Notes on Music - Billboard's Number One Tunes (and more!) from the Spring of 1986

The Roggebusch household at 48 Broad Street was a very musical household. The patriarch Frank played both jazz and classical tunes on one of the pianos in the music room. His wife Faith played classical stuff on the second piano. On some nights, with nothing on the tube, they'd play duets. The room also featured a synthesizer and a xylophone. The older of Faith's two boys, Alexander Peterson, was pursuing the bass. The oldest of Frank's biological boys, Stephen Roggebusch, played trumpet.

All of this is quite coincidental considering that, a hundred years earlier, 48 Broad was a music school. Indeed, one of its students was still around in the spring of 1986, when the story collection 48 Broad takes place. Bunny Stringfellow was the top violin student until she passed away from pneumonia at the age of 13 in 1913. Only nine-year-old Barry, the youngest (by far) of the Roggebusch brood, could see her, and see her quite clearly, his lazy left eye be damned. Bunny showed up to play the occasional Chopin in Barry's bedroom (the Blue Room). They'd also chat now and again. Actually, their dialogues were more like monologues by Bunny on how classical music was far superior to the stuff blaring from that weird device called a "radio" next to Barry's bed. Poor Barry had taken a stab at playing the piano himself. With his stepbrother John Peterson, he'd taken lessons for a couple years from the old lady down the street, but he couldn't maintain the necessary discipline. Like his left eye, he was just too damned lazy.


Even those at 48 Broad who didn't play an instrument loved music. Rare was the night when at least one or two of the seven siblings didn't blast something from the boom box in their bedroom. And Frank, when nothing was on the tube and he wasn't in the mood to play anything, would blast either classical or jazz on the living room hi-fi system.

But this post isn't about Frank's tastes. Or Bunny Stringfellow. Or classical or jazz. I'll touch on all that another time. No, I'd like to paint a small picture of what the popular tunes were at this time, the kinds of stuff you'd've heard on your local top 40 radio station in the spring of '86. This'll give you some idea of what the vast majority of the Roggebusch kids were listening to (loudly) on any given night. The only exception is Louis. With his taste in rap, he couldn't be bothered with most of the stuff listed below.


Here are the songs that made number one on Billboard in the spring of '86.

March 1-8 - "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister
March 9-15 - "Sara" by Starship
March 16-22 - "These Dreams" by Heart
March 23-April 12 - "Rock Me Amadeus" by Falco
April 13-26 - "Kiss" by Prince & the Revolution
April 27-May 3 - "Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer
May 4-10 - "West End Girls" by The Pet Shop Boys
May 11-31 - "Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston


The below songs didn't make number one during the 48 Broad time period but were still very popular. Some, in fact, were past number one hits.

"Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon
"Careless Whisper" and "Everything She Wants" by Wham!
"Jump" by Van Halen
"Sweet Dreams" by The Eurythmics
"One More Night" by Phil Collins
"Footloose" by Kenny Loggins
"We Are the World" by USA for Africa
"Our House" by Madness
"The Show" by Doug E. Fresh
"Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)" by Phil Collins
"Voices Carry" by Til Tuesday
"Your Love" by The Outfield
"Cum On Feel The Noize" by Quiet Riot
"Obsession" by Animotion
"I'm Chillin'" by Kurtis Blow
"Some Like It Hot" by Power Station
"Crazy for You" by Madonna
"Hello" by Lionel Richie
"Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds
"Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams

I omitted one song so I could give it special mention: "Take On Me" by a-ha. For whatever reason, "Take On Me" always made Barry think of Misty, a cute blonde in his fourth grade class for whom he harbored a Garbage Pail Kid-sized crush. Suffice it to say this song grew to be of enormous significance to our little guy. He could listen to it innumerable times without tiring of it (much to Bunny Stringfellow's Garbage Pail Kid-sized chagrin). Even after Barry got over Misty, "Take On Me" always remained one of those tunes that invariably evoked--how to put it?--a certain level of emotion which, if it could manifest itself, would look like a burgundy wash cloth saturated with warm, soapy water. On the one hand, it would feel positively divine as it traced the contours of your body. You'd feel like you were melting in its wake. Don't forget that soap, though. Sometimes a drop or two would get flecked into your eyes. And you'd cry a little.

