Читать книгу Through the Eye of the Tiger - Jim Peterik - Страница 13
ОглавлениеI ALWAYS CRAVED the spotlight. As time went on, I became more and more comfortable in the limelight, and then actually needed it to feel like myself.
My sisters, in a way, were the ones who raised me. With my dad busy at work adjusting relays at our local telephone company, Automatic Electric, and my mother doing community work (she volunteered at the Piggy Bank Thrift Shop, a resale store that sold donated clothes and items) in South Berwyn, it fell to my sisters to mind “Fatboy,” as they often called me. My belly was so big at age five that I used to lift it up and throw it down like I saw the bullies do in the cartoons I loved. It was the move they’d make when they came “harrumphing” into the room. Because of the many years between us, I was like an only child, but they made me feel like a golden child. I had so much more in common with them than with my parents. They made me feel loved and they doted on me. They laughed at my jokes and treated me like a rock star even before I learned to play the guitar.
“Fatboy” with my dear and gorgeous sisters, Alice Anne and Janice—Oceanside Miami Beach—Cavalier Motel, 1955.
My parents made me take piano when I was seven. God, did I hate practicing! Mr. Ulrich was my unfortunate tutor. He was ancient and smelled like mothballs. I was never prepared with my lesson and one day he finally looked me straight in the eye.
“You really don’t want to do this, do you?”
“Uhh, not really, Mr. Ulrich,” I stammered.
When my Uncle Raymond would visit, my mom would say, “Show your uncle what you’ve learned on piano.” I would reluctantly play my scales, but when he started yawning I realized that this wasn’t cool. Then Alice Anne would launch into “Clair de Lune” and Uncle Raymond would be all smiles. Piano lessons were a chore. I wanted to play songs!
Just like my dad before me, I’m an ear person. I never liked reading those ants on the page called “notes.” Never cared about theory or avoiding parallel fifths (apparently a no-no in classical composing). I quit piano lessons after one long year at the ripe old age of eight. By that point, I knew enough to work out the chords and simple melodies on my own. Soon I began to fashion those chords into primitive songs. I would perform those four or five simple chords mimicking another of my early rock ’n’ roll heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis, which included standing up and kicking away the piano bench as I’d seen him do on TV.
I developed a style that is known as a “writer’s piano.” For me the piano is mainly a tool for writing songs. The keyboard for me has always been more about mood than technique or fast runs. A few years later I’d use the guitar in a similar fashion to bring out the rock side of my songwriting.
There’s something so peaceful about sitting down at the piano because it speaks to my soul and inspires me to write about romance and beauty. When I want to rock, though, I crank up the guitar through a Marshall amp and feel a different kind of majesty.
Janice and Alice Anne were polar opposites. Janice was the popular girl in high school. Even though I was twelve years younger, I kind of sensed that she was hot stuff. Very attractive, very happening, and smartly dressed in her form-fitted skirt and cashmere sweater, Janice collected a closet full of the latest styles and a dazzling array of boyfriends. She actually modeled dresses for fashion shows for the upscale Wieboldt’s department store in Oak Park, Illinois, where she also sold ladies’ hats.
Not that Alice Anne wasn’t popular, but she was more conservative and perhaps not the trendsetter that Janice was. For some reason Alice Anne did not really resemble the rest of the family. Once when we grouped together for a family photo in Miami Beach the photographer shooed her aside shouting, “You, at the end. Just the family, just the family!”
Janice had a mad crush on a high school dropout named Al Kovarik, a slick-looking, James Dean type of guy from the tough Chicago suburb of Cicero. He was my favorite of all her boyfriends because he looked cool and drove a ’56 chartreuse and black Mercury Monterey convertible complete with spotlights, blue-dot taillights, and power windows. He would take me and Janice out cruising, some nights stopping at Big Boy, a burger drive-in on the main drag on Ogden Avenue in Berwyn. He’d let me order a double Big Boy and a chocolate milkshake… once he even took us to the drive-in movie way out on Cicero Avenue to see Apache. I drove them both crazy putting the power windows and power antenna up and down all night long as they were trying to make out.
