The Adventures of Frick and Frack: The Ricanys and the Candy Man

--Ryan
I remember when Gram—the original, not our step dad’s (Cement Hands)—used to call us, me and Kyle, by the nicknames Frick and Frack. We thought it was because she loved us, but the real reason was because we were little shits and got in more trouble than anyone else in the entire scumbag town (it was barely a town) of Beachwood.

Lets start with number one: I threw a keyboard at Kyle’s head (Number 2’s story was totally off—it wasn’t an accident). I threw a Compaq keyboard at Kyle’s head because I didn’t want him to be in our Super Intelligence Agency (aka treetop secret spot) and go tell Mom and Dad about it. They’d make us take all the cool shit out of the tree, and we were just about to figure out a plan to hoist the monitor up there.

Anyway, after the keyboard made contact with Kyle’s head, he did, in fact, run away like a little bitch to tell Dad. However, this is where Number 2’s story goes wrong: Mom WAS at work because we had to continue the tradition of getting hurt when Dad was at home alone. Anyway, I followed the trail of blood from the side yard to the house about five minutes later, screaming “don’t tell” the whole way. When I walked in the door, I looked up to see Dad was standing there with his infamous brown leather belt in hands. It was his waterproof belt, he liked to say, in case we were bad in the bath tub (which we often were). He held the belt in each hand and pulled it tight, making a snapping sound that still puckers up my butt. Pretty much the sound of any object striking flesh makes me tense, but how else are you going to discipline seven kids, especially when they’re throwing computer parts at one another?

Alas, that wasn’t the only time Kyle and I got into trouble. We were about eight or nine and I Kyle had the idea that we should fuck with the Ricanys (right) after their daughter peed in our yard. I remember lighting a shitbomb on the Ricany’s porch (more on the Ricanys later). This particular shitbomb consisted of a Shop-Rite bag filled with our old dog Cinnamon’s two-pound log of shit. I then lit it on fire and left it on the porch, ran to the neighbor’s house (which is now torn down) and waited. We waited, watched and laughed. The best part was when stupid Linda Ricany came out after I rang her doorbell and started screaming and kicked the shitbomb. I think at that point, the Ricanys finally figured out how much we hated them. This incident started a riot that I
won’t detail at this time, but it even made me hate their little grandma who lived two blocks over, too.

This was where we lived, with nothing to do:

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We called her Aunt Jean, since she was a friend of Gram’s, and she was nice enough, but we only used to go to her house because the Candy Man wasn’t home (see next paragraph). She would give us crappy, sugar-free ice pops. We would talk for 5 minutes then demand to see what kind of snacks she had in her fridge. To hell with the chitchat; Kyle and I made it our business plan to get straight to the point.

Sometimes, we needed a break from lighting shitbombs and throwing computers. This is where the Candy Man came into play, sort of like recess. Just like Aunt Jean, we used him for snacks, except we called him “Candy Man” to his face (I don’t even know what his real name was). When we were old enough (5 or 6), E revealed the secret of the Candy Man to us that she’d learned from our other neighbors, the Truskowskis: there is a man right next door to us who gives out candy to kids—for FREE! The Candy Man would go to Clancy’s (a tobacco and news shop) and buy huge bags of Reese’s and Snickers and stick ‘em in the fridge. We’d ring his doorbell eight or nine times and press our faces against the glass to hear if he was coming, because sometimes his car was in the driveway but he wasn’t home. So he’d come get the door, we’d wave up at him and smile, and he’d hold up his shaky finger as he headed to the kitchen to put some candy into plastic baggies for us. We trusted that guy with our lives! He could have poisoned those bags. But he didn’t, he just loved kids I guess. Until our parents kept procreating. I think he started to hate kids because of us. Every day after school we’d walk up to his house and ring the doorbell and hold up one or two fingers to indicate how many bags of candy we needed, then he would deliver the goods. I’d always say “three” because I was a greedy little bastard. I wasn’t really trying to get two more for my brothers and sisters. But everyone in our family did that and he rarely questioned it. I remember kids asking us about him and how we got our stash. Word got out and the Ricany kids started going, so we threatened to kill them if they didn’t stay away. "HE’S OUR NEIGHBOR," I added to E’s "FUCK OFF, YOU SCRAGGLY BITCH" (we made up our own words too, like “grunchess”—means “good feeling;” syn: groovy).

