Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
Ninety-two hundred
click to see big mofo hospital
We used to imagine the demolition of Los Angeles County Hospital. Would the city allow spectators? Would they charge for front row seats? How many former residents and interns would return to Big County for the privilege of seeing her leveled?
We eat Dodger Dogs and drink Coke. Or, in a fit of sentiment, perhaps we eat carne asada soft tacos and drink horchata or tamarindo. Someone passes me the pad thai. “Hey, Doogie, choke on this!” Another story for another day.
Someone mentions the Northridge earthquake of 1994. It did $389 million in damage to our auxiliary hospitals (Peds Pavilion, Women’s, and Psych), but Big County hunkered down and rode the shaker like a proud old whore.
The first explosives blow. Dust rises and the wings fall, then the main building, with its central hall so wide you could drive an old Buick through it. “Two,” someone says. “Two Buicks.”
The building crumbles. Big County. Mother County. “Ride this one,” I say.
Thirteen crushes
Funny, how some of them still own a piece of me.
1. T. I’m two months shy of my third birthday. She’s an older woman, maybe four or five, a head taller than me, and she won’t let me stand on top of that hill. Damn it! The game’s called King of the Hill, not Queen of the Hill! No matter how many times I try to fight my way to the top of the hill, T pushes me down again and again.
This establishes my lifetime attraction to doms.
2. S. I hope you’re still reading my blog, S, cuz this bit is about you. Remember how I chased you around in kindergarten, trying to steal kisses? Kinda scary to think what would happen to me now, behaving like that. Expulsion for sexual harrassment, no doubt. Back then, I spent countless hours (okay . . . minutes) in that gulag known as The Kitchen, Mrs. Bisetti’s time-out zone, but it did no good. The next day, I was back at it again.
3. Shirley Temple. Yes, there was a time in my life when I dug giggly, chubby-cheeked blondes. Imagine my consternation when I found out she was as old as my mom.
4. Elizabeth Montgomery. Okay, Liz Montgomery I knew had to be as old as my mom, but she was just so cute in Bewitched. One day, I was home with a fever, and I decided Liz was the gal for me. That crush lasted all of a day. It broke with the fever.
5. G. On to more age-appropriate interests. G held my fascination all through first grade. I’ve quite forgotten why.
6. B. What can you say about a ten-year-old girl with boobs? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. Yet extremely slow to realize why I loved playing touch football with her.
7. T. Towards the end of 7th grade, T’s friend told me, “She likes you. She thinks you’re cute.” Then she dragged me out of the library, where T waited on the steps. T wouldn’t look me in the face. She was trying very hard to explain my appeal to another friend of hers: “He’s cute!” Then she noticed me standing there and ran off.
I thought about her all summer. I’d never noticed her before, but that didn’t matter — she liked me! She thought I was cute! Those were two very potent aphrodisiacs, and indeed, they seemed like perfect (and sufficient) prerequisites. At long last, I would have a girlfriend.
Beginning of 8th grade, I learned that T had moved down to Rosemead. I never saw her again, but it took me two years to get her out of my head. Not that there weren’t others vying for head space . . .
8. L. Cute li’l thing and fellow brainiac. We danced the slow dances together in 7th and 8th grade. By 9th grade, she had developed an interest in older boys. She would still flirt with me, but that was the limit. Unless I suddenly developed facial hair and my wallet sprouted a driver’s license, I wasn’t in the running. No way, no how.
After I broke up with GFv1.0 (#11), I wrote L a letter. She wrote me back, telling me about her ambitious and soon-to-be-wealthy her fiance. I recall the phrase, “I know where to butter MY bread.” I never wrote her again.
9. L. We could never manage to be interested in each other at the same time, dammit. Certainly one of my most beautiful crushes. (Candace Bergen, circa 1975: my most beautiful crush.) Eventually she married young, and the marriage ended in disaster. But before she divorced that creep, I met up with her again. I hadn’t seen her since 9th grade. She told me, “Don’t ever get married,” but it was the depth of her pain that touched me — and made me fall in love with her, if only for that instant. She has a permanent bit of my cerebral real estate.
