Cultcha Shock

In 1959, when I was 15, we moved from Philly to Tampa, Florida. I opposed this move vehemently on the grounds of Carol who lived on Ithan Street, between Chester and Springfield Avenues. We’d been together almost a year. We held hands, made out. I learned about blue balls from Carol. Epididymal hypertension. Dare you to say that 3 times fast. Some medicos doubt the existence of blue balls. Huh. Remember when scientists doubted the existence of curve balls? Well, those who doubt the existence of blue balls need to explain this ->

There were times, after an evening conferring with Carol, I could barely walk home. Ours had been a classic love story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Now, thanks to my parents’ deranged Florida fetish, it was boy loses girl again.

But losing Carol was the least of it.

Culture shock is defined as “A condition of confusion and anxiety affecting a person suddenly exposed to an alien culture or milieu.” Boy howdy. Did I have me some culture shocks. I can’t remember now which shock came in which order, whether it was the toilet, the grass, the red ants, the fungus or whatever so I’ll just take them one at a time in no particular order.

Let’s start with the rain. Our new digs was a corner lot in South Tampa just a hop, skip, and jump from Hillsborough Bay, an arm of Tampa Bay. There were no sewers. Instead, there were what was facetiously called drainage ditches along the outside of the lawn. To this day I’m not sure what these ditches accomplished. Sure, when it rained they would fill up. Overflow in fact. As would the street and the lawn. If a car drove too quickly through the flooded street it would get the points wet and it would stall, have to sit there a while until the points dried out again.

Eventually the water would go away somewhere, but that it was because of the drainage ditches was by no means clear.

What was clear was the wildlife the ditches begat. Mosquitoes and toads, a double plague on our house. A group of toads is a knot, a group of mosquitoes is a scourge. This has been a public service announcement.

I’ll bet you didn’t know you could cure the black death with toad puke. Sir Isaac Newton said so and who am I, or who are you for that matter, to question Isaac Newton? So, you take a toad and hang it upside down in your chimney. After about 3 days it vomits up “earth with various insects in it”. This vomit must be caught on “a dish of yellow wax”. Once the toad dies you pulverize it, duh, and mix the powder with the puke to make a lozenge. And then Bob’s your uncle, eh? No more plague.

Though the toads kept us safe from bubonic plague they made leaving the house a delicate procedure. It was nearly impossible to take a step in the yard without squishing a knot or two.

As for the mosquitoes, they would give a B-29 penis envy. I don’t get that joke either but it sounded funny. Aedes aegypti. Look it up. Yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro, assorted viruses.

As much fun as the local fauna were, however, even more fun was getting caught on the street at night when the city trucks were spraying rolling clouds of DDT to kill the little buggers. There’s never a gas mask around when you need one.

All that said, however, the worst thing about the rain had to be the toilet.

One afternoon while it was raining I had to take a dump. When I was done I flushed. As one does. To my amazement, the water, paper and whatnot did not just swirl down the toilet and go to Australia or China or wherever that stuff is supposed to go. Instead, it started to rise. And rise. I was gobsmacked, gaping incredulously (it’s true I tell you!), paralyzed. This can’t be happening. Toilets could do this? I’d been using toilets for over a decade and had never seen anything like this. The filthy water kept rising. Oh my god, I thought. If this keeps up it’s gonna … It did. It spilled over the top and splattered onto the floor. I did what any badass juvenile delinquent would do. I ran from the room screaming like a little girl.

Pop cleaned everything up and mucked around with the doodads in that thing on the back of the toilet – who even knew there was anything in there?

Turned out, though, this little episode was not a one off. Seems that whenever it rained, which was all too often in this time of year the locals colorfully called “the rainy season”, you couldn’t flush the toilet. It would overflow every damn time. Well, guess what. Being unable to flush the toilet doesn’t stop humans from needing to empty their bowels. And we had five humans in that house. We had to keep the bathroom door closed because of the stench. We had an indoor outhouse.

You might be as stunned as I was to learn that all that crap, when it did manage to exit the toilet in the approved manner, went straight into the back yard! Into a thing called a “septic tank”. You probably thought this was a septic tank ->

But no. A septic tank is a big box of shit! Buried. In the back yard which is about an inch and a half above sea level. And guess what. They fill up. Yes! Shit enough and the septic tank gets stuffed, loaded, crammed, jam packed, engorged, saturated and not with hot fudge either.

Looking back, though, there’s something even more surprising. Pop had a thing for making stuff multi-purpose. He made a ladder brace that doubled as scaffolding, a fishing chair that doubled as a kid’s diving platform, a car luggage carrier that doubled as a row boat. You get the idea. So I have to wonder why this didn’t happen ->

So that was nice.

