The Toxic Waste Wonderland of My Childhood
Absorbing the world around me
Note: Please, pretty please with sugar on it, if you are a Medium member read this story here. That way I may get a few coppers out of it.
If the dude on the right looks familiar to you, there is a fair chance you grew up within rabbit-ear or roof mounted TV antenna range of WPIX-TV, a New York based Television station among whose offerings was Chiller Theater hosted by John Zacherle, later Zacherley — the dude on the right.
Little brother and I never missed Chiller Theater. The movie of the week would frequently cut to the host mixing concoctions while avoiding bats and other weird creatures swinging about on wires. This was what my brother and I lived for.
Chiller Theater began airing in September of 1963. This would place the events I am about to relate to when I was 13. That seems strange because looking back on it, it seems I was more like 10. At 13 one is making the transition from childhood to adolescence. That is, if one is a boy. The girls were way ahead of us.
Therefore, what follows would have to have taken place in the summer of my 13th year, between the 6th and 7th grades. In 6th grade the girls were just classmates I never spoke to. On the first day of 7th grade in September 1963 they transformed into angels from whom I could barely tear away my eyeballs.
Wait. The dates still don’t work. I must have reverted to childhood for the summer between grades 7 and 8, which makes what follows seem extra weird.
But not impossible. I’d struck out with the girls like it was baseball and I was me. No wonder I wanted to retreat to happier, simpler times!
However that was, play was still a thing that summer. Little brother and I loved Chiller Theater so much we set up “Zacherley forts” in wooded areas proximate to supplies of toxic substances with which we could re-enact Zacherley’s shtick. One of us would concoct brews and potions as the other swung around weird things attached to stings which were in turn attached to broken branches of suitable length.
One such location featured and embankment over which had been tossed a prodigious quantity of empty whiskey bottles, all pint flasks, along with old cans containing residues, some generous, some skimpy, of god-knows-what, discarded by the proprietors of the gasoline filling station at the top. All perfect for concocting “brews” during the re-enactment of our favorite Zacherley out-takes.
We had no idea what we were mixing up in those discarded hub-caps and other filthy vessels. A dash of this, a dash of that. We’d try to light our mixtures on fire, because of course we played with matches into the bargain. Once we found a liquid which burned with an eerie green flame when lit. Even big brother was impressed.
He improvised a religious ceremony on the spot. Oh, the great holy green flame or something like that. By this time, if memory serves, we were ensconced in our whiskey bottle fort.
I didn’t tell you? The aforementioned quantity of whiskey bottles was so immense we figured we could create a little fort out of them, stacking them on their sides and using the icky, black mud that covered much of the ground as mortar. It actually worked. There was some tar paper lying about so we used it for the roof. We had to crawl into it, our hands and knees sinking into the poisoned earth but what the heck? Fun was fun.
The water that made the icky black mud muddy had leached through the embankment qua toxic waste dump. We got our hands right in it. As we worked we poured the residues from the whiskey bottles into one bottle reserved for the purpose.
Upon completion of our endeavors we had about half a bottle of some kind of sludge which we dared each other to drink. Nobody did. I guess we retained a modicum of good sense.
Some such exposure was surely common among many of us boomers during our childhoods. This sorry situation no doubt maintained into the millennial generation. In my personal case, somehow all that toxic chemical exposure, of which I have described only a small portion, didn’t turn me into a racist lunatic, conspiracy addict, or some combination of the two. How? Judging from the state of the world today, only sheer dumb luck can explain it.