FOXY'S FIREHOUSE

There’s a picture of me when I was little, a photo I remember seeing often as I grew up, but that has since disappeared. I’m wearing shorts, a windbreaker, tube socks, and a shirt with a pattern lost to the early 70s. I’m holding a large bag of marshmallows, and wearing a forced, lazy smile, indicating that the picture was staged. The lackadaisical smile and the marshmallows don’t go together. I’m four or five years old, and my face should be filled with the maniacal joy that comes from possessing such sweet treasure. Instead I’m clearly going through motions I haven’t quite mastered yet.

Boy with Marshmallows: A Recreation

I can’t contextualize this scene. I think my godfather gave me the marshmallows; maybe as a parting gift before my family and I left Buffalo, New York for Las Vegas, Nevada. Is there something nefarious behind that smile? Did I not like this man who, as a friend of my father’s, became one of the many “uncles” Italian families give to children without their asking? Maybe I was the subject of an accidental Marshmallow Test as my parents, playing Walter Mischel, measured my willpower by making me “save them for later” so as not to spoil my dinner.

Why do I remember this picture at all? Why is a polaroid I no longer possess that captured an event I no longer remember held so firmly by my brain the way my hands held that bag of marshmallows? Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, in his book The Forgetting Machine writes that “memory makes us who we are.” So who does remembering random photos of myself, ones I don’t know the story behind, make me? 

It makes me curious. And frustrated. Until recently, I did not care that pictures had gone missing, that I have no boxes filled with bric-a-brac talismans to anchor me to a past I thought best to forget. Now that I know there’s value in that past – not just for me, but for people I love – I wish my memory of it was better because I’m having trouble pulling the pieces together. Timelines are muddled. Places and events blur and blend. Faces have faded. I turned to Quiroga’s book to try to jumpstart my faulty memory, but instead of unlocking archetypal Toms of days gone by, I ended up learning things about why my memory – and yours, too – sucks. Things that, according to Quiroga, I am likely to forget.

For example, humans only remember a fraction of the sheer volume of information they take in. Not only that, those things we do remember risk being inaccessible over time if we don’t go back to them. Like any other road or trail, a neural pathway “that is unused,” Quiroga explains, “will eventually become overgrown and impassable.” What I’ve forgotten is there, but it’s lost, unreachable via the parts of my neural network I’ve left untended.

The things we do remember aren’t reliable because memory making is an inferential, context-dependent experience, one rooted in senses we only partially use. When we look at something, we only “see” pieces of it while our brains quickly construct the rest. This comes from a time when seeing and perceiving had to be fast to ensure survival. Our eyes saw a flash of teeth, and our brains created a picture that said “sharp” and “dangerous.” Seeing those teeth again kept that memory – and us – alive by keeping our road to this danger (and hopefully away from it) clean and clear. That kind of “knowing” was vital, even if it was technically incomplete.

Humans also have the capacity to color and shape memory making – sometimes by necessity and sometimes by choice. Our memories of traumatic events are often amplified, distorted, or erased completely in service of our psychological well-being. Conversely, Quiroga notes how artists “load scenes with subjectivity,” emphasizing parts of an image they wish to draw attention to, sculpting the way audiences’ perceive and digest a world awash in creativity. 

I think people curate their memories with the same sort of selectivity, and apply it equally to what they want to remember or forget. I am certainly guilty of this. So you’ll have to accept the “fact” that my first memory of Las Vegas is a hypersexualized neon fox for what it is: an impression of an image I didn’t fully see or understand at the time, but am now presenting to you as truth. 

I was five – maybe full of marshmallows – lying on the floor of the backseat of our giant orange station wagon, drifting in and out of sleep when the warm, dark air above me started to pulse and glow. I raised my tired eyes to a flickering, firefighting fox floating across the windows, calling gamblers to “the hottest slots in town.” 

Foxy’s Firehouse Casino was once a deli and celebrity hangout that had been converted to a slot palace – not quite big enough to be a resort, but just big enough to take your money. Had Foxy made it 20 years past her 1988 sell-by date, its owners may have appropriated Kings of Leon: “Oooooh-ooohh, these slots are on fire!” For me, Foxy’s just another image burned into my brain, anchored in a childhood I lived but only remember in bits and pieces. She guards the border where “before” meets “after.”​

Foxy’s Firehouse Casino, 1977. Kodachrome photo and scan by Angus J.

Maybe there’s another reason why Foxy and her flames made such an impression. When my mother was pregnant with me, our house on Voorhees Avenue was engulfed one early spring day. As Mom was returning from the corner store, she saw smoke and flame bursting through the roof and frantically ran to make sure my siblings were safe. When I came into the world a few months later, my right leg was shorter than my left, and my right foot hooked like a broken field hockey stick. I crawled into my place as the youngest of five wearing a cast so tiny that Dennis, my oldest brother, used to take the casts I outgrew to school for show and tell. Metal braces replaced plaster when I was two. When those braces came off at age four, my right leg was two inches shorter than my left and my foot faced forward, but was still misshapen. 

