The night of Sunday, January 30, 1983, turned out to be quite a night for the Roggebusch family. Having just relocated to the house on 48 Broad in Mount Holly, New Jersey that weekend from suburban Washington, D.C., they didn't even have time to unpack more than their television before it was time to watch their beloved Washington Redskins battle the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. And believe me, they did so. Right there, smack in the middle of the forest of unpacked boxes in the first floor hallway with its mud-colored carpeting and its twin cold radiators standing sentry just outside that shell of a rusty kitchen. They didn't even bother with the chairs, so gung-ho were they in seeing if the Skins could win their first Lombardi trophy with a head coach who was only in his second year.
It wasn't pretty. Barely halfway into the first quarter, Miami's quarterback threw a postcard spiral into the waiting cradled arms of Jimmy Cefalo. While the Skins did score just before halftime, the Dolphins responded instantly with a 98-yard kickoff return, a Super Bowl record. The Fins were up 17-10 at halftime. Indeed, it wasn't until well into the fourth quarter that Washington finally managed to grab hold of the lead, and barely at that. On a fourth-and-one situation, when most teams usually punt, that upstart coach Joe Gibbs said screw it. If you don't risk big, you'll never win big. So he scrapped the whole punt thing and called for a run play off tackle with fullback John Riggins, an even more rebellious type who conked out in his soup at a White House dinner because he was still hung over from the previous night's excitement that he was even going to a White House dinner. As big a mother as Riggins was, he almost didn't make that one yard. One of Miami's defensive backs ran up and grabbed a hold of his jersey, but all to no avail. Riggo not only made that one yard, he huffed and puffed his beer-stuffed self all the way to the end zone. I don't think I need to tell you that Riggo was named the Bowl's MVP. That pass to Charlie Brown toward the end was the gravy on what was very nearly a turkey for Skins fans everywhere.
If you're not into football, then no doubt I could've written the above paragraph in Swahili (assuming I knew Swahili) and you would've gotten just as much out of it. Let me put it this way: While the Skins did win 27-17, it was one hell of a roller coaster ride getting there. The emotion in that first floor hallway shot up and down like the heart rate on a monitor.
It shot up and down for everyone, that is, except Bawrence Barney Roggebusch. Only six years old at the time ("six and a half!") and the youngest of all the Roggebusches, Barry couldn't have cared less about any football game. He didn't understand it, for starters, and never really felt compelled to try to learn about it. So much for contagious enthusiasm.
Nah. While the rest of the clan were all huddled together on that giant ochre pillow just below the side porch window, Barry sat to the side a bit, just a few feet away, by himself on the carpet, with his Walkman planted on his ears. Songs such as "Down Under" by Men at Work and "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)" by Hall & Oates drowned out the tinny roars of the TV crowd. These tunes found such favor with the little squirt that, without realizing it, he was singing along out loud. When your heart rate's tense and the fate of your health resides with that burgundy and gold team on the glowing cube atop that crammed moving box you can't imagine ever being in the mood to unpack, and suddenly that kid over yonder starts singing in his squeaky little voice: "I come from a land down under/Where beer does flow and men chunder/Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?/You better run, you better take cover," you're liable to blow a gasket and say something--or do something--at great expense to said tot.
And then when your team wins, you'll forget all about the one who didn't care in the first place. That's why no one noticed Barry getting up to use the bathroom; or how long he was gone; or how his face was a brighter shade of pale when he came back out. Not one person out of the eight who jumped up and screamed as Riggo made that historical run--not his father Frank, not his brand spanking (pun intended) new stepmother Faith, not his six half- and stepbrothers--noticed Barry barely able to stand on his own two feet and slap his Walkman back on. He himself didn't even have the wherewithal to notice how lopsided the earphones were, with the right earpiece coming to rest against his cheek while the left got lost in the scruffy blond hair.
He collapsed in a heap like so many of those Dolphins standing in the way of Redskins victory.
No one noticed.
"Hail to the Redskins!
Hail vic-tor-y!
