* This is true, mostly.
** Totally true. Like, 110 percent true.
*** Partially true. I think my grandpop’s exact words were “Stop playing with yourself,” but whatever.
**** Some judging for the parade now occurs in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, but this is only a recent development. Yes, I know this footnote isn’t funny, but this is what happens when I have to fact-check and shit.
***** The Mummers clubs have a variety of names. Some of them are whimsical, such as the Shooting Stars and the Jokers; others are named after places, such as Quaker City and Broomall; and some are named in honor of people, such as Fralinger and my own club, Froggy Carr.
* The fact that my dad started with Froggy Carr just after its inception has been the cause of much distress for me. Just because you go out with a club does not mean that you are a member of that organization. Almost anybody can march with a New Year’s club, but only a very select few actually become members. Being a member means acceptance into the inner circle. It’s a privilege of the highest order, an honor. Also, you get a key to the club and can go in there and drink whenever you want. The only way to become a member in Froggy Carr is if your father was an original member of the club. If that’s the case, when you turn twenty-five, you automatically become a member. Otherwise it’s nearly impossible to become a member. However, I think older members can make exceptions and invite new members in, but only in extraordinary circumstances. Like, for example, a wannabe member writing glowingly in his memoirs about the Froggy Carr club and how much he wants to become a member of the Froggy Carr club, bringing the Froggy Carr club to the attention of literally hundreds of millions of people, including the words “Froggy Carr” a grand total of sixteen times in his book. You know, something like that.
* Actually, I think it was more like “As soon as I was old and sturdy enough that if my dad dropped me I wouldn’t be seriously hurt, I was going out in the parade.” Yeah, that works better.
* Which is not unlike what I’m preoccupied with today.
* My ludicrous middle name has significance. Michael is both my father’s and my brother’s middle name, Joseph is my “unique” middle name, Patrick is for St. Patrick (because we’re Irish—get it?), Aloysius was my maternal grandfather’s middle name, and Elizabeth is what I would have been named had I been a girl. Did I mention that my parents were doing a lot of drugs in 1979?
** To be fair, he approached you.
* One of the tenets of Catholicism is that the older you get, the more you get into it. I believe this is called “hedging your bets.”
* Frenzy’s would later become Mick-Daniel’s, the bar at which I worked from about seventh grade through high school, washing dishes, short-order cooking, doing some barbacking work, and perfecting the art of shitting in dive bars, a skill that would come in handy later in life.
* This is something that never ceases to amaze me. My dad has told me many stories about getting arrested or getting in trouble with the cops, but he never spent more than a few days in jail in his entire life. If I hit a cop today, I would be sent to prison where I would earn the nickname “Cum Dumpster McGee” in under three hours. He hit a cop and basically spent a night in the drunk tank. God bless the ’70s, I guess.
* You have to give my mom some credit for the breadth of her complaints. Sometimes it was over standard domestic issues, like those above. Other times it was over less standard domestic issues, like when my dad would take the car on a night out and routinely forget where he had parked it. Once, the car was missing for a week and found three miles from our house. My dad had absolutely no recollection of how it got there, much to the chagrin of my mom.
* Sort of like how when I first saw a horse, I thought it was just a really big dog. True story. Even though I admit I was pretty drunk on my twenty-second birthday.
* It wasn’t until I was about seventeen that I realized that the proper spelling was “the Rec,” short for “the Recreation Center.” Previously, I had always assumed that it was “the Wreck,” because of the sketchiness of the people who hung out there and the disrepair of the fields, courts, and pool.
* In that order—and sadly, great stretches of time passed between the three.
** In retrospect, a great call on my mom’s part. Back then, this card cost about forty dollars. Using our special currency converter, we know that forty dollars to a nine year-old is roughly equivalent to $680 to an adult. As of this writing, this card is going for about two dollars on eBay.
* 210, 37, and 276 (!), respectively. And yes, I had to look that up. But back then I wouldn’t have had to. Trust me.
** Andrew Jackson. I had to look that up, too.
* Although most women who saw my penis in college were usually too drunk to take notice anyway. That, or they were fast asleep and so unable to see it pressed against the glass of their dorm room window.
* I believe in some circles this would be known as “blue-eyed soul.”
* The kid kind, not the now kind.
** Or he could get the name right. I didn’t have no dang fudge in my ears.
* I often wondered why he didn’t open a restaurant after serving as a chef in the war, but then I realized that he probably wasn’t making paupiette of black sea bass in a barolo sauce in the service, and South Philly was already full of places that serve shit on a shingle and other mysterious (but delicious) foodstuffs.
** Whole books probably have been written about it, but that would require research, which, as mentioned, is not my thing.
