At sixteen going on seventeen, I was outside Deerfield Courts waiting for my girlfriend in Aunt Joyce’s Purple Polaris when Tom Petty’s “Here Comes My Girl” came on. It was the perfect song. I had been waiting so long to finally have a girlfriend.
It was only a few months ago on that magical February night in her uncle’s basement. She had invited me and a few of my friends over after finals had settled down. By the time I had gotten there the only space available was on the couch next to her. Despite my awkwardness, I sat there anyway. I knew something was happening when our legs touched and she didn’t pull away. We all sat around talking and laughing about the kids we had been meeting in high school, our finals and how our high school teachers weren’t as much fun as the middle school teachers, with some exceptions. She was laughing at my jokes and wasn’t moving away when I put hands down or when we had to squish together to make room for someone else. We ended up in our own conversation so deeply that when there was finally a lull we realized everyone had left – I was still sitting right next to her, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh.
For the first time, I really looked at her. I noticed how 
her smile pushed up the corner of her eyes. Yet her eyes appeared happy even if she wasn’t smiling. How the single bulb in her uncle’s basement reflected back so beautifully off her pupil. And how her iris broke up the brown with flakes of blue, or was it green, in the most memorizing way. I noticed her smile had dropped and at the same time, I noticed I was leaning towards. What was really surprising was she wasn’t pulling away. In fact, I think she was actually turning her head. In a second it didn’t matter because our lips touched and then our tongues introduced themselves to each other.
“Is there anyone down here” a voice from upstairs yelled.
We immediately sat up, struggling a bit because we didn’t realize how far we had reclined. As we got up and acknowledge we were there, we joined the others upstairs. It was on the way up when she grabbed my hand that I knew I had a girlfriend.
The problem was – none of that was true. Actually, I was sitting in Aunt Joyce’s Purple Polaras outside Deerfield Courts. And when Tom Petty’s “Here Comes My Girl” came on the radio it wasn’t my girlfriend that was coming. It was my stupid brother, Dave. What a loser I was. Had I been listening to the ‘Damn the Torpedoes’ cassette tape that I would eventually buy, the next song would have been “Even The Losers”. This would have only made things worse because the chorus was “Even the losers get lucky sometimes”. That – was certainly wasn’t true – sixteen and no girlfriends in sight. The fact was it was still my brother coming through doors from Deerfield Courts.
‘Damn The Torpedoes’ was Tom Petty’s breakthrough album. We didn’t know he was from Florida because he didn’t sound ‘southern’. He and the Heartbreakers had that edgy sound that drew us in but it was his songs that kept us: “Don’t Do Me Like That”, “Here Comes My Girl” and “Refugee” were great songs but so were “Even the Losers”, “Century City” and “What Are You Doin’ in My Life?” I bought the cassette version of ‘Damn The Torpedoes’ for my car. Why I bought it on cassette is a different story. But for now, I was listening to The Loop or WMET. It didn’t matter. Tom Petty and The Heart Breakers were everywhere in 1979.
Now, calling Dave ‘My stupid brother’ was not a reflection so much on him but my frustration that despite the fact I was able to drive and being a junior in high school, I did not have a girlfriend. The reason I was picking up Dave was that we both worked in the same outdoor mall. Dave had taken my old job at Deerfield Courts. I had gotten that job from Steve Olson who had moved up to string tennis rackets. So what position is lower than stringing tennis rackets at a tennis court? A Towel Boy. I started at $1.95 an hour. I was not sixteen yet so minimum wage did not apply. During the week, if I worked, I would need to take a different bus after school and walk to the little outdoor mall behind the bigger Deerbrook Mall. I think it was called Lake Cook Plaza but no one really knew the name anyways. Usually, people just called it ‘the-mall-behind-Deerbrook-Mall’.
The main store we would go to was Frank’s Nursery and Crafts. Many times when we were done with our junior high bowling league at Brunswick, we would wander over there. John and I would look at the house plants. I would get supplies for my sand art or macrame. So, while I worked at Deerfield Courts and waiting to be picked up, I would hang out at Frank’s Nursery. The manager at the time, Kevin Taupin, saw me and one evening informed me they were looking for a stockboy and asked if I wanted to fill out an application. First work lesson – it is always easier to get a job if you have a job. I ‘passed’ my towel boy job on to Dave. So when we worked the same nights, after I had gotten my driver’s license, the family would drop the Polaris off so I could drive us both home.
One particular night, this plan did not work out so smoothly. Since Dave and Jim were now in Drivers Ed, Dave had driven with Aunt Joyce to drop off the Polaris. Uncle Jack probably followed to bring them both home. When they dropped the car off, Dave had found me in the store to give me the car keys. I was very proud of the fact that I would be able to drive myself home – instead of having to be picked up like a little kid.
