Marty After Dark - Almost Live...From New York

Entries in Ed Sullivan (1)

Friday

Jun242011

June 24, 2011

I thought I’d just walk home and write a short story tonight. I’ll take a few photos on the way home and then write a story about a favorite memory of mine.

And it's off we go towards the McDonalized light on 6th Avenue.

I'm just going to ignore that gum stain and walk by it quickly.

I hate it when people congregate like this in front of a restaurant hogging half of the sidewalk chattering away. You want to hang out and talk? Then go back into the fucking Olive Garden where you came from and talk while eating your stupid fucking endless salads and then choke on the endless breadsticks and die a slow agonizing death, please and thank you.

Shit!

Oh fuck, check out this mutant strain of the Cardboard Box Man. It just has a mouth and no eyes...yikes!

Okay, home sweet home and safe at last! Time to go to my writing area and get this story down.

Aaaaahhhh!

A Beatles Memory
I feel kind of lucky to have grown up when I did. I was a child in the ‘60’s, a teenager in the ‘70’s and a young adult in the ‘80’s. I witnessed a lot of things in those three decades. I can remember the day when President Kennedy was shot, because I was pissed off the next day that there weren’t any Saturday morning cartoons on, just news reports. Five years later I remember watching the reports on TV when his brother Robert was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan (a man so nice they named him twice!) and being shocked and saddened. He was the first politician I was ever passionate about. And I have to confess, it wasn’t really so much his politics as the fact that he had long hair for a politician at the time and I thought he was really funny and cool. I was ten-years-old when he was gunned down and I remember asking my mom why people were shooting at the Kennedy’s. She just shook her head sadly and said, “I don’t know.”

I remember the first moon landing and then seeing the same images being used twelve years later when MTV launched. I stayed up all night long with my brother watching the videos on the pioneer TV station. We couldn’t believe it, music videos all night long! Such a concept!

Random memories off the top of my head include: Richard Speck murdering those nurses in Chicago, Easy Rider, Martin Luther King getting assassinated, the Manson family scaring the shit out of the Hollywood community in 1969, Woodstock, Altamont, hippies, Watergate, Nixon quitting, disco, punk rock and kids dying in a stampede at a Who concert in Cincinnati. Lots of memories and I’m always playing them back like films in my mind. One of my favorite memories is the Monday after the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.

On February 9th, 1964 The Beatles appeared and sang five songs on the Ed Sullivan show. I was five-years-old and our family was living in Louisville, Kentucky at the time. I remember the week before hearing ads on the radio saying, “The Beatles are coming!” I was riding shotgun to the Winn Dixie grocery store with my mom and I asked her if they were talking about bugs. She laughed and explained to me that The Beatles were an English singing group and they were going to be on Ed Sullivan that week. I didn’t think much about it and was more interested in getting a candy bar when we got to the checkout line.

That Sunday was pretty much like every other Sunday of my youth. We went to church in the morning, came home and had breakfast then whiled the day away playing and engaging in things that pass the time when you’re five-years-old. My mom always cooked a big Sunday dinner and we probably had something like pot roast and mashed potatoes and gravy. Then after dinner the whole family gathered in the front family room and did what most families did in the ‘60’s. We turned on the TV and watched the Ed Sullivan Show. And here’s what we saw that night:

I watched in amazement at all the screaming girls and wondered aloud why they were screaming and carrying on in the theater.

“Because they like them, stupid,” my brother Jim said and then smacked me on the head.

We watched the whole show and although a couple of years later I would become a full-fledged Beatles freak, they didn’t have much impact on me that evening, but I did like the music.

The next day my dad dropped my brothers Tom and Jim and my sister Terry at their grade school, Holy Trinity. He then drove me to my kindergarten, Sacred Heart on the other side of town. Almost every day he’d let me steer the car for a little while if there wasn’t much traffic and I always loved doing that. We arrived at Sacred Heart and he watched me climb the cement stairs leading up to the school’s entrance. As I opened the front door, I waved goodbye as I always did, he drove off to work and I walked into the classroom.

Some kids were already there and others were showing up. I hung up my coat in the hallway wooden coat rack and went inside the room. We didn’t have separate desks, there were tables where you sat at an assigned seat with other kids. I sat at a table with two kids named Matt and Mark. I liked Matt, but I remember disliking Mark because he was kind of mean and didn’t share anything. He had a habit of drooling too and that was gross. Our teacher was a nun whose name was Sister Gabriela. I can’t really remember what she looked like, I only remember her full-blown penguin nun outfit. She was nice though and opposed to other nuns I experienced in my years of Catholic education was an nice and gentle woman.

We started the day out like every other day, we said a prayer and then Sister asked a question of the class.

“How many of you children watched the Ed Sullivan show last night?” She asked with a smile. Every hand went up in the air and then came down.

“And how many of you saw the English group, The Beatles on the show last night?” She asked as the smile disappeared.

A couple kids giggled and once again every hand was thrust upwards towards the gray corrugated ceiling.

“I want all you children to know one thing,” she said in serious tones as the hands went down, “it’s a sin for a boy to wear his hair that way.”

Mark immediately shot his arm up the air and Sister called on him.

“I’ll never wear my hair like that Sister!” He barked out in a sickening, ass-kissing moment.

Sister smiled and said that was good.

God how I hated that drooling, selfish, ass-kissing little prick!

As a little kid, I was pretty good and didn’t often question things my parents, teachers or authority figures told me. I wasn’t going to say anything in class that morning, but I wondered why wearing your hair a certain way was a sin. I didn’t get it and it bugged me all day long and into the evening. This incident may have triggered a life-long habit of obsessing over weird little things and not being able to let them go. (See: Box Man, Cardboard and Dog, Papaya.)

That night after dinner I was reading a Dr. Seuss book in the room I shared with my brother Jim. He came in and I put the book down and sat up on my bed.

“Sister Gabriela said it’s a sin for a boy to comb his hair like the Beatles do,” I told him.

He just looked at me and thought about that for a minute. Then he walked over to me, grabbed my arm and said, “Come on.”

I got up and followed him into the bathroom. He locked the door behind us, opened a drawer and took out a comb and ran it under water. He then proceeded to comb his hair down into Beatle bangs. Both of us laughed and then he handed me the comb and I did the same thing. We continued to laugh at the way we looked and then my brother defiantly said, “Nuns don’t know everything.” I looked at him and nodded in agreement.

Ten years later we were teenagers in the wild ‘70’s doing drugs, breaking rules, laws and questioning authority every fucking minute of every fucking day. And it all started with one downward swoop of a comb way back on a winter’s night in 1964.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.