The Hearse You Came in On Read Free

the wind over Fort McHenry during the otherwise nearly forgotten War of 1812. I wouldn’t be so crass as to accuse my own darling mother of compromising her virtue to get the part, but the fact remains that a firstgeneration Italian American with shiny black hair, olive skin, a slight accent and hips like a Vespa motor scooter wouldn’t exactly be the logical first choice to portray the vaguely spinsterish and patently Waspy Ms. Pickersgill. At any rate, “somehow” she got the part and she took the train down from New York for the shoot. My dad was tapped to be Francis Scott Key, local boy and scribe of the national anthem. I don’t believe that the historical Pickersgill and Key ever actually met, despite their significant relationships to Old Glory. But the make-believes certainly did, forging an alternate history with their clandestine coupling on the second floor of the Flag House down on East Pratt Street after the film crew had wrapped for the day. For a five-dollar entrance fee you can still visit the StarSpangled Banner Flag House and see for yourself the actual room where my parents bumped and giggled in the off-hours to conceive their dear little pumpkin. When I was a teenager the Flag House was a must-go whenever I started courting a new flame. I never quite presumed I would be so lucky as to star in an actual reenactment of my parent’s infamous tryst… but it gave me an easy opening to drop the subject of sex into the conversation. Which, on balance, rarely hurts.
    You can also see where the lady made the flag.
    My parents fell instantly in love, and so the discovery that my mother was pregnant with me apparently did not introduce panic. The acting scene in New Yorkhad been a constant sputter anyway, so my mother was easily convinced to move down to Baltimore and set up shop here. They married, and some months after my birth my mother began doing odd jobs at the TV station, voiceovers and the like. The station added a Bowling for Dollars show on Friday nights from seven to seven-thirty and tapped my father to host it. He convinced the station to let him bring my mother into the picture to help him in his little chats with the contestants. The pair of them were so charming and silly that soon those chats were taking up nearly as much time as the breathtaking bowling. I made my television debut, in fact, on that show. I was not quite a year old and I brought a whiff of scandal to the program as I nestled in my beautiful mother’s arms unbuttoning the top three buttons of her blouse while she and my father yak yak yakked with some kid from Dundalk who was looking to make a few bucks knocking down pins.
    Eventually the bowling show died—and my parents popped up with a little talk show of their own, one of the first of the now-glutted genre. Cross-dressing in-laws and mothers who sleep with their daughters’ boyfriends were keeping a lower profile back in those days. My parents interviewed players for the Colts and the Orioles, common folk who did interesting things, local chefs, high school coaches, you name it. It didn’t really matter who they talked to or what they talked about, so long as everybody had a chummy time. I popped up occasionally on this show as well, telegenic pip that I was. God help me, I even sat there on the set once in a straw boater and a seersucker suit while my parents chatted with Bing Crosby himself, who was in town to perform at the Painters Mill Music Fair. Bingcould barely take his nasty eyes off my mother. All those old Hollywood heyday types are as horny as goats; they’re constantly trolling for it. Bing was sent packing as quickly as possible and my father personally apologized to me for making me wear that getup.
    Most of my looks come from my mother, the dark hair, the blue eyes. Though the pirate’s smile … that’s compliments of my dad.
    As for the wary eye I cast upon the world, you can chalk that up to the indiscriminate Fates that would take such a wonderful