Just Like That!

By curtis shalo

A collection of humorous,touching & nonsensical short stories encompassing the countless people, tragedies and peculiarities that have touched the author's life.

Sweet, Funny, insightful....a look back that takes the reader on an honest (and probably sometimes not) journey through his interesting life! You'll laugh and shed a tear of two. With the read! Bravo to the first time author

• Language: English
• Publisher: curtis shalo
• Release date: May 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393082057

curtis shalo

This is the fifth book published by Mr. Shalo.  His other include Just Like That!, Lies my Father Told Me, Gangster your probably never heard of, and Gild the Lily.

Book preview

JUST

LIKE

THAT!

redux

Insignificant Tales & Love Stories

Curtis Shalo 

2024

For Cindy

On our 30th anniversary

Insignificant Tales

Page 10.  Kensington

Page 14.  Camp

Page 18.  Solo

Page 22  The Pieta

Page 26. Harry

Page 30. Warrington C.C.

Page 34.  Summer Jobs

Page 40.  Brandywine

Page 44.  Poop

Page 47.  Guide to Parenting

Page 51.  First Date Ever

Page 54.  G Irene

Page 58.  349

Page 62.  Pass/Fail

Page 70.  Coincidences

Page 74.  Kid Duds

Page 78.  Yiddish

Page 81.  #1

Page 87.  Anti-Favorites

Page 91.  Boobs

Page 94.  #2

Page 101.  Help Me!

Page 105.  Dreidel

Page 109.  Taffy

Page 112.  Chaka Khan

Page 116.  Miss Indiana

Insignificant Tales

Page 120.  Kidney Stones

Page 124.  Fetishes

Page 127.  Disappointments

Page 132.  The Golden Triangle

Page 136.  Independence Day

Page 140.  Fork in the Road

Page 144.  #3

Page 150.  Fait Accompli

Page 154.  The Hansom Cab

Page 158.  Happy New Year

Page 162.  Kinetic Energy

Page 166.  Calvin

Page 170.  Morning Tennis

Page 174.  The Sponge

Page 178.  The Eulogy

Page 184.  Hero

Page 188.  Realtors

Page 193.  Crash

Page 197.  Daytona 500

Page 201.  Super Bowl XXIX

Page 206.  Dinardo’s

Page 210.  The Seder

Page 214.  The Elevator

Page 218.  Flapdoodles

Page 225.  Collectibles

Page 229.   Jack in the Box

Page 233. Gone But Not Forgotten

.    Insignificant Tales

Page 237. The Dalmatians

Page 241.  The Lob

Page 245.  The Killing Fields

Page 249.  Public Places

Page 253.  Penalty Points

Page 257.  Dilemmas

Page 262.  Maybe Means No

Page 265.  Flaws

Page 269.  Busted

Page 273.  The Commute

Page 277.  Jim’s

Page 282.  Half-Mile

Page 286.  La Playa

Page 290.  Dads

Page 295.  Mr. Fix It

Page 299.  Questions

Page 302.  Bad Habits

Page 306.  8:05

Page 310.  The Interview

Page 314.  Zelda

Page 318.  Impossibilities

Page 321.  The Dinner Party

Page 325.  Stains

Page 329.  Tête-à-Tête

Page 333.  Pulp Fiction

Page 336.  Moments in Time

Page 342.  Vivid Memories

Preface

I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase just like that, but once I started saying it, I’ve never stopped. What I love most about this phrase is that I can use it to respond to just about anything, in just about any circumstance, and in front of just about anyone. It’s not offensive; it never gets old, and everyone that hears me say just like that will instantly start using the phrase. It’s like masturbation, but with words.

I can use this phrase at nearly any moment in my life. For instance, when I’m playing golf and explaining a shot: "I hit my ball into the woods, and it ricochets back, hits me right between the eyes, and knocks me out—just like that!

When I bowl, there are times when I slip and fall as I throw the ball and yet still get a strike—just like that!

At the gym, I’ve dropped a dumbbell on my foot and broken my toe— just like that!

When I go for a bike ride and lose focus for one second, I’ll ram into the rear of a parked car—just like that!

And even when I go to the beach and go for a swim in the ocean, I’ll lay down on my beach blanket, fall asleep, and when I awake, my entire body is burnt to a crisp—just like that!

