Notes on Alexander

"Alexan-DOR!"

If Alexander Peterson had a nickel for every time 48 Broad patriarch Frank Roggebusch addressed him that way, he could have bought the finest electric bass guitar money could buy. In May of 1986, when 48 Broad takes place, Alexander was approaching the end of eighth grade, and accordingly the end of a life chapter, as that fall he'd be a freshman at the fortress-like high school three blocks down Jacksonville Road. At this point he'd already been playing bass for a couple years. He practiced in the music room on the first floor when no one else was using it.

On the surface, Alexander seemed a lot like his stepbrother Jonathan Roggebusch. Jonathan soaked up the heavy metal. He had a Mötley Crüe bumper sticker on his bedroom wall. He blasted it in his room, and could often be seen decked out in some black heavy metal-themed T-shirt or other. Alexander also liked the metal. If anything, he played the part more. He grew his dark hair down his back like just about every metal rocker you came across in the eighties. He also wore the shirts. And blasted it in his room, although not as often as Jonathan did. That's the beginning of where their personalities forked. Indeed, the truth is, Alexander was nothing like Jonathan. No one was like Jonathan, for the matter of that. And no one was like Alexander.

If you've read the post on John, you already know a bit about Alexander's past, as he was John's only biological sibling at 48 Broad. Alexander's two years older, born in 1972. And whereas John took on a lot of the physical and psychological traits of his father Ford (e.g. the coffee), Alexander was very much Faith's son, both in look and personality: The black hair, the stoicism, the laconic speech. Since he didn't have Faith's tortured past, however, Alexander didn't carry all that mental baggage. Quite the contrary. The first ten or so years of Alexander's life were relatively drama free. Indeed, of all the kids at 48 Broad, he was the one who got to experience a nuclear family the longest. The rest of the kids were barely in elementary school, if that, when their homes broke. The one trait Alexander didn't inherit from Faith was her high-strung nature. No, that went to John. Alexander was fairly laid back. Indeed, he was the calmest person at 48 Broad.

The Petersons were living in Boulder when Alexander felt the first tickle of musical interest. As I said in Faith's post, because Ford didn't want her competing with him in math, she went back to school to get her degree in music (this after getting a BS and MS in math). When she saw Alexander starting to listen in whenever she played the piano, usually when Ford wasn't around, she indulged his budding interest. She'd set him on her lap and place his little handsies on top of hers. They'd start simple. A few chords. "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and the like. And then they'd tackle "Chopsticks." This would tickle Alexander to death every single time. Seriously, the little bespectacled squirt never tired of "Chopsticks." And then Faith would impress the hell out of him with her Bach and Beethoven. His hands would fall from hers and he'd just sit there open-mouthed and soak up both the sight of her hands bouncing along the keys and the sounds they produced.

Alexander didn't need much encouraging to try his hand--or rather, hands--at piano lessons. Only trouble was, he decided he didn't like it after the first lesson, but part and parcel with the stoicism he inherited from Faith came a boatload of patience. Faith knew he hated it. His poor practice habits betrayed him. And yet he kept going. Finally she forced him to admit it over breakfast one Sunday morning while Ford and John were outside throwing the football. As if to compensate for being stoic about it for a solid year, Alexander broke down and cried. Faith tried not to smile, but it was tough. Alexander was so darned cute when he cried.

Alexander didn't go straight from piano to bass. The whole bass thing took a while. At first he wasn't sure what he wanted to play. All he knew was that his mom told him just because he'd given up piano didn't mean he'd never play the same songs she did. You could play "Twinkle Twinkle Littler Star" on a guitar. Or a trumpet. Or a sax. You name it. Alexander asked, "Well, what should I play?" Faith was reluctant to point him in any specific direction, a very conscious decision based on her determination to be diametrically opposed to her dictator father. Let Alexander discover his passion on his own.

His next attempt was the organ. Yes I know it's similar to the piano. Alexander was just quirky that way. At least he was devoted, though. On Sundays he'd go with Faith to the church where she played so he could observe and study. Faith knew this would go nowhere, but she humored him. She plopped him right there in the front pew near the organ. Alexander may have only been five ("Almost six!" he'd say. "And after that, seven!"), but he knew the organ was like the piano. The sound of it was so much different, though. Just listen to it. Still, it didn't take.

Alexander tried guitar, drums, trumpet, flute, clarinet. You name it. By the time he was experimenting with the ukulele, he was ten, and his parents had decided to get a divorce. Ford was relocating to the San Fernando Valley for a new job at some aerospace firm. Faith informed her kids that they'd be moving with her to New Jersey.

Alexander never forgot the day, the very hour, Faith broke the news to him and John. Like so many other childhood memories, it happened at the mall. Faith let her boys get their arcade ya-yas out before taking them to the food court. John got his usual pepperoni pizza while Alexander opted for the usual fish sticks. Faith, who usually got a salad, instead just got a Diet Coke. And with that, Alexander knew this wasn't going to be the usual post-arcade lunch. The sadness in her eyes didn't help either. She looked at them for a long time. It was probably just a minute or so in real life, but in Alexander's memory it would always seem like an hour. Faith never used the word divorce. She said she and their father had decided not to live together anymore. They had reached a stage in their lives where it was best to live separately. This didn't happen only to them. Many moms and dads reached this stage, and it didn't mean they'd stop being John and Alexander's mom and dad, even if they did go off and marry other people. This led her to the subject of New Jersey. John cried. Alexander's inherited stoicism and mathematical mind allowed him to handle the news quite well.

Alexander remembered the drive home from the mall quite clearly as well. Faith tried to wow her boys with details of this supposedly huge new house they'd be living in. He remembered her specifically calling it a castle and that it had umpteen stairs to the second floor, and another umpteen to the third floor. It had wooden floors. A huge cavernous basement. In short order Alexander would discover a lot of this was gross hyperbole, but he never called her on it. He couldn't begrudge his mother trying to rally her kids.

The mall trip took place the first week of January 1983. When Alexander and John said their good-byes to their father two weeks later, John was pretty upbeat. He'd had a lot of time to process it all. He'd still see his father every summer and maybe at Christmas sometimes as well. And in Los Angeles! He gave his father a warm farewell-but-not-good-bye hug. When Ford turned to his other boy, Alexander simply shook his hand and said good-bye without betraying the well of emotion swirling inside. Faith knew exactly what was going on inside him.

On the first day of their road trip from Colorado to New Jersey in Faith's VW Rabbit, sometime after they'd stopped at McDonald's for lunch, Alexander broke down and cried. Faith was ready for it. And so was John. He leaned over and gave his big brother a big hug. When Alexander recovered, he started talking about musical instruments he was interested in trying.

Faith and her two boys arrived at 48 Broad on Saturday, January 30, 1983. They were the first ones there. Frank and his brood would arrive from Kensington, Maryland the following day. The kids had a ball exploring the house. When they reached the back room and John hopped on the freezer chest (inherited from the Safts) and asked what it was for, Alexander calmly explained that it was the same as a regular freezer, only you can fit more ice cream in it.

After Faith ordered pizza from Sal's, soon to be a 48 Broad staple, the boys frolicked across the first and second floors, stopping cold at the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor. John chickened out and went back to re-exploring the first two floors. Alexander, however, remained rooted to the spot and stared up into the darkness for some time. When Faith called up that the pizza had arrived, Alexander heard something above. What was it? He listened another few moments but heard nothing.

When the Roggebusches arrived the next day, Daniel, one of Frank's adopted sons and one of the oldest of this entire motley brood, cried when he saw all the work that needed to be done to fix up the house. Alexander could see in no time that Daniel was a high-strung guy, his supposed age and wisdom notwithstanding. He was like an older version of John. That night, before Super Bowl XVII started, they all had Burger King in the pool room on a bunch of foldout card tables George Taylor brought over. Alexander sat at the same table as Daniel and impressed himself with his ability to talk Daniel into not worrying so much about the sorry state of the house. A month from now it'd be fixed up. And look at how awesome it would be. Look at all the space. This brightened up Daniel in no time. Also at Alexander and Daniel's table was Frank. As he was wont to do whenever he had an audience, Frank regaled the boys with tales of his high school and college days playing piano for a jazz band in nightclubs and cruise ships.

Frank also talked about his idol, African-Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, who was part of a trio that included bass player Ray Brown. Alexander grabbed onto Ray Brown's name the way other kids grab their security blankets. Ray Brown on bass. Bass? What was bass? Where could he find out more about it and perhaps even see one? When he peppered Frank with these questions, it provided 48 Broad's new patriarch with that much more room to bloviate. He'd never in his life played bass, but of course for years he'd played in a jazz band that included a bassist, so he knew a thing or two. That was the beginning of Alexander's friendship with Frank. The latter became much more than his stepfather. He became his mentor. And not just in music. In all things.

Several times over the next several months, Alexander made Frank and/or Faith drag him to the music store to drool over the bass guitars. Soon enough the store proprietor let Alexander test out one of the display basses. It was love at first thump. Alexander found his instrument. Most days, when he got home from school, he'd run up to his room and blast music and pantomime the bass. It's all he did until Frank rang the dinner bell at seven. Then he'd do his homework and a bit more bass miming before hitting the sack. Rarely did he deviate from this pattern.

In the summer of '83, when Alexander was about to start sixth grade, Frank and Faith decided to end the kid's suffering and get him a bass guitar. Although I should say he had to pay them back bit by bit with his allowance. It took over a year's worth of allowances, but what else was he was going to do with the money? Alexander was officially in heaven.

His bass devotion made him disengaged socially and culturally. That's why he needed Frank's mentorship and guidance. He had no qualms about walking into Frank's office on the second floor and sitting down and asking Frank whatever was on his mind. Why did only men go bold (ironic since Alexander himself would go bald in his thirties)? Why didn't women like him (that was a tough one for Frank, who'd never had woman problems, at least not that kind)? Why did the black kids stick together? Why did the gym teacher pick on him? How did the outsides of the third-floor windows get cleaned? Frank did his best. Otherwise he'd have to help Alexander on an ad hoc basis. When they went to the Burlington Center Mall one time, Alexander walked into the entrance ahead of a woman who'd been walking up at the same time. Frank had to explain the whole thing about ladies first. During a game of Oh Hell!, Frank shuffled the cards and told Alexander to cut the deck. Alexander pulled out his Swiss Army knife and was literally about to cut the deck when Frank stopped him and showed him what he meant.

Sometimes Alexander's lack of grace and tact got him into serious hot water. For some reason, the water was always hottest with his brother John. While their sibling rivalry was a mere fraction of Jonathan and Stephen's, it still had its moments. In May of '86, a spring rain washed through overnight. The backyard never did drain water properly, so you had a massive puddle, a small pond really, over by the side of the garage, where home plate was during whiffleball games. The boys went out the morning after the storm to look it. They'd never seen it that big before. Alexander said something about how John would drown in it if he wasn't careful. John didn't know how to swim after all, Alexander pointed out. Even Barry knew how to swim. Everyone at 48 Broad knew how to swim. Except John. Be careful you don't fall in, John.

