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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”
I’m always bugging my wife with arbitrary shit like this. The pace has slowed a bit now, since my memory is fading in my autumn years and the significant dates are a little further apart, but I still get her every once in a while. It used to be constant, though. Every week or so, back in college and grad school, I’d get her with:
Me: Hey, honey. Guess what today is?
Her: Oh, dear lord, not again.
Me: Yep, we got another anniversary. Guess what it is. Guess, guess, guess!
Her: All right. Let’s see… we’ve been dating for twenty months?
Me: Nope!
Her: Um… twenty-two months?
Me: Nope! Guess again.
Her: I don’t know… we’ve… been together as long as you were in school before I got here?
Me: Nope! That was last week, don’t you remember?
Her: Oh. Hmmm. Oh, I don’t know — just tell me.
Me: Are you suuuuure you don’t want to guess again?
Her: Yes. I’m sure.
Me: Are you paaaaah-sitive?
Her: Yes!
Me: Absolutely positive?
Her: Would. You. Just. Fricking. Tell. Me.
Me: Well, okay, but you’re gonna kick yourself!
Her (under her breath): Not if I can kick you first…
Me: What?
Her: Nothing, dear. I’m waiting.
Me: Okay — it’s the second anniversary since we’ve been together of the day that’s exactly between our birthdays! Yay!
Her: Um, yay. I guess. Do you make this shit up? What, do you work for Hallmark or something?
All right, so it’s not quite that bad. But only because it would take more than that for her to say ‘fricking‘ or ‘shit‘ to me. (Believe me, I know exactly what it takes, and this isn’t it.)
But apart from that, it’s just about right. I kept track of months together, and then months engaged, and months married. And the number of days together, and married, and all sorts of other stuff. Partly to show how romantic and thoughtful I could be, and partly to bug the piss out of her. (In a good way, though. Always in a good way.)
I even proposed to her on our fiftieth-month anniversary. Maybe someday I’ll tell you that whole story. But it’s long and complicated, with twists and turns and unnecessary complications. In the end, the only important thing happened just the way it was supposed to, and we agreed to get hitchified. Getting to that point turned out to be problematic. But that’s a story for another day.
Right now, I’ve got to find another anniversary of sorts to bug her with. August of next year is just too damned far away to be the next one. I’ll have to get my calendar out, and find some date-calculating program, and figure out something closer to surprise her with. Oh, our ‘thirteen years together’ anniversary is coming up soon, but she’ll be looking out for that one. I’ve got to hit her with a ‘square root of something’, or a ‘such-and-such thousand days’; some arbitrary thing that won’t be on her radar. But this time,
Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”
You know, I’ve written about this in several posts already, so I won’t go into full detail again. I think all the old music I’ve been buying lately has bubbled the memories of this back to the front of my brain. (Yes, that’s how thoughts and memories get around my head. They bubble. It’s all champagne and beer and Windex up there. Does that really surprise you?)
So, for anyone who hasn’t seen the posts in question, um, go look for them. Really. I don’t remember what the hell I said, and it was probably more coherent than what I can summarize here. Go — don’t be lazy. Go already. What, you’re still here? Oh, all right, fine. I’ll catch you up. (Lazy no-good frickin’…)
What? Nothing. Nothing, I wasn’t saying anything. Just writing your summary. Here you go. (Prick.)
What? I didn’t say anything. Just read your summary. Man, you’re so touchy. Jeez.
So, here’s the story. I started listening to the local college station early on in high school. By my senior year, I had a friend in my class who was planning to go there in the journalism department. And he got an internship or something working at the station. He said they could still use some people, so I hit him up for a two-hour slot playing cool alterna-rock and being silly on the radio. And bringing in dozens of blank tapes to record shit that I couldn’t afford to buy, and that I couldn’t find, even if I had the money. I worked there for a year or so, and came out of it with oodles of good shit that no one had heard of then, and certainly nobody knows of now. And that’s the story. Happy now?
But you know what? I always say that no one knows this shit, but you guys out there are pretty cool. So here’s what I’m gonna do — I’ll list as many cool bands and / or albums that come to mind, and you guys can tell me whether you’ve heard of them. I’ve managed to re-collect these on CD or vinyl (i.e., finally pay for them), but some are still on my ‘wish list’. So if you know anything about these groups or albums, drop me a line. I’d love to at least know I’m not the only fool who bought some of these CDs.