One sad day, though, before we moved out of 1025 Cable and before our relatives, The Dirtbags, moved in, the Candy Man died. We mourned for a whole week and wouldn't leave the house until we figured out a way to get more candy (we ended up bribing the younger siblings to ride their bikes to QuikCheck). I’m out of time for today—I’m with MM in Utah and about to pwn some trails and make fun of Kyle when he falls. More to come about homemade bombs and violence later.

What NOT to name your kids

For some odd reason, BMW & I have been discussing baby names lately. Maybe it's because every time I see a kid, I decide that I'd rather have dogs; maybe it's because I'm a big fan of my "I hate your kids" t-shirt that BMW got me; maybe it's just because as the oldest of seven kids, I've decided not to punish mine by popping out slaves left and right. Or maybe I've been thinking about baby names because I read Perez Hilton multiple times a day, and in doing so I've become aware of all these celebrities having babies.

Not only are their kids consuming valuable air supply and giving way to crises like childhood obesity, but these kids (or their parents) are perpetuating the stupid trend of giving one's kids really "unique" (read: dumb) names. For some reason, people think it's "cool" to name their kid something obscure. It makes them "individual." You know what, you fucking hipster? Go get a book of baby names and pick something NORMAL for your kid instead of naming him Parker or Giles or Weston, or something ubiquitous like MADISON.

Madison. "Son of Matthew." Well, that's pretty unique, I have to admit. Why not just go around calling your kid "son?" It's just about the same fucking thing, in terms of originality. Appropriately enough, I'm finding that a lot of yuppies are perpetuating this trend--using surnames as first names because it sounds cool. Leave it to them to set the trends.

Unfortunately, however, some celebs have gotten hold of this notion as well, and haven't helped with the abolition of the idea: Madonna with Lourdes, Halle Berry with Nahla, Gwyneth Paltrow with her retarded first name and her daughter, Apple.

Maybe it takes one to know one--after all, their names are equally lame. Demi Moore, for example. I mean, what the fuck? Your name means HALF. At least give your kids something you never got growing up--the dignity of a normal name, instead of going with "Rumer," "Talulah," and "Scout." And Vanilla Ice: resist the urge to give your next offspring rapper names like you did with the other two (Dusti Raine and Keelee Breeze? Seriously?).

Attention, soon-to-be-parents: if you haven't learned anything from my blog about how not to raise your kids, at least know that you should consider the following:

The following politically inspired names are off limits:

• Che
  
• Benedict
• Jackson
• Quincy
• Quincy Adams
• Clinton
• Bush
• Gore
• Cheney
• Reagan

Democrat or Republican, you are still going to look like a douche for naming your kid something like Carter or Jefferson.

If, in naming your child, you lean toward naming your kid something that will indicate middle-class stature, you are not, in fact, middle-class. You are white trash. Stay away from these names:

• Cooper
• Reginald
• Dunston
• Eugenia
• Weatherby
• Walker

And do not even think of naming your kid after any boarding schools:

• Peddie
• Kent
• Taft
• Maxwell

Be advised that you should also steer clear of naming your child after a food, color, or religion (Ham, Blue, Christian, etc).

Also, it's pretty weak to give your kid two first names. Think of your kid going for a job interview twenty years from now and introducing herself as "Princess Tiaamii" or "Jane Day."

Naming your kids after cities you've lived in isn't cool, and neither is naming them after your favorite things. Do you have names on your list like "Brooklyn," "Paris," or "London?" Cross them off. Same goes for things like "Blanket" and "Mercedes," and "Kal-el" (Superman's birth name).

Also to be avoided are:
Paula Yates babies' names.
Side note: I'm kind of ashamed for linking to a side called "Find a Death," but it proves my point that sane people don't name their kids any of the following:

• Fifi Trixibelle
• Peaches Honeyblossom
• Little Pixie
• Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily

Robert Rodriguez's kids' names:

• Rocket Valentin
• Racer Maximilliano
• Rebel Antonio
• Rogue

Or any other dumbass names that celebrities picked:

• Alcamy (Lance Henriksen)
• Free (Barbara Hershey)
• Banjo (Rachel Griffiths)
• Moxie CrimeFighter (Penn Jillette)
• and as awesome as Frank Zappa is, Dweezil, Moon Unit, and Diva Muffin are not real world names.

