Chapter One- Jamestown Rd. The Innocence of Broads


JAMESTOWN RD.

In the North County of St. Louis, close to where the Missouri River dumps its muddy waters into the Mighty Mississippi, is where I grew up. I am what is called a third-generation “Laker”. My grandfather, Harry Sneed, moved to the middle-class neighborhood of Spanish Lake in the late 1950’s and thus became the first Sneed “Laker”.

GRANDPA SNEED
Grandpa Sneed was a product of North St. Louis City who grew up during the Great Depression in a long forgotten area of town often referred to as Hell’s Half Acre. Located somewhere between the ass-kicking neighborhoods of Wellston and the if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you-you’ll-stay-of-here Pine Lawn, these areas are still the worst parts of St. Louis, which has just been named The Murder Capital of America for its second year in a row. By all counts grandpa ran with the rambunctious crowd. The boys from the other side of the tracks who enjoyed their alcohol, hand-rolled cigarettes and wasn’t opposed to getting in a scuffle or two or breaking the law if it made for a little excitement. I’ve heard stories from aunts and uncles about some of grandpa’s escapades but I don’t care to share them here because I can’t believe he did such things. Thankfully, Grandpa Sneed grew up, got married, had children and wanted to better himself. So he moved out of the violent and congested North City and into a little brick Cape Cod house on two acres in the far North County called Spanish Lake. It was here, surrounded by farmland, schools, a Catholic hall, churches, ball parks and play grounds, Grandpa Sneed built a barn on the back acre and filled it with Hackney horses and Shetland ponies. On the front acre he constructed a chicken shed and raise Bantam chickens. It became known as Grandpa’s Farm.

Memories of my grandfather are positive and loving; filled with security and masculine nurturing. Sure, there were the ass whippings with the belts, weeping willow branches and anything else that was within arms reach later in life but as a child, Grandpa Sneed was my rock, my fortress against the storms of abuse and my haven of happiness. He was my only true father figure.

The dominant physical characteristic in the Sneed linage are our blue, crystalline eyes that sit close together porched beneath stern heavy eyebrows. Grandpa’s could beam with happiness one second or slice with anger the next; another characteristic passed down through the male Sneed bloodline. His voice was deep and rustic and he used words like “zink” when talking about where you washed the dishes and “chimley”; the brick part of a fireplace where smoke comes out. His full set of wavy, silver hair, parted and pressed down the middle was reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby minus the wealth and flashy clothes.

Grandpa was of the working class whose wardrobe for every season was the same; leather boots, muted-toned work pants and solid colored button-up short-sleeve shirts. Buried beneath his cotton shirt was the standard post WWII generation’s white undergarment called The Wife Beater t-shirt. I never saw grandpa in a pair of blue jeans or tennis shoes, nor on the hottest summer days did he ever wear shorts. He was from the old school, where men didn’t wear shorts outside. But inside the house it was perfectly normal to run around in your boxer or briefs underwear. Just like grandpa, my dad, brother and I also traipsed around the house in our skivvies when visiting Grandpa’s Farm. Grandma didn’t seem to mind, she had changed our diapers and bathed our naked bodies. Besides, being pantless in the morning made it easier for her to stick grandpa with a needle when it came time for his daily insulin shots.

As far back as my memory goes grandpa was always a diabetic. Sugar was a scarce (and often hidden) commodity around my grandparent’s kitchen. In its place was an abundance of dietetic deviations; “Sweet and Low” sugar substituted instead of real sugar, “Tab” sugar-free soda instead of regular Pepsi and orange juice poured over pancakes instead of syrup. These sugar substitutes were just a normal way of life living in a house with a diabetic and were easily enough to acquire a taste for; it was watching grandma give grandpa two insulin shots every morning that I couldn’t stomach. Sitting next to the eggs on the refrigerator door like expensive tiny jars of Russian vodka was grandpa’s insulin supply. Each day grandma extracted their clear liquid into a syringe and injected it into some part of grandpa’s body. One day it would be in his left arm, the next day his right. The following two days he was jabbed twice in the fatty tissues of each leg. Sometimes he’d even yank down the back of his underwear exposing a big hairy ass cheek and right there at the kitchen table, grandma would stick it. You would think that after years of daily needle pricks, one would become acclimated to their sting but I guess just like the other pricks in life, you never seem to become immune to the pain they cause you. With each poke, grandpa’s face would contort and scowl. Sometimes the needle would hit a tender spot causing him to curse grandma back into the hell from which she came. I couldn’t watch. Like most kids, I was terrified of needles and shots and watching my big, strong and brave grandpa grimace and call out in agony didn’t help sooth my fear. It only strengthened it. But like the bitter taste of pancakes covered in orange juice only lasted as long as you chewed on them, the painful taste of grandpa’s morning insulin shots never lasted long either and soon we were putting our pants on and heading outside to slay our daily dragons. Mine was of the imaginary kind and grandpa’s was of the physical kind.