Sadly, Janice made decisions with her heart, not her intellect, and her boyfriends tended to be left of center, nontraditional types.
She married the last in that line, a burly trucking magnate whose name could be seen silk-screened on the gravel trucks going to and from the local limestone quarry in Lyons. One of his big Mack trucks bore the name “Miss Janice” on the hood. But things were far from rosy between them and Mother and Dad had to intervene when Janice wanted a divorce. (In my parents’ day people mated for life! Divorce was a sin.)
Perhaps because of the marital discord, Janice became a closet drinker, hiding bottles of wine all around the house and spending time in rehab centers. I remember as a child feeling powerless at calming the battles that raged between them. Even though her husband loved her and funded her every whim (archeological digs, her vast collection of African art), money could not make up for a certain emptiness and growing aggression between them.
A lifetime chain smoker, Janice finally found peace on December 20, 1994, when she succumbed to emphysema-induced heart failure at age fifty-seven, leaving behind a heart load of precious memories.
She came to me in a vivid dream the day after she passed. “Jimmie, don’t worry about me. It’s wonderful here.” In my reverie she was restored to the teen queen Janice in her cashmere sweater and pearls long before life got the best of her. From that dream on I felt totally at peace.
Poor Alice Anne (nicknamed “AA”) was often the brunt of my mother’s sharp-tongued sarcasm, saying she looked like an Indian squaw while Janice would always come out unscathed. If Mom’s tactics created competition between the two of them, I sure never saw it. All I saw was a lot of love between them.
The contrast between Janice and Alice Anne was never more apparent than on the family 8-millimeter movie clip where Alice Anne couldn’t stay upright for even a millisecond on her water skis. She kept falling hilariously right back into the water, being dragged along helplessly by the speeding boat. Next, the grainy film showed Janice, tan in her bikini, flashing her all-American smile as she glided effortlessly across that same pale, blue lake, skimming the crystal-clear waters with bulletproof confidence, casually waving her free hand.
But Alice Anne is a true gem if perhaps a rough diamond, and to this day my closest friend and soulmate. When Janice passed away in 1994, AA and I closed ranks—a lot of our time together consists of reminiscing and remembering the shimmering spirit that was Janice and those dear old days when it was the three of us just enjoying all life had to offer.
Besides the huge influence of my sisters, my Catholic upbringing had a profound effect. My parents were not extremely religious around the house, but they made sure we went to St. Odilo’s Parish for Sunday school. (He must have been kind of an off-brand saint—I have never heard of a St. Odilo then or since…)
When my family went to church, I would tag along. It didn’t mean much to me; the priest was just some guy in a black suit droning on about who knows what. At first, the Mass was in Latin. Clear as mud. In Sunday school, I experienced the austere nuns. Their very glance could wither you. It’s as if they were taking their whole miserable life out on you.
Sunday school was all about the memorization of the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, and the Act of Contrition. After my first communion and confirmation I became defined by guilt. I took to heart that “if you thought about committing a sin, by God, you sinned!”
If I had “impure thoughts” about Laura Strama, that fantasy girl in grade school who always sat in the front of the class, I knew that I was going to Hell. Until, of course, I came clean with the man behind the curtain.
Masturbation was a huge no-no. I knew that if I happened to “fall off the wagon” it felt good, and then I felt bad! At that point, of course, I had to fall on the sword and go to confession. If you did masturbate, here’s what you had to say:
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession and these are my sins: I talked back to my mother, I disobeyed my father, I stole a silver dollar from Jerry Kmen’s parents’ bedroom (that really happened!), and had impure actions with my body.”
The priest must have heard this same scenario a thousand times, and then, in a spooky, disembodied voice, he would dish out my penance: “Say ten Our Fathers, ten Hail Mary’s, and make a good act of contrition.” (As opposed to a bad one?)
