Lawrence Hittle
04-30-2012, 04:28 PM
DAD’S SECRET TALENT
April 19, 1922 was his birthday. The earliest memories I have of my father go back to when I was about 4 years old growing up on the south side of Chicago. My folks were so good to us that Ozzie and Harriet could have taken lessons from them, but there was a side to my dad that would have made Harriet Nelson pack up David and Ricky and leave home. Dad’s bowels were spectacular.
We lived upstairs from Uncle Irv, dad’s twin, in a two story frame and asphalt shingle house at 319 West 117th Street. As a kid, it seemed huge, like everything did, but in driving by the old place a quarter of a century later a more mature eye would see it was actually pretty tight living quarters. Everything was small… the living room, the bedroom that Carl and I shared, and especially my father’s favorite room … the bathroom. The smallness of that room would confine and concentrate what my dad did in there and turn it into a Horrible Hittle gas chamber.
The Sherwin-Williams lacquer and varnish facility was a few blocks away. Dad and Grandpa worked there during the day. Grandpa had a small truck farm where he tended vegetables after work. Dad went to night school at Northwestern. Both of them had to breath the nauseating fumes that spewed from the condensing stacks where they worked. I’m pretty sure that some of that stench stayed in Dad’s system to later be released in the little room around the corner from Mom’s kitchen. We ate a lot of liver and onions in those days, and after dinner, Dad would roll around on the floor and wrestle or watch T.V. with us. I would bounce on his knee or jump on his stomach like most rambunctious four year olds are apt to do, and Dad would rub his coarse stubbly beard on my face to egg me on. Little did I know how much my actions were contributing to what would happen in that small room behind the little white door. My kid’s ears could hear his stomach growling as we played. There was an evil churning going on in his belly as we wrestled, a fetid gurgling, and pretty soon dad wouldn’t want to play with me anymore. I knew he would eventually disappear into his favorite room and be gone for a long time. That time was now … Death Sphincter was here.
Dad’s disappearance was an evening ritual. He gathered up his crossword puzzle, his pen, a chrome flip-top Zippo lighter, a Robert Burns cigarillo, closed the door behind him, and sequestered himself in his favorite room for what seemed an eternity. The room was sans ventilation fan. He stayed in there, concentrating his efforts, through a completed crossword puzzle, a whole cigar, and an entire episode of Lassie, and when he emerged from his porcelain mausoleum, he closed the door to Hell tightly behind him to keep all the day’s aroma in for the next visitor, usually me or Mom. He’d make his way back to the living room and would smile to himself as he snuggled up next to Mom on the couch knowing that one of us would soon have to go in there. Robert Burns, liver and onions, and Sherwin-Williams were waiting, in the dark, behind the little white door … and Dad knew it.
I couldn’t wait any more. I had to go. I knew who was in there. I had met them before. I shot a final grimace over my shoulder at my dad, took a deep breath and held it as I reached for the door knob. Death Sphincter leaned forward in his chair, smirking, to watch as I entered the Hell he had prepared for me. He was wearing a wonderfully sick Horrible Hittle smile as tears welled up in his laughing eyes. As I perched on the throne, with the door closed, my pants at my ankles, holding my breath I could hear muffled laughter coming from both my mom and dad off in the distance. It was the Horrible Hittle sense of humor. It was a sickness. And they loved it.
The years would flash by quickly. We would move to California and then to Pennsylvania where I would spend my teenage years. Dad’s bowels would mellow and sweeten with age and all of us would become artists in our own right. Death Sphincter would become The Whistling Sphincter as a fragrant music would replace the putrid outpourings of the previous decade. Second son, Carl, had followed in Horrible Hittle fashion and had perfected the art of speaking in peanut butter flavored burps, and Marv Jr., now two years old, was happy standing in his crib painting monochromatic umber wall murals with what he had discovered in his diaper. We were all Horrible. Life was good.
Most folks woke up to an alarm clock or a clock radio. Not the Horrible Hittles. Wake up time in our house was around 7:00 a.m., and every morning upon Dad’s awakening, he would stretch and the house would echo with the glorious high-pitched offerings of The Whistling Sphincter. It was just lovely, like the sustained squeal produced when the air is released from a filled balloon while the orifice is stretched to form a slit between the thumb and first finger of both hands. If Pavarotti was a virtuoso, my dad was a flatuoso! Most kids got to hear “C’mon boys, time for school”. We awoke to a bunghole concerto.
