Kingdom Come
S1E6
The mostly yellow and orange triceratops emptied its open maw of sandy gray soil, almost pellet like, into the pile that contained a slightly rusted toy Publix semi truck. Strands of roots plunged in and around the makeshift play area, near the carport, just behind Grandma’s trailer. Spanish moss, with its gray tendrils like an unkempt beard, dangled overhead from every angle but always high enough six year old me couldn’t reach (yet). When the plastic dinosaur toy finished dumping its contents I’d fill it up again in Sisyphean practice, content with the repetition and predictability. Not that the ground around me was predictable - the consistency of the dirt was nearly identical to the grainy piles of fire ant hills with the ability to turn any playtime into an instant escape scenario. The thick, humid summer air - that was predictable. But nothing was as truly predictable as the sun shower that would come at exactly 4:30pm and awaken legions of green tree frogs while it pattered and pinged off the tin roof of the double-wide’s family room extension. You could set your calculator watch by that rain.
Most summers were spent, in whole or in part, there at my grandmother’s house in Williston, FL. The relatively small parcel of land with a single trailer and barn was beset on all sides by horse farms but acted as an oasis from the entire universe and a place of warmth (literally and figuratively). The number of sense memories that can put me right back onto “the property,” as it was often referred to, are myriad.
The bisected barn behind the trailer was a highlight. It was fronted by a large porch with a porch swing and picnic table that made for a particularly enjoyable space to escape the heat, the summer rain, or both. A tin RC Cola-branded thermometer watched from the center wall, a reminder of the grandfather I never met and his many years of service to the cola company. The two red doors flanking either side brought you to the almost living-room like space on the left side and workshop on the other. The left side held an old plastic couch that stuck to your short-shorted legs and had a questionable amount of bar accoutrements indicating what the space was probably more meant for in evening festivities long after I’d gone to bed for the night. Several metal signs hung around, making jokes I didn’t get: “This Place is Bugged” with a picture of Uncle Sam; “The family that sleeps together, stays together” with a picture of a family with holes in their socks sharing a bed. A deep work sink did its job here near a drying rack where my swimsuits were often placed after playing in the metal tubs like mini pools. It was oppressively hot and stuffy here and you couldn’t explore but for so long before needing the shade. From the porch, the door to the other half on the right was a workshop I rarely went into despite being way more cool than the more windowed, sunny-sided left side - partly because the actual space to move around was so small, mostly taken up with storage and tools - but mostly because it was the domain of the man my grandmother later married that I thought was a giant asshole. (For the record, I was right. The many arguments he and I had would precede the revelation of his abuse of my grandmother many years later. A terrible feeling to have been right.) The one pleasant memory associated with that space was the old radio that we would hang on the outside of the door, aging yellow extension cord snaking back into the workshop over the door, playing a local radio station of mostly 1920’s and 30’s songs. This love of that big band era would become ingrained in me and helped me fall in love with the soundtracks of games like the Fallout series.
Behind the barn was an awning-like port for tractors, large tools, a few probably broken bicycles, and what I could only assume was an entire population of spiders I did not want to meet. The little blue(?) riding tractor was the one I could handle and later take for rides around the property, past the massive trees in the front, under the power lines, and sometimes along the entire perimeter with my dog Augie sometimes trailing and yapping in a sort-of protective-but-terrified posture. Later I’d also pass the massive satellite dish that helped shitty step-grandpa get many channels he’d never watch but would introduce me to the Spanish-language version of “Whoomp! There It Is” (“Whoomp! Si Lo Es”); I longed to fill it up with ranch dip like Bloom County would suggest such things were only good for. Behind my grandmother’s property was a large wooded expanse that technically belonged to the fantastically always-friendly-and-ready-to-party neighbors who, like many of the more affluent in the area, had horses. One such horse had been put out to pasture, somewhat literally, and was notoriously grumpy about riding interactions in his old age. Gray with a head of long black hair that draped an eye years ahead of emo bands, “Smokey” as I’d call him, would become something of an old friend when he’d make an appearance along the back fence of my grandmother’s property. I’d feed him carrots and he’d not bite or kick me and let me pet him.
