APOLOGY FOR NOT FINISHING WHAT I START

an old salt in watch cap

Before anyone starts reading this blog, you should know the following.When I was in grade school, at report card time, I'd often see checked on my report card, the message, Completes work on time, meaning, he doesn't complete work on time. Still at it all these many decades later. If you notice the dates of these entries, you'll see that they began quite some time ago and the job's not finished. I've tried to complete an autobiography several times, but since I'm not well known, I think it's a waste of time to write one. I've tried the memoir route a couple times and all my fiction, except two, are filled with autobiographical details, hidden as fiction. Metafiction, I guess it's called, after writers like Vonnegut. Here's a hope for me. I'm still trying to write a publishable novel. If it's good enough, maybe sometime will pay me to write about all the years I led that led up to a late in life publication. Now wouldn't that be something?

INVOCATION

Invocation


Closet Child Support

She’s dead now but here she is anyway. She points
A scorning finger and he cringes. She says,
“You’re no good. You’re selfish and childish!” and he asks
Himself if $80 bucks a month is too much for food.
She says, “You’re not half the man your Father is!”
And he slashes his clothing budget in half. He knows
He’ll have to give her everything she demands.
Maybe, he thinks, if he can just give enough, just make
Himself small enough, she’ll be satisfied and leave him alone.
Maybe, if he can crush himself into a small enough space,
She won’t notice him, she won’t scorn him anymore.
Perhaps, if he can just turn himself into a living ball
Of pain, a mess of bleeding sores, an open wound with tiny
Lips that cry, “May I have more, please?” she’ll take pity on him
And relent, give in and give him what he wants—whatever
That is, whatever it is he thinks she wants him to want.
If he can just hurt enough to make her understand, maybe,
He thinks, he can give until there’s nothing left to give,
Give until she can‘t see him anymore, until he disappears,
Then she’ll leave him alone, then she’ll go away. Or, he thinks,
Maybe, if he cries loudly and long enough to get her
Sympathy, she’ll become an angel of mercy, she’ll come home
And let him out of the closet where she left him locked in.

BOTTOMS UP: The Autobiography of a Nobody

Introduction: 1937 to 2006

When I was born a Nobody, TV wasn’t spawned yet, so most everyone still lived in anonymity with no real opportunity to get his or her 15 minutes of fame on a reality show. Unless you lived in the narrow spotlight of small town America where you were somebody to everyone, most everybody was a Nobody while America remained locked in Depression. Now, I’m one of a few Nobodys still alive.

In 1937 only two of five Americans entered high school from the 8th grade, only one of four graduated from high school and only one of twenty Americans finished college with an advanced degree. Seventeen percent of those who wanted to work were still unemployed and two and a half million Americans sole income still came from government programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps or other public works programs.

Most Catholics religiously ate fish on Fridays and practiced birth control through the rhythm method. They took their ritual in Latin. Though not Catholic, I tried the rhythm method myself. I didn’t like condoms, and my first wife didn’t trust birth control pills, so two sons came along while I was still in college before I was in a position financially or emotionally to care for them.

Thirty-one percent of all dwellings didn’t have running water, 32 percent of all households had to dash through cold and rain to pee, and 39 percent still took Saturday baths, if any bath at all, in a tub of water which had been heated on the stove or they sponge bathed with tap water in a sink. Fifty-eight percent of Americans went without central heating and still warmed themselves before a fire or around a wood stove, and, thus, like Herb Shriner, practiced a form of cracker barrel philosophy common in early 20th Century America, that is, a lot of opinion sprinkled very sparingly with facts. Kind of like talk radio is today.

America was still a nation of small towns and farm communities. Blue laws dominated everything in 1937. Homosexuals crouched in the closet where we’d forced them to hide. The Hays office censored free speech in movies. Very few stores were open on Sunday; people tended to stay home and putter around the house or visit relatives on Sunday. People worked hard, but play was not much on their minds. America was Victorian if not still downright Puritan in values, full of the superstition and prejudice that go with those more primitive religious, fundamentalistic and cultural beliefs. The Ku Klux Klan flourished and Ohio, my home state, had had one of the last governors who was openly a Klansman earlier in the century. In the South, Jim Crow laws repressed and disenfranchised African-Americans.

In 1938, one year after I was born, a poll that asked the question, “What kinds of people do you object to?” revealed that 35% named Jews, 27% named “noisy, cheap, boisterous and loud people” and 14% pointed their Victorian fingers at, “uncultured, unrefined, dumb people” while all other types trailed behind. (see No Ordinary Time by Doris Goodwin, p.102) Those are the typical values of Christian fundamentalists (the name for modern Puritans) and people of lofty Victorian standards. Holy cow (or, substitute Jesus Christ or Allah be damned), most modern Americans wouldn’t like themselves very much if those standards still prevailed today, would they? And, is it any wonder that many Jews who wanted to escape Nazism could find no country to take them, not even the United States?

Though I couldn’t know any of these facts and troubling attitudes as I lay bloody and bruised on my mother’s breast after 16 hours of labor (October 20, 1937), I wanted to put them up there on the scoreboard as a baseline upon which to build this tale of a Nobody who lived anonymously while America rose to its full grandeur in global affairs in the 20th Century and before it became the sadly Bush-league nation it is now, in the early 21st Century.

Okay? Then, out with sword and, withall, to work....

Today is May 22, 2003. I told myself this morning as I drove I-90 out to Cheney from Spokane, Washington to get my caps and crowns cleaned and photographed that I’d better start this autobiography before my mind finally goes. I’m currently listening to a biography of actor James Stewart by Donald Dewey which may explain how the idea of an autobiography reappeared in my mind this morning for perhaps the umpteenth time in the past ten years. In this time of Iraq when the phrase “dying for one’s country (or flag)” is on everyone’s lips, Stewart’s biographer reports that Stewart who was WWII bomber pilot had little patience with the “dead hero” concept. To him, like Patton, dead heroes were “mainly dead”. And why, you may ask, should an entry about heroes come up in this autobiography of a Nobody, specially since I’m definitely not one? Well....

I never got a chance to die for my country. Truth is, though I now realize that I wanted to die when I was younger and that combat would have served as well as any suicide to achieve that end, I was too young for WWII and Korea and in my late twenties and already a veteran of the peacetime Navy during Vietnam. I recall exactly where I was when VJ day happened, and I recall exactly where I lay with a childhood fever during a blackout when the Cold War began for me with a Walter Winchell radiocast about waking up in the middle of the night while being stabbed in the back by an ally. I recall the briefcase-flinging moment when I learned that JFK had been assassinated and the words that flew out of my mouth. “The bastards! They did it!”

In short, this Nobody is a member of the “silent generation” which, according to Gale Sheehy, fertilized the roots of the Sixties revolution. Well? Maybe....

For me, the Fifties were a horribly repressive time, on the cusp of the sexual revolution, plagued by that infamous double-standard, right on the edge of a watershed of so many positive changes, and I know my personal struggle for growth was dampened by the oppressive culture of that time and the repressed personalities of those who raised and influenced me as well as watered by those younger personalities who entered exuberantly into the change. I lived and live always about fifteen years younger than I am.


Today the sun struggles to penetrate a thin overcast as I slip this paragraph into yesterday’s text while sitting in “The Coffee House” in Spokane, at the moment ogling a tall, slender woman’s behind, wrapped in an olive green skirt. Many fine looking women are discovering this place which has been open less than a year.

I’m writing on an almost new, white Mac iBook, and I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (science) and Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men (politics), and I recently finished The Passover Plot (history) and The Illusive Messiah (survey of historical research). Last night at work, while my machine whined its little heart out, I listened to audio books, to Charles Barkley’s I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It (social commentary) and began In Search of America (intellectual and cultural history) by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster. With this list of my current and recent reading and with previous paragraphs, I’m establishing how this autobiography will jump around in time from present to past with asides and digressions. I intend to enter reflections on current events and daily reflections in the text as they occur to me, and as they might or might not pertain to something in a my past. Nobody writes in a vacuum and this Nobody is no exception.

Today, and for five more months, I’m 65, a little more than halfway to 66 when I will try retirement, although, presently, by my request, I’m down to a 32 hour week with benefits, compliments of my excellent employer whose name I won’t mention in order to save him the ordeal of appearing in a book which might embarrass him.

At my age, I may not be too far from that state of half or lost mind I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Lately I frequently discover I misremember big chunks of my life. For years I’d gone around thinking that a young student of mine during my one year of teaching high school had introduced me to Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2”. He assures me that it was I who introduced him and his entire junior class to Fellini. He remembers me bringing it up and talking excitedly to the class about the symbolism and techniques of the Fellini film.

Recently I was talking with the owner of The Coffee House espresso where I spend most of my time writing this book, and he brings up his class reunion. He says that he played in a lot of bands in high school, and, at the reunion, he and several friends got to discussing the various bands they were in, who left them and joined them and why. He said he was blown away by how much their memories diverged. They couldn’t even agree on the personnel in each band. Where he recalled firing someone, one of his friends recalled the guy leaving on his own volition. In fact his memory was so different from his friends’ memories that he ended up questioning reality itself. Currently finishing Pinker’s How the Mind Works, I understand perfectly how and why the brain distorts reality. In short, this book can be described as the most real fiction you’ll ever read, except for all those autobiographies in which the man or woman claims to be telling you the truth. The truth, my friend, is relative.

Further adding to the unreal reality of this book, one of the techniques of this recollection of a Nobody is that I don’t intend to do any research in order to correct my faulty memory. I want this autobiography to reflect exactly how one does talk of one’s past as he sits discussing his life with friends over a beer or espresso, with anecdotes and asides tossed in helter-skelter, errors preserved, enlarged and illuminated, an anecdotal life, replete with the fictions one carries around with him in the narrative his consciousness tells him he is living and has lived, and which, when written down, becomes the literary genre called autobiography. In a way, you might say that Federico Fellini’s techniques are the techniques of this book which may read, at times, like a surrealistic jaunt through the spastic bowels of my Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

I’ve been trying to write this autobiography, the story of a Nobody, for some time now, ever since it dawned on me one morning over a “large, nonfat, sugar free Hazelnut Latte” that I was not going to be CEO and general manager of General Motors Corp. anytime soon, at least not in this lifetime. I tried it first as an autobiographical novel which opened in the late 19th Century with my grandparents and great-grandparents. I also tried to smuggle an autobiography in under the heading of On Becoming An Atheist, another sort of autobiography with a specific and limited slant, but now I’m coming out of the closet and giving my ego to you straight and linearly, with asides, diversions and digressions. I’ve decided to travel in time from I am born until I reach a current moment in my progression from life to death, whatever that stop date is. It might be a heart attack that stops me in mid....

Speaking of halves, of lost and half lost minds, my half brother was in his early-thirties when his carotid arteries leaked, and he suffered a stroke. Whammo! He became an immediate aphasic with a hundred word vocabulary who could play a flawless game of pinochle even though, if one held up a king of diamonds and asked him to name it, he might call it the jack of hearts or the nine of clubs.

He died at 36 from drug complications, of kidney failure caused by the both legal and illegal drugs he consumed to fight the pains and disabilities of the rheumatoid arthritis which was so severe he had to have a hip replacement at age 19. At the end he was taking Black Beauties.

He first smoked Mary Jane at Kent State University to escape pain. He recalled hallucinating that his right leg was made of a glowing red material like a bowling ball, but the marijuana gave him relief, and, naturally, he continued the self-medication. Later, he began to sell nickel bags and then moved to California where he set up to sell drugs on a large scale. I was told, but this is unconfirmed, that he sold drugs in New Orleans, Chicago, Dayton, Ohio and Cincinnati before someone dropped a dime on him, probably a competitor or accomplice who wanted his market share. My Dad paid a ten grand bribe to get a judge who was easier on marijuana assigned to the case. My bro got probation and couldn’t leave Ohio for a year. By that time, he was nearly dead and never left Ohio again until he permanently flew the coop.

