Daniel Roggebusch is a delicate flower. His younger half-brother Barry, the protagonist of 48 Broad, learned early in life that talking to Dan was akin to tip-toeing on those proverbial eggshells. Careful what you say. What's innocuous to you could be the spark that lights Dan's ultra short, super high-strung fuse. Barry's bedwetting problem? Fuhgeddaboutit. One night, when he was six or seven, Barry didn't want to sleep alone because of the thunderstorm raging outside his third-floor bedroom windows. So he, yes, tip-toed into Dan's room and kindly asked if he could spend the night in his bed. Dan happily obliged. And then Barry wet said bed. Of course, this would be annoying to anyone, but Dan went beyond annoyed. He went ballistic. "WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY!" He jumped out of bed and stampeded up and down the room ripping Barry a good half-dozen or so new assholes. Barry had known what was coming, of course. Dan was still asleep when he woke up to the wetness. He crept out of bed and lay down in the center of the room on the off-chance that the distance from the bed and his volatile brother would somehow shield him from Dan's righteous indignation.
Okay now maybe it was hard to get my point across with the bedwetting example. Let's take something more innocuous that yielded a more hysterical response, such as the time Dan ripped off the new floral wallpaper in the bathroom...
...when he was told he had to go to bed.
When Dan was eight or nine or so, Mom and Dad said it was time to hit the sack. It was past ten. It was a school night. You know how it goes when you're that age. Well Dan, being a sports nut, wanted to stay up to watch Monday Night Football. His hometown Washington Redskins were battling their arch nemesis, the Dallas Cowboys. Didn't matter. His parents were insistent to the point that his father raised his voice. To say that Dan became livid wouldn't do his temper justice. First, he stampeded around the living room proclaiming that it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair his older sister Peggy got to stay up later than him. Now mind you, at this time Peggy was only eleven or twelve. Her bedtime was all of one hour past Dan's, but when you're that young, that's an eternity. When he saw that his tantrum was having no effect, he marched into the first-floor bathroom in all his pajama-clad fury and proceeded to rip off every strip of the just-laid wallpaper. His parents didn't bother stopping him. They knew better than to prevent the temper from running its course. Just the year before, Dan had thrown a baseball through the glass sliding door because his mom wanted him to clean his bedroom before dinner. During the 48 Broad years, when he was a teenager, Dan's stepmom Faith chided him, albeit gently, for picking on Barry, to which Dan responded by slamming down the cookie sheet full of tater-tots and stomping up the three floors to his bedroom. Incidents like these weren't exactly common, but they happened enough so that it became clear to the whole motley crew at 48 Broad St. that our man Dan leaned toward the fragile side.
Now after all of that, you might think Dan was simply stark raving, someone to avoid at all costs. I apologize if I've given that impression because it simply isn't true. First of all, let's start with his background, shall we? The cards were stacked against him before he made it to preschool.
Daniel Roggebusch was born Daniel Woods. His mom and dad were Joanne and Marcus "Woody" Woods. When he was two or three, Joanne and Woody each started having affairs. Not at the exact same time. The question of who started cheating first would remain a question until the end of time. To her dying day Joanne, who later changed her name to Joan, contended that Woody was the original cheater, and that he cheated openly. Apparently he came back from a trip to the Caribbean with his mistress and left the woman's used panties on the bed for Joanne to find. He wanted out of the marriage but lacked the cojones to ask for a divorce. Joanne would always claim that's why she started her affair with Frank Roggebusch, who lived down the street with a wife and two kids of his own. Not only was Dan still a toddler when this happened, not only was Peggy all of five or so, but Joanne said Woody started cheating on her when she was still pregnant with their third, and what would be their last, child, Louis. It was about a year after Louis was born that she initiated her affair with Frank. Again, this is her story. If you ask Woody, you'll get a completely different version.
Whatever the chain of events, the end result was that Joanne and Frank ended up marrying, with Frank adopting Peggy, Dan, and Louis. Like I said, he already had two kids of his own from his first marriage. Now do you think that stopped him and Joanne from procreating? Hell to the naw! Where do you think our hero Barry came from? He was the one and only child born of that union. His parents split when he was six and a half, and neither had any kids after him. That is how he remained the youngest of the umpteen, and why he should get as much of our sympathy as we can spare.