With two acres of land, a barn filled with horses, a shed filled with chickens, two dogs, three kids, four grandkids and grandma all begging for his attention, grandpa was forced to play the roles of farmer, cowboy, breadwinner, mechanic, groundskeeper, chauffer, foreman, handyman and most importantly, surrogate father. It was Grandpa Sneed who taught me how to ride a pony, a horse, a lawnmower, a tractor and a bike (in that order). While most kids were still learning to ride their bright yellow plastic Big Wheels, I was already galloping on a pony around the pasture one minute and sitting on a riding lawnmower cutting the grass in the same pasture the next. When it was time to get my first hair cut, grandpa was the one sitting across from me at his barber shop promising me a chocolate shake from White Castles if I sat still and didn’t cry. I didn’t cry but I also didn’t sit still. I never sat still. I still don’t sit still. I’m always moving, tapping, rocking, fidgeting or swaying to an imaginary tune in my head. Grandpa never sat still either. Just like me, he was always on the go. Or was it that I was just like him, always on the go? We were cut out of the same Godly granite; two male Sneeds sharing the same name both gregarious and friendly-spirited people who could talk to a stranger as easy as smiling at them, who was always willing to help someone in need and who didn’t take shit from anyone.

One of the most vivid memories of my grandfather’s potentially tumultuous temper is the time we made a trip to the local grocery store called Tom Boy’s. I was maybe six or seven years old. Grandma needed some groceries and since she had never learned to drive, grandpa was her main means of transportation. The three of us all climbed into Grandpa’s pickup truck and drove the mile or two down the street to Tom Boys. Grandpa and I had decided to wait in the truck while grandpa did her shopping. As we sat there hanging out and doing some grandfather/grandson bonding, a rusty old Ford Fairlane pulled up in the parking spot next to us with the stereo blaring Three Dog Night’s “Liar”. A long-haired, hippy looking guy quickly jumped out of his car and in the process he banged his door into the passenger’s side of my grandpa’s pickup truck. He ignored the fact that grandpa and I were in the truck and he kept right on walking into the drug store that was next to Tom Boy’s. Upon hearing the distinctive “dink” sound against his truck, grandpa immediately jumped out and ran over to see if any damage had been done. There was a tiny, yet visible dent in his door.

“Hey you asshole!” Grandpa shouted to the hippie who by then had made his way across the parking lot and was about to enter the drugstore, “You dented my truck with your car door.”

The hippie turned to see who was loudly calling who an asshole and realized he was the object of my grandfather’s articulation. He defiantly rolled his eyes and proceeded to go into the drugstore stopping momentarily to do something really, really stupid; he gave my grandfather the finger. I’ve seen my grandfather pissed many times. I was the often object of his pissfulness, sometimes it was my brother, father, grandma, aunt or uncle. An uncooperative horse, chicken or dog could also get grandpa’s err. And then there were stupid drivers, slow waitresses and blind baseball umpires; all were capable of setting off the trigger to grandpa’s pissfulness. But in each scenario, it was always something the offender was personally doing that was frustrating or aggravating to grandpa. To physically or personally attack grandpa himself, even by a mere flipping of the birdie, was enough to open the missile silos of grandpa’s anger and commence a retribution of ass-whipping war.