Braves on the warpath!
Fight!
For old!
D.C.!"
Barry came down with Bell's palsy. The facial nerves and muscles responsible for the left side of his face had gone colder than the radiators. That half of his face would remain paralyzed for months. When he smiled, whenever he could scrounge up a reason to do so, it would look more like a twisted grimace. The doctors were at a loss as to how he caught the condition. Frank took his youngest to the doctor no less than half a dozen times in the two weeks Barry was out of school. And then there was that trip to the hospital for the CAT scan, which would go down as one of the most scarring experiences of Barry's life. Are you kidding? When you're six, the whole idea of being wrapped up and bound to a mechanical gurney with an iodine needle jabbed in your arm and a machine peering into you, that just...well...fucking sucks.
If that didn't make things interesting enough, along came that five-alarm fever. Almost every day for those two weeks of being bed ridden, the mercury climbed up to one-oh-seven, which theoretically is the point at which your brain shuts down and dies. Not for Barry, though, not with his father Frank and brother Dan watching over him like hawks and dunking him into an ice cold bath whenever that fever reached a fever pitch.
In the years afterward, Frank would take five minutes now and again to do impromptu facial exercises with his boy. Meanwhile, as you can guess, with a weird-ass name and now a weird-ass face to match, people harpooned Barry with more purpose than Mr. Dick ever would've the proverbial white whale had he ever caught the colossal motherfucker. Still, Barry snatched what hope he could. A year or so after the illness, he came down to dinner at the sound of that bell above the kitchen doorway that Frank gave a yank on every night at 7 p.m. As always, the horizontally expanding Barry got there first. Frank took him through the facial exercises. "Okay, now your eyebrows." Barry gave it a go, expecting nothing as always. But wait! This time, that left eyebrow actually, kinda sorta, went up a bit. It didn't hold a candle to the normal right eyebrow, but hey, that it moved at all made Frank's face light up with hope, and that hope rubbed off on Barry. To his dying day he'd never forget the look on his father's face at that moment.
That didn't stop the jokes at school, though. What made it worse was that most of the taunts came when his back was turned. Nor was Barry safe at home. Indeed, his brother Jonathan dubbed him one of Jerry's Kids. This was, of course, in addition to Barry's being used to wax the kitchen floor by one older brother or another on a routine basis. Dan was cool. Stephen never physically kicked his ass, but he could let loose with the verbal assaults if necessary. He loved saying "Bawrence Barney!" in mock indignation, as if Barry had done something wrong. That was because Barry's dad really did address him with his full first and middle weirdo names whenever he did something against their liking. Barry felt inspired by how his brothers looked so cool going to school in the morning after using mousse to make their hair look so perfect. Perhaps he could make his hair look stylish enough to offset that Quasimodo face. I'll let you figure out if it worked or not. This was compounded by the fact that he kept getting fatter. Spanky became yet another one of his nicknames.
Just as the Bell's palsy always remained a mystery, so did Barry's chronic bed wetting. He didn't piss his PJs every single night, but one morning out of every three he'd wake up to find his sheets soaked. This muddled even further the already rocky relationships with everyone else at 48 Broad, especially those siblings who got their jollies out of whooping his ass. Now they had one more excuse to do so. The bed wetting obviously wasn't Barry's fault. Most kids, by the time they're in Kindergarten or so, have in place whatever signal is needed to alert the brain when the bladder's full so they can wake up in time. Not Barry. Somehow his wires got crossed now and again. Frank bought a sort of white plastic covering to protect the mattress. That was something, at least, but suffice it to say sleepovers could get complicated. As patient as Frank could be, evidenced by his ability to be the guardian of seven kids without going bonkers, even he found himself begrudging his youngest a problem that was as much a part of nature's whim as the hurricane that blew down the tree next to the house that one summer.
