Kitty Cocktails & PONG

I like to tell this story; since its birth some 30 or so years ago it has taken on some degree of the fantastic, fiction with some rub, like friction but a little more revealing.

So, I was 8 maybe 9, Peter was two years younger, and my Dad several years older. He, my dad, was single, swimming in blow and more than likely getting blown, by a flight-attendant, or a woman he met in the hotel lobby, while Peter and I would sleep in the hotel room alone; this was our trip to LA, Beverly Hills, to be exact.

It’s the first post-divorce vacation and actually probably a first vacation for Peter and I (though Peter did go to a camp called Day at the Farm, a vacation of sorts, and I went to camp where we learned how to Batik and Dye, worked on lapidary, and sang racist songs about living in Dixie, but I digress)
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The story happens even before we arrive, before the academy award party is held at our hotel and Peter Sellars kisses me in the elevator, before we visit my hypochondriac Great Aunt Bess, who hugs us so hard that our bones touch, before we meet Alan Hale, Jr. the skipper from Gilligan’s Island who cheeks blush like Passover wine, before my father plagiarizes an autograph from John Travolta, before I know this will be the first and last trip that the three of us will ever take together, we are flying in Contiental style and headed to sunshine.

The year is 1977, maybe 1978 and planes are not yet weapons or places of restrictions and discomfort, they are oasis’ of sexiness and decadence. In this particular oasis there is a lounge where people (my dad) can come and drink and mingle, talk altitude, spit charisma, lean on the bar, wash down a screwdriver, and feign possibility of wealth, of status, & of success. The lounge also houses what will come to symbolize years later a cause of anti-social behaviors, and an inhibitor to imagination, but today it’s the coolest, fuckin’, hippest thing Peter and I have seen...ever.. PONG.
“PONG?!” We get a quarter from my dad.

We make our way over to the game consul kitty cocktails, in hand.
Peter and I play a round, perhaps. The game moves slowly as.. it takes awhile for the white ball? square? to…move, be hit..…from...one…side.. of…the..screen..to..the..other. In PONG one accepts that this is its speed of action, of interaction, slow yet deliberate, eventual. And this was how the game of daughter/dad played out in years to come, slow coming, yet eventual.
Not unlike PONG my dad's heyday was situated in the 70's and it would take the end of my dad’s life before he would leave the bar, or the business, or the babe and make his way over to our/my side for a visit.

A boy in the lounge, age 9 or 10, someone very familiar approaches Peter and I. My heart races, I know who he is, “Peter, Peter, that’s that‘s the guy from the Harris Bank commercial..the boy, oh my god!”

In Chicago, Harris Bank was making a play for customers. If one opened a checking account one would get a “Harris Doll” which was a larger than life stuffed lion, maybe three feet standing, fit with glasses in order I presume to read bank statements, and dividends. The Harris Bank commercial (at least to me) was enticing. Picture this: an African-American child, cute, cheeks full of mirth, add a fistful of moxie and animation, and attitude who quips, ‘You wanna a Harris Doll? You Get a Harris doll?" He then lets out this cackle-like laugh and tons (or 100) of these three-foot Harris dolls fall on his three-foot frame. Clearly, I had become smitten by him, or by these dolls and like many find a Harris doll gracing my twin bed, situated in between my stuffed turtle Tomato, and my Aunt Gemima doll (but that’s another story) supported of course by, a Harris savings account for college.

The Harris Doll boy approaches us, wearing a navy blazer. “Wanna play” he asks Peter and I as he moves a quarter from his blazer front pocket as if he is and will always be prepared for situations such as this. I can’t speak, I, who talk more than anyone (said my second grade therapist Ms. Rosenblitt & my teacher Ms. Sanders) ever in my grammar school’s history, cannot even muster a ‘hi Harris’ , or a ‘my cleaning lady is black, too’, or ‘do you have a Harris doll or a girlfriend?’ Nothing.

Instead he speaks and tells us his name is Gary. Peter, who would never pass up a free run of anything (at this point Peter was into collecting bottle caps he found on the street) plays PONG with Gary for the rest of the ride. And together.. we all drink our kitty cocktails as the plane soars over the Rocky mountains through shining blue stream waters, leaving the mundane middle-west and landing into a world of Different Stokes.

Months later, Gary becomes almost iconic gracing the cover of my Dynamite magazine, asking “What you talkin’ about Willis’?, and my dad becomes absent. He, too flys off to what he hopes is a bigger, grander life down south. Years later, I learn that Gary had fallen on hard financial times unable perhaps to transcend the child-adult persona which catapulted him to stardom. And my father, too falls unable to grasp the responsibility and the cost of adulthood, making sure of course to deplete my Harris savings account as he began, like Gary, to live a life under the radar, in the background moving farther and father into oblivion.