My Friendship with Ray Haney
CHAPTER FOUR
Now when I think back on Ray’s mom and dad — Beverly and Walter Haney — the first thing that comes to mind is how downright zany Beverly was. I mean, she was ditzier than a meerkat on speed! As for ol’ Walt (that’s how me and my buddies referred to him in secret) — well, ol’ Walt was basically this unapproachable ogre with wiry black hairs springing out of the back of his neck and ears, and he had this big ol’ honkin’ nose that I could see where Ray got his schnozz from. Truth be told, I never really liked ol’ Walt. I always suspected a false piety and distinct perverse nature about him.
Beverly, on the other hand, struck me as the classic knows-her-place, ball-and-chain housewife, with a charming but melancholic nature, and there was something a bit “off” about her that I liked. I can’t put my finger on what, exactly, but ditzy and zany are the operative words! Heck, maybe she just had some sort of nervous condition, as they call it, or some mental aberration, who knows. Certainly not me. I mean, what the hell did I know? I was just a shy, not quite nerdy kid, into sports and all, and pretty danged good at everything, but because of my stunted growth, I was never as big as all the other guys my age, and suffered for that in more ways than one (like being bullied in the 8th and 9th grades), but as a good friend of Ray’s, I spent a ton of time hanging out at his place, and so I got to notice and observe a lot of things about his parents, especially Beverly since she was the one always around, not being the bread winner like ol’ Walt. I saw her as just a plain common housewife consigned to home and chores.
But in truth, Ray and I tended to ignore all the family drama and went about our friendship business apart from the comings and goings of both our families. We swore to and upheld our bond of friendship, finding succor in each other’s companionship, because if the truth be known, we were both pretty much from broken, struggling families.
One day over at Ray’s I saw Beverly washing her reddish curls in some sort of sudsy liquid — turns out it was beer! What kind of a character does that? Was the woman nuts, or did she have a beauty secret? Come to think of it, as I got a little older and my juices started flowing, I noticed that Beverly was actually kind of pretty and sexy, in a downplayed way. I always imagined that she longed for some handsome stranger to sweep her off her feet and whisk her away to Never-Never-Land and leave behind her banal world. What I remember about her mostly, though, is that she struggled to keep a clean home and feed all her kids and wash all their clothes, and get them off to school in time, while also having to attend to the menagerie of animals that had accumulated in the fenced in backyard, now expanded to include a rooster, four chickens and some hamsters, because we all know the kids did shit when it came to cleaning up around the house, let alone to tending to the animals and pets. For being just a plain old common housewife, why shit, Beverly should have been paid twenty bucks an hour or something for all the work she did to keep things together and running as smoothly as things could run in the Haney household.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Beverly could be a pretty decent homemaker when she put her mind to it and applied her domestic talents, for she was always cleaning (no big surprise) and she was conscientious enough to ensure food on the table at semi-regular hours, but it seemed that no one really sat down to eat together as a family, like we did at my house.
One time I was over there, Beverly had cooked up some hamburgers and served ’em up with dollops on the side of that canned syrupy fruit salad, and me and all the siblings, except Ray, gobbled it all down with relish! For her oldest boy, she offered preferential treatment and prepared a special batch of fried red potatoes for him, which he devoured heartily. What confounded me most about Ray’s shit diet, though, is that I don’t once ever recall him being sick, or having a cold, or having to go to the doctor’s, or complaining about being hungry. Not once, if you can believe that.
Now as for ol’ Walt, to me the guy was a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in an enigma, to borrow some expression I heard the other day. He was, for the most part, MIA on the home front, a disappearing act — ostensibly owing to his enterprising nature, his so-called entrepreneurial endeavors — which is to say his workaholic personality. You see, ol’ Walt was hardly ever home, except when he was on the few rare occasions he made his presence known. But I’d bet that over the years I saw him no more than a handful of friggin’ times.
