In the Summer of Short Pants and Flannel
So, here’s a story.
This one goes way back, thirty plus years, back in the summer of short pants and flannel when I was beginning to dig what the boys from Seattle were laying down but couldn’t quite turn loose of Skid Row, Queensryche and Saigon Kick. Back then, I cultivated shoulder length hair, dyed jet black, in the style of Trent Reznor, though I was secretly taking my follicle aesthetic from Achtung, Baby! era Bono. I feared I looked like neither, though. Just a big, pasty-faced Polack with this clump of stringy black hair.
I was nineteen, maybe twenty at the time and mostly an idiot, anyway. The Polish Hammer persona hadn’t quite taken root. I was feeling egotistically vulnerable. On top of that, most women were still resistant to my charms, if you can believe that. So when Robin Dellarocco called me, half drunk, three o’clock in the morning, wanting to know what I was up to, I had to admit I was immediately available.
There’s a possibility I was the one who called her.
No matter. Either I invited myself or she told me to come by. Regardless, I shaved my balls, combed my hair back, put on my best Fastway concert T-shirt, and got my ass over to Robin’s parents’ house on Gostelin Street. To say that she lived in a rough neighborhood shouldn’t downplay the fact we lived in The Region where every street in every direction presented its own cornucopia of criminal endeavors and dangers.
Now, before I hopped into my ’78 Buick Electra, Robin warned me I needed to be quiet. This alarmed me. Had it gotten out to the ladies that I whimper when I orgasm? No. Her wicked stepsister was sleeping on the other side of the house. If she were to be awakened by a bumbling Polack, there’d be hell to pay.
“Knock gently on the second window from the front,” Robin said. “Softly. I’ll hear it.”
“Not a problem, sweetheart,” I answered, laconically. The way Jim Morrison might have responded if he were a desperate, sex-starved Polack.
I made sure to quote Robin directly here because when I knocked on the designated window, her goddam stepsister stuck her head out. I remembered her from high school. She had a rotten name like Marjorie or something. She didn’t like me. She didn’t like anyone, really, but her distaste for me seemed a little extra.
“What the hell do you want?” She fairly growled. “You have any idea what time it is?”
I briefly entertained the notion she asked me this second question because I’m Polish. Like I couldn’t read a fucking clock…
“Uh… Booty call for Robin Dellarocco.”
Was that disappointment that briefly flittered across her features? And if so, for whom?
She drew her shaggy head back into the house and shut her window. Three minutes later I heard a brief commotion and directly afterward Robin stormed out of the house followed by five other people, four of whom sported goatees of varying degrees. One guy carried a thirty pack of Old Style in a can, the donkey piss of beers.
“What the hell, man,” Robin greeted me. “You not know how to follow simple directions?”
“Well, yeah. Second window from the front.”
“Did you even stop to look which side of the house was the front?”
I did not. I couldn’t say this, though, with everyone staring at me. I merely scratched my suddenly itchy balls.
“I guess there’s nothing to do but make the best of it. Want a beer?”
I did want a beer, but I had to settle for whatever Hobo underwear sweat constituted Old Style in a can.
Apparently, Robin did not invite me to her house for the best sex of her life. With her parents away on an Alaskan cruise, she was entertaining a small gathering of friends and thought I might like to swing by and socialize. The prospect of sex, she insinuated, was something I must have fabricated out of thin air. I know, I could hardly believe it myself.
I was vaguely familiar with her friends. The males regarded me with belligerence. The lone female, Allison, treated me to her usual ambivalence. I didn’t hold this against her. She was a tiny, incredibly shy girl. Maybe she talked more when I wasn’t around. I don’t know. Only words I’d ever heard out of her mouth up to that moment was “stop staring at me, pervert.” And that had been a while ago.
There were a few lawn chairs, and I settled into one of them and cracked open an Old Style. I took a cringing sip. Yeah, it still wasn’t for me. Hotdog water would have been more refreshing. I set the can down in the lawn and never looked at it again.
Socializing consisted of the four other guys constantly trying to cockblock each other while I languidly hung back wondering how I could nonchalantly retreat back to my Buick and get the hell out of there.
We must have been out there twenty minutes before the cops swooped in on us suddenly and with a studied precision. One moment, the jackass with the slightly bushier goatee that actually connected in the corners of his mouth was pontificating upon being the first among his comrades to acknowledge the genius of Kurt Cobain, the next moment there were three squad cars and a paddy wagon surrounding the house. I recognized these police as Hammond’s gang unit from my brief affiliation with the Polish Mafia.
Allison immediately made a run for it, scurrying like a mouse toward the alley. Just last week she’d been nabbed for underage drinking at the forest preserve. So, she had that going for her. She didn’t get far. Two officers ran her to ground before she got twenty feet.
