by Edward Jackson
Children of the 1970s wax poetics of that time as if it were some utopia. A time free of the so-called dangers of today’s world. A time free of the internet and cell phones where parents tracked where we were. A time free of busy schedules with organized activities and play dates that prevented freedom for creativity. A time free of tiger moms and helicoptering parenting.
And it was free of those things, but that by no means makes the 1970s some era of bygone years where the world was safer. We just didn’t have access to information that gave us the stories that things were dangerous all around us. I would argue that the 1970s was a more unsafe world than today. A world free of seat belt and helmet laws, supervision of children was laxed, and label warnings were unheard of. Air pollution and gridlock were heightened. It was a time when a twelve-year-old Jodi Foster could play a prostitute in the ultra-violent Taxi Driver. Crime was high, infrastructure was crumbling, and inner cities were riddled with sex workers and porn shops. To be clear, I have no problem with porn shops and sex workers, and I really like Taxi Driver as a meditation on a man’s descent into madness.
While my summers did not involve my mother ushering me from one expensive day camp to another, I did ride a very unsafe ten-speed without a helmet. The brakes were rubbed raw, and the chain was rusted. I rode down two hills to the local Y to play tennis where I drank water out of old tin tennis cans surely poisoning me and cutting my lip. However, the sound of a new can of tennis balls being opened brings back vivid memories of inhaling the smell of felt and rubber carcinogens that I inhaled with joy only to be replaced with the same joy upon discovering cocaine in college.
Pets of the 1970s were also unsafe and lived among us in that dangerous world. Designer dogs that fit into purses didn’t exist for the most part. In my neighborhood, one without sidewalks, people didn’t walk their dogs like it was an obligation to prevent pet obesity. Vets didn’t shame pet owners if they brought in a dog that was clearly beyond the BMI chart for its size. No one even knew about BMI in the 1970s. Registering dogs and cats was not expected and getting pets vaccinated was rich people stuff. We were not rich people. Instead we were that family. That family whose pets ran free, shit anywhere they wanted, and went to the vet as often as we went to the dentist. To be clear, that wasn’t all that often. We went to the dentist only when the pain became unbearable and our pets visits to vets was the same.
There was a term latchkey kids in the 1970s for kids who went home to an empty house. That term latchkey kids couldn’t be applied to us since that would mean we actually had keys to our house. My mother believed that replacing a broken window or door was far more expensive than anything inside the home so there was no need to lock it. If people were going to break in, they’d come right through an unlocked door. I don’t think anyone even knew where the keys to our house were.
We ran free with little rules regarding time. During the summer I watched four hours of soap operas with rape and incest storylines. To this day, I still think of Beth Raines from Guiding Light and the abuse she endured at the hands of her stepfather Bradley. I was eleven the summer of Beth Raines’ incest storyline. Summer evenings were for watching horror movies in friends’ basements on HBO with titles like Massacre at Central High and My Bloody Valentine. I saw my first grown up penis while watching Massacre at Central High. I would like to think that watching that movie was my first realization of my homosexuality. I assumed that all horror movies must show penises, so I watched them in voracious amounts to see more of them. Little did I know at the time I was wrong. Bare breasts were necessary in horror movies, but the penis was an anomaly. I continued watching horror movies with high hopes of seeing more penises. Perhaps that first experience of seeing a penis in a horror movie at the age of nine is what cemented a love of horror movies that I still have today as a gay man who is long winded on his dissection of Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as homoerotic horror.
It seemed that everyone in our neighborhood had dogs. Next door they always had German shepherds that wore red bandanas. I steal this fashion dog accessory today, but mine wear rainbow, tie-dye, and holiday themed bandanas. Most neighbors had fenced in yards, so while they didn’t walk their dogs, their dogs did get to run free in large, fenced in backyards. Our backyard was not fenced in because we were that family.
The first dog I remember us having was a fat dachshund named Scuffy. I always hated that name. It sounded like a name poor people would give a dog. Scuffy wasn’t nice and we were poor so it fit. She seemed angry all the time. When we would unload the groceries from the back of the forest green station wagon that had faux wood paneling, she would dive into the brown paper bags for raw meat. Scuffy would take it to the front foyer closet that was always ajar. In that closet there was a chest that was always propped open. I can still see the shiny sheen of that wood chest and the gold fixtures that kept it propped up. Scuffy would dive into the endless well of coats, hats, single socks, and unmatched mittens that were shoved into that chest and eat her catch of the day. Mostly it was raw hamburger meat.