Happy birthing!

Desperate times call for creativity: jumping off the garage roof

--Number Two

Pools, in my opinion, are a great invention. They provide a social atmosphere in which removing clothes is required, which I wholeheartedly support. Pools can be great, when done right. But when done wrong, they can get real bad.

Let me give a testament to my expertise on pools. Throughout my childhood, I was yelled at every time I didn't take care of the pool... which was once a week. I was charged with vaccuuming the pool, chlorinating it, changing the DE (which stands for diatomaceous earth) in the filter, "bumping" the filter, cleaning the filter basket, etc. I've opened and closed pools numerous times. I've even patched holes in the vinyl siding while the pool was leaking. For all intents and purposes, I know how to care for a pool.

Now, though I had a terrible track record for consistently doing my chores, our pool water stayed reasonably clear. Our neighbors who lived behind us, the Shorts, their pool water...not so clear.

Through a series of similes, strong imagery, and potentially dangerous metaphors, I'm now going to best describe the condition of the Short pool.

• If you removed an Alabama outhouse and exposed the underlying cesspool in the heat of summer, you would know the smell of the Short pool.
• The water could have respawned a mutant polio virus
• There was a Ciba-Geigy plant about 10 miles away that polluted our water with contaminants. I think they went straight to the source and paid Ciba-Geigy to fill their pool with the waste products of chemical synergy.
• http://www.epa.gov/region2/superfund/npl/0200078c.pdf
• Know the glow of the blue screen of death? Imagine that, only green, and you're trying to sleep but the monitor won't turn off all night.
• The pool was purchased at Walmart. On clearance.
• If the filter were ever used, it might have activated a nuclear implosion chain reaction with the pool's "water," triggering the largest single instance of nuclear destruction in the history of the world.
• I "swam" in the pool one time - I am pretty sure I saw Jesus's face in the green algae hanging out on the bottom of the pool. I immediately exited, for fear of contracting Typhoid. I might as well have played in a creek whose primary tributary was a power plant's runoff stream.
• Ever see Erin Brockovitch? If so, you already know where I'm going with this.
  

Maybe I am the way I am because I entered their farce of a pool that one day. It makes me wonder, "how did those kids turn out?" I mean, I never saw THEM in that pool...

Anyway, while looking through the list of topics that "E" told me I could write about, one of them caught my eye. And by caught my eye, I mean I almost giggled like a five year old in the front row of my fixed income class. (Like last night when Jack told me about how he opened up a YouTube video of two gorillas fucking each other at full volume in his equities class). Anyway, that writing prompt was to tell my story of how I encourage idiocy--in this case, how I encourage jumping from edifices (and trampolines) into pools.

In case you haven't noticed already, our family is a bunch of assholes. As children, we were no different. Yes, little asshole children who caused outrages from the neighbors on numerous occasions. Asshole children who dug holes in the backyard to make bonfires from a pile of dried leaves. Asshole children who couldn't be satisfied with Tekken or other video games, children whose alternative entertainment had been banned by the ER staff of Jersey Shore Medical Center and our Mother, we became asshole children who resorted to jumping off roofs. By we, I don't mean my older sister. She would've been all for it, except she was doing something worthwhile, like babysitting, or getting caught by Mom giving a handjob to her boyfriend.

So back in the day (which was a Wednesday), me, my brothers, and one of my friends were bored. It was a sweltering New Jersey summer day. If you've ever experienced one of these, you know that they SUCK. There's no wind, and a disgusting wet blanket of heat hangs in the air. It's probably hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, but the humidity makes you too lazy to wanna try. Instead, you dream up "cool" shit to do in order to quell the heat.

In our three-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch in Beachwood (before it was ghettofied, before neighborhood thugs went around painting swastikas on our uncle's work truck) we had a pool. For now, I'm going to ignore the fact that there were NINE people crammed into a house with one bathroom. As a result, Dad constructed an extra bedroom in the basement where Ryan and Kyle shared a room with me.

Anyway. In our backyard laid a 4-foot deep above-ground beauty in which we would swim during lightning storms, ignoring the neighbors' protests (details to come in "The Short Story"). But today we had had enough fun simply swimming in the pool and jumping off its sides that had begun collapsing from frequent 10-year old weight on top of them. Fuck it, we needed altitude.

