Going back and attempting to ground a memory in a time and place (having inherited my mother’s narrative unreliability) seems to be relatively important (to me, anyway) when describing an event. It must’ve been sometime in 1965 or 1966 when I (in retrospect) discovered my affinity for the Strange and the Weird and the ineffable Cool. By this time we lived on Fruit Street in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood in a rented downstairs of a duplex (this is where, believe it or not, I had my first encounter with the FBI when, while my parents were out, came to the door asking about the guy who lived in the upstairs who wore a military uniform when he really shouldn’t have been wearing it…I suppose that was grounds for FBI surveillance then) and I went to school at Saint John Cantius, where us kids were the only Puerto Ricans then.
I’m remembering a few other things from that time. I’ll leave those for another post (maybe).
In any event, my dad worked at the steel yards down in the valley behind the Tremont bluffs. He worked late at night and my mom (bless her heart) would let me stay up late watching TV until he came home (I doubt my mom would let me stay up that late on a school night which means I’d watch his show on a Friday or Saturday night).
Like thousands of people who are today in their sixties and up, I remember watching the Ghoulardi show.
He was fascinating to me and not only because he hosted the schlocky B-grade science fiction movies that back then I took incredibly seriously (so seriously I would inevitably be terrified sitting in the dark living room, but couldn’t tear myself away). Ghoulardi is what a beatnik was supposed (to my impressionable mind) to be back in the Sixties: bearded with a chatter patter anti-establishment schtick that targeted Midwest middle class values (of course, I didn’t think that almost sixty years ago…that’s my 2023 embellishment). The nuns at Saint John Cantius certainly disapproved of him ( which shouldn’t be surprising inasmuch as Sister Ralph once took away my Outer Limits bubble gum cards because they were unholy and never returned them which still fills me with resentment).
Ghoulardi had a thing about Parma (which is the largely Polish-American Cleveland suburb). Kids (I think they were kids) would write in to the show and any mention of Parma would be grounds for Ghoulardi to yell “Parma” followed by polka music and much revelry. On top of that he’d utter any number of phrases that are still understood by Cleveland’s of my age: “Stay sick,” “Cool it,” “Knif.”
He introduced me to the concept of gurning. It took me decades to figure out there was an actual verb that described the grotesquerie of the face that would appear from time to time to the tune of either The Rivingtons’ “Papa Oom Mow Mow” or The Trashmen’s “Surfing’ Bird” (today I have no idea which one it was). This was so damn cool to me.
My mom would rush me to bed as soon as my dad’s car would pull up (he was a prick about things). I’d fall asleep so damn excited and dream about how cool it was to be a kid in Cleveland then.