So, here’s the list of The Best 80’s Bands I Bet You’ve Never Heard Of. I’m only gonna go for the really obscure shit here. So even though I was listening to the Replacements, and the Cure, and the Call, and the Alarm, and U2, and REM, and They Might Be Giants, and a million others, I’m not going to mention them. Um, well, again, of course. I can’t unmention them now that I’ve told you that, now can I? Anyway, here’s the list. It’s all from memory, so forgive me if I get any details wrong.
Okay, twelve is probably enough. I’ve got plenty more worthy-but-obscure bands in mind, but this is getting awfully long. Still, just in case you happen to know any of these, here’s a list of the bands that didn’t make the list, because I liked them just a little less, or thought they were more popular, or just couldn’t remember them off the top of my head. I’m consulting my collection for these, just to be comprehensive:
Beat Farmers, Bolshoi, Communards, Connells, Guadalcanal Diary, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, It Bites, Paul Kelly and the Messengers, Lucy Show, The Mission UK, Rave-Ups, Screaming Blue Messiahs (who aren’t on the main list only because I already discussed them here), Spoons, Swans, and Velvet Elvis.
Damn, I’m sure there’s more. Maybe it’s time to make another used-bin CD run! Hooray!
Aha! (…he said the next day.) I knew there was more! And here they are:
Adrian Belew and the Bears, Camper van Beethoven (and Cracker, for that matter), New Model Army, Michael Penn, Wire, Yello, and X (though they were actually pretty popular, I think). Okay, that’s probably enough. For now.
Permalink | No CommentsCharlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”
Okay, so most of you don’t know that I’m six feet, three inches tall. Or that I attained most of that height early in life, prompting everybody and their frickin’ cousin to push me toward hoops. You probably also don’t know that all of my friends played ball, watched ball, and generally went all googly-eyed over basketball at a tender age, or that our local university was moderately successful with its hoop program around that time. All of which is to say that basketball was not something I could easily avoid.
But you need to know one other thing to appreciate my opinion on the subject.
I absolutely, positively, so help me Hannah, no question, suck major rosy-cheeked ass at basketball.
I mean, I’m bad. And you know how ‘bad’ sometimes means ‘good’? Well, not this time, brothers and sisters. This time, ‘bad’ means ‘more likely to hurt myself than contribute in any meaningful way’. Which is exactly what happened the last time I played, and precisely why ‘the last time I played’ is now half a lifetime ago.
I’ll tell you how it happened. I showed up at the local YMCA, hoping to play racquetball — my game of choice at the time — with a friend of mine. But we hadn’t reserved a court, and they were all taken. To kill time, we moseyed over to watch pick-up hoops in another gym. By that time of my life, I liked to watch ball — I had even picked out favorite college and pro teams — but I knew that I had no business actually playing the game. So of course, that’s what I ended up doing.
See, the guys in the gym were just about to start a four-on-four fullcourt game. When my friend and I showed up, they recruited us to fill out the teams, despite my best efforts to run the hell away. To make matters worse, I wound up on the ‘skins’ side. ‘Hey, everybody, look at that skinny white topless kid with no game. What a tool!‘ Beautiful.
So, anyway, long story short, I ended up making one decent play in twenty minutes worth of court time, and got a badly dislocated left shoulder for my troubles. For you morbid sicko bastards interested in the gory details, you can hop over to #88, the worst physical pain I’ve ever experienced. Heartless bastards.
Suffice to say, I never played again. Now, I’m no quitter. When there’s any chance of improvement, I tend to stay with something, and ride out the shittiness until I start showing a glimmer of promise. Sometimes at that point, I chuck all the hard work out the window and tell myself that I could have kept getting better, and really been a star, but not before. And sometimes, I stick with something and really do get pretty okay at it. (Or, as in the case of golf, I stick with it, and feed off the occasional glimmer, knowing in my heart of hearts that I’ll always pretty much — but not completely! — suck major ass.)
But once in a great while, I’m so bad at something that it’s not even enjoyable to try and get better. Basketball is squarely in that camp. I would play, reluctantly, and try to generally stay out of the way. But I could see, when I made my first real honest-to-God play, and it led to having a major limb completely dislodged from its home, that the game was not for me. It was a sign, and it told me that the risk-reward proposition for this particular activity wasn’t nearly worth the headaches, not to mention the physical therapy.
