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.