On the other hand, there are parents who rarely mention their children. You might think I would enjoy them more, but they are often crackheads or people offering to sell their children for heroin. I'm not saying the upper middle class obsession with parenting is ALL bad. There are a lot of kids who grow up in neighborhoods without nice cars and manicured lawns. O.K. Most of them. I grew up in one where people's cars often had fucked up paint jobs and/or dented fenders or tape on broken side windows. Lawns were mostly native weeds and Bahia grass that rarely got mowed and there was never any trimming along curb lines or driveways. And look at me! I turned out. . . .
Most of the kids I grew up with didn't do so well. The most successful aspired to work for the county in one way or another, and of course. . . kids.
Dresser, one of my biker friends from the old steroid gym, was a parent. Dresser had a bad limp due to a motorcycle accident before I met him. I had seen him a few years before I knew him in a bar sometimes frequented by bikers. He was wearing one of those little caps like Brando in "The Wild One" and his biker colors. He was an unbelievably handsome fellow with a winning smile. But his loving heart got twisted somehow over the years, and his pretty wife kicked him out because she could no longer suffer his wandering ways, and she raised their daughter alone. Sort of. Dresser would go back and forth once in awhile when he was desperate for a place to stay. Eventually Dresser started turning tricks. It was something several of the fellows at the gym would do. Dresser, like a few others, drove a cab at night, but he eventually/inevitably lost his license and turning tricks was his main source of income. None of these fellows who did this considered themselves "gay." It was an open secret, of course. They wouldn't kiss a man and would never perform oral. It was sort of the old saw, "I'm not gay, but twenty bucks is twenty bucks."
One night, Dresser called his ex from the hospital. He had been found in a dumpster with his head bashed in. I later learned that he had tried to hustle a fellow who hit him with a tire iron. Dresser was a little simple for awhile, quiet-like. He would sit with his hands folded in his lap and simply stare out at the world. His daughter was in high school at the time, a pretty girl who was a good student, and she looked after him. For awhile. Dresser seemed to regain most of his senses in time and returned to his wayward lifestyle. He broke the heart of his only child.
But Dresser and I got along famously. I was his source of reading material each time he went to jail--Kerouac and Bukowski are two I remember giving him. He eventually got his drivers license back, and it wasn't more than a few months before he got drunk and ran head on into another car on a lone highway to the beach.
He decided to skip town. A few months later, I got a telephone call from him at the gym. He was living in Milwaukee working in a shoe factory. He wanted me to know that he had a Black girlfriend with whom he was living. They had become Brewers fans and went to many of their games. All in all, he said, he was doing fine. . . and ended the conversation with a laugh.
He would sneak back into town from time to time, I heard, to see his daughter. The last time I saw him, I was walking back from lunch with one of my buddies in Gotham. We passed a bum walking ahead of us on the street. The bum had straggly long hair, ragged clothes, and a limp. The sole of one shoe was flapping. As we passed, something clicked, and I turned around to look at this disheveled pirate fellow.
"Dresser!"
"Ha. I wondered if you would say hello to your old friend," he growled.
My buddy looked on at us with some distressed amazement as I chatted with Dresser for a few moments. This was Dresser, the once beautiful outlaw biker who danced in chaps onstage at gay bars to pay his way home from Key West, who slept for a month in a lawn chair in another gym guys garage, who had eventually been banished from the biker gang he had helped to build.
He didn't mention his daughter.
I'm just sayin'. . . blah blah blah.
It's not just the upper middle class who have children, and their incessant jabber about little Timmy's soccer games isn't really bad. . . probably. I have bohemian friends whose kids turned out terribly. Mental illness, drug addiction, bad crimes. . . .
So yea. Teach your children well and all that. Just know how inane talking about it can be. Take a lesson from Dresser.
Joke. Just a joke. As I say, I like kids. It's the parents that kill me.
But that's enough of that. One last thing. YouTube gave me Aubrey Plaza last night. I watched clips of her on talk shows and other things for an hour. I didn't know who she was. Really? It turns out she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022 by Time Magazine. WTF? I had to look her up. Most of what she was famous for was alien to me. I never watched "Parks and Recreation" because it was on commercial t.v. But. . . I HAD seen her in two things--"Bad Grandpa," and "White Lotus."
Huh.
I think her best performances, from what I can surmise, were on those t.v. talk shows and in random interviews. Holy Christ at Christmas, I was bowled over. Seriously.
It seems my aversion to all things commercial cost me something. But. . . I started catching up last night.
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