Tape title stories

  one hundred dollars for that picture      Somewhere back in time there are some fine young people, nicely stoned and focused on a sweet Simon and Garfunkel song drifting out of some cheap Pioneer speakers maybe on Marshallfield Lane or Seminole or Saturn street. Old friends, winter companions, the old men Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset The sounds of the city sifting through trees Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends Can you imagine us years from today Sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be 70 Old friends, memory brushes the same years Silently sharing the same fears What made the classic album and beautiful songs even more poignant were the recorded "voices of old people" that preceded the song speaking about what thier lives had become. Greg was probably 18 and I was 23 when we repeated the words "I've little in this world, I would give honestly without regret one hundred dollars for that picture."  It was pa...

 We don't piece here     We used to berate ourselves and say we were pussy suburban privileged white kids but that was only partially true. It certainly is a better description of my work history than Greg's who sometimes joined the working men in parts yard or factory. The problem with many of us in the Boomer generation was we wanted to be hippies because that was where the fun and chicks were but we also wantd to have some money to pay for fun and take those hippy chicks out for beer and pizza pie. In my case I lasted exactly one day in the glass bottle factory of Owens-Illinois over on Fruitland in Vernon. It was a BC involved hire and I assumed I would be in an office taking orders over the phone but instead I reported at 6;30 am to the factory where I moved cases of empty milk bottles off a box car and onto a conveyor belt at a speed that kept you sweating. The noise was absolutely deafening as the embossing machine was just feet away and each bottle stamped caused...

  One True Friend                         when the ocean was monochrome “If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.” ―  S.E. Hinton      Closing in on a terrible anniversary now and I am still floundering in the void. What makes these days even more dismal is another memory, ten years before when my  spirit was scuttled and sunk to the bottom of a very deep ocean. After ten years I still cannot understand how my mind became so utterly engulfed in anxiety, then depression that became a six month journey through mental health hell. It began with a diagnosis of sleep apnea, then a phobia about CPAP machines, then a complete meltdown of emotional fragility where I could not eat solid food or stand to be alone in my own home. Every day was a torture without anything I could hang onto in the maelstrom that were my thoughts. I lost fifty po...

  "Teach your children well" Teach your children well Their father's hell did slowly go by Feed them on your dreams The one they pick's the one you'll know by Don't you ever ask them why If they told you, you would cry So just look at them and sigh And kno w they love you" "Teach Your Children"- Crosby, Still and Nash      First it was a phone call on this day, then a text message asking Greg if his children had honored him on this sacred Father's day? His answer ranged from hell no! to "I hope not" that reflected his belief  that the day was a phony, made-up sham to justify florists selling lots of arrangements for Mother's Day which he also ignored and disparaged. I know he loved his red-headed offspring and enjoyed spending time with them more than any necktie or wicked slippers could demonstrate. Poor Lissy endured the rigors of childbirth twice and never got as much as a molasses chip for her motherhood, except for the oth...

  but not of them      The value of a liberal education was evident in our dear friend who made the most unlikely subjects illuminated by describing them in terms drawn from great literature. This episode involved sitting in the bleachers at Dodger stadium, the left-field bleachers where we sat for a buck and a half in the resurgent 1974 season. After being in the doldrums for too many Summers the team had acquired Jimmy Wynn "The Toy Cannon" and a jerk wih a screwball named Mike Marshall who pitched in an unheard ot 106 games. We also had two strong starting pitchers in Don "Sonny Boy" Sutton and Andy Messerschmidt along with the new star of Steve "another asshole" Garvey who knocked in runs. It was a time of dominance by the Cinncinnatti Reds Big Red Machine but this year we overachieved and won 102 games and the National League pennant. So, the point is that going out to the stadium was fun again and we went to quite a few games, sitting in left field t...

 the Summer of 42      While Greg had a fine career as an Architect and worked his entire life without any bum periods I feel he may have missed his true calling. The man had an uncanny ability to recall and recite lines of dialogue from stage, film and TV scenes that strummed his heart-strings. I mean he could mesmerize our group when he was moved to repeat the  introduction to "the Fall of the House of Usher," or scenes from "Double Solitaire" with a deep emotional expression. I could ask him to answer a line from the underrated film adaptation of Moby Dick by saying "Was it not Moby Dick that took off your leg?" His face would redden like he was expressing angst and he would moan "Aye...twas Moby Dick!" We have heard before about his tavern recitation that caused his cousin Evan to be booted from the Sunshine Meat, Fish and liquor Company and suffer a lifetime ban but these performances were rare. Dutch courage might help but his monologues w...