Other animals nearby included the titular Florida gators of my parents University who wandered between watering holes in pastures across the road. While only occasionally seen, their antics and appetites were legendary and reason enough to never sneak between the thick brown fence facing my grandmother’s property. Last but certainly not least was the horse-neighbor’s African Grey parrot who could be heard squawking playfully and famously learned to swear from the playful arguments of his owners. Looking back, for as humble as my grandmother’s was, it was also quite an epicenter of exotic zoology, from fire ants to frogs.
Inside my grandmother’s house, a heavily modified mobile home that was never ever going to be mobile again, the AC blasted from the kitchen on one end, near my grandmother’s collection of coffee cups that included my favorite, the one from the World’s Fair when it was in Knoxville, TN. There was a thin cabinet door near the gas stove that likely was designed for something tall but one long summer visit, because she knew I liked tuna fish sandwiches, she packed entirely with the tallest stack of Charlie Tuna cans you’ve ever seen outside a grocery store. Attached to the kitchen was the dining room addition where my grandmother would reliably prepare an entire dinner for us after being told not to when we arrived after the long car trip from Virginia. At or around that table I distinctly remember:
Dancing with my grandmother to Elvis at Christmas time, the pseudo-suede feel of her housecoat on my cheeks and neck, then my arms as I grew to her height
Drawing monsters on my Dad’s computer paper hand-carried from Virginia
Watching my favorite Aunt Blanche come ripping down the drive in her green 70’s Plymouth Duster - always the first to a party - and then her sly smile as she popped the top of a beer and sat with my Grandmother here and caught up before the rest of the picnic’s guests could arrive, pinnacle of solo-badassery after the death of my beloved uncle Pod
Rolling up would-be role playing characters for tabletop games I was excited to play when I got back home to friends
Seeing the pilot for the Seinfeld TV show on the small tube TV on a typewriter stand
Seeing my name listed in the back of Todd McFarlane’s Spider Man number 16 (the infamous 1991 horizontal gimmick issue you held like a pin up, also featuring X-Force)
...among others.
The add-on living room was pretty straightforward but included my crap not-grandfather’s so-called “Archie Bunker Chair” which was more than a little indication that he didn’t get the satire of All in the Family. A sort of second living room, the original from the trailer, was a step up away but had the telephone with outrageously long curly phone cord that could travel across the room to my grandmother’s favorite chair. Years later I’d use her famous Saturday-morning telephone call habits in my Powerpoint routines about generational differences: she’d call anyone she had an inclination to and then chat with my Mom last about all she learned - a habit not unlike checking Facebook and quizzing whether you saw so-and-so got a puppy or engaged, and so on. Down the hall were the two bedrooms - one thin one often referred to as, “Grandma’s room” which I always thought was funny until I’d later learn it’s because she frequently slept there instead of the primary bedroom at the end of the hall. The lone bathroom in the entire property had a very distinct smell of Skin So Soft and Oil of Olay which to this day I can only associate with grandma’s house. When the power was out the bathroom was too. Only the gas stove worked because the water pump was electric and located in a tiny little house near the garden painted with little red doors just like the barn.
My memories of the property are so distinct but also very much mine - my parents have all different relationships to both the land and the trailer. The original trailer was what they lived in early in their marriage in a trailer park across from the University of Florida in the late 60’s and early 70’s; they would buy the property and gift the trailer to my grandparents who moved up from southern Florida. In one of my favorite family facts, my grandparents’ best friends would also move up onto property down the road. My Uncle Wink once rented a room from my grandparents and worked for the post office and now he and Aunt Angie would move just a stretch of dirt road up the hill and eventually raise a family that also lived in houses dotting the same property where I’d get tractor rides and join in on massive family reunions (theirs and ours - always mixed and always considered family regardless) in their larger barn for entertaining. I can smell the giant pot of boiled peanuts and cigars even as I type this. For my grandmother, she certainly had different memories - from the death of my grandfather (just after finding out my mother was pregnant with me) to the death of her kind but often sick next husband, and finally her rescue from that house from the abusive asshole that my parents conducted with a rented SUV my grandmother was amused to see was called a Ford, “Escape.” Despite the ending, I also know she had love for the place.
Swinging on the barn swing with her daughter and the smell of rain.
Her morning coffee in her chair.
Laughing with her friends in the summer sun.
Watching her grandson play with toy dinosaurs in the dirt near the carport.
The Tale of the Tape: World Party - Bang!
