from Broadway musicals, like “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. I was mortified when girls my own age walked in, turned around, and walked out. I so wanted to go into a rockin’ version of “Wipeout” or “Louie Louie,” instead of a waltz from Louis XIV, or so it seemed. We’d set up in the grand ballroom of the Lodge, and from 7:30 to 10:00 P.M. we played four sets, each a half-hour long. I had to pull my long hair back, slick it down with pomade and butch wax, and put it in a ponytail. I looked like a fourteen-year-old Al Pacino in Scarface!
I got two or three summers of that under my belt, playing every night for two months with my dad. The audience was older, but now and then some folks would bring in their daughters; it was a family affair. And while I was playing one night this good-looking girl in a white dress came in with her parents. I watched her from behind the drums, eyeing her up and down and fantasizing as little boys do. Her mother would look on while her father, of course, had the first dance with his little cherub. How cute! She had to be fourteen—plump, pubescent perfection, flashing her big green eyes, and hair down to her waist. “Oh, my god,” I thought, and overcome with teenage lust, I let my hair down, though it made my dad very angry. I wanted to let my FREAK FLAG FLY! I’m sure that hearing the songs we were playing, if she weren’t with her parents, any girl in her right mind would have been gone in two seconds! I could see her thinking, “I’m so outta here!” . . . and so was I! The chase was on! During the break, Dad was in the bar with the band and I was drooling in the hallway, looking for the cherub in the white dress.
There was a guy named Pop Bevers who used to come and mow the fields when we got up to Trow-Rico in July. He chewed tobacco—big plug o’ Days Work. I’d sit and talk with him while he rolled his cigarettes and taught me how, too. I’d make my own cigarettes using corn silk. I’d put it on the stone wall, dry it out, roll it up in cigarette paper, and smoke it. Corn silk! I tried chewing tobacco once and got so sick I blew chunks all over my sister Lynda.
Lynda, 1967. Vargas, look out. . . . (Ernie Tallarico)
Then came the drinking years. All summer long my family would collect large quart bottles of Coke. My mom would save empty pop bottles, beer bottles, and wine jugs during the winter when we lived in the Bronx and Yonkers, and we’d bring cases of empty bottles up to Trow-Rico. At the end of the year, when the guests would leave, it would be apple season, and my entire family and I would go pick apples at an orchard and bring them to a place that pressed the fruit. We’d take the juice and put it into the bottles and keep them in the basement of Trow-Rico where they would turn into hard cider. One evening after a show at our barn (where we played every Saturday night), my cousin Auggie Mazella said, “C’mon, let’s go in the basement.” We grabbed a bottle and drank the whole thing out of the tin cups from our Army Navy surplus mess kits. The top of the kit became a frying pan in which you could cook your beans over a can of Sterno. It had a couple of plates, a cup, and silverware—the coolest thing.
The hard cider was strong stuff. We drank it just like we were drinking apple juice, and with no clue that we were getting hammered fast. I stumbled into the barn where the band was jamming and began to entertain the startled guests in an altered state, one to which I would soon become well accustomed. The glow shortly wore off. I felt queasy, staggered outside, fell flat on my torso, and woke up with a mouthful of yard. I crawled back to my cabin. Had I learned my lesson? Yes! But not in the way you’d think.
One night at the Soo Nipi Lodge my childhood ended. I went from sitting with Daddy in the bar, having a Coke and eating peanuts, headlong into the evil world of dope! I met some of the staff, the busboys who lived down in the bungalows. Went out there and somebody twisted up a joint. Now, back then, we’re talking 1961, a joint was thin. They were tiny. Pot was so illegal I didn’t want to know about it. Another night I went into town to see a band at the Barn and one of the guys rolled a joint in the bathroom. He goes, “Hey, you want to smoke this?” “Nope,” I said. “I don’t need that! I got enough problems.” Plus I’d seen Reefer Madness, so I passed it up, but then I got curious. I don’t know if was the smell or the romance, but eventually everything that I did was illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Shortly thereafter I started growing pot, hiding it from the family—as if they would ever know what it was. I thought if I put it right there in the field, knowing my luck someone would probably mow it down. So I went up to the power lines and planted some seeds, thinking that maybe that was far enough away. I figured I could just go up there and water the plants whenever necessary. But first off, I took a fish—a perch that I’d caught in the lake—chopped it up in little pieces, and put it on the stone wall so the summer heat would ferment it. After two weeks, flies are buzzing around it. It’s rotten, just stinky! I mulched it with dirt, put it in the ground, took my pot seed, and went up and watered it every day. Two months later, I have a freakish bonsai of a pot plant. It’s had plenty of fertilizer, but for some reason it wasn’t growing. The stems were hard like wood. What’s wrong? I wondered. Maybe it was because New Hampshire’s cold at night—that’s it! Wrong. Turns out they’d sprayed DDT or some pesticide under the power lines that stunted the plant’s growth. Hey, motherfuckers! I was pulling leaves off and smoking it and getting high anyway. But the plant only had seven leaves on it. Still, I loved getting high and being in the woods. I would trip and go up to the mountains and streams with Debbie Benson—she was my dream fuck when I was fifteen.
I’d get high smoking pot with my friends in my cabin. We’d lock the door, even though I never had to hide my pot smoking from my mom. I’d say, “Mom, you’re drinking! Why don’t you smoke pot instead?” I’d twist one up and say, “Ma, see what it smells like?” She never said, “Put that out!” mainly because Mom loved her five o’clock cocktail (or the contact high).
When I couldn’t get a ride from Trow-Rico down to the harbor—which is what, four miles?—I walked. In New Hampshire at night in the woods, it was so dark, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. All those terrifying stories I’d told to my friends back in the Bronx came teeming to life. Wolf packs! Black widow spiders! Silhouettes of the Boston Strangler! Blood-thirsty Indians! I knew there weren’t any Indian tribes left up at Sunapee. We—the white man—had wiped them out. But what about the ghosts of the Indians? They would be really pissed off, rabid with unquenchable bloodlust. Or else I was trippin’ on my mom’s homemade hard cider.
When clouds went over the moon the road got pitch black and I went, “Oh, shit!” I tapped my way with a stick like Blind Pew from Treasure Island. Really lonely . . . and scary. Yonkers and the Bronx were always lit up. You could hide in the snowbanks and when a car came around the corner you could grab on to the bumper and ski along behind it. But in Sunapee I almost had to crawl on my hands and knees to follow the white line down the middle of a dark country road. Later on I’d be back on my hands and knees following another kind of white line down a different dark road.
When I lived up there and September came and everybody was gone, I’d feel abandoned. Rough stuff when you’re young. I used to think, am I going to be that crotchety old fuck yelling at kids to get off of my lawn? No, that’s not me. I was the kid pissing on the lawn. You know, at this point in my life, I’m still in the woods. There’s still so much I’m not sure of, and I kinda like that. It’s the fear that drives us.
“Seasons of Wither” comes from the angst and loneliness of those nights when I was walking down that spooky road.
Fireflies dance in the heat of
Hound dogs that bay at the moon
My ship leaves in the midnight
Can’t say I’ll be back too soon
They awaken, far far away
Heat of my candle show me the way