Ray openly admitted his dad was hardly ever around, so he felt like at times he didn’t have a dad, and I told him, “Join the club, Ray, me neither,” ’cause of my own dad’s problems with alcohol. But you can be sure that ol’ Walt was around when it was time to gather the troops, scrub them clean, and whisk them off to church, never a Sunday sermon to be missed. And, I remember this, ol’ Walt would take Ray out of school sometimes, and they’d be gone for two or three days off somewhere, doing what I’m not sure, ’cause Ray really never told me much about those episodes or where he and his dad disappeared to. Naturally, I always was curious, but kept my mouth shut, why Ray seemed to have a slight limp for the next few days like maybe he’d been on some kind of arduous nature outing or something. But that made zero sense at the time.
I will give ol’ Walt credit, though, for trying. Through some means lost to my recollection, he managed to secure ownership of the town’s most popular — well, only — restaurant, an old-timey diner with pinball machines you could tilt and play for hours on end, with old photos of movie stars and Hollywood memorabilia, and cherry red pleather booths, and an americana juke box that for a quarter played honest to god honky tonk country music and shake your booty rock ‘n roll. I can’t tell you how many times we sat in one of those booths, plates of French Fries and cokes at the table, feeding the juke box quarter after quarter to hear Jumping Jack Flash and Going Up the Country and Bad Moon Rising over and over. I like to think that maybe Ray had something to do with all those cool tunes in our dumb hick town, being the musical wunderkind he was.
But, hold on, there’s more that ol’ Walt, the small town tycoon, presided over. His little empire also included a run-down movie theater with a torn screen, sticky cement floors from years of spilled cokes that never got wiped up, and ripped seats popping their springs out. He was also the proud proprietor of a once grand miniature golf course, but it, too, was now in utter disrepair. It’s amazing that anyone frequented these places.
Now, on top of ol’ Walt’s legitimate businesses, he had a few side hustles going on to bring in extra money, mostly bone-headed schemes, in my estimation. One was this idiotic enterprise he signed up for as an independent operator of “Pet Switchboard”, and charged Ray, who subsequently enlisted me, to run the thing. It was an ad that caught ol’ Walt’s eye one day in Popular Mechanics: “MAKE $$$ FINDING LOST DOGS AND CATS!”
As a franchisee, you had to go around and convince all the people in town who were pet owners to sign on for ten bucks a month, then you gave them these I.D. tags to put on their pets’ collars, and if someone’s dog or cat got lost or stolen, the I.D. on file with the Pet Switchboard Operator could then be traced back to the owner. Even at my tender age and utter lack of business savvy, the whole thing seemed ridiculous, ’cause, c’mon, if my dog got lost or stolen, that’d be the end of it, ’cause more than likely, he’d gotten run over, as happened to about five of my sorry-ass pooches on the main road in front of our house that everyone speeded by on. Well, needless to say, we solicited all of about six gullible local pet owners (maybe they just felt sorry for us) to part with their money, and in the end, not two months into it, the stupid business went belly up.
Ray said, “File this in the D.I. folder — for Dumb Ideas.”
But ol’ Walt railed on us, telling us how lazy and unmotivated we were and didn’t put in enough effort to making it happen. Yeah, sure, right.
But, the biggest boondoggle of ’em all, in my mind, was when ol’ Walt parted with his hard earned money to invest in what I thought was a risky and questionable scheme to convert an abandoned used auto lot into some sort of menagerie to exhibit exotic animals. Yes, you heard right, “exotic animals”.
Ol’ Walt gathered us all around the table one night on one of his rare appearances, announcing to Beverly and all us wide-eyed kids that he was set to launch “the greatest show on Earth,” he proudly proclaimed, then, a minor retraction, “Well, at least in Kickapoo County.” He elaborated that an unnamed associate had given him a “screaming deal” on the land. “I couldn’t turn it down, you see,” and he went on and on about how it was “just perfect” for his long-time dream to own what he liked to call an “exotic animal palace”.
The land he purchased was just beyond the outskirts of town, and he had already consigned to build a couple of structures, erect some big top tents, pave walkways, and landscape the whole shebang in faux African-looking decor, all without any of us having a clue about it. He had already put up a ginormous sign off Route 33 that cheesily advertised “Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park.” He hoped that crowds from the bigger cities in Kickapoo and adjacent counties would come in droves. Then ol’ Walt pulled out a binder and showed us photographs of his project in the making. “We’re opening in one month,” he said. “Ray, I want you to be in charge of admissions and concessions.”