There was a kid about my age across the street. Ben. Gap toothed, big grin, damnedest accent, went everywhere barefoot. Here’s Ben now ->

Streets in Tampa aren’t like Allison or Kingsessing. They’re not paved with smooth asphalt. Instead, it’s something called chipseal. It’s very rough and abrasive. And the grass isn’t at all like the little clumps we had on either side of our front steps on Allison Street. That grass grew straight out of the ground, as proper grass should. Tampa grass is called St. Augustine grass of course. It grows along the ground in thick mats. And the blades are deadly. They’re called “blades” for a reason. Play some tackle in Philly, like down at Belmont, then take a shower. Nothing. Play some tackle on St. Augustine grass and take shower – yee hah.

So one day I get this great idea. Maybe I should stop resisting, get with the program, maybe try this barefoot thing. For starters I’d stick to the grass, maybe take on the streets later. Well, also in that grass are clumps of burrs. Yeah, just like West Catholic Burrs only not at all. 

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So I sat down to work on them and got a load of ants in my pants. Fire ants, they’re called. You’ll never guess why. I don’t know what Ben had on the bottom of his feet but NASA could probably use it on reentries.

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So that’s the toilet, the grass, the burrs, the ants. What’s next? Oh, let’s do the ghost town.

There were precious few kids of any age or gender. Of boys my age, there was barefoot Ben. That’s it. There was a girl up the street. But even if there’d been more kids, the heat and humidity of a Tampa summer would have kept us all hiding under rocks. So there was no swarm of kids of all ages playing hide ‘n’ seek of an evening. No hot potato, no Red Rover, Red Rover. There were no girls doing insanely athletic rope jumping or those impossibly complicated hand clapping games. There was no surface on which to make a hopscotch grid.

There were no front stoops and so no adults sitting on them watching the kids, there were no steps on which to play stepball. No one chalked bases on the street for corec boxball. There wasn’t a single wall anywhere on which to paint a strike zone so there was no stickball. No waves of kids roller skating or racing up and down on homemade orange crate scooters. There were no hucksters selling Jersey tomatoes, no ice cream trucks, no one going down the alleys looking for knives to sharpen. There were no alleys. Can you imagine not having alleys? I knew every inch of every alley in my block in Philly. Who knew such a world even existed?

One thing Tampa did have was public transportation. That there? That was sarcasm. There were times in Philly, at 56th and Chester, when I’d decline to board the trolley in front of me because it seemed a bit crowded for my taste. I could see the next one back a block or so. I’ll take that one. In Tampa there was a bus. That’s singular. A bus. One bus. Came within walking distance of my house once a day and not every day either. Somebody had to be in the mood. The stop was at the nearest store. The nearest store to our house on Allison Street was less than half a block away. I could have made the trip walking on my hands, assuming I could have walked on my hands at all. This store in Tampa, Lester’s, seemed miles away. Wasn’t really but walking half a mile down a white shell road in 90+ degrees, 90+ humidity made it seem so. I was there on schedule. Guess who wasn’t. Lester looked at me, clearly saw a Yankee, drawled out over the space of at least 15 minutes that the bus would come along sho’tly. Prob’ly. And Lester was correct. The bus did eventually appear, about an hour late. So now, finally on my way downtown. Thrilling. But wait. Halfway there the driver announces he’s thinking mebbe he’ll stop here at the Colonnade Restaurant, mebbe get him a coffee. What? The driver, already running late, can just stop for coffee? Isn’t he worried the caffeine might get him all agitated?

So transportation was a problem.

Sans car, I was stuck meandering around the neighborhood. That affected every aspect of life but none more painfully than religion. In Philly, Pop liked to sleep in on Sunday morning. MBS had Masses all morning so piece of cake for me to “go to an earlier one”. First I’d hie up to Chester Ave, to Rush’s bakery, get some goodies with the donation money, then hang out in the vestibule of the apartment building across the street from the church. About halftime I’d mosey on up the avenue next to the church so I could hear the Gospel and sermon in case I got quizzed on it later.

Same with Confession. I’d never made a good confession, lied at my first one, age 7. Pop would ask, did I go to Confession? Sure, you bet, wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Now, though, the church was miles away. Had to go with Pop not only to Confession and Mass but during Lent on Fridays the Stations of the Cross. I’d let Pop get ahead of me, then stand there daydreaming about Carol till he moved on to the next one. Then I’d count to 15 and go to the one he just left. And it was about this time the Church thought up a new angle to torment me. Instead of just the altar boys doing the responses to the priest, the whole crowd would. In Latin. Pop. Abusing Latin. Booming it like he was shouting from the rooftops. Sanctus fucking cacas.