John exploded. He didn't have any trouble throwing the first punches, but he did have a big problem when Alexander fought back. And that's how Alexander ended up chasing him straight through the water. The other boys cheered them on. None of them gave a flying fuck who won. They just wanted to see someone fall into the giant puddle. For a second it seemed both of them would when Alexander got John in a clumsy headlock. Barry in particular felt a huge rush. In the end, though, while the Peterson boys got plenty wet, neither fell. Barry was disappointed. Later he felt guilty about that.

Notes on Stephen

Whereas most of the Roggebusches were born in Washington, D.C., our man Stephen Roggebusch, oldest child of Frank and one of the two oldest at 48 Broad (tied with adopted brother Dan), was born in Houston. How'd that happen, you might wonder? Well, about a year before he was born, in the spring of '67, Frank scored his PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins. Not fully aware of the various career paths available to him, he pursued the one gig he knew his degree would get him: An assistant professorship, which he found at Rice University. He taught there all of one year, from the fall of '67 through the spring of '68. Just before moving out there, his wife Mary broke the news that she was pregnant with their first child. Stephen was born the following March.

By the end of that one year at Rice, Frank had already had his fill of being a teacher. He'd eventually return to it thirteen years later. By the time 48 Broad takes place, he'll've been a professor at Temple University for five years. But that's later. Meantime, he had no desire to be a teacher after having been a student for ten years. He wanted to apply all that knowledge in the real world. And so back to Washington, D.C. they went, the young Roggebusch clan of three, Frank and Mary not even thirty. They settled in a neighborhood right down the street from Joanne and Marcus "Woody" Woods, the latter a reporter for one of the local network affiliates. They too had just had their first child: Daniel Woods, born in January of '68. Who could've predicted that Daniel and Stephen would end up the two oldest siblings at a three-story Victorian Queen Anne in South Jersey during the eighties? Not I. That's for sure.

It's suitable Stephen would have a hometown unique from the rest. I mean seriously. Houston. Talk about becoming the oddball of the family right out of the gate. It was perfect, though, as Stephen ultimately became the one with a world view far more unique than anyone else at 48 Broad. In this case "unique" is sort of a euphemism for weird.

Unlike his kid brother Jonathan, Stephen could actually remember when their parents were still married and their household was still nuclear. By the time Frank cheated on Mary with Joanne Woods, Jonathan wasn't even two yet. Stephen was five. While his memories of that time weren't crystal, he still had memories. He remembered Christmas at that house. He remembered his mother getting him a Flash Gordon figure. And The Thing costume his dad got him for Halloween. Frank had been Stephen's age when The Thing came out. Anyway, point being, Stephen remembered the brief time his parents were together. And as it does to everything else, hindsight sprayed the memory with gold paint. Paradoxically, what made Stephen most unique from the rest of his 48 Broad siblings was what made him most like his father: Stephen Roggebusch could nurse a grudge with the best of them. No joke, he could bathe in the same bitter juices for years on end. This, in turn, informed his unique point of view.

After his parents' divorce, his mom moved back down to North Fort Myers, Florida. She grew up there. Her parents and sisters were still in that area. Mary was reeling from Frank's divorcing her. As far as Frank was concerned, Mary was Count Dracula incarnate, and the only question he had regarding the divorce was what took him so long. For the rest of her life Mary would vilify both Frank and his new wife Joanne. Even after Frank divorced Joanne, the damage was done. Mary would lie to her sisters that Joanne had abandoned her kids. Whereas Jonathan bought a lot of that propaganda, Stephen didn't. And this cost him his relationship with her. Upon Stephen's high school graduation in the spring of 1986, he was all set to go to Temple University and major in music, with a girl on his arm he was almost certain to marry. But then, suddenly, the relationship was no more. No one was clear how it happened, but everyone knew Mary had something to do with it. Somehow, someway, from way down in the Deep South, she was able to ix-nay the relationship.

Just to hammer home the stark truth of "hell hath no fury," Mary didn't stop at ruining her son's relationship. She also pilfered the money from his college fund. Back when Frank and Mary divorced in '73, the agreement stipulated that Mary would take a percentage of the child support and alimony paid to her by Frank and deposit it in a college fund for both Stephen and Jonathan. But then during Stephen's senior year of high school, Frank discovered that in the more than ten years since the divorce, Mary had opened no such fund and had pocketed all the money for herself. To his dying day Frank would claim that he had never felt the kind of righteous indignation that he did upon that discovery. It was solved fairly quickly at least. One letter from Frank's lawyer to Mary's took care of it, but the damage was done. Mary had fucked over her two kids as a way of sticking it to their father.

Now what do you do if you're Stephen? You're the older of the two and so whatever your embittered mom tries to do to her kids, you're first in line. But at the same time, as the first-born, you're expected to set a model of behavior and comportment. It's a lot of pressure. But your mom's just fucked you over. Sure, your dad teaches at Temple, which has the free tuition perk (helluva perk!), but it's the principle of the thing. Plus, your mom made you dump the love of your life.

Just because Stephen didn't buy his mom's propaganda about Joanne Woods didn't spare Joanne from some of his bitterness. If you read the post on Jonathan, you already know that during Frank's marriage to Joanne, they were living in the D.C. suburb of Kensington while Stephen and Jonathan lived in North Fort Myers with Mary. During the summers they'd go up to Kensington. Frank worked during the week, of course, which meant Joanne had two more kids to deal with in addition to the three from her first marriage whom Frank had adopted. And then of course our main man Barry was born in August of '76. A laugh a minute on Soward Drive, boys and girls.

Now depending on who you talk to, Joanne mistreated Stephen. The latter would always claim that, even decades later. Mistreated him how? Well. Right. How indeed. He was always a bit nebulous on the specifics, but suffice it to say those Kensington summers left a bitter aftertaste in his mouth that never went away. Joanne became yet one more person Stephen considered an enemy. After moving to 48 Broad, he never missed an opportunity to insult her in some way, shape, or form. One time he and Barry were watching one of the Star Wars movies in the family room. Stephen related this one time when Joanne had taken all the boys to the theater to see the first Star Wars. I'm sorry, I mean, when she took them to see Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. Barry existed but was still far too little to go to the movies, so he was at home with Madori, the Indian teenager who lived in the same cul-de-sac and often babysat him. The way Stephen told it to Barry, all the boys were rowdy and causing a ruckus in the theater, embarrassing Joanne and annoying the shit out of everyone else. Joanne lost her cool and threatened to take them all home if they couldn't keep a lid on it. When Barry asked why their father hadn't gone too, Stephen didn't say it was because he'd been at work but instead said: "Because he's not that stupid! He's not stupid enough to bring a whole bunch of little kids to a movie theater!" You might think Barry would say something back after having his mother insulted to his face, but he was too taken aback by the outburst.

In addition to his ultra-sensitivity and grudge nursing, Stephen also inherited his father's slow metabolism. His whole life Frank's weight was like a roller coaster ride. For Stephen it was exactly the same. During his prepubescent years, he was a slim guy like Jonathan. But as puberty approached, he not only grew vertically but horizontally as well. Around 1980 or so, when he was twelve, he was one fat little bugger. Fatter than his father. Frank was never all-out fat in a John Candy sense, but he always had that gut. A good twenty or thirty pounds of extra heft that his daily jogs did nothing to shed. Stephen carried around more weight than his father, percentage wise, commensurate with the ideal weight for someone of his age and height. So it didn't just show in the gut. It showed everywhere. That couldn't have helped his awkward relationship to food. Dan and Louis never missed a chance to needle him about it. Dan in particular could be positively brutal. They'd be having dinner, right? A steak, say. And Dan would be like, "Hey Steve, want my fat?" Everyone would crack up. And Stephen would never, ever forget it. From thereon out he made it his mission in life to find an opportunity to punch Dan out. He never did. Like his father, he was far too passive-aggressive to take anyone on directly. He talked a good talk, don't get me wrong. Again, like his father, he wasn't afraid to speak his mind. But when the kitchen got really hot, it was sayonara. I should say by the time 48 Broad takes place, Stephen was once again slim, while our man Bawrence Barney claimed the "most overweight at 48 Broad" mantle.

Like many others at 48 Broad, Stephen's chief consolation was music. Amazing, really, how musical that household was during the eighties. Especially considering how, a century earlier, the house had been a music school. See my post on Bunny Stringfellow for more on that. Like his father, Stephen's taste was jazz. Among his favorite artists was Chuck Mangione. Also like a lot of the 48 Broaders, Stephen played an instrument, in his case the trumpet. He was in his high school marching band and would play in Temple University's marching band during his one year there.

While his relationship to music was sound, Stephen's relationship to Barry was complicated. His relationship to everyone inevitably become complicated because he was prone to take everything so hard. But Barry's the hero of 48 Broad so I'll use him to help illustrate Stephen. As I said in the post on Jonathan, it was thanks to Barry's mom that Frank divorced Stephen and Jonathan's mother Mary. Barry represented the reason Stephen and Jonathan didn't get to experience Leave It to Beaver. Most people don't nowadays, but that doesn't seem to help when it happens to you. So like Jonathan, Stephen may have subconsciously had it in for Barry because of what the little bed wetter represented. Unlike Jonathan, Stephen actually remembered what it was like to be a family unit, so he knew what he was missing. Stephen never out and out kicked Barry's ass the way Jonathan did. So you've got to give him that. But that passive aggression I mentioned earlier more than compensated. He would, for instance, lead with a card during a family game of Oh Hell! that he knew would mess up Barry. Or he'd tell Barry one of his favorite movies was on TV when it wasn't. Stuff like that. And he loved mocking Barry's first and middle name. That never got old. He'd go "Bawrence Barney!" in a mock angry way like Frank would sometimes do, in a very angry way, when Barry did something wrong. He also liked giving Barry the middle finger behind his back. And lifting up one forearm while using the other hand to rub his bicep, a casual "fuck you." To be fair, most of the kids at 48 Broad would make a face or a gesture behind your back if they were sore at you. Boys will be boys, right? Stephen, however, made it an art form, as he did with passive aggression in general.

On the other hand, he and Barry were comrades-in-arms with the grocery shopping. Every Wednesday after school they'd take Frank's Dodge Caravan to the Super Fresh in Lumberton and stock up. They'd each get a cart and fill 'er up. With seven boys in the house, most of what they got would be junk food. They'd usually head out to the store just as Frank was going out for his jog. Just before taking off, decked out in his Redskins windbreaker and Temple U. shorts, he'd give them a wad of cash. The tab would generally be north of two hundred bucks. This is 1986 bucks, mind you.

Stephen and Barry also threw the football back and forth sometimes, especially in the fall during football season. One thing neither of them would forget was when Stephen, stewing over something one of his science teachers said to him three years earlier, threw a tight spiral way over Barry's head, across Buttonwood Street and straight through someone's living room window. Speaking of autumn, they would sometimes co-handle the leaf raking duty.

Indeed, despite everything, Stephen got along better with Barry than he did anyone else. Because of that, Stephen was the one who caught onto there being a ghost on the third floor. No, he never did find out it was the ghost of a thirteen-year-old violin prodigy. Only Barry could actually see and communicate with her because that's the way Bunny wanted it. Yet, while she could escape the eyes of everyone else, Bunny couldn't always escape their ears. One Saturday night, during an Oh Hell! game, Stephen excused himself to get the pair of glasses he left in Barry's room earlier that day when they were playing with Gorbie, the family Lhasa Apso. He heard something as he approached the doorway. It sounded like someone turning pages. It was, in fact. Bunny was perusing the score for Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D major (opus 61). It was one of the four pieces she'd been mulling over for her end-of-year recital. She died before she could make a decision. And there on the third floor, almost a hundred years later, she still couldn't decide. Stephen decided he didn't really need his glasses and hurried back downstairs.