Tuesday night was golf night for dad. He’d get together with Harold Voneeda, Asher Scott, and Kenny Moore after work and try to squeeze in nine holes at the little Twilight Golf Course at the river’s edge. When summer was at it’s peak and the days were at their longest, sometimes they would try to get in twelve holes. When that was the case the match usually ended well into darkness. That’s why I went along; as sort of a “seeing eye” caddy. My job was to stand 220 yards down the darkening fairway and listen for their golf balls to land. I would yell back to the tee and let each player know if it landed left, right, or on the fairway then run up to the green and listen again. The system worked pretty well and got them some extra playing time. After golf, the four of them would go to the nineteenth hole. Dad would have his one beer and a cigarillo, swap small talk with the guys, I’d have a soda, and after fifteen or twenty minutes we’d head for the car and pack up his clubs to go home. But it was summer, the air was still warm and full of gnats, and we didn’t always go home. Sometimes we would turn left on the road instead of right, go past Bowman Field, and the two of us would go fishin’.
Lycoming Creek spilled into the Susquehanna River less than a mile away. We would fish two miles above the confluence at a place that had easy access and a nice sandy shoreline. Dad’s beige ‘60 Chevy would find its way down the rutted road all by itself. It had come this way many times before and would eventually come to a stop on a ledge just above the creek’s edge and cast its lights out on sixty feet of slow moving bass water. Headlights off, parking lights and tail lights on, the trunk would pop open to reveal its cache of golf clubs and fishing gear. He still had on his sweat-encrusted green cap with the two embroidered golf clubs on the front. It’s color was just slightly lighter and yellower than the hip waders we were slipping into. It was pitch black outside so it didn’t really matter anyway; the fish wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a golf hat or a fishin’ hat.
Grandpa Hittle was a master fisherman. He had a dozen heavy duty tackle boxes that were filled with plugs and lures, mostly for pike and other big fish that enticed him to the upper peninsula in Michigan. He stalked the BIG fish, liked Pfleuger bait-casting equipment best, and had probably passed a lifetime of fishing secrets and stories on to his twin boys. At times, when the fish were not biting, Grandpa said he would drag a clanking metal high chair behind his beat up aluminum motor boat to wake the fish up. This was Pennsylvania, not the Michigan peninsula, quiet and tranquil, home of the Amish, and a region where fishing techniques were refined and tactful. No strong arm techniques were required. I was armed with an eight foot split bamboo fly rod designed for the graceful and gentle presentation of a delicate hand-tied fly. In the hands of an experienced angler, it was a thing of beauty. In my hands, my awkward movements looked more like the antics of a Polynesian machete dancer. Dad had a clear, six foot, fiberglass spinning rod and a Mitchell 300 reel that was held to the rod’s cork handle by two sliding chrome rings and a band-aid that took up the extra space to make one ring fit more snugly. He fished live bait, and in the light of the car’s amber parking lights, he would bait up with a hellgrammite. It was his favorite for bass and walleyes and looked like a leech with legs. It had a fierce set of pinchers at the head end that could draw blood if you weren’t careful how you handled it. No sweat. Dad was a pro. Grandpa had taught him well. He had his rod. He had his reel. He had his Robert Burns cigarillo and Zippo to keep the swarming gnats away from his face. He had years of fishing wisdom in his mental rolodex, and of course, he had the secret weapon. It was time to go fishin’.
The waters were so wide and so deep that they made no noise as they flowed. Any sounds that occurred were made by a fish or some animal breaking the water’s surface or by me losing my balance on the slippery rocks as I waded thigh deep into the darkness. We were probably fifty feet apart but there was no way of knowing for sure. I whipped the water and jerked the stone fly to give it some action as it drifted somewhere out in front of me. Nothing. Took a few steps. Flailed the bamboo wand and made another offering into the darkness upstream from me. Again, nothing. Now my feet were wet. Leaky boots. I loved this for an hour. This was fishin’ with my dad.
Somewhere downstream, a chromed Zippo could be heard opening. It was a polished “click” followed by a distinctive metallic resonance, a scratch of flint against a wheel, and a faint flickering flame. Dad’s face was briefly illuminated by the lighter’s fire in a cupped hand as he lit his cigarillo. The flame disappeared and the Zippo clicked shut, soon to vanish in a right hand pants pocket. Like a firefly, dad was again invisible, except for the intermittent red glow as he puffed on his cigar. Now you see me … now you don’t. Now you see me … now you don’t. The only sound from him as he stood silently in the dark waters was the occasional opening of the bale on his Mitchell 300 just before every cast and the “chink” it made as the bale was being closed. In between “chinks” his bait was silently drifting in the current and his cigarillo glowed in shorter, faster spurts as he kept one finger on the monofilament line to feel for a fish striking the bait. Nothing. Another cast. Check the bait. “Chink”. Puff, wait, puff. Do it again. Patience. Repetition. This, too, was fishin‘ with my dad. He was born to do this.