Notes on Oh Hell!

Oh Hell! is a card game unique in the fact that it never fails to live up to its title for everyone who plays it. It's not like most card games. Take 21 for instance. When you sit down to play 21, you could easily play oodles of hands and never once get 21. Ever. You could play baccarat (which comes from the Italian word for zero) and never once get a zero. Although, come to think of it, you wouldn't want a zero. You'd want as close to a nine as you could get. That makes me wonder why that game is named zero instead of nine. Is that an ironic title? At any rate, Oh Hell! is neither an ironic title nor a title whose realization could elude you. It doesn't even matter if you end up winning the game. At some point on your journey to victory, no matter how decisive, you will experience frustration, just like all the losers, worthy of the name of the game. Nor does it matter how many people are playing. You could have, say, nine people playing a game of Oh Hell!. I guarantee you that all nine will, at some point, get pissed off enough to exclaim the name of the game.

Nine is the number of people who play it at 48 Broad Street. That's how many people make up the mixed brood who live there, presided over by Frank Roggebusch and his third wife, Faith. Between the two of them, they have seven little kidlings to take care of. Well actually, I shouldn't call them little or attach the syllable "-ling" to any word referring to them. Perhaps that would only work for the youngest (by far) of the bunch, Bawrence Barney Roggebusch. Bawrence to his dad and stepmom. Barry to just about everyone else on the planet. That was yet another cool thing about Oh Hell!. Since it neither involved betting money nor was difficult to figure out, anyone could play it, including nine-year-old droopy-eyed bed wetters like Barry.

Frank introduced everyone to Oh Hell! not long after they all moved to 48 Broad in January 1983. It was a Saturday night, as it usually was when they played. Dinner, always prepared by Frank, was done. The dishes, always a team effort, were done. Not much was on TV, which of course has been the case with Saturday nights since time immemorial. So Frank suggested they all come back to the kitchen for this cool new card game he wanted to show them. In no time flat, Oh Hell! became by far and away the favorite pastime of the 48 Broad brood. By the time we arrive at the spring of 1986, when 48 Broad takes place, the Roggebusches were playing it with just as much frequency and heated intensity as ever.

So how do you play? I'll explain it to you just as Frank did on that night 25 years ago. Okay. Each player is dealt a certain number of cards. Let's say ten. That's a nice round number. Of course, that meant the Roggebusches would play with two decks of cards, since one deck only has 52 cards. Anyway, so each person at the table starts with ten cards. Before play can begin, each player has to announce to Frank how many hands they think they'll win. This is called their bid. Frank then uses the soft-tip pen (black, blue, red, or green) to record all the bids on his yellow legal pad, on which he has a grid mapped out with everyone's names on the left. This is how he keeps track of all the bids and all the scores. After all ten hands have been played, each person gets a score. If the player wins the number of hands they bid, they get that number plus ten. If they don't win thier bid, though, their score is reduced by the difference between the number of hands they did win and the number of hands they bid on. The only exception is if that loser had the highest score after the previous hand. If the high scorer gets the wrong number of tricks, then their score drops by that same difference...multiplied by five! Okay? So for example, let's say you're the (un)lucky schmo with the highest score, and then on the next round, you predict you're going to collect three tricks. In other words, you tell Frank that you bid three. But then your luck goes to shit, and you win five. Instead of your score being reduced by two points (the difference between five and three), your score is reduced by ten points. Man. Nothing like the pressure of staying on top, eh? You may not think there'd be much pressure. After all, you're sitting at your computer right now, all relaxed and comfy. What pressure could there be in a card game with no cash at stake? Trust me. If you were playing Oh Hell! right now, and at some point you were leading the pack, especially a pack as volatile and carnivorous as the Roggebusches, the pressure to keep bidding correctly would squeeze more sweat from your forehead and pits than sitting next to a frickin' water heater in a tiny dark closet with the door locked. Inevitably you'd fuck up and then watch Frank, no doubt with wet-lipped glee, write down your new, and much reduced, score. And he'd do so in a very slow and meticulous fashion, as if trying to rub your face in it. Say it with me now: Oh Hell!