It was with Gorbie that Stephen showed his softest side. Gorbie was probably the one sentient being in the entire household against whom Stephen never held a grudge. He'd let Gorbie sleep in his bed during the winter. One dreary morning on football Sunday, during the winter just before 48 Broad takes place, Stephen woke up to find Gorbie chewing on his electric blanket. The furry little nut had already gotten through to the wires. Every few seconds he'd chew too deeply into a wire and give himself a little jolt. And then he'd start chewing again until getting shocked again. Perhaps some dogs have better short-term memory than others. Gorbie wasn't one of them. Stephen laughed so hard he almost fell out of bed. Stephen also walked Gorbie more than anyone else. Sometimes Barry would go with him.

Let us not forget the mohawk episode. Or I should say, the reverse mohawk episode. Usually they'd take Gorbie to the vet for a flea bath and haircut. It was supposed to be a monthly thing, but structure was something that could elude 48 Broad at times, the chore chalkboard in the kitchen notwithstanding. Anyway, when it was time for another trip, Stephen said they could save money if he trimmed Gorbie's hair and gave him the bath. He didn't really care about saving his dad and stepmom money. What he didn't tell them was that he always felt terrible when Gorbie went to the vet. Gorbie was terrified of the place. So Stephen bought some flea shampoo and clippers. It was a bloody disaster. Gorbie, like most small animals, was terrified of clippers. Stephen had to grip that pooch's collar like it was the last thing on Earth. Gorbie trembled and shook and whimpered and did everything he could to get the hell out of Dodge. Stephen jerked the pooch toward him a bit too hard, about which he'd feel guilty later, and tried again. Gorbie threw a tantrum and made Stephen crop off that central part. Disgusted, Stephen finally let go of Gorbie...who now had a reverse mohawk. Jonathan never let him live that down.

Ah yes, the ongoing saga of Stephen and Jonathan. They hated each other. They always hated each other. When it started and why was rhetorical and irrelevant. If you were to ask them if there was ever a time when they could abide each other's presence, they'd draw a blank. Frank eventually developed a theory. After the divorce, he and Stephen developed a decent rapport. That may have been because, as I've outlined throughout this post, he and his first-born were personality twins. Stephen also looked a lot like Frank, I should also mention that. Now Jonathan? He looked more like Mary. And he bonded with her much more than Stephen ever did, or could. That's all Frank could come up with. It was simply a clash of personalities diametrically opposed to each other. Viewed a certain way, Stephen and Jonathan were Frank and Mary all over again, with all the resultant drama that implies.

Exhibit A: The library lot brawl wherein Stephan and Jonathan had a fight that spanned a football field. Literally. One of the pastimes for the kids at 48 Broad was heading the three or so blocks north on Buttonwood to play football on the huge field behind the Mount Holly Library. Tackle, mind you. None o' that touch shit. Stephen and Jonathan, as you would guess, were usually on opposing teams. While most of the time they could make it through a whole game without any physical altercations (arguments, on the other hand, were a given), on one particular occasion they didn't even make it to the kickoff. They always did a coin toss to see who'd get the ball first, as they do in real football. Jonathan was supposed to call it in the air, but he decided to wait until the coin landed with tails up to say tails. He swore he hadn't been looking at it when it landed and had meant to say tails all along. While the others lightly busted his chops, only Stephen, not surprisingly, became indignant. Alexander, who had no reason to be partisan to either side, said it did indeed look to him that Jonathan had simply forgotten to make the call and did say tails without looking at the coin. His objectivity pretty much ended it right there, but that didn't make Stephen feel any better. As they began the trek to opposite ends of the field, Stephen said, "Let the PUSSIES have it!" And on the word "PUSSIES" he slapped Jonathan square on his back.

As if expecting it, Jonathan spun around and threw a punch at Stephen's shoulder. Stephen returned the gesture in kind. The other five Roggebusch kids stood rooted to the side of the field by the path leading to Buttonwood, transfixed at the sight of Stephen and Jonathan throwing punches and slaps while literally making a circuit around the entire field. Barry would never forget it. He would especially remember that first slap by Stephen, and the image of them on the other side of the field, under that huge tree which, during games, was the unofficial sideline, since beyond that were more trees leading to the back of the library itself. As with most of their fights, there was no clear winner.

Notes on Louis

Louis Roggebusch was one brutal motherfucker. If you've read the post on Jonathan, you'll know the house at 48 Broad St. had already safely fulfilled its bully quota. On the off chance it needed one more terminal prick, it had Louis to fall back on. Nine-year-old Barry, 48 Broad's main man, used his allowance to survive this environment that otherwise would've done him in. Louis was the beneficiary, gladly accepting the five dollars with bruised-knuckle hands to protect Barry from Jonathan. He didn't like Jonathan very much. Truth is, Louis didn't like a lot of people. Funny, 'cause Jonathan kinda sorta looked up to him. Louis as well as his older brother Daniel inherited their father's charisma and charm. They could've made the devil admire them.

No, their father wasn't Frank Roggebusch, the 48 Broad patriarch. Louis and Daniel were the offspring of Marcus and Joanne Woods. After their divorce, Joanne hooked up with Frank while Marcus remarried and had two more boys. Soon after marrying Joanne, Frank made a decision that would engender hard feelings on all sides to the dying day of all involved. He adopted the three kids Joanne had with Marcus: Daniel, Louis, as well as Peggy, the oldest of the three who'd already finished high school by the time 48 Broad takes place in May 1986. So of course they had to change their last name from Woods to Roggebusch. Marcus, meanwhile, and much to Joanne's chagrin, was absolved of any financial obligation to those kids. Depending on who you spoke to, that was either a godsend for Marcus or something akin to criminal at his (figurative, obviously, and pardon the pun) expense. And this is before you talk to any of the kids. What about Frank's two boys from his first marriage, Stephen and Jonathan? What did they think of suddenly having a few more siblings who sometimes got more attention?

Without getting too much into that, let's just say if you're wondering why Louis could be volatile sometimes, a very confused domestic dynamic might be part of it. Consider: When Joanne was still pregnant with him back in 1970, Marcus was already having an affair with his eventual second wife. Indeed, during the summer of '70 he took off to the Caribbean with this woman under the pretense of a business trip. Marcus was a reporter for one of the Washington, D.C. network affiliates. He fed Joanne some bullshit story about having to go to New York or some such place for an assignment. Where'd he really go? Nassau. And get this: When he got back, he left his mistress's used panties on the bed for Joanne to find. She was still in her first trimester with Louis. By the time Louis was born on December 19, the only Christmas miracle to greet him was that his parents hadn't divorced yet. Oh no. In fact, Joanne toughed it out for a while longer. It wasn't until just after Louis turned two that she had eyes for Frank, her neighbor down the street with a wife and two boys. It was at the New Year's Eve dance at the Kenwood Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Joanne and Frank were dancing and enjoying each other's company. Marcus and Frank's wife Mary were around somewhere. The couples knew each other so of course they'd probably figure no harm no foul in swapping partners just for one dance. Oops. It was during that one fateful dance that Joanne uttered the words that'll net any guy anytime, anywhere: "You're cute." That was it. That was, as Churchill said, the beginning of the end....of Joanne and Frank's respective marriages.

One year later, Frank and Joanne were married and living in Kensington with Joanne's three kids. Stephen and Jonathan had gone with Mary back to her native North Fort Myers, Florida, where they lived during the school year while spending their summers in Kensington. Barry was still minus three years old. So sure, by the time this motley crew was living together at 48 Broad in the eighties, they knew each other well enough. Well enough, that is, to know how they felt about each other. Stephen and Jonathan, whether conscious of it or not, couldn't help viewing Daniel and Louis as symbolic of why they had to move from D.C. to Florida to New Jersey. Daniel and Louis, for their part, couldn't help viewing Frank as the reason their childhood was all over the place. Again, most of this was subconscious. For the most part, people got along. For the most part.

So maybe you can see why Louis tended to act out aggression more than most. Like Jonathan, the kid never had a chance for that proverbial nuclear family. With Dad cheating on Mom when he was barely a trimester old, the odds were stacked against him from before the get-go. It didn't help that he developed into a very competitive athlete. Another parallel with Jonathan was his love of sports. Although, while Jonathan focused on golf, Louis played football. His forte was strong safety, although he played fullback sometimes as well. Now you might think colliding with people at high speeds would help vent his aggression, right? Wrong. He was just getting started.

His competitiveness even spilled into backyard whiffleball games, and often at the expense of Barry. If Barry had a nickel for every time Louis ripped him a new one, he wouldn't've had to steal that wad of five hundred bucks out of his father's sock drawer to feed his Garbage Pail Kid habit, precipitating the chain of events in 48 Broad. It got so bad that Barry finally put his chubby little foot down and said he refused to play whiffleball if it meant having to be on the same team as Louis. Remember what I said above about Louis's inherited charm and charisma? He employed that here and promised not to get mad at him anymore. Fast forward about, oh, fifteen minutes. Louis's team's on the field. Alexander, one of Barry's stepbrothers, smacks a grounder in Barry's direction. Our bedwetting hero lets it go through his legs, turning what should've been a single into a double. Boy did Louis let him have it or what? Jonathan laughed and Barry stared at Louis in flat disbelief. But Louis had promised, right? "Yeah I'm yelling at you 'cause you're shitty!"

The boys also played football, sometimes in the backyard, but more often a couple blocks up at the library, which had a huge field in the back. You might wonder why Barry in his right mind would want to be part of that, but he was. Hey, he was the youngest, and it was what all the older boys did, so why not? It's like why he'd tag along when they went to 7 Eleven. If they were going, shouldn't he too? Even more against all logic, Barry would play on the same team as Louis who, of course, always had to be the quarterback. He called the plays, and God help you if he threw it your way and you didn't catch it. Barry never forgot how Louis called those plays. What Louis would do was, he'd gather his team a few yards away from the line of scrimmage and have them hold out their palms so he could use his finger to trace the routes he wanted them to run. Yes, Barry would sometimes run the wrong route and/or drop the pass, and you know the rest. Playing football was a lose-lose situation for Barry. If he played for Louis, he'd get yelled at by Louis. If he played against Louis, he'd get tackled by him. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. When the 48 Broad kids played football, it was tackle. Louis wouldn't abide that touch shit.

Like Jonathan, Louis was a rebel and no mistake, only he rebelled in a different direction. Jonathan became a purveyor of some of the finest pot in South Jersey. That was his bailiwick. Louis stayed away from drugs. He was a devoted athlete and so accordingly devoted himself to staying healthy and physically fit. No, Louis's rebellion, while not worthy of jail time, still constituted a lot of aggression aimed at just about anyone in his general vicinity. Indeed, one of his favorite pastimes at 48 Broad was to throw stuff at passing cars from the blue room, that bedroom on the third floor noted for being the only room in the house painted sky blue with a matching shag carpet. This room had two windows facing Buttonwood Street plus one facing Broad. In the winters, Louis's thing was to bring up buckets of snow to make snowballs. And in the summers? Charcoal. Yes, charcoal. He'd take the bag of charcoal from the back porch and haul it up to the blue room. As for which brothers would participate, that would depend on who felt the ballsiest on any given night. There was a sort of rotation. Jonathan was up there the most, but not always to participate. He'd peak out the window from behind Louis and laugh his ass off at the sound of charcoal smacking the roof of that gray VW van. One time Louis and Jonathan were joined by Barry. When our hero saw the twin banes of his existence heading up to the third floor to make some mischief for the local motorists, Barry thought, "Why not?"

