Carole Brady is a Big Fat Liar Or Why I Wish Peter’d Got His Ass Kicked

I was what we called a latch-key kid. In today’s kinder, gentler vernacular I might have been labeled “neglected”. Of course, when I was a child acting up got you slapped: today it gets you Ritalin and $150 deductible for psych services-simpler times indeed.
For parenting I had the TV! Thirteen VHF channels! Three UHF channels! Black and white until ’75 and color after that. The youngest kid for a remote control and instead of cable boxes we had bunny ears atop the Zenith ($79.99 at Gimbels, wood-grain cabinet extra). I don’t recall what prompted Don Quixote to tilt at windmills, but I derived my grandiose ideas about civility, morality, fair play and decency all from that glorious, glowing square box.
But ours was a circumscribed love. The TV had to be turned off so it could cool in time for my folk’s arrival. Pop would actually put the back of his hand on the tubes, the way a normal parent might show concern for a feverish child. He was convinced that the TV needed to rest, just like any other working creature, and since he couldn’t afford a replacement, ours was babied like a youngest child should be. Too bad if I, the actual last of his brood, was bored to tears. I’d lost my new kid smell and the older ones were on deck to produce grandchildren anyway.
I’d faithfully watch “Good Times” which taught me that, comparatively speaking, I didn’t have it so bad. “The Jeffersons” taught me how good I might have it, someday. How I longed to trade in my sister and our tenement in the ghetto for Laura Ingalls Wilder and her “Little House on the Prairie”. The Walton’s were almost perfect but they lived in the Depression and I was already living in one of my own.
Ultimately, it was the Brady’s that became my archetype for family life. It was they who taught me the cold hard line between “should be” and “is”.
In one episode of the Brady Bunch, Peter, the rather boring middle boy, broke a lamp and after some silly machinations involving the lisping Cindy, confessed the whole affair to a loving and understanding Carole Brady. Telling the truth had resulted not only in an equitable and humane punishment, it had garnered the respect and trust of his mother. What joy! This was a lesson I longed to employ. So, one day, while lying draped on the couch with my head on the floor and my legs up on the wall (a favored position which explains a lot of my current lower back pain) I inadvertently nudged some “art” with my foot. The plaque, a tack-tastic 8 inch oval, beige, molded plaster, 1950’s Puerto Rican idea of art, was one of a pair depicting a Colonial man and woman, dancing a minuet. I had nudged the nail out of the faux wood paneling and the plaster lady had fallen, nail and all, to be shattered on the vinyl peel and stick floor below. All the Elmer’s glue in Kings County wasn’t putting Martha Washington back together again.
Ordinarily I would just have peed my pants in anticipation of the ass whooping which would result in my peeing my pants. But not this time. I knew how to beat parents at their own game because Peter Brady had shown me how. I would tell the truth before they even noticed the other plaque was dancing solo. I would disarm them with my honesty and they would repay me with a just punishment and pride in my new-found faith sense of honor.
Shall I spare you the details? No, let’s go on.
My folks came in, I waited until they were seated, presented the broken plaque, and explained exactly what had happened. I did it just like Peter Brady.
The first slap caught me by surprise which is surprising in itself, in hindsight, because really, what the hell was I thinking? Carole and Mike weren’t poor Puerto Ricans living hand to mouth in a Brooklyn ghetto raising kids they viewed as an unhappy consequence of mediocre Catholic sex! Tomas and Marina hadn’t so much merged two families as they had collected the survivors of the car wrecks that had been their previous marriages. They couldn’t understand why I thought telling the truth was somehow a mitigating factor. Did I think them so stupid they wouldn’t notice the missing plaque? Did I think they forgot that I was the only one home all day?
Besides, we were Catholic and telling the truth only got you less time in hell, not absolution! Remember purgatory?
Oh yes, I did.
And I also remembered that purgatory was a temporary place. Not quite hell, more like a waiting room for heaven. Right then I got the real Brady lesson, which wasn’t “always tell the truth” but rather “tell the truth to those who deserve it and lie your ass off in the interest of self preservation to everyone else”.
Like Don Quixote in Converse sneakers and a Dorothy Hamill page boy ‘do, I sadly learned that life is seldom as it should be, as we dearly wish it would be, as finer souls know it can be. Carole, Mike and Peter weren’t wrong (except about pork chops and apple sauce-that combo tastes like ass). They were just unrealistic, for Brooklyn. The message was right. It was the audience that was lacking.
Suffice to say that there were many ass-whoopings between 1975 and the day I moved out in 1988. But never once in between did I ever, ever again stupidly volunteer to tell them the truth. About anything.
Ma died in 1997. Pop died in 2002. I haven’t told a lie since.

Betty Trevino