10. S. In 10th grade, I relocated to Alhambra High School. One of the first girls I noticed was S. Mornings, she volunteered in the school library. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her hair. It was amazing! A year later, I confided this in J, AKA GFv1.0, who laughed at me. “You idiot. That was a perm!“
Nevertheless, S served to distract me from my growing interest in J.
11. J. She sat behind me in 10th grade biology and entertained me with a seemingly endless supply of snark on the other kids in class. If Smart Bitches had been around back then, J would have been a founding member. For my part, I did her dissections for her, and I suspect I was pretty funny back then, too. It took me a whole year to realize I’d fallen in love with her, can you imagine? A whole year. And when it hit, it hit like a semi.
This was the girl I would marry. We’d raise a family and grow old together. I couldn’t imagine a future without her in it.
Things flew apart in our second and third year together, largely thanks to me. But even as I was busy sabotaging the relationship, I was still talking marriage. “You know,” she said about six months before the break-up, “you keep assuming I want to marry you.”
Yeah, I took a lot of things for granted. Which was the problem, really.
12. C. Towards the end of my second year at Berkeley, I met C — aw, Carmela, okay? God knows I’ve talked about her enough. We took German together. One evening, our class went as a group to a German restaurant in downtown San Francisco, and Carmela wore ruby slippers. Ruby slippers! How can a guy not fall for a girl who owns a pair of ruby slippers? But what really hooked me on Carmela was her schtick. One day after class, we sat together on a patch of lawn near Wheeler Auditorium, and we started riffing off each other. It was . . . oh God this is trite . . . it was magical. Somehow, we had launched into a mutual standup comedy routine, unplanned, unscripted.
Carmela had a gold necklace of the number 13, a gift from her grandmother, a Northern Italian witch whose workbook the villagers burned after her death. Carmela had a recurring dream of herself in ancient Greece. As Carmela got older, the girl in her dreams aged, too. When I knew Carmela, the dream girl had recently married, and her husband had left her to fight in a far-off war. The girl remained behind, like Penelope, biding her time, waiting for her husband’s return.
Sometimes, I wonder if he ever came home.
13. Karen. Long-timers here know the whole story (here, here, and here) of our courtship, but I thought I’d add one detail. After my friend Stan and I crashed Karen’s apartment two or three times, I called him one night. “What do you think?” I said. “Does she love me yet? Why is this taking so long? Gaaaaaaaaaah!“
I don’t recall being particularly coherent. I do recall Stan’s exasperation. He must have felt like he’d created a monster.
Funny thing is, I don’t think I was in love with her at that point. Fascinated by her, yes. Wanted to be around her, learn everything about her, be a part of her life.
I guess that’s love. As I’ve posted previously, I have a problem with the word.
D.
Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
Drop a note in the comments, yatta yatta.
or
as we yids say
yatata yatata
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants
Don’t get on Trish’s bad side.
The Red Queen has some reading to do.
Ms. Bizarre thinks twice about a piercing. (I think she should have told her husband, “I will if you will.”)
Sapphire Writer gives us her 13 favorite first scenes. (Better late than never, eh, Sapph?)
Kate’s never happy when it rains.
If Sting is the King of Pain, Darla is the Queen of Spam.
Thursdays suck.
Pre-adult Swim
Temple City had one bowling alley, one miniature golf course, and one movie theater, the Temple Theater. This last caused me no end of confusion as a kid. “We’re going to the Temple” could mean a baffling and stressful trip to the theater (Dad liked his war movies) or the interminable boredom of Temple Beth Shalom. Why, oh why couldn’t my parents leave me with a babysitter?
We had one mall (by the early 70s), one small library, one park. The mall had not yet succeeded in killing off our one short but thriving Main Street. We had a few big nurseries nearby — always fun for catching bugs and lizards — and a few elementary schools, which in those days were ungated and stayed open on the weekend.