 An Early Hibernian Obsession                                       the McCabe daughters with Mom Nora      Growing up hetero was not always easy despite an entire society set up to make the journey one of lollipops and rainbows. Most of us started to notice girls around 5th grade and by 6th grade we were overmatched. I recall the Halloween scene at St. Helen's where the cutest girl in school dressed as a princess, wore lipstick and struck about a dozen boys smitten to the levels where we would do anything just to stare into her blue eyes. It will be another story about my obsession and failed attempt to win the heart of Jean Lowe but this blog is about Greg and he suffered the same malady that the rest of us young fellers were gripped by throughout our tween years. Greg matured earlier than I did but unfortunately was schooled by very poor role models who feared the rejec...

 the Roulette Wheel      It does seem ironic that Greg and I discussed death a lot, even in our salad days when we were just playing with the concept of mortality. We got a little more serious in 1992 when we saw our father's close their mortal accounts. Then the thunderbolt of Ed Carroll's untimely death in 2007 really gave us pause and increased our imagining of what this would be like to just cease being. Greg used to say it was simply "the cessation of sensation" but behind that sentence are gallons of tears, wails of despair and countless hours of paralyzing sorrow. We move forward in life holding onto one another and when that grip loosens the challenge to continue can be terrible. Over all the years there was one concept we shared however and that was the great roulette wheel of life. This was no "wheel of fortune" where we might win an outboard motor boat but the possibility of greeting the new day with a forboding impairment. It might be a troubled...

  hawaiian sellout      There is a quote by the great Dodger hero Roy Campanella that says "you need to have a lot of little boy in you to play baseball for a living." You could say that about a great number of activities in our adult lives from laughing at farts to being fascinated by balls moving about a TV screen. However, there was nothing as basic to the men and women, boys and girls in these posts as spirited games of "hawaiian sellout" The term comes from a hilarious Firesign Theater sketch where contestants play a game called hawaiian sell out that ends with the greediest player getting a prize of a big bag of shit. Since we often quoted silly Firesign sentences that everybody but nobody truly understood we plucked the nonsense title out of our subconscious to describe a game we began playing out of sheer boredom in the old crash pad on Midvale. All hawaiian sellout entails is any kind of wadded up piece of paper, cloth or soft nerf ball that is bat...

 Chunking not Chung-King “Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.” ―  Marcel Proust,  Swann’s Way      This was an ongoing joke Greg and I passed back and forth during the last decade we were pals on this earth. The concept is called chunking and our perception of time began to shorten and major events or milestones seemed to take place every other week.  " Research suggests that people tend to chunk more as they age, potentially contributing to the common feeling that time speeds up as we get older. " Processes that accelerate time, like chunking, may also increase the appeal of nostalgi...

 Into Flight from...      Greg would probably describe himself as a better than average college student but no Phi Beta Kappa kind of cat. It was not the way he became an extremely erudite young man but it did enable him to put a couple of letters after his name as in B.A. in History. The man had a thirst for knowledge and we were lucky enough to be given many opportunities to enrich our South Gate brains with culture. Greg had no compunction about going to the theater or concert by himself and when he was attending college he was also educating himself about classical music. In our youth there was hardly any representation of this art form except the Standard School Broadcast Hour with pieces conducted by Carmen Dragon such as "Peter and the Wolf" or "the Sorcerers Apprentice" that we heard on Disneyland. All it took was for this South Gate Sheehy lad to sit in Royce Hall or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and be overwhelmed by a full orchestra getting him stoned wit...