That’s one of few memories of Scuffy I have. I spent my first seven years with this dog. There are no pictures of any of us cuddling her. I have no idea how my parents came to adopt her. She was always rooting her nose into things, looking for food I presume.
We lived on a road, Parchmount, that was neither busy nor sleepy. It was not suburban or urban or rural. It was just a street in a grided neighborhood that was meticulously laid out on a map. No house had a second floor, and all had finished basements of some sort it seemed. People had wood furniture with televisions and stereos encased in them. That furniture had to have been weighed by the tons. We lived fifteen minutes out of town, and a five-minute bike ride down a hill to the paper plant that stunk up the area and polluted the river.
I spent most of my days going across the street to my only friend in the neighborhood. I was a Catholic school kid, and no other kids went to Catholic school in that neighborhood. But this lovely young girl was kind to me and a good friend. We played mostly at her house since mine was so unkept and chaotic. Her parents were kind to me as well. Her father had a mustache, wore jeans every day, and owned a car mechanic shop in town.
I remember playing library at her house, roller skating in her basement around the octopus of a furnace, and simply watching her mom with awed fascination. Her mother had poodles that she loved and kissed them on the nose. Something I mimic and perform to this day. She had a giant pink hair dryer she sat under while she smoked and drank diet soda laced with a cancer-causing substitute. That drink has long been discontinued.
Her mother was kind to my effeminate ways as a young boy, as was her mechanic father. My sister once choregraphed my friend and I in a dance routine to Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot, that I must say, contained some very intricate moves that my friend and I practiced for days. My sister put me in white dance tights, a white t-shirt, and slicked back my dark hair with Vaseline, and we performed this routine for my friend’s parents. I watched their faces for fear of being mocked or laughed at. They did neither. They knew I was that boy. That boy who wore white tights and danced. So, they pretended they were entertained and clapped happily at the end. I am grateful for them for being so kind. My sister on the other hand, had a thing for slicking my hair back with Vaseline and once used a black marker to add a widow’s peak to my large forehead.
We were a mess of a family but we were that family that others looked out for. My father was in a wheelchair, stricken with an overly aggressive form of progressive Multiple Sclerosis. Another family across the street had a fleet of boys, I don’t think I ever knew how many, but they would look out for us. In the middle of winter, when roads were unpassable, one of the boys drove a snowmobile to get my father’s medicine for us. When we needed help with lifting my father in and out of automobiles, they were always there. The teen girls next door and across the street did a great deal of babysitting when not suntanning or washing cars in their driveways. They could be relied on to come in the middle of the night in case my mother had to take my dad to the hospital.
My father eventually was moved to live in a nursing home, and we were alone a lot while my mother worked and went to night school to obtain her degree. On May 13th, 1980, Guiding Light was interrupted with an emergency warning of an impending tornado. We went outside to go look for it because we were that family who didn’t think to take shelter during a tornado, but instead wanted to go look for the tornado. I can still see that dark sky and feel the stillness that one feels when a tornado is nearby. I heard no train whistle sound though.
Seeing us outside, our kindhearted and soft-spoken neighbor took us to her basement. I still remember simply leaving Scuffy outside to fend for herself as the world may potentially be destroyed.
I loved this neighbor’s basement. It had a great bar, ping pong table, and endless bottles of soda. I spent that tornado time staring at a bumper sticker on the wall that read, “Make Poland our 51st state.” I didn’t know what Poland was or even where it was, but I thought it sounded like a really promising idea since this woman was so kind. If they wanted Poland to be a state, then by god it should be. It would take me years to realize the significance of geography knowledge in one’s life.
That tornado tore my Catholic school down and left it in a pile of rubble. I don’t believe in miracles because I have no experience with them so I cannot recognize what they may be. Catholicism is confusing when trying to understand miracles. I was taught about them as if they were magic tricks. One fish becomes more fish than one can count type of thing. Bushes burn magically and deliver messages to people. The bible read like fantasy fiction regarding miracles to a kid like me who didn’t trust things.
But if miracles exist, the fact that no one was in that school building that afternoon may be just the type of miracle Catholicism should be teaching. School had ended at the normal time and all kids boarded busses to go home. Strangely there were no after school activities on May 13th, 1980. Teachers had departed for a meeting at another building and the evening cleaning crew had yet to show up. The building was destroyed, reduced to a pile of bricks, but not one person was injured in relation to that school.
But to me, the real miracle was that we didn’t go back to school for the remainder of the school year. Summer started a good six weeks early for us. That is the perk of the 1970s, no one cared about a compulsory amount of days. No one complained like they did during the Covid-19 pandemic, that without schools open who would babysit the kids? In the 1970s that was for siblings, televisions with soaps playing, and neighbors.