And I haven’t looked back. Or raised my left arm much, either, for that matter. Damn you, basketball!
Permalink | No CommentsCharlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”
Okay, so it isn’t exactly having bamboo shoved under my thumbnails. But it wasn’t much of a birthday, either. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college. Soon after I’d started at the school, my parents moved, also. (And in the other direction. You think they were trying to tell me something? Or should I have read something into the fact that they didn’t tell me where they’d moved? Nah.)
So, this was my second summer in unfamiliar territory, with no friends, no knowledge of the area, no history there, and plenty of time on my hands. So, my parents did what all good folks would do in that situation to help me out — they made me find a job. Hoo. Ray.
Actually, my dad found me a job. He was a supervisor at a plant that made glass bottles for various industries — food, beverages, biological research, whatever. And the plant had all sorts of opportunities for a young, near-apathetic kid to make some spending cash by breaking his back for six or eight hours a day. In my case, it was loading crates of IV bottles for Abbott Labs onto wooden pallets, so they could be wrapped and shipped. Groundbreaking stuff. Very engaging, let me tell you, and stimulating? Oh, you don’t know the half of it. I’m surprised I didn’t take up writing poetry on my lunch breaks, from the veritable raincloud of inspiration that hung over the place.
So of course, I took it upon myself to find another job. Okay, that’s not quite fair. I think I was pressed into finding another job. The box-loading thing only lasted for a month or two, which left a lot of long summer days to be filled. Plus, I needed the money for the next school year, to buy beer and gas station hot dogs… er, textbooks and school supplies. Yeah, that’s it. You can never have enough ‘three-ring binders’. Sure.
So, I found a job working at Little Caesar’s Pizza. You know, ‘Pizza Pizza!‘, and all that. Except this Little Caesar’s didn’t exist yet. Me and a couple of dozen other kids signed up to work there once it was finished being built. So we had a week or so of training beforehand, and got our cute little uniforms and aprons and hats, and even got to practice in the real store a few times before ‘opening night’. Which was on my birthday. And which was also one of my last days at the bottling plant. Eep.
So, I got up at the butt-crack of pre-dawn, as was my custom on box-loading days. I didn’t have my own car, so even though I didn’t have to be there until eight or nine, I still had to ride to work with my dad at seven. Or five-thirty, or three o’clock, or some ridiculous godforsaken early hour. I’m not a morning person, folks. Trust me on this one. And spending six to eight weeks of my summer in college getting up goddamned earlier than I did for classes — much less classes in high school — just wasn’t on my list of things I wanted to do before I was fucking dead. And that’s the last summer I spent at home, by the way. The next two years, I made damned sure I found an on-campus summer job. One that started at a reasonable hour, after the fucking roosters have woken up.
All right, where was I? Oh, right, my birthday.
Well, I worked my factory shift. It went until two o’clock or so as I recall, or maybe a little later. We took a break around eleven for lunch, but apart from that, our group — four or five of us — was packing pallets non-stop from eight until two or so. Given that I was there at six-thirty or some shit that morning, I’m counting that as the full six hours.
After that, I trundled off to the pizza place. I think I went straight there, and changed in the car, or the back room of the restaurant. And walked into a shitstorm of people. This was a sleepy Southern town, you see. (Yes, I’m fully aware that’s redundant.) And it seems that everybody wanted to try this new pizza joint that was having their grand opening on that day. My birthday. We were swamped. I went to work immediately at the ‘landing’ station. I had a knack for getting the hot pizzas down out of the oven, slicing and boxing them, and setting them up for the clerks to grab. It was a hot, sweaty job, and a high-pressure job — insofar as any part of making pizza can seem significant — and it required a fair amount of mental juggling to keep track of all the pies in their various stages of readiness.
And on that day, the place was a madhouse. Literally hundreds of people ordered pizzas that day. Some of them were just tryin’ to tickle our balls, I guess, because several pizzas never got picked up. Or maybe we got behind, and they got tired of waiting. I have no idea. All I remember is that we stayed open later than the posted hours that night, to fill all of the orders. Or maybe it was planned that way all along, as a goodwill gesture to the new customers. Again, I really don’t recall. I just know that we finally closed the doors well after eleven, and that’s when we got to take our first breaks, and grab a bite to eat. But we weren’t done yet, of course. We spent the next two hours cleaning up, and scrubbing down, and making neat. Dishes were washed, food was stored, and counters were shined. We finally got out of there sometime after one am. My twentieth birthday passed me by, as I was wearing a smock and rubber gloves and scrubbing pizza pans. If it had happened a year later, I’d have killed somebody that night.
