CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Still Digging. Down? Or Out?
In high school, I fiercely continued my interest in competition too: another escape from the ordinariness of life for the “Man In A Gray Flannel Suit” who, I think, feared that a very ordinary “Death Of A Salesman” was ahead for him (i.e. me). All through the road job years into high school, I continued to compete at cards, board games, sports, for attention in a crowd, trying to shine my little light on the big bad world, trying to make the nearby world look my way so I wouldn’t smother to death under a big bushel basket of humanity. I was afraid to confront the fear that I am the Nobody I am.
The high of victory is a great escape. This new TV ad (2003) for Champion sportswear certainly gets at the kind of spirit I felt as I played basketball on the weekend school grounds. Champion’s tuned into something with that ad. My guess is that sales will head up for them, unless it frightens people too much way down in the unconscious where the real animal lives. Their line “We’re not going anywhere,” is audacious when you think about it. It gets right at the ambivalence of the gritty failure most of us expect from our lifelong competition with one another, yet continually put out of consciousness. I can only speak for myself, but that’s what motivated me and hurt so much as I struggled: the sense that I’d fail even as I competed to succeed in my imagination for my shining place on a globe swarming with human animals just like myself. “Please make me shine. Please make me shine,” might well have been the lyric, beating in the rhythm of my heart beneath my everyday hearing.
Even swimming at the Oakday swimming pool was full of tag competition and worries that I looked too skinny to be attractive to women, to compete for their sexual favors. As I said earlier, I think I’m missing the breast bone in the middle of my chest. It leaves a tiny depression there which, when I was a teen, seemed as big as the Grand Canyon. I knew everyone could see it. I frequently stood with my arms crossed high on my chest to hide my physical deformity, but I loved to swim, so, as long as a potential girlfriend wasn’t around, I could play, leap, cannonball and splash to my heart’s content. But every first date or meeting at the pool always contained the hole in my chest first encounter. Would the girl notice it and dislike me for it? Or would I be more important to her than the Grand Canyon right there, plain as day, in my chest.
Walking a mile or so to get there, I spent lots of summer hours at the Oakday swimming pool, eating the yellow mustard covered pretzels, diving for coins we threw into the pool, swimming with open eyes underwater until my eyes turned red with chlorine, flying down the curving slide into the water. We jousted from each other’s shoulders, our girlfriends on top of our shoulders as we got old enough to date.
Our games of tag ranged all over the pool. We’d dive off the edge right into the hurtling paths of people diving and jumping off the ten, fifteen and twenty foot boards. We ran on water slick pool edges, sometimes falling and whacking our heads, but nothing serious seemed to harm us. I don’t know how we escaped injury. More than once, I leaped off the twenty foot board as some oblivious swimmer paddled into the path of my downward flight and missed him by a foot or so.
I just now, writing this, asked myself why I didn’t keep going to Koontz's Pond where I could swim free? I think it had to be the girls, to ogle the girls. At Koontz’s there was just us guys. The pool was the larger world.
Basketball became very big for me after my return from the “road wars”. My commanding relationship with most of the Kenview crowd had weakened, and I was moving in my new bunch. As I said, Bob, Vince, Henry, all Catholics, were my best pals, along with a few basketball playing pals from Stivers. These neighborhood and school friends weren’t athletic types at all. We were sort of nerdish, I think. But I was always trying to move up and out of my nerd slot, so other Stivers guys (who I secretly thought less nerdish) became my basketball buddies. From other neighborhoods, they showed up at the Belmont school playground to play basketball. I got to appearing at the Belmont school playground after school and weekends to play pickup basketball with them. Some big and tough guys also showed up, tall and heavy, older and out of high school.
I was not always the first chosen. I was only 5’9’’, but I got better as time went on and moved up the list of the chosen. I could pass and defend pretty well. Stivers High had a run at being state champions when I was there. They were atop the state ratings all year long, but in the district tournament at the University of Dayton field house, they lost to a lesser-ranked team, Middletown, led by their freshman center who later played in the NBA and helped the Knicks win a world championship, Jerry Lucas. Stivers unsuccessful championship run probably encouraged basketball fever in Stivers guys.