And we had one public pool.
Ever get the feeling your best posts were behind you?
I’m idea-starved this week. Is it possible I’ve so thoroughly ransacked my memory that there’s nothing left inside but recipes?
Naw. Ain’t true. But as I’ve mentioned before, all my best stories are off limits. I mean, I have to live with these people.
I have a great Thursday Thirteen in store for you tomorrow. Maybe that will make up for this otherwise anemic week. For tonight, here’s a quickie memory. Not my best story, but over the years, its appeal to me has never faded.
We grew up next door to an old Southern nurse named Sadie. Sadie was so benign, even my mother couldn’t hate her, and my mother hated all of our neighbors. Worst thing my mom could say about Sadie: her floors were filthy. Which was true.
Sadie had a Cocker Spaniel named Baby. Every day, she played fetch with Baby, and she encouraged us kids to throw the ball for Baby, too. We liked Sadie because she didn’t mind if we played keep-away on her front lawn or pretended her overgrown backyard was the Congo. She never lost her temper with us, not once, not even when I ate her hibiscus flowers*.
One day, while all us kids were playing touch football in the street, Sadie tossed the tennis ball into the bushes and Baby dashed after it. He came back with not one but TWO tennis balls. Okay, now you have to imagine this old lady with a genteel Southern accent. Ready?
“Wah Baby, lookah that! Baby’s got two balls, don’t you Baby? You got two balls!”
We kept repeating this to each other — Baby’s got two balls! — laughing ourselves silly. To this day, I’m sure I could get my brother to crack up just by saying, “Baby’s got two balls!” With the appropriate accent, mind you. And now I’ve passed the story on to my son, who says the same thing at every opportunity. Baby’s got two balls!
Us Hoffmans, we’re easily amused.
D.
*I had pica — remember?
PS: I pinched that photo from this website. (Evil me . . . but at least I’m giving attribution. That’s a step forward.) Lots of great Spaniel photos, but do yourself a favor: turn off your speakers first.
A trip through the retrospectoscope
Blame Tam for this meme 😉
Thirteen honeymoon memories
My sister saved the excessively long letter I wrote her about my honeymoon, and later gave it back to me. No way I would have remembered half this stuff!
Karen and I did Europe on the cheap in the winter of 1984 (back when Europeans liked us Americans). We rented a car in Brussels, and toodled around Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany for three weeks. Know what I remember most? Jet lag was a bitch.
Here’s Belgium and France. I’ll leave the rest for some other time.
Culinary pariahs
Apologies for the profanity. Food makes me passionate.
Some folks love food, some just eat it. If you don’t know what this gizmo is, you’re probably in the latter group.
Hey, nothing wrong with that. I don’t look down my nose at folks who don’t know their cassoulet from a hole in the ground. But can I give you some advice? If you come over to my house and I make you cassoulet, don’t (A) insult me for the fact I spent several days preparing this for you, or (B) refuse to ever invite me to your house for dinner, since for you it’s all about one-upsmanship, and you don’t want to put out the effort, or (C) forget to show up in the first place. Yes, all of those things have happened to me, some of them more than once.
I like cooking for people. Know what I made for my wife and son tonight? Homemade ravioli with two different fillings (spinach and cheese, and sweet potato) and two different sauces (tomato sauce for the first, sage and browned butter for the second). Yes, it was delicious. No, it wasn’t that much work (about two hours prep time). Yes, I’d do it again.
But not for some people.
Thirteen television memories
Sometimes, I get an idea for a Thursday Thirteen, but I’m not certain I can meet the number. It’s a two-part challenge: come up with something new and interesting, and find thirteen things which apply.
This time, the challenge is different: can I come up with only thirteen television memories — and can I pick the best thirteen?
You folks will undoubtedly have a few of your own television memories, too. Feel free to tell me about them in the comments.