After the store closed and we finished cleaning up, Mr. Taupin told us we were free to go. With keys in hand, I approached my Purple Chariot and relished my burst of independence. I started the Polara and she roared freedom and smelled like abandonment (or was that oil?). I shifted the Polara into reverse and backed out of the parking space, but after shifting into drive the Polara would not go forward. My mind blinked, I put Polara back in park and again into drive but she didn’t move. What the hell? I tried reverse again and she went rolled backward – drive, nothing. I was having my first ‘Car Problem’ – shit. I was flustered and a little panicked. The knock on the window startled me. It was Mr. Turpin.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Yea, the car won’t go forward,” I replied.
Mr. Turpin knew I was a new driver and asked if he could try. I got out and watched as he got in.
“It will go backward but it won’t go forward,” I explained.
I felt somewhat vindicated when he had the same results. He could not go forward after putting the Polara into drive. Then he got serious. Warning me to watch out, he closed the car door and changed the gear back to park. Stepping back a few feet he tried and reverse and rolled back a few feet shifted gears and sat there. Changing gears again, moving back a few more feet and stopping again. Finally, the door opened and he said he would open the store up again so I could call home for a ride.
Once inside on the office phone, I called home and explained the situation. I don’t remember who I talked to but after explaining Mr. Tupin had also tried without success they agreed to rescue me. The strange part to everyone was the car was fine before they dropped it off.
When Aunt Joyce and Dave arrived. Dave jumped out to try since he was the one that had ‘broken’ the Polara. As he got in he asked, “Did you take the parking brake off?”
“Parking brake?” I asked.
The Polara was an automatic. I had not driven anything but an automatic. I had never put the parking brake on. To be clear, the Polara’s parking brake pedal was a 3rd pedal all the way to the left. I didn’t even know how to take the parking brake off. Dave reached down and pulled the release. He put the car into gear and it rolled forward.
Who the hell puts the parking brake on with a car with an automatic transmission?
My brother does. Everyone was relieved there was nothing wrong with the Purple Beast. I tell this story whenever someone brings up parking brakes.
Another time, after Dave had gotten his driver’s license, I was now getting a ride home from Dave. We were still using Aunt Joyce’s Purple Polara. I had gone inside Deerfield Courts to catch up with the night manager who I knew from when I worked there. We walked out together as the manager closed up. Dave and I walked to Aunt Joyce’s car. Since Dave had driven there, it was my turn to drive.
As we pulling out of the parking lot Dave followed behind the manager. He ran through the Stop sign that was posted in front of the ‘mall road’ that led through the mall to Lake Cook Road.
“He blew through that stop sign!” I remarked.
“It’s OK,” Dave said. “It has a white border.” The manager would occasionally drop Dave off at Franks if I wasn’t done yet. Apparently he never stops at this particular Stop sign. Dave simply gave the same explanation was that Stops signs with white borders were optional.
I had only been driving a year more than Dave but I had never heard this before. I thought this would have been discussed in Drivers Ed or one of my friends would have said something. Something didn’t seem right.
When we got to the Stop sign before the stoplights on Lake Cook I realized why I had never heard about the optional white-bordered Stop signs.
“You idiot,” I said. “All Stops signs have white borders!” The manager had given Dave his first lesson in ‘plausible deniability’. While confident in my conclusion we still checked the Stop sign on Lake Eleanor Drive to Carol on the way home to be sure that it too had a white border. It did.
Cars were definitely Dave’s ‘thing’. I didn’t appreciate to what level until a year later when we were coming home in my own car. As Dave and I were heading North on Wilmot Road when Dave said, “I wonder where Aunt Joyce is going?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She just pulled off of Berkeley”
“Way up there?” we were at least a 1/2 mile away and it as dark out. “How do you know it’s Aunt Joyce?”
Well, I don’t know if its Aunt Joyce, but it is the Polara,” he stated.
“How can you tell?”
“By the headlights”
“How can you tell by the headlights?”
“Well, the directions signals on the bottom outside of the headlight…” and my ears glazed over as Dave explained in detail how the Polara lighting and directional lights were arranged. I was only half listening as we met the Southbound car and sure enough, it was the Polara, and from what I could see of the driver in the dark, probably Aunt Joyce.
After that, I never argued with Dave again about cars. OK, that’s not true, there was one late-night conversation we had about if someone running low on gas should you drive faster or slower to get to the gas station. Dave insisted that you should drive faster while I was trying to make the point of fuel efficiency. So I was more than happy to argue with Dave about car logic but not about car details. He was at a different level when it came to that.