Sometimes during sex, I get too excited, and I have an orgasm in ten seconds—just like that!

This phrase can also be used for special occasions, like when I turned 50 and everyone in my family forgot my birthday—just like that!

When my wife makes me dinner and the food is so bad that I have to wrap what I tried to eat in a napkin, then go to the bathroom and dump it down the toilet—just like that!

And at work, when I announce that everyone is going to have to come in to work on a Saturday, and I find a scrambled egg appear in my desk drawer—just like that!

I can use just like that! to sum up my life in an instant. I grew up in Philadelphia, went to college, got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, got married, worked hard, moved to Florida, and happily retired—just like that!

The phrase also works great when someone asks how I liked a movie. The beginning was great, but then the it got too slow, and I fell asleep. But when I woke up, the movie had ended, so I have no opinion!—just like that!

When I’m asked by my friends to review a restaurant: After dessert, I went home, found out I had food poisoning, and puked—just like that!

I have the ability to use JLT in the middle of a sentence as well. "I ran to the bathroom as fast as I could, did my business, and, just like that, I lost two pounds! Or I cleaned the kitchen, did the laundry, walked the dogs, and then just like that my wife responds: "If I clean the kitchen, do the laundry, make the bed, and take the dogs on a good walk, then, just like that! we can discuss having sex"

Rarely do I ever use JLT at the beginning of a sentence. It just doesn’t have the effect needed to make my point. For instance, "Just like that, I tripped and fell and sprained my ankle. Or, Just like that, when I asked my wife to fool around on a weekday, she just says no. In these instances, the exclamation point is completely eliminated, and that simply makes, just like that, a commentary much too serious.

The perfect execution of using this phrase is when I snap my fingers as I’m saying just like that! The person I’m directing my response to now has a visual to go along with listening to my catchy phrase. I think Alex Trebek should use this dual method on Jeopardy! He could respond to a contestant’s wrong answer by snapping his fingers, telling the contestant that they didn’t answer in the form of a question, and then announcing that they’ve lost all their money—just like that!" The audience would surely be mesmerized, and I’m certain that the ratings would soar. Perhaps I should write to the producers of the show.

I've limited my use of JLT to instances like My kidney stone passed—just like that! or My pimple vanished—just like that! To sum things up, I've already forgotten about yesterday and don't give tomorrow much thought, so I should probably start writing these stories down and make today the best book ever written —just like that!

*

Kensington

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine; could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor.

Fred Rogers

I’m not sure when or how my grandfather, Yontub, immigrated to America from Aleppo, Syria. What I do know is that when he arrived in America, he married my grandmother, a Romanian woman named Sadie. They moved to Philadelphia, and at some point in the 1920s, he opened a very small children’s clothing shop in a section of Philadelphia called Kensington. The shop was 10’ x 30', and he lived above the shop with his wife and three children, Sylvia, Irving (my dad), and Marilyn. When my father returned from the war, he worked in the store with my grandfather.

Kensington was, and still is, a 100 percent blue-collar community. The row houses are so small and condensed that there are only half-number addresses. The main thoroughfare was Kensington Ave., and the central intersection was Allegheny Avenue. This focal point was referred to by everyone as 'K&A. There was a train (the El") that ran overhead the entire length of the avenue. Most of the residents were of Polish descent, as were the churches. The shops on Kensington Ave. were predominately owned by Jews.

My first memories of my dad's shop were coming to visit on the El. When I looked out of the train window and passed the store’s location, I saw a big neon sign with the word Shalo’s in bright red lights. I thought that was pretty cool to see my last name all lit up for everyone to notice.

The store had ten feet of windows on each side of the entrance corridor. Each window had twelve mannequins, and the windows were always decorated with the theme of the time of year. There was a very thick and heavy glass door that was really hard to open. Every time I opened the door, I would see Yontub in the back of the store, sitting on a stool, and my dad behind the counter counting the money in the register.

For as long as I can remember, there was only one salesperson who worked there six days a week. Her name was Tillie. She always wore a gray dress that showed off her large, saggy breasts. She was an extremely religious woman who bragged about giving money to worthy causes, like TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Baker.

I used to go up the small staircase to the second floor when I was younger, maybe five or six years old, and spend hours pretending to build forts out of the empty cartons that were kept up there because no one lived there anymore. When it was lunchtime, my dad would take me around the corner to Barney’s Sandwich Shop. Barney was not the brightest man, nor was he the cleanest, but his corned beef sandwich was the best.

