The Funeral of Davie, end of an era

 

Davie at the beach with my grandparents, circa 1982

Yesterday we attended the funeral of my childhood next door neighbor, Davie. Davie and his wife Sandy had three girls who were roughly the same ages as my brother and me and lived across the street from my parents for 50+ years.

And when I say next door neighbor, I mean the kind of neighbor we didn't knock on their door, we just slammed right in their house and made ourselves a sandwich. (Which would have been white bread, butter on one slice, mayo on the other slice, Lebanon Balogna with a dab of yellow mustard and a handful of potato chips jammed in there. But this is beside the point).

Davie was a skinny chain-smoking functioning alcoholic with anger management issues. He also was always up to something you desperately wanted to be a part of. One halloween he dressed up like Fig Newton and all I remember is his skinny legs in these bright green tights sticking out of a gigantic green fig costume standing on the corner smoking and drinking a can of Miller Highlife while people driving by in their cars almost had accidents. Shit like this.

My brother spent a lot of time with Davie. We didn't have a TV and my brother had the 80s version of a screen problem. When our TV broke (which is why we had no TV, the 'rents just never bought another one) my brother went down into the basement prior to trash day and just stared mournfully at the unplugged TV for long enough that everyone in my entire family had a chance to see him and makes fun of him for it to this very day.)

So it was a pretty win/win relationship. My brother would go across the street after school and watch Greatest American Hero and Dukes of Hazzard with Davie, who relied on my brother to change the channel (no remotes back then). The changing of the channel got interesting because Davie's family didn't have one TV, but two. 

The thing is, both those TVs had also broken. Did this happen a lot?

In this case though, with great fortune, the sound broke on the one TV, and the other one had no picture. 

Slightly less fortunately, the TV where the sound broke was a little black and white jobbie, and the picture broke on the giant color console TV with legs that stood on the floor. 

A similar color console TV

So they put the one little TV on top of the other TV and watched the little black and white guy while listening to the big color one. Changing the channel became a very precise operation to make sure the sound and the picture lined up on both the TVs. My brother became the expert. Davie relied on him heavily.

In hindsight, did no one have enough money to buy a new TV? As an adult, these are the things that make me go hmm.

Then there was the time Davie got furious on the golf course and threw his driver up in the air in frustration and it got stuck in a tree. So then he threw his putter up in the tree to try to dislodge the driver, But the putter also got stuck in the tree. 

Fast forward to that night,  he gets my brother out of bed, they sneak out onto the golf course under cover of darkness with a ladder to get both golf clubs out of the tree. Which was a whole other story. Again, just shit like this. And yeah. Where this little ditty came from there are 500 more. There's a whole sub genre involving ladders.

In hindsight, most of the truly hilarious stories begin with Davie having a temper tantrum, doing something kind of ridiculous and then the whole endeavor to fix the situation which may or may not turn into a whole other situation. Then again, I'm older than Davie probably was then, so from this vantage point the light is a little different.

But Davie was an integral part of my childhood and I'll never forget playing monkey in the middle on the street, repeating his jokes I didn't fully understand and getting in tons of trouble, the gigantic bonfires out in the woods on hiking trips, the red shag carpet in his refinished basement he was so proud of. And just. Yeah. It's the end of an era.