Like many brothers, over the years Dave and I had our share of nighttime conversations and daytime fights. While Dave was always faster than me due to my weight, but Lord help him if I did catch him. There were many tears shed in those fights, mostly by Dave. Dave was typically the family member that Mom and Dad would have to ‘worry’ about; and not just because I would be punching him.
There was the one time in the Red House he jumped out of a second-story window on to the driveway below to get away from Hope. Or the time he took Hope’s bike, that was too big for him after being warned to leave it alone, only to take it anyways. Of course, he wiped out. He wiped out so badly, he knocked himself out. I still remember a gaggle of neighborhood kids carrying Dave’s unconscious body down the sidewalk to our house only to be scooped up by Dad who carried him inside. Dad laid him out on the bathroom countertop while Dr. Mom checked him out. He eventually came to and outside of a large bump on the head he was fine. No actual doctors were used in the resolution of this story. That’s my brother for you.
Unfortunately, that was not the case the night Dave and I went to bed in the Gray House and had our pillow fight. The pillow fight itself was actually pretty short. To be fair, I did start it. After a couple of whacks with my pillow, Dave retaliated with his own. With a nice overhead swing, I was jarred out of my playful mood with a sharp pain to the back of my head. I put my hand up to my head and my fingers found a new hole. I ran downstairs screaming. By the time I got to the kitchen where Mom was the blood was dripping down my neck.
Mom got a cold washcloth and Dad got the car ready to take me to the hospital for my stitches. It turned out Dave had been playing with a flashlight the night before. Since he wasn’t supposed to play with flashlights anymore he had hidden it in his pillow. When I returned from the hospital Dave showed me the dent I put in the flashlight. That got me to laugh. I could tell he felt bad for what had happened.
Dave and I were the only ones in our family that stayed together after our parents died, both falling under Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s care. This makes Dave the only person I have grown up with my entire life. With my parents, Dave and I would fight like brothers, consistently. Lee and I got along despite being a year and a half apart, two school grades. We really didn’t fight regularly. Maybe Dave and I fought because we were too close in age.
But after our parents died, the fight in Dave and I just kind of – went. We were scared little boys, at 11 and 12 years old. In light of our circumstance, we had landed with Comanecian grace but at the time I thought we were crumpled spirits. It would take me years to understand the blessing and good fortune we had actually received.
My rejection of our good fortune was probably best illustrated in one of our first rituals when we moved in with the Beckmans. As we would go to bed Aunt Joyce would tug John and Jim in. We would hear their ‘good nights’ and their laughter through our wall.
Our door would open and Aunt Joyce would ask, “Are you ready for bed?”
Aunt Joyce would go to Dave’s bed first and tickle him followed by a good night kiss. When my turn came I would pull the sheets over my head so she couldn’t kiss me but she would still be able to tickle me which I would still laugh and giggle. It would become a game to us – her attempts to kiss me good night.
It wouldn’t take more than a high school psychology student to figure out I was resisting her as a replacement for my Mom. Dave on the other hand fully appreciated her intervention. I think this is where Dave and I diverged our relationship with the Beckmans. While John and I got along, for the most part, the next couple of years were classic junior high adjustments for both of us. We were at new schools with unique situations. And despite being the same age, we did not go to the same junior high school. John was getting some of his learning disabilities addressed. I was facing a new school without Hope and Lee to break new ground for me.
Dave, on the other hand, paired up with Jim who was an ‘old hand’ at Woodland Elementary. He introduced Dave to his friends, and probably most importantly, he explained why his cousin was now living with him. Jim and Dave did a lot more hanging out together and with their friends. John and I hung out together as well but we didn’t share friends and school.
There was one story Aunt Joyce shared with me many years later. Woodland School had parents’ night so they gathered at the school one evening to get updates from Dave and Jim’s teacher. As typical on a parents’ night, the teacher had arranged the room to show off what her students had been working on the past few months.
One of the works were short essays or stories by each student on what they had done over the summer. Like all the other parents Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack searched for Dave and Jim’s essay. When they found Dave’s there were taken aback that he had written about his mom dying and moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack. Aunt Joyce thought Dave’s essay shared too much and spoke to the teacher on why she would display this. The teacher assured Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack that the entire class agreed that Dave’s essay should be displayed. So on the wall, it remained.
I did not share such public discussions about the death of my parents. The closest I would come would be reading a short story in my high school creative writing class about an orphaned kid moving in with an old man. It was our first assignment. I had written it assuming only the teacher would read it or maybe a couple of other students in my class. I was embarrassed about being called on to read my story aloud to the class. And I am pretty sure it was obvious to all in the room who the little boy in the story was.
