Sluggo Sleepover

Most people recall their first big crush, even if it was on a movie star or fictional character. I certainly recall mine who serves as a role model to this day – Sluggo. The comic strip Nancy & Sluggo was one of several strips like Blondie, Dondi, Our Boarding House and Gasoline Alley that were set in a netherworld that certainly was not contemporary and seemed somewhat stuck in the 1930s. Most of the styles and characters in those strips gave me the willies with the exception of Sluggo.

There was something so sumptuously rounded about him, and there was that buzz cut head that certainly conjured up images of wanting to run barefoot through it. He usually covered it up with that little red tough guy cap, but when he sometimes let the world see that sensuous bristle noggin of his, my entire body quivered thinking of what it must have felt like to touch. Though I certainly was not like Rollo, Nancy's rich kid friend, I knew that Sluggo came from the wrong side of the tracks and wore wonderful tough guy clothes instead of mine that had gone through two cycles of fabric softener and a light sheen of spray starch administered by our housekeeper. Of course, in my worst nightmare I was Nancy -- a chubby little fuzz head in a too tight skirt and blouse with a pathetic little ribbon on top like a maraschino cherry on an unworthy ice cream dessert.

Besides owning a monkey, one of my recurring pre-middle school fantasies was to have Sluggo over for a sleepover so I could feel that crisp, sandpaper sensual scalp as we snuggled in my bed with my stuffed toys and favorite blankets. From the age of five to about 11, I loved having boys from school for sleepovers, and just when their breathing suggested that they had fallen asleep, I’d haultingly move my hand from my visitor’s stomach to the top of his head to see if he possessed the crown I was in search of. Only once did one wake and mumble, “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Oh, just trying to see if you have Sluggo-worthy hair.”

“Okay. But just don’t try any funny business.”

Alas, I never found a worthy Sluggo surrogate at my school. Most were too equally intrigued with watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie’s International Film Festival or making toll house cookies with me to convince me that they had that Sluggo edge.

Finally I decided that it was because I lived in the wrong part of the country. I sense that Sluggo was probably from Newark or south Boston, the perfect urban animal. When my grandparents took me to Manhattan every October beginning at age eight, I was always on the look out for some little Sluggo hanging out in an alley. I was prepared to be my own Fresh Air Fund of one to sponsor an inner city boy of my exact age, giving him all the great Midwest sunshine and unpolluted air that would strengthen his little lungs. Sadly, most of the other eight year olds attending How Now Dow Jones and George M! were equally overly intense grandsons with doting grandmothers straightening their blazers with faux crests as they meticulously read the “Who’s Who” in the cast from Playbill. “Look Grandma, she was in 70 Girls 70 that we saw last year!”

Looking back at my most passionately adult romantic pursuits, there was always a Sluggo factor in the process. Always a hope that he was from the wrong side of the tracks but would still be interested in me. Several of them wore caps and striped shirts and would look both ways before sneaking a kiss in public.

I once wrote a short story about what happened to the adult Nancy and Sluggo. They ended up in San Francisco in the mid-1980s where Nancy, whose round face and figure were always at the center of her self-esteem crisis, took a very low level job at the Bank of America. She commuted every day from her tiny, overpriced studio in Alameda. The plumbing leaked, and the ceiling was sagging, but she lacked the self-confidence to complain to her landlord.

After first sharing the apartment with her, Sluggo soon went through a series of increasingly wealthy boyfriends until he finally settled with a partner in Noe Valley where they had a quaint garden and a pair of Jack Russell terriers named Chucko and Mimi.

Nancy was driving home from work in her 12-year-old Honda Civic in October 1989 when the expanse to the Bay Bridge collapsed and she died instantly. Sluggo went into a deep depression, repeating: “I always told her to drive across the bridge with at least one window partially rolled down. That way you’ll have a chance to breaking out of the car from the bottom of the bay.”

I wonder if Sluggo is still out there? Maybe I’ll have dinner in Noe Valley tonight after all.

Adoption Papers

While wrapping up family business at Lazy Acres this weekend, my sister and I were recalling various family stories and legends. She recalled that for a couple of years she insisted that she was adopted, and I wanted to be adopted. Not that I was unhappy with my parents. It wasn't that they were Beaver Cleaver/Ozzie and Harriet enough. Maybe it was that they fit that model TOO much.

I went through various adoption fantasies. Claudine Longet would have been a fun mom, but then I'd have Andy Williams as a dad. Ew. I sort of thought of the Brian Keith/Sebastian Cabot/swanky Upper East Side, all male digs, but I felt there might be something a little off there. Nico would have made a great glamour mom, but I suspect her nurturing and cookie baking skills were weak.

All the women in my family sort of resembled Babe Paley, but then my dad was never as cranky as Bill.

I thought the perfect adoptive parents would be Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickinson. It wasn't as if I didn't already have an attractive Jewish dad, but Burt Bacharach was just a little more swingin' and with it. He also started out as the arranger for Marlene Dietrich whom many people said my mom was a brunette shadow of which was equally ironic.

I always loved the Bacharach TV specials, especially when he sang his songs himself in that whispery, raspy offbeat voice. No wonder Elvis Costello and Oasis eventually idolized him. One of my favorite tunes of his was Hasbrook Heights, probably the best song ever written about a New Jersey suburb. I came across a rare original recording or Burt singing that tune in the 25 cent bin at the Alemany flea market a few years back.

In my dream scenario, papa Burt would noodle away on the piano while mother Angie recounted stories from the days of the Rat Pack and Camelot.

Like all fantasies, this one finally burst. After a few dark phases such as the theme from the Arthur movies, Burt made a comeback in the late 1990s. Angie made such classics as Big Bad Mama (1974) and Big Bad Mama II (1987) -- not to be confused with the equally marvelous Shelley Winters' vehicle Bloody Mama. And she was the best Westchester housewife gone wild in Dressed to Kill (1980).

When I was watching the new version of Casino Royale, besides being impressed that the swimsuit moment was for Bond not the Bond girl, I really missed the soundtrack of the original 1967 version. Though that version had somewhere on the order of 20 directors, it had wall-to-wall Burt and Herb Alpert. Herb Alpert...but that's another childhood fantasy we'll discuss in the future.