Joe ~ May 5

 

A Challenge

 

There have been many times in my life where I have been challenged in what seemed at the time to be an insurmountable. All those events that presented themselves were new and frightening, and made me want to run away as fast as my little legs could carry me. I have been told that as a baby I never crawled. Now I feel that all babies crawl and why was I the only one who would bounce around on his butt to get where I was going. Maybe, it was a harbinger to come. When I played little league baseball I was gifted with the monicker, STICK ASS. One smart ass kid said I ran as if I had a stick up my ass. And I guess perception does eventually become reality because the name stuck for years. Yes, It was indeed a challenge to walk out my front door and try to avoid every pair of eyes in the neighborhood who were waiting in hiding so they could jump out and scream,  STICK ASS!!! STICK ASS!!! It was eventually condensed down to a more rhythmically sounding STICKY. Sticky was a nickname that I could live with because in my neck of the woods there were: Shorties, Square Heads, Butchie, Con, Clem, Deacon and Jigs. So Sticky wasn’t the worst. But the challenge of accepting a title of such weight and distinction was a situation that I had to reason with even though it was based on a false anatomical protuberance. 

One of the biggest hurdles to take on was moving to New York City. Even though I said in my wildest dream that I was going to be a famous artist and move to New York City I had no illusions of the possibility that it could happen. Yet on May 30th 1983 I packed up a U-Haul and moved to a place that might have been on the outskirts of Katmandu. Oh sure…all this time later I can say….”Yeah, I lived in the city and it was cool”. Well it wasn’t. It was scary as sh*t and I never felt so out of place in my life. Going out on job interviews and making cold calls left me in the words of Neil Young, “Helpless…Helpless….Hel…ellpless!!! Plus I had a new wife. I would sit on the Subway after a day of interviews and count all the different ways I could make my life worse than it already was. No computers, no cellphones, no answering machine, I was spiraling down into the abyss waiting to crash land. It got to the point where I was about to give up. Too much rejection to swallow and I didn’t want to persevere any longer. The subway got noisier, the buildings got taller and the people got nastier. One more call to make. It’s a number that was given to me and I had thought I had thrown it out. But there it was and I called it. I, with all my heart didn’t want to dial that number. Growing up, I had a phobia about making phone calls. Ever since I was a kid and we shared a party line with Gracie Boyle next door I would totally freeze when faced with a phone conversation. This was probably because Gracie caught me once listening in on one of her calls and gave me a dressing down and told my Mom, who then gave me another dressing down. When I first fell in love with a girl named Rosie in the seventh grade I would call her and wouldn’t say a word…and then I’d do it again and again until I became so ashamed that I gave up hope that I could ever have a girlfriend. I mean there were numerous challenges involved going on here….being shy…being called Stick Ass, being a student of every punk on the block that would explain in detail there sexual conquests and how rough and tough they were, while the  adult mentors in my life were suffering from the “Nobody ever told me syndrome” that infected mostly humans who grew up Irish Catholic. So, I made the call and it led to something which led to something which made me a cool New Yorker with a job and friends that I could go out and have a beer with. A wife who after many doubts about this man who would see her through thick and thin was indeed having trouble with his own thick and thin to grasp the fact that he was a husband now…and he was living in NYC….and he had accepted the challenges at hand and was moving on to new and more challenging challenges and no one …. I mean no one would would dare call him STICK ASS ever again.