Old Missoula

The article below is taken from Out Among ‘Em (1991) by Steve Smith. He is the author of several Missoula books, including Fly the Biggest Piece Back (1979), and The OX(ford): Profile of a Legendary Montana Saloon (1983).  

 

Eddie Spageddie           

            Once there was this kid named Edgar Francis Adorante who was born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1918, grew up in Rochester, New York, and later took the name Eddie Spageddie because an old, old, old Italian lady in his neighborhood used to invite him to her house and cook spaghetti and ask him, “Eddie? Spaghetti?”

            Eddie Spageddie, whose father was a musician in the U. S. Army and who never saw his real mother with his own two eyes that he can recollect, was a nice enough boy. Still, when he was 16, his step-mother, who detested him, ordered him out of the house because she resented his real mother, who may have been what Spageddie calls a camp-follower.

            “Things,” Spageddie remembers, “weren’t right.”

            Young Spageddie took a room in Rochester. There, he sometimes was visited by a 30-year-old Hungarian lady whose husband was ill and couldn’t “perform.”

            Above Spageddie’s room lived a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lolly who cooked on a kerosene stove that had two cylinders and the kerosene would get sucked up on the side and the oxygen would turn the flame blue and come out thousands of tiny little holes.

            Every day Mrs. Lolly cooked oatmeal and once she made a potful and said to Spageddie, “Do you want some?” and Spageddie said yes because if he said no it might have hurt her feelings. The Lolly flat stunk of kerosene and to this day Eddie hasn’t been able to touch oatmeal.

            Spageddie joined the Navy and went through World War II as Pharmacist’s Mate First Class Adorante or Spageddie, depending on whom he was talking to.

            At some point there was a wife and two children, and then no wife and no children, since the Mrs. who was a Sioux Indian in North Dakota, liked to go dancing and Spageddie was much older than she and usually too tired.

            Spageddie believes women are like cats and cats are like women because they’re all so “damned independent.” He says, “You take a cat that’s had enough to eat, it won’t come to you no matter what the hell you do.”

            Spageddie, who has lived in a small house on the alley in the 200 block of East Alder in Missoula ever since he rode his balloon-tire bicycle here from Miles City, knows animals.

            “The cat I got now, the back of it was torn up by some guy’s cooling fan,” Spageddie said. “Cats always crawl onto engine blocks and they soak up heat that way. This guy started his car and here’s this cat running around the neighborhood with his back all tore up.

            “So I went to see the druggist over at Smith Drug and he said, ‘Well, I’ll give you some of this penicillin and I’ll even loan you a syringe.’ He only charged me $3 for three units and I thought to myself, ‘I’ll give the cat one.’ The druggist said give it all three and then if I run out I should go back and get some more. I figured his cash register would get tired of ringing up all my money, get it?

            “So I gave the cat one shot and then made up the excuse that I didn’t want this animal to get hooked on dope. First thing you know it would be hanging around Smith Drug looking for a free sample. I gave it the shot and I squeezed a half a cup of pus out of the wound and now the cat’s OK.”

            A former medical technician who learned how to use X-ray equipment through trial and error, Spageddie has devised a plan for operating on his German Shepherd, Shep, who has an undescended testicle that’s so full of semen it’s the size of a big grapefruit. The testicle is very painful and Spageddie has to warm Shep’s drinking water to make him feel better.

            Spageddie, who once mended Shep’s badly torn ear with Super Glue and some tail hairs, used to feed the dog Kentucky Fried Chicken bones.

            “I’d say to him, ‘Shep, these bones are bad for dogs, so you’re on your own. Anything happens to you, don’t look at me with sad eyes while you’re dying.’ Shep would ignore me, like he was saying, ‘Just give me the bones and cut out the chatter.’ He ate ‘em for 15 years.”

            Spageddie had another dog, a “cockapeekapoo,” that he “scooped up and put in his pocket” while standing in front of the Safeway store on West Broadway.

            He also has some theories and opinions. For instance, he’s convinced that children eat dirt because they have mineral deficiencies.

            What’s more, he doesn’t like marijuana: “I tried it one time. It never did anything for me. Something’s got to do something for you or otherwise you’re not interested. Like, for instance, if pot magnified my sex drive. It didn’t do that, though. Here’s all these guys smoking the stuff and running around aroused, but they’re probable aroused anyway.”

            Among Spageddie’s strongest convictions is that if a person drops a coin and chases it along the sidewalk only to have it roll into a storm sewer, the person better make the chase look worthwhile.

            “Everybody sees you running, and then they say, ‘Well, he’s got to pick up something.’ You don’t pick up something you look like a complete idiot. Even if you bend down and pick up nothing and put nothing in your pocket, people think better of you.”

            About Missoula: “I just love Missoula. For one thing, it’s a university town. Universities always have the strangest of the strange as far as people go. . .”

            About university professors: “The low-class people – those who ain’t makin’ enough money and never will get to be a millionaire – they’re the common people and they’re the best. They’re the ones you really and truly can talk to and reverberate with. University professors never seem to be able to come straight at you and give you an honest-to-goodness conversation.

            “Once they become professors, they’re not common any more. They’re above all that. They’re like God, and who else have they got to answer to?”

            About salt: “I once fell for that trick about eating too much salt. What a tragic mistake that was! I got this disease called no-salt disease. The body doesn’t have enough salt in it and something happens to you: you’re not happy any more and you don’t see the bright side of life. I got so mad for not eating any salt that I punished myself by going and buying two pounds of saltine crackers that were on sale for a dollar and 10 cents and eating ‘em all.”

            Spageddie, who has invented a parking brake for a bicycle and supplements his Social Security check by recycling cans, painting signs and repairing bikes, has hundreds of memories. Once, he said, he took a horseshoeing course at Montana State University. The man teaching it was very large.

            “He’s the only guy in my life that I ever saw punch out a horse and knock him cold.” Spageddie said. “I think he paid more than he should have for the horse and that irritated him. The horse should have been put away – I mean in a mental institution . . . So this guy is standing there in front of the horse and he has his fist like this and I’m watching him and then you see the horse layin’ on the ground because the guy went BOOM, right between the eyes . . .”

            Later, for $10, Spageddie agreed to shoe a horse for an Indian man in South Dakota: “After the horse gave me a few kicks, the man realized I wasn’t handling things very well . . . He got that horse tied down in so many different ways with ropes that the poor animal was struggling to get a breath. He had rope around his nose. It was like the guy was saying, “You son of a bitch, behave, because we got this crazy white man who’s gonna put shoes on you.’

            “So I’m banging away and I’m hitting my fingers and I was wishing that the guy couldn’t see me hitting my fingers because what the hell kind of a horseshoer hits his own nails instead of the horseshoe nails? Later the guy gave me the money, walked away and didn’t say nothin’. I never wanted to shoe another horse again.”

            Awhile back, Spageddie was at the Oxford bar.  A man asked him his name and exclaimed, ‘Wow, that’s a nice name!’ when Spageddie told him. Spageddie bet the man that he’d forget it, and then told him he’d buy him his favorite drink if he remembered it next time they met.

            A few weeks later, the man approached Spageddie in the same bar, slapped him on the back and shouted, “Hey, Eddie Macaroni, how you doin’?”

            Spageddie, who bought the man a drink anyway, laughs and says, “Geez, ain’t life fun?”