As we got into high school, I found it interesting that Dave would not refer to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack as his aunt and uncle to his friends. He would refer to them as ‘his folks’ thus avoiding the discussion with the person on why he was not living with his parents. I, on the other hand, would just refer to them and ‘my aunt and uncle’. On occasion, the person I was telling this to would ask, “Where are your parents?” I would simply tell them “they died”. Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes they would continue to ask, “How did they die?” My response would typically go something like “Well, my parents were going through a divorce and my Dad didn’t like it so he shot my Mom and then he shot himself.”
This was typically received with dropped jaws, apologies and various other sympathetic gestures. After a while, I got used these reactions. Sometimes I would get emotional despite my efforts to hold it in. Sometimes I was more detached or more ‘as-matter-of-fact’. Depending on the situation, sometimes I would tell them the ‘whole story’. Many times I would include my conclusion that a person in an abusive situation was worse off than what I had gone through. My situation, as bad as it was, would never get worse. But the abused soul was always being pounded down like a hammer on a nail. Or I would go into everyone’s worst moment is their own. For some people, their worse moment is a scratch on their Cadillac. We all have our worse moments but it isn’t a contest. It would be a teachable moment in empathy.
While I would shun people’s sympathy, Dave would embrace it. The first summer we moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack we got to spend a week in Lutherdale. Lutherdale is a Bible Camp in Elkhorn Wisconsin where we would spend a week enjoying the lake and hanging out with each other. They were peaceful weeks just Mom and us kids. So it strange being there without Hope, Lee and Dawn. It was also the first time John and Jim were away from their parents. It didn’t really go too well for them.
Camp counselors were the twenty-somethings, or younger, there to watch the younger kids that showed up for camp. Since we were there during Family Week they were more available that week. I believe Dave and I were their hard-luck case having lost our parents that winter. Dave connected with one particular counselor, I believe his name was John. He was part of a singing group and Dave’s inspiration to get into singing. He still has their album which he signed. I have to admit, I was impressed to know someone who had made an actual record. It is their version of ‘Pass It On’ that I remember so well from Lutherdale.
This friendship, while it may have ended when we left camp that week, stayed with Dave for the rest of his life. In junior high, he joined choir, which continued into high school. John, Jim or I did not appreciate being dragged back to school to see all his performances but we all had to support Dave in his singing career – according to Aunt Joyce. She even got him voice lessons as well. His singing career continued at Valparaiso. And while singing in school wasn’t exactly a ‘career’, he did sing solos in our church choir and sang at weddings and funerals and some of those were paid gigs.
In Deerfield High School all the halls are designated with a letter. The music department was given ‘M’ for their short hallway. Off the ‘M’ hall, there were a couple of rooms they had for their band and choir classes, a few practice rooms, and the music teacher’s office. So the slang term that developed for people in choir or band was ‘M-hallers’. Its implied meaning ranged anywhere from ‘being gay’ to ‘being a dork’. It was a way to put someone down that didn’t conform to your high school values. So Dave was an ‘M-haller’. The problem is when the group embraces a derogatory term, that term loses its power – like ‘Cheese Head’. (Full disclosure: in high school I did take a music class, Beginning Guitar. So I too, was an ‘M-haller’ at one time.)
Dave never really embrace being an ‘M-haller’. I had always hoped he would find some friends to sing in a band with. We sang together often enough with our own music in our bedroom so I knew he could sing. But when he sang solo’s I always thought he sounded deeper and nasally. Normally when we sang in our bedroom we sang at least an octave or two higher. I always preferred the higher parts and loved the high pitched singers like Steve Perry, Geddy Lee and Jon Anderson. But Dave never joined a band so I would have to keep my friends from teasing him too much. While I never preferred his ‘professional’ singing voice but he does have a gift and continues to sing today.
Dave’s first job was inherited from me, but after a couple of other jobs, he ended up working at his friend Steve Petersen’s dad’s company – R-Columbia in Highland Park. Dave, Steve, Ted Horist and a couple of other friends would assemble headphones that Steve’s dad would sell across the country. Dave would proudly point out that their headphones were used by the NFL coaches on the sidelines back then.
One day while Dave and his friends worked at R-Columbia they notice a lot of extra activity across the street at the Porsche dealer. Turns out it was a film crew who was working on the ‘Risky Business’ movie. You can see R-Columbia at the end of this clip after the scene when they open the Porsche’s door. It is the building on the left through the window as Tom Cruise and his friends are sitting in the chairs against the window. One of Dave’s ‘Brushes with Greatness’.
All four of us boys had our own group of friends and by high school, we all had pretty different circles of friends. On rare occasions, we would cross each other’s path. For example, one evening Greg, Jeff and I decided we were going to paint the fence by Deerfield High School. This wasn’t a school project, we weren’t painting to cover up the existing graffiti, we were going to add our names to it. Today you would call it ‘tagging’. The gray privacy fence was famously scrawled with graffiti. Thinking back its amazing that the Village of Deerfield let the graffiti stay as long as they did.
