The Streets With No Names

Some time in 1989 or 1990, I was driving through Massachusetts on my way to visit Uncle Frank and Aunt Theresa Hebert on Cape Cod. When I was just outside of Springfield I came under sudden attack of impulse to find and explore the old Air Force Base I used to live on in 1972 – Westover Air Force Base. It had closed in ‘72, shortly after we left and I had no idea what I would find if I were to try to locate my old house, the old street, or the base itself.

I found the base. It had reopened. I didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad sign, as I figured they would never let me on base without an official ID card if it were an operating base once again. But if it were a neighborhood I would likely be able to drive where I wanted, find my old house, and maybe even go in it if the people living there would let me. ‘See my old bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, dining room. The layout is still fresh in my mind and each room still has its distinct and different memories that come flooding back as soon as I do a mental walk-through.

The laundry room is the first room you walk into. I remember walking into the laundry room with a bloody nose once. Leslie use to beat me up every day after school and my mother would never do anything about it. So I was glad that I came home with a bloody nose this time to prove that I was really being beaten up every day after shool. (Leslie is her real name. I didn't change it to protect the innocent. She was guilty as sin. I hope one day she reads this and she finds me so I can punch her in the nose. And don't wait until we're 90 and your on blood thinners, Leslie! Show yourself now!) Where was I? Yes, one particular day I marched into the laundry room with a bloody nose and a quote from a Bill Cosby album, “Mom, if you really love me you'll go out there and beat her up!"

She just laughed. But my brother loved me because he did go out there, find Leslie, pick her up by her ankles, shake her and tell her to leave his little sister alone! And she did. I didn’t have to walk home via the dirt road that took me past Spooky Trails anymore. I could show my face through the neighborhood sidewalks and not have to worry that mean Leslie was going to pop out of nowhere with her sidekicks. All because one day I called her a “shit-n’-fucker” to top the swear she had just yelled across the street to me. For no reason other than that I was there. One day I tried a delay tactic by engaging Leslie in pre-fight pander. I asked her “Leslie, why do you beat me up every day after school?” I thought she was going to say "Because that time you called me a shit-n-fucker!" But no. It was worse than that. It was worse because she couldn't remember why she went out of her way to track me down and harrass me and my sisters. She thought for a minute and finally said “I dunno.” I thought that would discontinue her daily ritual but it only distracted her. Sometimes she would find another kid to beat up and my sisters and I could slip by her but other times she continued to beat us up as well. Until the day I walked into that laundry room with the bloody nose.

The next room was the living room. The left wall had the Laffey’s house on the other side of it, an exact replica of ours but in reverse. I remember the little black and white television airing President Johnson’s funeral and my brother saying to me “You should watch this. This is historical.” He was glued to the TV and thought we should be too. No, what was historical was the secret that Johnson went to his grave with about Kennedy's assassination. THAT was historical but that wasn't on the news.

Off the living room was a little hallway that led to an even smaller bathroom. The hallway had two closets on each side. One closet held linens. The other was my brother’s “bedroom”. A mattress fit across one shelf and the shelf above it was removed so he wouldn’t bang his head when he sat up in the morning. He didn't seem to mind his unusual sleeping quarters.

Every base we have lived on there is the conversation piece: my brother’s bedroom. Living with six sisters in military housing that wasn’t designed for seven kids, the only boy always got the leftovers. The kitchen, the dining room, they all have memories that are different for each of us, at each of our homes, but the memories correlate when it comes to my brothers bedrooms. Everyone, including our friends from the old bases, remembers the exact same thing – how unusual! So unusual that it left indelable memories of great detail and some exageration in the minds of our friends and neighbors. Mrs. Bosley remembers that Mrs. Parish's son used to love to come over to our house to play with Steve in his "bedroom" (the laundry room off the kitchen) because they could reach the refrigerator from his bed.

That, I'm sure, was an exageration. His bed was a shelf above the washer and dryer with a mattress on it and the fridge was about three feet away. So unless they had Stretch Armstrong arms they were stretching the truth.