As it was, I was too damned tired. I think I opened whatever presents my parents got for me that night, but honestly, I can’t remember now what they were. I’m sure they were cool — my parents are pretty good about knowing what to get — but I was too tired to really register anything at the time. I think I slept well into the next afternoon.
Now, really, the whole experience wasn’t that bad. And I’m not really bitching here — plenty of people have it as bad or worse, every day.
(Though I was bitching then, let me tell you. I was a bored twenty-year-old kid who hated getting up early, missed his friends, and was beginning to wonder whether he needed the money that fucking badly, after all. Oh, I bitched, dude. I kept most of it to myself — who the hell was I going to bitch to? — but there was bitching. There was most certainly bitching going on.)
And now it makes a pretty good story. ‘The Birthday That Wasn’t‘, I can call it. Or ‘What? That Was My Birthday?‘, or ‘See? I Told You My Parents Don’t Love Me‘. (Just kidding, ma.) And I did get two free pizzas out of the ordeal. Not because it was my birthday, mind you — I doubt that I even told the people at Little Caesar’s about that. It’s just that we had all those extra pies lying around. Everybody took home pizzas that night; some people had three or four.
And eventually, the summer ended. I went back to school, and my parents moved again. (And out of the south, thankfully. I had a private detective track them down that time. Try to ditch me, will you?) And I never went back there. That’s been a dozen years ago, but I bet the Little Caesar’s is still there. Hell, some of the same people are probably still working there. (It was either that, or work for the local paper factory. Or stack pallets at the glass plant. Personally, I’d stick to the pizza if I were them.) Maybe one day I’ll go back and reminisce about how it all started, so many years ago. And then I’ll order a half-dozen pizzas and leave them there without paying. Oh, sure, the money will come out of their paychecks, but at least they’ll have a snack to take home that night, as they wander home to collapse into bed. Ahhh. Just like old times.
Permalink | No CommentsCharlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”
The fact that I know this — and that it’s actually important to me — is further evidence (as if you need it) of my shaky, borderline-compulsive personality.
For what it’s worth, there are twelve steps between the first floor and the basement, and thirty-nine steps (boo!) from the street to the house. (Yes, we live in the ‘creepy-house-up-on-the-hill’. It gets us some funny looks, but it keeps the children away, so it’s worth it.)
So, anyway, I used to be quite a bit more, um, insane with my compulsions. I like even numbers for reasons I can’t even begin to imagine, so I would always take an even number of steps when going somewhere. Assuming that I was paying attention, of course — many happy walks went by without me thinking about it, but when I did, look out!
Because it wasn’t enough for my mind to make me take an even number of steps. Oh, no. That would be too easy. I had to take an even number of steps on each surface. On the sidewalk? Even number. Crossing the street? Even number. And if you’re on the white part of the walk sometimes, and the black part other times, even number on each. Step on a crack? Then step on another one. And on and on and on, ad delirium.
I suppose the best thing you can say about it is that it kept my brain occupied, and therefore out of trouble. (As Exhibit A, I’ll mention that I had no time for writing crap like this back then. So you can see, it wasn’t all bad.) But it did make many things — like, oh, walking — rather difficult. But it never got really out of hand.
These days, such oddball obsessions only seem to arise when I’m nervous, or practicing old habits. If I’m cheering for my favorite team, I’ll likely clap my hands an even number of times. Always. And stamp each foot in multiples of two. I often kiss my wife an even number of times, at least when I’m, er, capable of thinking about such things while they’re happening. Which is not always the case, of course. But I’m sure we always end on an even number, even if I’m not keeping track. No, really, I’m sure of it. Let me have my delusions; they keep me company while I’m trying to sleep at night.
And, of course, if I’m walking down a staircase with an odd number of stairs, I’ll tap my ‘other’ foot against the very last stair, so that I’ve touched the steps an even number of times. It’s second nature at this point; I’m not sure I could help it if I tried. But, of course, all that toe-tapping does create rather ample opportunity for tripping and falling on my face. So, it’s a very, very Good Thing™ that the steps inside my house have had the good sense to arrange themselves in even-numbered groups.
Now, if I can just find room for one more step leading up to the porch…
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