A blind person could have seen Grandpa was pissed. A blind person’s seeing-eye dog could have sensed it. I was pissed too. I didn’t like anyone banging their door into my grandpa’s truck and I especially loath anyone gesturing to grandpa with the “fuck you” sign. We both had every right to be pissed but when he told me to roll up the window and lock the door, that’s when my pissfulness turned into scaredfulness. I was too young to know what a James Dean movie was but had I know what a James Dean movie looked like at the time, I would have sat shaking in grandpa’s truck saying to myself, “This looks like a scene from a James Dean movie.” Grandpa lit his Pall Mall, removed his shirt, exposing his white wife beater t-shirt and casually leaned against the front of his truck, tapping his fingers on the hood and waiting for the hippie to reappear from behind the drugstore doors. I sat nervously forward on the seat, secretly excited and prayed that Grandpa wouldn’t kill the guy or the guy wouldn’t kill grandpa; or worst grandma wouldn’t come out before either and spoil the whole thing. After several minutes, the hippie walked back out and saw grandpa was still there, now a raging fountain of pissfulness.

I didn’t hear the exact word exchange; I only watched the verbal confrontation in the front of the truck as the hippie pointed his finger at my grandfather’s face in an act that seemed to be interpreted as “Don’t mess with me old man”. While the next series of events lasted a mere half minute, it played in my mind like the surreal slow and jerky scenes in Spielberg’s war classic, Saving Private Ryan. Like a firecracker’s blast, Grandpa grabbed the hippie by his collar and threw him face first into the hood of his truck. The slamming jolt of his body against the metal shook through the driveshaft, the transmission, the steering column and the dashboard until it finally reverberated through my own little shaking bones. Grandpa then leaned over and said something into the left ear of the hippie. Again, I couldn’t hear the dialog but I imagined it was something like;

‘You need to show a little more fucking respect to your elders or I’m going to beat it into you.”

I watched the hippie’s face contort with pain just as grandpa’s did when he got his morning insulin shots but only the hippie’s face was heightened red and painfully more intense. Grandpa had a handful of the hippie’s long hair clenched in his fist and used it like a tent peg to secure his head in the exact position he wanted it. There were no punches or kicks, no rolling around the parking lot pavement; no knives or guns; just a hippie’s face smashed against the hood of the truck and grandpa in complete dominating control behind him. Through the windshield, I could read the hippie’s lips repeat over and over:

“I’m sorry man. I’m sorry man.”  

And just as quick as Grandpa laid into the guy ready to remove his long-haired head for his lack of disrespect, when he heard those magic words, he let go of him and pointed to the hippie’s car.

“Alright, now you get your ass out of here and have a good day.” I imagined him to say.

The hippie dashed back into his Ford Fairlaine and when he cranked the key to make his get away, his eight-track stereo came back to life, once more blasting the Three Dog Night’s Lyrics;

Ain’t that what you said.
Ain’t that what you said,
Ain’t that what you said,

Liar, Liar, Lair

Grandpa got back into the truck and gave me a big grin and a wink. The fear rushed out of my body and I smiled too. I could see in his eyes, for a brief few minutes, he had visited his past; the glory days of his youth; running dangerous and wild in the streets of Hell’s Half Acre.

“Don’t tell your grandma what just happened.” he instructed.

I promised not to tell grandma but you can bet your ass I went on to tell my mom, dad, my brother and sister, the stranger walking his dog in front of Grandpa’s Farm, my Sunday school teacher and any other ear that didn’t mind hearing. That next Monday at school I was in my natural element standing in the hall surrounded by classmates telling my animated story how my grandpa kicked a hippie’s ass. By the end of the day I had added a couple more hippies to the mix and maybe they had guns or nunchucks, whatever made for a more interesting tale. It’s easy suppressing the truth when the sound track that plays to a particular memory is Three Dog Night’s “Liar”.

I was grandpa’s namesake and was admittedly spoiled by him and my grandma. They doted on me as their first grandchild and showered me with favoritism over my half-sister and brother. This created a wedge of sibling jealous and rivalry, bonding my sister and brother together as one offensive antagonizing team and me and the “Sneeds” as the other defensive team which made for some interesting chapters of my life that I’ll share later.

