subject to motion sickness, each day's ride was a grueling affair. Kids who got off on early stops did not care how much trouble they made for others. I only wish he could have experienced getting home so late in the winter that it was actually dark in the Northern Michigan afternoon. Maybe he wouldn't have been subject to as many half hour delays. Knowing David, however, he probably wouldn't have cared.

David ruined field trips and class visits and playground equipment and lunch outings. He tripped people doing the three-legged race on the last day of school, and he was waiting to steal your cookies on the first day of school. David Campbell was a menace.

***

We had a little biology lesson going on in sixth grade class. A terrarium had found a worthy occupant in a small painted turtle. As time went on, we added a frog for company and some random bugs for food. At some point in time a Mason jar appeared with a single frog egg. This was watched curiously every day- sixth graders, for all of their apparent aloofness, are very inquisitive creatures.

The egg grew and became a tadpole. I missed some of these stages due to illness, but I remember returning to school and heading right for that Mason jar. There he was, swimming placidly in the water, utterly unaware of his impending doom.

We did our studies and were released for lunch hour. I remember cruising out of the classroom and hearing a ruckus behind me, but ignoring it. Partway down the hall, two boys from my class passed me, headed back from the cafeteria, pounding the floor in their rush. These were not boys who ever skipped a lunch, so their urgent need to be in the classroom disturbed me. Could something be wrong? I turned my steps back to the classroom and popped my head around the doorframe just in time to see David Campbell's red head flung back and the Mason jar in his hand, empty.

He had eaten the tadpole.

After lunch recess, we shuffled back into the classroom, ready to finish our studies. David sat smugly in his chair, cutting notches into his desk.

The entire terrarium was gone. Our teacher stood before the class with a grave look on his face.

"I have an announcement." He said simply, "Due to people's lack of respect for the animals in our classroom, we will no longer have any animals in this class. People interested in animals may study them in books, in the library."

David did not get punished, to the best of my knowledge. Turns out, there were no actual rules about kids eating classroom experiments. He did, however, get salmonella. He disappeared from school after vomiting on the schoolbus one day, and was not seen again for two months. I suppose being an idiot does occasionally pay back.

Frank the Trailer Park Guy

When I was ten years old our family purchased a 28 foot RV with scratchy red curtains and we headed west. Winding up in Tucson, AZ, we settled on a pleasant little place called Town & Country Mobile Estates, out on Benson Highway on the south end of town. We were the only RV in the trailer park, to the best of my memory, but that's the way the Roncari family rolled.

I remember stopping by a few RV parks on our way out there, and most of them were too expensive for long-term stay. I guess my dad was either too poor or too dumb to just rent an apartment or a house for the duration of our stay there. So we somehow hit on the idea of a trailer park- it had all the hookups, a nice little driveway, and even some sort of scraggly tree in the tiny yard.

Best of all, it had plenty of other kids to play with, something we'd never had out on the forty acres in rural Tustin. I remember that the park was split in two sections- the 'family' side, and the old people side. Dad found a lot that he liked better on the old people side, but Frank, the property manager, was adamant that we stay on the family side because we were, after all, a family. With three kids. I still don't know how my dad thinks he can get away with crap like this. Megalomania, I suppose.

I remember being very grateful to Frank at that point in my life. You see, I had never had many friends, and on the family side of the trailer park I saw many friendly faces peering out from various windows. Frank stayed and chatted with us for a while, and I developed an uncanny liking for the guy. He was big- tall and heavy, with massive arms and long, flowing blond hair. In fact, he had the prettiest hair that I had ever seen on a man. Although we had spent half a year in Quartzite, northern Arizona, southern Tucson was new to us then. The sunlight, which never really goes away until August, glinted off Frank's hair and made it look like gold.

After Frank and my dad got all of the hookups done (requiring a couple of trips to the hardware store for various water and septic adapters) Frank bustled off in his little golf cart and my dad and mom were giggling about something. I didn't have much time to stick around being curious, because there were already several children hanging around outside my door. I suppose I must have been the freak- the kid whose family moved into the park in a giant recreational vehicle instead of a regular single wide like everyone else- but I never lacked for friends in those few months.

Frank came by a few days later to see how we were settling in. His hair was different that day- more curly, more blond- and something else was different about him this time. His nails were long and- well, pretty. They were a soft, shimmering shell pink. I was in awe. I had never seen a man with pink nails. He didn't have rough, cracked cuticles like my dad had, no chips on the ends like mine, not short and utilitarian like my moms... just soft, shiny, pretty.

