Koogle

In the commercial a mousy blonde housewife who just couldn’t get over how awesome Koogle was. When Kenny told him about Koogle, Wade said that it was some kind of Jewish food. “No, it’s a new kind of peanut butter...a flavored peanut butter.”

“So it’s not Kugel.”

“No it’s Koogle.”

“Oh.”

The mousy woman in the commercial looked exactly like Goldie Hawn.
The first time Kenny saw Koogle in the supermarket he couldn’t contain his excitement. He couldn’t decide which flavor to choose: chocolate, banana, vanilla or cinnamon? He chose the cinnamon, mostly because Jack would think it was a perfectly stupid pick, even though he loved cinnamon toast, having learned to make it from reading an old children’s cookbook he found in his classroom.

“We have peanut butter at home,” his mother said.

“NO WE DON’T,” Kenny said.

“Why are you yelling?”

“We only have the chunky that you bought like a million years ago. I hate chunky and Jack only eats it when he’s really hungry.”

“What about the Jiff I bought last week?”

“Two weeks ago. It’s gone.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“So can we get it?”

“You two are eating me out of house and home.”

“Please?”

Kenny put the jar in the cart and then walked over to the cereal section, mentally preparing for another argument. It was true about the chunky peanut butter. They hated it. Jack only ate it with a spoon when he was really hungry and there was nothing else to eat but saltines. Sometimes he used a soupspoon and walked around outside sucking on a huge spoonful. Kenny thought that was disgusting. Kenny had more class. There was also a jar of Goober Grape in the cabinet that was almost as old as Jack. Kenny made sure that it stayed behind an old box of pasta, where no one could find it and claim it as edible.

Stretch Armstrong

Stretch Armstrong stood at 12 inches tall. A ninth birthday gift from Kenny's grandmother, purchased during an unsupervised trip to the mall, Kenny realized immediately that he was too old for the toy. He also knew that Stretch Armstrong was something he could make fun of for the benefit of his friends. Stretch had a muscleman's body and was made out of a super elastic material, which allowed you to stretch him to unimaginable lengths. You could tie his arms around his body or take his legs and extend them around his head. There wasn't much else you could do with Stretch Armstrong; He didn't fit in G.I. Joe clothes so Kenny was at a loss to conjure any relationship between the two action figures. You couldn't rip his limbs off. He did have a Stretch nemesis named Stretch Monster, who looked like the Creature From the Black Lagoon, but there was no way Kenny's mother was going to buy that for him and even if she did surprise him with the toy, there really was no way you could have the two dolls interact in any sort of meaningful way. Basically Stretch was just a big dumb doll that stretched out its limbs.

A couple of years later when Kenny figured out what to do with Stretch Armstrong--he would freeze him! There was nothing to do that day; Kenny was watching “Gargoyles” on Wade's ancient green-tinted television that looked like it should be hanging from a wall in a mental hospital. Wade was barely paying attention to the movie, which told the story of modern day gargoyles living in a cave in the desert. What was especially galling to Kenny is that it was only thing they could find to watch. “Superstars,” where athletes competed in athletic competitions, was on Channel 7. “The Big Valley,” starring a very young Lee Majors (“The Six Million Dollar Man”) was on 9. “Gargoyles” was on 11 and golf was on 2 and bowling on 4. They were sick of “Superstars,” especially since the baseball players they had heard of were such poor athletes compared to the football players who seemed to win all the competitions and take all the prizes, which turned out to be lame as well. And “The Big Valley” was this crappy western show that was so old and starred this old lady that nobody had ever heard have except Wade's mother who said she used to be a big movie star in the 40's. It was so boring. And who wanted to watch golf except old people who lived in Nebraska and drank Schaefer beer out of the can and ate beer nuts while their dogs sat at their feet

“Nazis,” Wade said. “People who own a lot of guns.”

They left Wade’s house and went to Kenny’s empty house. Wade followed him up into Jack's smelly room where they searched for the Stretch Armstrong doll amongst the mountains of crap.

“He's a messy boy,” Kenny said.

Wade picked up a paper bag.“There's about fifty Everlasting Gobstoppers in here,” he said.

“That's from his Communion money. Mom and Dad let him keep ten bucks of his Communion money and he bought ten dollars worth of candy at Rocco's. All he's got left is the Everlasting Gobstoppers.”

Wade put a handful of them in his pocket and Kenny spilled the rest of the bag on the floor. “He'll start crying when he sees this,” Kenny said.

Kenny and Wade went through Jack's drawers and looked under his bed. There was a pile of plastic army men mixed with his underwear, a Sorry! game with most of the cards and pieces missing and an empty box of Danish Go-Rounds under his bed. A box of Danish Go-Rounds had disappeared from the kitchen a couple of months before without Kenny even having one. “Remember when the Mannuchis brought a box of Danish Go-Rounds to Burger King and ordered cups of water and sat there and ate them?” Kenny asked Wade.