* The formula was not so secret that people didn’t know it. If you sit at a bar today, you might notice an old-timer screaming “Oh shit!” in disgust after a race. It could be because of his horse, but it could be because he just realized that his number wasn’t coming out that day, since he had computed at least one digit of the winning number after the race.
* I’m still not sure why this makes sense. I would think that a grown man taking a child in and out of bars all day would arouse more suspicion than if he went sans child, but when I pressed my family about this, their only response was “It was different back then.”
* For the record, I have never and would never use any sort of firework on an animal, stray or domesticated. Not only because this would be cruel, but because if I missed, the animal would probably be pretty pissed off and come after me. No thanks.
* I had, and still have, rather eclectic tastes in music.
* I never told David that this was part of the reason why I offered him this partnership. So now I have to be fully prepared for a punch in the face the next time I see him. Hi, Dave. Sorry about that.
** And for the record, I think this was the first and last time David got the raw end of a deal.
* I am actually kind of getting an erection thinking about all this math. I really, really wish this were a joke.
* With all due respect to the Polish Rifle, it’s gotta be Randall.
** Screech got his own rather unoriginal nickname from the ubiquitous television show Saved by the Bell because he bore a slight resemblance, hairwise, to Dustin Diamond’s nerdy character. Later in life, Screech’s nickname would be changed to Nugget, for reasons unknown to me (and probably everyone else).
*This is a complete lie, written to impress any attractive women reading. I never worked in any homeless shelter and don’t know about any homeless people’s stories. My editor made me put in this footnote explaining the truth—something about “not being irresponsible” or something. My only hope is that this footnote is so small that those attractive women reading the book don’t read it. Keep your fingers crossed.
* Which EA Sports actually released in 1992, one year before I graduated eighth grade.
** Cut me some slack—I wouldn’t touch a boobie until about four years later, so I had to take joy in other, less boobilicous moments. (Okay, seven years later. And it was my own. Don’t be a dick about it.)
* A better example: Player 1 and Player 2 are on th
e same team. Player 1 skates along the boards toward the net, Player 2 straggles behind. When a passing lane opens up, Player 1 passes the puck back or across the ice to Player 2, whose stick is already raised, cocked for the shot and ready to go. When the puck arrives in front of Player 2, he shoots. Because the shooter’s stick was already raised and he did not need to wind up, the goalie has less time to prepare and set himself for the shot. The result? GGGGGOOOOOAAAAALLLLLL!!!!!!
* Sorry, but Wikipedia is just about the extent of my researching prowess. And no, I don’t care that I’m not putting my history degree to good use.
* In Scoville units, there is only one pepper hotter than the Scotch bonnet: the Red Savina habañero. According to redsavina.com, just one gram of the Red Savina can cause detectable heat in 1,272 pounds of sauce, which is roughly equivalent to the amount my Uncle John consumes every two years. The only thing hotter than the Red Savina that is not a derivation of the capsaicin chemical compound is pepper spray. That’s right, mace. This stuff is not for the uninitiated.
* Read: “After stealing a case of the peppers.”
* That is, once my mouth and face stopped hurting and I got my senses of smell and taste back. I am forever indebted to my mother, who, after smacking me around for being such a moron, put me on a steady diet of white bread and vanilla ice cream to get rid of the heat. I am still on this diet today, though not for pepper-related reasons.
* You’re probably saying this right now, ain’t ya?
* My blood pressure is the reason that I did not eat a pepper at the Pepper Party or in preparation for writing this book. I earned my stripes and did it once, which is about four times too many.
* Really, the whole Girl You Know It’s True album is remarkable for its breadth and dexterity, but this song gets the nod in no small part because it inspired the Gulf War–era local radio station parody song “Blame It on Hussein.” Man, Saddam Hussein. What a dick.
* I mean, how could a drug that comes in a balloon possibly be harmful for a twelve-year-old?
* I do not know what nationality Carlos was for certain. My dad met his dad at a parent-teacher conference and described him as being from “one of those Puerto Rico–type countries,” so I guess we’ll just go with that.
* Note: I have absolutely no scientific or even fictional research to back this up.
* Again, sorry about that, Mike, Matt, and Cam.
** Greatest non-werewolf-related fear, that is.
* Soon, almost everyone in the neighborhood had the chip, a development that would give birth to one of the greatest childhood games of my or any era: remote controlling. All the houses in my neighborhood were row homes, stacked against each other, without front or back lawns, and with windows and screen doors that opened directly into their homes. Often, curtains, blinds, and storm doors were left open, exposing an intimate view to passersby of the home’s living room—a couch here, some kids laying on the floor over there, a dad sitting in his chair there, and in the middle of it all, a television.