That the physical and emotional stress from the fire impacted my development in the womb was a story I told to explain my disability as I grew older, though I have no proof of its accuracy. I constructed it to stand in for memories I could never claim; for facts no one shared with me. Then I told it to show how heat and fire became part of my neuro-fabric. It’s a narrative borrowed from other people’s memories that I’ve made my own. So while I can’t place my early days in Vegas onto Freytag’s Pyramid, I have a timeline filled with flashes focused on a common motif I can trace back to that house fire.

There was the dumpster fire I saw burning behind our apartment building on Silver Dollar Avenue shortly after we moved in. 

Lighter fluid flames outlined the race tracks Dennis made for his remote control cars in the parking lot of the Mormon church just up the street from that apartment. 

There were burns, like the second degree sunburn I got from splashing in the shallow end of our apartment’s pool, and the one I got from hot oil sizzling my stomach as I tried to make popcorn. 

It’s as if heat and flame stepped into the void left by mom and dad, for each of these memories is also marked by the absence of adults. Somewhere between Western New York and Southern Nevada my family exploded like an atomic bomb, leaving each of us burned, blinded, and alone.

Before I met Foxy, life was eating pepperoni sticks and pistachio ice cream behind the bar at my father’s restaurant, and hearing him sing novelty songs, like “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell as he got ready in the morning. It was playing with Jethro Tull, my sister Linda’s cat, while Linda played her Beatles records. It was tunneling through the snow drifts of a cold Buffalo winter, then reveling in the green of a Great Lake summer at Shoshone Park. It was where my family – mother, father, my two sisters, and my two brothers – was whole.

But those memories confuse familiarity with happiness. When all you know is dysfunction, you can’t recognize it for what it is until you are exposed to something functional. While I remember my father as the man who made funny faces, who had silly nicknames for each of us (I was “Jacko”), in reality, life in Buffalo was far from marshmallowy sweet. Pop was a recovering mobster and practicing alcoholic who made his living running a tavern called The Little Red Inn. He desperately wanted a family, and when he met my mom – who came with three children from a previous marriage – he got one. He adopted my older half-siblings, and added two more to his crew – my brother Michael and then me – but Pop didn’t know how to be a husband, or a father, or a businessman. When he drank, which was often, he was verbally and physically abusive towards my mother and my brothers and sisters. That I witnessed this abuse is certain, but I remember none of it, not one single incident. 

After his restaurant failed, Pop set out for the desert at the Bicentennial with a letter of introduction from a crime boss in his hand. The rest of us followed early in the fall. America turned 200, I turned five, and my family turned to dust. 

Why do I remember a picture of me holding a bag full of marshmallows, but recall nothing of the moment that picture captures? How come the toothless smile my dad made when he pushed out his front dentures lives in my mind as a warm reminder of his jovial nature, while I don’t remember the vicious beatings he gave my siblings – especially given the brain’s tendency to amplify traumatic experiences? 

Perception and memory are connected recursively, influencing how we see and remember, see and remember, see and remember… and then act. We process input on sensory and emotional levels which in turn produces physical and emotional responses. But children need others to help them make sense of this input-output cycle – people to help them shape and normalize perceptions into schema they can lean on in the future. As dysfunctional as Buffalo was, I had people around me who helped me process and make sense of things, at least to some degree. My older brothers and sisters – they looked out for me. After I met Foxy I was largely alone emotionally. Yes, I was more or less fed and clothed, but when it came to making sense of my new family situation in my new surroundings – or learning about ways to process and shape what I saw into a healthy sense of self – that was all on me because everyone else was unmoored, too.  

Mischel’s Marshmallow Test attempted to measure willpower, and sought to say something about how its four to six-year old test subjects navigated their world via their ability to defer gratification. The decision these kids faced was something like this: you can have one marshmallow right now. However, if you can wait until later, not only can you have this marshmallow, but I will also give you another one. The adult would then leave the room, sometimes as long as twenty minutes. Kids who couldn’t wait were labeled “hot” or “go” thinkers while those who could hold out – about one third of the kids tested – were “cool” or “slow” thinkers. Hot thinkers were impulsive and emotional. Cool thinkers were balanced and rational. When researchers followed these kids into the future, they noted that cool thinking kids scored better on those matrices that define conventional success – be it SAT scores, income attainment, or physical and emotional health.

But hot and cool thinking is not innate. Like building and maintaining memories, building and maintaining the ability to make good choices is situational; borne from without before it’s internalized and expressed, requiring repetition and reinforcement. I’m sure some hot thinkers may have demonstrated more willpower had they been “tempted” by a broccoli floret as opposed to a marshmallow. I’m also certain that many of those cool thinking kids wanted the marshmallow just as much as their hot thinking peers – they just had help developing the skills they needed to delay and double their soft, pillowy gratification.