My dad used to walk us to K&A, where there was a Horn & Hardart Automat restaurant, on the nights the store was open. We would proceed down the line, me always ordering the Salisbury steak with gravy and mashed potatoes, and then we would stop at the small windows that held all of the desserts. When the door opened, my dad would give me a dime to put in the slot and take out the cherry pie I wanted.

When my mom had to work at the store to help out, she would bring my sister and me and drop us off at one of the two movie theaters, the Iris and the Midway.

There were stores and people I still remember. Stein Brothers was the fruit stand on the corner. I later discovered that their son ended up patenting the yellow ‘smiley face and became a multi-millionaire. There was Levine’s Department Store, which sold everything the local residents needed in their homes, offering credit at ridiculously high rates. Uncle Paul owned the shoe store and was the local bookie. Mega Manny owned a uniform store; he was 6’10, had a horrible pot-marked face, and ran the local brothel. Mild-mannered Leon Salosky managed the men’s clothing store and was the only other person that worked in Kensington that my father would eat with. ‘That Bastard Charlie was the name my father called his dreaded competitor who owned the other children’s shop on the next block.

Beside the local people with missing limbs who would race down the avenue and fall off their scooters, or the perverts who would stand in front of my dad’s windows and masturbate whenever he changed the mannequins, my fondest memory of Kensington was when I would walk down to the intersection of K&A where the Genes Pretzel stand sold soft pretzels for five cents. I can still taste them now—warm, salty, and dripping with that dark brown deli mustard. Yum.

*

Summer Camp

"Apparently, Osama bin Laden was killed with money and phone numbers sewn into his clothing. So we got him right before he left for summer camp."

Jay Leno

At seven years of age, my mother made the decision that it was time to send me to an overnight summer camp. She initially picked out a Jewish camp for boys that all her friends’ children attended called Camp Arthur (the nearby girl’s camp was called Camp Rita, where all the daughters of my mom’s friends went). When she told my father the cost of the eight-week program, I thought his head was going to explode. Camp Arthur was out.

After a little more investigation, my mother found a nearby facility called Lake Owego for Boys. The camp was located in Greely, PA, which was in the heart of the Pocono Mountains, a two-hour drive from home. My father reluctantly agreed to send me there (he really didn’t want to spend the money), and on the first Sunday in July, my parents drove me up to Greely and dropped me off at the camp. I remember trying not to cry as I watched them drive away, but I couldn’t hold back. Two minutes later, I accepted my fate and went to my bunk to meet my counselor and the other kids.

My counselor’s name was Jonathan. I’m guessing he was about nineteen years old. The very first thing he told my bunkmates was that if we wake up in the middle of the night and he’s not there, we shouldn’t be scared and not to tell any other counselors that he wasn’t there at night. We later discovered that Jonathan had a girlfriend who lived nearby that he snuck out to visit every single night.

After a quick tour of the camp grounds, Jonathan took my fellow camp buddies to the lunchroom. The only liquid available to drink was something we called Bug Juice, a concoction of Kool Aid and something unknown that made it taste and smell horrible. I stuck with water the rest of my stay.

There were a lot of activities offered. I loved baseball and played every day, but that activity only took two hours. I never swam in the lake because, when I stepped in the water, my feet sank in the mud. It was an awful, icky feeling, and after being told that there were a lot of water snakes in the lake, in addition to the water being freezing cold, that activity was eliminated for me altogether.

I tried archery, but I was too weak to draw the bow back. They had a rifle range, but I was too afraid of guns and didn’t trust myself. I tried arts and crafts, but I never had the patience to complete a project. I would have made a lanyard, but I didn’t know what it was or what it was used for, so I never tried.

I did, however, volunteer to join Jonathan and about ten other kids on a hiking trip. We spent the day walking through the woods, cooking lunch on a fire pit we built, and listening to all the birds and animals. When we piled back into the van to return to camp as it began to get dark, Jonathan only counted nine other kids. He asked if we all knew where Eric (the missing boy) was, and when we all said no, he left us in the van and went back into the dark forest to look for Eric.

For nearly two hours, everyone in the van sat in complete silence, pretending we weren't scared, until Jonathan returned with Eric. Jonathan asked us to confirm his story that we were late returning to camp because we had to hide from a stray bear on the loose. When the other kids at camp heard the story the next day, we instantly became the coolest kids at camp.

