by Craig Carton
Later the same year, I had the single worst eating experience of my life. A fall Sunday brought about great change to the Cartons’ mundane routine. My folks had heard of a new Chinese place opening in a neighboring town, the same week that our beloved Henry was back in China visiting his family. My father decided that it was a good time to cheat on the Empire and try a new restaurant.
Now, my father is not a cheater. He isn’t a drinker or a gambler, either. But on this day, he threw caution to the winds and decided to have an affair with another Chinese restaurant. I asked for my usual items, and everything was fine until he ordered the entrees. My dad is a control freak. Nobody else, including my mother, was ever allowed to order. He was the only one who spoke to the waiter. If you wanted something, you had to run it by him. Then, like Judge Judy, he would contemplate the request and make a ruling on it. Typically the answer was “Guilty,” or “No!”
I should have known that something bad was going to happen, since viewing Halley’s comet was a more common occurrence than Dad changing what we ate. Yet here we were in a new restaurant, and my dad was switching what we ordered. I had finished my egg roll and a spare rib when he announced that tonight was the night I was going to try shrimp.
I’m a father now, and I agree with broadening my kids’ horizons and having them experiment with new things. But my dad, who months earlier wouldn’t allow me to eat dinner because I had tried something new and didn’t like it, was now going to force something on me that I didn’t want to eat—in public. It didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t, thirty years later.
The shrimp came, and I started to sweat. He put one on my plate and said I had to try it. I protested: “Dad, I like what I like. I don’t want it.” We argued back and forth. I wouldn’t budge, but neither would he. My mother, brother, and sister sat there helplessly as we battled. This showdown was Rocky versus Apollo Creed, except that he was my father and I wasn’t going to win, no matter how much I tried or fought back. I relented, and he shoved the shrimp into my mouth. I gagged and threw up all over the table. I was humiliated and pissed off, but I wasn’t the only one. My father thought I did it on purpose to embarrass him. He yelled at me, then pulled me out of the restaurant by my collar, shoved me into the back of our car, told me to wait there while they finished dinner, locked the door, then went back inside.
When they came out forty-five minutes later, he was still fuming at me. “How dare you do that!” I said, “I didn’t want the shrimp! You forced it on me. It’s not my fault I threw up!” We argued for most of the trip, until he’d had enough. He pulled the car over, kicked me out more than a mile from our house, and told me to walk home. After I got out of the car, he pulled away and never looked back.
When I got to our house, my father was in his room for the night. He didn’t want to talk to me. My mother asked if I was okay, and then she went to bed. I brushed my teeth and went to bed, and we have never talked about it again. Nowadays when I go to a restaurant, I order every single thing on the appetizer menu—just because I can.
Growing up, one of the things that distracted me from my problems was listening to the radio. There were only four stations I ever listened to. WCBS-FM was the best oldies station in America. I always identified with oldies because my father loved ’50s music, and the songs were catchy and easy to memorize. I must have sung “Chantilly Lace” a million times. Motown also grabbed me at an early age, because I could always identify with the lyrics.
The second station I got turned on to was WNBC, but only for one guy, Howard Stern. Howard talked in a way I had never heard anybody talk before. He was brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny. I’ve always felt that he was the best person who ever hosted a talk show, because he was the first and only guy who gave me the feeling that if I turned off his show, I would miss something. This is well before he started doing as much of the sexual content that he became so famous for. He was irreverent, in-your-face, and he was a master at making you hang on to his every word.
I have always felt that people who classify Howard as a guy who only talks about sex or naked girls completely miss the boat. The sexual content is what grabbed most people and got him headlines, for sure, but if you ever stopped to listen to all the other content, which was more than half of his show, you would recognize that Howard was and is brilliant. He is the best interviewer I have ever heard to this day, and he has an amazingly articulate way of making you care about what he says. He has to be the only guy who can make more than fifty million dollars a year and be driven to work in a limo, yet still appeal to the blue-collar guy making fifty grand.