Diagonal from the pool was our garage. It was a serious garage--had an attic and shit, and this was where our Dad stored his rolling cart for changing the oil in the Suburban--the same oil cart that we used to tie to the back of our bikes. The garage was set off from the house, completely separate from our living space. The roof was as high as that of our house, plus it was much closer to the pool. And inside that garage was a ladder.

You know what happened for the next hour.

Front flips, back flips, jack-knives. You name it, we did it. Into a 4-foot deep pool. Dumb? Yes. Fun? Hell, yes.

Ryan, Kyle, Chris, and I climbed up the ladder to jump the 20 or so feet into our pool until disaster happened. No, it's not what you're thinking--or what, by all means, SHOULD have happened. No broken neck, no compound fractures, no one falling off the garage roof. Nope. Instead, our brilliant relief from boredom ended traumatically with our fucking rat neighbor Mrs. Short, calling our grandmother who lived two blocks away. And then Gram called Mom.

On a side note, E & I suspect that the reason Mrs. Short called Gram was because she was jealous of our pool. She had tried to give her kids a pool, but since she was no good white trash and bought her kids a cheap one.

Anyway, if you've read my previous story then you already know what happened. Mom called home (she was at work) and reamed me out so hard--that day, she pretty much made me feel like I was the AntiChrist.

All I have to say is it takes one to know one, Mom!

Family CUNT

Due to a brief interruption of something called "ADD," the family CUNT is on its way and will arrive shortly.

This week's story describes one of my brother's greatest ideas: jumping off the garage roof into the above-ground pool.

Stay tuned!

I got rear-ended by a mail truck and all I got was this lousy neck brace

So, last night, on my way to Whole Foods, I was thinking to myself, Self, now would be a good time to get hit by a mail truck. Lucky for me, there just happened to be a mail truck right up my ass.

I stopped behind the car in front of me. It was heavy traffic, and I checked my mirror to make sure the mail truck was slowing down. He wasn't. When he hit me at roughly 20 mph, BMW screamed not unlike a little girl, just in a deeper voice. Change went flying and on went my hazards.

Because I hate that the first thing often said by people in car accidents is something accusatory or explanatory, I asked the postal worker if he was okay; he was. I told him my neck hurt a little bit, and that it wasn't his fault--some guy whose truck had broken down walked a little too close to the oncoming traffic--I had to swerve around him, and so did the mail man. But I guess that threw him off and he didn't see that I was stopped in front of him. Whatever, just because I felt bad for him didn't mean I wasn't calling the cops.

Obviously, in a city with a poverty and crime rate that often tops the nation's "Most Dangerous Cities to Live" list, some cops might not take kindly to rich-looking white kids who seem to be trying to screw over a poor mail man.

Unfortunately, the race issue came into play. Officer E.[at a dick] Tyler is black. Mr. Mail Man is also black. BMW and I are, well, clear.

Officer Tyler first goes to talk to the mail man. Fine, whatever. I looked like I was rubbing my neck for the hell of it, I'm sure. Then she comes over to us:

Officer Tyler: "Are you hurt or injured?"
Me: "Um, well, yeah, my neck kind of hurts."
Officer Tyler raises her eyebrows as far up as they can fucking go. "Are you HURT or INJURED? she repeats."

Sorry, Officer. I just thought it would be fun to give you a break from your stab victims and convenience store robberies so you can come investigate a fraudulent claim. It's a good thing you cut to the chase and basically asked me if I was lying, because my arm's getting kinda tired from rubbing my neck!

Me: "Well, yeah, it didn't hurt like this before, so I guess I am injured."

Officer Tyler rolls her eyes (BMW will confirm) and takes my license, writes down my info. Looks on the back of it.

Know how when you're in the DMV getting your license and they ask you "Do you wear glasses or contacts?" Well, if you say yes, they put down the condition "Must wear glasses or contact lenses while driving."

Officer Tyler: "Were you wearing your glasses while you were driving?"

For the record, I could've lied. My glasses were in my purse. I also could've lied when she asked me if all the damage on my bumper was from this accident. Stupidly, I told the truth.

Me: "No, I only need to wear them at night."
Officer Tyler can apparently read: "It says here..."
Me: "Yeah, I told them that I only need to wear them at night when I was getting my license."
Officer Tyler looks at me again and raises her eyebrows. At this point I'm ready to punch her. "Really," she says.
Me: Psych! Gotcha there, didn't I. "Yes, really."