One detail I didn't mention about the blue room was that it was Barry's bedroom. Regardless of whether he partook or not, the fact was that charcoal was flying out of his room, not Louis's or Jonathan's. So if any of the passing drivers ever figured out where the projectiles came from, Frank and Faith would suspect Barry by default. At least, Barry figured they would. It made sense. Sometimes, though, luck took a break from working against Barry and sided with him. Such was the case when Barry joined Louis and Jonathan. Barry's hand was the first in the charcoal bag. He missed the first few times and then decided to watch Louis. He observed the master while Jonathan rolled on his ass both at Louis hitting cars as far away as the Broad and Buttonwood intersection and at the clueless drivers never figuring out where the charcoal was coming from. Then Barry gave it another go. Bull's eye! He mimicked Louis's sidearm style and pegged the roof of a Ford station wagon on Buttonwood.

The station wagon squealed to a halt. The driver, a bespectacled man in his forties, knew exactly what the score was. He marched right up to 48 Broad and pounded on the door. Down on the first floor Frank was playing piano in the music room while Faith was reading in the living room and Alexander and John were playing the Commodore 64 in the pool room, which was closest to the door. Alexander and John were so startled by the loud pounding that all they could do was stare open mouthed at the indignant mustachioed face boring holes through the glass. It was a long awkward moment of anger meeting befuddlement while Frank came down the hall. The man gave him the story, including which window the charcoal had flown out of. Frank was smart. Hell, he had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins after all. While the charcoal had come out of Barry's window, he knew, or thought he knew, that Barry didn't have the cojones to pull off something like that, at least not by himself. What's more, while talking to the pissed off station wagoner, he could hear rapid footfalls upstairs, followed by the unmistakable cackle of Jonathan. Frank yelled for Louis and Jonathan to get down there that instant. He didn't call for Barry, but Barry came anyway, assuming he was in hot water as well. After apologizing to the man, the roof of whose station wagon luckily hadn't suffered more than a black smear, Frank told the boys to park themselves on the music room floor by the faux fireplace so he could keep an eye on them for the rest of the night. Figuring he was just as doomed as the other two, Barry sulked into the music room to sit by the fireplace as well. Frank asked him why he was doing that. He wasn't mad at him, just Louis and Jonathan. What luck, right? Well, sort of. While Barry was spared being figuratively chained to the music room fireplace, he wasn't spared the wrath of the two meanest motherfuckers in South Jersey. They'd get their revenge.

As Jonathan demonstrated with the crooked paperboy episode, Louis's aggression could be channeled now and again in more helpful ways. It's already become legend how Barry used his allowance to get Louis on his side whenever Jonathan wanted to wrestle in the first-floor hallway. But Louis didn't always require a fee. You take the bat episode for instance. No, I don't mean bat as in baseball bat. I mean the nocturnal bird with the radar brain. Jersey does have its share of the wild, what with the pine barrens and all. Mount Holly's a good distance from all that, but no radar is perfect. It wasn't unheard of for a bat to wander into town. Barry had a classmate or two with a bat story. They were almost like an exclusive secret club. Your domestic bat invasion wasn't something you talked about with just anyone.

Once again Barry's bedroom was at the epicenter. As it was May, Barry had the windows open and the fan on, the only weapons against the notorious Garden State heat and humidity. Because the bat wasn't very big, it barely made a sound when it swooped in. In fact, Barry thought it was a moth as it danced and fluttered along the wall above his bed. Don't worry, Barry wasn't in bed. He was standing over by the bookshelf, which also doubled as his toy shelf. The "moth" would flap for a few seconds, stop, then start up again. It continued this pattern for a good five minutes before Barry set down Optimus Prime and took a good hard look at it.

The primal scream he let out while darting downstairs as fast as his chubby legs could carry him was yet one more thing his brothers never let him live down. Louis was in his room making out with his girlfriend Tanisha when Barry stormed in with tales of a bat. He figured Louis would kick the shit out of him for barging in like that, but he didn't care. Either take a beating from Louis or risk getting bitten by a bat. As it turned out, Louis didn't get mad at all. He jumped out of bed, grabbed his tennis racket, and stormed up to Barry's room. The bat didn't have a chance. Louis didn't kill it, but he did score a good lick or two before the bat's radar directed it toward the open window.

Louis's girlfriend, speaking of her, was black. That may not strike you or me as a very big deal, but in 1980s South Jersey, it was at least notable, if not objectionable, in some circles. Tanisha Bradford lived in the Gardens, the predominantly black neighborhood in southwestern Mount Holly. Soon after moving up to Jersey in January '83, Louis befriended a number of his African American classmates. Like a lot of middle children, Louis felt like an outsider in his household, so perhaps he identified with the local black population. He also adopted their music. While Jonathan gravitated to heavy metal, Stephen to his father's jazz and classical, and Barry to Top 40 repetition, Louis got a boom box, decorated it with graffiti, and blasted it with the likes of Run-D.M.C., Doug E. Fresh, the Fat Boys, and Big Daddy Kane. No, not NWA or Eazy-E. 48 Broad takes place just before the South Central L.A. explosion.

In May of 1986, Louis was about to finish his freshman year of high school, which he already knew he'd have to repeat. Like Jonathan, school work never fit into Louis's rhythm of things. He found a family in his friends from the Gardens. Better to hang out with them than read Tom Sawyer. Tanisha, in stark contrast, was quite bright. She was about to polish off her freshman year with straight A's. Like the rest of us, her household had its fair share of drama, but 48 Broad never failed to make her feel better. Frank hit it off with her when he realized she was a math whiz. As an economist, math was Frank's world. So you'd have times when Louis was upstairs moussing his hair just right while downstairs Tanisha and Frank would talk shop.

Louis didn't get flak from anyone at home about dating a black girl. No, the flak came from some of the kids at school, including those guys with mullets from Hainesport and Lumberton, two townships just outside Mount Holly made up of families who'd lived on the same farms since the Civil War. The high school administrators never admitted it, but the fact is gangs existed at the school, and they were based on race. Certain circles viewed Louis as a traitor. Every so often he'd get jumped after school. Maybe now you can see why he'd be in the mood to kick some ass when he got home. Poor Barry.

And poor Louis. For it was in May of 1986 when his and Daniel's biological father, Marcus "Woody" Woods, made a day trip to 48 Broad from D.C. to talk to Frank about taking back his kids. Like all adopted kids, Daniel had reached the inevitable age when he started wondering about where he really came from. He was sensitive to how Frank might feel, so when they had a moment to talk in private, on the side porch after Frank got back from his daily late afternoon jog, Daniel broached the idea of living with his real father after graduating from high school the following month. Frank was perfectly amenable, but when he called Woody, the latter's response was tepid. He couldn't commit over the phone and said he'd rather come up and "negotiate" in person.

Faith didn't trust this guy the moment she laid eyes on him. She'd grown up with an abusive father and had been married to a guy who couldn't handle her competing in the same field, so she'd developed a sensitivity over the years to men with a questionable moral compass. It was a short visit. Frank, Faith, Daniel, and Woody sat in the living room on a Saturday afternoon. Frank said he'd talked it over with Faith, and they wanted to respect Daniel's wish to get to know his real father. Daniel had already been accepted to the University of Maryland. With Frank as his legal guardian, he could've gone to Temple University, where Frank taught, for free, but his longing to know Woody took precedence. Woody said Daniel could live with him for one year. After that, they'd see where things stood. Daniel had no idea what that could possibly mean, nor did Frank or Faith.

And so Woody went home that afternoon. Daniel should've been pleased, but why did his stomach feel queasy? Faith didn't waste a minute. As soon as Woody pulled away in his station wagon, she told Frank she didn't trust that slimeball for a minute. There was just something about his very nature that didn't sit right with her.

What no one stopped to consider was how Woody never asked about Louis. Tanisha had invited Louis to come with her and her family down the shore, but Louis, of course, wanted to be home when his father was there. He stayed upstairs at first while they were negotiating Daniel's move. Finally at one point he did come down under the pretense of getting a Tab from one of the extra refrigerators in the laundry room. Woody didn't say anything when Louis walked by. When Louis came back and made to go upstairs, his dad still didn't say anything, didn't make any indication he knew Louis was there. Finally Louis couldn't help himself. "Hi, Dad!"

Nothing.

Marcus continued talking to Frank and Faith and didn't even look in Louis's general direction.

Late that night, while the rest of 48 Broad slept, Louis lay wide awake. He got up and putzed around. He didn't know what to do with himself. At one point he grabbed the scissors from his desk and cut his bed sheets into ribbons. Then he decided he was hungry. In addition to two extra refrigerators, the laundry room had a freezer chest for storing meat, bags of vegetables, and tubs of ice cream. Louis grabbed the vanilla and the strawberry tubs, hauled them to the kitchen island, took a spoon from the drawer, and ate directly out of the tubs while watching a Twilight Zone rerun on the little black and white TV. After two or three helpings from each tub, he decided he didn't want anymore. And so he went back up and conked out in a blissful sugar coma.

Meanwhile, the two tubs of ice cream melted on the island. The family dog Gorbie came in, hopped onto one of the pedestals, then onto the island, and accidentally knocked over the tubs when he tried to eat out of them. When Frank came downstairs that morning to grind and brew his Peet's coffee, he was met by melted pink and white ice cream all over the kitchen floor.

Frank went berserk. He banged on Louis's door before marching in and ripping him a new one and ordering him to get his irresponsible ass downstairs to mop up the kitchen. Then he saw the hacked up sheets, which didn't exactly calm him down.

Losing his cool was a rare thing for Frank. In fact, he prided himself on his ability to maintain his composure in the face of raising so many teenagers and, as he liked to say, "pre-teenagers." That's why he always regretted blowing up at Louis. He didn't stop to consider the reason for Louis's erratic behavior. It wasn't until after sex with Faith that night when he wondered aloud if Louis needed professional help. Faith pointed out the obvious. Louis's father had come to the house and sat there for several hours and didn't even give his son the time of day. Like most middle children, Louis was already developing outsider syndrome. Combined with his being adopted before he was three and now living with a bunch of people who, besides Daniel and Barry, weren't related to him, the kid was a Petri dish of enough complexes to give any child psychologist a headache.

Notes on John

"JOHNNNNNN!..........athan."

