I love coming over here. Mrs. Clark is so nice. Better than my Mom. About some things. There’s Dickey. But, I’ll start to start and see how this goes.
   I live next door to Dick Clark. And his wife too. He has a son Dickey. Their dog is around but I don’t play with him much. Most times I just walk inside the side door and go into the kitchen. Mrs. Clark is in there a lot making bread. Her kitchen’s got these great smells that grab your nose and won’t let go. Makes your whole body feel good.
  “Mark, would you be my taste-tester and try my bread? It just came out of the oven.”
  “I sure would. Thank you Mrs. Clark.”
  It’s the best bread I ever had. One way Mrs. Clark is better than my Mom is on ice cream truck day. I hear the ice cream truck ringing and I know my Mom won’t give me a nickel for it, so I go see Mrs. Clark.
I come in “Is Dickey around? The ice cream truck is here.”
  “He’s upstairs. Here’s a dime, for you boys. Better hurry before the truck goes away.”
  “I will. Thank you. Dickey the ice cream truck is here! I’m coming up. You better come down.”
  One more thing about Mrs. Clark. She can play. One time I walked in and she was on the couch over Dick Clark’s lap, and he’s spanking her. It was all in fun. Kind of funny.
  “No Dick. Stop that. Ha Ha. Enough!”
  “Okay. You’ve learned your lesson.” says Dick Clark.
  Now Dick Clark is a big deal. He has his own TV show. I’m six so no one talked to me about seeing it in person because I’m just a kid. But, with Dickey, I did get some of his pictures, on these like baseball card things, that has American Bandstand on the back. He looks real young for a dad. And good looking. Maybe part of why he’s on TV.
  He’s gone most of the time so I play with Dickey. He’s my age and we’re best friends. We do everything together. I go to his birthday parties and he goes to mine. It works great for me because he’s got a maid and a lot of money. Well, his dad does.
  Anyway, when I go with my mom to the grocery store they have all these neat toys on the top shelves and I say, “Mom can I have that toy?” and she says;
  “Ask me when it’s your birthday or Christmas.”
  “Can’t we pretend it’s my birthday or Christmas?”
  “Not today.”
  So I go next door and watch TV with Dickey. And see all these cool toys on TV.
  “Hey Dickey. That’s a way cool toy. You should get it.”
  And in about a week or two there it is in his room. He has a ton of toys. I’m in heaven when I go there. We play and play all day. But, sometimes I get bored and think of something to do instead of what we’re doing. So I invent things.
  “Dickey.”
  “What?”
  “I thought of a new game called ‘Mess Up’. You want to hear it?”
  “Sure.”
  “We get all your toys and push them on the floor. We grab your bed stuff and get that on the floor too. We wreck the place and leave for two hours. Your maid will clean it up. Then we can do it again.
We can wreck stuff just like in the movies, and it gets fixed, and wreck it again.”
  We play Mess Up a bunch of times and nobody ever says anything. One thing we never messed up was Dickey’s car. He had the neatest toy car you ever saw. It looked like a real car only smaller. It ran around because of car batteries inside, and me and Dickey could both sit in it and drive around the neighborhood. There’s this movie my Dad made with us driving; I was at the wheel, and Dick Clark was sitting behind me and Dickey on the trunk, riding with us too! It was like having another kid playing with us.
  My Dad wouldn’t play with us, but he’d play guitar and sing and they’d go with the Clark’s to neighborhood parties and dance and play cards. My Dad helped Dick Clark build a stonewall and a bridge that went over a stream in the backyard. Dick Clark had a player piano, with scrolls of paper, that played by itself and that was a blast to watch.
  I spent all the time I could at the Clark’s. I liked it better than my house. My Dad comes home one night and tells us we’re moving, and I cried and cried, and we did it anyway. I never saw Dickey again. Never really said goodbye. I was such a mess. But, his Dad’s still on TV. And that’s something anyway.