On the fourth week of camp, my bunkmates and I went on a canoe trip down the Delaware River. We were each put in a canoe, one in the front and one in the back, and were taught how to row and how to turn the canoe from left to right with our paddles. When my canoe partner and I reached the first little rapid, we went through it perfectly. I remember what a great feeling of accomplishment I felt. As I looked at the shoreline, I saw Jonathan screaming and waving for us to bring the canoe back to land. When we rowed back and asked why we had to stop, he told us to look towards the middle of the river, where we saw Eric and his partner stuck on a rock. Everyone on shore was screaming for Eric and his canoe partner to stay put, but Eric got scared and jumped out of the canoe, fell on a rock, and split his head open.

When the day was over, Jonathan was fired, Eric was in the hospital, and my parents came to take me home after they found out about what had happened. Summer camp was never an option for me after this debacle, but the best part of this entire ordeal was that I never had to drink bug juice again.

*

Solo

Life is something like a trumpet. If you don't put anything in, you won't get anything out.

William Christopher Handy

When I was in fifth grade, every student was asked to learn how to play an instrument of their choice, and then they would be invited to try out for the orchestra in sixth grade. The school offered every type of instrument to lend to students who didn’t have their own. My mother told me that her brother Milton used to play the trumpet when he was young, and he even played in the Philadelphia Orchestra. When she called my uncle, he said he still had his prized Conn trumpet and that he would gladly give it to me.

When my mom and I opened the trumpet case for the first time, we gasped as we took sight of an old, dirty, battered trumpet that looked like it had been picked out of the garbage. My mom took the trumpet to a music store, where she was told they could bring the trumpet back to life. Two weeks later, my mom told me she had a surprise for me. She handed me the trumpet case, and when I opened it, there was a magnificent, bright, and shiny brass instrument that I could call my own.

I began to take lessons every Saturday morning at the Settlement Music School, and I still remember my teacher’s name, Sigmund Herring, who I later learned was world-renowned as the author of the most popular music books for trumpet. I learned to read music quite easily, and though I was very small in stature, I was able to play crisp and clear notes for about thirty minutes straight before I would run out of breath. When I started playing well, I used to look forward to playing duets with my teacher, pretending I was performing to an audience in a concert hall.

By the time I entered junior high school, I was playing the trumpet really well and decided to join the orchestra. Playing in the band was too nerdy, even though I was 4’10" tall and looked like the nerdiest kid in school. After I performed for the Christmas concert, the conductor praised my performance and awarded me with being seated as the first trumpet and first chair. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had peaked at twelve years of age.

The orchestra's performance in the school play was the highlight of the year. The school production this year was West Side Story, and to my surprise, I was picked to perform a solo trumpet accompaniment with the lead female role, Maria, who would be singing the song Tonight, Tonight. I was overjoyed and couldn't wait to tell my mother. I practiced every single second I could, driving my parents, sister, and our two next-door neighbors insane as I blasted away incessantly. I perfected the song and anticipated my debut performance with bated breath.

Two days before the opening of the play, I began to feel ill, and by the time I got home from school, I couldn’t even pick my head up. My mom took me to the doctor, where I learned I had a 103-degree fever and something called the mumps. The mumps was one of three diseases that children got prior to vaccines being discovered, the other two being measles and chicken pox. The symptoms of the mumps were high temperatures and very swollen glands. When I woke up the day of the show, I had both warning signs. My face was bright red, and my throat was so swollen I couldn’t even swallow. I was devastated.

My mom told me that she would call the conductor to tell him I wasn’t going to be able to perform. I cried all that afternoon, begging my mom to let me go. I really thought I could play, even though when I tried to blow, not a sound came out of the trumpet. The conductor knew how much this solo performance meant to me and came up with a brilliant idea. He told my mom to bring me to the auditorium, and when it was time for my solo, I could go on stage, stand there, and pretend to be playing while another trumpeter would be playing the song behind the curtain.

I got dressed in my new shirt and clip-on tie, and my mom drove me over to the school, where I pulled off the ruse to perfection. Immediately after the solo was performed, I snuck off the stage and went home to bed. When I returned to school the following week, everyone came up to me to tell me how great I did. This was my very first