Ah yes, one of the favorite pastimes of the boys at 48 Broad St. Well hey, most of them couldn't drive in May of '86, when these stories take place. They had to entertain themselves somehow, right? The Commodore 64 and Cheers could only cut so much mustard before their pre-pubescent brains started looking elsewhere for stimulation. One such example that never got old was making eleven-year-old John Peterson, the second youngest of the seven boys, run all the way down the three-story Queen Anne before letting him know they'd actually been calling for Jonathan. John always fell for it. Seriously, each and every time someone called his name at the top of their lungs, John would come out of his room on the third floor, stand at the stairs, and say, "What is it?" And then whoever it was would keep calling until John finally hurried down the stairs. "What, what, what?" And then as he begin the descent to the first floor, "..........athan." Upon which time, depending on his mood and the state of his nerves, John would either laugh it off, march silently and deliberately back up to the third floor, or throw up his hands and fume. Everyone ended up doing it to him at some point. Frank, John's stepdad and the 48 Broad patriarch, fooled him one night when he was drunk on Scotch.

Even nine-year-old Barry, the youngest of the household and the 48 Broad protagonist, got in on it. Like a lot of kids who are the youngest, whatever the older siblings are doing is probably the right thing to do. It's certainly the cool thing to do, right or wrong, so best just to follow suit. If you get in trouble, you just say, "Hey, but they do it too!" And so one day Barry tried his hand at the "John..........athan" trick. At first nothing happened. Had John even heard him? Barry walked halfway up to the second floor and let his voice rip. Sure enough, he heard John's door open, followed by, "What?" Barry said, "Come here a minute!" When John started coming down, Barry realized he'd messed up. You're not supposed to answer the "What?" You just keep shouting "JOHNNNNNN!" until he comes down. Barry tried to make up for it by shouting his name again. He couldn't help laughing at his own goofiness. John came to a stop halfway down the stairs and gave Barry a deadpan look, just waiting to get it over with. Doubled over with his face red in crooked, Bell's palsy-scarred laughter, Barry could barely say, "..........athan." John maintained his deadpan look for one more beat before storming down the stairs and kicking the living shit out of Barry.

Yes, our boy John Peterson could be quite the moody little bugger, his reactions impossible to predict in most situations. Nothing else illustrates that better than the John......athan prank. As for Jonathan, if you read my notes on him, you'll know he was 48 Broad's tyrant, the last person in the house--scratch that, the last person in all of Mount Holly--you'd want to cross. But at least he was consistently an asshole, right? You never had to roll the dice to predict his behavior, although being around him was sort of a roll of the dice if you know what I mean.

John? He was a completely different, and very high-strung, story. Seriously, check it out. This one night, he had some homework to do. Math homework. Now in May of 1986 John was approaching the end of sixth grade. His math that year was pre-algebra. He was ahead of the curve. Like a lot of high-strung people, John was pretty bright. Hey, once you've demonstrated a certain level of intellect, your elders will no doubt expect that same level from you consistently. No matter what. At least, that's what it seems like when you're a kid. It's tough maintaining par, you know? So you get worked up easily. Most of the pre-algebra kids in John's class were seventh graders. A few were eighth. Only two others were sixth. Sometimes the curve can catch up with you, right? Even the best and brightest can feel it nipping at their heels. John was no exception. So on this night, he went berserk over his pre-algebra homework. He'd started at his desk in the pool room. Then he'd gone up to his bedroom, which he shared with Alexander, his only biological brother at 48 Broad, and then he came back down and parked himself at the roll-up desk in the music room. While Jonathan and Barry wrestled out in the hallway, John wrestled with equations. He developed a migraine and started crying and shaking his little fists at the textbook, which lay there with clean black ink on that special kind of crisp white paper you never see outside school textbooks. The kind that's a tad bit thicker and smoother. John positively fumed. He punched the air, then opened his hands and pleaded. "What?! What do I have to do?!"

Because John was the closest to him in age, Barry used him as a crystal ball. You might think Barry didn't have the time to notice his stepbrother cursing the heavens while Jonathan used him to wipe the hallway carpet. Well, you'd be wrong. Barry did notice. No sooner did he slip some cash to his brother Louis to protect him from Jonathan than he noticed John. Barry was on his way to the family room to watch Cheers (he loved yelling "NORM!" with the rest of the bar whenever the big man made his entrance) with dad Frank and stepmom Faith. The family room and music room were opposite each other. Sure enough, Barry stopped when he saw John mid tantrum.

Frank said hello, but Barry was too captivated by John's red face and tears to notice. Frank interpreted his son's silence as a form of passive-aggressive rebellion, reciprocity for his divorcing Barry's mother. When Barry walked into the family room and sat on the couch next to Gorbie, the family dog, Frank said hello one more time. He gave him one more chance. Barry said nothing. He was too busy wondering if homework-induced migraines and bouts of crying were in his future. But if so, at least it was two long years away (don't you remember how long two years seemed when you were nine?). That cheered him up so he could enjoy Cheers. NORM!

Barry himself could excite John's high-strung nerves. I mean besides for obvious reasons like failing miserably at the John......athan prank. Indeed, it was usually for reasons not obvious at all. At least not to Barry. A prime example would be Barry's hardcore movie fandom. Starting around second grade, about two years before 48 Broad and soon after Barry survived the Bell's palsy near-death experience, he discovered he loved movies. Certainly he'd seen plenty of movies before. His first was The Empire Strikes Back in the summer of '80, but it wasn't until second grade or so when he started inheriting the fandom from his older half-brothers on his mom's side, Daniel and Louis. We're talking mainly comedies and horror. The inestimable A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was the first film Barry admired enough for repeated viewings. That didn't bug John too much. He watched it too. Truth is, he liked most of what Barry liked. But Barry took liking movies to a whole new level. From Freddy Krueger he graduated to stuff like Amadeus (neither comedy nor horror, I know, but hey, Barry was complicated), House (a bit of both), and Goonies. It was Goonies, in fact, that Barry was watching after school one day, for the who-knew-how-manyth time. John came home, tossed his backpack on the loveseat in the hallway where Gorbie liked to sleep because of its proximity to the window, grabbed a Pepsi from the third fridge in the laundry room, and headed down to the family room to channel surf. It was great to have cable. A lot of his friends at Holbein didn't. When he saw Barry watching Goonies, however, John positively freaked. He threw up his hands, in the process sloshing some Pepsi onto the hallway carpet (for which Faith later grilled Barry, assuming he'd done it), and howled his bafflement at the high ceiling. How could Barry still enjoy Goonies after watching it almost every day for months? For his part, Barry was completely caught off-guard. Goonies was celluloid art. Whence came his stepbrother's confusion?

Now let's go back a bit and put John in better context. When he was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1974, his mom and dad were already on the downslope of their marriage. If you've been following the notes on the other kids, you'll recognize this as a recurring theme, kids born into homes that, if not yet broken, were betraying cracks in the foundation. Faith and Ford Peterson were no exception. They held it together a little while, long enough for Alexander and John to get started with middle school and elementary school, respectively. At first Faith thought she could hang in there with Ford until their kids were done with high school, but after a particularly nasty spat when John was in first grade, Faith took a walk in the snow around their Boulder neighborhood and pondered the idea of another dozen years with a man with whom she couldn't even agree on what time dinner should be. The idea seemed as bleak as the white landscape.

Ford was a brilliant guy, a PhD in mathematics who cut a fine reputation for himself in the aeronautical industry. His weakness was insecurity: Ford Peterson couldn't handle a wife working, much less succeeding, in the same industry. Which is why, after scoring her master's in math, Faith went right back to school to get her bachelor's in music. That didn't help much, though. Ford's insecurity didn't stop at his wife's mathematical acumen. He was insecure in general, which might make you wonder why he'd marry a woman who was so obviously bright. But men do funny things all the time.

Ford could be a fun dad too, despite everything. John developed an interest in coffee early on. Yes, you read that right. Coffee. During one particular weekend breakfast, practically the only time the Peterson family could be together, John watched his dad absently eat his heavily buttered white toast and sip his coffee while reading the business section. Ford did this all the time. And John watched him do it all the time. Only this time, John decided to ask about the coffee his dad kept slurping like it was going out of style. Ford let his boy have a sip, thinking he'd find it disgusting and that would be the end of it. Not only was that not the case, but John was hooked on coffee from that day forward. Perhaps it was the Swedish in him. Coffee flows like water in Scandinavia. Heck, in Finland, people hook up via personal ads that always start out with, "Let's meet for coffee." The Peterson clan had settled in the Midwest in the nineteenth century, but not even a hundred-plus years away from the motherland could distill their passion for that divine caffeinated nectar.

Faith, as all you moms might imagine, was appalled that her four-year-old should be drinking coffee. She didn't say anything to Ford at the table, but when they were alone, she gave him the third degree. Ford didn't raise his voice. He never did. That was one of the things that drove Faith batty about him. Ford always softened his tone commensurate with his wife's shrillness. Sometimes it reached the point where Faith would be screaming her lungs out while Ford whispered. That's pretty much how it went during the coffee drama. John's a big boy, he could make certain decisions on his own now. "But he's four!" Faith protested. Her argument was that all John knows is that coffee tastes great. His gene pool tells him that. But as his parents and guardians, they need to intervene when it's in his best interest, and it's not in his best interest to drink coffee at four years old. Caffeine stunts growth, it's just not what you give little kiddies. Ford tried to compromise. He knew his boy would cry and sulk if told this morning's coffee was a one-time deal. So he got decaf. Just to show you, though, that you can't escape who you are, John absolutely hated decaf. He could instantly tell the difference, that this wasn't what Daddy drank, and he wanted what Daddy always drank. Ford complied. Faith didn't bother getting mad this time, but she did let her disgust be known in other, more passive aggressive, ways, like pretending to forget to buy Ford a new set of razors. Or leaving his car windows down when she knew a blizzard was coming. At any rate, seven years later, when 48 Broad takes place, the junior high John still loved his coffee. He was the only one of the seven boys who joined Frank in the kitchen over a cup before heading off to Holbein.

Around the same time that he discovered coffee, John discovered baseball and joined Little League. Ford and John would go out now and again to play catch. Only, pitch and catch became scarcer as time went on. By the time Faith met Frank Roggebusch at a math conference in Boulder, her marriage to Ford was as good as gone. Sure, symbolically Faith could be viewed as the bad guy here. She cheated first, right? Well okay. But I don't think Ford was exactly a heart-crushed Romeo over here. He relocated to the San Fernando Valley, landed a job in an aeronautical consulting firm, met and married a hippie who had no career aspirations whatsoever, and bought a house in the West Valley community of Woodland Hills.

And that's how John and Alexander became bi-coastal kids. They'd spend the school year at 48 Broad, and then literally the day after school ended, they'd hop on a plane to L.A. When they came back to Jersey, it always seemed to be John who had more stories to tell. As you'll see in Alexander's post, John's cerebral older brother didn't betray emotion very much, nor did he betray, well, his voice. Dude barely talked. And when he did, he was usually deadpan. John, in stark contrast, and as I pointed out above, was easily excitable. One summer he came back going on and on about seeing Alyssa Milano at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. The rest of the boys were quite impressed. Jealous, even. Including Barry. He may have been several years from puberty, but he could spot a babe same as any male.

John's Alyssa Milano moment notwithstanding, when he wasn't around, the others at 48 Broad had the occasional exchange about his sexuality. See, John had a pal at Holbein named Donald. He was a black kid who lived in the Gardens, a predominantly black neighborhood in the southwest part of town. By the time the events of 48 Broad roll around in May of '86, they'd been best pals going on two full school years. Or were they more than pals? Whatever the case, John always insisted on having Donald to himself. When they were watching a movie in the family room, John would shoo away anyone who tried to watch with them. When they were playing G.I. Joe in John's bedroom, while listening to songs like "It's My Life" by Talk Talk, John would shut the door and not answer if anyone knocked. When he and Donald had the Commodore 64 to themselves in the pool room, again, John wouldn't tolerate anyone playing with them, or even watching for that matter. John had the occasional girlfriend too. So what was his deal?