'Fact is, the bed wetting taxed the patience of everyone, in part because no one could understand why it didn't fix itself. For his part, Barry was resigned to the problem lasting his entire life. Any thoughts of eventually having relationships with women, getting married, all that stuff? As they say in Jersey: Fuhgeddaboutit. Sometimes he'd complain about it to his mother. All she'd say was that it would go away eventually (which it did, although it took a few more interminable years).
Ah yes, Barry's mother. After Frank divorced her, Los Angeles native Joanne Roggebusch, nee Barney, dropped both the Roggebusch and the Barney and became Joan Purvis, assuming the maiden name of her mother. This despite the fact that her mother had committed suicide when Joan was 18, and the fact that on most mornings she woke up swearing she'd never forgive her. She hung around the D.C. area for about a year and a half after the divorce, visiting the Howard Johnson's a few miles from 48 Broad so she could see Barry as well as Dan and Louis, the two sons by her first husband Marcus Woods. She even agreed to swallow her humiliation and stay at 48 Broad one weekend to watch the kids while Frank and Faith went away for some alone time. Finally, in the fall of '84, after deciding that swallowing her humiliation was causing too much indigestion, she packed up and relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the cost of living was lower, where it would only take her kids an hour's flight to reach her and where, as part of the greater Triangle area that included Durham and Raleigh, jobs would always be plentiful. Indeed, she wasn't there two weeks before she landed a temp gig at Duke University. After six months of that, she landed a permanent gig at the University of North Carolina Hospital.
Pretty much right after the divorce, Barry and his mother established a routine whereby they'd talk on the phone for about an hour every Sunday evening without fail. This routine became the only consistent thing in Barry's life. Usually he'd use the phone in the second floor hallway, bringing it into that deep and narrow wardrobe closet and closing the door before getting settled as far back as the cord would allow.
Pretty much right after the divorce, Barry and his mother established a routine whereby they'd talk on the phone for about an hour every Sunday evening without fail. This routine became the only consistent thing in Barry's life. Usually he'd use the phone in the second floor hallway, bringing it into that deep and narrow wardrobe closet and closing the door before getting settled as far back as the cord would allow.
Joan had one more child with Marcus, a daughter named Peggy. Yes, believe it or not, Barry actually had one more sibling in addition to the 48 Broad brood. Peggy was the oldest. Like Dan and Louis, she was adopted by Frank soon after he married their mother. But when they divorced in January of '83, Peggy was in the middle of her senior year in high school. Moving to a new school in a new state just wasn't practical. So, although her biological father wasn't legally her father, he lived only a few miles away and so she moved in with him and her stepmother.....and yet two more little half-brothers from that side of the family.
During Barry's fourth grade year (1985-86), Joan and Frank agreed Barry could move to Chapel Hill and live with his ma during his junior high years. Suffice it to say by the spring of '86, when 48 Broad takes place, Barry was probably the only child on the planet looking forward to the next school year.
Lest you think this post is going to be all gloom and doom--one more time from Jersey--fuhgeddaboutit. Barry, like everyone else, certainly had his moments when he wondered what in Christ he'd done to deserve such a household, but he was a child, don't forget. And children aren't nearly as adept as adults at self-pity. So in that vein, let's talk about those rays of Garden State sunshine that kept his life from becoming a black pit of despair.
First, you've got Misty, that tall leggy cutie in his class with the blonde hair so bright its sheen could light up 48 Broad at midnight. At home, whenever "Take on Me" by a-ha started playing on the little clock radio next to his bed, he'd think of Misty. He was sure Misty wasn't one of those meanies making fun of his face whenever his back was turned. The reason he was fairly confident about this was because Misty didn't seem to realize he existed at all.
The one and only girl who spoke to him was Patricia, who sat next to him in class. About as chubby as Barry, Patricia had dreams of being a ballerina. Like Barry, she'd been a fan of the show The Greatest American Hero and was a fan of this awesome sitcom called Cheers. Barry watched Cheers religiously every Thursday night (along with The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Night Court). Whenever Norm came in, the entire bar, plus Barry, would shout out, "Norm!" Patricia also liked talking to Barry about her ballerina class, about how her mother just didn't understand her, how her father wasn't around for long stretches of time. About anything, really. Of course, Helen Keller could have seen plain as day that Patricia was madly in love with Barry Roggebusch. Unfortunately, Mr. Roggebusch wasn't remotely as insightful as Ms. Keller.