Greg, Jeff and I had the brilliant idea that spray paint would take too long so we were going to use a pump canister we had ‘acquired’ from Franks to apply our paint faster. So under the shadow of darkness one evening, we parked our car at the corner of Chestnut and Telegraph. It’s actually more of a bend than a corner. From there we only had to cut through a shrubbish lot, cross over the railroad tracks and go a block north to where to graffiti was closer to the high school to be noticed.
With our paint-filled pump spray ready, we made our way as far north as we could before crossing railroad track and Waukegan road to the fence. Greg insisted on painting the fence while Jeff and I played lookout. He pumped the canister and started painting his masterpiece.
“It’s not working!” he hissed.
I tried to grab the canister of paint but Greg insisted he could get it to work. Cars were passing us on Waukegan Road as the three of us tried to figure out why the paint was not coming from the nozzle. After a few more feudal pumps to try to build up enough pressure we had to concede failure. Luckily Jeff was still playing lookout and then he yelled.
“Cops!”
Sure enough, brakes lights from Deerfield’s Finest as they were passing us and our fence canvas. Lucky for us there was a break in the evening traffic and we were able to sprint across the road to the railroad tracks. We did not see anyone get out of the cop car when we dared a glance having made to the other side of Waukegan Road. By the time we got to the top hill onto the railroad tracks, the cop car had to continued North. Apparently satisfied with scaring us off instead of chasing us down.
We went down the other side of the hill so we couldn’t be seen from the road. Our nervous laughter betraying our actual fear. Soon we fell back into our high school bravado and fantasies of what we could have done. We took turns blaming Greg, the paint and the canister. Greg was having none of that. The reality was we were stupid high school kids thinking we could pour paint into sprayer made to spray water and expecting it to work. Eventually, we found our way on the trail through the bushes to get back back to our car. As we got closer we heard voices. The bravado was again lost.
We could barely make out the shadowy forms that were first betrayed by their muffled dialogue. A light, or rather a flame appeared amongst the figures. Suddenly I realized who it was – Dave and his friends. He had been talking about his friends burning their term papers. And his friend Ted lived just a couple blocks from there.
“It’s Dave!” I whispered to Greg and Jeff.
All fear gone, Greg yelled out in his father’s voice, “What are you kids doing!?”
The shadows stood up and took off running south on Telegraph towards Ted’s house. Jeff growled, I yelled as we came out from our own shadows to chase them but they were already gone. As we made our way back to our car I realized scaring my brother and his friends made up a little for our failures as graffiti artists.
While Dave and I got along, outside of music, we had pretty different interests. While John and I paired up on plants and fishing, Dave and Jim paired on mechanical things. With the lake behind us, a few people would snowmobile there in the winter when it got cold enough. Jim got a snowmobile first and eventually so did Dave, by borrowing $500 from me (family lore still questions whether that loan was never actually paid back). Dave and Jim would also tinker with their car engines and do bodywork on their cars. Dave and Jim would rather get their hands oily than dirty from the garden or potting soil like John and I.
Without our parents, the task of teaching us to drive fell to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack. From when we first moved in Uncle Jack would let John or Jim, and eventually, Dave and I seat next to him and steer the car around ‘The Circle’. The block that made up our street – Chris Court, Carol Lane, Hickory Knoll Road and Montgomery Drive was referred to as ‘The Circle’. Normally we would have called ‘going around the block’ but that would imply there were multiple blocks and there wasn’t in this case. So ‘The Circle’ is where we would steer the car while Uncle Jack worked the pedals. We would walk Mimi, the Beckman’s miniature poodle and eventually Daquari, Maxine and Luke. When we were trying to be healthy Aunt Joyce would have us jog around The Circle. Steering the car around The Circle would be a privilege and would most likely occur on Sunday after church or Saturday if we were all together running errands.
I was always more comfortable with Aunt Joyce when I was learning to drive. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had driven with Uncle Jack. He could be a harsh critic. And I was not a confident driver. The worse case was driving with my driving instructor and ‘losing it’ on a left turn onto Deerfield Road from Sanders Road forcing the instructor to use his ‘second brake’. Outside of that and ever since, I’ve loved driving – especially when I could bring my music with.
I had taken my driver’s ed course earlier than most of my peers since I was one of the oldest in my class – second semester my sophomore year. It was a weird time in Illinois Driver’s Ed historically. We were taught to brake with our left foot. I know! crazy right? The logic at the time was then drivers would be used to using their left foot when driving. For those of you who don’t drive stick, you use your left foot to work the clutch. Currently, only 2% of cars sold have a manual transmission in the US. Only 18% of drivers know how to drive stick. ‘Left Foot Braking‘, as its called, is still around as a ‘safety concept’ but it only survived few years in Illinois Driver’s Ed.