Just a quick note about bidding. Everyone at the table can bid whatever they want. Except for the dealer. Let's say you're the dealer. It's the beginning of the game, and you have to deal around the table until everyone's got ten cards. The first person to bid is the person to your left. And then we work around the table until we arrive at you. The dealer is always the last person to bid. If you're at the Roggebusch table, that means eight other people get to bid before you. Let's say each person has bid one. That means each of those eight people are convinced that they have one card in their hand that will win them one trick and that the other nine cards in their hand aren't good enough to justify a higher bid. Since eight people have bid one trick each, that means eight tricks out of ten have been accounted for. Let's say you, the dealer, would like to bid two. Too bad. You can't. That would add up to the number of cards dealt, and that's not allowed to happen. You get me? The total number of tricks bid on must NOT equal the number of cards dealt to each person. So in this example, you may bid zero, one, or anything higher than two. If the other eight had bid on a collective ten tricks, then the dealer may not bid zero. If the other eight bid on a collective number of tricks higher than ten, then you the dealer can bid on whatever you want.

Now comes the crucial question: How, for the love of New Jersey, do you win a hand at Oh Hell!? Let's stick to the above example, where you are one of the nine Roggebusches, and it's your turn to deal. After you've dealt all the cards, you put the remaining deck next to you and turn over the top card. Let's say it's a...oh I dunno...a three of diamonds. That means diamonds are now trump for that round. So if someone is dominating a trick with an ace of clubs or something, and it's your turn and you throw out a two of diamonds, then you beat that ace, and if no one throws out a higher diamond, you win that trick. As with bidding, the first person to start the first trick is the person to your left. That person can throw out whatever they want. Whenever a new hand starts, the first person has free reign. So let's say, to kick things off, the person to your left throws out a seven of clubs into the middle of the table. The next person now must throw out a club. If it's higher or lower than a seven depends on if that person wishes to win that hand. If that person has no club, then they can throw out whatever. After all ten people have tossed out a card, then whoever has the highest club wins the trick. But again, if someone chucks out an ace of clubs, but then someone else who has no club throws down a whatever of diamonds, then that diamond card wins. Whoever wins that hand will then be the first person to throw down the first card to start the next trick. Whoever wins that trick will then be the first to start the trick after that. That's the way it proceeds until all ten tricks have been played. Then Frank will pick up his pen and go around the table to see who won the number of tricks they wanted, and who didn't.

And now the person on your left has to deal. Each person will get nine cards. Everything above will then be repeated. After all nine tricks have been played and the scores adjusted accordingly, then the next person will deal eight cards. You see where this is going, don't you? The deck of cards works its way around, with each round having one less card. Eventually we get to the point where each person is dealt one measly card. That's always fun (not!), because most everyone will bid zero, and then the dealer won't be allowed to bid one. Lovely. After that, everyone gets two cards. We now work our way back up to ten.

Please note that the above is just an example. You can play with as few, or as many, people as you want. There's also no rule saying you have to start with ten tricks. You can start with more (good luck!) or a little less. Don't start too low, though. The game'll go by too fast. Nor, once you get down to one card, do you necessarily have to work your way back up to whatever number you started at. That's just how Frank Roggebusch prefers to do it. Who are his pupils to say no?

One more thing about the Oh Hell! tradition at 48 Broad. After the game, Frank likes to doodle a bit on the score sheet, sketching stuff like World War II fighter planes and tanks. To cap off the evening, everyone puts a dollar into the middle of the table. Frank reshuffles the deck and deals everyone seven cards face-up. Now it's like poker. Whoever's got the best hand will win the nine dollars. You might think that's no big deal, right? It's just nine dollars. But it means there will be a second winner for the night. They like to spread the love at 48 Broad.

Notes on Garbage Pail Kids

In June of 1985, just as Barry Roggebusch was about to turn nine whole years old, a new and ghastly deformed pop cultural phenomenon stamped its mangled foot in the complacent mire of the Reaganomic landscape: Garbage Pail Kids!