But, as we came to find out, Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park was really nothing more than a depressing concrete jungle consisting of boxed-in enclosures and gnarly cages imprisoning the most mangy-ass animals you ever did see. I don’t even know where or how ol’ Walt ever got his money-grubbing hands on the poor creatures to begin with. Or how or why I ever consented to work the concession stands there with Ray on hot muggy nights. But that Ray, he had a way, he had sway, and swagger, in his business pretensions, following as he was in ol’ Walt’s footsteps, and he made it sound like we could make a lot of money and have a shitload of fun to boot, “and meet some chicks from the city, if you get my drift,” he nudged me in the ribs with his elbow.
Speaking of following in his dad’s footsteps, ol’ Walt was a God-fearing man, a dubious quasi-respected pillar of some local hick church with the name Christ in it, but I can’t remember which church exactly, ’cause you’d never believe that a little shit town like ours had something like ten fucking churches, I swear. As Ray was being molded — or tortured — however you prefer to view his inculcation in the ways of worshipping the Lord — he was always being forced to choose between church and, well, having fun, with me, ’cause you know I wasn’t much of a believer and performed every act of subterfuge in my powers to avoid having to go to Sunday Catholic Mass and Wednesday Catechism, being from a “good” upstanding Catholic family as opposed to what my mom called the “heathenish” cult religion the Haney’s adhered to.
So poor Ray, he was set up early in life for this great conflict, to be an upstanding Christian, or a wayward free soul runnin’ wild with the pagans, which ol’ Walt actually once labeled me when I convinced Ray to skip service one Sunday morning in favor of hitting the golf course. I remember ol’ Walt, the Lord’s disciple and disciplinarian, giving Ray a fierce whipping with his belt on his bare ass — “it’s for your own good, boy!” — when we returned from our golf rounds (I made myself scarce real quick like), and who knows what else ol’ Walt may have doled out to Ray as deserved punishment for his own good, but I could hear him cursing and maligning his boy for consorting with me, his religiously truant buddy. Ray also got grounded for a month and was told he couldn’t see me, and was ordered to attend mass every night for the next two weeks. I felt so sorry for him, but he didn’t seem to mind much and took his punishment with a grain of salt, and actually proclaimed his belief in and love of Jesus Christ, he told me sincerely, and shared a bombshell bit of news that when he grew up he wanted to be a minister. I never believed him for a second.
So, things on the Haney homefront were always fun and light-hearted . . . that is, until ol’ Walt showed up. I’d be over there hanging out and suddenly the ogre would appear and, man, when ol’ Walt showed up, everyone dropped what they were doing, ten-hutted, and Beverly scurried about haphazardly like a juggling clown trying to rustle up an impromptu platter of food for her hungry man. All us kids would scatter off into various rooms or outdoors at the first opportunity, but ol’ Walt insisted this time that Ray and I sit down at the table with him as he presided over his pathetic domestic kingdom, mumbling inaudible tirades to Beverly to “Hurry up, woman, can’t you see I’m HUNgry! Plus, I gotta get back to the store to meet some clients tonight!” all the while ignoring poor little autistic Becky’s pleas for attention.
Finally, Beverly, slopped down some greasy hunk of meat and anemic-looking overcooked vegetables on ol’ Walt’s plate, and added two slices of untoasted Wonder bread slathered with bright yellow margarine, and ol’ Walt dove right in and gulped his food down in beastly inhalations, not speaking a word or betraying nary an emotion. Beverly then served up Ray and me some delicious, I’ll have to admit, home fries, and then served herself and took a seat opposite ol’ Walt at the kitchen dinette, daintily forking at her own modest plate of pork chops and iceberg lettuce salad with a wedge of pale tomato all covered in vomit-colored Thousand Island dressing.
Finally, ol’ Walt gruffly excused himself with the pretense he had to get back to attend to some business or another at one or another of his businesses. It was damn hard to keep track of him and his comings and goings, so mostly he just did whatever the fuck he wanted to, and everyone seemed fine with it because, let’s face it, ol’ Walt was not the most pleasant person to be around, and we were all glad and relieved when he made his exit.
