Wildwood Nights

I didn't post anything yesterday because I was just too damned busy. End of story.

Today's title refers to a beach town in New Jersey. It's a part of my childhood. When I was little my grandmother would take me there every August for a few days (we weren't rich so week-long vacations were unheard of), around the Catholic Feast of the Assumption (August 15th) which Irish superstition holds is an auspicious day to put one's "feet into the water" to cure whatever variety of ills one has.

Nevertheless, Nana keeled over dead at 62 of a massive coronary brought on by years of drinking and smoking. But her feet were gorgeous.

Those few days every year were some of the happiest days of my childhood. I loved Wildwood, or as it's known in Philadelphia and Wilmington, "the Irish Riviera". It had a mile-long boardwalk, loaded with arcades, rides and fast-food take-outs of the disgustingly beach-front variety. For a buck or two a night (we're talking the late 50's, early 60's here) you could have a swell time, eat some pizza, ride the scary rides until you puked, ate cotton-candy, won a stuffed toy at a shooting gallery and played pinball or ski-ball until well past 11 p.m.

The last time my Nana and I went there was in 1962. I had just turned 13 and it was getting to the point where it was totally inappropriate for me to share a bedroom in one of the Irish-run bed and breakfasts there with my grandmother. Rather than cruise the boardwalk that year, I totally checked out and went to an air-conditioned movie theater on the boardwalk where I saw, in glorious CinemaScope, David Lean's ravishingly beautiful motion picture, "Lawrence of Arabia", which made an indelible mark on me. I changed a lot during that first year of puberty. I acknowledged to myself that I was gay (or queer, or different or something) and that Roman Catholicism and I were irrevocably on divergent paths from then on. I also knew that I was "okay" and that it was the religions which were fucked up.

Anyway, that August was the last time I set foot in Wildwood until about 9 years ago, when I got my first car in many decades. I drove down there on a whim one Saturday in February or March of 1999. It was cold and wet and rainy but just seeing the place made me want to come back.

And now it looks like I will. My closest friends and I are looking to spend a week there this coming July. We're looking at condo rentals now.

I hope I'm not setting myself up for some sort of disappointment.

Nana

I spoke at length about my maternal grandmother yesterday and about how she sacrificed to give me what she could in my childhood.

I should elaborate a little on some of the circumstances surrounding that. Long story short, my mother couldn't be bothered raising me as a single, 19 year old, parent. Hence I wound up being cared for by her sister (my aunt) her mother (my grandmother), her grandmother (my great-grandmother) and a succession of her girlfriends, many of whom would've made her a fine husband, if you catch my meaning and get my drift.

But my grandmother drank. A little at first, then more after her mother-in-law, my mom's grandmother, died. I was six when that happened. Then her other daughter, my aunt, married and moved out. After that I eventually became my Nana's confidante, son and best friend. I also became her bartender ("Ronnie, get me a beer while you're up, please and take this empty with you.")

Sometimes I became her ambassador to the neighbors. I remember once being told by the drunken man next door that there was "going to be trouble" if I didn't do something about a tree that was about to fall on his car. I was 11. Another time a beer bottle went horribly awry in the middle of the night and visciously attacked my Nana. I had to go wake the neighbors and ask them if they could drive us to the Emergency Room so Nana could get stitched up.

I hated Christmas Day. I hated Easter, too. And Thanksgiving. These were big drinking days in my family and I knew that no matter how much resolve they all showed before the big day arrived, when it did it was almost guaranteed to end in screaming, arguing and acrimonious verbal exchanges.

One of their biggest sources of contention with each other was, surprise, me. They would often drink and fight over me. Matters of custody, mostly. Like I wasn't in the room, or couldn't hear them from upstairs where I was shaking under my covers in fear that they might hurt each other for real... or me.

I lived a life torn between two women I wanted to love, my mother and my grandmother, but both of whom seemed to do everything within their power to make sure that I would grow up hating their combined guts, instead.

They had their good moments, as I wrote about yesterday regarding my grandmother, but those times were almost always outweighed by the self-centered evil of their uncontrollable anger and self-pity which emerged when they were drinking.

I know now that they were not bad people, but merely sick people.

I got something they never got, though.

And that was "better."

a la recherche du temps perdu

The photo is of the intersection of 8th & Market Streets in the sleepy little burg of Wilmington, Delaware, sometime prior to 1959, which is when they took down the last of the overhead electric trolley lines. I missed the electric trollies because they didn't belch out diesel fumes and they were quiet, unlike their replacements.

The picture was taken near the holidays because the Christmas lights are up, hanging from the lamposts all along Market.

My mom worked in that Kresge's on the corner, before I was born. She worked behind the lunch counter. When I was little my aunt would sometimes take me there for a soda treat. This was back when they actually drew the Coca-Cola syrup from a fountain pump and mixed it with the requisite amount of fizzy soda to make a real fountain Coke. They were far better than bottled Cokes.

Way off in the distance, on the upper right-hand side of the picture, you can see the top of the Hotel DuPont, at 11th & Market.

Market Street was turned into a pedestrian mall in the 70's which killed off what little remained of downtown. To this day they keep trying new ideas to revive downtown, but nothing seems to work because they can't restore the one thing that is irreplaceable.... the era. I grew up in Wilmington in post-war America. Things were good. Jobs were pretty plentiful. There was always meat and vegetables and potatoes on the table. Nobody (it seemed) went hungry. Everybody had a job and was buying a car or a house or a "hi-fi" or a tv in those days. Appliances flew off dealer floors. You could buy things "on installment" in those pre-credit card days. TV sets were as much pieces of furniture as they were something you watched. They had to "match the decor" of your living room.

Bargains were still to be had at places like Wanamaker's or Strawbridge's or (for the real bargain hunters) Wilmington Dry Goods.

And around Christmas time Market Street got transformed.

I have never forgotten the year I wanted a toy so badly I could taste it. I kept asking and asking if "Santa was going to bring it" and I got shot down every time. It was some sort of "Astro-Lander" thing that had lots of flashing lights and a side door that opened so a lunar rover could be lowered to the ground and then it would run around. Look, don't knock it. It was the cat's ass when I was a kid.

Anyway, on a snowy December night, I left my grandmother shopping at the Wilmington Dry and started walking up Market Street, through the crowds (I was all of 9 or so). Suddenly I stopped. There, in the window of a novelty store or drug store or something was the toy of my dreams. I RAN back down the street, slipping on the snow-covered sidewalks, to tell my Nana that I'd just saved Santa a lot of hard work and that I'd found it myself.

That good woman just sighed. I knew right then, in that brief moment, the truth about Christmas and Santa. Selfishly, I clung to the illusion, resolved to hang onto it long enough to get my wish.

Nana was not a rich woman, you see. And this toy was not cheap, probably more than $10 (1959) dollars.

But that present was under the tree come Christmas morning.

Of all the toys I got in my childhood, from American Flyer trains to Erector Sets, I have never forgotten that one because for the first time in my life I knew just how much someone who loved me was willing to sacrifice in order to give me a few, brief moments of happiness.

My Nana passed away in 1968, a few months before I entered the Navy. I was 19.

She may have been a drunk. Her alcoholism probably consummed a lot of my childhood and made me the co-dependent ACOA I am today. But when push came to shove, my Nana loved me.

And I loved her.