Now back to Dan. Can you see now why he may not have been put together as neatly as he should've been? You can't begrudge him his parents philandering when he was barely old enough to say "milk." During the ten or so years Joanne was married to Frank, and the brood was still living in the D.C. suburbs, Dan adapted as well as could be expected. While still in elementary school, he volunteered to do the dishes every night. Indeed, for the rest of his life he would remember with great fondness how on some nights, while he was doing dishes, his adopted dad Frank was down in the basement playing jazz on the piano or xylophone.
Frank divorced Joanne smack in the middle of Dan's freshman year of high school. Because Joanne didn't have much money, having given her final two trust fund payments to her first husband and Frank's first wife, she couldn't afford to raise any of her kids. So Frank took them all up to 48 Broad St. in Mount Holly, New Jersey, the three-story Queen Anne he bought with his third wife, Faith. Again, this was a huge change, and challenge, for Dan. High school sucks enough as it is. Now having to switch high schools halfway through your freshman year...?
Dan's dishwashing ritual carried over to 48 Broad, and it fostered more happy memories. As an adult, he'd recall doing the dishes in that gargantuan house, with that big bay window above the sink looking out at Buttonwood St., as Frank and Faith played classical piano duets in the music room down the hall. It's ironic that some of Dan's fondest memories involved music, as he never really liked music much himself. Quite the contrary. As time went on, he became a talk radio junkie. By the time he was a teen, it was simply impossible to go to bed without voices coming out of the radio. It didn't matter if it was news, sports, whatever. Someone had to be reading a story to him in some way, shape, or form, or he'd never fall asleep.
Dan was no fool. He knew he was emotionally delicate, and that his occasional freak-outs would, well, freak people out. And so, perhaps out of a subconscious desire to compensate for that, he became the clown of 48 Broad. Rarely did a dinner or a game of Oh Hell! or any other family gathering go by without Dan saying or doing something that would get the Roggebusches rolling on their asses. On a road trip to Six Flags Great Adventure, the brood was split between Frank's white Ford van and Faith's VW. Among those in the van were Dan and Barry. On the way home Barry had to take a leak something fierce. Dan had a plan. He took an empty McDonald's cup and had Barry relieve himself in it. Dan even held it for him. Then Dan, unfamiliar with physics, opened one of the side windows while the van was going full speed and, instead of aiming the cup backward (don't worry, the road behind was empty), he aimed it forward. Yes, the warm yellow stuff flew back in his face. Not only did he not explode upon this occasion, he simply sat back and afforded everyone a priceless deadpan look while drops of Barry's urine dripped down his face. Frank's laughter doubled him over the wheel and made him veer onto the shoulder before he regained control.
As I indicated above, Dan had two siblings who shared the same mother and father. The oldest of the three, Peggy, didn't come with the family to New Jersey. She was in the middle of her senior year of high school and didn't want to change schools now. Although legally she was the daughter of Frank, she worked out a deal with Woody, her biological father, to live with him while she wrapped up high school. That didn't stop Dan and Peggy from being each other's confidant. They spoke on the phone at least once a week. Dan went down to visit now and again, but Peggy never came up.
Actually, Peggy did visit 48 Broad all of one time. It was in the summer of '83, about half a year after the family moved up there. She'd just finished high school. In the six months since reconnecting with her real father, she'd become his legal ward again. Her only purpose in coming up to Mount Holly was to ask Frank if he could finance her college education despite his no longer being her father. That didn't go over too well with Frank. Peggy went back to D.C. with no idea how she was going to pay for college. She and Frank never spoke again.
But that's another novel. Let's stick with 48 Broad, shall we?
The third and last child born of Woody and Joanne, Louis, did come with everyone to Jersey. He and Dan were like peas and carrots. They excelled at making each other, and everyone else, laugh. If you saw one without the other, somehow it felt wrong. They were the Starsky and Hutch of the household. Ponch and Baker. Batman and Robin.