For some reason, not spiteful, of course, she called a fire truck and was going to have an ambulance take me to the hospital. BMW offered to drive, and as we drove away I gave Officer Tyler the finger.

We got to GWU hospital and waited for four hours in the ER waiting room.

Some highlights during my six-hour stay:

• BMW decided it was a good time for a photo op. That paper bag I'm carrying contains my urine.
• On line at the bathroom I waited behind a detox patient who was clutching a pink puke basket with an IV in her arm.
• Some lady lugging around an oxygen tank started wheezing about how she was tired of carrying it around. To which her companion said, "That's yo life giver! Don't git tired of life!"
• At about 9pm, a couple of doctors burst through the ER doors yelling, "Get the ambulance door! It's DOMINO'S!" A couple hundred pizzas were loaded onto this gurney

When I was finally ready to be taken into a room, I got to listen to a lot of interesting shit. The woman on the other side of the curtain was snoring, and when the doctor woke her up, she told him she needed something stronger than Percocet.

"You ain't gonna gimme nothin stronger than this shiet?" she moaned.
"I can see about some Vicodin, if that'll work."
"Naw, I just want some more of em if that's all yous gonna gimme."

Down the hall, some lady (I think) was screaming on the phone about not having a coat or house keys, so they couldn't make her wait outside. She stood by the wall on the ER phone, calling people and repeating the story for the whole time of my lovely stay.

I was lucky enough to escape for an X-ray--or so I thought. I sat down in the chair in the X-ray holding area. The girl laying in one of the beds saw my neck brace and started talking to me.

Igor: "Oh! Are you okay? I had to wear one of those. I fell fifty feet off a bridge and broke my back. And my leg has a rod in it. See my head? I broke my skull, and now I have this scar here [above my eyebrow] and now I'm ugly."

I was going to tell her it wasn't the just scar that made her ugly, but she interrupted. "Now I look like Igor!"

I smiled and figured she wanted me to reassure her. Instead, I decided that if she was going to talk to me, I was going to find out what happened.

Igor: "There's this bridge next to the Key Bridge, it's the same height. Me and my friends were walking on it. And next to it there's this grassy knoll and like, one small patch of concrete. And I was drunk and my stiletto got caught and I fell on the concrete."

I stifled a laugh because I thought she was joking. She was laying down and moving her arms. She looked fine to me. Igor was barely 18 and didn't look like she could pull off a pair of stilettoes, even if she could walk. But then she sat up and I saw the body brace that they put on her, and wondered WHAT THE FUCK someone would be doing near the side of a bridge at night, drunk, in stillettoes.

She rambled on some more before trying to get an X-ray tech to wheel her outside for a cigarette. "Well, good luck with your neck," she called as she was being wheeled out.
Me: "Thanks, good luck with...your body."

After she left, I looked at the girl next to her and asked her if Igor told her the same story.

Sick Girl: "Hell no. I woulda closed my eyes on her. I'm already sick, I don't need to hear her bullshit. Fell off a bridge. Psh! You know that bitch jumped!"

I started laughing because I'd figured the same thing--Igor had said something about life being so hard sometimes. I guess maybe when you throw yourself off a bridge onto cement you're entitled to speak about hard things.

After my X-ray I saw that I was kicked out of my niche and moved to the ER chairs. I told BMW about Igor and two seconds later, a crazy chick walked in and sat down next to BMW with a suitcase containing lettuce, Gorgonzola cheese and Ranch dressing.

I couldn't hear everything she was saying, but about every two minutes, she'd utter a phrase that would cause BMW to turn to me and make a face, mouthing "What the FUCK!"

Some of the things I heard her say:

• "Are the furry animals away yet?"
• To her suitcase: "I'm really glad you're here."
• "God or Satan?"
• The doctor said to her, "What brings you here?" to which she replied, "Oh, my toe hurts. Just kidding, I need a refill of LITHIUM. 900 mg of LITHIUM." The doctor confirmed my suspicions: "You have Bipolar Disorder?" and continued to ask her about her suicidal thoughts.

She also kept singing "Someone to Watch Over Me," but that might have been more because we were watching American Idol in the waiting room and less because she was just off her meds.

