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.
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.