Still, Dan and Louis had their fundamental differences. For one, Dan liked structure. He liked order. When they first moved in, he helped Faith steam the wallpaper on the third floor. The way to do it was to steam in square-shaped sections. Faith would have him trace a square on the wall, and then steam that. And then make another square, and so on. Dan became the right hand to George Taylor, the elderly guy Frank hired to be the family's handyman. A month never went by when George didn't come over to fix something. And during the summer months he was there almost every day tending the lawn and flower beds. George Taylor had been married to the daughter of the couple who lived there before the Roggebusches. The daughter and the couple had all passed away by this time, and George, for all his sturdy demeanor and granite countenance, looked plenty old enough to drop at any time himself. He already had his plot picked out next to his late wife. Anyway, Dan helped him out a lot.
Dan's bedroom, on the opposite end of the third floor from Barry's, had a little alcove right outside it with a window looking straight down at Buttonwood St. This is where he set up his desk that he hardly ever used except to store random stuff on. Dan wrestled with his classes a lot more than the rest of the brood. Don't even get him started on geometry. Rarely did a day go by when Faith wasn't tutoring him. With a master's in math, geometry didn't faze Faith. If not for her, Dan would've failed for sure. As it was, he still barely passed. In fact, he always suspected he did fail geometry but that the teacher passed him just to get rid of him. During his senior year, which is when 48 Broad takes place, Dan's U.S. History teacher worked part-time at nights in a liquor store. Was he a lush? Was that why he sometimes repeated the exact same lecture as the day before? That never bugged Dan. At least it gave him a second chance to digest the material. Why couldn't his geometry teacher have done that?
While he wasn't a big music fan, he did have a Walkman that came in handy during homework time. That is, unless Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" came on. Several times during the song you've got the line "I'm on the hunt I'm after you." But one time toward the end it goes "I howl and I whine I'm after you." No matter how many times he heard this song, Dan would always think he could hear Louis say, "Dan, I hate you!" at the same time that line was said. He'd always lift one of the ear pieces to see if Louis really had yelled something.
Speaking of Louis, another difference between Dan and him was that Louis had a ton of friends. Dan? Not a big people person. He never had a problem with the ladies, though. At a tad north of six feet, he was the tall one of the house. And he was physically fit, being an avid basketball player. Tall? Athletic? Getting a girlfriend was a no brainer. For most of his high school years his gal was Veronica. She came from the family that had founded a local chain of hardware stores, but money wasn't what attracted Dan. They loved each other. They lost their virginity to each other. In fact, it was in the middle of the virginity loss that Barry walked into Dan's bedroom to see if his big brother wanted to play video games. No, don't worry. Dan didn't freak out at all. He and Veronica could only laugh.
It was due to Dan and his great sense of humor that two neighborhood regulars had catchy nicknames. First and foremost was the big old bald guy next door. On the family's very first night in the house, Dan and Barry were up in a second-floor room that was a TV room before it became Frank's office. From there you had a direct view into the house next door. When they looked down, they could see into the kitchen on the first floor. This old bald guy was walking around getting something to eat, and Dan immediately dubbed him Boss Hogg, after The Dukes of Hazzard character. That show, by the way, was one of Barry's favorites at the time. Dan had only called him Boss Hogg to make Barry laugh, but the name stuck. Everyone at 48 Broad ended up referring to him as Boss Hogg or just Hogg.
And let us not forget Squirrel Man. Yes, Squirrel Man. Like Boss Hogg, his real name was never discovered. Unlike Boss Hogg, Squirrel Man didn't live nearby. At least, he didn't live close enough for anyone to ascertain where the heck he did live. He was a scrawny little guy in his thirties or so, always in jeans and a jean jacket, a sweatband keeping his long curly brown hair in check, glasses square and thick. He must've lived at least somewhat close by because almost every day you'd see him walking down Broad St. The first time Dan saw him, the guy had stopped on the sidewalk just outside 48 Broad to observe a pair of squirrels chasing each other to and from a tree and the roof. Dan dubbed him Squirrel Man on the spot. Like Boss Hogg, the label stuck.
For all his volatility, Dan was beloved by all. His sense of humor was sharp, sometimes biting and uncompromising, but that's how he couldn't fail to earn your respect. The odds were against him becoming a functional human being, but he toughed it out and overcame the odds.
Scary times lay ahead, though. 48 Broad is set in May of 1986. A high school senior, Dan is all of a month away from the rest of his life. Ideally he'd like to go to the University of Maryland. He applied but hasn't heard back yet. More than that, though, his plan is to follow Peggy's lead and reconnect with his real father. He hasn't told Frank yet.