The evening was getting late. He had done everything right, as best he could, but the fish just were not cooperating. Dad had no choice. If we were going to catch any fish, it was time to change tactics. He was standing thigh deep in moonless darkness, focusing, digging deep into his bag of tricks, reflecting on all the years of his Horrible Hittle Boy wisdom. The Pied Piper was summoning all his talent, posturing to lure the hesitant fish from the safety of the water‘s depths. There would be no magical flute, no rats, no trolling of clanking high chairs to wake the sleeping fish. It was time for the secret weapon.
The silence seemed to grow deeper, then gracefully, seductively, the maestro closed his eyes, flexed his bowels, and The Whistling Sphincter squealed it’s magical song. I turned to face downstream as its melody floated hypnotically past my ears and across the surface of the water like a sour angel on a summer wind. All through the ten or twelve second performance the maestro’s face glowed intensely in the red ash of his Robert Burns cigarillo. I could almost see him smiling as the fish call seeped from his bunghole bassoon. It ended just as softly as it started. There was no fan fare, no standing “O” after a magnificent performance, just the silence of a Horrible Hittle Boy smile spreading across his lips that could be felt fifty feet upstream. The Whistling Sphincter had spoken.
There was the click of a Mitchell 300’s bale opening, the sound of line being peeled off the spool as the bait sailed out into the darkness, the “chink” as the bale was closed, then a brief silence followed by the sound of line being immediately stripped off the reel against a tightly set drag. Dark silence was broken by the splash of swirling waters. His cigarillo was fully aglow. His rod arched. The water frothed and churned some thirty feet ahead of him. With stogie crimped between clenched teeth he’d chortle, “ Ha, ha, ha … gotcha!”
This was a performance that would be repeated many times over the next few years before he died. He didn’t always use the fish call. Sometimes he didn’t have to. Sometimes he just toked on his stogie, fished very quietly, and was content, but whenever he did release that succulent, melodic, fan fare over the waters, he always caught fish! Now that’s talent.
He would have been 90 today.
Thanks, Dad.
Written 19 April, 2012
April 19, 1922 was his birthday. The earliest memories I have of my father go back to when I was about 4 years old growing up on the south side of Chicago. My folks were so good to us that Ozzie and Harriet could have taken lessons from them, but there was a side to my dad that would have made Harriet Nelson pack up David and Ricky and leave home. Dad’s bowels were spectacular.
We lived upstairs from Uncle Irv, dad’s twin, in a two story frame and asphalt shingle house at 319 West 117th Street. As a kid, it seemed huge, like everything did, but in driving by the old place a quarter of a century later a more mature eye would see it was actually pretty tight living quarters. Everything was small… the living room, the bedroom that Carl and I shared, and especially my father’s favorite room … the bathroom. The smallness of that room would confine and concentrate what my dad did in there and turn it into a Horrible Hittle gas chamber.
The Sherwin-Williams lacquer and varnish facility was a few blocks away. Dad and Grandpa worked there during the day. Grandpa had a small truck farm where he tended vegetables after work. Dad went to night school at Northwestern. Both of them had to breath the nauseating fumes that spewed from the condensing stacks where they worked. I’m pretty sure that some of that stench stayed in Dad’s system to later be released in the little room around the corner from Mom’s kitchen. We ate a lot of liver and onions in those days, and after dinner, Dad would roll around on the floor and wrestle or watch T.V. with us. I would bounce on his knee or jump on his stomach like most rambunctious four year olds are apt to do, and Dad would rub his coarse stubbly beard on my face to egg me on. Little did I know how much my actions were contributing to what would happen in that small room behind the little white door. My kid’s ears could hear his stomach growling as we played. There was an evil churning going on in his belly as we wrestled, a fetid gurgling, and pretty soon dad wouldn’t want to play with me anymore. I knew he would eventually disappear into his favorite room and be gone for a long time. That time was now … Death Sphincter was here.