When I finally got my ‘blue slip’ (for you kids reading this, a blue slip is your certificate of completion so you get your driver’s license) none of my friends could drive. Without any pressure to drive, I put off getting my license. First, it was because the lines were too long. I remember being in Deerbrook Mall where the DMV was when the ‘blue slips’ had been sent out, there was a line from the DMZ office to the General Cinema on the opposite side. But eventually, I would go passing on my first attempt. I was definitely more comfortable driving by myself.
Now that I had a license, the next step was to get a car. One of the many lessons Uncle Jack taught us was saving. “Deposit your whole check into your account and only keep out what you need,” he would say. The many trips to Deerfield Savings Saturday morning I remember Uncle Jack hovering over me as I filled out my deposit slip and critical of much my ‘Less Cash’ was. “Do you need that much?” he would ask. I’ll admit I didn’t save as much without his accompaniment. But his tutelage had paid off. By the time I got my driver’s license. I had saved two thousand dollars.
My favorite car has always been a Ford Mustang. Keep in mind I’m not into cars. But a ’64 Mustang was always my ideal car. A guy on Wilmot Road very close to us was selling a black and white Mustang Cobra II. It had a black stripe down the middle, black quarter window louvers, stick, hatchback. It was beautiful. And it was two thousand dollars.
“Absolutely not,” Uncle Jack said.
I was crushed. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t buy the car with MY money? But Uncle Jack had spoken and I was afraid of him enough that I would not defy him. Later that summer we had a rare Zilligen get together and my cousin Mike was selling an orange ’72 Mustang Mach 1. When I asked him how much it was he said:
“I would never sell it to you. You’d kill yourself.”
It seemed like I would never get a car. I guess I was going to have to borrow Aunt Joyce’s Polara until I moved out. Luckily this was not to be the case. So this is how we went from being a one-car family to six cars by the beginning of the ’80’s we filled the Beckman driveway.
So shortly after Dave and I moved in, Uncle Jack, through
his work connections with a scrapyard in Waukegan, purchased a car for Aunt Joyce – a Dodge Polara. For some reason, we always called in a ‘Polaris’. Up until a few years ago, Dave pointed out we’ve been mispronouncing the car’s name – for 30 years. The Dodge Polara was purple – some would argue plum. Prince would say it was not purple. It was the car John and I started driving in the evening and on the weekends when we first got our licenses.
I was the first of us to work a ‘regular’ part-time job – at the Deerfield Courts. Not to be outdone, John got a job at County Diary in Wheeling. He was making $2.50 to my $1.95. Unfortunately, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack would have to take John to and from his job while I would take the bus after school and get picked up or ride my bike. When I started working at Franks I could drive and Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack would sometimes drop off the purple beast. I assumed they did the same for John.
John was the first to get his own car, a ’76 Monte Carlo – a classic long hood coupe. It was a beautiful car. My first car was once again acquired through Uncle Jack’s connections from the scrap yard. They had received a ’72 Ford Galaxy – a four-door ‘boat’ that needed transmission work. By paying for the transmission bill, the car was mine. Gone were my days of taking the bus to school or my bike to work. As Dave and Jim got their licenses, Jim purchased a Vega from the Parsons down the street. Dave basically took over the purple beast and Aunt Joyce purchased a Buick LeSabre from our cousin Alan.
Each family member now had a car. This meant we would have to coordinate our schedules to arrange the cars in the correct order.
There would be quite a few evenings Uncle Jack would assign who was to go where in the driveway so our mornings – and his – went smoothly. Uncle Jack would typically be at the end of the drive since he left first. One of us boys would follow with one lucky driver to be in the garage with Aunt Joyce since she typically left after us.
Once we had our assignments, those who were not in order, which was most of us, would pirouette out of the driveway on to the road or across the street into the Todd’s driveway returning to the driveway in our assigned positions. This way things worked smoothly in the morning – for Uncle Jack.
We all enjoyed the new freedom our cars brought us. During my freshman year, I took an intro to guitar class. And through this, I eventually got an electric guitar. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack encouraged my purchase of a solid body ash Ibanez electric guitar. It was from a music store in Wauconda that had taken over an old bank. Their gimmick was keeping all their expensive guitars in the old safe in the basement. With the purchase of the guitar and amp entitled me to 10 free guitar lessons.
Over the next two years, I would continue to take guitar lessons there. And when I got my own car I drove myself to Wauconda. In my mind, I was becoming a rock star in our basement but the reality was my guitar lessons had devolved from learning to playing guitar to learning out to play specific songs.
