lickhaven

Possum Hollow and Rose Valley Roads

That was the exquisite yet ridiculous address of the house where Rod and Ginny lived for 40 years before moving farther into the suburbs. There I spent my Christmases (and occasional New Years) in the ’60s, also during the years of distress following the breakup with Julie, and still later with Linda and the kids.

Rod and Ginny loved cats. Too much. Rod had picked up a mentally disturbed tortoiseshell from his work in R&D at Sun Oil, followed by strays from their local parking lot that had, for some odd reason, become a cat dumping ground. All these muck-abouts produced an endless line of interbred progeny – blind cats, deaf cats, entire litters of kittens that didn’t play, a feline Jukes family that rested blank-eyed on their haunches like discarded pincushions and had as much smarts as would make a jelly bean roll over.

Julie and I adopted two gray kittens that seemed marginally brighter than the others. We named them Thin Tail and Fat Tail. Fat Tail soon morphed into… Fathead. He finally figured out how to jump the back fence one day but never found his way home again. Which is to say, he got lost 15 feet from his own door.

Rod’s total, cats and kits, maxed out at 26 by my count. They sent my allergies into overdrive. Ginny would meet me at the front door with a bottle of Dristan in hand, and I would bolt a couple pills before entering. The cats pissed on everything – including the stove. Turn on a burner and run for the hills.

Their one accommodation to the cats was to scatter the floor under the Christmas tree with mothballs to discourage them from climbing and dislodging ornaments. I slept on the couch across the living room from the tree. Or tried to. The mothballs warred with the cat hair to keep me from breathing.

But those Christmas trees… Rod, with his mania for numbers, set out each year to a cut-your-own tree farm to search for the largest tree that would fit in their living room. The all-time champ was lopped off at eight feet to accommodate the ceiling, but had a 12-foot wingspan, extending from the far corner of their sizable living room to half way across the fireplace. It took Rod and then teenage son Roddy a good hour to wrestle it through the side door.

Even this massive invader from the woodlands was overburdened with decorations of all kinds, including the somewhat disturbingly embellished Christmas balls created by a local friend, Nancy. She turned a simple round ornament into a fat (pregnant?) angel in flight – revolting or erotic, depending on your leaning.

Rod’s was the first place I tried any kind of drug. Dexedrine, an upper that could make people squirrelly, was then legal and used to promote weight loss. Rod had some in his medicine cabinet, so I took one or two on Christmas Eve to see what would happen as I lay across from the mothballed tree extravaganza. Listening to the radio, I had the good fortune to hear Schutz’s “Christmas Story.” I’d grown to love Schutz, and this is probably his friendliest piece. The Dex brought an intensity, almost a melding with the music. I’ve never tried uppers again. Huh.

Gift-giving, especially once Roddy grew to an adult still living at home, was an enormous production. For stockings, each gave each of the others an entire full-length nylon stuffed with exotic food and (in Roddy’s case) joke items – an overpowering eruption of stuff. I couldn’t (wouldn’t want to) match this potlatch. In later years, Roddy would give Linda and me drinking glasses. Whether through innate clumsiness or the fact of having a tiled kitchen floor, we constantly shattered glasses; each year Roddy would replenish the supply with a new design. 

Getting there for Christmas was not always easy. By myself or with Julie, we took the commuter rail line. Rod’s house was bracketed by two train stations, at one of which they’d pick us up.

With Linda and the kids, we made the journey in our first car, a rattletrap ’64 Dodge Dart – when we could. One Christmas morning we found the battery dead. On whim, I moseyed around to Pearl St. to check for CJ. CJ, in his 40s, repaired cars out of a couple rental garages. Why would he be working on Christmas, and why did I somehow think he would? He came around and jump-started us and we were on our way. Merry Christmas, CJ!

Another year, Linda, Morgan, Erin and I went out by subway and trolley. Was the car dead? Were we between cars? (We didn’t take the train because the Christmas schedule was sparse and erratic.) The subway took us to the 69th St. terminal, where we grabbed a suburban trolley (the last one leaving that day). In Media, the nearest town to Rod’s house, we waited, at eight degrees, to be picked up by Rod, dancing around in circles in the snow to keep warm. Cold as a teacher’s wit.

(The opposite weather extreme ruled for Christmas of ’64 or ’65, when I invited friend Carol to join me at Rod’s. That day, the temperature reached 77. Carol was short, zaftig but plain, with red hair hair so luxuriant and thick she could comb it all the way around her head, switch her glasses to the rear and appear to be a fiery haystack moving backwards. 

(Carol and I trained back to my apartment where we spent two days in exploratory sex that did not end in intercourse (bizarre, if not just stupid). Fortunately, we were out when her father and brother dropped by looking for her or I might have been hospitalized. Instead, they just shoved an unfriendly message in the mailbox.)

New Year’s at Rod’s did not quite become a tradition, but an off-again, on-again happening, ultimately leading to my fusion with Linda in 1978. Before that, the most memorable New Year’s was riding around with my chucklingly crazed friend Chris Hessert. Were we driving to anywhere in particular? Don’t think so. I told Chris that we were close to Rod’s and he thought it would be a delightful idea to drop in, though he had never met Rod and Ginny.

We did that, just before or after midnight, and Rod and Ginny were awake. We had a fine time that Ginny still remembers fondly. For me, that particular memory of Chris is lost. Though so many more remain.