Let's Take a Tour of Spitzy's Home Town!

Oh man, this is gonna be great. There's so much to show you, I don't even know where to begin. Can you believe I grew up in such an adorable small town? I know, crazy, right? Just wait till you see the tree house, still standing after all these years, or the Corner Store where my brother and I bought comic books and fireworks, or the river that ran through town where all the neighborhood kids would fish on hot summer nights, or the home of Carl Roberts, the guy with a reputation for farting zucchinis out of his butt. Kinda reminds you of a Norman Rockwell painting, doesn't it?

Well, not the zucchini farting part. I guess that doesn't really qualify as classic Americana.

Honestly, though, you should've seen Carl in action. He'd stumble out of his house, drunk as Sinatra after slapping around Mia Farrow, and stand in the middle of the street, farting so loudly that it sounded like an air siren. And then, as I and the other neighborhood kids watched in slack-jawed horror, a zucchini would mysteriously appear in his pants, trickling down his leg like an internal parasite before finally landing on the cement with a moist ker-splat. Nobody knew how he did it - we could only assume voodoo was required to make a zucchini emerge unblemished from a human rectum - but we never cared to solve the mystery. Carl was our Houdini, and the less we knew about his secrets, the better.

I'm getting ahead of myself. We've got a lot to see before we get to that stop on the tour. If you're lucky, Carl might still be alive and he'll agree to an impromptu performance. Getting excited? You should be.

KEEP ON READIN'! WHAT, YOU GOT SOMEPLACE BETTER TO BE?

* * *

Okay folks, we're startin' with the big guns. See that house in the distance? The one with the cobblestone brick walls and the swing in the back yard? Yep, that was my childhood home. Well, at least until my dad got a new job and we moved to Chicago, when I was just a hair over 13. I like to think of it as my pre-masturbatory abode. Anyway, see that window on the second floor to the left? That was my room. Pretty sweet, huh? You can't make out much from this distance, so you'll just have to use your imagination. I'd love to give you a guided tour of the inside but, well, that's never ended well.

Trust me, it's not worth the trouble. I know from experience. I tried it again just last year. My brother and I knocked on the front door and told the new owners that we'd grown up here, and they graciously invited us inside. But the house wasn't the way we remembered it. That should be obvious, I know, but it always comes as a surprise.

"When we lived here," we'd announce to our hosts, "the couch was over in that corner, and the TV was next to the bay windows."

At first they just smiled politely, but before long they became defensive and even combative. "Is that right?" They'd ask, smirking at our every decor correction. "Well, things change, don't they?" To be fair, the festering hostility was almost entirely our fault. We considered even the slightest alteration as a personal offense, a flipping of the bird to our childhood memories. We just assumed that our home would be preserved, right down to every rusty nail and last piece of kitchen silverware. Perhaps we were biased, but we sincerely believed that our home would be frozen in time, like a museum display or Lincoln's log cabin. When we discovered that they'd torn down a wall to turn two bedrooms into one large master bedroom, we were so horrified that it very nearly came to fisticuffs.

Motivated by existential panic and an innate fear of our own insignificance, we scoured the house for evidence of Us, and discovered a tiny scratch on one of the bedroom doors that had somehow escaped the revisionist history of paint. We huddled around it, ignoring the not-so-subtle hints from the new owners that we'd overstayed our welcome, and debated every possible explanation for the scratch, coming up with hundreds of potential origin tales and giving its backstory far greater weight than it probably deserved. We examined it and photographed it and traced a finger around its edges, like anthropologists trying to piece together the clues of an ancient civilization.

So yeah, it's probably for the best if we just skip that part of the tour. It'd just be a disappointment. If you're like me, you'll leave feeling vaguely unsatisfied and thinking, "I kinda expected everything to be much, much bigger." I totally know what you're talking about!

* * *

The big abandoned building to your right - yeah, the one with the badly dilapidated sign and the for-lease ad in the window - that's our family's favorite restaurant. Well, not anymore, obviously. It closed down after we moved away, but during the 70s and 80s it was the town's biggest hotspot. We had dinner here pretty much every weekend, as did most of our neighbors. The food was okay, I guess. It was typical Midwestern fare. Burgers the size of bumper cars and everything else deep-fried until it met the community standards of culinary conformity. My brother and I were more impressed with the video games in the back than anything they served on a plate, if only because shooting at asteroids didn't give us quite as many chest pains. But our parents - every adult we knew, actually - they all loved this place. They couldn't get enough of it. And y'know, I think I've finally figured out why. It had nothing to do with the Guess-Which-Vegetable-We've-Fried-Into-Oblivion appetizers or the shrimp that looked (and tasted) like pencil erasers. It was the peanuts.

This was one of those restaurants where you could throw peanut shells on the floor. I know that because, to this day, my family still refers to it as "the place where you could throw peanut shells on the floor." That is our one memory of dining here, and judging from the way my mom's face lights up every time she mentions it, it's a good memory. I can still vividly recall the shocked expressions of my parents and their friends when gossip began to spread about the strange new bohemian eatery that had opened downtown.

"You can litter!" They told each other, giggling with excitement. "You just throw your shells on the ground and they don't care. They want you to do it. Oh my gosh, can you imagine such a thing?"