My friends and I would take the remote controls from our houses and roam the streets of the neighborhood looking for the perfect home to sabotage—one that had a clear view to the TV and living room, with a family sitting around watching the local news or Wheel of Fortune or something. Banking on the fact that this home probably had the chip, we’d point our remote controls at their TV and change the channel to one of the porno channels. If the family didn’t have the chip, the channel would turn to static. If they did, they’d miss the answer to Final Jeopardy because some twenty-one-year-old with fake tits was now on the TV screen guzzling cum with a big smile on her face. Watching the confusion that unfolded after successfully changing the channel—everyone jumping up from their seats, running to change the channel, completely befuddled as to what happened, screaming and yelling and cursing—is one of my most treasured memories. If there is a heaven, and if I get in after I die, I’ll spend 90 percent of my time going remote controlling with my childhood friends.
* Probably at the hoagie factory. God, he was so fat as a kid.
* Right up there with sharks, the previously mentioned werewolves, and pretty much everyone on BET.
* I’m not sure if this mandate was a product of Irish Catholic education, which traditionally doesn’t favor any sort of birth control, or my Uncle Tommy, who at every Thanksgiving since I was old enough to hear would get drunk and tell me, “Jason, for Chrissake, just wear a condom. Trust me.”
** And I don’t think ever for Hutton—not because he didn’t have sex, but because he is sterile and he also doesn’t believe in STDs.
* I like to leave some clothes on in case I get cold.
** I always thought they’d be tough to open, like how you’d see in movies or TV shows, so learning that they were easy to open was quite a relief and allowed me to fret about other sex-related issues, namely, “Where does my bird go again?”
* Get it? “Shot”? Maybe I shouldn’t have written so much of this after three in the morning.
* This is me being dramatic, but it would not have been very good for my dad had my mom learned about the loaded gun incident.
** This is a lie. If I pissed in my dad’s house, he would make me eat the piss-covered carpet and would then take me outside and run me over with his truck. So the more fitting example would be something like, “Every time I use the last of the milk and my dad gets pissed at me…”
* There was precedent for this: Eclipse was the first guy any of us knew who got jumped. He was returning a video to West Coast Video when a group of kids from Avenue and Morris grabbed him, beat him up, and stole his video. The two things that most stand out in my mind about this was the name of the video (the Tom Hanks classic tearjerker Turner & Hooch) and how much West Coast Video charged Eclipse’s mom for the lost video ($92).
* I’ve gotten better though, thanks mostly to tequila.
* Going “up the mountains” meant a trip to the Poconos, just as going “down the shore” meant a vacation in North Wildwood, NJ.
* Not me, though. Really, any and all girls were okay with me. As much as I liked masturbating on the bathroom floor, I aspired to bigger and better and warmer things.
*The girls of the ASP would eventually grow up to be beautiful women. Perhaps I’m just bitter because while I was at my sexual peak at the ripe old age of twelve, they were more interested in boxing out and foul shots than they were in getting felt up by me.
**The boys were also divided, into the Pretty Boys and the Roughnecks. The Pretty Boys were like their female counterparts; they wore Drakkar, put gel in their hair, and wore gold chains. Basically anybody who wasn’t a Pretty Boy was considered a Roughneck, a wide group that encompassed everything from jocks to aspiring drunkards/stoners to normal guys. I was a Roughneck.
* A year or two earlier, a new cineplex had opened in the neighborhood. This was a modern technological marvel and for a few months after its opening, everyone became serious moviegoers. Prior to this cineplex’s opening, we had to travel over the Walt Whitman Bridge to Jersey to find the nearest movie theater. More important, next to the theater opened a rock-’n’-roll-themed restaurant with fifteen-cent wings and twenty different kinds of milkshakes. Then it burned down. I miss that place.
* Sweet, sweet youth!
* Wawa is like the Philadelphia area’s version of 7-Eleven, but much, much cleaner.
* In addition to being a horrible writer, I’m also a really bad musician.
* I don’t really believe this is true. I hope to milk my childhood for at least two, possibly three or four more books.
* I have no idea whether this is true and it was early only in terms of my “final” deadline, after I missed my previous two deadlines. Whoops.
* I wasn’t a crier, but more of a shrieker.
* When Billy and his first wife divorced, she married a man from around the corner, a real bruiser named Joey Gilpatrick. She justified her choice of new husband by saying, “Well, Joey’s the only guy a
round who can beat up Billy, so I really didn’t have many options.” This line has been repeated thousands of times and has become part of neighborhood lore. On a personal note, I can only hope that my wife chooses to marry me based on my ability to beat up her ex (or exes). I can’t think of a better compliment.
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