One trip to my guitar lesson my friend Steve Olson accompanied me to check out the music store while I took my lesson. On the way, I had found my normal route was under construction so it forced a detour on a road I wasn’t familiar with. After the lesson, I took what I thought was the detour on the way back. Unfortunately, it was a gravel road and the first right turn I took too fast and started fishtailing and ended up hitting a tree in a ditch.
Steve and I were ok. I was better than Steve whose head had hit frame between the windshield and car door window. We had to walk to a nearby house to call home. Uncle Jack came out to pick Steve and I up. I watched as my Ford Galaxy was towed off, eventually, to the junkyard from which it came. My freedom had been neutered to being a passenger dependant on friends and family to get where I wanted to go or to borrow someone else’s car. I would be without a car for the next 4 years.
Dave’s accident was of his own making. Actually, it was not an accident like my poor Galaxy, Dave’s accident was one of age and youth. One day leaving DHS, while he was driving his Purple Polara, he punched the accelerator on Waukegan road and found the limits of the Polara’s crankshaft. Like Sean Penn in Fast Times in Rosemount High, Dave thought he could rebuild the Polara’s engine. After a month of the Polera’s engine parts occupying the garage, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack brought in an expert – our cousin Danny Brumm. He with Jim and Dave was finally able to get the Polarea back together again. While it did run I don’t think it was ever the same but Dave was able to sell it and picked up John’s old Monte Carlo.
Thinking back to those high school days, Dave, Jim, John and I had found much of ourselves through our cars. Well, not through our cars, but from the freedom our cars provided. While our birthdays were all within 15 months of each other, we all had our own paths. Jim worked various jobs – Ace Hardware, True Value, McDonald’s and eventually ended up at Jewel, the coveted employer in Deerfield due to its higher pay. John eventually left Country Dairy when his emergency dog group and volunteer time at Deerfield Animal Hospital turned into his dream job at the Deerfield Animal Hospital. I had gotten my ‘dream job’ at Frank’s Nursery and Craft. As I mentioned earlier, Dave ended up working with his friends at R-Columbia electronics.
In the middle of high school, our lives consisted of school, work and hanging out. Hanging out consisted of one of your friends or more and a place. Hanging out at the lowest level involved someone’s home. You could start there but you would have to, eventually, ‘go somewhere’ because your home wasn’t ‘anyway’. So I could ‘hang out’ at Greg’s house. Or we could hang out at Jeff’s work. Or hang out at the mall. But our favorite hangout was the arcade.
I remember seeing Space Invaders for the first time. It was at Strike ‘n’ Spare bowling alley where Aunt Joyce and Grandma bowled. In junior high these ‘video games’ sat next to the two or three pinball machines – which was next to the jukebox. By the time we got to high school, video games were showing up in restaurants and movie theaters. On a visit to Lakehurst Mall, we found Aladdin’s Castle had open up on the second floor near a magic shop we used to frequent. Aladdin’s Castle seemed almost like a place where parents could drop their kids off while they shop – which they did. But it was too clean, bright, convenient to hang out with your friends. And Lakehurst Mall was 25 minutes away. We needed something closer, something cooler. Then Peacock showed up.
Peacock ice cream opened up in 1979 on Skokie Boulevard down the road from the Eden theaters. They had 2 coolers of ice cream but the owner’s real genius was lining the outside wall with arcade games. It seemed each time we went there were more games. Soon one of the ice cream coolers was gone, then the other. The games were put back to back and there was a maze through all the machines. One night a new room appeared. Parking was tough. There would be people hanging around outside. The inside was dark and lite with the screen glow and neon. There were a couple of change machines. It could be the middle of January and it would still be warm in there.
Being in high school at the time I was, as the commercial would say, nose-blind to the odors. All the prepubescent sweat must have made that place reek but I never noticed. Peacocks became our ‘hangout’ until another arcade opened in Wheeling (who’s name was lost to the ages). Eventually, the games were brought to our homes by Atari, or in our case Mattel’s Intellivision. But the games at the arcades were only half the reason we hung out there. It was our clubhouse, or at least where we would start or end our evenings.
But in all honesty, I kinda lost track of my family when I was in high school. My friends were becoming more important to me. I avoided Dave, Jim and John in high school, I tolerated Dave a little more than John and Jim but I was trying to find my own way. They knew my vulnerabilities. I would be ’embarrassed’ when my friends would come by and they would have to interact with Dave, Jim or John – or, heaven forbid, Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack. Part of it was your typical teenager stuff – your parents are embarrassing.