One thing Barry noticed early on was that John was more of a follower than a leader. Yes, Barry noticed this because he was one of the people John followed. When Barry took piano lessons, so did John. When Barry decided to give Pop Warner football a shot, so did John. When Barry switched from Thousand Island dressing to Ranch, once again John followed suit. Barry wasn't exactly a model of originality himself. He only switched to Ranch to be like Louis.

Notes on Jonathan

The nurse who helped deliver Jonathan Roggebusch on May 31, 1971 was what they called back then "liberated." To that end, she thought it only appropriate that Jonathan's father, Frank, slap on some scrubs, complete with that funny fluorescent shower cap sort of headwear, and stand by his wife during the delivery.

The sixties may have been over, but the mentality certainly wasn't. And to some degree, the mentality never went away, for what the nurse made Frank do isn't really a novelty anymore. Pretty much all dads have to do it these days. It's a small price to pay, to be sure, given that it's the woman who endures the ineffable pain of labor.

Nonetheless, it was a liberated nurse, and perhaps her sense of liberation passed onto Jonathan. For, of all the kids who lived at 48 Broad St. during the eighties, I think it's safe to say Jonathan was the most, *ahem*, liberated.

First, let's go back to the seventies, shall we? Indeed, let's go back to the early seventies, right after Jonathan came into this complex world. Yes, by the time the kid turned two, his world had indeed become complex and then some. His folks divorced in early '73, and his mom Mary left their home in Potomac, Maryland to go back down to her homestead in North Fort Myers, Florida. And it's in North Fort Myers where Jonathan and his older brother Stephen spent the first chunk of their lives, through elementary school and middle school and some of high school. By the mid eighties, they were living with their father Frank and his third wife Faith at 48 Broad.

Right after divorcing Mary in '73, Frank married the gal down the street, Joanne. Indeed, it was his affair with Joanne that precipitated the dissolution of his marriage to Mary. By the summer of '73, Frank had sold the house in Potomac, married Joanne, and bought a house in nearby Kensington for his new wife and her kids from her first marriage: Daughter Peggy and sons Daniel and Louis. Frank's adopting them engendered hard feelings on all sides, emotional fallout that would never truly go away.

Throughout the seventies, Jonathan and Stephen would visit the Kensington house in the summer. Over time they got to know Joanne's three kids. They became a sort of east coast Brady Bunch. This is why, by the time they were living together on a permanent basis at 48 Broad in the eighties (except for Peggy), they had established a pretty strong rapport.

All except for Bawrence Barney Roggebusch. Barry. The protagonist of 48 Broad. The one and only offspring of Frank and Joanne. He didn't really have a rapport with anyone, and indeed, his years at 48 Broad were less like living in a house and more like that show Nature, where small animals try not to get eaten by the bigger animals. But I've already written about Barry in another post. Let's get back to Jonathan and his liberated spirit...

During his first summer visit at Kensington, the summer of '74, Joanne took to calling him Double. Jonathan always seemed to get into the most mischief. Double trouble, as Joanne said. And let me tell you, that nickname stuck. By the summer of '75, everyone was calling Jonathan Double. It wasn't anything outrageous or criminal, mind you. Not yet, anyway. The kid was only four. But ya know, he'd do stuff like break a window with a baseball ("by accident"), rip up Joanne's flowers, throw rocks at passing cars, and so on. Whatever a four-year-old could possibly do to get in trouble, Jonathan was no doubt doing it.

Why, you might ask? I mean, his brother Stephen was pretty much staying out of trouble. Give Stephen some chocolate milk and a Star Trek marathon, he'd be happy. Not Jonathan. Again, think about his world and how unconventional it was. His world by no means jived with the worlds of his friends at school. His father adopted the kids of this other woman, the woman who, you might say, undid the marriage of Jonathan's father and mother. So who knows? Stephen handled it better, but Jonathan? Maybe it was his way of hitting back.

He had some health scares during his summer visits to Kensington. One summer both he and Stephen showed up with heads full of lice. Joanne took them to the pediatrician for some special shampoo. Forever burned in Joanne's mind is the image of her fingers massaging the scalps of these two poor kids while the bugs literally fell out and flowed down the drain. Another summer, Jonathan showed up with a hernia. The kid's nuts were grapefruits. Once again, Joanne had to take him to the pediatrician, who referred her to a urologist. Jonathan had to have surgery. While no one else in the house seemed bothered by this, Joanne couldn't help but wonder what these kids were going through down in Florida. Did Mary not notice any of this?

Although Stephen and Jonathan weren't her kids, and she never adopted them like Frank did her brood, she did have some vested interest here. On her thirtieth birthday in 1975, Joanne got her final trust fund payment from her parents' estate (they both died when she was a teenager): Ten grand. That check went straight from the mailbox to Frank's bank account so that he could write a check for that amount to Mary to keep himself out of hot water. Thanks to child support and alimony, Frank was in it deep with Mary. Plus he had a mortgage and a bunch of kids in Kensington (and Barry wasn't even born yet), and Joanne didn't have a job. And did I mention the housekeeper? That was a hangover from Joanne's childhood in West L.A. Her father had done okay for himself. They had a live-in housekeeper who sort of became Joanne's best friend. That was the world she knew, and she tried to bring it with her to the east coast. It didn't last. Not long after Barry was born, the housekeeper had to go bye-bye.

Anyway, that ten grand not only smoothed over the child support wrinkles, it helped Mary with the down payment on a new house, the house where Jonathan and Stephen did a lot of their growing up, and the house where Mary lived for the rest of her life.

Now let's jump to the eighties, shall we? In May of 1986, when 48 Broad takes place, Jonathan was on the verge of fifteen and about to wrap up his freshman year of high school. Yes, everyone still called him Double. Actually, Quadruple might have been the more appropriate moniker at this stage of his life.

Jonathan smoked pot. And he dealt pot. He grew pot too. By the end of his freshman year, he'd made quite a name for himself in Mount Holly's drug scene. This sometimes meant he was in it hard for the money. When it was flowing, it flowed like the Nile. But when it was dry, it rivaled the Sahara. That's when he'd pilfer some cash out of his dad's sock drawer. Frank kept quite a bit in there. With so many kids in the house, having an emergency cash fund was de rigueur. But Jonathan was clever. He never took enough for Frank to notice. And when he had the surplus, he'd actually, yes, take the time to put back the amount he'd taken. Of course, Jonathan couldn't have possibly anticipated that the young Barry, the youngest of the seven boys, would be so brazen as to take a wad of five hundred bucks out of that same drawer to feed his Garbage Pail Kids habit. It's that theft that sets in motion the chain of events tying 48 Broad together.

Jonathan introduced Barry to pot. Barry accidentally got caught up in a little weekend adventure with Jonathan and his friends in the Jersey Pine Barrens. It wasn't until they got there that Jonathan realized Barry had unwittingly tagged along. The poor kid had been hiding from his brother Louis in the cab of a pickup parked in front of 48 Broad that belonged to one of Jonathan's friends. Jonathan and gang hopped in and took off without noticing the little blond porker curled up in the back. Later that night, sitting around a fire, they convinced Barry to try his lungs at a joint. Barry gave it one puff......and puked his guts out, while the teenagers around him, including Jonathan's very hot flavor-of-the-month girlfriend, laughed their asses off. Those same friends, by the way, could also rub Jonathan the wrong way if they ever dared call him Jon. Jonathan and Barry had a stepbrother named John. He was the last person with whom Jonathan wanted to risk getting confused.

Just to show you, though, that Jonathan could be just as complicated as the world he grew up in, he was a superb golfer. He played on his high school's varsity golf team all four years. Indeed, during his freshman year, he helped get his school to the state finals. They didn't win, but it was the first time the school had been on the golfing map since the seventies. During the summers Jonathan practically lived at the Springfield Golf Course in Mount Holly. True to his nickname, though, sometimes he'd take one of the golf carts out for a spin through the rough, flooring it and scaring the bejesus out of whichever 48 Broad brother(s) happened to be with him at the time.

Jonathan also played basketball, although he didn't have as much impact as he did with the golf team. Frank had a basketball net installed against the front of the garage so Jonathan and the other boys could play. Street hockey was another hobby, usually in the winter when the NHL was in season. Mount Holly was only twenty miles from Philly. The Philly teams were the teams most people rooted for in Burlington County. Jonathan's favorite winter garb was his Flyers jacket. He and his friends, almost every night after school during winter, would play hockey on the parking lot behind the huge church on High Street, which you could easily get to using the alley behind the 48 Broad house.

The kid wasn't all brawn and no brains. Although it was incredibly hard to discern for reasons I hope by now are quite obvious, Jonathan Roggebusch did have an academic itch to scratch. It mostly took the form of astronomy. Yes, you read that right: Astronomy. When you think of space nerds, you probably think of, well, space nerds. In the eighties the archetype would be like those two main guys from Revenge of the Nerds: Giant glasses, pocket protectors, high-water pants, a laugh that sounds like a seal in extremis. Again, as I hope I've made abundantly clear, Jonathan was about as far from that archetype as you can get. He was Fonzy, but with freckles and a mullet. That's why almost no one knew he dabbled in astronomy. No kidding, Jonathan could lecture you on stuff like which stars and constellations would only be visible to a Southern Hemisphere observer. He could tell you all about the Perseid meteor shower and the best place in all of New Jersey to catch it, and how it's made up of remnants of comet Swift-Tuttle but is named after the constellation Perseus because that's the point in the Earth's sky whence the meteor shower radiates. Speaking of the sky, he could tell you the full moon constituted half a degree in our sky. Then he'd talk about other space bodies and give you an idea of their size using the degree measure. The constellation Leo? Well, it's made up of a body of stars that are this many light years across, that many light years from Earth, and take up so many degrees on our sky. And its alpha star? That would be Regulus. Maybe there is something to be said for legalizing pot, because he would almost always be high by the time he cracked open one of his astronomy texts, usually late at night in his bedroom on the third floor of 48 Broad.

Frank may not have caught onto the money thefts, but he sort of had a whiff (pardon the pun) of his son's adventures with pot, as much as a father who worked two full-time jobs could catch onto such things. In an effort to straighten out his kid, he'd give him projects to do at home. One example would be cleaning and organizing the basement, a catacomb of dirt floors that had been virtually untouched since the Roggebusch clan moved to 48 Broad in January of 1983. It took a few prods, but Jonathan finally gave up a Sunday to do it. And to be fair, Frank did pay him a little more than his usual allowance in recognition of the time spent. Another, more formidable, example would be that floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the music room on the first floor. Frank could've easily afforded professional carpenters, but why bother with so many tall strapping boys in the house? So he tasked Jonathan with it. There's the lumber in the garage. The bookcase needs to stand against that part of the wall and be this wide. Go to it. Jonathan, of course, put it off for a good month or so before Frank confronted him about it. Jonathan blew up at him and said you know what? This is capitalist exploitation. Seriously, he used that word. Exploitation. Frank didn't hold the baseless charge against his boy. No, he blamed Mary. Whereas Frank always had a strong rapport with Stephen, not so with Jonathan. He seemed more partial to his mother, who was perhaps still indignant at having been unceremoniously dumped by Frank over ten years earlier. Jonathan had spent a healthy portion of his childhood with Mary by the time he arrived at 48 Broad. Who's to say Mary didn't implant certain things, propaganda if you will, into Jonathan's corn-blond head at the expense of his father? You have to admit the charge of exploitation came out of nowhere. At any rate, in the end Jonathan bailed on the bookcase. Stephen had to take care of it. And Barry, of all people, was tasked with helping him. There were several instances during their trimming the lumber with the Buzzsaw in the backyard that Barry was convinced the saw would malfunction or something and bounce and kick in his direction and hack off his arm. It never happened. The kid watched too much TV.