“No,” said Wade.

“I told you about that.”

“No you didn't.”

“I thought I did.” Kenny opened the closet and looked through all the clothes his brother never wore. He had a lot of sweaters and slacks--gifts from Kenny's grandmother. His mother said that little boys in Queens wore clothes like that to school. (Jack said that boys in Queens must be gay femmes.) He bent down, took a whiff of his brother's garbage bag full of laundry and almost puked. Then he saw Stretch Armstrong sticking out of one of Jack's snow boots. He took him out and dangled him in front of Wade. Wade was sucking on a gobstopper. “Do you think this is kosher?” Wade asked.

They went into the kitchen. Kenny wrapped Stretch in a paper bag and shoved him into the back of the freezer, behind a box of Jones sausages, a box of melting Double Dozen ice pops with all of the fudge, banana fudge and cherries missing, two metal ice trays that stuck to your skin, something wrapped tightly in foil that Kenny recognized as one of his father's mysterious leftovers that he saved for when the rest of the family ate something really good like McDonald's or pizza, a box of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks that were at least a year old, and a box of Howard Johnson chicken croquettes. Kenny took out the chicken croquettes and showed them to Wade, who made a face. He took the Stretch Armstrong package and hid it behind the croquettes and the leftovers. “Now we have to wait,” he said.

Four months later, Kenny's mother discovered the strange package while cleaning out the refrigerator. “Kenny, what is this?” she asked.

Kenny pulled out the foil wrapped leftovers. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Dad’s leftovers.”

Kenny carried Stretch Armstrong outside. Jack and some friends were playing kickball in the street.

“I froze this in the freezer,” he said. “Now I'm going to break it.”

Jack and his friends surrounded Kenny as he threw Stretch Armstrong in the air. He returned to the Earth with a thud and broke in half. Kenny stomped on the doll, breaking its legs.

“He's like glass,” said Jack.

“I froze him.”

“Cool.”

Alex Chilton Fan Still Regrets Not Buying Box Tops Album When He Was 11

BROOKLYN, NY—Greg Scoff, associate editor at Stereo Review magazine and Alex Chilton fanatic, still regrets not buying a copy of a Box Tops LP he remembers seeing in the $1.99 bin in the record department of a Huntington, Long Island Woolco in 1977. “I still remember it like it was last week,” Scoff said. “I was flipping through this bin of records while my Mom was buying sneakers for my little brothers. There was this Box Tops album in the bin and I remembered picking it up and thinking to myself ‘what the hell is this?’ I put it back, thinking they were just a Beatles rip-off band or something.”

What Mr. Scoff didn’t realize at the time was that Alex Chilton was the lead singer of the ‘60s pop group. “I was only 11 year-old, what the hell did I know? I was into the Beatles and The Who at the time I hated all ‘70s music except for Cheap Trick.”
Scoff was a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany when he found a Big Star album in the record library at WCDB, the college’s radio station. “I remembered reading in Trouser Press that the guys in The Shoes really liked Big Star, So I put the record on and it was awesome. Then this guy at a used record store in downtown Albany told me that Alex Chilton was also the lead singer in the band that sang “The Letter.” He showed me the Box Tops album and I was like ‘holy shit!”

Scoff bought the album and immediately became one of Alex Chilton’s biggest fans. “Everybody is into Big Star and Alex Chilton now, but I heard the first Big Star album in 1984, so I’ve been into him longer than anybody I know...I mean, I was listening to ‘September Gurls’ a full year and a half before The Bangles covered it.”
Also a huge Jonathan Richman fan, Scoff thinks he remembers finding the first Modern Lovers album in a box at a flea market when he was twelve.

“I might be mixing it up with this dream I had where I’m at this flea market with my Dad and I found The Beatles’ “butcher cover” in a box full of Grand Funk and Three Dog Night albums, but I’m not sure. Even, if I did see the album, I was still a little kid and I didn’t have a paper route yet, so I didn’t have any money to spend on albums. Like there was this time when I was in a Sam Goody with my Dad and he was buying my Mom a Roberta Flack album and I almost asked him if he could buy me this Yardbirds album, but he was in a bad mood, so I didn’t.”

Still, Scoff regrets not getting the Box Tops album when he had the chance.

“If I had to do it over again, I would’ve bought the album in a second, even if I had to ask my mom for the money,” he said. “I mean, I could’ve been into Big Star a whole 8 years before I got to college!”

“I also would’ve bought this really cool coffee-table book about horror movies I was looking at,” Scoff added. “It had some really cool color stills from ‘50s and ‘60s Hammer films and stuff.”