Out on the Streets of Hammond
I’m fifty-one years old, staring down the barrel of fifty-two, and I still have no fucking idea what I wanna be when I grow up. I remember coming close to deciding about ten years ago when I was slinging funny books at The Deep. Life was good. Stress free. Money free. I’d spend the day reading comic books, discussing comic books, occasionally dispatching a mouthy customer with the back of my hand. I could do this forever, I thought. I didn’t need money or health insurance. I was forty-two years old; I thought I had the answer to life, the universe, everything. I’d stand behind the cash register, big grin plastered across my face, newest issue of the Immortal Hulk splayed spread-eagle across the counter, watching a co-worker, a grown ass man with a massive mountain man beard and his own bedroom in his parents’ basement after three decades of walking the earth, and maybe he feels like he’s got things figured out as he excitedly opens his chicken nugget happy meal his mother so thoughtfully dropped off for him. It was a SpongeBob themed happy meal. I watched him open it out of the corner of my eye.
His name was Owen. I remember that much. He’d sometimes blush at the Red Sonja and Vampirella comic books I favored.
“Oh, man, Squidward, again,” Owen huffed around a mouthful of processed chicken bits.
He had a barbecue dunked nugget in one hand, a shrink-wrapped Squidward in the other. Twinkling blue eyes among all the long blonde hair and a blondish beard exploding off his face as if it were in a hurry to go duck hunting. I’d seen this cat get emotional over a fucking Pokémon card he pulled from a slim pack he gave thirty of his mom’s stripper dollars for.
“Hey, Polish Hammer, you want my Squidward? I got like three of these already.”
“No, I don’t want your fucking Squidward. Maybe if we were eight years old and I caught your ass on the elementary school playground, maybe then I’d horsewhip your monkey ass and take that Squidward from you. Rightfully. By force.”
“Jeez. What’s got into you? You so mean.”
“Goddammit, man, you mind chewing those chickie nuggies with your mouth closed? You’re discombobulating the customers.”
I went back to work at the fucking factory not long after. Come to find out, I did need money and health insurance, after all.
When I was a kid, back north, running the streets of The Region, I always knew what I wanted to be once I grew up. It may have changed from one day to the next, but I always had an answer to the question.
I wanted to be an archeologist, of course. I carried a coffee table book on the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb that I bought for fifty cents at a yard sale. I kept a tattered backpack with a trench tool and a hand broom in case I was called upon to unearth any Egyptian artifacts from the dirt piles behind Hermit’s little league field. I also carried a pocket-sized journal where I jotted hieroglyphics as I found them in the public restrooms at Pulaski Park. Phrases like “Trinity sucks dick” or “Polanchek shit his pants 6-13-82.” Only thing, I needed to complete my archeological cosplay was a .38 revolver so I could shoot Nazis in the face.
Next day, I’d be training to be a boxer, doing six sets of four push-ups throughout the day. This seemed to amuse my dad who didn’t know what to make of the rubberbands I wore around my upper arms to make my biceps swell. I’d run around the outside of the house two times to get my calisthenics in. Dad would hold a hand up to see how hard I could punch.
He wasn’t impressed.
“What the fuck’s that?”
“That’s… uh… my right cross.”
“No, that thing you’re doing with your fist. Winding it up. That’s dumb as hell.”
Now, I’d seen Popeye winding up his fist countless times before launching Bluto into the stratosphere with one punch. I couldn’t imagine punching real hard without putting a little mustard on it.
“It’s ridiculous. Quit it.”
I wound up my fist again, and he clocked me one on the side of the head with his open left palm.
Tears instantly stung my eyes. “Hey! That’s cheating.”
My dad sighed, looked at me the way I would one day look at Owen stuffing Happy Meal nuggets into his yap. I began to sense perhaps the Polish Hammer would not be tomorrow’s shot at the Great White Hope.
Maybe singing in a rock n’roll band was a little bit more my speed. I’d won a boom box in a raffle from the Dairy Topper earlier in the summer. It came with a cassette player which allowed me to record songs off the radio. Mostly, I used it to listen to Quiet Riot tapes I stole from Zayre. I lacked the ability to recognize pitch. I possessed a dodgy sense of rhythm. My grip on remembering lyrics was slippery at best. Regardless, there are locals who lived near the ancestral manse at 4110 Sheffield Ave who even now recall with disconcerting clarity the deranged caterwauling that would drift on the polluted air as incessant as the chug of freight trains crisscrossing town. “Condition… Condition… Condition Critical… Critical…”
Writing my own songs I felt added legitimacy to my rock n’roll dreams. After all, one couldn’t achieve radio saturation by covering the song of a band who already covered the song from another band. The royalties would be watered down to pennies every time my imaginary band, Silent Ruckus, covered “Cum on Feel the Noize.” I needed original tunes. Not too original, though. Most of the lyrics I penned could be sung to the instrumentation of Eddie Grant’s “Electric Avenue.”
With my handful of songs, I decided to put on a concert. Acapella, since I owned no musical instruments, no resources to procure musical instruments, and no instruction in how to play musical instruments should the opportunity to steal musical instruments present itself to me.
My dad sat at the kitchen table nurturing a can of Old Style. It was that time of day when he’d finished one work shift and was counting down the minutes until he had to leave for his second job. He wore his navy-blue polyester pants and white wife beater shirt. He rarely wore anything else. His hair was swept back displaying the famous Koweski M hairline that at some point in my ignorant youth I looked forward to developing completely unaware I’d very soon skip the M altogether and land straight on the Polish Hammer O.
“Hey, Dad, I got some songs I want to sing for you.”
“For fuck’s sake,” he sighed, rotating the sweaty beer can in his hand. “The whole goddam neighborhood just heard you hollering about ‘bang your head’ or some shit. Can we just give it a break?”
“This is a good one, Dad. I wrote it myself.”
“I gotta go to work.” He seemed happy about it for once.
“Just one song.”
“Christ.”
“Okay, here it goes… Out on the streets of Hammond…”
Without musical accompaniment, and with the singing voice of a muttering wino my song came across more like spoken word poetry. Which is strange. I’ve wanted to be a televangelist, a ski instructor, a camp counselor, a ranch hand, a ninja mercenary for some shady government facility headquartered in a swamp who ends up doing battle against a vegetative beast who looks sorta like a dude crossed with a cucumber vine, but I’d never wanted to be a poet.
The song continued…
“Down near the trash fires and winos… the rain falls like broken glass…out on the streets of Hammond… if you’re not watchful, careful… a dog will end up raping your ass…”
“Stop. Stop. Stop.” Dad scowled. “Raped by a dog?”
“Yeah, those dogs out on the mean streets of Hammond are fierce.”
“Son, do you know what ‘rape’ means?”
I thought about this for a second. I thought I knew what the word meant. Something like assault except a little more vicious. Dad shook his head, the way he often did when he circumstances forced him to teach me something I should have somehow already learned through social osmosis.
“Dogs can’t rape people. And people really shouldn’t rape dogs. I mean, what the fuck, son?”
We sat there for a second, sizing each other up as it slowly dawned on me the word carried some sort of sexual connotation.
“Oh…”
“Yeah, oh…”
And, I think now, forty-two years later, my father in the cold ground for thirty-six of those years, that this is a lesson that Kash Patel should have learned at the feet of his father at some point.
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.