Frank didn't give up on Jonathan. He had him join his high school's ROTC program. No negotiation. You can scream exploitation til the Jersey peaches go ripe, you're joining the goddam ROTC to straighten out your Florida-bred ass. It didn't really work. If anything, it just expanded Jonathan's pot clientele. What's more, while the uniform made him look like a young Laurence Olivier, it made him act like Darth Vader. He hated wearing the thing. And he often took it out on Barry.

One of Jonathan's favorite pastimes was kicking the shit out of that chunky little bed wetter Barry. No fisticuffs or anything that would cause permanent damage. It was more like wrestling. One interest all the boys had in common at 48 Broad was watching WWF wrestling (today it's known as the WWE). And so Jonathan would get his ya-yas out of wrestling Barry to the ground, pinning him there, contorting him, all that Rowdy Roddy Piper stuff. This usually happened in the first-floor hallway, about twenty feet or so from the living room where Frank and Faith would be having their scholarly debates and what have you while watching stuff like Nature or Nova. They never lifted a finger to intervene on Barry's behalf. Barry got so desperate for the wrestling to stop (he loved watching it but wasn't crazy about participating in it) that he used some of the five hundred bucks he stole from his father to bribe his brother Louis, 48 Broad's other tough nut, to protect him from Jonathan.

Before you label Jonathan a bully and leave it at that, don't forget how complicated he was, how he was a reflection of the complicated world in which he grew up. To Jonathan, Barry represented the reason he could never enjoy that traditional nuclear family we all know and love from Leave It to Beaver. Of course, most people don't get to enjoy that nowadays, but that's not much consolation to a teenager. Now was Jonathan consciously thinking, "Barry represents the dissolution of my homestead. That's why I beat him up so much."? Nah, who talks like that? That may have been in the ol' subconscious, but consciously Jonathan had a lot of aggression in him that stemmed from who knew where? And he had to ventilate it somehow. Golf helped, but sometimes chasing a tiny white ball across vast oceans of green only aggravated his frustration. The basketball and street hockey did their part, but again, only so much. So there'd be Barry. Our Barry. Whose face was still scarred enough from the Bell's palsy three years earlier that Jonathan loved calling him Jerry's Lost Kid. And when they wrestled, Jonathan took the role of Piper and dubbed Barry the Missing Link. You get the idea.

Don't think Jonathan and Barry were enemies, by the way. That was never the case at all. More like grudging allies. Think U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during World War II. For example, one kid in Mount Holly who really was Barry's enemy was the paper boy Kyle, around twelve or thirteen or so with spiked blond hair and a nature corrupt enough to give Jonathan a run for his money. Only, speaking of money, while Jonathan always gave back what he stole from his father, Kyle never gave back what he stole from the Roggebusch family, as well as all the other families in the neighborhood who subscribed to the Burlington County Times. The way you'd subscribe to the paper in those days, in that time and place, was you'd tell the company you wanted it delivered. You didn't have the option of weekend only or anything like that. Either you subscribed and got it seven days a week or you didn't subscribe at all. And then once a week the paper boy would come around to your house to collect money for a week's worth of papers. "Collecting," is what they always said when you answered the door, and you knew exactly what they meant. And paper boys would get tips too. It was a great way to pile up the spending cash. Just think: If Barry had taken that job, all the trouble in 48 Broad never would've happened.

Kyle's simple scheme, like most simple schemes, worked beautifully. Instead of collecting once a week, he'd collect twice a week, only he wouldn't do it to everyone the same week. He'd scatter his collecting days far enough apart that no one caught on. No one, that is, except Jonathan.

Barry didn't know Kyle was a thief, but he knew Kyle was not a very nice kid. On his way to and from school (everyone walked to school in Mount Holly), Barry would sometimes run into Kyle and his clique. They'd call him names and push him around. It wasn't ever more than that, but when you're nine, and already beyond self-conscious with a bedwetting problem and a crooked face, and with a brother who wrestles you because it's so easy, the last thing you need is a freakin' junior high gang to contend with. And you never knew when you'd run into them. Which is why, when Jonathan finally caught onto Kyle's collecting scheme, not only was he doing the whole neighborhood a favor, he was making Barry's life easier.

It was a funny scene. Barry was out front playing with his Transformers. Kyle comes by, his second time in a week hitting up 48 Broad for some cash. Before walking up to the door, he snatches Optimus Prime from Barry and smashes the fearless leader on the sidewalk.

Enter Jonathan. Or rather, exit from the house Jonathan, down the steps, his tall muscular shadow darkening the diminutive Kyle's little spiked head. Were Barry's eyes playing tricks, or did those spikes wilt a little upon Jonathan's approach? No punches were thrown, no blood was spilled, but Kyle got Double's message doubly loud and clear. If he ever tried ripping off 48 Broad again, he'd have to deal with Jonathan. And if Kyle so much as blinked the wrong way in Barry's general direction, he'd have to deal with Jonathan.

Kyle was never a problem again.

So you see? Jonathan wasn't one hundred percent terror to Barry. He had Barry's back. He had everyone's back at 48 Broad. Sure, he was mischievous. He was Double. When the boys played whiffleball in the summer, it was Jonathan who insisted they substitute the white plastic ball with the blue rubber ball he used for street hockey. That meant if Double hit the ball high and hard enough, he could send it straight through the window into the master bedroom. He did this on more than one occasion.

Sometimes blame could be assigned to him unfairly. Don't forget that it was Barry, not Jonathan, who stole the five hundred bucks. Before anyone knew it was Barry (yes, ultimately everyone found out, as secrets never had much of a life expectancy at good ol' 48 Broad), most of the household suspected Jonathan. When Jonathan's basketball was slashed with a knife and then squashed, again everyone's knee-jerk reaction was to point the finger at Jonathan. But that was Jonathan's b-ball. He loved playing hoops in the driveway. Why on earth would he stab his own basketball? Well, he didn't. Barry did. Barry woke up one Saturday morning pissed off at his big bullying brother. No one was on the first floor at that particular hour, so he stomped downstairs wearing nothing but the tidy whities he slept in, grabbed one of the steak knives from its wooden block home, marched into the pool room (so called because originally it featured a pool table which the seven boys quickly turned to mince meat), and rammed that knife into Jonathan's basketball. Right to the hilt. But he wasn't done yet. He jumped up and down on the ball until it resembled a deformed orange pancake. This was one secret that lasted. It was never confirmed who murdered the basketball. They just figured it had to be Jonathan who, for his part, had a pretty good idea who the real culprit was.

For all his breaking the law and causing trouble and making people suspect him of everything wrong in the world, it's a grand irony that one of Jonathan's closest friends during his high school years was a cop. Of course, that wasn't how his relationship initially kicked off with Officer James Douglas of the Mount Holly Police Department. Their introduction came late one school night when Jonathan was selling some weed behind the school. Officer Douglas, for his part, had originally driven behind the school to meet up with a student he was having a fling with. When he saw the two dark shapes standing in the corner, his heart practically leapt from his throat in time with his finger flicking on the siren, sending a scare of similar proportions up the spines of Jonathan and his customer. Officer Douglas took them both in but let them off easy with a warning. I suppose he was hoping the whole process of riding in the back of a cop car and seeing the inside of a police station would be enough to scare these kids straight. Obviously he didn't know Jonathan.

Thereafter Jonathan and Officer Douglas "got together" once a month or so. Jonathan never made his deals in the same place twice. He was never officially caught again, but Officer Douglas made a point of making his presence known. Sometimes he'd wait outside the school in the afternoon as the students were leaving. He knew which exit Jonathan used. Nothing dramatic would ever happen. In fact, Officer Douglas wouldn't do much more than make small talk while he walked Jonathan part of the way home (48 Broad was only four blocks from the high school). Sometimes the small talk would veer into the territory of confiding. Officer Douglas became a sort of ersatz therapist. He was in his forties, divorced with a kid. You know the rest.

By the end of Jonathan's freshman year, when 48 Broad takes place, Jonathan Roggebusch and Officer James Douglas had established a dynamic that was a multi-headed hybrid: Cop and criminal, therapist and patient, big brother and little brother, father and son. Rival golfers? That might be a stretch, perhaps only inasmuch as the first-place golfer is always being pursued by the rest of the field. However, seeing's how Jonathan was first place on the green most of his high school career, and that Officer Douglas never could catch him a second time in flagrante vis-à-vis that other kind of greenage, perhaps rival golfers is an apt metaphor after all.

Notes on Faith

One weekend afternoon in May of 1986, two of Faith's teenage stepkids, Stephen and Jonathan, were having a heated argument in the kitchen of 48 Broad St. What were they bellowing about? Oh who knows? It probably started as something you and I would consider innocuous. Stephen and Jonathan never got along from the word go, but more on them in their own posts. For now, suffice it to say that these two behemoths looked ready to come to blows when their stepmom came down to the kitchen using the backstairs that led to and from the master enclave on the second floor.

It's too bad that Stephen and Jonathan were most likely arguing about so much bullshit, because our Faith here, her bullshit quotient was a flat zero. Yes, that's probably what you need to know up front about the matriarch of this three-story Queen Anne. The bullshit needle started at zero. And it stayed at zero. We're talking frozen, okay? So when she came upon these two going at each other, she said bluntly and with a volume slightly lower than normal that they should knock it off. Of course Stephen and Jonathan did no such thing. They'd been fighting on a regular basis since they were old enough to raise their fists, long before their stepmom entered their lives. They certainly weren't about to stop just because she said so. Of course, like most teenagers, they grossly underestimated adults, and no adult more so than their stepmom. Keeping her temperament and tone level, she reiterated that it really would be a good idea if they stopped. Again, nothing. Then Faith, rather than upping the volume a notch or two, suddenly spun the dial full blast and told them to KNOCK IT OFF!

This at least shut them up, but not for long. Faces glowing red and chins decorated with spittle, they turned to their stepmom, whose eyes bored holes through their heads. They considered her with mild curiosity, as if she were a new pair of salt and pepper shakers, before turning back to each other and going right back at it, this time with some pushing and shoving thrown in.

That did it. With all the purpose of a Major League pitcher, Faith retrieved a can of peas from the cupboard, did her best windup, and hurled it at her two stepsons. Seriously, Faith didn't just toss it or chuck it. She Nolan Ryan-ed it.

It smacked Jonathan square in the temple.

