What follows are the last three of the Six Weird Things From My Childhood.
If you missed the first three, for discontinuity's sake, scroll to the post below so you can be brought up to speed.
And yes, I realize it's been almost two weeks since the first part, but I've been swamped, and I promise that I did start this half the next day. So, be happy. Or at least, get over it.
Party Line.
Ask anyone, they'll tell you I'm a talker. Apparently, this started back when I was a small child. I received a Mickey Mouse Talking Phone for Christmas. All I can remember about how the phone looked was that the base was red, the handset was sky blue, and the "cord" connecting the handset and the base was white. When you pressed a button with a Disney character's picture on it, that character would "talk" to you (in reality, a grainy, pre-recorded message, but dammit, I really did think Goofy and Daisy were talking to me. And at all hours of the day, no less. I was impressed at the Disney characters' availability).
Well, one day, my phone broke. I was so focused on Goofy saying hello to me that I pulled the handset off the base. As my attention span was too short to bother trying to fix it, I decided to go use the phone on the desk in the living room.
Luckily for me, the phone had nice big buttons, a lot like mine. And, my brother, good old Sideshow, was nice enough to leave his address book next to it, so I had plenty of people to call.
I proceeded to open it up and started dialing. I think I may have actually spoken to four of my brother's friends from school. My brother tells me that all I did was dial the numbers, ask for the people listed in the book, then told them I was Sideshow's little sister, and how are you today? I apparently hung out on the phone for a few moments until I couldn't come up with anything else, then said goodbye.
I am told this all happened when I was five, and my brother was fourteen. I say that I'm told this because apparently, I've blocked out everything that happened after I started dialing.
However, Sideshow the Magnificent didn't bring up the fact that I did drive-by phone calls to his friends until I was ten years old. And by then, I was horrified, because 1)I was just at that age where boys started getting cute to me (especially much older ones); and 2)I realized that for five years, those guys I called would be at the house all the time and knew I was the crazy little bitch who called them for no reason, but they never said a word about it.
Mortification? That comes with the territory of being the sibling of a Sideshow. I could never look those guys in the face again. Luckily, we moved out of state soon after that.
Add this to the list of retributions to the Sideshow. It's ever-growing.
Me and My Filthy F***ing Mouth.
When I was in middle school, I was a big fan of listening to Eddie Murphy. I had a tape copy of his self-titled comedy album, and I would often fall asleep listening to it. I have no idea how I procured this tape; after all, I was eleven and there was no way in hell my parents would buy me something so rich with profanity. But, I had it, and I enjoyed listening to it very much. I listened to it so much, that I'm quite sure to this day I can recite the "Drinking Fathers" and "Hit By A Car" routines to near-perfection. (Yes, the Girl Full of Useless Information has made room for that. What had to go? Grades 8, 10, and about ten credits earned sporadically during freshman and sophomore year in college. As Dr. Elliot Reed: Moment Killer, would say, "Frick!")
Anyway, the middle school years were oddities, as my Mom continued to live in Jersey for those years. She stayed there to work as a nurse, since nursing gigs in Jersey paid much, much more than the same gigs in Florida, and she figured she'd live up there and earn the extra dough, then come down once I started going to high school. This worked out okay, I suppose.
However, when my mom would come down to visit for a week or so at a time, I tried to play catch up with her on those mother-daughter moments that we were supposed to share before the ones that came when we were supposed to be walking on the beach and talking about feeling skunky (and by the way, those beach moments are ones I don't plan on having. Ever. 'Cause I don't intend to be skunky. Ever).
So, on one of these happy occasions when my Mom was down to visit, we hung out in the kitchen just chatting. I decided that this was the perfect time to relate to her a fabulous snippet from the Eddie Murphy Comedy Gold Collection. As I was eleven at the time, I was just old enough to have enough common sense to self-censor with "gosh-darnits" and "shoots" instead of giving her the full R-rated performance. I can't even remember which bit I was trying to tell her; all I know is that I had her full attention, and she seemed very into my tale.
As the routine went on, I became more and more confident in my delivery, gesturing as I imagined Eddie gestured, adding inflection, tone. My mother was actually smiling and chuckling, which was boosting me higher and higher, and I became more and more animated.
Then, as I was coming to the crux of the tale, it happened.
"So, these motherfuckers..."
Gasp.
Silence.
My mother and I stared at each other in shock. My mind was reeling. I just said "motherfuckers" in front of my Mom!
The silence continues for a few more seconds. My Mom stared at me, expressionless! No fair! I needed a gauge! What was I to do, how was I to proceed? First thing that came to mind was this:
I looked at my Mom, said "Oh, shit!" then booked it out of the kitchen and into my room, before she finally decided to react in some way.
I didn't come out of my room for a few hours after that. But I could have sworn I heard my Mom chuckling under her breath as I ran for my life. I do think she was secretly amused, but I wasn't about to push it.
That evening, I decided it was probably safest that I didn't try to do any more Eddie Murphy routines for the family. They would be restricted to my Catholic school classmates and my volunteer time at the nursing home only.
My Cousin, The King of All Media in the VCR at the Moment.