That period of my half-brother’s life was in the late Seventies and early Eighties. He was cool. He was my hero even though he was eleven years my junior. I was a married stick in the mud, a Nobody of the silent generation, and he was the hip slick and cool hippy I wanted to emulate. With his cane, his limp, his leather jackets and bell bottom jeans, his long, wild, coal black hair, the gift of his Italian mother, my stepmother, the beautiful women who threw themselves at him, including the porno star he dated for awhile, he cut a figure eight miles wide and ten deep in my imagination.

He gave me my first marijuana cigarette, my first taste of mescaline and my first snort of cocaine. My first acid trip at thirty-six was with a beautiful 18-year-old cellist who was supposed to be my guide, but I ended up guiding her through a bad trip.

Yes, my half-brother was my hero and I was his. He told me one time that when the cops had him after the dime drop and were banging his forehead into a tabletop during interrogation, he kept thinking of something I’d told him years before he fell into the drug business. “They can take everything from you, but they can’t take your mind.” I do recall telling him that when he was a teenager and I was home from college, but I couldn’t remember who the “they” were I was referring to, the ones who want to steal your mind but can’t. Recent events make me remember that it’s people like the Bushies.

Today, May 27, 2003, I insert this letter to the editor I’ve just composed to be sent to the Spokesman Review:

The Dictatorship of Bush is now firmly established in Iraq, and Bush seems quite comfortable being a dictator.
Remember that Sheik who Bush had arrested awhile back who was disappeared off the streets? He’s so far disappeared, I haven’t heard his name since and can’t remember it or the city he inhabited. That Sheik wasn’t part of Saddam’s government nor a terrorist; he was just a local leader that got in the way of Dictator Bush’s oil-scheme for Iraq. And can we forget the unarmed civilians who wanted their school back, who got in Bush’s way, and were gunned down for their trouble? Currently, like Hitler, Bush is disarming the citizens of Iraq. All the signs of a Dictatorship to me.
Bush lies to us, telling us that the type of Iraqi government is going to be decided by Iraqis, but, supported by his Christian coalition, Dictator Bush is now forcing his American style, government by the oil-rich, on Iraq.
But we can’t expect much else from Bible-believing Christians like Bush. They have no model for democracy in their “good book”. Not one democracy in it and not one elected official. They worship kingdoms and princes. In fact, they pray for a king to come rule over all of us. Evangelical Christianity like Bush’s and democracy aren’t compatible.

CHAPTER ONE

I Am Born

You are there. Miami Valley Hospital, October 20th 1937, I am born in Dayton, Ohio, Montgomery County. The Depression is still a serious business but F.D.R. prepares to do something about it, to restore hope to America with liberal, socialistic ideas that put the average citizen above the interests of the few and the powerful.

From my birth through the 1950s, Dayton was the 50th largest city in the United States. Dayton was the tool making capital of the world with more than 300 shops up and running. Then, like much of the rust belt in the Seventies and Eighties of the 20th Century, Dayton fell on hard times, losing maybe 60,000 jobs when National Cash Register pulled its manufacturing facilities out and moved them south, leaving only its headquarters in the Gem City. My first mother-in-law worked there most of her life after her divorce. She never remarried. Like my grandmother on dad’s side of the family, once was enough.

At one time the National Cash Register Company was the leading maker of cash registers in the world. They monopolized the business! You could find NCR’s huge cash registers all over the world. When I was in the Navy, stationed on the tiny island of Antigua in the British West Indies, I found a massive brass NCR cash register in one of the shops in the city of St. Johns. I saw these giants everywhere in Puerto Rico when I passed through there while in the Navy.

Other companies closed down in Dayton too. Delco Products, where my grandfather labored in the tool crib after moving from West Virginia and where one uncle worked for a good part of his early years at a punch press, followed NCR’s lead as jobs disappeared by the tens of thousands. Job shops folded by the hundreds. Germany became the tool making capital of the world. Then, I think, and still, Japan.

Not to be outdone by other cities, Dayton’s downtown retail business died in the Seventies and Eighties. Recently while visiting Dayton on the Web, I found a desktop picture of the explosive destruction of the Rike’s building and put it in my computer files. Rike’s was the premier department store during my childhood and for most of Dayton’s modern Twentieth Century history.

As a rambling preteen I made special trips downtown for the thrill of riding Rike’s escalators up and down, and I remember my frightened first stumbling toddler steps off and on those escalators, clutching mom’s hand. I clearly recall once dangling and twisting by my arm from mom’s grasp when I missed an early attempt to mount and dismount the magically moving steps. Some success and some failure during the escalator learning curve but always a delicious thrill in the pit of my stomach.

I remember the nervousness as I neared where the teeth of the lurching, climbing steps meshed into the zipper at the top. A challenge, a thrill every time and, then, I master it, and one more piece of excitement disappears from my life forever on my journey to this bored moment at Starbuck's on Hamilton in Spokane, Washington. Elevators were never the same after the coming of escalators, but I remember standing at fart level, crowded butt to face in those crowded boxes and having my stomach tickled with the elevator’s momentary flights of weightlessness. It’s probably only imagination that I remember the smell of some of those farts.

More frightening than farts, and emerging out of the past as I write this, is the memory of being lost in Rike’s. I remember crying and stumbling around on the first floor and somebody finding me and taking me to where my lostness was announced over the loudspeaker system.

At age one, I won Rike’s “Most Beautiful Baby” contest. I have the tinted photo that won the contest for me and my mother. I still recall the day I accepted the award and, standing tall at the podium next to my thrilled mother, with a huge blond curl rolled proudly atop my skull, delivered a one hour oration on the benefits of Woodury soap for my baby complexion. It was my first experience with public speaking and I believe I did well for a child of one. Of course, it was all a con job to get mothers to spend money on fancy portraiture.

Rike’s was still doing business downtown when Sear’s, where I bought my first ever rotary power mower, closed its downtown building and moved into a suburban mall, still doing business when Lowe’s, Fox and Paramount theaters dimmed their screens, shut their doors. Long gone before the theaters’ closed was the Purple Cow where my mother took me in the 1940s to drink thick, very-malt-tasting chocolate malts and hear Glen Miller on the speakers and the boogie woogie beat of the “Flight of the Bumble Bee”; long gone the dark, thick-carpeted, royal purple King Cole restaurant where a woman complimented my mother on what a well-behaved tike I was, for my age. Five? Six? My mom was much on etiquette, but she made it like a game, and, after my folks were divorced, I so wanted to please.

Another downtown store which is part of my special memory is Metropolitan Clothing. When I first got out of the Navy in 1958 and had nearly exhausted my unemployment benefits, I began work at the Metropolitan Clothing Store as a window decorator. The Met, as it was called, was one of downtown Dayton’s upscale clothiers. Eventually, as downtown Dayton crumbled, it moved its operation right across the street from Rike’s on Main Street. I don’t know what happened to the Met after that. Whether it closed before or after Rike’s is unknown to me. Now Rike’s is long gone from downtown and so am I. The last time I passed through Dayton, downtown was mostly office buildings and restaurants. The many-storied YMCA building was still downtown beside the Great Miami River though.

I can’t tell you what time of day on October 20th, 1937 I entered into this lifetime from the birth canal of my 5’ 5’’ short mother. I’d have to look it up and that would go against my announced plan of serendipity, of relating my history as spawned from the falsehoods, tricks and truths of memory. All I can tell is that I weighed 10 pounds 8 ounces, and my mother endured a 16 hour labor while I tunneled that last short distance from semidarkness to daylight and, during that long struggle, first experienced the unconscious, lifetime attitude that life must be a grind, full of toil, trouble and pain. My karma of struggle was probably not helped by the fact that Guernica was bombed in April of 1937 when I had lived about two months in the womb. Sixteen-hundred of 7,000 citizens were killed by the fascists on that day, and I have been antifascist since the day I became politically aware.

The birthing experience was so horrendous, my 18-year old mother (married at 16 to escape a horribly abusive childhood in which she was beaten with coat hangers, locked in closets and called a whore by her jealous father) must have sworn off having children from that day forth. My dad went on to have another son with his second wife. My half brother.

I sense that birth and womb experiences impact the earliest formation of the human animal’s basic attitudes toward life. Why would any body forget, totally, such a violent experience? A violent experience is a violent experience and all violent experiences lodge in the synapses and jostle one another in memory and fuel unconscious reactions to similar anxious situations.

Not too long ago, during one of those transcendent moments which occur in good counseling, I traced certain combative or flight feelings I’d been dealing with most of my life back to my 16 hours of labor to get out of the mother and into life. Later stressful experiences then blended into those feelings of danger and combat until I experienced enough conflict and trauma from birth onward to become an manipulative, controlling and combative person without ever consciously confronting what had happened to me. Take my word on this. I’ve been there and done that.

Some people, usually male, deny that counseling experience is valid or helpful. Most interesting in conjunction with my own refeeling and tracking of traumatic experience is my understanding the fact that the most aggressive and punishing sorts of human animal, usually male, are conditioned in exactly the same way, but they are not aware of it. They’re unable to take responsibility for their own victimized and abusive natures. They’re the ones who victimize victims by denying the victim’s experiences or by telling the victim “to get a life” or by speaking dismissively of people who “refuse to take responsibility for their lives”.

It’s all well and good to expect people to take responsibility for their lives, and one should try to be as responsible as one can be, but those who are most adamant and angry about those they deem irresponsible are usually not very aware either of who they are, and they act in very instinctive, unconscious and abusive ways themselves. Their abuse of the abused, their inability to identify with the abused, proves their own abuse is nestled in the nerve pathways within themselves.

Abusive people are just as influenced by their pasts as anyone, but they are blind to their own experience because they are afraid to feel and release the fear and pain recorded in their synapses. They think by suppressing their pain, they are dealing with it. Actually, they allow it to fester in themselves and pass it on to the next generation. It takes a lot of denial to make a terrorist, but they are still being created. It is not by forgetting pain and experience that one masters one’s life. It is by never forgetting the past that one becomes a human who understands and remembers what it is to be both human and animal in this savagely soothing life.

Paradoxically, the only path to taking responsibility is by first accepting that one is a victim and by going through a period of deep and pitiful whining. Yes, what I am saying is that your George Bushes and Rummys and Cheneys, your Hitlers and Stalins, are just men who are afraid and stuck at about age 12 when men bump dicks about as hard as they’ll ever bump dicks. Much current adult life in 2003 is just the adolescent dick bumping of world leaders who don’t understood themselves. To me, it’ll be a wonder if the world ever escapes the behavior patterns of adolescence because so many people are afraid to look into themselves and to re-experience the terrors of infancy and childhood which have frozen their emotional development.

So ask yourself. Was your birth quick and relatively painless or a protracted struggle? If you came easy into a welcoming motherworld after an uncomplicated pregnancy, ask yourself if you can really take any credit for your “life is a bowl of cherries” philosophy. But if your body’s memory of entering the world is of long struggle, darkness, tremendous pressure, the distant terrified screams of your mother, of pain, maybe drugs, its trauma may explain a lot about your own hyper vigilant, defensive and controlling attitudes.

Then, did the pain of birth so traumatize your frightened, inexperienced, uninformed mother that she could not fully welcome you into her world with gushing effusions of love and gentle cooing word music for your shell like ears? Did her own lifelong, anxiety-racked body’s adrenaline, coursing through your joined bodies, condition you to accept fear’s chemicals as a normal body state so that fight or flight feels normal to you and calm an abnormal state of being? What is that like, to enter into the world, battered and bruised, chemically addicted, drenched in the adrenaline of fear to a cunt-torn, unwelcoming and fear-drenched mother figure? A most beautiful baby launched sideways in a straight ahead world?