The third station I grew to really like was Z-100 in the heyday of Scott Shannon and the Morning Zoo. I liked the music more than anything, but with Howard still on in the afternoons and no real contemporary of his in the morning, Shannon was the best thing coming out of New York. He also had a very funny character named Mr. Leonard. Listening to these great shows probably stirred the beginnings of my interest in radio, although I didn’t even realize it back then. At the time, it was just a way to relax and take my mind off my parents’ control-freak ways.
I hate Sundays—always have. I know how ludicrous that sounds since Sunday is a day off with NFL football, and is still a whole day away from Monday. My disgust for the day dates all the way back to when I was a small child in the 1970s. Sunday is the day that always brought the most conflict. The other days are easy:
Monday: Work and get ready for Monday Night Football. Hope that the waitress bringing your wings and beer is hot, because your buddies aren’t.
Tuesday: Recover from the night before and get through work without being fired for saying something to the sexy new girl at the office.
Wednesday: Week’s almost over. Start putting in order which girls you are going to call first for the weekend.
Thursday: Best night out: no amateurs, and the chances are high of meeting a new girl and getting her number for a weekend date.
Friday: Work is out and happy hour is on, and the strippers all know my name.
Saturday: Sleep until noon, start drinking during the SEC Game of the Week, and make sure your jeans are clean so you can wear them again when you go out.
Sunday: Just have to wake up in time for NFL Today on CBS, and before my bookie closes up shop for the one o’clock games.
No matter when you wake up on Sunday, you know that the clock is ticking toward Monday morning. At least you can roll out of bed late, sit on the couch, and watch football all day long from September to February—or make it three straight drinking days, watching games at the local tavern with your friends.
Still, at some point, it’s going to be nighttime, and you’ve got to prepare for the buzzing alarm clock. Even so, I look forward to Sunday all week long, especially during football season. But since I was a kid, I also hated the seventh day of the week. Sunday wasn’t a day of rest from punishing me or making life miserable for me. Sunday was worse than every other day.
For most Jews born before 1950, religion was important, and understandably so. These adults were children of the Great Depression, and their parents most likely immigrated to this country during or near the time of the Holocaust. Their kids would be raised Jewish.
Although I’m Jewish, I detest and resent religion, and I believe that people who live their lives by the notion that there is a higher being watching and judging us are nuts. There’s no proof whatsoever that a higher being exists—any more than there’s evidence that we were seeded by aliens. And also, if there were a higher power, then why—oh fuck it, there isn’t one, as far as I can tell.
While I don’t believe in God, I do acknowledge that many of the tenets of religion are powerful ideas—some of which I even agree with.
Thou shalt not kill. That makes sense. Thou shalt not bang thy neighbor’s wife. I agree with this one, and if you saw my neighbor’s wife, you would, too. You’ve got to believe that commandment came from a guy with a hot wife and ugly neighbors.
While religion is bad enough, I don’t get adults who are born-again. They seem to find religion later in life, and it becomes their entire way of life, and anything less is offensive to them. When you grow up with religion in the house, it’s all you know; but it seems to me that these born-agains don’t respect anyone who doesn’t want to hear the preachings of a fifty-five-year-old who thinks the sun rises and sets on his newfound beliefs.
There is one caveat, and that is the guys or gals who find religion while incarcerated.
My single biggest fear is being locked up in jail. It’s irrational, but I think about it often. I have two rules of thumb if I ever do get arrested, and these rules apply to any level of jail—even a holding cell for an hour for a driving ticket.
Rule #1 is to act crazy and start mumbling out loud. The more gibberish, the better. Seems to me that in every movie that includes a jail scene, no one wants to mess with or fuck the crazy guy.
Rule #2: Find religion as quickly as possible. Jail is broken up into gangs, as far as I can tell, and they are based on race and religion. I’m Jewish and white, but if I thought finding Allah would protect my precious rear end, I would buy the Koran, change my name to Muhammad Ali Carton, and start believing.