Leaving the confessional, I felt that I had been purged, and then, yippee, I was free to go out and sin again! It was like putting gas in the tank of eternal salvation; you had to do it every couple of weeks or face eternal damnation. I have to admit I felt cleansed at least until real life dirtied me up again.
The negative influence of guilt in my life manifested itself in far-reaching ways. In those days they didn’t have initials for what I suffered from as a child. Nowadays my behavior would probably be called obsessive-compulsive disorder. Back in the day, I was just “a boy trying to find himself” as my sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Hull told my folks at the dreaded parent-teacher conference. I was also “a chronic worrier.”
“Jimmie, don’t you be’s a worrier!” my mother would often intone, lapsing into a peculiar soulful dialect. I obsessed about everything: the test coming up on Monday, the project due on Tuesday, and even way back in kindergarten, I stressed out about how I was going to button my smock in art class (finally my mother installed snaps on it, thus saving me the humiliation of not knowing how to button a button).
After watching Dr. Kildare (starring a very young Richard Chamberlain) or Ben Casey (featuring Vince Edwards), two very popular medically based dramas, I contracted whatever disease was diagnosed that particular episode. One week I was convinced I looked pale and, of course, I concluded that I must certainly have leukemia.
Another week it was cancer. It was the disease du jour. I staggered between fear of tornados, earthquakes, thunderstorms, and, after I watched the terrifying TV drama On the Beach, which depicted the world after nuclear annihilation, I had nightmares of mushroom clouds on every horizon.
In my later years, I worked on divesting myself of this guilt—unlearning all the BS. We’re all sinners and we’re accepted anyway. Jillian, a Christian artist who I produced, was a great influence, and a great source of consolation.
She would preach the word of the Lord to nondenominational churches all over the country. One day in the car on the way to the studio she asked if I had accepted Jesus into my heart.
I told her that I went to church almost every Sunday. Jillian again asked me if I had accepted Jesus, and I responded that I wasn’t good enough; that I’m a sinner and I don’t feel worthy enough. She essentially told me that that was nonsense! She said, “We’re all worthy of having Jesus in our hearts. Jesus knows we are imperfect. We are forgiven the moment that we sin.”
I’m not crazy about the phrase “born again,” but in that moment I felt lighter than air. I felt a new energy come over me. I felt like a child again.
We’re not perfect, but we’re loved anyway. This epiphany eventually formed the basis for my new way of thinking. But religion was not the only influence in my early life; I was also entranced by American popular culture.
When I was about eight years old I was drawn to Charlie Brown, the self-effacing main character in Charles Schulz’s comic strip, “Peanuts.” Whenever I tagged along with my mom on boring shopping expeditions, I would get lost in the book department of the upscale Marshall Field’s department store in Oak Park.
There I was, laughing out loud at the antics of those comic strip characters. Charlie Brown was the underdog, an ordinary kid who tried harder but often fell short. I identified with him, and later the message that I clearly stated in “Eye of the Tiger” reflected his belief system.
Like many kids, I loved Captain Kangaroo, who was an iconic father figure. He was a stocky, kindly man with blond bangs that looked like they had been chopped short with pinking shears around an upside-down cereal bowl. The Captain’s soft, reassuring voice was something a kid could count on every morning. The jingling of his keys as he walked was music to my young ears. My other faves were Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Ding Dong School, Garfield Goose, and a bit later the hilarious Rocky the Flying Squirrel from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Despite my love for those innocent television characters, music still held the trump card. On Halloween, as a kindergartener, I dressed as a pirate, complete with charcoal mustache and plastic sword.
The following Halloween, my dear mother, seeing my infatuation with rock ’n’ roll as a whole and Elvis in particular, took it upon herself to apply the name “Elvis” on the front of my ukulele in white surgical tape. When she showed it to me I didn’t react the way she expected. I told her that there was no way I would go as Elvis. I felt terrible (and still do) for destroying her expectations after all the time she took putting on that tape. But no matter how she begged me, I was not gonna be a rock pretender. I’d rather go as a pirate again than fake being a rock star.