As we exited the ER I was lucky enough to get a prescription for Valium, so I can at least make some money off the Postal Service from wasting my entire night and being stereotyped by a cop.

Unfortunately, this morning as I was walking Darla, I saw a mail truck and was forced to pop a few pills. I might need to go back next week for a refill. Fuckers.

On Fuckerwear

--BMW
Note: that Briana Banks pic is for you, Velvet.

E has a big family. Her mother was pretty much pregnant from 1985 (Back to the Future) to 1995 (Toy Story). Seven children has got to take a toll on a woman's "equipment", and if you have seen the way this family attacks the dinner table - "RYAN! If you don't stop beating those fucking drums in the next five minutes there isn't going to be any more ravioli left!" - said equipment could probably have been featured in National Geographic's annual "Droopers of the Third World" edition.

Needless to say, after feeding the whole clan (with all three boys over 6 feet tall), "Milkmaker" could have been a continental soldier (wait for it, wait for it, ok laugh). I have a theory that at this point, women do one of three things -

1) They forsake all bras, stop shaving their legs and move onto nudist communes;
2) They strap those bitches up like Yentl and forget they have them; and
3) They make an appointment with Drs. McNamara and Troy staple those babies back on their chest where they belong.

MM went with route 3. She didn't just stop with a little lift though, oh no, she decided to go the whole 9 yards and became the proud owner of "Real American Breasts" (courtesy of her cement hands husband). At the prime age of 44, MM decided that she wanted to be Stifler's mom - I am not going to call her a MILF for the obvious, nauseating repercussions of that acronym.

E does not fall very far from the tree, and all of her readers should be aware of the "sexual" aspects of her personality. MM likes to show off her new sweater kittens (thankfully I have not been asked to touch or look at sans covering), and she likes, well, she likes cement hands.

The punch line of this ramble is such - One morning during one of our semi-regular visits to the beach, I walked downstairs for coffee and was greeted by MM and the girls, in a lacy, diaphanous, goddamn see-through red night gown. Glib as I am in the morning pre-caffeine, I said "Nice sleepwear, MM", and straight-faced she simply replied, "oh its not sleepwear, its more like fuckerwear."

Indeed.

Things to do in New York City

Family CUNT will come tomorrow, but today I'm making a list, and I need your help. Since we'll be in the City of Best Pizza, etc, I have been thinking of things I need and need to do while we're there.

On my list so far:

• Art after Dark at the Guggenheim. It's supposed to be an amazing party in the museum with DJs, drinks, and art. What's not to love?
• Go to the top of the Empire State Building. Yes, I know. I grew up going to New York every other weekend, yet I haven't done this.
  
• Some of the Thursday night concert series at the South Street Seaport.
• Bryant Park Summer Season--free music, dance & film across the street from Jer's office.
  
• Metropolitan Opera Parks: free performances through June and July.
  
• Museum Mile Festival: museum open-house (second Sunday in June).
  
• Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade
• New York Jazz Festival
  
• Howl Festival at Tompkins Square Park
• Wine classes at the Astor Center
  

Any other ideas of things we should do?

Doing laundry

I'm not sure how my parents financed this, but growing up, six of us went to Catholic school. I remember checks coming from the church we went to in Sleazeside, supposedly to pay my mom for doing sign language every Mass, but the money might've also been for blowjobs.

Father Flynn: "Hey, seven kids, might be willing to give it up? Whaddya say, Father Brennan Joseph?"
Father Brennan Joseph: "No, I like boys."
Father Flynn: "Okay, how about you, Monsignor Donovan? Wanna proposition Mrs. Fisher?" And Monsignor Donovan said, "Fuck yeah, she has a nice rack."

I went the longest, from first grade to eighth. After I finished eighth grade, Mom decided that was the last year of parochial school. It might've had something to do with the Fisher kids always getting their bus privileges revoked, but the reason we stopped attending St. Joseph's Grade School has yet to be verified.

My mom wanted us in private school for several reasons. She was thrilled that St. Joe's was traditional, in that we had to go to Mass on holy days of obligation and the first Friday of every month. And Catholic school also had the added benefit of savings: by requiring uniforms, St. Joe's saved my parents money, money that would otherwise have been spent on clothes for public school. Also, as my mother was quick to point out every single time our neighbors, the Huba boys, fired B.B. guns at our trash cans or lit bonfires in their back yards, "kids who went to Catholic school were better-behaved."