But short of the above happening, I think I’m going to take my chances being atheist here on the outside.
Growing up, I resented religion. It was forced upon me as a kid in the form of mandatory Hebrew school every Sunday. I had to attend school six days a week. Regular school was boring enough, but to have to get up early and go to Hebrew school was the worst. I have nothing against the fine people who dedicated their lives to raising us Jewish and explaining Judaism to me, but I hated the program.
The only good thing about Hebrew school was that there was a playground. The hiccup was that you didn’t get to have recess. You learned about being Jewish for three hours, and then you went home. I didn’t care about learning about the Pharaoh and letting my people go. I read the Ten Commandments once, and I got it. I sang the same songs every Passover, I lit the eight candles every Hanukkah—what more did I need to know?
So in between classes, I would invariably find my way outside to the playground. Each time I did, a teacher came to get me. A note was always sent home. The first few times I threw the note out, but when I didn’t bring it back signed or my parents didn’t call the school as requested, the teacher called my folks to let them know that I was a miscreant.
What always surprised me was that I could rarely get my friends to go outside with me. Maybe they wanted to learn about Jewish stuff, maybe they were scared, I don’t know; but I was alone on the playground almost every Sunday. It was there that I perfected my NBA-worthy jump shot, my major-league slide into second, and my diving catch of the Super Bowl’s winning throw.
By the time we got home, it was noon, and there was only one hour before the football games. We ate lunch and then tried to throw the ball around a little in our backyard to get into the mood. Then we settled in for some 1 p.m. Giants or Jets. My father wasn’t a huge sports fan, but even he understood the importance of Sunday football. We weren’t a close family; we didn’t usually have all the immediate relatives over for the games; but we did watch football together, and my mother would make food for us.
I wish I could tell you that these games were the beginning of a great bonding experience for my family. They weren’t. It turned out to be the worst. While we could watch the 1 p.m. games in their entirety, the 4 p.m. games rolled around and the mood in the house changed with questions about homework and preparation for school: Did you take a bath or shower yet? Did you read a book today? Ugh!
Everyone knows that a football telecast takes about three hours, so the 4 p.m. games would end around 7, and then CBS aired 60 Minutes. My parents watched 60 Minutes like fat people feed their chocolate cravings. They never missed it. That meant that we kids had to have eaten dinner, done our chores, read a book, done our homework, and gotten ready for bed, all before 7 p.m. It also meant that we would not be watching the second half of the games.
So while all my buddies would be raving in school about this play or that play, or “Hey, did you see the way that game ended?” I wasn’t. I could describe the first half, but when a game ended on a dramatic did-he-or-didn’t-he kind of play and your best pals asked, “What did you think?” I was fucked.
There were days I got smart-assed and tried to explain to my folks that even God took Sunday off. That never worked. Are you God? Of course not; I’m just the lucky offspring who can’t watch the fourth quarter of a damn Jets game because I have to be fed, washed, and in bed so you can watch 60 Minutes. This routine went on even after I was bar mitzvahed and well into my teens.
My bar mitzvah, by the way, was one of the single worst days of my teenage years. I had to prep once a week for six months. Prep meant going to more Hebrew school to learn how to read certain passages of the Torah in Hebrew. It also meant learning several Hebrew songs that I would have to sing solo in front of everyone. The real problem, though, was the guest list. My parents were frugal, and they monitored the guest list the way Border Patrol agents guard against drug mules. I submitted the list of friends I wanted to invite, a solid mix of girls and guys. My father peered over it and came back to me with the following statement: “There are people on this list who have never been over to our house once; therefore they won’t be invited. We have a limit, and if you invite all of these kids, we’ll be over the number.” The bad thing for me was that none of the girls on the list had ever been over to my house. Why would they have? I told my parents that the result would be no girls in attendance, but they didn’t care.