Dad’s disappearance was an evening ritual. He gathered up his crossword puzzle, his pen, a chrome flip-top Zippo lighter, a Robert Burns cigarillo, closed the door behind him, and sequestered himself in his favorite room for what seemed an eternity. The room was sans ventilation fan. He stayed in there, concentrating his efforts, through a completed crossword puzzle, a whole cigar, and an entire episode of Lassie, and when he emerged from his porcelain mausoleum, he closed the door to Hell tightly behind him to keep all the day’s aroma in for the next visitor, usually me or Mom. He’d make his way back to the living room and would smile to himself as he snuggled up next to Mom on the couch knowing that one of us would soon have to go in there. Robert Burns, liver and onions, and Sherwin-Williams were waiting, in the dark, behind the little white door … and Dad knew it.
I couldn’t wait any more. I had to go. I knew who was in there. I had met them before. I shot a final grimace over my shoulder at my dad, took a deep breath and held it as I reached for the door knob. Death Sphincter leaned forward in his chair, smirking, to watch as I entered the Hell he had prepared for me. He was wearing a wonderfully sick Horrible Hittle smile as tears welled up in his laughing eyes. As I perched on the throne, with the door closed, my pants at my ankles, holding my breath I could hear muffled laughter coming from both my mom and dad off in the distance. It was the Horrible Hittle sense of humor. It was a sickness. And they loved it.
The years would flash by quickly. We would move to California and then to Pennsylvania where I would spend my teenage years. Dad’s bowels would mellow and sweeten with age and all of us would become artists in our own right. Death Sphincter would become The Whistling Sphincter as a fragrant music would replace the putrid outpourings of the previous decade. Second son, Carl, had followed in Horrible Hittle fashion and had perfected the art of speaking in peanut butter flavored burps, and Marv Jr., now two years old, was happy standing in his crib painting monochromatic umber wall murals with what he had discovered in his diaper. We were all Horrible. Life was good.
Most folks woke up to an alarm clock or a clock radio. Not the Horrible Hittles. Wake up time in our house was around 7:00 a.m., and every morning upon Dad’s awakening, he would stretch and the house would echo with the glorious high-pitched offerings of The Whistling Sphincter. It was just lovely, like the sustained squeal produced when the air is released from a filled balloon while the orifice is stretched to form a slit between the thumb and first finger of both hands. If Pavarotti was a virtuoso, my dad was a flatuoso! Most kids got to hear “C’mon boys, time for school”. We awoke to a bunghole concerto.
Tuesday night was golf night for dad. He’d get together with Harold Voneeda, Asher Scott, and Kenny Moore after work and try to squeeze in nine holes at the little Twilight Golf Course at the river’s edge. When summer was at it’s peak and the days were at their longest, sometimes they would try to get in twelve holes. When that was the case the match usually ended well into darkness. That’s why I went along; as sort of a “seeing eye” caddy. My job was to stand 220 yards down the darkening fairway and listen for their golf balls to land. I would yell back to the tee and let each player know if it landed left, right, or on the fairway then run up to the green and listen again. The system worked pretty well and got them some extra playing time. After golf, the four of them would go to the nineteenth hole. Dad would have his one beer and a cigarillo, swap small talk with the guys, I’d have a soda, and after fifteen or twenty minutes we’d head for the car and pack up his clubs to go home. But it was summer, the air was still warm and full of gnats, and we didn’t always go home. Sometimes we would turn left on the road instead of right, go past Bowman Field, and the two of us would go fishin’.
Lycoming Creek spilled into the Susquehanna River less than a mile away. We would fish two miles above the confluence at a place that had easy access and a nice sandy shoreline. Dad’s beige ‘60 Chevy would find its way down the rutted road all by itself. It had come this way many times before and would eventually come to a stop on a ledge just above the creek’s edge and cast its lights out on sixty feet of slow moving bass water. Headlights off, parking lights and tail lights on, the trunk would pop open to reveal its cache of golf clubs and fishing gear. He still had on his sweat-encrusted green cap with the two embroidered golf clubs on the front. It’s color was just slightly lighter and yellower than the hip waders we were slipping into. It was pitch black outside so it didn’t really matter anyway; the fish wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a golf hat or a fishin’ hat.