  This is Greg Sheehy...     One of the most confounding, irritating, exasperating, and annoying habits Greg had from the dawning of cell phones was his insistance of answering scams, phishing, robocalls and siren songs from places like Kolkata, Pakistan, Jamaica, New Jersey, Manila, Alabama and those calls clearly described as TELEMARKETER on his phone screen. Instead of ignoring the obvious criminals he would snatch up his phone wherever he happened to be and briskly answer "This is Greg Sheehy." He might not send his bank info to a Nigerian Prince but when it came to cell or even landline calls from unidentified sources you would hear  "This is Greg Sheehy!" It always galled Ed and Lissy would give her trademark eye roll as he listened to claims of needed IRS payments that might end the family in jail. Greg would respond, taking them serious with rebuttals of overdue Amazon payments, denied wire transfers and was not quick to act on limited time offers. I  m...

  Techno-logic skips a generation                                             "the child is the father of the tech man"     In the full seventy years of knowng Greg, we saw so many technological advances it  boggles the well-wrinkled brain        Let us see:       transistor radios that allowed even kids to hear the great pop songs of the 50's and 60's along with the golden voice of Vin Scully who made Dodger games sound like a Greek drama. Greg used to go to sleep in the boys bunk bed on McNerney with his transistor tucked under his pillow playing stuff like "Runaway," "Midnight in Moscow,: or "Love is Blue." There were still vacuum tube radios at grandma's house but you could not put them in your jacket pocket. When you visited Dodger stadium in the early years you could hear Vinny's voice echoing across the ballpark...

 Guiding hand of Geoff Bible  “we do not believe that cigarettes are hazardous; we don't accept that"                 Joseph Cullman CEO of Philip Morris .      Greg had a very sharp eye for the absurdity of corporate mendacity and the irony of the big lies pushed without shame on Americans. We can all say without regret that we are glad he does not have to suffer the brazen falsehoods that the Trump administration pukes out every day.  Everything the good man stood for is at the moment spun as weakness or foolishness. It almost seems that the way too early departure saved him from enduring a depth of despair he never faced in his span. However, there was a time when we could laugh at this hypocritical bullcrap and point out the absurdity of the money grubbers who would sell death-trap cars, useless medicine and those kings of cancer called cigarettes. We all sat and knocked off years from our lives but even when...

 Tales of the Dump House     The title here may be deceiving since the sobriquet Dump House was used by both Greg and I just to describe the places where we lived before getting to our dream pad. In my case it was a very expensive and rare three bedroom house in Brentwood where my first year of marriage was spent. It was also where Katya was born and was an adorable baby. For Greg, his dump house was at 2911 Francis where he lived from 1988 to 1995 quite happily in marital bliss. The Dump House was an excellent decision by Lissy to buy in a good neighborhood when prices were reasonable and no Greggy was in sight. After some kidlets came along the architect couple decided to build their own dream home which they did with panache. The new Francis opened in 1996 that was filled with gratitude and happiness for the rest of our man's fine life. When I bounded up the treachorous stairs on Francis I knew I would find laughter and comfort.  During construction they were abl...

 The Lennox Experiment      Greg was what sociologists call a "nester" and when he chose a place to live he made it commodious, tidy and fully functional. Even as a young man he was domesticated and organized. Thus his first venture outside home was during his enrollment at Loyola U. in the unlikely city of Lennox. It was dirt cheap, close to campus and seemed nice enough when he handed over a check to the landlord and began his tenancy circa 1973. Lennox is a humble place to say the least that had once been farmland or before that just a chunk of the Centinela Sausal Redondo Rancho where sheep farming was the scene. It was owned by the rather famous Daniel Freeman who was successful enough to donate a hospital where LA Dodgers sometimes were treated. Mostly this town of cheap apartments was stuck between  land-grabbing Hawthorne and Ingelwood who annexed parts of Lennox leaving the scraps of the area with a small population. There is one big problem about the n...