Although I was spoiled and knew I was the apple of my grandfather’s eye, I don’t recall him ever actually verbalizing he loved me. The male Sneed’s weren’t the kind of men who vocalized or showed affection. My grandfather never showed it towards my father, just as my father never showed it to me. But when it came down to it, I knew grandpa Sneed loved me. And while he never wrapped his arms around me and spoke those three words, as I learned to do on a daily basis with my children, it was expressed in every pat on the head, every gleaming smile he flashed my way and every time he called me “Kid O’Kid”. And on those special occasions, when grandma and grandpa would push their twin beds together and let me sleep on the crack between them, I would snuggle up next to Grandpa and inhale his natural cologne made of three very distinctive scents; his own body sweat, the scent of the great out doors and the lingering stench of Pall-Malls. On an individual bases, these smells can be offensive and belligerent but combined and smeared on the brow and body of Grandpa Sneed, they made for a masculine musk that still lingers in my scent memory. I knew I was in the safest place in the world, no monsters, robbers or long-haired hippies could get me because Grandpa Sneed loved me and was there to protect me. I can honestly say, besides for my son, he was the only male, who I truly Loved with a capital L.

After a long employment as a foreman at Emerson Electric, grandpa retired and used his horse handling skills to become a mounted Park Ranger for the St. Louis County Parks. He spent his golden years riding horses around Spanish Lake Park checking fishing licenses, confiscating alcohol from under-age teenagers (many of which would one day become my friends) and patrolling the park. Sometimes I would ride my bike up to Spanish Lake Park and have lunch with Grandpa. I was proud of Ranger Sneed dressed in his kaki uniform and shiny badge and sitting heroically upon his horse. Grandma often accused him of cheating and having all kinds of girlfriends but I didn’t believe those accusations. He was an old man and old men don’t cheat on their wives and have girlfriends. But as I got older, I fell from that spell and I realized the appeal that draws women to men in uniform. I wondered if there hadn’t been any validity to those accusations of infidelity. Besides, where did I get my turbo-charged sexuality and womanizing from? Surely it wasn’t from my father.

GRANDMA SNEED
Grandma Sneed was, for lack of a better word, Baptist. By some strange mystery, upon her death, her diary found its way into my possession. Reading your grandmother’s diary during the Great Depression has the potential of being extremely interesting. There was Black Monday, soup lines, Al Capone, speakeasies, Amelia Earhart, Jazz, the Rise of Hitler, each a promising interesting chapter of a life lived during the Swing age. Unfortunately, unlike grandpa, the bad boy of the block, Grandma was a preacher’s kid or PK as they’re infamously called. While most PKs I have ever known (some in a biblical sense even) were wild and rebellious, Grandma was one of those goody-goody church-going and Bible studying PKs. Her diary entries are short, boring snippets of days spent playing card games with her sister and evenings going to prayer meeting and movies. I know the exact date she met my grandfather and have read her secret frustrations with dating him. It was the classic—good girl falls in love with bad boy—story. And just when you get to the part where she finally comes to her senses and realizes bad boy is not good for good girl and decides she wants to break up, something tragic happens. Between the prayer meetings or after the movies, the bad boy seduces the innocent good girl and voila, Grandma Sneed became pregnant. Several months later they were married and soon afterwards my aunt was born. I would not learn of this ...until many years later after both Grandpa and Grandma Sneed had passed away. Had I sat down and did the figures of how many years they were married minus the age of my aunt, I would have figured it out. But Grandma Sneed was a God-fearing, Bible reading Christian woman and the thought of her having premarital sex had never crossed my mind. It was impossible. Unimaginable. It was like thinking God was going to let anyone other then Baptists into the gates of heaven.

Shortly after Grandma and Grandpa Sneed moved to Spanish Lake, their youngest son, my father, Harry Philip Sneed Sr. became the second Sneed “Laker” when he married my mother, Irene Alma Farrell and moved into the house who’s address is printed on my birth certificate; 1625 Jamestown Rd.

I don’t know any specifics about my parent’s dating life or their early marriage other then they met on a blind date set up by one of their cousins. Both had been previously married, my father for a short time to a woman known anonymously as “Susan”. She supposedly only married him because she needed some kind of operation and dad had insurance at the time. It was a convenient and temporary marriage that ended upon her recovery.