I became an easily frightened and startled child, a sensitive babe who cried easily and sometimes so deeply that I lost consciousness, fell down and peed my pants. (My daughter also suffered from crying that deeply.) I remember running and crying until I lost consciousness when I was four. I feared the semi-dark of night like a womb. I feared the dark far into my 40s. I speak only for myself, but I believe my fear-based attitudes were so ingrained in my consciousness before I was jettisoned into air that I never knew anything but anxiety and could no longer separate my consciousness from that hyper alert state of body, or even recognize anxiety for what it was until I lived far into my fifties.

For others, let’s say their fearful, dysfunctional mother drank booze like my mother did, smoked, shot up heroin or snorted coke while they were in the womb? Bathed in the chemicals of fear, abused by drug poisons and addicted to alcohol before they have a chance to choose for themselves...? Think about it, as you look around yourself disdainfully at the wreckage of lives early lost. How much credit can anyone take for the robust state of their mental health and list of social accomplishments if birth and pregnancy are so out of their control?

(Strange that on this date, June 9, 2003, as I rework these passages, I come across an article in the Spokesman about rats. Seems that mother rats who lick their offspring four to five times more than other mommy rats raise adult rats which can deal with ordinary rat life with much lower levels of stress than their fellowrats. The licking behavior causes permanent changes in the baby’s genes that create additional receptor sites for the intake of happy chemicals from the bloodstream. Strange too, in this Bush-league age of anti-drugsturm that we are becoming ever more aware that good people and bad people and all the range between behave well or ill based very much on the drugs in their blood streams. Think about it! All our behavior is based on the drugs in our body systems, yet we have criminalized people for trying to make corrections to the lack or presence of chemicals in their bloodstream so that they can live happier lives. What’s the real difference between heroin and Lexapro, a good long daily run, a brisk walk and marijuana, other than what we make criminal and what our culture calls legitimate? It’s all about chemicals. People can become addicted to running too.)

Too many Americans never stop to count their blessings. Born healthy, with average intelligence, to welcoming parents and raised with basic standards of health care and mental encouragment—many people I know seem not to count their blessings or thank “goodness” that they got off to a good start. Instead, they spend their days griping about the lazy, the alcoholic, the street bums, the welfare cases, the poverty stricken, the whipped and defeated, about whom they know nothing. Just by accident of birth, they began with a better deal and never suffered most of the mental or physical trauma which leveled their fellows.

These “life’s a bowl of cherries and it’s your fault if you don’t make it” guys are fooling themselves and trying to fool you too. But I’ve told you the secret of the “bowl of cherry people”. The most truly contented people I know do have compassion for the defeated and also know that life is not a “bowl of cherries”. Never has been and never will be. They accept that painful truth and know they’ll be lucky to escape life with only a normal portion of pain and suffering. They don’t expect or seek happiness; they accept life on life’s terms and make the best of what comes day in and day out. They’re not escapists but those who turn their prows into the wind and sail against it. Most of them know that luck is a big part of anyone’s success and that fortune sometimes defeats and sometimes lifts up the individual. Grateful for what they’ve got, they don’t seek out “happy” movies or escapist literature because they want to know who they are and how they got to be that way even if the psychological discoveries along the rocky path bite like rattlesnakes.

May 26, 2003 under an overcast, Sunday sky at Starbuck’s on Grand Blvd., groggy from one-third of a Lorazepam sleeping pill last night, bowels rumbling... (Ah, Bush, our relationship stinks. You stink! Sleeplessness, Irritable Bowel Syndrome plague me. What a life!) ...I continue this Nobody’s autobiography beside a floor to ceiling window which looks out over macadam, parked SUVs and passing traffic....

That was yesterday and another Starbuck’s. Today, May 27, I insert the following.... I sit farther into a different Starbuck’s from similar looking floor to ceiling windows but still look out at traffic and tar on Hamilton Avenue on an overcast Memorial Day Monday. Thinking “tall buildings, traffic, macadam”, I no longer have the energy to complain about “tear down paradise, put up a parking lot” life. The battle’s over. Paradise lost.

I listened to a collection of Jonathan Franzen essays two weeks ago and he concurs. His description of the depression which plagued him after his first novel was published is very familiar to my depression from 1965 to 1976 when I was struggling to escape Nobody status. I’ll get to that. Right at this moment, I just hope to live through this season of Bush-league play into a more gentle and hopeful time. At least I have no more illusions about being famous and getting on the Johnny Carson Show. As Ed McMahon said: And now, wwwheeeere’s Johnny? Franzen at least gets his books published and achieves a minimal celebrity. Almost on Oprah, he was. But I wouldn’t be a Nobody in my own mind if I accomplished that much. What would I call this book? Would I even have reason to write it?

Suddenly I remind myself of the comic in Seinfeld’s “Comedian” who was obsessively worried about his celebrity. I don’t recall his name. (Man, would that hurt him!) He was so open about his craving for fame that I squirmed to watch him. I pretended for so many years, like many of my contemporaries, that to succeed was to sell out. Who has not had to consider that attitude? And, judging from the results, there’s little chance I ever will “sell out”.

I like to think I hid (hide) my own craving better than the Seinfeld comic (Arnie, is that it?) but who knows? From the inside looking out is not the same as from the outside looking in. All I do know is that I craved fame as much as I craved to write something “beautiful”. And I craved that too in my more relaxed moments, to write something as beautiful as some of the work that touches me in my reading and viewing life. I tell myself that if I could write something that I knew to be truthful, that radiated the beauty of life, then I’d be satisfied. Who really knows?

Interesting to me that one can see the same vulnerability, the same “how’m I doing” comments and attitudes, in the other comedians in Seinfeld’s flick, even Seinfeld, but the others aren’t so obsessive/compulsive about their need to achieve. Or the talking about it. And perhaps that’s the difference between making it (whatever it is) and successfully becoming a Nobody. But I’m also reminded of Sid Caesar, Milton Berle and the stories of their lives. And there’s also Lenny Bruce.

And what about Woody Allen’s fabled neuroticism? That Woody Allen existed and created is something I’m extremely grateful for. Same for S.J. Gould, Sagan, Joseph Campbell and Steven Pinker, Scorcese, Yeats, Fellini, Fitzgerald, Bergman, Eliot, Cronenberg and Harmony Corinne, to name a few. I’m glad I’m post-Darwin and Freud also. I’m glad for Alice Miller and John Bradshaw, almost contemporaries. These people pointed the way into the cave of myself and lighted its dark corners or pointed me out into the broad shiny Cosmos and eventually layered me into that wired space between the physical world and the world of the consciousness that we call reality about which I am currently reading, i.e. How The Mind Works.

Yes, everyone of us has the world outside us and the world inside us as represented by that animal resource we call consciousness. And that’s all there is, my friends. “As the psychologist George Miller has put it, ‘The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world.... [A]ll [the] fundamental aspects of the real world of our experience are adaptive interpretations of the really real world of physics.’” (How The Mind Works p. 333)

I was pleased to read in one of Woody’s biographies that he considered “Stardust Memories” to be his favorite flick. It’s mine too which is probably because Fellini’s “8 1/2”, the inspiration for Woody’s “Memories”, is a movie that opened my head as wide as the Mediterranean to welcome the foreign film into my conscious awareness where it lodged to lead my consciousness into the totally different reality in which I now happily reside.

Big aside: I want to meet Woody Allen. Hey, Woody, if this autobiography of a Nobody ever makes it into print and you’re still around, can we sit down and have a chat?

To be ruthlessly honest, the first foreign film I recall seeing was “Sundays and Cybele”, and what I remember most about that film is a woman on a bed who, in getting up or getting down from it, revealed her panties. That was enough for me. I fell in love with foreign films, and so followed my unpatriotic penis out of the pallid, predictable, plot heavy, sexless American film of the late Fifties into the aisles of French New Wave cinemas and beyond. By the way, I recently reviewed “Sundays” and got a whole lot more out of it. Not until “The Graduate”, late 60s, did American films mature and yield up anything much more than cliché plots into which cliché.

Eventually, I became a regular patron of the Lemon Tree, the only foreign film venue in all of Dayton’s big city, backwoods environs. I watched “Knife In The Water”, “Black Orpheus”, “8 1/2” and “Blowup” there. Like many foreign film theaters of the time, the Lemon Tree eventually morphed into a porno film venue. From panty crotch to full frontal crotch is a natural progression, isn’t it?

My friends and I also drove out in the country to the sleepy, tree-heavy Yellow Springs, home of Antioch College and John Bryan State Park, to watch foreign films in its narrow, smelly downtown movie theater. I saw Bergman’s “Scenes From A Marriage” there. Another winter in the 60s, The University of Dayton put on a foreign film series every Sunday. There I saw “Hiroshima Mon Amore” among others.

The Oakwood Theater, a single screen theater that tried to save itself with foreign films, brought me and my good friend Carl, Jacque Tati’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” and I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Another single screen neighborhood theater on Sprague Avenue in Spokane, Washington a decade later tried to save itself with foreign films in the 70s and, like The Lemon Tree, moved from foreign films into pornography. I saw Pasolini’s very religious and socialistic Italian film, “The Gospel According To St. Matthew”, there. It is a straightforward presentation of that Gospel which employes peasants in all the roles. Christ’s speeches are given verbatim from the Bible text and, proclaimed plainly and without religious hype, Jesus sounds so revolutionary and even angry that you come away convinced that he was a man preaching social revolution. Two months later, two friends and I enjoyed the sensuous pleasures of “Deep Throat” and Marilyn Chambers in “Behind The Green Door” on the same screen from which Christ proclaimed his doctrine of social change.

Eastern Washington University put on a foreign film series also, when I was enrolled in the mid to late Seventies and early Eighties, and I saw the surrealistic “Guernica” there. In it peasants piss on crosses and little people fornicate with nuns. You get a good feel for how much the peasant communists hated the church and why. That film was so mind blasting that the first projectionist refused to show it, and we had to hunt up a replacement for ourselves on short notice.

Earlier, at Southern Illinois University, I watched the Russian film, “The Cranes Are Flying” and “The Blue Angel” as part of another series of foreign films. I missed not a one of those either. We were very intellectual, me and my Southern Illinois friends, and deeply discussed themes and ideas afterwards. One musician with our bunch topped all comments after seeing “The Blue Angel”, the story of an abusive, middle class, conservative German high school teacher who falls for a cabaret singer, Marlene Dietrich. You can see the psychological roots of the average Second World War German in that movie which are very much like current American, Bush-league trends, but, anyhow, someone asked the musician what he learned from the film. He said, “Man, German prostitutes are really fat!”

I watched many foreign films in the Sixties through the Seventies and still hunt them out today. Foreign films were a real part of the intellectual revolution many of us experienced during those times, away from TV and plot heavy American films toward symbolism and surrealism, a reality much more authentic than the forced reality that story telling plot lines force onto modern consciousness. They opened our minds to a truer way of viewing reality and actually helped teach us that reality is pretty much what you make it out to be.

That monumental shift in consciousness is pretty frightening to the ordinary sensibility, and I struggled with it for a long time myself. Simultaneously, I wanted to let go and hold on to the working class mentality I proudly inherited from my mine worker roots, but I also couldn’t escape the deluge of information that was on the side of modern psychology as expressed in the arts of the Twentieth Century. I had to go along with those obvious truths.

Part of the bitterness of today’s battles between the left and the right is between those of us who live comfortably in modern reality and those who would like to drag us back to the small boxes of yesterday’s cliché story line realities and stuff us into them and into roles which make us little more than characters in a bad B movie written by an unimaginative superbeing left over from the days of the Hollywood contract system when actors had few choices.