One thing, too, I could never figure out about ol’ Walt, was his finances, and why, if he indeed owned all those so-called successful businesses, why wasn’t the family wealthier? Come to find out, just last week I learned from one of my teachers that Walter Haney was MIA most of the time not because he was a working stiff trying to provide for his family, but because the man had a secret gambling addiction and frittered away most of his money playing poker in the barrooms across the state line, not more than thirty miles away, and furthermore, he was a terrible and dishonest businessman, and never could keep a good crew or stable manager at any of his businesses, so they all went to hell, basically. But his gambling was a big “Ah ha!” moment, explaining his lengthy absences and the wise guy wads of bills he’d seem to be flush with every now and again, flashing them to his kids, doling out fives to the little ones and a ten or twenty occasionally to Ray. Once, believe it or not, he gave me a ten spot, too! But last I heard of him, he was broke, and all his businesses, save Haney’s Diner, had gone bust. His fervid religious nature seemed out of character for such a dissolute loser through and through engaging in immoral activities while professing a deep sincere belief in “the Good Lord” and “the Holy Book”.
Thinking back on things, though, I really liked Beverly, because she struck me as a maverick, a square peg of frivolity and inventiveness in a round hole of cornfield conservatism and schlock. I felt sorry for her, though, and even at my tender age, I could sense in her a soul trapped in a body in a life she didn’t want. Making the best of things in her spare time, when she wasn’t bending over backwards to care for her errant brood, inept and incompetent though she was at times, or perhaps she was just plainly uninterested, didn’t care, or was just sick and tired and fed up with it all, she tried her hand at and found modest success writing saccharine little ditties that she had printed up on greeting card stock paper, folded and cut, and sold them at the local IGA and crafts fairs and the like. She was really good at it, and in another life, down some unrealized revolutionary road, she could maybe have gone on to New York, or at least Chicago, and made something of herself in creative advertising or marketing.
But like I was saying, Beverly was very ditzy minded which didn’t exactly help her focus and plan and manage things properly in ol’ Walt’s home, what with having her hands full doing all the chores and keeping a wary, watchful eye on her scattered brood. One day, waiting for Ray to hurry up ’cause we had to meet some buddies to earn a few bucks cutting corn out of beans in the hot sunshine for a couple of hours, I stood off in a corner watching Beverly vacuuming the white shag rug in the family living room, by now having seen better days ever since six of us boys were overnighting it at the Haney’s a few months ago and had snuck out on a rainy night when, a bit later, we returned and tracked in mud all over the brand new white shag rug! Ol’ Walt, you see, had dumped a load of dirt out in the yard, who knows what for, ’cause the Haney’s didn’t have a garden, and we boys were jumping and climbing all over it in the drizzle, then it started pouring so we ran back in the house and that’s when, barely giving it a thought, we soiled the brand new white shag rug with our muddy tracks. What on earth were we thinking, or not thinking? You can imagine how furious Ray’s parents were at us, and how much it cost to have it cleaned.
Distracted by that bad boys memory, of which no real dire consequences resulted that I can recall, I was all the while patiently waiting for Ray to hurry up and get the hell out of the bathroom, where he had ensconced himself, because, honestly, I think he was in there fucking masturbating again.
Meanwhile, I was watching and could hear Beverly faintly reciting one of her little ditties she probably was making up on the spot. Over the whiny roar of the Hoover, I heard her plaintively sing:
“I’m home all alone doing my chores / down on all fours / scrubbing the floors . . .”
When the vacuum sputtered out. I missed a line or two, then could hear an almost bluesy inflection, a sad coda to her little jingle:
“I’m home all alone / sigh and a groan / cleaning the rugs / and killing the bugs.”
By now my patience was wearing thin with Ray, ’cause we were gonna be late for our ride out to Fender’s farm and miss out on some good pinball or movie money, so I yelled through the bathroom door, “Hey, Ray, c’mon, man, what’re you doin’ in there, let’s go!”
A few seconds of silence, a slight sigh and a groan, then Ray responded, “Hold on man! I’m coming! I’m coming!”
Which I’m sure he was! That’s when I looked over at Beverly, and she slyly winked at me, not sure why or if it had anything to do with, well, anything at all other than her boy — future rock star or pious minister? — strummin’ on his pink gui-tar.
Stay tuned for CHAPTER FIVE!