I remained seated on the lawn chair. Given the neighborhood, it was obvious to me the police were gleefully anticipating a cadre of Latin Kings to bust. Disappointment was writ large on their faces as they surrounded our circle.
I recognized the lead officer. He’d pulled me over a couple of weeks ago on Calumet Avenue heading toward Whiting under some bullshit pretense. He didn’t like the Miller High Life bottle caps strewn across the backseat floorboard, but there wasn’t much else he could hang me with. He especially took issue with my buddy in the passenger seat, Dave Miller, who really was trouble personified. “Robocop” as we came to call this paramilitary leaning cat quickly fixated on the green pachuco cross tattooed on the webbing between Dave’s thumb and forefinger. He demanded to see what other tattoos we sported. I proudly displayed my newish wolf head inked into my chest and the zombie head on my shoulder. When Tom, a half-retarded friend who’s association with us came about due to his home’s close proximity and a mutual love for Iron Maiden, sitting in the backseat revealed the cartoony tiger rub-on Barqtoo on his bicep, a crackerjack style prize he’d pulled from a twelve pack of root beer, it was more than Robocop could stand.
“What are you doing out here this late?” Robocop asked.
“I live here,” Robin said.
I noted with some bemusement that one of the officers accompanied Allison to a squad car and seated her in the back seat. I had a feeling if they wanted to round us all up, we’d be marching to the back of the paddy wagon by now. Another officer gathered our IDs and checked for priors and outstanding warrants.
“Having a few beers?” Robocop asked.
A couple of the guys nodded, shame faced.
“Hell, no,” I said. “I came late and thought I was going to drink a few beers until I saw they were drinking Old Style in a can. I’d rather guzzle fluid from a skunk’s anal gland.”
“So you drank nothing?”
“Well… I took a sip to be friendly, and that liked to kill me.”
“Why are you all outside, disrupting the neighbors? You know people gotta work.”
We all shrugged, not a fucking job between us. Aside from Robocop and the officer questioning Allison at the squad car, there were six other officers, flashlights bounding across the yard looking for something, anything to further incriminate us. This after they frisked us and found nothing. Robocop did the honors of patting me down.
“Why are you wearing cowboy boots?” He asked. “You work at a ranch?”
This was back in 1993, mind you, a year or two before I’d seen the Doors movie, and that was it. I thought I was the reincarnation of the Lizard King on top of everything else. I’d begun writing poetry about death and wearing cowboy boots. Thank God, I’d opted not to wear my leather britches.
After taking my boots off and shaking them out, proving I carried neither dope or weapons, Robocop conferred with the other officers, and they decided I could go. About this time, my Polish blood betrayed me, and I reminded him he’d pulled me over a couple weeks ago and let me go then as well.
He narrowed his eyes and studied my features. I could tell the connection was made the moment his lips curled up in a smile. “Barqtoos. You just hang out with idiots or what?”
“Almost exclusively. They’re the only people who’ll have me.”
“Okay, Bono, I see you like to talk.”
“Nice! But, honestly, I’m going more for the Trent Reznor look when you get down to it,” I hedged, nervously side-eying Robin and her friends.
“Well, you look like a diabetic Count Dracula. Why don’t you tell me where I can find some drugs, you like to talk so much.”
“Officer, I don’t have any drugs on me.”
“Yeah, but I bet you know where I can get some. Hell, my gramma knows where to score some dope.”
I did not doubt this. I’ve known some savvy grannies. My first inclination was to say “then why don’t you go interrogate her geriatric ass,” but I knew only heartbreak laid at the end of that clever bon mot.
Fortunately, one of Robin’s weaselly friends looking to curry favor with the black boots spoke up. “I know some people who sell marijuana.”
I quickly turned and memorized that fuckstick’s face. Piece of shit. I made a mental note never to peddle the weed in his presence.
“All right,” Robocop said, “looks like goofball’s off the hook. You can go ahead and fuck off back home, now.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. But he did, as I started toward my Buick.
“Where you going?” He hollered.
I pointed at my car.
“No way. I don’t know what you drank or didn’t drink. Your ass is walking home.”
Fuck. Five miles through The Region’s worse gang-infested territory.
“Can I at least grab my Seven Mary Three CD? That shit’s like gold around here.”
“Do you want to go to jail with your buddy over there? Leave the shitty music and the Buick. If I ride back by here and see you’ve touched either, I’m coming after your ass, and there won’t be a Barqtoo in the world that will save you. Understand?”
I wasn’t the one with the rub-on tiger tattoo… But I doubted I’d score any points arguing. And that’s where the story ends for me. I bring it up now, I suppose, because I’m feeling nostalgic for the days when supercops would show a little fucking restraint rather than gunning you down in the street if you could flash some white skin.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