The hippy days were a lot more intellectual than current opinion recognizes. Now foreign films are harder to find, but they’re still getting into America and people who are literate enough to read subtitles as they watch can still enjoy a refreshing viewpoint when they tire of the bang fuck predictability of current American movies and fairy tale entertainment for children, like the Hobbit stuff and the wizard kid and comic book characters, or high tech tomfoolery which tries to make up for intellectual thinness with whiz bang spec effects. Movies that end with a gun battle have the most boring endings I can think of. Not long ago, a great little American movie called “Hard Eight” entertained me to no end until it concluded with a totally unnecessary gun incident. At that moment I fully realized how stupid the idea is that gun battles and death make an authentic ending to life’s dramatic moments.

Today Independent films are taking up some of the intellectual slack. Let me name one or two interesting recent films, foreign and independent: “Gummo”, “Crash”, “Far From Heaven”, “Lone Star”, “The Princess and the Warrior”, “Santa Sangre”, “Freeway”, “Bound”, “Two Family House”, “Crumb”, “Bowling For Columbine” and “Ghost World” or any Lynch film.

Negativism! I try not to fear the future or fall into negativism, but even I must agree with conservative fears about the decline in literacy. The weirdest part of my joining with conservatives who fear intellectual decline in America is that so many of conservatism’s populist, know nothing supporters are dumber than chicken poop. Just listen to the illiterate medium of talk radio for a day. Superstition, wild assertions, claims without proof or merit—you’ll think you’ve returned to the dark ages. We’ve grown so much dumber now, in Bush-league America.

Spring, 2003, in the present and out of the theater darkness and mystery, and two young girls behind me in this espresso joint chatter about boyfriends. One says she’s tired of having her heart broken. Who isn’t? Every time I think about Bush’s America, my heart breaks. Continuous heartbreak. All America’s promise gone and we’re back to Christianity’s vertically organized dog eat dog life. Some of us are trying gamely to alleviate our evolutionary physiology, but the Christians won’t let go of it. They live it out, monkey grin to monkey grin, and can’t see themselves in the mirror truly. They just can’t get past their Darwinian roots.

Aside: if you don’t know that Bush is a dim-bulb, acting mostly out of animal instinct, then you are inexperienced, gullible, uninformed, or blinded by religious prejudice. I’m sorry, but certain levels of experience and education are necessary to recognize dim-bulbs in any culture. So you can call me elitist if you want to, but I’m much less elitist than those who claim they know the one and only true savior and that all the rest of us are doomed to a horrible eternity if we don’t acknowledge their superbeing as our superbeing. Pardon me, but that attitude’s just arrogant ignorance.

Poor girls. Young love’s always painful when you’re not ready to accept the basic nature of the procreative drive evolutionary biology reveals to us. Poets call it love, but that yearning we feel is only the procreative urge our swarming chemicals set us up to fulfill. That doesn’t mean we don’t experience feelings for our mates which we call “love”. I hope, now happily on my fourth marriage, I have no more painful tales to tell on that head.

CHAPTER TWO

Grandfathers, Uncles, Dad and Cousins

So much for the time being for the city and movies. Back to the historical linearity of this Nobody's autobiography. You already know I took 16 hours climbing out of the womb with a howling push from my mother, but unlike David Copperfield, I was born without a caul. This must have been an unlucky omen, for I’m still a Nobody though my mother lived longer than Master Copperfield’s, poor woman.

I’ve read David Copperfield three times and Great Expectations twice. I’ve had my Dickens of a time. I treasured my own great expectations, as do all human animals, and failed to achieve them, like most everyone else. I had to learn to put my head above my heart too like Davy Copperfield, though I no longer think so simplistically about “head” and “heart” in the psychology of the human animal. Believe you me, I was naive for the longest damn time. May the Goddess Athena (Goddess of Democracy) grant that I never return to that romantic, Christian and hopelessly Victorian state of mind!

The fraternal side of my family came into America from Wales, I believe, in the last quarter of the 19th Century, a family with coal miner roots. The Welsh were noted coal miners in the land of their origin, and when I was young I enjoyed the movie, “How Green Was My Valley” about coal miners in Wales because of that association. And John L. Lewis, an honored personage in my grandfather’s house, who formed the United Mine Workers was Welsh too.

Two things stand out for me about the Welsh besides their mining expertise. They loved to sing and are often portrayed as singing while they walked to and from the coal mines. In fact, my dad and his three brothers all sang well enough to sing in the Dayton Glee Club, a citywide choir. I have an old picture in which three of them are in the choir picture at the same time. My dad also said that he and his friends really did stand on street corners and sing for entertainment some evenings. A few out of context lines from one old song stand out as referring to my father’s childhood:

When we were kids
On the corner of the street,
We were rough and ready guys,
But O how we could harmonize!

Here comes Jack. Here comes Jill,
Down to lover’s lane.
Now and then we meet again,
But things don’t seem the same.

How I get a lonesome feeling
When I hear those church bells chime.
Those wedding bells are breaking up
That old gang of mine!


The other thing about people from Wales which stands out is a deep-seated Welsh hatred of slavery. I came across a book of collected letters written from the new world back to Wales, and found that few, if any, Welshmen would settle south of the Mason-Dixon line, and they swelled the ranks of the abolitionists. But no one is perfect. In those very same letters which show the Welshmen standing tall above the evil of slavery, one finds long diatribes against the filthy, ignorant, immoral and animal-like Irish.

The Welsh distaste for slavery may be rooted in their own struggle to remain free of English domination. They were the only country in that neighborhood which did not succumb to English conquerors. In fact, a Welsh king conquered England, but I don’t know the details and, according to my plan, I can only tell you this history as it might come up at a table in a bar in bits and snatches without research to discover the details.

My paternal grandfather worked in West Virginia coal mines, down near Bluefield where early union efforts and mine owner resistance generated terrible violence and death. A great film, based on true facts about mine conflicts in West Virginia, is “Matewan”, written by John Sayles, the cool director of “Lone Star”. Watch “Matewan” and you’ll understand why we ought to be troubled at how easily modern young men and women sell short the breaks and benefits, the working conditions, that union men and women fought and died for in those times. Politicians like Tom Delay and George Bush, completely in the pockets of capitalists, are working steadily to return America to those days more than 100 years age.

(Aside: as I return to this chapter on July 11, 2003 while searching for a passage on the funeral parlor, let me report that I recently purchased “Matewan” on the Internet for my collection of great films.)

Today, Americans like to put down the French, but the average French working man and woman still control their economic destiny in more direct ways than American workers do. The French workers can still close down their country anytime they want to. Americans, for all their pride, seem much more docile when confronted with authority. They make a lot of noise, but do nothing. Modern America, if you ask me, with its current religious furor and stress toward mindless patriotism is too much like historical Germany.

Not that all mine owners or today’s businessmen were or are necessarily cruel people. “How Green Was My Valley” shows how economic pressures created insurmountable problems for mine owners. Something had to give—wages, or layoffs and mine closings. The conflict could tear families apart as some family members held loyal to the mine owners while others unionized or left the mining communities for greener pastures. Some benevolent mine owners tried as long as possible to keep their workers employed while others went immediately to tougher measures to save their own economic butts. Caring Welsh mine owners could go bankrupt trying to keep their workers employed while others survived on ruthlessness.

In America, events were much more cut and dried and coldness prevailed. In light of those experiences, we should all remember with amazement the New England businessman who recently kept paying his workers while his burned down factory was rebuilt. Ah, you see, I’ve already forgotten this businessman’s name but not the deed! But, if we can recall the deed, we can research for the name.

My grandfather’s chest was crushed in a mine cave-in. The accident resulted in a weakened heart, and angina much of his life, which finished him off with a heart attack in his 60s. I recall from my stint of living with my grandparents that he used to take a raw egg every morning in a shot of whiskey. The concoction was supposed to be good for his heart. He’d slip it down his gullet out of a shot glass. I don’t know whether that was an old wives’ remedy or a doctor’s prescription, but the egg probably didn’t do him much good. And nowadays we know why.

Grandpa’s angina led to another situation that I don’t forget when I think about unions, early 20th Century working conditions, the Depression and ruthless business owners. During the Depression, without medical benefits or sick pay, grandfather’s angina was relieved only when he slept on his knees with his head in the seat of a chair. He’d have to sleep like that all night and get up in the morning and be on the job on time because if he wasn’t there, a line of unemployed men waited at the gate to take the job of anyone who was too sick or too slow to show up and on time. Also recall, he worked through this grueling routine 6 days a week, 48 hours a week, without having a choice about it and without getting paid overtime for it.

Another condition not so nice in those days was that a man couldn’t leave his place at work on the line to take a shit or piss until the official break time arrived. The shitter was a long board with holes in it beneath which flowed a stream of water in a trough. Now this may not sound as bad as grandfather’s heart condition and struggle to get to work on time, but I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome and have also suffered with diarrhea on and off during my life. Certain accidents in my later life tell me that if I lived in granddad's day, I maybe would have faced a repeated choice between being disciplined and fired or shitting my pants.

So grandpa slogged through life, sick and in pain. To some young men I know, nowadays, his struggle for bread sounds pretty romantic. Those tough old days when men were men and women knew the difference! No place for wimps there. Some young men these days may think they’re tough enough to return to those hard times, and many may very well be as tough as those hard-handed old factory workers and miners like my grandpa, but why would anyone in their right minds volunteer to suffer like that while rich CEOs increase their take from 40 times the average worker’s wage to 1,000 times his wage and live plush lives off the sweat of the worker’s brow, plus find enough extra cash to buy the presidency for men who tip the scales in their own favor over and over? Has the average worker grown stupid and turned Bush-league?

Of course it takes courage to pull up your jock and panties and get in there and work and suffer and earn your daily bread! Be happy and proud (if you need to feel pride instead of gratitude) that you are able to pull your daily load. Be like Thoreau’s pitiable farmer if you must: look at him, writes Thoreau, “pushing his farm down the road before him!” But it takes courage, also, to oppose the Alpha-males, to stand up to the fat cats and create a society which is fair to everyone and which takes a compassionate view toward those who crumble and break in the struggle and toward those who from birth defect are not up to the competition or toward those injured along the way and knocked out of competition and toward those grown old and worn down by the very longevity of the competition itself, and for the youth who needs a hand up, not a boot in the face!

For one example, mental illness incapacitates 7 to 8 percent of us and gives others a competitive edge over those who suffer from it, and mental illness is not some made up cop out. It’s a well-documented physiological condition, just like a weak heart or bad knees, but it’s even more likely to be dismissed as weakness rather than sickness. Mental illness or poor impulse control create some not so very lovable characters, and others are not likely to want to help such assholes in the first place. It’s so easy to blame the mentally ill for his or her mental problem rather than to create a society which allows for and supports those who struggle to hang on to a place in society.

The American psyche does have a long streak of masochism in it, but some of us would like to soften that tendency which keeps creating conservatives whose own inability to feel suffering impels them to force suffering on the rest of us. I’ll guarantee that if you asked my grandfather if he’d like to have his working conditions back, he’d tell you to kiss his ass. He was a union man through and through.

Finally, you must not imagine my grandfather was a noble and selfless individual. The abusive conditions that made him a tough individual also hardened his responses to those around him, and he sought relief from his responsibilities in booze and gambling. Many weekends a month, even during the Depression, he took precious household money to disappear for card playing and drinking, not returning until Sunday night.