Grandpa Hittle was a master fisherman. He had a dozen heavy duty tackle boxes that were filled with plugs and lures, mostly for pike and other big fish that enticed him to the upper peninsula in Michigan. He stalked the BIG fish, liked Pfleuger bait-casting equipment best, and had probably passed a lifetime of fishing secrets and stories on to his twin boys. At times, when the fish were not biting, Grandpa said he would drag a clanking metal high chair behind his beat up aluminum motor boat to wake the fish up. This was Pennsylvania, not the Michigan peninsula, quiet and tranquil, home of the Amish, and a region where fishing techniques were refined and tactful. No strong arm techniques were required. I was armed with an eight foot split bamboo fly rod designed for the graceful and gentle presentation of a delicate hand-tied fly. In the hands of an experienced angler, it was a thing of beauty. In my hands, my awkward movements looked more like the antics of a Polynesian machete dancer. Dad had a clear, six foot, fiberglass spinning rod and a Mitchell 300 reel that was held to the rod’s cork handle by two sliding chrome rings and a band-aid that took up the extra space to make one ring fit more snugly. He fished live bait, and in the light of the car’s amber parking lights, he would bait up with a hellgrammite. It was his favorite for bass and walleyes and looked like a leech with legs. It had a fierce set of pinchers at the head end that could draw blood if you weren’t careful how you handled it. No sweat. Dad was a pro. Grandpa had taught him well. He had his rod. He had his reel. He had his Robert Burns cigarillo and Zippo to keep the swarming gnats away from his face. He had years of fishing wisdom in his mental rolodex, and of course, he had the secret weapon. It was time to go fishin’.
The waters were so wide and so deep that they made no noise as they flowed. Any sounds that occurred were made by a fish or some animal breaking the water’s surface or by me losing my balance on the slippery rocks as I waded thigh deep into the darkness. We were probably fifty feet apart but there was no way of knowing for sure. I whipped the water and jerked the stone fly to give it some action as it drifted somewhere out in front of me. Nothing. Took a few steps. Flailed the bamboo wand and made another offering into the darkness upstream from me. Again, nothing. Now my feet were wet. Leaky boots. I loved this for an hour. This was fishin’ with my dad.
Somewhere downstream, a chromed Zippo could be heard opening. It was a polished “click” followed by a distinctive metallic resonance, a scratch of flint against a wheel, and a faint flickering flame. Dad’s face was briefly illuminated by the lighter’s fire in a cupped hand as he lit his cigarillo. The flame disappeared and the Zippo clicked shut, soon to vanish in a right hand pants pocket. Like a firefly, dad was again invisible, except for the intermittent red glow as he puffed on his cigar. Now you see me … now you don’t. Now you see me … now you don’t. The only sound from him as he stood silently in the dark waters was the occasional opening of the bale on his Mitchell 300 just before every cast and the “chink” it made as the bale was being closed. In between “chinks” his bait was silently drifting in the current and his cigarillo glowed in shorter, faster spurts as he kept one finger on the monofilament line to feel for a fish striking the bait. Nothing. Another cast. Check the bait. “Chink”. Puff, wait, puff. Do it again. Patience. Repetition. This, too, was fishin‘ with my dad. He was born to do this.
The evening was getting late. He had done everything right, as best he could, but the fish just were not cooperating. Dad had no choice. If we were going to catch any fish, it was time to change tactics. He was standing thigh deep in moonless darkness, focusing, digging deep into his bag of tricks, reflecting on all the years of his Horrible Hittle Boy wisdom. The Pied Piper was summoning all his talent, posturing to lure the hesitant fish from the safety of the water‘s depths. There would be no magical flute, no rats, no trolling of clanking high chairs to wake the sleeping fish. It was time for the secret weapon.
The silence seemed to grow deeper, then gracefully, seductively, the maestro closed his eyes, flexed his bowels, and The Whistling Sphincter squealed it’s magical song. I turned to face downstream as its melody floated hypnotically past my ears and across the surface of the water like a sour angel on a summer wind. All through the ten or twelve second performance the maestro’s face glowed intensely in the red ash of his Robert Burns cigarillo. I could almost see him smiling as the fish call seeped from his bunghole bassoon. It ended just as softly as it started. There was no fan fare, no standing “O” after a magnificent performance, just the silence of a Horrible Hittle Boy smile spreading across his lips that could be felt fifty feet upstream. The Whistling Sphincter had spoken.
There was the click of a Mitchell 300’s bale opening, the sound of line being peeled off the spool as the bait sailed out into the darkness, the “chink” as the bale was closed, then a brief silence followed by the sound of line being immediately stripped off the reel against a tightly set drag. Dark silence was broken by the splash of swirling waters. His cigarillo was fully aglow. His rod arched. The water frothed and churned some thirty feet ahead of him. With stogie crimped between clenched teeth he’d chortle, “ Ha, ha, ha … gotcha!”
This was a performance that would be repeated many times over the next few years before he died. He didn’t always use the fish call. Sometimes he didn’t have to. Sometimes he just toked on his stogie, fished very quietly, and was content, but whenever he did release that succulent, melodic, fan fare over the waters, he always caught fish! Now that’s talent.
He would have been 90 today.
Thanks, Dad.
Written 19 April, 2012