A few months later, there I was at my bar mitzvah playing the game of Coke and 7-Up, which requires half the kids to be on one side of the dance floor facing the rest of the kids on the other side. Each kid has a partner, and when the DJ says “Coke,” if you’re on the Coke side, you run across the floor and sit on the lap of your 7-Up partner. It’s a great game if there are girls on one side and boys on the other, but it’s lousy when it’s all boys. I had the worst bar mitzvah any thirteen-year-old with raging hormones could have ever had. Years later, just to see if he remembered, I asked my father why there weren’t any girls there. He responded without blinking an eye: “Because you are ugly.”
The older I got, the more conservative my parents got with the homework. While Monday came for everyone else at midnight, ours started at halftime in the late afternoon. I grew to hate Sundays, which was silly because then it only left me Friday nights and Saturdays. I dreaded the Sabbath because I knew I would either be in Hebrew school or getting ready for bed with the afternoon sun still out and my team still on the field.
The only thing I could do in protest was to root against my father’s favorite teams. Although not a huge sports fan, he was your typical New Yorker. He was old-school, and that meant Giants football. It also meant the Dodgers until they moved out of Brooklyn; Knicks hoops; and to a far lesser extent, Rangers hockey. So in my second year of Hebrew school, I started rooting for the Jets. It was 1977, and they stunk.
Eight years removed from their only Super Bowl win—a game I have come to believe was fixed, to guarantee long-term prosperity for the NFL—I was now all in as a Jets fan. I picked a team with three wins to its name, no QB, no coach, and no place to call home. Dysfunctional just like me, the Jets had me at hello, and it’s been a relationship that has served me well if for no other reason than it set the stage for some great character building.
There was no reason for an eight-year-old boy in New York to pick the Jets as his team, especially growing up in a Giants home. Except that the Giants stunk, too, so it wasn’t like I had the choice of picking the front-running top team in town. I had to pick between two losers during the 1977 season—my dad’s losers, or my own. There wasn’t much I owned or could stake claim to back then. So the Jets were it.
WHY GUYS LOVE FOOTBALL
1. It’s a violent sport with lots of
scoring and bone-crushing hits, reminding us that it’s in our DNA to rout and pillage.
2. We can gamble on it.
3. No matter how much of a ball and chain your wife or girlfriend is, she has to respect the fact that Sundays from Labor Day to February are yours to drink, gamble, hang with the guys, and act like a man on. She gets two Sundays anyhow—the first one’s after the Super Bowl, and the second is Mother’s Day—so she shouldn’t bitch.
Life changed yet again in the spring of 1984, because clearly I had not experienced enough embarrassment, humiliation, and negativity in my life up to this point. I was fifteen years old and about to graduate from Albert Leonard Junior High School. I was still a few months way from having organized sports stolen from me by my grade-conscious parents, when they dropped another doozy on me.
Having been at the top of the junior high varsity soccer team in goals and assists, I was looking forward to the awards banquet at the end of the year. I knew that Jason Hadges and I would receive awards, and I was pumped for the event.
At that banquet we would receive our championship trophies for winning the league title; personal awards for goals, assists, and sportsmanship; and our official varsity letter, which most of our moms would sew onto our varsity jackets. We got the jackets when we made the team, and the letters were special: a blue and white A, and an L with an orange soccer ball stitched inside the letters. You were allowed to invite whomever you wanted to the banquet because it was also a fund-raiser. My parents invited all of our relatives within twenty-five miles and, in typical generous Carton fashion, made each one of them pay their own entry fee to attend.
The downside of the banquet was that we didn’t get to sit with our teammates. We had to sit with our families. So rather than messing around and hanging out, I had to endure an hour or so of family time, meaning I couldn’t get up from the table for the duration of the event unless I was called up to the stage. My parents, brother and sister, aunt and uncle, and great-aunt and great-uncle were all at my table. I had gotten through the dinner portion of the night pretty well and thought I had clear sailing to the awards ceremony.