He beat his sons with willow switches, and he demanded they cut their own switches. If the switches weren’t both sufficiently limber and thick enough (a complicated balance) to leave painful welts, he made them cut another and added ten lashes to their punishment. He ruled, literally, with a quick hand over his sons, and more than one of them found himself knocked on his butt from a sudden backhand or openhanded slap upside the head. He was not one to hit a woman, so grandmother escaped the swings of his fist. Even so, after her husband passed, grandmother never sought another mate, did not even date from that day forth.

Grandfather could be generous too. Route 40, the Old National Road along which travelers passed to “go West young man”, passed through Dayton, Ohio and quite near where the Nobodys resided during the Depression. Jobless and homeless men tramped this highway back and forth across the nation in search of work, and if grandpa met one sitting beside the road or tramping along as he walked home from work, he’d ask them up to the house for dinner. After feeding them, he’d pick their brains, asking them where they were from, what they’d been doing, how they’d lost their work. Some of them carried guitars, and my dad told me of hearing these men sing folk songs at the table after dinner.

These tales of hobos and union matters my family passed down to me when I was a kid made me feel I was part of the Depression era. But I wasn’t a part of those times, though I was born right at the tail end of it. I was proud of my working class roots and my family when I was a kid. College and ambition and my mother’s genes changed all that eventually, but until my first marriage and college and early failure, I was damn proud to be the scion of a working man. I sure loved John Steinbeck’s work when I met it in college. Before then, though, I’d met his characters in the movies, in “Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men”, both of which took me in and moved me deeply. My own early loss of family prepared me so that when I encountered Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the Sixties, I was prepared to respond immediately and deeply to the drifter’s feelings.

Later, in the Sixties, when I worked in a small, grimy machine shop in Dayton, I met two of those old drifters directly. Neither was married or had been married for a long time. One was an old railroad machinist and the other was a machinist from Germany who’d come from Germany to escape the Depression only to hit the Depression in America. The German for a long time had worked with the Civilian Conservation Corp. and helped build part of the Cincinnati Zoo. At the time I knew him, he rented an apartment in a house within the fence of a defunct amusement park. He’d have to key the padlock on the gate to let himself in and out, and one night after a night of drinking, I drove him to his gate and remember watching him swing through the tall gate and walk off down the street into a darkened amusement park and thought what a surrealistic place to live, what a way to end up one’s life. I felt I knew his loneliness in my bones, even though my wife and children waited at home for me, but he never talked of being lonely. He was skeptical and hard edged but unafraid to talk about his life. Taking me under his wing one night, when I was talking about romance and pain, this old communist, for that’s what I think he was, told me, “Luff is fuckin’!” I loved men like that when I was young. I imagined they’d seen LIFE in capital letters.

The railroad machinist was a tall thin man and rugged looking with a very old fashioned indicator. Its pointer ranged over a plus three, minus three range from a central zero. It was just a spring loaded pointer on a straight brass scale. No fancy glass cover, no circular dial. Very old stuff. We talked several times about his life. I was surprised to find out he was still married but hadn’t seen his wife or family for years. During the Depression when he couldn’t find work down in Kentucky, he’d hit the road to look for work and traveled all over America to find it. He’d also left his wife and family so that they could get welfare. Families with men at home couldn’t get help, according to his story, so men had to do what he did. I asked him why he didn’t go home when the Depression ended. He told me it was too late. All the feeling between him and his wife was gone after all those years on the road. There was nothing to go home to.

A third guy, Frank, an old Italian butcher I worked with when I worked my way through undergraduate school in an imported food store, may not have been a drifting machinist like the other two, but I remember him, like them, as part of that older generation of men who’d been around the world some and knew something worth listening to. Frank boxed in New Orleans as a young man and delivered groceries to French Quarter brothels. He got an early education in sex down there, and I identified with him, let me tell you. My own penetratory sexual experience began with whores in Puerto Rico when I was 18. I could tell Frank had been at one time a lady’s man though he was now happily married. He carried himself with a jaunty manner and sported a trim mustachio and constantly hitched up his pants with his elbows because his hands were always bloody with meat cutting. He told me about whores, gypsies and fortune telling. He’d been madly in love with a New Orleans’ fortune teller and had believed in her powers, but she hurt him deeply in some way. “Buddy,” he told me, “Don’ trust no fortune teller. Ask ‘em tell you what you eat for breakfast. If they can do dat, then they know sometin!”

Yes, I loved those guys and their stories from the old days. Later, in my first attempt at graduate school, a friend from really big city, Chicago, from Capone’s Cicero actually, told me he always imagined me kneeling to pick up handfuls of soil from rolling crop fields and letting it trickle down through my fingers while commenting on its fertility. So I guess my roots and my reading showed.


In talking about grandfather in Dayton, walking home along the Old National Road and of his penchant for bringing hobos home, I’ve skipped ahead of myself. To return to West Virginia and the Nobodys saga in America: jolted by the cave-in that damaged his heart, grandfather Nobody managed two years of college in mine engineering and became a mine inspector for the State of West Virginia. Then, according to legend, he attempted to start his own mine operation, but he and his partners’ mine was up a holler beside a creek, and they needed a barge to move the coal from the mine site. He and his partners borrowed money to build the barge, but a fire burned the barge to the waterline and they went bust.

When the Depression came, grandfather was in or moved to Ohio where he eventually landed his job with Delco Motors in the tool crib. My similarities to my grandfather amaze me. There he was, a partly educated, mining engineer, working angrily but probably gratefully in a tool crib, and I’m a dude with an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing who makes his pissed off way as a machinist in a job shop, arguing too frequently with my mostly Bush-league colleagues.

My dad wanted to be a doctor and took four years of Latin in high school as preparation, but he got married instead, at eighteen to my hot little, sixteen year old mother, and he became a draftsman for a lamp manufacturer in Dayton and, later in his life, a much respected tool designer in the Dayton community of tool workers. He was one of those fortunate men whose first job turns out to be in a field which he liked and which liked him. As for myself, I am seldom satisfied for long. I think I’ve always felt over or under challenged in anything I do. One state of mind bores and the other frightens me. Another trait of the Nobody?

Grandfather also played semipro baseball. Supposedly it was during a baseball game that my uniformed and dashing grandfather met my serious and sensible Baptist grandmother who had worked from the age of 12 in a hat making shop. When have such couples not been a part of the social scene in America? They formed a pair not made in heaven but a very familiar type to those who study dysfunctional family relations. He was the dashing, exciting athlete, a card playing, combative, church eschewing drinker while my grandmother was the codependent, saintly, Baptist lady with 7th grade education, swept off her feet by the boozer's charm and boldness. (Think George and Laura Bush).

Grandfather Nobody had that early 20th Century mix of political liberalism and moral conservatism which made my own life difficult when I began to struggle to reconcile those two traits in myself. It’s not hard to understand that anyone can hold liberal ideas with a conservative, religious fervor, or how one can be socially liberal and financially conservative, or vise versa. Grandpa could be an FDR loving, liberal Democrat in one breath while in the next he could call my mother a “whore” for walking me over to visit him and grandmother in my baby carriage unaccompanied by her husband. I think I’ve become a more liberal person than he by realizing that much morality is essentially relative and by joining that to my liberal hopes for working class Americans. But as I truly get older now and read more about the science of biology, I feel less certain that the human animal can escape his biological determinism. When I was younger, the fear that nothing would change could depress me to no end. Now, I realize I’m not the one that has to worry about it. It’s my poor damn kids turn!

My dad, like his father, tried to start a business too, a tool design business in 1959, and went bust during that 1959 recession, the one that eventually helped elect JFK because Americans at the time wouldn’t stand for an unemployment rate over 3 percent. My oldest son has been struggling with his own advertising business for four or five years. The only business I ever started was a literary microzine, thanks to my maternal genes (more later), which never made any money and, when I started it up, I knew I had no chance to make money. America is slipping into illiteracy so why should a literary endeavor succeed? Illiteracy also explains the growth of conservatism and religiosity in the current American culture. The abusive conservative and the superstition of the religious always swell like cancers out of ignorance and repression.

We were a male-dominated family. By the time the Great Depression struck, grandpa’s family had grown to six. He and grandmother had four sons, no girls. My dad spermed two boys. Another uncle spermed five boys and no girls. The youngest of my dad’s brothers managed one girl and a boy. I sired two boys and, finally, in my mid-40s, a girl. My next oldest cousin has two boys. The other cousins I’ve sort of lost track of.

This youngest brother, the one my father (next to the youngest) was closest too, was killed in a boating accident when my dad and he and some of my dad’s friends were drinking and playing chicken with power boats in the early spring on the Mad River. In two boats, they swooped and drove at each other and swerved at the last minute until someone miscalculated and they crashed. The prow of one boat struck my uncle in the temple where stood by the motor and killed him before he hit the water. They knew this because he didn’t have any water in his lungs.

My dad dove in to save his brother, into muddy, ice cold, spring river water. He could see nothing and dove and dove, blindly feeling in the rushing, murky water, until he was pulled out of the Mad River in a state of shock. He doesn’t remember being pulled from the river, and he never found his brother. Something tells me that they had to troll and use hooks to retrieve the body, but as I said, some of my memories are suspect.

It’s no wonder my youngest uncle on dad’s side of the family should be killed while horsing around in a dangerous situation. He and dad were best buds and ran around together everywhere. All four brothers went to the same high school, Stivers HIgh School, so they got to know each other pretty well. Dad told me that my uncle when very young did back flips off of high flying swings. Then one day, he didn’t move fast enough and a wooden-seated swing hit him in the head and knocked him cold. He bled pretty bad, my dad told me, but he survived to get his switching for costing the family the price of stitches with his foolishness. A little older but hot wiser, in the Belmont swimming pool, my uncle would bounce from the 20 foot diving board onto the ten foot board, then bounce to the five foot board and finally jackknife into the pool. You can imagine how that trick would go over in a modern pool where too aggressive splashing can lead to banishment from the water for the day.

This favorite uncle had one other close call with water while a kid. Every spring they and the boys my dad and uncle ran with set up a diving board on the Mad River by jamming a piece of planking into rocks on the bank. They’d get my uncle to go out on the end of the board to test it. Which he proudly and daringly did, being the youngest of the crowd. One spring the board wasn’t lodged under rocks well enough and tipped my uncle into the river. Again the Mad current ran swift and cold, and my uncle was rapidly disappearing down river, yelling for help. The gang ran along the river bank, not knowing what to do. Eventually, he caught hold of a low hanging bush and hauled himself ashore. The funny part of this adventure is that one of the boys, Peanuts, threw rocks at my uncle as he was being swept away. After he clambered to safety, they asked Peanuts why he was throwing rocks at my uncle. Peanuts said he was trying to splash my uncle into shore.

When my uncle finally did die by water, Peanuts, an alcoholic by this time, showed up out of nowhere in a new, pinstriped ill-fitting suit, oversize shoes, sockless and drunk. No one in our family had seen him in years. He lived on the streets. He staggered up to my uncle’s coffin, sobbing, and fell into the casket. He had to be led away and comforted. My dad was further grief stricken to see all this.

My dad couldn’t forgive himself for his brother’s death and was severely depressed every year at the anniversary of the accident for many years afterward. My dad blamed himself for calling his younger brother away from his spring chores. My uncle was industriously putting in screen windows when dad and his friends pulled up, towing boats, and enticed him into a boating excursion on the Mad River with them.

Many years later, my dead uncle’s wife called my dad over to her home late one night and tried to seduce him. After the death of her husband, dad often went over to help my sexy aunt. I think his guilt drove him to bend over backward to help her. She probably wouldn’t have tried to seduce my dad except that she was drunk, as she often was. She drank way too much for a lot of years after my uncle died, and her daughter, my sexy cousin, left home early, like my dear mom, to escape into a first marriage which was no more successful than my folk’s marriage. This seductive aunt, a Texan, big-boned and statuesque was also very sexy to me when I entered puberty and beyond, well built, tallish and a red head which may explain why, soon, after I found Maureen O’Hara to be so attractive as an actress.