Every year Hiawatha School would have a Halloween parade. As we would snake through the different classrooms, I felt special because, even though I was just one of the crowd, I had experienced what it felt like to be in the public eye. I liked that feeling—a lot.
Although I looked forward so much to the Halloween parade with my schoolmates, I had other friendships. In my Berwyn, Illinois, neighborhood, I hung around with a pair of great kids, Binky Cihak and Johnny Babinak.
Every kid should have a Binky and a Johnny. Sure, they were a little older, but they were my buddies, and not only did they know a heck of a lot about the opposite sex, they would always bring home new records.
Once Binky sent away to the Beechnut Spearmint Gum Contest, and through the mail came a recording of “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Unfortunately, when it arrived, we found that the record was cracked. The rockabilly singer repeated “great balls of fire” over and over because the record repeatedly skipped. But the message and echo on Jerry Lee’s voice rang loud and clear.
When the chorus would hit, Binky and Johnny would lead a sing along, “Goodness gracious, my balls are on fire!”
My parents didn’t like these boys one bit. “They’re a bad influence, Jimmie. Stay away from them!” They were actually really great kids—just a bit more mature, and sexually aware.
We collected marbles and played them endlessly at the empty lot at the end of the block that we dubbed “the prairie.” I still remember the feeling of those babies in my hands as I thumbed them toward the valley we dug in the mud: cat’s eyes, cat’s eye boulders (the bigger ones), purees (no colored glass inside), puree boulders, and the heavy steelies and steely boulders. The colors dazzled me: turquoise, coral pink, yellow, orange, and purple.
One day, Binky and Johnny organized a night bike ride. All the boys in the neighborhood made plans to go out in a pack that evening. I could barely contain my excitement until my mother informed me that I couldn’t go because I didn’t have a light on my bike like the others. I was disconsolate. When my dad got home and was told the situation he quietly affixed our family flashlight to my handlebars with electrical tape, and off I went into the starry Berwyn night. At that moment he reaffirmed his status as my hero.
But our main compulsion was cars. We built scale model, plastic cars, which we raced down the sidewalk. I still remember the somehow seductive smell of the Testors glue we used and the slick flame decals we’d lick and apply carefully to the fenders. Some we would purchase at our local hobby shop, already built, that contained a friction mechanism that kept the car in motion when you gave it a good shove. It wasn’t about how fast you could go, but how far we could get them to coast down the sidewalks of Wesley Avenue in front of our houses. If your car made it to the Dandas’ yellow bungalow you were doing pretty darn good.
Me, Binky, and Johnny, with miles of unstructured time each day, would perch on the curb on busy 26th Street and report on every car that passed by: “’53 Packard Caribbean—three-tone paint—coral pink, gray, and white, two-door hardtop, V8, white walls; ’54 Buick Skylark, convertible, wire wheels, whitewalls, V8, no portholes” (the normal Buicks had three or four of these mock portholes on the front fender depending on the prestige of the model). We would talk over one another trying to blurt out the info first.
We didn’t much care about the workings of the engine; it was all about flashy design, and color schemes. I’m still a car nut and recently could afford to relive those days by buying myself a mint-condition 1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible and a 1958 Corvette convertible—both in coral red and cream, both with matching interiors and V8 engines and power windows! Someday I’d like to own a 1956 T-Bird (with Continental kit) and a chartreuse and black Mercury convertible—just like Al Kovarik’s.
Binky and Johnny and Alice Anne and Janice were my life until I turned seven, and then we moved up in status to a brand-new location only about a mile away. Suddenly, there was a whole new group of kids, and though the new crowd made me feel light-years away from Binky and Johnny, I made new friends and quickly adjusted to my new surroundings. But I always maintained a soft spot for my Wesley Avenue digs—the real cradle of civilization for me.