My mother had also been married to a man named Donald Hauk, who left her upon finding out their second child was diagnosed with severe Cerebral Palsy. Unable to cope with a raising a retarded child, he deserted or divorced my mom and left her to raise, Carolyn and Donnie Jr, my half sister and brother all alone.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on who you ask, she met my father and
I guess there must have been something called love in the beginning. For a young single divorcĂ© to marry a woman with two children, one being mentally and physically retarded, has to say something about the nobleness of my father or the irresistibility of my mother. I’ll put my money on the later.

I might as well pause here and interject a warning to the reader. Chances are the more you read this book, the more offended you may get from its language. You may believe my choice of words like “retarded”, “nigger” and a plethora of other extremely offensive curse words are uncalled for and totally unnecessary. I know there are even some out there in reader world who take offense to the word “Broad” in the title of this book. But allow me to point out these are not my “choice” of words. They are words that were used as a stable vernacular diet in my house. To attempt some sort of political correctness and say that I called my brother ‘mentally handicapped” would be absurd. As a boy, the word handicap was something having to do with golf and was just as foreign as the game to me. In my world growing up, Donnie and every other physically and mental handicapped person was “retarded”. Blacks were “niggers”, homosexuals were “queers” and “fags”, lesbians were “dikes”, cops were “pigs”. Jews were “kikes”, Asians were “gooks”, Mexicans were “spics”, Italians were “wops” and women were “broads”. There was no political correctness or prejudice against who was called a racial slur in our house. Everyone was equally insulted.

[NOTE: Recently some publishers have once again decided to replace the word “nigger” from Mark Twain’s books. They say it’s offensive and degrading. And in today’s society they are absolutely right. But taking the word “nigger” out of Mark Twain’s books and replacing it with “slave” because someone is racially offended, is like putting a loin cloth on Michelangelo’s David because someone is offended by nudity. Advocates of this type of censorship are so caught up in seeing the ugliness of one old, dead, and decaying word, that they don’t see the beauty and majesty of the thriving story. Future generations, don’t ever change my words or censor my books. Better to have them covered with dust sitting on shelves like fine wine waiting for sophisticated, intelligent and open-minded people to taste them on rare occasions then to water them down with politically correctness and censorship so that the masses can swallow them better.]

Curse words, racial slurs and political incorrectness were my normal way of life during my Innocence of Broads years and many years afterwards. It showed the ignorance and prejudices of those who raised me. But I am not my ... grandfather, nor my ... father.

I am me, Harry Sneed III

I was born eight weeks pre-mature exactly one week before Christmas on December 18, 1962 and became the third Sneed “Laker”. The name on my birth certificate says Harry Philip Sneed, Jr. but that name will change over the course of my life taking on different forms until finally, as Samuel Clemens adopted his nom du plum, Mark Twain, I took on my own pseudonym, Speegg Met.

I was a pretty baby, if there is such a thing, who sported a full set of dark hair and carried on the classic bright blue Sneed eyes. For some cruel reason, maybe it was because I was extremely premature or maybe it was merely my parent’s choice but I never got circumcised. I felt it necessary to state this fact here and now in this chapter of my life because it plays such an important part in the other chapters of my life; later, when I’m no longer innocent of broads. It’s strange to image how I was so traumatically embarrassed of being one of the only boys in the neighborhood, in the school gym lockers, in Boy Scouts camp showers, in the entire world that was uncircumcised, that I painstakingly hid it throughout my early life only to announce it to the entire world in this book written later in life. It just shows how we mature and change with time. So often the nouns of our present lives; the people, places and things that seem so monumental and profound become the unimportant and forgotten pro-nouns of the future. I don’t remember her.  ...

In addition to the doctor sparing my penis with the scalpel at birth, he also didn’t cut my umbilical cord short enough. Dad said my belly button stuck so far out they had to tape a quarter to it to push it back in. I sported an “outy” belly button all through elementary school.

I haven’t verified the validity of this next tale but the story goes that at the time of my birth, there was a popular local television program called The Charlotte Peter’s Show. Each week proud parents would send in pictures of their newborn babies and Mrs. Peters would pick the “Cutest Baby of the Week”. The winner was awarded $25 and the baby’s picture was momentarily flashed on the screen. Supposedly, I won one week and got my cute kisser aired on TV and mom and dad got $25. Mom took it as a sign I was destine for greatness in the eye of the public and dad, well he just took the $25 and probably went out drinking.