My uncle was a paratrooper during WWII and was so good that he went straight from training into being an instructor at Fort Benning, Georgia. One time, my dad and I went down to visit him at Fort Benning and ended up for a couple of hours in the brig. We were waiting for uncle to get done with his duties and for some reason were standing under the wing of a plane, probably to shelter from the humid, intense heat and baking sun, when MPs pulled up in a jeep and asked my dad why he was smoking under the wing tank of a plane. They took us to the brig where we waited for my uncle to come get us out.

For a time after the war, he managed a military housing project for the air force outside of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and was able to bring movies home from the base and show them to us kids when the clan gathered. These housing projects were actually rundown barracks, and my uncle and aunt were pretty poor on army pay in those days and could not afford much in the way of entertainment, but they were special to me when I was little. Later, I got more judgmental about my aunt, but I always thought she was sexy as hell.

The oldest of my dad’s brothers had no children and adopted a boy and a girl, and became the quintessential hyper-Christian pedophile who went to prison in his 80’s for a lifetime of pederasty. He molested his own grandchildren by his adopted children and this eventually caused a split with his children, but his super-religious wife never left him, and she was one meddling, religious woman I never liked. She used guilt like a master swordsman uses his rapier and could shame you at the drop of a hat. So, of course, who else but Mrs. Super-religious would be married to the family pedophile? I can’t tell you how often that is the case in the pedophile’s family. Someone or both is always super-religious.

When I was four or five and living with my grandparents after my parent’s divorce, I had an experience with that aunt I still remember. She lay on her back on the bed, and we were wrestling, with me on top. My sexy aunt was leaning against a wallpapered wall, watching us wrestle, when I got a miniature hard on, a sort of exciting tingle in my groin, and I began to rub myself very aggressively against my religious aunt’s groin. My face grew hot and my aunt beneath me began to catch on to what my wriggling meant. She grew perturbed. “Stop that,” she said and threw me off. My sexy aunt laughed to see such a sight and the dish ran away with the spoon. I recall extreme embarrassment.

Speaking of aunts, foreign films and sex, I recall a foreign movie in which peasant women admiringly discuss the size of a male infant’s penis, and in reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, I came across one tribal culture where there is a ritualistic “kissing [of] the genitals of an infant boy”. (p. 368) My aunts, who I think were living with my grandparents while their husbands were away at war, often bathed me, and I vaguely recall the sexy aunt speaking of my penis in some way or other and perhaps touching me in some laughing way. Just the slightest sort of memory and why would I make that up?

My pedophile uncle also entered the service in America’s World War II and rose to second in command of a destroyer in the Pacific. He told me he never saw action but was walking on a Pacific island beach one afternoon shortly after the island had been secured when he tripped and fell face first into the sand, nose very near the gaping neck wound of a beheaded Japanese infantryman. He said that was enough action for him. The more I think about it, the more I think he must have seen some action to be walking on the beach of a newly conquered Pacific island. Perhaps he was one of those veterans who don’t talk about traumatic things.

During the final part of his working life, this uncle was the director of a west coast city’s YMCA for about 20 years. Imagine the damage he may have done there? I don’t know the whole story since I lost touch with this oft moving family member. He was the only one of four brothers who got in two years of college before the Depression flattened his career. When he moved back home, quarters grew cramped for these growing boys in a three bedroom house so my dad volunteered to move out and go live with his maternal grandparents. He once blamed his under supervised time at his grandparent’s home with his marriage at an early age. Of course, I soon asked him if he and my mom had been forced to get married. Who wouldn’t? But he pointed out that they were 18 and 16 when they married and 20 and 18 when I fought my way into the world in 1937.

I am the oldest of these male cousins, first born of my generation. I had those two sons I mentioned with my first wife, and a daughter, at last, with my third wife fifteen plus years later. My only female cousin died of cancer just as she was turning into a most beautiful blond sexpot in her thirties and after getting married to the love of her life. They lived one year together before she died. Several of us male cousins had crushes on her over the years when we were younger.

As I said, the second born male cousin of my generation yielded two boys, and I have lost track and count of all the other cousins and their offspring in my father’s line. Some of my male cousins moved to Florida and others to New York. One cousin was married briefly to the sister of the basketball playing Paxsons. He and his wife had a son. One of the Florida cousins started his own extermination business. Like most American families in the mid to late 20th Century, we Nobodies have been on the geographic move. One of those New York cousins, the one closest to my dead half-brother makes big bucks in the computer world. He spoke at my half-brother’s memorial service. He told us, among other things, that he loved my half-brother’s favorite way of handling a difficult situation. “He’d just say, ‘Fuck it!’” Many years later I heard that “Fuck it!” is the short form of the Serenity Prayer.

Another cousin on my mother’s side is a very rich man in Florida, owning several marinas, and for a time, he was the national power boat racing champion. A crash eventually slowed him down, I believe. As a youth, he led a band and played at my first wedding, but he is not a Nobody, like myself. One of his brothers, another first cousin of mine on mom’s side of the family, went in a different direction. He and his wife have adopted several severely handicapped children over the years, and their names and story appeared in local newspapers when I was still in Ohio.

Another son of my dad’s second oldest brother died barely escaped from a lifetime of alcoholism. A wild man, he lived through the navy, motorcycle and auto crashes, fist fights and foolishness, and married one of the sexiest wives any of my cousins married. She’s now a millionaire in Portland, Oregon. That’s another story which ought to come much later, after I arrive out in the Pacific Northwest myself. The wild man’s brother, the oldest of five males, spent 13 or 11 years in a Catholic brotherhood, teaching high school and living and working within poor communities. Eventually, after years of misery and struggle, he left the brotherhood for a wonderfully alive and funny woman. Together, they have two healthy boykins after their first child was born, in a genetic catastrophe, without a head. It took years before they could accept that this birth catastrophe was not God’s punishment on them for his leaving the brotherhood and her marrying him.

I learned one of my earliest lessons about sibling rivalry from their story. The oldest cousin, it turns out, went into the monastery to earn his mom and dad’s love. They were devout Catholics. The second oldest sought and won their attention with his wildish ways. I was present at a Country Kitchen restaurant with my two cousins when they admitted these sneaky motives to one another. I often witnessed how their mom would tell tall tales within family gatherings about the eldest’s scholarly ways and then shake her head with fond amazement over the wild antics of her second eldest. One got positive attention while the other took the negative, but they each earned attention. The other three brothers, because of our age differences, are sort of lost to me except for the youngest who was quiet and obedient. He reached puberty as the hippy days were waning, late in his parents’ child bearing and raising years, and chose not to confront or discomfit his father, my uncle, but his brothers and my half-brother told me that the dude stole just about anything that came his way which was not tied down, smoked pot, drank and used various chemical strategies for life coping without his father’s ever finding out. He was incredibly sneaky and I met two other young people when I was teaching high school who showed me how effective these conciliatory strategies were for doing damn well as you pleased while placating the establishment. I hope I remember to tell those stories when I get to them in this, my autobiography. When I came to family roles in my reading of John Bradshaw, I recognized the strategies in my cousins in the family.

Like father, like son. That’s it in a nutshell for the only son of my dad’s youngest brother, my favorite uncle, the paratrooper. This cousin, like his dad, demonstrated athletic prowess and the ability to dive and do tricks. I think he swam and dove competitively in high school. He went to Vietnam as a navy seal and, more than once, risked his life stopping the men on patrol boats in the Mekong Delta from raping the Vietnamese women on the sampans. He supposedly adopted a family in Vietnam, learned their language and took care of them while he was there, supposedly without expecting anything in return. But, like so many Nobodys gone bad from good and conservative motives, when he returned to the states, he fell on some difficult times.

Originally, my cousin returned from Nam, wanting to “do good” for the youth of America, so he tried to get into police work, much to my disdain. When he couldn’t get immediately into the Dayton police force, he went to the county, he became a “county mounty”, as we called them. But, after a few years on the force, he went wild. I can’t recall what they called it. He went sort of street crazy in a way only policemen can.

Soon he was carrying on a feud with a couple of county hoodlums in a personal way which is not true police work; he developed a kind of Dirty Harry police criminality. Eventually, the three got into a brawl when he was off duty. One of them caved in cousin’s skull with a steel headed cane that the gangster carried around with him. Then my cousin was accused of insulting a woman and her husband in an after hours club when he was in uniform but off duty and that was the end of his police career.

At this time, I have no idea where this cousin is or what he might be doing, but in my memory, he’s a shining kid, one of the good who wants to do good, but whose goodness is the direct cause of the troubling behavior which eventually destroys him. He wasn’t the first to be undone by good motives nor the last. When someone tells me they need heroes, I think of the doom my cousin found pursuing it. As Pinker notes in How The Mind Works, “In real life, villains are convinced of their rectitude.” Not that I think of my cousin as a scoundrel. He’s probably doing a lot of good right now, wherever he is, but he got caught up in the power trap of trying to force goodness on others. Does the name William Bennett ring a bell?


Thirty years ago, I broke free of my hardwood family anchor in Ohio and drifted (by way of the dream-ridden, misty morninged, Spanish moss draped, Loblolly pined Gulf Coast) to the other side of the Continent, to these eastern Washington scablands and Ponderosa pine where, for the most part, I remain aloof. For all I know, my second born cousin who carries on the family tradition of male domination with his two sons is the only cousin still living in Dayton. His mother, my last living aunt in the Ohio country, died a few years ago and since that time, I’ve felt absolutely detached from that time and place. I mourn her most of all aunties because, at a tumultuous time in my life, she was the aunt who thought of me, the first born of a new generation, and who sent me birthday cards every year until she died.

An interesting factual aside to me is that my birthplace in Ohio, before the Louisiana Purchase, was in what was called the Northwest Territories, and I am now living and will probably die in the Pacific Northwest, although my wife and I talk of fleeing Bush-league America for Canada before it’s too late for Buddhists and atheists in an increasingly evangelized and, of course, repressive America.

CHAPTER THREE

The Earliest, Itty-Bitty, Most Terrible Memories

Used to be I thought my earliest memories came from around the age of four years old, in St. Louis Mo. when my folks decided to get divorced, but, recently, I seem to be recalling even earlier memories, from Dayton, and I’m having trouble deciding which is the very first. Two memories stand out. One memory is a very specific one of pain and a second is of fear. I think the fearful memory is my earliest memory, other than the purely neural transcendental recall of birth pang experiences.

Another early memory is of a tavern, but that tavern seems to be a concatenation of memories, of a place, Brun’s Tavern, and of delicious thick-sliced, cold-onion-covered prewar hamburgers they served there which, like all fantasy memories, have never been duplicated for taste and pleasure.

My reading teaches me that one’s first authentic memory must be a recall that is not based on a photograph or other memory trigger. The memory must arise spontaneously from the brain as something one’s own. So, in my second earliest memory, the one of pain, I’m peddling a trike in daylight. I think we are heading home from Brun’s Tavern because we are coming from that direction. I don’t remember who is with me, mom or dad. They both went to Brun’s with me; they both drank.

We’ve just rounded the corner, turned left onto Kenview Avenue where my home is located. My keeper is behind me, and I’m peddling to beat the band when the right toe of my white shoe catches in the spokes of the front wheel. My ankle twists and the pain is real bad. I and the trike topple to the right onto the grass berm between sidewalk and street. I’m crying very hard. I’m in pain, and for some reason the person with me is not happy. They pick me up and take me home, and I’m afraid because we’re leaving the bike behind. I refuse to ride it, and they won’t carry it, and all this is very frightening. I want my bike. I hurt. They’re taking me away from my beloved bike upon which I can feel as free as a child my age can feel. Help. Help!