My ten-year old mind didn't really take in what was the situation at the time. I had been raised pretty sheltered. Sure, by that fall we had participated in three seasons of the Michigan Renaissance Faire, so I'd seen a good portion of blue spiked hair and excessive cleavage; but I had never, ever seen a man with pink nails.

Frank chatted a bit with my parents and walkeda round the side of the camper to check a connection of something. My mom and dad exchanged looks, and my dad giggled again. I had no idea, honestly, what they found so funny about Frank.

Life went on- my dad opened his first mall kiosk- a little pewter and silver sales booth in the food court of the El Con mall. That is where I fell in love with horchata- the creamy white rice drink from Mexico, and tacquitos. I attended most of my fifth grade year at Gallegos Elementary school and learned a few Spanish words. Frank stopped by every now and then- to collect rent, let us know of some announcement about the park, or gently chide us kids for riding our bikes through the 'old people' side of the park (there's a strict no-kids policy on that side, except for Christmas caroling). Every time he stopped by his hair was magnificent and his nails were gorgeous.

There was a pool in the center of the trailer park, but I do not ever remember being allowed to go there. My parents were very anti-fun in those days, but I had a feeling also that we were not encouraged to hang out around Frank all that much. It took me another five years before I figured out just what kind of a person that he was, and we were long gone by then. He was always, always a very kind man, almost too chatty. I think now, looking back, that he was lonely. Whatever he was- transgender, transvestite, or just gay- it was still the 80s and things like that were not mainstream yet.

I do think it was kind of appropriate, in some strange way, that the crazy family from the backwoods of Michigan, living in the RV, wound up in a park run by the man that was also somewhat of a societal freak. But at the time I didn't know that we were freaks, and I didn't know that Frank was weird in any way.

I just thought he had pretty nails.
And I've never gotten mine to grow out that nice.

A Tale of First Loves- Culinary and Human

Gatlinburg, Tennessee, 1989. I was twelve, just beginning to take an interest in life outside of fairy tale books.

At that time my dad owned a little floundering jewelry store on the sixth floor of the Mountain Mall. I would come to work most days with him, doing my best to help wait on the few customers, occasionally puttering with the wax that has since become my life. I had friend next door whose dad owned both the fur and carpet shops on our floor. We would play together, catching crawfish in the river out back or burying ourselves beneath Oriental rugs in the storeroom. A couple of floors down was a magic shop, and if I stopped by long enough I was guaranteed a demonstration of the latest novelty trick. Escalators connected all six floors, and my sisters and I would take turns racing the wrong way, courting scoldings from some of the other store proprietors. At the time, Gatlinburg residents got into most of the tourist traps for free, and I’d spend long happy hours inside Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Fannie Farkle’s.

I had a lot of freedom back then, my dad was too preoccupied with life to be overly concerned with me. He’d often give me three bucks to get a Wendy’s salad down on the ground floor. That was back in the day of the legendary Superbar. Don’t you wish they’d bring that back? My thirty-year old GI tract probably couldn’t handle it now.

My favorite thing to do that summer was hit the salad section of the Superbar, loading that plastic plate high with lettuce, peas, mushrooms, red onions and croutons. I’d pop a few cherry tomatoes on the side, scatter sunflower seeds all over the place (once I picked the raisins out and carefully put them back. Man, I was a nasty kid) and ladle a generous amount of their lovely ranch dressing all over. I can still taste that salad in all its vernal perfection.

One sticky summer day I walked downstairs as usual, clutching my paltry three dollars in the pocket of my hot pink jumpsuit. (Don’t you love the 80s? Bad fashion and food for less than ten dollars…) I rounded the corner, carefully stepping on the parquetry flooring that ran parallel to the street, and came up short in front of Wendy’s.

The Superbar was closed for cleaning.