Some paternal traits like athletic abilities, artistic talents and even professions are often generationally passed down from one male figure to the next. Great musicians are often the offspring of other musicians; same with baseball players and rich bankers. The art of consuming large quantities of alcohol and still remaining relatively sober was a cursed legacy passed down through the male Sneed family tree.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if an Irish man marries and Irish woman and they have kids, their kids are considered to be full-blooded Irish? The same holds true for Italian, Romanian, Polish or any other decent. When you bring two people of the same nationality together and they have children, their children are full-blooded descendants of that nationality.

If that’s the case, then (waving hello) Hi, my name is Harry and I’m a full-blooded alcoholic. That’s right, both my father and my mother were 100% prof...I mean...pure alcoholics therefore I am a purebred alcoholic. And it is because both my parents were alcoholics and I have witnessed firsthand, up-close and personal the misery and destruction alcoholism causes in people’s lives, I evaded alcohol like liver and onions. I’ve never drank my entire life, therefore I have never been drunk. One would think that a person who has never killed billions of brain cells by the effects of alcohol or have forgone nights passed out on dorms floors has a stable mind and clear memory. I only have one response to that....LOL HAHAHAHAH LOL HAHAHAHA LMAO HAHAHA HAHAHA....ROFL....HAHAH!!!!!!!! Riiiiiiggggghhhhttt.

To be totally honest, one must remove the phrase “to be totally honest” from their vocabulary. Whenever I hear someone begin a sentence with... “To be totally honest...” it makes me think that person lies a lot and is normally not honest but they’re going to do something special and be “totally honest” for the next few seconds. I had that epiphany many years ago and no longer use that phrase and make it point to share my little piece of wisdom about being “totally honest” when I hear others say it.

But since this book is part fact and part fiction I’m going to insert it right here:

To be totally honest, I don’t have too many memories of my entire childhood. Like apples that hang on a tree after a fierce storm, the stories of this book are few but ripe and delicious and worthy to be partaken. My mind holds very few details of early (and even later) childhood. That is why this book is only 150 pages. When my friends, siblings and cousins come to me with an excited memory of the past and say things like, “Remember when we did this?” or “Remember when you did that crazy thing?”, I just look at them with the usual blank stupid stare. Nope. I don’t remember.

But the lack of my recollection of my very first house on Jamestown Rd. isn’t because any suppressed memories, it’s because I was but a babe-in-arms and was too young to remember anything. Ironically, years later one of my very best friends would live across the street from this house and I’d pass it on a regular basis. On occasion, my father and I would drive by and I’d ask him for any good stories about the living there. The only memories he was able to recall was the time he started a fire in the fireplace and forgot to open the “chimley’s”  flue and smoke backed up into the house sending mom and us three kids scrambling out of the house. Boring.

Oh...there is one more story he told me that will give you a peak into why I probably don’t recall much of my past. As I stated earlier, my brother Donnie had severe Cerebral Palsy. He was unable to walk, talk or do simple things like feed himself or use his hands functionally. Donnie spent most of his life lying on a mattress on the floor in front of a TV. This allowed my mom the freedom to do domestic chores and take care of my sister and me. On this particular day, it was nap time. My sister and I were peacefully sleeping in our beds down the hall. Donnie was lying on the floor contently watching TV, so mom thought she’d take advantage of the situation and do some laundry. The washer and dryer were in the basement under the stairs so she left the door open to listen in case anyone woke up. As mom was putting in a load of laundry, she heard a noise at the top of the steps. When she looked up, there was Donnie hanging his head over the first stair and smiling through the risers. Mom let out a bloodcurdling scream which jolted my brother to tears then frantically took off to save him from tumbling to his potential death. But when she rounded the corner, there at the top of the stairs, was my father safely holding Donnie and dangling him like a human retarded puppet over the top step. Donnie’s crying woke me up and I started crying which started my sister crying which started my mother crying. Dad thought it was the funniest thing in the world and delighted in telling the story each time we drove by the house.

Thanks for reading my first chapter of The Innocence of Broads. Please follow and share with others.
-Harry "Speegg" Sneed

No comments:

Post a Comment