When I Grow Up
- Ray DeGraw
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
December 11, 2025
As I see my son in high school and my daughter in fifth grade, I find it surreal. Afterall it wasn't all that long ago that I sat in my mother's kitchen sipping on a cup of coffee and staring off into the backyard when I had a vision that would shape the rest of my life. There was a small red shed that used to house a pony when my parents bought the house. Buy a house, comes with free pony! Of course, with five children to feed my folks had no interest in keeping the equine beauty. The pony given away, the shed abandoned.
It had become nothing more than a derelict building, filled with large scary brown spiders and tons of field mice. I was a sophomore at the time when this divine revelation entered my train of thought. I'm going to make that into a bar. What? Really? What 15-year-old comes up with this sort of shit at 6:45am while drinking black coffee and getting ready to run off and catch the morning bus to school? Well, me. That's who.
The rest they say is history. The Barn, or the FBG as it would later be called (that's Frank's Bar and Grill for those of you not in the know). Why Frank's and not Ray's? Well, we felt Ray's sounded too much like a pizzeria in New York City. Frank's Bar and Grill had an edge to it. Afterall, this was supposed to be a teenage speakeasy hidden deep in the New Jersey suburbs not some greasy spoon on the upper west side of Manhattan. Yes, Frank's Bar and Grill, or the FBG for short, was born.
We raided our parent's homes for anything we could use. Old 2-by-4's, carpets, a roll of electrical wire that Billy's dad swore he had in the back of the basement somewhere! "Billy, did you see that roll of 14-2?" Sorry Mr. Grodeska, it still powers the barn to this day. Bar stools from Garabrant's house, Glenny's old Nintendo, the Budweiser lamp from Frank's dad, the Ballantine light from my Poppop...it was a team effort. As was the debauchery that followed.
The party continued to the greatest one of all...my wedding. Yup, my wife Kathy and I got married in my mom's backyard. Cocktail hour in the FBG and a game of stickball to follow. It's all true I have the pictures to prove it...the commemorative plaque still hangs on the old girl as we speak. The barn, not Kathy! Those of you who know me well enough know I wrote a book about it...two actually. The first was Nowhere Man (still available on Amazon if you search hard enough!), the second being Life Behind Bars (available on this website, free of charge I might add!).
A few years ago, my sisters and I decided as a family that the barn had seen better days. I was tasked to demolish it. As I began to tear her apart, I felt a sense of dread. My childhood was over. With each nail I pried away, with each board I tossed on the pile another memory flooded my head. Again, another weird divine revelation filled my thoughts. Fuck it, this building has to be saved. I had already torn off the roof where we had all signed our names and written funny, sometimes off the cuff remarks. I decided I would take those boards home and figure out what to do with them. I put on a new roof, fixed the broken windows, replaced the rotted wood...and a nice paint job followed. Eventually the commemorative plaque (the one the building, not my wife) was placed. Mom had her shed back, and we filled it with rakes and shovels and lawnmowers...you know the kind of shit that actually belongs in a shed?
I ended up taking the old roof and reconstructing it in my basement, the way the FBG looked back when were young and full of pith and vinegar! A time when we would sit and postulate the mysteries of the universe. A time when we would dream of what our future lives would entail. The very same thing I see my son William and his friends beginning to do right now. I'm jealous of that, by the way. But it makes me smile. It also makes me cringe. Because after all this time, I still haven't figured out what to do for a living!
I've been a sportswriter, a failed novelist, I've worked begrudgingly in an office (never ever again!), I bartended for several years before getting too old and grumpy...you name it, I've done it. And now, after all the shit I've been through, after all the adventures, I find myself cutting lawns and weeding gardens and occasionally hanging up a towel bar in an old lady's bathroom. It's tough sometimes to swallow that reality, especially as I see my peers advance in their careers and make oodles of money while I sit around doing gig work and playing the starving artist. Maybe it's time to put the commemorative plaque on me!
Oh well, one of these days I will figure out what it is I want to do when I grow up. Maybe then I can finally get my house fixed and that inground pool I've been dreaming about! That would be sweet.