First of all, I'm sure you remember Cabbage Patch Dolls, right? Those tiny, innocent, sundae-skinned, Chia Pet-haired dollies who looked so much like real-life cuddly infants and, at the same time, looked like they'd ram their pacifier down your gullet and think nothing of it? No, really. Those things were creepy. If I had to guess where writer Don Mancini got the idea for that horror flick Child's Play? You know, the one about that adorable little doll that goes all cock diesel with a steak knife? I'd say he got it from the Cabbage Patch. Dude probably took one look at those dead-eyed little squirts and was like, "Holy shit! If that thing were alive right now, it'd find the nearest sharp object and tear out my ticker!" And so, a comic horror franchise was born, and actor Brad Dourif discovered his niche.

So anyway, the inimitable Garbage Pail Kids were a direct and overwhelming response to the Cabbage Patch. Some mad genius at the Topps trading card company, whose brain I'd pay top moolah to have in my skull right now, decided to go balls to the wall with the whole demonic infant thing. I mean really. Why make tiny guys and gals under the guise of cuddly innocence when even Helen Keller could see they were 100% guaranteed malevolence? And so was spawned a brand new breed of the foulest, most disgusting, most disturbing race of children this side of the Styx. But wait! The genius goes even further! Instead of actual dolls (Topps don't do dolls, man), they designed their characters as trading cards. That way, right? It's so much cheaper, and the mad genius could flex his wicked imagination to the max in nightmaring up as many hideous little hobgoblins his brain could spew out. But wait! The genius isn't done yet! Instead of just one name per Kid, he came up with two! That's right. So he'd design one Kid, and then produce two cards per, each with its own hilarious name. For instance, one pair of cards from series one had this little diaper-clad baby sitting on its pink blankie....puking up all of its toys. On the first one, its name was Up Chuck; on the other, Heavin' Steven. A series three Kid was a Venus fly trap in the process of snacking on someone, an arm dangling from the maws. This fly trap Kid was called Juicy Jessica on the first card, Green Dean on the other. See what I mean? Each series of Kids featured about forty such pairings, which meant that devotees such as Barry Roggebusch would have no less than eighty cards to collect per series. But wait! The genius still isn't done! Not only were these trading cards. They were stickers to boot/kick! So if you didn't care about preserving the cards in clear plastic until you were seventy, at which time you could cash in and create a double-named nest egg or something, you could peel some of these little deformed bad girls and boys and use them to deform the living shit out of every piece of furniture in your house. Indeed, the latter is what you'd probably do. It's what Barry did. Topps didn't create this miniature master race to cater to the crowd that cares about the condition of their friggin' cards decades after they've bought them. Barry didn't buy these things just to stick 'em in plastic and store 'em in the closet. He bought them to revel in them, just as much as Slobby Robbie and Fat Matt from series one reveled in gorging themselves on candy and ice cream until they crushed the weight scale.

Ah yes, deforming the house with GPK stickers. If there was one house where such a task posed a challenge worthy of the Garbage Pail name, it would be the house at 48 Broad St. In the end, the house was far too big and too full of big people (from Barry's fourth grade point of view) to inflict much deformation on. Still, that didn't stop the boy from getting caught up in the Garbage Pail wave. Au contraire. The Garbage Pail Kids spawned an epidemic of card-purchasing frenzy. By the time Topps released series four in May of 1986, which is when the story collection 48 Broad takes place, the epidemic had ballooned into a pandemic, and Barry was but one of the innumerable victims.

Actually, it might be more accurate to call Barry a beneficiary. After all, it wasn't his money being spent on the gobs of cards that slowly accumulated within the flimsy cardboard walls of the old Converse shoebox he'd gotten for the purpose from his half-brother Daniel, in his bedroom (the Blue Room) on the third floor. Frank gave his youngest an allowance same as the other six boys. Unfortunately not even those five weekly dollars could curtail the bind in which Barry found himself upon series four's release. GPK's most devoted deformity lovers greeted series four with nothing less than a fever pitch, but Barry was at a loss as to how he could get swept up in it. It was impossible if he didn't have any money, and by May he was still spending every penny he had on the first three series. He still hadn't gotten all 120 pairings. It wasn't from lack of trying. And in trying, he now had who knew how many copies of each pairing. If he opened another pack to find Horsey Henry (or his twin, Galloping Glen), he'd throw up. One more Slain Wayne (or Ventilated Vennie) and he'd march the three blocks to the Mount Holly Pharmacy, his home away from home, and demand a refund.

