Last Tuesday night I watched, for the fifth time, the 1989 film Scandal, a “docudrama” about the John Profumo scandal in Britain, featuring the late John Hurt’s best performance, along with a young Bridget Fonda (bad Brit accent, but a convincing wisegal) and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, an actress whose subsequent work escapes me. Early on, Nat King Cole’s hit “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer” is played in the background, and it was fun to hear it again in July (like the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” in December), especially during a spell of violent thunderstorms and 100-degree days.
My son Nicky, seeing Scandal fresh, wasn’t wowed—he liked the historic angle, and Hurt, but thought it looked like a made-for-TV film, commenting on many technical faults that went over my head. That Scandal hasn’t been given a Criterion re-master bath is puzzling, ditto for director Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990), a walloper that my wife and I saw at a theater off Piccadilly Circus just days after it was released.
Earlier that day, a pocket-sized pamphlet was slipped into our vestibule, with a black-and-red headline, “Are YOU good Enough? Have YOU kept the Ten Commandments?” That irked me, as nosy, from-the-mountain-of-faith proselytizing always does, but at least I didn’t have to answer the door. Two summers ago, in July, a family of five, new to the neighborhood, knocked at around seven p.m. and introduced themselves. It was a strange “Up With People” 10-minute encounter, as God, spirit and “togetherness” were mentioned, and though I don’t think they were Jehovah’s Witnesses—but you never know—it was just two shades short of creepy.
As it turned out, that was a churlish assessment, as we didn’t see (or at least recognize) the five minstrels again. Until: last January there was an eight-inch snowfall in Baltimore, the heavy, wet kind, and though I made a lot of money shoveling driveways as a kid on Long Island, my wife has sensibly forbidden me from now undertaking that task, given my age. Although my dad and several brothers had/have heart worries, of varying severity, that gene (for now, I beseech the Almighty), it’s not inconceivable for even a low-blood pressure/good cholesterol, fairly thin senior to keel over on that last shovelful.
Anyhow, just in time—glory hallelujah, and Up With Some People—one of the religious teenagers mentioned above was making the rounds on our street with his snowblower, and asked Melissa if we needed help. A friendly kid, around 15, he finished the job and my wife asked how much we owed. He shook his head, a bit embarrassed, and said, “I didn’t think that far!”, which was maybe a tiny scam. His innocence, and work ethic, was winning (scam or not), and Melissa gave $50, and he walked away with a big “Jesus loves me, yes I know” smile. Talking to my son Booker that night, he scoffed, and said the teen wasn’t a true entrepreneur, a chump, and I jokingly chastised him for that cynicism, reminding him he was twice the kid’s age and has spent eight years working in the financial industry.
Back at college in the mid-1970s, I had two close friends who didn’t abandon religion like almost everybody else I knew. The first, my roommate, had attended Jesuit schools from K-12, and unless he was loaded or stoned (not infrequent), kept his speech nearly free of vulgarity, considering it a slothful way to communicate. One night, in the process of draining a bottle of whiskey, he told me he’d considered taking the vows as a priest, but that the celibacy (at least in theory) requirement nixed that. Reasonable.
The other pal was a year younger than me, a Fundamentalist from a working-class neighborhood on the edge of Baltimore County, where few youths went on to college. We met in Spanish class, which I was flunking, and we’d grab some coffee after the 50-minute session was over. He was a dorky-looking guy, wearing thick black Elvis Costello-glasses before EC had crafted his persona, and very shy. But he was eager to learn about Bob Dylan (he’d read my stories in the Hopkins News-Letter) and I told him what I could; as a trade-off he tutored me in Spanish. I got the better end of the deal, since I squeaked by with a desired C in the course, whereas he got my blather, plus a few homemade tapes I made.
His motto, from Matthew 7:1, was “Do Not Judge, Lest Ye Be Judged,” to which I nodded, and put it out of my head. As it turned out, not surprisingly, two years later he rebelled against his strict upbringing, lifted weights, started drinking crates of beer and screwed any girl who’d have him. We drifted apart, but I still remember him as one crazy—before and after—motherfucker.
The picture above is a group shot from Camp Mohawk (Litchfield, CT), a bare-bones facility that I attended (no say in the matter) for three two-week sessions in the early-1960s. (I’m second from the right in the third row.) The camp had vague religious ties (prayers in the morning and night that kids talked through), but it was A-OK. My cousin Chuck was a counselor, which helped, and it was easy to make see-you-next-summer friends, and on one rainy day, I constructed a clay ashtray that’s still around somewhere in the house.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: John McCormack is Speaker of the House; the CIA’s “Domestic Operations Division is created; Federico Fellini releases 8½; NYC’s newspaper strike ends after 114 days; Frank Sinatra hosts the Oscars; Taylor/Burton film Cleopatra is released; Malcolm X is still alive; Wendell Scott is the first African-American to win a NASCAR race; Steven Soderbergh is born and Dick Powell dies; Roger Staubach wins the Heisman Trophy; Sonny Liston knocks out Floyd Patterson to win boxing’s Heavyweight Championship; Julius Boros wins golf’s U.S. Open; Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World” is Billboard’s #2 best-selling song; Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” was third most-played country song; and Joan Didion’s Run, River, John Rechy’s City of Night and J.P. Donleavy’s A Singular Man are published.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023