So no Carol, no basement, no stickball, no boxball, no mobility, religion up the wazoo, St. Augustine grass, burrs, fire ants, overflowing toilet, my cup runneth over. I thought.

But, ah, the fungus.

I had a carefully groomed Fabian style head of hair. Spent entirely too much time fussing with it, so maybe it was Karma. One day I had some goopy stuff on the left side of my head. Maybe about the size of a quarter. Soon half a buck. Soon covered most of that side of my head. Sort of gray, oozing, at least a quarter inch thick. Very sexy.

Of course, as soon as we hit Tampa Pop started looking for the Catholic schools. Jesuit was the only Catholic HS. Expensive, especially considering Pop had somehow neglected to nail down any employment in Tampa prior to quitting his job in Philly as a sheet metal worker. That there were no unions in the South came as quite the surprise. To Pop. I had learned about it in what was called “history class”. Still Pop wanted to scrape together the money, he was hell bent on me finishing Catholic high school. I had an ace up my sleeve though. In my sophomore year at West I had cunningly flunked Religion. So, at Jesuit I would have to repeat my sophomore year. At the public HS, much closer and cheaper, meh. They didn’t care about my Religion grade. So off to TR Robinson HS. 11th grade, my first time ever in coed classes. Just one problem. The fungus among us.

We had a family heirloom. It was a ratty, nasty, red wig like maybe Harpo would have worn if he wasn’t worried about cooties. To cover up the fungus, I wore that wig my first day at Robinson. Hey, better a joke than a freak, right? Not one teacher said anything, though one smirked. I overheard one girl ask another, “Do you think that’s his real hair?” Hey, anything for a laugh, right? Of course, that only worked the one day. After that it was like being an escapee from a leper colony.

Let’s see. Anything else?

Oh gee. How could I forget the hurricane?

We knew it was coming so we were prepared. Mom filled the tub and all the sinks. One never knows when soap scummy water with pubic hairs floating in it might come in handy.

Pop surveyed the house to assess which room was the safest to hole up in. The least likely to be crushed by falling trees turned out to be my bedroom so that’s where we gathered. To be on the safe side we put my two sisters in the closet. They were ages 10 and 4, so we’re not talking large people, but even so they were unable to lie full length on the floor and it was decided the best thing would be to lie opposite each other with their heads and backs on the floor and their legs up the wall. That allowed them to have pillows under their heads. Then we wished them luck and slid the door shut. That left the rest of us to assume battle stations. For Pop and me, that meant kneeling next to my bed saying rosaries. We prayed our asses off. Mom was exempt, being Methodist, so she lay on my bed and fell asleep. We each had a job to do.

And then came winter.

Yeah, yeah. I hear ya scoffing. Winter. In Florida. Get real, right? Well, does 14 degrees sound real enough? To be fair, it only happened that first winter, but yikes. And guess what is completely and utterly unprepared for that sort of temperature. A Florida house, that’s what. In Philly, every room had a radiator. Heat came from somewhere down below, straight from Hell as far as I knew. You’d certainly think so if you ever touched the radiator. But, for all the flaws of a radiator, each room had its own heat source. The house in Tampa had one heat source. For the entire house. And it wasn’t in my room, though you could at least see it from there. Couldn’t see it from any other room but, hey, it was within walking distance. It was a big ol’ thing but only oozed dribs and drabs of heat out of a small grill at the top. It was nestled into a cranny in the hallway such that you could only embrace it from the front, one frostbitten Floridian at a time.

Have I mentioned the snakes yet?

Back in Philly I saw a garter snake once. Some kid at school had one. Offered to let me fondle it. Hard pass, but thanks.

My first Tampa snake was not a garter snake. I was at Ballast Point one day. I’d been out on the pier as usual to see if anyone was catching any fish. They weren’t, as usual. Now I was in the park area. I thought maybe I’d try to catch a lizard. The trees were crawling with them. Easier said than done, though. I’d creep up on one and wouldn’t even get within arm’s reach before it would scurry further up the tree and, as if that weren’t enough, around the other side. I had made a number of futile stabs at this when this kid pulls up on a motor scooter.

“Whatcha trying to do”, he says. “Catch lizards?”

“Yep”.

“That’s not how to do it,” he says. “Hop on and I’ll show ya how”.

Motor scooter. Transportation. Already I’m thinking this kid’s pretty cool. So I hop on and off we go. Most excellent, this motor scooter business. You zip right along in a cool breeze. I didn’t see how this was going to catch any lizards but I also didn’t care.

Our destination was just up the road a piece at the intersection of Gandy and Bayshore. There was a small drive-in burger joint there.

“I noticed they got a new sign,” he says pointing to an old paint-chipped sign lying on its side just off the edge of the parking lot. “That’s the old one”. It was maybe ten feet by 3 feet.