In the end the real miracle may have been the luck of the draw my parents pulled when they bought that house with neighbors who had our backs and cared for us. A neighbor who saw kids trying to look for a tornado and took them to her basement for safety.
We were that family whose pets and kids roamed free and whose mother was prone to yelling for whoever was missing for dinner or when she deemed it was too late to be out. Sometimes it was one or two, other times it was all living beings that came home when our names were yelled from that front door. Scuffy did little running but was often found rooting that nose of hers into garbage in the neighborhood.
Seven wasn’t just a pivotal year to watch horror movies and see my first grown up penis, it was also my first experience with death. One sunny day Scuffy was outside rooting that nose into the ground while her belly, which was calloused from years of dragging, acted as a fifth leg making her slow movement even slower. For an unknown reason, because she never followed me anywhere, Scuffy decided to follow me across the street to my friend’s house and got hit by a car. She didn’t die on impact and the older boys across the street, who often lifted my father when needed, assessed her injuries then came back with a shotgun and put her down. We buried Scuffy in the garden at the edge of our property. That home of ours backed up to a field owned by the public schools and I always liked not having neighbors behind us.
Soon after we adopted a golden retriever who us kids inappropriately named Whiskey. That dog was wild; always in motion, chewing and jumping. This dog was not tamed and hadn’t earned the privilege of running free. We were warned not to let him loose. But Whiskey’s wildness and want of playtime was his downfall. I was walking to that same friend’s house six months after Scuffy died. I made careful sure to close the screen door properly that was metal about four feet up and then screen mesh and windowpane the remainder of the door. Whiskey would jump endlessly when I walked out. That day though, Whiskey’s jumping hit the handle of that screen door loosening it and he ran with endless abandon to follow me. Like Scuffy, he met his fate with a car. Unlike Scuffy, he was not hit by the car, instead he ran with full force into the driver’s side door.
The older boy across the street got his shotgun and put him down for us as the injuries were clearly beyond anything a vet could do. Another grave was dug in the garden and another pet buried.
When I think of these two pet death experiences, I don’t always pivot to think of the actual animal so much anymore. I think of the drivers of the cars. I feel badly that they were put in this position and wonder if they think of it too. I’ve hit animals by accident in my life. Deer, squirrels, and a dog as well. It sucks to take a life. But there is something about killing a pet on accident. You know it was loved and cherished by its family. I think about those two drivers. One sped off, and the other stopped to see the beautiful golden retriever whimpering on the road. I still see his look today. I hate that this happened to him.
When I tell these stories to friends much later in life, they cannot fully comprehend the humanity of these pet deaths. All they hear are shotguns and buried in the garden. It sounds almost barbaric to them. It’s not how people I surround myself with in the urban inner city today did things as a kid. They didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere in Michigan and thought this must have been rural and country folk type stuff. We were neither. We were just poorer than most and lived in that kind of 1970s neighborhood.
In my adult life in Atlanta, pets are given expensive vet care and death is like hospice with IV’s and medicines to stop the heart. It’s calm and peaceful. I too live this way. I don’t own a shotgun to put my pets down.
When friends hear my stories of shotguns they find this way of putting an animal down violent. I fully understand why my friends are horrified by these stories of mine. Stories of dogs named Scuffy and Whisky and cars hitting them, it sounds rough. I understand that the word shotguns sound scary and putting a dog down that way seems so country folk stuff. I think my friends find it offensive but fail to see the difference between gun cultures. These were not people who bought guns for the sake of guns. They hunted. That’s Michigan. And hunting is food and helping out a neighbor by doing the kind thing and putting a gravely injured dog down, a dog that was not going to survive, but surely suffer. Those neighbor boys and their shotguns prevented hours of pain that would have resulted in the same outcome. Death.
I think about that neighborhood a lot and those neighbors of the 1970s. I think of how they all treated an effeminate boy who wore tights and danced to Pat Benatar with acceptance and sensitivity. I think about how they treated my ill father with grace and kindness. I think of how they always had my mom’s back and understood we may have been that family of the neighborhood that was a mess, but we were their family of sorts. I sometimes wonder this as I wax poetics about my neighborhood in the 1970s.
Edward Jackson is a writer and educator whose prose has appeared in various literary outlets. He holds degrees in English and Education, including an MFA from Youngstown State University. He lives in the Midwest with his husband and a menagerie of pets named after Mad Men characters.