As I said, 2647 Oak Park Ave. was a move up the social ladder for my folks. There was more money in the Peterik family coffers and my parents wanted to move closer to my Auntie Clara, my mother’s twin sister. Auntie Clara was Gracie Allen to my mother’s Barbara Stanwyck. They both came from affluence (Mother’s father, Jim, was the butcher of choice in Hawthorne), but my mother was all sophistication, and Clara all over the deck. Auntie worked behind the long luncheonette counter at Murphy’s five-and-dime in the Berwyn Cermak Plaza. At any given time of day you could hear her shouts resounding though the entire store: “Murphyburger.” “Murphyburger Deluxe.” I would bring friends there just to have them hear my mother’s twin’s ear-splitting voice in full song.
Growing up had its challenges. By the time I was eleven, I had become a target for bullies. Maybe it was the black-rimmed glasses with the tape mending the bridge that made me look kind of nerdy or maybe the bullies just decided to pick on me because I was the musician, “the guy in the band.” I had started playing in the grade school band with those gaudy uniforms and I felt I was scorned upon by the “hard guys.” It seemed they were lurking everywhere in Berwyn and Cicero. One Christmas when I finally got that Schwinn Jaguar bike I had been lobbying for, it wasn’t more than two weeks before it was stolen from our garage. After the police retrieved the bike, it was stolen once again by three thugs who followed me from Cock Robin Ice Cream to G.C. Murphy’s where it was stolen for the final time.
My true nemeses though were two brothers, Gary and Tom Booth, good-looking Irish-Catholics who slathered pomade on their combed-back hair. These boys had lots of swagger and got kicked out of school constantly for truant behavior and failing grades. They tried to make up for their lack of discipline and antisocial tendencies by becoming the kingpins of their own amateur gangster world.
Their henchman, Mike McKenzie, was way nerdier than I was, but since he aligned himself with the “Booth Boys,” his status grew. He became “their guy,” their lackey. Mike McKenzie had wisely bought himself protection.
One day, I was shooting baskets in my driveway when Mike McKenzie yelled, “Hey, want to take a walk to the park with me?”
“Yeah,” I said, excitedly.
Here was this cool henchman who wanted to hang with me. I glanced at the huge beds of colored, dried autumn leaves that were piled up high. Not only was it a gorgeous fall day, but also I was finally being accepted and appreciated for the cool guy I really was. One of the Booth Boys had shown up at my house to meet me!
But when we reached the park, my luck changed. Mike McKenzie shoved me into another pile of leaves, leaving Tom Booth free to shove his frigid switchblade toward my neck.
“I never want to see you again! Never walk past my house again. If you do, I’ll slit your throat,” he said, in a threatening tone that I’ll never forget.
I shook and trembled as Booth lunged over me, thrusting his silver blade closer to my throat. I managed to croak, “Okay” as my young life flashed before my eyes. These hoodlums finally let me go and, though they didn’t actually injure me physically, the mental scar will be with me forever.
After that experience, I made great pains to avoid going past that house. I created a whole new route home just to avoid them. From what I heard, the Booths ended up becoming petty criminals. Tom died recently. God only knows where Mike McKenzie is today.
My days being the brunt of bullies came in handy recently when I got a call from an old record company buddy of mine, Bobby Tarantino, who was looking for an antibullying song for the group he managed, Ariel & Zoey & Eli, Too. This group of twin fourteen-year-old girls and their eleven-year-old brother had already made a name for themselves with their own variety show on The Cool TV network. The song I wrote and produced for them, “Hey Bully,” would eventually go viral on YouTube with their creative video. Maybe I have the Booth brothers to thank for giving me the ammunition I needed to write that song.
I never used the music as a selling point, though, not until about fourth grade when I picked up the sax and played “Wiggle Wobble,” which was a popular tune that year by Les Cooper. When I played it for the class, the girls started giggling. They started looking at me differently. The guys sat silently in awe, looking a tad jealous. My teacher looked surprised. That day my course was set.