“Gonna be a lot of lizards under there,” he says. “We’ll stand side by side and when I count three we lift it up and push it over. They’ll be too surprised to move for a couple seconds and that’s when we grab ‘em”.

Sounds like a plan, but at 1 a carhop in short shorts comes out of the restaurant so by 3 my mind and eyes aren’t on what was under the sign. I mean, c’mon, you’re 15 and you see this? ->

“Jump back!” my new friend hisses real urgent like.

“Huh?” I say.

“Jump back!” he says again, and that’s when the rattle starts.

I look down and, even though I’d never seen one before, I know immediately I’m looking at a diamondback rattlesnake. Didn’t take a genius. It was a snake, hefty, all coiled up with diamond-shaped markings on its back and its tail standing straight up shaking. Looking at me.

I yelp and jump back but not quite far enough. The snake sprang at the same instant and nailed me. Well, not me exactly. There it was, stretched out, fangs hooked onto my jeans. In a flash, Bill, that was his name, the kid not the snake, reaches down and gets the snake right behind its head. He unhooks and has me roll up my pantleg. Not a scratch. Bill laughs, quite pleased with the whole operation. My knees are buckling. Bill’s holding up his catch admiring it.

“Go into the restaurant,” he says. “And get me a bag to put it in”.

“Huh?” My plan was to heave the damn thing into the jungle behind us and run like hell in the other direction. “What are you gonna do with a rattlesnake?”

“Sell him,” he says. “Dollar a foot”.

So into the restaurant I go. Empty except for a girl behind the counter. She smiles. I ask if she has a bag. Clearly an odd request but she takes just a second before reaching down and pulling out one of those little brown bags you might put gum drops in.

“How’s this?” she says.

“Hmm,” I say. “Probably too small.”

“What’s it for?” she says.

“Well,” I say. “We (note the plural pronoun) just caught a rattlesnake out in the parking lot…”

Before I can finish she runs into the back of the joint. I wait a few minutes and when she doesn’t return I take the paper bag and go back out to Bill.

He looks at the bag, then me.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” he says.

Before I can come up with a snappy reply the girl from the counter and the carhop I’d seen previously come out the back of the restaurant carrying a big shiny trash can between them. They ooh and aah as Bill drops the snake in the can and then puts on the lid. To me he says, “You stay here and keep an eye on this while I go to that gas station across the street, see if they have an inner tube.”

And off he goes. The girls go back into the restaurant but then a minute later out comes what I assume is the cook. Big ol’ guy, white paper hat, white pants, white apron, dirty white shirt stretched across his belly.

“Wheah’s this heah snake?” he wants to know.

I nod at the trash can.

He whips off the lid, looks in.

“Whooee, big ‘un!”

I concur. Biggest one I’ve ever seen.

Whereupon he snatches up the can by one handle and carries it into the back of the restaurant. With the lid off.

A minute later Bill returns with an inner tube, sees no trash can with snake, just this useless kid and just as he’s about to ask, the cook and both girls come running out of the restaurant. Snake’s loose in the kitchen. Bill sighs, stomps in the back door. We heard thrashing and banging, pots clanging, footsteps running and then out comes Bill with the snake by the neck again. He grabs the inner tube and stuffs the snake in head first. Then he hands the inner tube to me and says, “You hold it while I drive”.

Uh, excuse me?

“Don’t worry,” he says. “In there it’s dark and the snake will be kinda hypnotized. You’ll be fine”.

So we hop on his scooter and putt-putt down the road, me hanging onto Bill with one hand, holding the inner tube at arm’s length with the other, to a place near my house that I had no idea existed. It was a regular house but the back yard was chock-a-block with cages and boxes and assorted litter. The owner produced another shiny trash can (did everyone around here keep an unused trash can just for snakes?) and Bill got the snake from the inner tube into the can. That snake was pissed. Here’s a pic ->

While the owner and Bill concluded their business I had a look around. There was a big jar with a coral snake, aquariums with various non-poisonous snakes, cages with a bobcat, raccoons, possums, a regular zoo. Speaking of raccoons, a few days later Bill came strolling down the street walking his pet raccoon on a leash. And not long after that Pop was weeding and picked up a pygmy rattler he managed to fling aside without getting bit, and I ran over a cottonmouth moccasin with the lawn mower.

I was not in West Philly any more.

There was one thing both towns had in common though. When the girl up the street intimated to me that if I popped round her house one night, say around 1 AM, when her folks were sure to be asleep, and scratched on the screen of her bedroom window, we might repair to her garage and become more closely acquainted, I discovered that Ithan Street wasn’t the only place on God’s green Earth where a guy could get a raging case of epididymal hypertension.