At that point in my life, I don't think I'd ever seen adults experiencing so much pleasure, so much unmitigated bliss. You'd think a floor covered in peanut shells was just a notch or two above a Roman vomitorium in terms of sinful extravagance.

I don't know if I'd ever really thought about what that meant until now. I always thought of my parents as happy. But when you're five or six, any adult who isn't yelling must be happy, right? I can't imagine what it must've been like to be in your 30s and living in a town this size, which has a population barely bigger than the average daily attendance at a suburban mall. You're pretty much cut off from civilization, and your only contact with the outside world is the crap on TV or whatever mom-and-pop restaurants haven't gone out of business yet.

Would it have been any different for me if I'd stayed here? Would I have been the kind of guy who thought to himself, "I hate my fucking insignificant, soul-sucking excuse for a job, and I'm one bad migraine away from ending my loveless marriage and the snot-faced satan spawn we produced with a murder-suicide. But I can find the strength to go on because I've deluded myself into thinking there's something liberating about a restaurant that lets you discard your snack refuse with the nothing-left-to-lose abandon of a Dickensian orphan. I want to watch those shells waft gently to the floor like my abandoned dreams, and then I want somebody less fortunate than me, perhaps even somebody from my high school who dropped out after failing gym, to pick up those shells with grubby, unwashed hands, preferably while I'm watching them with an arrogant sneer, thus allowing me a fleeting sense of self-worth, and maybe tonight I'll be able to fall asleep without drinking quite so many highballs."

Wow. Suddenly I'm very, very depressed. Let's move on, shall we?

* * *

Ah, here's something that everybody can enjoy. The Willowbrook Ice Cream Parlor - which, no surprise, closed down. Did everything go out of business when the Spitznagels left town? Weird. Anyway, before the Willowbrook became a coffin for my adolescent memories, it enjoyed a brief heyday as the town's prepubescent Plato's Retreat. Except instead of casual sex with strangers and STDs, it had ice cream and arts-and-crafts projects. Sounds innocent enough, I know, but the Willowbrook was so thick with sexual tension that the pheromones alone could've powered a hybrid car.

Or maybe it was just me. I asked my brother and he doesn't remember it quite the same way. But this place will always be synonymous in my mind with pre-teen erections. Sometimes I can close my eyes and still see them, the girls with their newly curvaceous bodies, once so easy to ignore but now absolutely hypnotizing. Oh god, I would've followed them anywhere. They were like the Pied Piper of Hamelin and I was just a dirty, horny rat. They'd lure me and countless other neighborhood boys to the Willowbrook, where we'd practically fall over each other for the chance to buy them ice cream cones. I wasted entire afternoons watching them eat those obvious phallic symbols, running their tongues across the frozen confections with just enough slow deliberation to make us believe we were looking at something really, really dirty.

Even if my brother never joined the unwashed masses at the ice cream brothel, I know for a fact that he visited the craft hut, located just below the parlor in a difficult-to-find burrow that would've felt confining to a Hobbit. Under the disinterested tutelage of a few retirees, kids could make their own leather belts or jewelry out of petoskey stones. I assume you have no fucking clue what I'm talking about, right? A petoskey stone is a fossilized coral that can only be found on the beaches of northern Michigan, and the locals collect them like they're priceless artifacts. Let me put it into perspective: This town has no hospital, one grocery store that isn't open on weekends, and three stores that specialize in art made from petoskey stones. We were raised to have childlike deference for these stones, to revere them as a national treasure and horde them like they had actual monetary value. You can tell you're dealing with a Michigan native if they think it's perfectly normal for a married and childless adult, not suffering from any emotional problems or mental disabilities, to devote an entire weekend to hand-crafting a miniature version of Rodin's The Thinker made entirely out of petoskey stones.

While my brother busied himself with leatherwork - making his own belts and wallets and vests and wristbands and more leather clothing than anybody outside the BDSM community has any reason owning - I made necklaces for girls. Not girls I was dating or girls I wanted to date or even girls I admired from afar. I just wanted to be ready when I met her, whoever she might be, to pull a necklace or a pair of earrings out of my pocket and win her over with a seemingly spontaneous romantic gesture. But because of the geological state pride instilled in me as a kid, I sincerely believed that all women wanted jewelry made out of petoskey stones. It never occurred to me that when you give your lady friend a fossil on a string, what you're basically telling her is, "I am either a clueless hick or the cheapest boy you've ever known, probably both, and allowing me to touch your private bits might not be the best idea." It'd be one thing if I was dating a paleontologist who didn't know any better, but most women between the ages of 8 and 89 do not consider a petoskey stone to be a precious metal. Who knew?

I just wish somebody had shared this valuable piece of information before my family moved to Chicago and I gave my very first girlfriend a petoskey stone necklace and she looked at it like I'd just handed her a turd on a stick. I still think that Michigan - not just the retired women who ran the crafts store at the Willowbrook but the entire fucking state - owes me a public apology. I blame them for my inability to have a healthy relationship. Is it any surprise that I'm still so clueless about the opposite sex when I came of age surrounded by well-meaning but criminally irresponsible adults who convinced me that the only thing women want more than driftwood art or clay ashtrays is jewelry constructed from stones that easily weigh more than their head?

Fuck this town. Seriously, everybody here can go fuck themselves. I need a drink. Anybody else need a drink?

(To take the second part of the tour, go here.)