(London 1983 - Richmond, VA 1993 - London 2022 - London 2025)
I am sure I’m the only one but it is impossible for me not to think about the original cover to World Party’s Bang! album, which I had on cassette in 1993 soon after seeing them open for 10,000 Maniacs (the latter of which we’d learn was their second-to-last with Natalie Merchant at the helm). The image was a claymation Karl Wallinger’s head blowing up with numerous things flying about that from memory I am sure I can’t correctly identify. A train? A plane? Was there a toy or two in there? I remember the glasses and I think “World Party” was spelled with Scrabble tiles. So maybe I don’t remember it nearly as well as I thought but I do know that the pop art replacement cover of a comic book explosion seems so plain by comparison that it actually makes me a little mad.
There are so many things I loved about Karl and World Party’s music in that incredibly prolific era that it’s hard to put it into words. Egyptology remains one of my favorite albums. If you’ve never heard the far more affecting original of “She’s the One” you should do yourself a favor; how Robbie Williams would later get to remake the song is its own tale I won’t tell here but worth the music-industry-scuttlebutt to look it up. Bang!’s “And God Said” lines of, “And God said, ‘Look after the planet’ / And man said, ‘fuck you!’” was a prescient summation of what I saw in politics around my Dad’s work in climate science.
Bang! in particular has a weird tie to London’s Tower of London and Tower Bridge that I can only attribute to some sort of relational memory glitch. I really can’t give you a great reason why I think of the Tower area so much when I hear it, especially since I have so many memories distinct from the music. Most recently I tried to solve it by listening to the album on loop as I visited the Tower and Bridge hoping it’d either help me explain the connection or just finish it off with a flourish. I’m not sure either happened but it did make me reflect on my keystone remembrances in order of occurrence:
Lest you think my interactions with my grandmother were only in southern states it’s important to point out the trip to London when I was in the second grade. In her first time in another country, my parents brought my grandmother and I to England in the late summer of 1983. A particularly funny story involving the Tower would eventually make it back to my grandmother’s Sunday School group at Flemington Baptist Church: In a visit to a bathroom near the Bloody Tower she was shocked by two things regarding the toilet paper: it had the Queen’s symbol on it and it was a bit harsh / cheap. Amused, she unrolled some and carefully folded it before placing it in her purse to bring back and show the folks back home. She emerged from the bathrooms to meet up with my parents and I but was startled to see the garish, flourish-filled Beefeaters. Thinking they were likely to find out she stole the Queens toilet paper, she quickly pulled it from her purse and disposed of the evidence.
Sometime in the 2010’s on one of umpteen work visits to London I started the routine of visiting the Tower area not long after a morning landing; it’s an easy and reliably walkable way to try and wake up and get into the time zone - either with some coffee near the bridge or a long absorption of the history inside the Tower walls. One morning after stowing my bags at the hotel I’d head to the Tower and after a looping walk around it spotted a group of people costumed as, of all things, X-Men from the comic books tumbling downward into the Tower Station tube stairs next to me. The cosplayers and I got on the same train and, in a fit of heck-it’s-morning wanderlust I got off when they did and was greeted immediately by a massive weekend Comicon. A cheap day pass purchase later and I was among the first that morning to meet David Prouse (Darth Vader), some movie Hobbits, see a panel with Christopher Lloyd on his time filming the Back to The Future franchise, and most memorably spend a considerable amount of time talking with James O’Barr, one of my favorite artists of all time and creator of The Crow; he’d sign a picture of a unicorn for Addy and a few months later would meet her in person when he came to a similar con in the States.
Addy would continue the tradition with me on our fateful trip years later, this time a bit more premeditated with a reservation for an English breakfast at a restaurant with a great view of the Tower Bridge. A requisite first-time photo shot later we’d tour the tower and a parallel love for the Bridge and tradition was born in her.
Which brings me to my immersion therapy with Bang! in 2025 as I crossed the bridge and hid in its shade for a break from walking. In addition to my arrival-morning tradition I’d returned later in the trip after consulting a schedule for Tower Bridge openings so I could finally witness one in person. I positioned myself farther down the bank of the river for an optimal vantage point, tracking the sizable tour boat foretold in the appointment table.
While Bang! rotated with the cogs in my tape player I watched for the first time the likely millionth opening of the drawbridge. I wondered whether my grandmother ever saw it open.