We each had about three sets of uniforms that we had to go buy the summer before from a uniform wholesale store in north Jersey. It took most of the morning getting up there, and by the time we'd rifled through piles of piss-yellow shirts, hunter green pullovers and cardigans, making sure to snatch up the ugly-ass green, gray & yellow plaid skirts that I always rolled up to make them shorter (they wanted the hem to read our knees! psh!). By the time we'd grabbed our respective sizes, it was dinner time, so we'd pile into the Suburban and pick up a pie for the drive home.

In calculating the frequency with which we did laundry in our house, my mom figured that three sets would be enough--they didn't need to be washed every day as long as we kept them clean. This was one aspect she neglected to factor in--that as kids between the ages of 14 and 6, shit was bound to get dirty. Another situation she forgot to think of was that we (mostly Evan, Ryan, and Kyle) had a tendency to lose things. Knee socks, for example, were always getting lost in the back of drawers and behind the pile of shoes in the closets.

The week would play out like this: if Mom did the laundry over the weekend, she made sure to get all our dirty uniforms into the wash so that they'd be clean for the week. However, if we didn't do the laundry, or couldn't find all of the dirty uniforms, etc, we would run out of clean clothes as early as Tuesday or Wednesday. This sometimes led to stealing our more responsible siblings' clothes, ahem, Ryan and Kyle (which led to us writing our names on the tags). More often, however, it led to us rifling through the laundry to do emergency wash with our uniforms.

Emergency laundry was a messy process to begin with. All of the dirty laundry was [supposed to be] dropped down the makeshift chute in the bathroom closet to the laundry room below. My dad had cut a hole in the closet floor and cut the bottom out of a plastic garbage can, stuffing the trash can in the hole to make a chute--which deposited the clothes into a larger garbage can--an outdoor, industrial-sized garbage can that was constantly overflowing. When we needed to do laundry, we'd open the door to the laundry room/Dad's workshop and dump the garbage can over, throwing clothes left and right in a mad dash to find a shirt or sweater.

After finding herself for the thousandth time wading knee-deep in clothes that she couldn't tell whether they were dirty or clean--on a MONDAY, the day after she'd worked the night shift and was supposed to be sleeping--my mom brought the video camera down to the laundry room.

"What is this?" she screeched, holding up a towel. "Is it dirty? Is it clean? I DON'T KNOW!"

We watched the video when we came home from school that day. She explained how, from then on, the laundry room door had a lock on it and only she had the key. We would have to ask permission to enter form that point on. Also, every Sunday evening before she left for work, we were required to present our complete uniform sets for the whole week (my dad couldn't be relied upon to oversee that we were ready for school the next day; my mom had come home Monday morning to find us waiting at home because we didn't have our clothes ready the night before, and we missed the bus as a result).

We couldn't follow through with this simple task of "being prepared," of course. Mom sometimes had to leave for work before we showed our clothes to her, and the next morning Evan/Ryan/Kyle would be racing around to find a sock or a tie. How would all of us catch the bus on time if we didn't have our clothes, and the laundry room door was locked?

These moments mark the early development of my problem-solving skills. I evaluated the situation; it seemed that Evan/Ryan/Kyle could either miss the bus and be punished for not having his shit together the night before, and we would ALL be subjected to the lecture, OR we could send Maggie down the laundry chute to unlock the door. Sometimes she'd get stuck and start crying, so one of us had to stay upstairs to push her head down just in case. Evan/Ryan/Kyle would be waiting at the laundry room door for Maggie to "land," and then he'd grab his clothes--no time to wash them at this point--and shove the pile of dirty laundry back into the garbage can.

If we still happened to be late, either Bridget or I would run out to flag the bus and hold it until Evan/Ryan/Kyle got out the door, sometimes running barefoot with a toothbrush in his mouth.

Mom only began to catch on to our plan when she noticed the cracks in the chute trash can, and that our clothes smelled like feet, but there wasn't shit she could do about it at that point, except take us out of Catholic school for good.

That was one of the reasons we left, I think. The other reasons--how we almost got kicked off the bus a million times and the bimonthly conventions in the principal's office with Mom and the Fisher children--will have to wait for another Family CUNT.

The next year, we all went to public school.