I spent the summers of my adolescence escaping the blistering heat of Florida and reveling in blissful ignorance in South Jersey. By this time, relatives from the Islands had migrated over to Jersey, including my cousin Jay, who you may remember from my previous post about the duck pond.
Jay and I spent our days playing Nintendo, tooling around on bikes, and setting things on fire in the back yard (in fact, I am proud to say that I introduced the concept of the aerosol blowtorch to him when we were thirteen). We mastered Contra (sure, we needed the thirty lives, but who didn't?), re-enacted the WWF in the den (much to the chagrin of my aunt and her coffee table), and recorded "commercials" suitable for radio (a personal favorite was our series for "Bill And Ted's Excellent Proctologists"). Yes, we had a grand time.
During most of that time, my aunt and her family lived down the street from my uncle and his wife. My uncle would spend the week working in North Jersey, then come home for the weekends. When he'd come home, he would bring food and supplies from a Filipino food store in my old hometown, as well as videos rented from that same store for everyone who understood Tagalog (the national language of the Philippines,) to watch.
Needless to say, as I was the lone savage not forced to learn the language at an early age (my parents feared it would hamper my grasp of proper English), I was never interested in watching these movies, as they had no subtitles, and, as previous experience had shown me, they were all cheesy as hell.
I quickly learned to consider the person choosing these movies. Don't get me wrong; I love my uncle, but this is the same man that asked me and my cousins if we wanted to see an "awesome" movie, then proceeded to put Gymkata in the VCR.
Anyway, my parents flew up to Jersey one week to attend a wedding in New York and have a little family reunion. That same weekend, my uncle brought over the usual supplies, as well as a couple of movies. My aunt thought it would be a good idea to pop one of those movies in so my Dad could watch something while everyone else was getting ready to go out. She tasked Jay to set up the movie, and my Dad settled in to watch. My older cousin, Tracy was ironing a blouse for work, and Jay settled into the recliner. As I was bored and had nothing to do anyway, I plopped down on the floor.
I couldn't understand a damned word anyone in the movie was saying. My Dad and Jay understood, but didn't react to anything on screen. Tracy continued to iron. This went on for about six minutes.
That is, until the crazy porn music started.
Suddenly, I looked up at the television to see two very naked people doing something decidedly not suitable for the people gathered in this room to be watching! And from what I saw, I could tell that porn homegrown in the Islands is not the most glamorous production around.
I shot a look at my Dad. He looked absolutely startled, then laughed nervously and walked away, suggesting that Jay shut the television off. Jay looked shocked, mouth open, but leaped from his seat to stop the cavalcade of awkward. Tracy, who had not been looking at the television as she was ironing, heard the commotion and scrambled up the stairs to tell my aunt what was going down.
It was as if the entire house erupted.
You could hear my aunt screaming on the phone at my uncle, who was only six houses away. "What were you thinking?!" she screamed in Tagalog (thanks go to Tracy for translating). "There was porn in my house!" (that part she yelled in English).
She yelled at him for a good ten minutes. Just enough time for curiosity to get the better of Jay.
As the yelling continued upstairs, Jay crept toward the VCR and popped the tape back in again. The movie resumed, but Jay turned down the volume and stood inches away from the screen. After five seconds, he ejected the tape and leapt away from the television as if burned by a hot stove. He jumped up and down, whisper-screaming "Oh shit! Oh shit!" over and over again.
Screaming continued upstairs. I migrated over to talk to Tracy over by the ironing board, because damned if I was going to get caught helping Jay watch crazy Filipino porn. After Jay let out about a dozen "Oh shit!"s, he creeped back over to the tele, popped the video back in, and played it for another few seconds. The backwards leaping and cursing started over, but now he was jumping around the whole den.
By this time, Tracy was just about done with her ironing. She told him to calm down, cut the crap, and bring the tape up to their mom, who was still screaming. He waved her off, saying he would do so. But, only after popping the tape back in first and jumping around the room some more. Tracy rolled her eyes at him, and kept ironing.
This routine of playing the video for five to ten seconds, then ejecting it, leaping back, and hopping up and down with a litany of "Oh shit!"s continued on for a couple more cycles, until my aunt yelled down the stairs for him to bring her the offending celluloid.
Later, after the madness died down, Jay showed me the hard plastic case the tape came in. It was plain case with a label on it, like any local video store would have, but he tugged on the plastic covering the label, which revealed a second label underneath it, simply labeled, "Sex." This video store's organization system no doubt rivaled the concepts of binomial nomenclature and the Dewey Decimal System.
At the time of this travesty, I was fifteen, and Jay was just getting a handle on fourteen. We haven't talked about it since that day, but I think it's safe to assume that since it was unfortunately mine, it was his first-ever glimpse of porn. And let me tell you, it has definitely affected me. That's right; I think that should I ever choose to view porn again, I'm going to stay away from the home-grown Filipino porn. This is simply because should I ever see it, I would shudder to think that maybe, just maybe, I may somehow be related to one of those people.
Eww, I can't think about it anymore. I'm done.
Hope you enjoyed. If you didn't, please don't tell me.
Now I'm off to work on the next thing I'm tagged for.
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