Series four hadn't been out a week yet when Barry began drowning in desperation. His father may only have given him five smackers a week, but Barry knew there was oh so much more where that came from. What's more, he knew exactly where it came from. And so, on a quiet weekday afternoon on an otherwise pleasant, if a bit humid, Jersey spring day, Barry came home to find most of the house deserted. His father was teaching at Temple University today. Two or three days a week would see him do that. Otherwise his expanding cheese- and booze-fed ass would be parked in his office on the second floor. Barry's stepmom Faith was out somewhere with one of her two boys. And all the other boys? One or two were around the house somewhere. The rest were out with their pals or their girlfriends. Who knew and, more importantly, who cared? All Barry knew was that the avenue to salvation was wide and clear and no one would see him take it. The avenue in question was the second floor hallway, which ended at his father and stepmother's bedroom. And it was there, in the top drawer of his father's dresser, the sock drawer (why is it always the sock drawer?), where he'd find paper and plastic of the monetary variety. For reasons Barry still didn't get, his father had never used a wallet in his life. Ever. Frank would pronounce this once in a while with a note of pride. And then he'd explain why, but Barry never understood. Every other male adult used a wallet. Why couldn't his father? No matter. Frank's not doing so always meant there was an appreciable amount of cash in his sock drawer, as well as a credit card or two. The plastic meant nothing to Barry. He had no idea what they were for or what they meant. He was plenty old enough to understand the green paper with dead presidents on them, though. On the particular afternoon when he opened the drawer, he reached in, clutched the wad with his fat little fingers, closed the drawer, and calmly walked up to the Blue Room like everything was hunky dory. That single act, of course, is what precipitated everything going to shit for everyone at 48 Broad. More on that another time.

So what was it that drew Barry to the Garbage Pail Kids with so much fervor? What would make him risk getting into so much trouble just to continue his relationship with two-dimensional deformities? I don't want to get too analytical. Barry was hardly the only human under five feet who devoted so much time to the GPKs and to chewing that cardboard gum and to sniffing the wrapper for that ineffable scent of cards mixed with gum powder. Zillions of kiddies did so, but the vast majority of them weren't dumb enough to steal $500 from their parents. Yes, that's how much Barry ended up pilfering, although he didn't know the exact amount until much later. He didn't bother counting during the crime. The wad was too thick to worry with specifics. Still, he knew he was taking quite the sum. And he knew it was wrong. So why? Could it be that he could relate to these little felonies against nature better than he could to anyone three dimensional? After all, he was sort of deformed himself. The Bell's palsy that nearly killed him three years earlier had left the muscle tone on the left side of his face permanently damaged. That meant his left eyelid hung lower than the right. When he smiled, only the right side of his face would cooperate. The left would remain almost neutral. When he cried, once again, only his right side would have the strength to emote. It looked not unlike Rocky Balboa crying out for his beloved Adrian. Even when Barry wasn't showing any emotion, when you or I would have just a neutral look on our face, his countenance would appear locked in a scowl courtesy of the left side of his face having a slight sag, with a clear boundary between his cheek and the skin around his mouth, while the right side remained uniformly smooth. If you didn't know this was simply residue from a near-fatal illness, you might think the young lad was scowling at you, when in fact all he was doing was looking. Nothing more. Our poor Barry rubbed a lot of people the wrong way by just passing his eyes in their general direction. A lot of people thought he was giving them what in today's parlance is called the stink eye. Suffice it to say that Barry didn't have many friends. Coupled with his bed wetting, you might say Barry was a bit of a biological freak himself. If he were a Garbage Pail pairing, you might call one card Bed Wetting Barry, and the other, Wrong Eye Roggebusch. Maybe that's why he clung to the Garbage Pail Kids with white-knuckled fandom. I mean shit, look at these Kids. Ugly as cuss, and they could still make you laugh. Barry liked making people laugh too. Fourth grade was around the time he realized he might actually have a knack for it. Sometimes he felt he had no choice, what with the way he could piss people off without effort just by looking at them. But who would make Barry laugh? Perhaps that was another outlet the Kids provided. Most people at 48 Broad only opened their mouths in his direction if they wanted him to do something or reprimand him for doing something wrong.

And that, of course, has got to make you wonder what in Christ he was thinking when he grabbed all that cash from the proverbial sock drawer of his father Frank Roggebusch.