My mother started working when I was five. Before my sis and I were allowed to be latch key kids, we used to get deposited at this old lady's house after school. Would spend all day there during the summer too. Can't remember her proper name, other than the kids used to call her Granny Goo Goo.

She constantly wore muumuus. Her house was near enough to our school and home for convienience, which I attribute to my ma's turning a blind eye to it's complete ghetto decor. Car parts scattered everywhere, rusty calico patterns of primer and faded paint El Camino on cinder blocks, old ochre sienna and white patterned knitted cloth couch on the front porch, tattered curtains, and more onion grass, weeds and dirt patches than actual lawn.

She had two sons and one daughter. Or they might have been children from her own children that had been abandoned by them and she took on the task of housing them. Hard to tell. They all looked like bastard children of the Ramones. They were all nasty shits. They would force the children under their care to battle for their amusement, and would get a little rough if kids refused to fight each other. Constantly snacking on whatever lunches kids had brought from home. The oldest would trick kids into chomping on heaping spoonfuls of horseradish. And, the most unforgivable for me, they used to fuck around with my comic books, drawing in them and what not.

I remember one altercation. Granny Goo Goo came storming out of her bedroom upset that I and another boy were roughhousing loudly. She shook us both and screamed like a banshee. While wildly admonishing us, her dentures sprung from her face and hit me dead in the chest. As if I didn't need nightmare material anyway.

I complained all the time that I didn't want to go there. Granny Goo Goo was cheap during the days when we were struggling. My ma, trained I believe from her own mother ignoring her childhood complaints of abuse happening to her, decided that I was stretching the truth. Admittedly, I was expert at that. She finally desisted in sending us there when the oldest accosted her with a vulgar stream of genital related venom, after he had thrown all of my sis and I's stuff outside and forced us to wait for our ma on the sidewalk all day long. Luckily, ma listened and verified whatever I said after that.

Thus began my stint as a televisual junky latch key kid.

I called another lady Granny Goo Goo later in life. At the Italian restuarant I worked at the few years before I moved to NYC. She would always come in, with a muumuu, scattered out of her skull, and accuse the wait staff of the craziest shit. A couple times she pissed herself right in a booth. Never got the opportunity to see her false teeth go sailing across the room.