That’s my second memory, I think, almost as far back as I can go, a memory of pain and fear and parental disapproval. The parental disapproval may only be a misinterpretation of feelings which are uncomfortable and which I don’t understand. After all, kids experience others feelings pretty intensely and feel disapproval when, perhaps, there is only discomfort in the person interacting with them. I am either late two or early three in this memory, I believe.

The earliest memory of my life now enters in darkness and fear. I think I can say this is definitely at two. The terrible twos are upon me, and I’m stubborn like a two year old in this memory. I don’t think I’m big enough to be pedaling a trike because I’m sitting on somebody’s lap in a movie house, and I’m carried around a lot. In this memory I never know who I am with, but I believe it’s my parents. On screen, a nighttime storm whips trees and bushes. Somebody hides in the wind-whipped bushes to watch a house with brightly lit windows. Then we’re magically inside the house where a party or dinner is going on.

Everybody, like everybody was in those early movies (we’re talking late 1930s here), is dressed in fancy evening clothes, gowns and tuxedos. They chat and are clever I imagine. I don’t know for certain, but as I watched later films, more mature, I know that’s what always goes on in these dinner party flicks, these gowned and tuxedoed films.

It must be a weekend at a summer place because now everyone is going upstairs to go to bed. An older man and a young woman talk about something outside one of the doors in a hallway at the top of the stairs. I think he gives her a gun. Then she goes into her room and retires for the night.

Her room’s dark now, but the young woman is awake and staring at a full length mirror attached to the closet door. From out of the mirror, a pair of glowing white eyes approach. The woman screams and now has a gun which she fires at the mirror. We hear glass shatter. Lights up! People rush into her room, and now they have my full attention. But they find nothing.

Later we’re at a lawn party with japanese lanterns. People are wandering around. Our young woman, I think it’s the same woman from the room who fired the gun, wanders away and goes to a drinking fountain and steps on its peddle. She sinks into the earth. Now that’s pretty scary, sinking into the ground like that! Next she’s under the earth in a small cave from which tunnels radiate like spokes in a wheel. And sure enough, those two glowing eyes are approaching down one of those tunnels towards our young woman.

Okay! That’s enough! I begin to scream for real. They can’t shush me up or take the terror away. Finally, someone lifts me and hurries me up the aisle. But whoever has me doesn’t want to miss the best part so they try to stand at the back of the theater. We’re out of the tunnel now and back at the lawn party. I’m a little calmer. The person holding me is kissing my cheek and sort of rocking and turning with me. A man on screen looks for the lady, I think. Maybe things will be okay. I watch carefully, nervously. But he also goes to the water fountain and sinks into the earth.

My whole body perks up now. He’s in the small cave too where the woman ended up. No eyes yet, but I damn sure know they’re coming so I scream and cry at the top of my lungs. The person who holds me doesn’t want to leave, but I’m firm on this one. You will take me out! You will take me out! I’m not speaking, but my whole body has the language of terror going for it. My screams bother everyone in the theater, and I won’t be shut up. I’m really certain about this. I have to get out of here! You can’t make me stay!

I win. My terror trumps the caretaker’s curiosity. We’re in the lobby now and I’m safe. It’s late afternoon because the sun slants weakly through the windows. The person with me is not happy to be missing the flick. I’m such trouble.

I think we’re in the lobby of the ? Theater. It’s not Loew’s. That was on Main Street farther west. And not the Victory which was almost across the street from Loew’s, nor the Paramount which was on a cross street to Main Street. This theater of the horror movie was one block west of Main and about five blocks south of it. Seriously, I know exactly where the theater is and can see it in my mind, but I don’t remember its name. I broke up with a woman in a small cafe right next door, actually connected by a door to the theater lobby, soon after I got out of the Navy. I used to eat lunch in that cafe occasionally when I worked as a window decorator for Metropolitan Clothing. Had I married that woman instead of the one I did, my life might have followed a different course. Maybe not. I always imagine she’d have been tougher on me and forced me to communicate. With a knack for real heart to heart communication, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble. But, as with all speculation, perhaps not!

So that’s my two earliest memories. Pain and terror and an assertion of my will.


Friendly people cooked and worked at Brun’s. No bad feelings associate with my thoughts of this place in my childhood. And the hamburgers with a thick slice of onion on them were delicious. I sit up at the counter beside my mom or dad and I eat this delicious hamburger and I also think I must eat hot, crispy french fries too and have a chocolate malt or fountain coke to wash them down. My mother takes me there in the daytime so she can get out of the house. She’s a free spirit and her artistic genes fight it out in my body with my dad’s more conservative ones.

Memories of later times remind me that when I am old enough to drink there, Brun’s was for a long time a white frame building with a peaked roof and a left-slanted concrete slab porch that ran the length of the front out of parallel with the building proper. You entered the tavern through a creaky screen door onto an unvarnished, unpainted wooden floor of narrow tongue and groove boards. You had to go down in the basement to go to the toilet. Strangely, in retrospect, several weeks after writing this chapter, while toweling off after a shower, I realize that I have clear memories of the tavern at that time of my life, sitting at the bar, eating burgers, the wooden floor, etcetera, but I have no memories of the interior of my home. The tavern is more real than my home.

I can recall my home on Kenview Avenue too, but, like the tavern, I have so many later memories of the house, it’s impossible to find a specific early memory of my time there. That frame house, with a porch on the right, a bay window in the middle and a chimney on the left side, was built by my maternal grandfather who was a contractor, a trucker and a farmer among other things, in collaboration with my father who put every free moment of his time, weekends and evenings, into getting that house built so he and mom could move out from living with his maternal grandparents. I lived in, moved from and back into that house many times in my youth. The house cost $4500 dollars. Years later I sold it for $18,000 to pay my school debts and help with my graduate education.

Our house is the first house built in the new plat on the outskirts of Dayton in the Belmont area. Beautiful Hill, the plat is carved not far back from the lip of the shallow Miami Valley, out of a recently purchased farm. In fact, the farmhouse remains on the corner of the new street. Sidewalk and street are there, and the Nobody house is built three lots away from the tall two story farmhouse. As I grew in that house, I watched the edge of the city and farmland beyond retreat from a five minute walk to get there, to a ten minute bike ride and eventually to a 30 minute car ride. You probably can’t get there from the house now.

This house would come into my possession when I turned 21 because, after the divorce, the families couldn’t decide what to do with the house which both families had a hand in building, so they gave it to me in trust at my 21st birthday. When I got it in October, 1958, the house was paid for and $2,100 bucks had accumulated in a bank account for me. Mom told me that there should have been much more money in savings, and that my stepmother and father who lived in it for ten years ought to have paid a higher rent than they did.

My mother’s bitterness was still alive after all those years, the bitterness between the Republican family and the Democrats which still surrounds me today, June 16th 2003, as I write this very sentence. The house was built to save a marriage, I’m told later. The marriage was already in trouble and the families were at each others throat. I am told about one confrontation in which an uncle holds my maternal grandpa in the kitchen of this marriage-saving house while another uncle hits him. In a novelistic attempt to write my autobiography, I invent a reason for this battle, but all I really know is that it happened, a dustup in the kitchen between the Republicans and the Democrats.

Of course I also understand how the truth gets distorted. Perhaps my uncle was only trying to stop the fight and happened to be pulling my maternal grandfather back from the fight when another uncle swung at him and hit him. Maybe, it wasn’t meant to be a hold and slug moment, but grandfather would not know this, and he could very well imagine that one Nobody held him while another Nobody hit him. Since he later retired at 55 after a successful career as a builder, selling a 1000 units to do so, he would naturally be offended by being ganged up on by a couple of Nobodys.

The two Nobody uncles involved were, of course, the wild, later to be paratrooper and the 2nd oldest angry one who converted to Catholicism when he married my Catholic aunt who later joined Alanon when he, like the youngest, began to enjoy his cups too much. Right down the line to me, you can see the working class Nobodys enjoying their alcohol. So much for now for Dayton, Ohio where I was born and have my earliest real memory.


The next and severely traumatic memories commence in St. Louis after the Second World War has begun. My dad worked there because that’s where work was as America began to climb out of the Depression. All my life I remembered and told of a tall, seven or eight story, red brick apartment building. Then while I attended graduate school in Carbondale, Illinois in the mid-60s, I drove my first wife north to try and find this apartment building which I knew was right across from Marlon Perkin’s St. Louis Zoo. My wife and I found it, but the building was only three stories high, so, like all neighborhoods of childhood, it is smaller in truth than it is in fantasy. The same experience I have when I see Kenview Avenue where I did some more of my growing up. We played full out softball on its wide streets (and only broke a window once) which now seem only wide enough for bowling.

Our apartment was on Mac Arthur Street. I knew I had found the right building because I called my dad soon after and established that I was on the right street. I also remember a drug store across the street because I see in memory my mother dashing across the street to use the phone there. We’re talking the early 40’s here, and phones aren’t just everywhere. I am watching from high above, through the window, and no one is in the apartment with me. I can feel the emptiness behind me in the room as she disappears into that door.

My mother was beautiful, with a terrific figure when young and long blond hair and she had a throaty voice, deep and golden. A scar cuts across her left cheek. From a farming accident, I think. She’s very artistic. During her life, she sang with dance bands, modeled, played clarinet with the Dayton Philharmonic, tried drawing and interior decoration. The last part of her life, she worked with the St. Petersburg, Florida Chamber of Commerce in its promotion department. She was very cultured and charming and clinging and sensitive, perfect for that sort of work. I only visited twice down there, once on a mad drunk dash with a Mobile, Alabama associate named Preacher and again with my second wife.

Mom and her third husband, M—, lived in a one story, I want to say “white stucco” house in St. Petersburg, well and tastefully decorated by my mother. Reflecting her youth, I think, in the 1920s, she liked Oriental decoration and prints, gold and blacks.

Mom appreciated my poetry and drawing attempts whereas my father didn’t. But that awareness all comes later. Suffice it to say, that they were not at all compatible, and I believe their genetic contributions to me have battled it out in me all my life and that my father, who raised me after the divorce, could see my mother in me and resented the memory of her in me all my life. I know he did not understand or appreciate me as I wanted to be appreciated for my creative and wild side anymore than he appreciated her even though he loved her all his life.

When I was younger I would be saying this with a lot of self-pity. Now I’m stating it as a sad fact. Well I remember an evening in either St. Paul or Minneapolis, Minnesota (we lived in both cities during one period of a couple of years because dad worked road jobs a lot; he liked the extra money). Dad came home drunk to his second wife, my evil stepmother. Lying on his back sideways across the bed (I stood at its foot, about 12 or 13 years old), he was letting my stepmom pull his pants off. He suddenly looked at me and slurred, “I love her, you know?”

I was confused, that’s all I recall of emotion, and I asked, “Who?”

And he said, “Your mother.”

He said this right in front of my stepmother. I now imagine, just at the moment of writing this, he might have said “loved” instead of “love”, but I heard it and have remembered it all my life as “love her”. Was it any wonder, then, that my stepmom had a bit of a beef with me? And why was my dad trying to tell me this at this particular moment, when he was drunk, when I’m reaching puberty, when I’m already having sexual fantasies about his wife, my stepmother, who is quite codependent? Had they been fighting? Was he sensing in me some loneliness for a missing mother or was he trying to make an explanation of the divorce between he and my mother?

Being drunk often causes painful and ill-considered remarks to come flying up out of deep memory and through the lips from a guilty conscience. I was drunk when in close cross-questioning from my first wife, I admitted that, yes, I’d had an affair a year or so before, just blurting it out after a year of carrying it around with me. But I’ll get to that later in this Nobody’s autobiography.

