A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [10]
Once, at the Mayfair, I talked Darren into stealing one of the magazines by stuffing it down his pants. On his way out of the store it slid out of his left pant leg, and he was taken to the manager’s office. I ran across the street and watched the store to see if he’d get away. Minutes later, police arrived. Then his parents. I was scared they were talking about me.
The Manships
Another family in the neighborhood was the Manships. Carl and Kenny were the kids and they seemed really poor and depressed. Carl was my age and Kenny was a couple years younger. Their parents were old and mean. The dad always wore dirty overalls as if he farmed all day (maybe he did, I don’t know) and the mom was an apron-wearing biddy with varicose veins everywhere. I thought she had some kind of disease.
Their house was really small and dusty. They had a tiny front yard with a little grass, but their backyard was all hard dirt and dog shit. An old Ford truck from the forties or fifties sat near the alley with weeds growing around it. Matt and I would play games with Carl and Kenny sometimes, but we never hung out at their place, mainly because they had a crappy TV—an old black-and-white one that picked up only three channels. And the only snacks they had were hard candies that were all stuck together in a glass bowl.
If we were ever out playing somewhere, it would always have to be in the neighborhood, because Carl and Kenny’s dad would never leave his yard to look for them. He would only bark out their names in a voice that sounded like extra-chunky gravel. It would grow harsher, louder, and more curt with each call. If Carl and Kenny weren’t within shouting distance, we were pretty sure they’d get their dad’s belt.
Mark
My brother Mark had moved into a small house with a friend shortly after the house fire. He had just graduated high school and was cooking at a hotel restaurant. People thought the hotel was kind of fancy because it was on a piece of land that jutted out into the Columbia River. It was called Clover Island.
Some people still thought he had something to do with the house fire, but nothing was ever proven.
Every time I went to the new house that he lived in, it smelled of thick pot smoke and thin beer. Mark was also becoming more interested in motorcycles at this time. I thought this combination of things added up to being a Hells Angel or something. Dad didn’t like me going over there because he probably knew what was going on.
One night though, I made up some kind of story and went over there to watch a KISS concert on HBO. There were other people hanging out, most of them sitting on the floor as Mark and his roommate tried to figure out how to hook up the stereo speakers to the TV. About halfway through the concert, Gene Simmons began an ominous bass refrain between songs and then started spitting fake blood out of his mouth. But he wasn’t really spitting. It was more like he was just letting it gurgle out of his lips and down his chin. When he was done, his stuck his long tongue out and gave a devious look as the band started into “God of Thunder.” Everyone watching the concert totally loved this, except me. I thought it went too far and I was afraid I might have nightmares about the bloody face. Someone said it was a trick, that Gene kept a packet of goat’s blood in the back of his mouth until it was time to bite down on it. The person who explained this said it was easy to hide stuff in your mouth. He pulled at the corner of his mouth with a finger and showed us a wad of gum stuck to one of his stained wisdom teeth.
I always liked Paul Stanley, the star-eyed guitar player and singer, better than Gene. I liked the pucker of his lips, the androgynous superhero quality that he had. Plus he owned a certain cool quality the rest of the band lacked. He would never stoop to spewing blood.
Later on, when Peter Criss stepped out from behind the mammoth cluster of drums and sat at the edge of the stage to sweetly serenade the fans with their