While secretly he reveled in Jonathan's pain, Stephen exploited the incident to advance his mission of convincing his father that Faith was a stark-raving lune. That night he marched up to his father and said, "See?! She threw a can of peas at Jonathan! She's crazy!" To which Frank, buzzed from his nightly dosage of Scotch and soda, waved away his first-born's concerns with a heavy-lidded smile and a slurred, "Bullshit. You and your brother shouldn't've been fighting in the first place." He paused to take a sip before saying, "And besides. You two are twice her size. Consider the situation from her point of view."

Ah yes. Point of view. This concept is key when discussing Faith. Well let's be honest, it's important when talking about most people, but when it's a tough nut like this woman... Consider: At dinner one night, within a week or so of the pea incident, the Roggebusch clan was sitting around the table having tacos. At one point the topic of Boss Hogg, the next-door neighbor, came up. I'm not sure why. I think Dan or Louis was talking about all the cats the old coot seemed to have. Nine-year-old Barry, the youngest of the clan and the protagonist of 48 Broad, giggled and remarked on how ugly Boss Hogg was. To which Faith immediately bored her eyes through his soul and said, "You can be ugly and nice." Frank looked at his wife and said, "Faith. Calm."

That remark was like a figurative can of peas to the head. It hurt Barry quite a bit because it was a cheap shot at the lingering after-effects of an illness that had nearly killed him three years earlier. For two weeks he'd been bedridden with a double-whammy of Bell's Palsy that paralyzed the left side of his face and a virus that had kept his fever consistently above a hundred. When he came out the other side of that ordeal, the left side of his face had suffered permanent muscle tone damage so that it always looked lopsided. In a family chockfull of handsome and charismatic siblings, Barry came down with a four-alarm case of ugly duckling syndrome. Faith's telling him point blank that he was ugly didn't help matters.

Now consider Faith's point of view. Barry was the youngest of the house and was accordingly, in her opinion, a whiny little brat. From her perspective, Frank wasn't remotely the disciplinarian Barry needed. Or the other siblings needed, too, for that matter. But as she did with Frank's other kids, Faith never got too involved in telling Barry what to do. She'd tell Frank, and he'd pass it along to him. Sometimes, though, her no-bullshit policy would mandate a circumnavigation of the usual chain of command. Just ask Stephen and Jonathan.

Her two biological kids, John and Alexander, were no safer just because they were, ya know, actually related to her. One of the gang's favorite pastimes during the eighties was playing video games on the Commodore 64. If you think having a video game platform of any kind in a house with seven kids was like sending an open invitation to disaster, you'd be right. Frank and Faith tried to structure the kids' time around when they did homework versus when they watched TV or played video games. They set aside an hour a night for homework. The kids couldn't stay up past a certain time, depending on the age of the kid in question. It didn't always work, though, and Faith's two kids were as guilty as anyone. On one particular evening she was stomping down the first-floor hallway from the living room to the kitchen. When she passed the game room (officially known as the pool room since it originally contained a pool table), she saw Alexander watching Barry play the Commodore and cried out: "I'll blow it up! I'll blow that fucking thing up!"

By now you might think Faith's approach to parenting veered toward the harsh side. Maybe it's harsh for you, but for her course, it was par. To understand why, we should probably go a few decades back and a few thousand miles west.

Faith Roggebusch was born Faith Drummond in El Cerrito, California, a suburb of San Francisco on the east side of the bay, about ten or so miles north of Berkeley. She was the second of three kids, with an older brother named Stevie and a younger sister named Sarah. When she was still in grammar school, the family moved to Berkeley. Their house was perched on a hill with a gorgeous view across the bay.

Soon after arriving in the new digs, Faith befriended an elderly man who lived in a house on the way to school. She would often find him outside tending his lawn and flower beds. Most of the time they wouldn't exchange more than a hello, but now and again Faith would stop at the guy's fence to chat about this and that. She'd vent about the kids at school who made fun of her nerdy glasses and bony figure. He would offer advice about how to deal with it, the recurring theme being patience: This too shall pass. But if the kids were persistent enough, maybe they should all get together in the principal's office to talk it out. This old guy, by the way, was none other than Chester A. Nimitz, the five-star admiral who commanded the entire U.S. fleet in the Pacific during World War II. Indeed, Admiral Nimitz was one of only six men to achieve the five-star rank during the war (he got his in December of '44). Only two others got it after the war. That's pretty huge, right? We're talking the largest naval operation and fleet of any kind the world had ever seen. To this day there's never been anything like it. And the man who ran it all retired to Berkeley where he dabbled in gardening and befriended a little math whiz named Faith.

A house with a view and having Admiral Nimitz as her pal were the only good things about Faith's childhood. Her father was a raging alcoholic who liked to pass the time by backhanding Faith and Sarah. Literally. And often right there at the dinner table. Now and again Dad would whack Faith so hard that she'd fall out of her chair unconscious. Mom wasn't exactly a vast improvement. For starters, she was riddled with arthritis, and so accordingly would rarely be in a good mood. But Mom went beyond grouchiness. She figured her kids were no good, and it made no difference how much they excelled at school. For her part, Faith was a math genius. While other people banged their heads over geometry and wept at calculus, Faith wasn't fazed by any of it. She eventually went to UC Berkeley and scored a degree in math. Then she went to the University of Colorado in Boulder and got her master's. While being away from home at least meant Dad couldn't clock her, her scholastic success didn't make so much as a nick in her mom's displeasure.

For reasons neither Faith nor her siblings could ever discern, their mom held in much higher esteem the family of her sister, Faith's Aunt Suz. Mom thought Suz's kids, Faith's cousins, were far superior to her own. The reason that baffled the hell out of everyone was because there didn't seem to be an obvious reason for it. If Faith's cousins had all been rocket scientists, that would've been something, but none of them excelled at school like Faith did. Family gatherings? As they say in Jersey, fuhgeddaboutit. Mom would always find a way to make Faith feel like shit. More than once this took the form of Faith not having a boyfriend. Her cousins, all three girls, never had much trouble finding a man. They weren't exactly supermodels, but they weren't, as Faith's mom liked to dub her second born, a pirate's dream (sunken chest). The only comfort Faith could take away from these get-togethers was that she wasn't alone in Mom's crosshairs. Stevie often had to endure his poor grades being called out. Again, the cousins weren't exactly straight A material, but at least they never got Ds and Fs, which Stevie routinely did. And so on. It didn't really matter in the end. Even when Faith did land herself a man, Mom found something else to criticize.

When Faith left Berkeley for Colorado, she never looked back. On her way to getting her master's, she met and fell for a fellow math student named Ford Peterson. While Faith stopped with her master's, Ford continued up the ladder until he scored his PhD. With five degrees between them, they settled in the Boulder area where Ford scored a teaching job at the school. Faith had a tough time finding work that didn't involve teaching in a high school. When she suggested going for a doctorate herself, Ford said no way. In fact, he sort of suggested she not pursue a career in math at all. Although he never said it outright, Faith would forever think her first husband just didn't want a spouse competing with him in his field.

As good a sport as one could be in that kind of bind, Faith went back to UC Boulder, this time to get her bachelor's in music. She and her sister had taken piano lessons as children. Maybe they weren't the best at practicing, but they always had Dad to beat the shit out of them if they ever wavered. Even with that kind of motivation, Faith never viewed the piano as more than her parents' lark, something to do simply because they mandated she learn it. For some reason, perhaps because her brain handled notes like it did numbers, she excelled at it. But then she was off to Boulder. Outside her parents' sphere, she promptly let go of the instrument. When she enrolled in UC's music program, she chose the organ as her specialty. It was different from the piano, but not so different that she couldn't start out with a wee bit of a head start. In fact, Faith aced the program and graduated summa cum laude in three years.

Before going into the dissolution of Faith's marriage to Ford, I should mention what happened to her siblings. Like Faith, they pretty much fled the nest as soon as they could. Stevie moved up to Sacramento where he could nurture his cocaine addiction in peace. After two overdoses and two near-death experiences by the time he turned thirty, he finally went clean (as clean as you can be smoking a pack of cigarettes a day) and found work appraising the value of tree plots that were candidates to be cut as timber.

As for Sarah, she went south. She graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in history. Then as now, UCSB was renowned for its party scene. It was at one such party where she met her future ex. No sooner did they get settled somewhere in Ventura County than this guy realized it'd be so much easier if he could strum his guitar and smoke pot while wifee went to work and took care of their two kids. Whereas Faith didn't take much shit, Sarah had a habit of taking a lot. Call it a hangover from her childhood. But she did have her limits. When her man joined a society that conducted ceremonies requiring supplicants to bathe in sheep's blood, she'd had it. Sarah divorced him and, no surprise, had no trouble convincing the judge that she should have full custody of the kids.

Faith, meanwhile, had two kids of her own before she and Ford split. Alexander and John Peterson are, of course, two of the seven kids who end up at 48 Broad in the eighties. When they were still in elementary school, their parents attended a math conference at UC Boulder. Also attending was an economist (and married father of three) from Washington, D.C. named Frank Roggebusch. If you've read the post on Frank, you know the score. He and Faith hit it off right away. She represented a new beginning for him. And now you can see how he did the same for her. They eventually got married and bought that three-story Queen Anne on the corner of Broad and Buttonwood.

And talk about bouncing back, before you could say "infidelity," Ford landed on his feet in the San Fernando Valley married to another woman. This is where John and Alexander would spend their summers during the eighties, and where they'd eventually relocate after high school.

Now I can't talk about Faith's marriage to Frank without relating how Frank had to meet Aunt Suz. After Faith accepted Frank's proposal, they flew to the west coast to meet the fam: Faith's parents and siblings, the fearsome Aunt Suz, the hated cousins, and more. The aunt and cousins, in particular, were all fired up to give Frank the proverbial third degree. Not only was Faith's father not much of a threat, but he and all the other men involved were disgusted at the prospect of Aunt Suz sounding off. Which is why, as soon as dinner was over, the men bolted. That's when the interview, such as it was, began. It was pretty much what you'd expect. They were especially interested in Frank's scholastic and professional background. With a PhD from Johns Hopkins and a CV that included the Department of Energy, it wasn't much of a problem for Frank. Further, he'd had a few Scotch and sodas at this point and so was able to take it all in stride. Finally Aunt Suz announced that the interview was over and that Frank had passed inspection.

"Oh," Frank said. "I hadn't realized that I was being inspected."

"Yes," she said, "that was the point."

"Well actually, I thought I was meeting you and yours for the same reason. And so far, I've yet to make up my mind."

I don't need to tell you that Aunt Suz became livid. Frank and Faith had their cue to go back to the hotel. Faith was ready to do cartwheels. It was hard for her to talk about her aunt and cousins without using words like "flaming douche bags."

When they were settled in Jersey, with Frank teaching econ at Temple University while still moonlighting for Energy, Faith scored a plum gig with a firm up in Princeton writing software for industrial robots. And she kept up with the organ. Those extra college years studying the instrument had gotten her hooked. If they paid organists what they paid people who worked with robots, she'd've picked the organist job any day. As it was, she could only do it on weekends. At first this was simply playing Sunday mornings at a Methodist church in Riverton. By the time May of 1986 arrived, when 48 Broad takes place, she was ensconced as weekend music director at the Episcopal church in Medford, while her robotics career was thriving.

All was well on the professional front. Now on the home front...?