Once my friends starting feeling comfortable with my family, it would not take much for them to unleash their biting sarcasm on Dave, Jim or John. There is a classic lyric by Joe Jackson – “Don’t call me a faggot unless you are a friend.” I’ve always loved the sentiment behind Joe’s lyric. Back in those days, it was nothing to call each gay or fags. But once you went outside of our circles the words became unacceptable. Like the word ‘nigger’ in the black culture – “Don’t call me a faggot unless you are a friend.”
My friends would occasionally go ‘outside of our circle’ with Dave, Jim and John. I would have to call them out and rein them in but that was not always possible. The bottom line was sometimes my friends could be jerks, and I was not always the best at calling them out for being jerks. But I was always more protective of Dave.
Not that John and Jim didn’t deserve protection, but Dave was special. He was my true brother. And while time would melt that definition between all four of us it would both erode and yet enhance that definition between Lee and me. But there has always been a special bond between me and Dave.
We are the only two who remained together after our parents died. Growing up, Dave didn’t always make the best choices, like jumping out of the second-story windows or riding a bike that was way too big for him. After we moved in with the Beckmans, Dave didn’t do as many ‘dumb’ things. But everything moved slower. I think it was the pain we carried unspoken between ourselves that slowed us down. But as we got used to the weight we realized we were growing up. Life was returning to both of us. Our late-night conversations were happening less. Partially because we were out with our friends or working, partially because we were growing apart. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, we were growing up. We weren’t as scared as we had been before and we were confiding in our friends more.
As the years when by, Tom Petty was right I would eventually have my first girlfriend and I would watch her walk across the room or hall to me. And there would be college, and more friends and more girlfriends. Eventually, there would be a wife and children. But as the years would roll by there would always be Dave. And there was only Dave. The only person I could say I grew up my entire life with. That may not seem like much to some people but over time I’ve realized how special our relationship is – because of what we went through. Maybe two siblings who have moved around a few times would understand this. The loss of our relationships with Hope, Lee and Dawn haunted both of us. As bad as things had been for all of us, somehow Dave and I were given each other. Having each other gave a hidden strength we didn’t acknowledge or understand ourselves. And as joyful as our sibling reunions would be, the goodbyes would again renew our loss. And for Dave and I, the goodbyes would be painted with a weird coat of guilt. Why were we so lucky?
I’m sure it was because Dave and I are only a year and 25 days apart in age. Uncle Jack once told me he and Aunt Joyce were trying to get all three of us boys but the Brumm family thought that would be too much of a burden for them. As grateful as I to be placed with Dave, I believe the real blessing was being placed with the Beckmans. And while I wasn’t aware of my good fortune growing up, I look back and see many times I squandered this. This unappreciative child may be the oldest clique. I am but one of the millions who under-appreciate what life has given them: a loving family, committed siblings and loving parents. Too many people take these blessings for granted. Mine are just more obvious due to my circumstances.
Early into marriage Desi and I had an apartment in Wheeling. When Cindy and Dave got married, they moved into a townhouse in Palatine. But we didn’t hang out together. I was hanging out with my friends, and the bars, and working. When they bought a house somewhere else Palatine, we bought a house in Lindenhurst way up north. A year or so after that Cindy and Dave also bought a house in Lindenhurst, about a mile away.
Now we would drop by each other’s houses on the weekend. There were many days we would ride together to work. In the early ’90s our offices were about a half-mile apart. I changed jobs and that ended that. But 6 months later so did Dave. Once again, our work and homes were a mile apart from each other. Our occasional morning commuters could continue. We would regularly call each other with ‘traffic alerts’ and then our conversations would continue onto various issues we were dealing with our new families. We would occasionally walk through our business problems too.
I remember one particular commuter home that started with me alerting Dave to a traffic problem on 83 and he should avoid it. Having caught him on 53 he changed his route home as duly warned. Our conversation turned to issues he was dealing with at work. And almost to prove his point, he said he had to take an incoming call – it was work.
I remember hanging up and wondering how much better taking our ‘Midlothian’ route would be since I was stuck in the parking lot that used to be Route 83. Thinking about Dave’s problem I realized he was no longer the stupid kid that would ride bikes that were too big for him, or jumped out of second-story windows. I was proud of the fact that he was a husband, a father and a respected employee. I know he’s a better son to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack than I am.
I was brought back from my mind wandering by a Tom Petty song on the radio. I was reminded of that evening waiting for Dave outside of Deerfield Courts when Tom was singing ‘Here Comes My Girl’ but I was lamenting at what a loser I was because it wasn’t my girl coming through the doors but my stupid brother. But now when I play that memory of Dave coming through the doors of Deerfields Courts he’s not my stupid brother, he is the only soul that knows me and my entire story. I feel so lucky to have him as a brother and a friend. We have gone through a lot together – more than most people, but I believe we turned out OK.
Girls are overrated anyway 😉