Being a hungry adolescent, I wasn’t about to wait forty minutes for the thing to be restocked and reopened. I needed food, and soon. My eyes cast around for another idea. I knew that the restaurants up the street were fairly expensive, and didn’t want to venture outside of the mall that day. The only other choice that presented itself to me was the Irish pub next door to the tobacconist’s. I’d never set foot inside, but I’d seen people eating at the long laminated bar. I stepped inside,

“Bit early in the day to start drinking, eh?” The voice came from a handsome man, dark hair setting off eyes that crinkled at the corners. He sounded different from the natives I’d grown accustomed to, a Yankee accent, like mine. I smiled shyly at him and was rewarded with further eye-crinkling.
“I-I just need lunch.” I stammered, embarrassed to be in this den of adulthood.
He jerked his thumb at a dry-erase board, still almost a novelty back then. The board hung on the wall behind the bar, between signs for Guinness and Budweiser, elixirs which I would remain innocent of for another several years. Scrawled on the board were prices for the standard bar burger, some sort of chili dog with too many toppings, and something called an Irish Taco.

It was exactly $3.00.

“I’ll take that, please.” I pointed at the bottom line on the whiteboard and spread my bedraggled dollars on the bar. The handsome face grinned, told me to have a seat, and ducked under the bar for a carryout container.
I clambered up on the tall stool and sat watching his back. He moved with an easy grace, one that I’ve since come to know as congruous with that of an experienced bartender. He opened a foil packet of Fritos, dumped them into the black plastic dish, and tossed the bag in the trash without looking. In the little food prep station, there was a chafing dish on simmer. He flipped the lid open, winked at me in the mirror, and poured a heaping ladle of chili all over the Fritos.
“You like spicy stuff?” he asked. I nodded dumbly. I didn’t notice it particularly then, but now I remember that he never called me ‘kid’, ‘squirt’, or any of the other demeaning nicknames grownups often tag children with.

Maybe that’s why I fell in love with him.

Or maybe it was the beautiful way he handled things, like he gloried in the simple pure contact with everyday things. I had often watched my mom chop tomatoes- chop, chop chop! I had even done it myself, but never had I seen someone bend his head over the cutting board and carefully, almost tenderly, cut a razor-thin perfect round slice of the red fruit. To this day I cannot slice a tomato like that, it always has one edge thicker or angled off.

He threw a dollop of sour cream on top of the chili, then threw those perfect tomato slices all over, not caring in the least for his masterpiece of shaving.

I had never been interested in an older man until that point. Looking back now, in order to have worked in a liquor establishment, he must have been at least 21, but he seemed young to my twelve year old eyes. He had a solid and lovely chest under the ratty tee shirt, and his white apron draped easily on well-proportioned hips.
“Want a beer, too?” his light mocking caught me off-guard.
“No thank you.” I replied, blissfully unaware of the fact that I wouldn’t have even been able to order one.
“Then how about green onions, on top of the taco? It comes with it, but most people don’t want them.”
Green onions have always been a weakness of mine.
“Oh, of course!”
“Good!” he smiled, and his eyes crinkled again, “It’s the only way to eat it.” Whereupon he proceeded to sprinkle finely minced green all over my lunch.

With that same rapid grace, he flipped a lid onto the mess, slid it across the bar towards me, and punched keys on the register. It came to $3.12
“Oh!” I flushed, panic setting in, “I only have the three d-“
“Don’t worry about it!” he cut me off, waving away my protestations, “I’ve got it. Enjoy your lunch.”

I don’t remember getting back to the store, five flights of stairs with that hot dish in my hands. My heart was hammering as I scrambled onto the stool near my dad’s repair bench. Opening the box, I could almost feel myself salivating, and I can taste that first bite to this very day.

Every respectable bar has at least one dish that they cook well. For some, it’s a burger, others- wings. In South Bend, there’s an Irish pub that makes a divine stew, liberally seasoned with Guinness Stout. For this bar, whatever its name was, the dish was chili. Meaty, spicy, rich and warm, their chili was perfect. Coupled with the salty corn chips, cool sour cream, and the fresh tomato and green onion, it was a dish I would be happy to eat at any elegant restaurant.

Irish Tacos soon trumped Wendy’s Superbar for lunch. Not only did they taste better, but no one at Wendy’s flirted gently with me, or gave me free New York Seltzer Chocolate Seltzers, or cut their tomatoes with such a craftsman’s hand. I made sure to always bring four or five dollars after that, leaving the change in a little pile on the bar top for my Chili Knight. We moved away late that summer and I have never been back, not in all of these eighteen years since. I’ve encountered the same dish since, called anything from Walking Tacos to Chili Pie, but no one (not even me!) has ever made it taste quite as good.

So wherever you are, man that cuts tomatoes nicely and is friendly to shy children, thank you.