I pulled up to the security gate to ask the man in a military uniform if I could drive in and see my old school and my old house. I explained that I used to live on Westover Air Force Base and I wanted to go back and see my old house. He looked at me kind of funny when I asked him where Powell street was. I asked, even though I knew I'd be able to find it myself.
"Powell?"
"Yea, it's just off of Davis," I said, waving toward the left.
"Davis is over there," he said, waving toward the right.
"Are you sure? I remember it being over there to the left of Selser Elementary. I used to walk home from school every day and I went that way.”
"It's been over there as long as I've been here. How long ago did you live here?"
"1972. The last year before the base was closed."
"Oh. Well they took down all the signs after they closed the base. When they reopened the base they didn't put the sings in the old places."

I hadn't thought of doing such a thing but I'd guessed that it sounded possible. I imagined a shed in which all the signs had been stacked. They'd pull them out by the ones on top first and place those on the streets they were using. Since they didn't reopen the entire base, they didn't need all the signs and somewhere in that storage shed was a sign that said Powell Street.
I looked at him and hesitantly asked, "Would it be okay if I came in so I could check out my old school and street?"
"Sure."

I could have cared less about the school. Although it was the first building I recognized and from there I knew I could find my way "home". I drove passed Selser Elementary where I can say without a doubt that that's where I got the worst education of my life. Miss. Roback, who we called Miss. Robot, didn't teach. She watched us fill in the blanks on papers all day, and put the papers in the bins she had lined up on the radiator while she thought about what TV dinner she was going to have that night. I imagined that when she went home she thawed out a frozen TV dinner and ate it on a TV tray in front of her TV that flickered until 10pm when she climbed into bed and started the next day all over again, same as the last, in the polyester pantsuit she laid out the night before. The first time I heard Eleanor Rigby, I thought of her.

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I looked for Miss Roback on yahoo people search and I couldn’t find her. One Mrs. Roback, who wasn’t her, left a message on my machine, telling me she wasn’t the Mrs. Roback I was looking for but she hopes I find her. She sounded like a very sweet Mrs. Roback. I’d wished she was our teacher. Sometimes I wonder what ever happened to Mrs. Roback. Did she finally come out of the closet in the 80s? Did she come out of her shell ever? Become a skydiver, bungy jumper? Or did she just melt into the suburbs and disappear?

I passed Selser Elementary with narely a glance, took a left toward "Davis", and finally another left onto a street where a sign that said "Powell" used to be. There were no signs up for the housing part of the base since it was not being used. The streets looked as though they hadn't been driven down since the last family left. Powell Street was completely run down. The paint on all the yellow houses was peeling off, the windows and doors were boarded up and spray painted. They could have been sold as low income housing, but no. They just stood like tombstones. It was a ghost town. No signs of the lives that were there. No Major Kehoe, Major Laffey, Major Soto, Major Marshall over the doors, bicycles in the driveway, cars with metal bumpers and wood paneling on the sides driving by. It was hard to remember living there because it looked so dead. At least when I went back to Clinton Sherman there were people still using those homes and the energy they once contained seemed to carry on by the families inside who unknowingly kept them stoked.

I walked around the driveway, noticing the garage where Dewayne and Joe Laffey used to play the drums. I looked into our garage where our pinto used to park. I used to sit inside it at night while my parents were inside watching the news and think about "adult things" like how to drive the car and how much gas cost and one day when I would drive a car to work. I walked through the breezeways between the house and the garage where I had planted tulips. I walked into the backyard where I found my cat Tiger. I walked around the other side of the garage where we posed in front of the bright yellow forsythia on Easter Sunday in our Sunday best. My mother's bold red hair high up in a beehive hairdo. I walked along the dirt road that lead to Spookey Trails. The tall chain link fence was still there, hidden behind birches and sumac.

It didn't feel like going home. It felt like visiting a cemetary where the names have all been washed away by Mother Nature and Time.