Barry had a friend at home too. George Taylor was older than the mount that gave Mount Holly its name, but he was in fact the first pal Barry made upon his arrival at 48 Broad. And I borrow the word "pal" from George. That was his word. The night they arrived, George was already there trying to make the place at least habitable before the real restoration began. The family plus George all sat around the room that eventually housed the pool table, eating Burger King on a bunch of foldout card tables. George was the only other one at Barry's table. Barry was sucking down the vanilla shake when George said, "You and I should be pals. Would you like to be my pal?" Barry would never forget that.
George Taylor was, in fact, the son-in-law of the previous owners of 48 Broad, Donald and Frances Saft. The long-gone Safts had one daughter, Hortense, who herself had already passed away by the time the Roggebusches rolled into town. George became the Roggebusches' handyman and gardener for the next ten years.
I also shouldn't count out Frank as a sort of friend, at least in the way friends can be confidants. Barry never understood why, but his father would sometimes confide in him things which he would no one else. Quite often this would concern his first wife, Stephen and Jonathan's mother. Barry never could remember her name. He'd never met her. She lived in Fort Myers, Florida, where Stephen and Jonathan had done some of their growing up and where they went during the summers. Frank always called her Dracula, so that's how Barry always knew her. Apparently she'd done something really nasty and underhanded at great financial cost to Frank, in the wake of his leaving her for Joan. Frank would also ventilate his frustrations with some of Barry's siblings. The prime target here was Jonathan, the younger of the two boys Frank had had with Dracula. Jonathan's nickname was Double because he always got into double trouble. The older he got, the more he lived up to the moniker, to the tune of citations for drunk driving with a bong poorly concealed (because it was too big) under the passenger seat. Frank even said to Barry once how he wished Jonathan would aim more carefully when taking a piss so as not to leave so many stains on the toilet rim. On other occasions, Frank would relate some of the more heated arguments he had with Faith. Who knows? Perhaps Frank viewed his youngest as a sort of therapist because Barry didn't seem old enough to judge him, or because he seemed to live in his own world and therefore didn't have enough emotional investment in anything Frank wanted to get off his chest.
Barry had hobbies, as nine-year-olds do. These included watching HBO and MTV with that awesome new cable box, listening to top 40 rock on his clock radio, playing the Commodore 64 in the pool room, and playing God with his He-Man and GI Joe figures. His chief hobby during fourth grade was collecting Garbage Pail Kids. These were the seemingly endless series of Topps cards to which I've already dedicated an entire blog post, if you're interested in reading about them in nauseating detail. To say Barry was obsessed with these repulsive and repetitive little bastards is to understate the case by a mile. So devoted was he that the Mount Holly Pharmacy, where they were displayed at the counter up front, became his second home. So devoted was he that his weekly allowance of five dollars simply didn't cut it. And so one weekday afternoon, while Frank and Faith were who cared where, Barry strolled very casually into their bedroom, pulled open the top drawer of his father's dresser, and removed a wad of cash from beneath the socks and underwear. Frank kept his plastic there as well, but Barry wasn't old enough to understand that. He curled his little piggy fingers around the wad and walked out.
It turned out to be about $500. His taking it set in motion a chain of events which affected everyone at 48 Broad.
To end the post about Barry, let's go back to January 30, 1983, the night of Super Bowl XVII, the night he collapsed on the shit-brown carpet with the first signs of Bell's palsy. He wasn't out for a very long count. By the time everyone else adjourned to the kitchen to celebrate the Redskins victory without noticing the face-down Barry, he himself was already awake. But he didn't move. He couldn't move, not if he wanted to focus on the sound coming from above.
Upstairs, way upstairs on the third floor, in the room that was to be Barry's bedroom, someone was playing a violin.