Far too many kids face far more difficult choices in uncontrolled conditions, and they often face them alone. When my father decided to leave Las Vegas and head back to Buffalo, I was given a choice: “do you want to stay with your mom or go with your dad?” I have no certainty that I physically faced this question (maybe this is my moment of amplifying trauma), but for some reason the choice is cataloged as “memory” in my mind. Not vividly, the way flashbulb moments – like 9/11, or the birth of my daughter, for example – are. It’s more of an impression; an abstraction constructed to rationalize the singular aloneness I felt walking into my future after choosing “mom.”  

Mom drove the car past the dumpster fire. 

Mom sent me along to the church with my brother so I could watch him take cars he meticulously made and run them through flames that would diminish his handiwork if not destroy it altogether.

I braved the pool because it was too hot not to, and going inside was out of the question. Mom’s new boyfriend hit me when I walked in on them doing something I didn’t understand at the time. So I went swimming, nervously holding onto the edge, afraid to move to a part of the pool with a bottom my crooked foot couldn’t touch. 

She had left me alone and hungry, so I decided to try my hand at making popcorn; burning my stomach instead of filling it.

These experiences, along with many others, got lost in the weeds of my hippocampus – that part of the brain that connects emotions to memory. These events weren’t processed; weren’t talked about. I reacted to them in a way that would become my go-to, fully engaging that hot part of my brain to the point where my affect was rooted in sadness and fear because that’s what the world gave back to me. The desert is where I mourned the loss of all I’d known; where I moved towards the future scared and alone and forgetful.

A few summers after I moved to Las Vegas, my mother had a friend and her family over from work. We were at our fourth address, living in an apartment that my brother and I largely had the run of as our sister Melissa – who would watch us when Mom was at work – had moved in with her much older boyfriend. The adults had retreated inside, leaving Mike, me, and our guests' daughter (whose name I can’t remember) on the patio with some marshmallows brought for us to roast over the grill’s still red coals. 

In the two or three years since Foxy, I had seen my father just once. My sister Linda and my brother Dennis followed Pop back east, and Melissa would be in and out of a girls’ home before taking her leave, too. Mike had been sent to and returned from a youth camp in California run by Synanon – an organization later indicted for abusing kids like him, among other crimes. Mom’s on-again-off-again relationship with the man who would soon become Husband Number 3 was currently off, and I had said goodbye to Sammy – the dog who was the only bright spot of my time in Las Vegas to that point. I mourned all of these losses with an impulsive heat, retreating into the safe cocoon of my imagination. 

In school, instead of doing my lessons I’d lose myself to cool daydreams – creating elaborate cartoon contraptions to shower whoever was laying in bed next to Mom instead of my dad with pee, or water, or eggs, or feathers as he entered the room; have him dodging hammers with heads the size of watermelons, and force him to leave. These dreams were coldly imagined, if not forward focused, and well worth the stacks of schoolwork I’d have to do on the weekends. I was throwing a wrench in Mischel’s work with my slow thoughts triggered by go feelings that sprang from uncontrollable helplessness. 

That night, I came out of the chrysalis, and I was pissed. My brother and I took the gift of those marshmallows and fucked shit up to the extent that we could. I’m sure we ate one or two, but while the adults sat inside making conversation we moved through our complex like a raiding party with molten marshmallow torches we then threw onto our neighbors’ windows and sliding glass doors. Not only that, but we corrupted our young female guest, making her an accomplice.

I think we were lowering ourselves to the expectations of our neighbors, who didn’t like the way we moved through the summer without any responsible adult supervision. Now we were owning this reputation; leaning into it. Were we being impulsive? Probably. So much of that time saw me making hot moves; ones completely devoid of any sort of rational thought – like the time I put my hand through our front window because Mike had locked me out of the apartment while Mom was at work.

But I’m not convinced this was just another incident born of impulse. Sure, we felt the adrenaline rush that comes from doing something you’re not supposed to, but the jumping off point for us – because I can’t remember if it was me or Mike who threw that first molten marshmallow – was a cold, calculated “fuck you” to the neighbors who had recently told their kids not to play with us. I knew what we were doing was wrong, but I didn’t care. I took the fire I was given, made it mine, and threw it back, smiling.

We were evicted the next month.

​I shouldn’t grieve my inability to shape those early Post-Foxy era experiences into some sort of neat and tidy narrative. Those weren’t neat and tidy times, and my forgetting much of them is research based, blessed by Quiroga’s explanation of the way our brains work. The fragmented nature of my memories matches the fragmented nature of my childhood, reflecting the isolation that would follow me until Mike and I were “rescued” by the church. The fact that I survived that time relatively intact – I mean, my leg didn’t get any shorter, and I still have all my other limbs – says more about who I am and about what I’ve learned than the melted marshmallows I had to scrape off of my neighbor’s glass. The kid in the picture with the marshmallows and the fake smile existed and exists still, just like the angry kid with the burning marshmallows and the mischievous smile. They are with me and they are me. Sometimes cold, sometimes hot, and occasionally forgetful.

Man with Marshmallows

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All photos by Cecily Pollard & Tom Guzzio unless otherwise noted.