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.