Dad also let me in on the suffering and bitterness he felt right after the divorce. He moved to Waterbury, Connecticut after the divorce, giving me over to the care of my fraternal grandparents, to work in the making of bombs and shells. He used to have the fuse of a brass shell, cut apart so as to view the innards, lying around the house when I was young. He told me that he’d run around with his buddies in New York City on the weekends, drinking and being very bitter about women. Women were plentiful; it was the war. He recalls at least one time, maybe more, that he threw his hotel room key into the middle of the table and challenged some woman to come up for sex. He told this as something to be ashamed of. He wasn’t proud of it. He beat himself up over a lot of things that, nowadays, are quite understandable. Part of my life’s struggle was to try and free myself of my middle-class, Welsh, working man sensibility which I think can kill. I have only partly succeeded.

In NYC my dad was part of that big war time party. He danced live to the big bands, the Dorseys, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw, Goodman; you name the band, they were there, and he danced to them. I have always liked big bands myself. Somehow that music got passed through to me, just like the bedrock, hard times, hobo driven depressive feel of the Depression, even though they were not mine, of my generation. Then he met my stepmother in Waterbury, and he danced with her to those tunes and times, and he stopped throwing his keys into the middle of the table. She was eighteen, Italian, dark-haired, big-busted and trim-waisted and he was about twenty-six.

When I was kid and began my movie watching career, almost all movies seemed set in New York City or Chicago, gangster movies and miracle movies, musicals, etcetera. All soldiers departed from Grand Central Station or lunched at the Waldorf Astoria with the woman they’d just met while on leave. Of course, Tennessee Williams gave us plays which became movies set in the South too, “The Rose Tattoo” for example in Key West, Florida and “Night of the Iguana” set farther south than that in the bosom of Ava Gardner.

Hey, though! In my imagination only that one grand city existed for me with its Broadway and Times Square, the Great White Way. In my teens and later, I thought I was going to go to NYC and become a famous author in black and white. I was going to be on the Johnny Carson Show. That is, when I wasn’t going to become a farmer or miner and work my butt off, just a down home guy with wife and kids, picket fence and Budweiser. What other dreams were there for a middle class American like me? My dreams were either all or nothing, huge or tiny, of success or failure. I couldn’t imagine a middle ground which was truly my real stomping ground. The ambition was my reel stomping ground.

Those were my dreams of New York, of the Babe and Broadway. Now I’ve got to return to St. Louis, Missouri where this Nobody is serving his time in life at three and four. I know the war has come because of two clear memories. The apartment has an alcove off the living room, and in the alcove behind a heavy, dark green curtain suspended on brass rings is my crib. Yes, slats, I’m looking through slats. I’m probably too old for a crib, but my folks are just rising out of their Depression era financial situation. It’s the very late 1930s, they’re newly moved to this famous midwestern city (Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis. Or Judy). Maybe the war has begun. America is at least beginning to sell lots of war materials to Britain, thus dad’s job, so why waste a perfectly good, huge crib with plenty of leg room? In my recall I have my legs shoved out in front of me, and I’m playing with very small army trucks, driving them over the hills and valleys of my crumpled blanket. The army trucks are dark, military green, and the fake canvass tops are the same green color. Star shaped insignia are glued on the sides and tops. I don’t recall owning soldiers yet.

The second memory of war is a fantasy I play out with the dining room chairs which are tall, dowel-backed mahogany chairs. The dining room has a window out one wall of the building. I think we’re in a corner apartment because no window opens out the other wall but lots of windows stretch across the living room. The dining room is an L off the living room. Through a dining room door is the kitchen where my mother cooks while I play on the floor in the dining room. On a shelf beneath the silverware drawer beside the sink she keeps the box of glazed donuts. One day I polish off a whole box of donuts when she isn’t watching.

My staging for the war game is quite elaborate. I place one chair face down with its back up and facing to the front, like a fighter plane nose. The second chair is also placed face down but its back points the opposite direction with its legs interlocking with the first chair. Another chair is placed with its back on the floor. There’s a gap between the back of the second chair and the seat of the third chair so I can climb into the cockpit. Its seat is my back rest; its dowels my uncomfortable seat. A fourth chair is face down, back up like the second chair in the nose of the plane, its legs interlocking with the legs of my cockpit chair. This is my fighter plane, and I’m at war, getting in and out of the cockpit, like I must imagine fighter pilots do. I do not remember having seen any war movies at this time nor of having any reason to imagine this combat stuff, but I’m sure my parents took me to gobs of movies. My mother loved them, and the Battle of Britain must have been on the newsreels of the day. I’m three or four. It’s nearing 1941, and that’s when my parents’ divorce comes to me, crippling in on wings of flame, the screams and yells of the dying.

(Now I think, “Coming in on the wings of a prayer....” and look out the window of the coffee house where I, atheist, write this, but all the nostalgia, most of the pain is worked through so I feel only a vague puzzlement. Everyone is really dead now. Only the reel remains and I still go to lots of movies.)

This memory of my waking up crying to a raging battle between my parents is my own memory too. No photograph or story by my parents triggered it. It was a vague memory most of my life. I didn’t put much stock in it, and most of the time it remained unrecalled. All I remember is waking up crying and that my parents are yelling at each other on the other side of the dark green curtain which was pulled shut at night and open during the day. Someone comes through the curtain to get me out of my crib bed, lifts me and carries me in to sit on the couch. That’s it.

Not long before my father died, I asked him if he remembered that moment from my childhood. “Yes,” he told me, “I do. That was the night your mom and I split up. I put you in the car and drove you to your grandmother’s in Ohio and left you there. Then I turned around and went back to St. Louis and got a divorce.”

He did not return to Dayton except for a rare visit until I was nine. Times with mom were also rare and far between. She said, the Nobodies tried to keep us apart, making up excuses whenever she or her family called about picking me up.

Just like that, in one mad and swift weekend drive, I lost both my parents and found my grandmother. I am intrigued by the matter of fact way dad related his brief story to me. All my life I carried around this vague memory of the split up of my folks. I remembered this important moment without context, without knowing it was their moment of rending. Their divorce turned out to be momentous for my life, and I remembered it but didn’t know I had.

One other genuine memory of St. Louis, without photo or parental tale as mind jogger, is of going to the opera with my dad in an outdoor arena near the St. Louis Zoo. The opera stage was at the bottom of a deep bowl. Rows of earthen seats, I think, were cut in descending levels into the earth. Whether the levels were set off by rows of stones or boulders I can’t recall. Maybe there was just gently sloping earth down to the stage and no steps at all. Maybe it was stone steps all the way down and no earth. I do recall clearly my dad sitting on a rock wall at the top of the bowl, one leg straight down to the earth and the other bent at the knee so that his foot rests atop the low stone wall. He’s smoking, his torso against the blue sky. The fact that he’s smoking means, at this very moment of writing, very much to me. I don’t know why. I haven’t smoked for more than 20 years. Suddenly, I want a smoke. I want to sit atop that stone wall, outlined by sky, and smoke. I want to sit with my dad and talk. I want to be him! In fact I am him, now, in mirrors! Sometimes I must check myself in a mirror and tell myself I am really me and not him.

Remembering his moment on the wall, I feel all his sorrow, and I don’t know him at all.... Anyhow, I’m playing below him. The opera doesn’t much interest me, but speak of a cliché moment! The people onstage, which seems very far away, wear those helmets with horns that are the standard cartoon figure for any joke about opera. So am I watching the Ring Cycle of the Niberlungenlungenschaftenhegel? As you can see, my early experience with opera did not lead to a lifetime of opera and ballet. I am, after all, a blue collar working stiff with a college degree tacked precariously over his shop apron.

Finally, through photos of St. Louis, I see myself sitting in front of a window with a huge bib covering me from chin to tummy, sipping coca from a mug, the big mug hiding everything but my eyes; one of my shoes tipped on its side on a windowsill; a dead dog lying beside a railroad track on an overcast day when I am walking with my dad; and, finally, and importantly, myself standing on the lip of a fountain in the zoo park in full military uniform! Four years old! My uniform is complete, brown from jacket to shoes. It sports a Sam Browne belt and a stiff-billed cap too, and I am straight, tall and proud and my salute is as crisp as a brand new two dollar bill!

Strange that I don’t remember much about the zoo itself during this time. I know just enough to know that my folks took me there when we lived in St. Louis. After all, it was right across the street from our apartment, and what kid wouldn’t beg to see the zoo, but I can recall the Cincinnati Zoo and the Seattle Zoo better than the St. Louis Zoo. I know, for example, that much of the Cincinnati Zoo was built by the Civilian Conservation Corp. I remember the feel and rundown look of the neighborhood in which I parked to get to the Cincinnati Zoo in the 1960s and 70s. I recall the gorilla park at the Seattle Zoo, but I don’t remember much about the St. Louis Zoo.

Maybe it’s this.

Over the years, I’ve talked only rarely to my folks about their divorce. My dad told me my mother had cheated on him with other men. He also told me that she didn’t take care of me very well. He said he’d come home to find me hungry, with a snotty nose, my shoes untied and my mother drunk. He said he’d come home from his 12 hour war work days and find me in the care of strangers, of people he didn’t know.

About the time I graduated from college, my mother, up from Florida for my graduation, told me, when I asked about her cheating and the divorce, that the reason she cheated was that my dad suffered from premature ejaculation and would do nothing about it. She said she begged and pleaded with him to go to the doctor with her, probably a psychiatrist, but he refused to go. She was going crazy, she said, nuts, and he wouldn’t do anything about it. So, she said, she cheated, found men in St. Louis and took care of her needs.

Look, my dad (like so many of his generation, and much of mine) distrusted psychologists, would be dismissive about them even when I was going to a counselor to work on my own stuff after my third divorce. He once said, “Why should I pay someone to tell me what I already know about myself?” You can see that he knows nothing about the counseling process by his take on it, so I can believe both her part of the story and his.

My counselor might say, yes, you make excuses for them, but who was there for you? Who was making you feel welcome in the world? How do you feel in all of this? And deep in my heart (which doesn’t exist as a place of feeling in the human animal, it’s only a metaphor) I know that I “feel” that no one cared what happened to me. I spent much of my life a little lost kid, unaware that I felt like a little lost kid, alternating between trying to please the unappeasable and telling the world to fuck off, surviving not very well, looking for parents and not knowing it. At first, as I emerged from my mental darkness, I thought I was looking for the mother only, but I was looking for the father too which took a little longer to understand. What’s the truth of my whole situation? The truth is how I feel it is and what I understand of it, and truth, when it comes to memory, is relative as hell.

A final piece of my childhood tale fell into place toward the end of my father’s life when I asked him how he discovered my mother was cheating on him.

“You told me,” he said. “You and I were at the zoo and you said, ‘Daddy, this is where mommy meets the sailors.’ That was the night your mom and I had the fight that woke you up, and I took you to your grandmother’s.”

Finally, just like the faintly remembered zoo, I can’t recall where any of the closets were in that apartment in St. Louis, and in that detail hangs much of the balance of the remainder of my life. I can remember the black leather couch, the alcove where my crib was, the green curtain on brass rings, the kitchen, the donut location, the dining room table and its chairs I turned into airplanes, and the bathroom out in the hallway. That’s right, a bathroom shared with other people in an apartment building. Nothing like you’ll find built in modern America.

I can remember all those things about that St. Louis apartment, but I can’t recall where any of the closets are. I can even see a yellow wall just inside to the right of the entrance door right where a closet ought to be, but I can’t see one closet anywhere in the damned apartment.

I’ll get to the closet detail later, in another chapter. For now, St. Louis bye-bye. Goodbye St. Louis until another time. Goodbye mom and goodbye dad. I’m off, just like Little Red Riding Hood to grandma’s house. All of four years old. Can kindergarten be far behind?