I’ve been living in the past these last few days, spending my time in the halcyon days of my childhood. Okay, so there wasn’t very much that was particularly halcyon about them, but still, I’ve been kicking around a lot of memories these days of hanging out with the newspaper staff and going out to Lincoln Beach to drink beer and smoke pot. With the Chorus on hiatus, I’ve taken up a writing project to keep my mind busy, and it’s starting to come together very nicely.
It’s based on an obscure old legend that kicked around my school about a place called Grunch Road. It was one of the old shell roads that led off into the woods in the undeveloped eastern expanses of New Orleans. It’s all been developed now with paved streets and neatly ordered row houses, though most of that got torn up by Hurricane Katrina. But back when I was a kid, Grunch Road was the popular spot to take your girlfriend to make out. (Not that I know this from personal experience, mind you.) So the story goes – and there are different versions, depending on who you talk to – a boy took his girlfriend out there one night back in the fifties to “watch the submarine races” as we used to say. They were never seen again, and the story was widely told that the grunch got them. Or the grunches; depending on which version of the story you listen to, there was either just one horrific beast or a whole clutch of the things. They were half-man, half-goat, and they came out at night to feed on unsuspecting, innocent young people who unknowingly wandered into their lair. The point of the story was to scare your girlfriend so she’d huddle closer to you. Girls were a lot more gullible back then.
So I’m writing a novel based on the old legends of Grunch Road. It’s set in 1971, when I would have been a fourth grader, at my old alma mater, Abramson High School, which I mention by name, with characters based on the students and teachers I remember. All of the names have been changed, but anyone who went to “Abe” will immediately recognize them. Most of them are dead now, I think, so I’m not too worried about getting sued. It has a little bit of the flavor of the whodunit mysteries I used to write in high school, using myself and friends as an amateur detective agency, and even included one of those friends – he and I are the only surviving members of this band of investigators – as a character. My storytelling skills have improved: I’m not as shy about a lot of things, like getting my protagonist laid. A little sex never hurts when you’re trying to sell a story, even if it is straight sex.
One thing that’s really got the memories – and the creative mojo – flowing is an e-mail I received from my sister this morning with six pictures attached. I’d been trying to get her to find a copy of my senior picture to send me, because it’s the only decent school portrait I ever took. Not only did she deliver on the senior picture, she also sent me a couple of baby pictures, like this one. It’s the oldest picture of me I have now, and it explains why my mother always used to say that she should have put me up for adoption when I was little and cute.
She also sent me some of the horrid class picture I’d had taken over the years, pictures I could have sworn I had destroyed. Like this one from when I was in the fifth grade. I’m guessing at the dates here, because none of these pictures were labeled, but I remember that sweater from when I was in the fifth grade because I loved it so much. Damn, all that hair.
She also sent me two pictures that reminded me that I had worn the same shirt to school on class picture day in tenth and eleventh grade. I went to a different school both years, though, so I guess nobody else noticed. I’m sure it’s high school, since I’m just starting to try to grow a moustache in the latter picture, and I still have a copy of my freshman yearbook picture my old classmate Lenny Hirsch sent me.
This one, I’m pretty sure, was from kindergarten, when I had chipmunk cheeks and my hair hadn’t turned red yet. But I definitely remember that plaid jacket. It looks awful, of course, but I loved it back then. See how styles change?
And of course, she sent me the one I wanted, my senior picture. I look pretty handsome in this one, if I may say so myself, but as I recall it took a lot of effort to look this nice. And the photographer the school contracted with to take the senior portraits retouched it to remove the acne.
It’s a pretty impressive touch-up job when you consider that Photoshop hadn’t been invented yet.
Wow. All that hair.
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