We played half court most of the time at Belmont park. Only one court at Belmont school, so if there were enough guys to make up four teams, we’d play two half court games. If the crowd was smaller, we’d play full court. Sometimes we got up tournaments and played elimination games. Sometimes, like in playing pool, the winning team kept the court until defeated. I’d stay on the playground for hours, watching and playing. When only a couple of guys showed up, we’d play horse until more arrived. I developed a hook shot because I thought, short as I was, a good round house hook would be effective for me. I also liked to drive diagonally across the key left to right, toward the baseline and make a driving, leaping hook shot. I could make that better than 50% of the time.
Winning was everything and come from behind victories were best. One time, I played on a smaller, younger team, and we were definitely outgunned by the bigger, older guys on the opposing team who got off to a 16-2 lead. (One point per basket.) Then we rallied. It was a full court game, and I think we just ran the older guys, who were smokers, into the ground. We came back to win by a point or two. I loved underdog victories more than anything! Memories like that are so faint that I can’t remember who was on either team. I can only remember the high of that intense drive to victory and the exalted feel of that moment of victory. Strong enough, the feeling, to set that moment vaguely in memory, but no other details. My basketball skills steadily improved.
I also took up bowling during those years. My dad bowled with the Shriners for many years, and I admired him pretty highly and thought proudly of myself as a Nobody whenever I followed in his footsteps. First game, I threw a lot of gutter balls. I think I scored 108 or 118 my first game. I may have been on a double date with Bob and my steady girlfriend, Sue, when I first bowled. This does not take into account the time in Connecticut with stepmom’s people when I was real small that we all rolled a game of “duck pins”. You bowled at tall thin pins with a wooden ball a little bigger than a Croquet ball. Something tells me you had three balls to knock down all the pins.
I must have trusted Sue because I usually wouldn’t try something I was poor at in front of a new girl I was trying to impress. Soon, I was bowling on my own or with buddies at the Park Lanes. We also got into pin ball playing at the Lanes. Like phone calls, pin ball cost a nickel. A line of bowling was 50 cents or 25 cents at special times. After awhile, If I had enough money, I’d come home from school and stop off at the bowling alley before going home to roll 6 to 10 lines of bowling by myself. I got better and better and could roll one or more games in the low 200s every time I bowled. One-eighties and 190s weren’t beyond me when I bowled alone and bowled a long series of games back to back. I could find a groove that would boost my game. In one league I bowled in after my return to Dayton from the Navy, I average in the 180s. That’s the best I ever got, then I quit bowling as too bourgeois.
I actually went out for track in my junior year and scored 26 points and won a letter. Not usual for the loner I imagine myself to have been back then. I was track coach Larue’s best long distance runner. I ran both the mile and the half mile. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had prepared myself for this distinction by running all those nights back home from the Dabel Theater after my second double feature on Saturday and Sunday. I developed a natural stride and only had to learn how to relax my arms to be good at running in competition. I could be depended on to bring in some points. I almost always placed, and I won one or two meets.
A couple of things stand out about this great spring season. I envied the high jumpers. I’d watch them loll on the grass between jumps, relaxed, joking and grandly enjoying themselves, whereas, my competitions seemed grueling, the half mile about the third event and the mile coming about five from the end of the meet. I’d just get recovered from one, then I’d have to do the other. I always ate sugar cubes just before a meet, hoping to get an energy release as I ran. Of course, in all fairness to the jumpers, they usually also ran the hurdles and some sprints. Hundred yard dash men were shorter and stocky and so didn’t hurdle well.
At first, I ran only the half mile during a meet. I begged coach for weeks to let me high jump too. Finally, he told me if I could win the third spot in intra-squad competition, he’d let me do it for one meet to see how I worked out. I learned the fairly new “Western roll” in order to compete for a spot with the high jumpers. Now they do the “Fosbury flop”, don’t they? I got up to 5’3” in my jumps on a consistent basis, and Larue told me I could jump the very next meet but along came a late comer, named Hartley, and took back the spot. After that, Coach Larue, thinking I must have energy to spare, started having me run the mile as well as the half mile.
I recall coming onto the team and beating out some seniors in the practice meets and in competitions among team members. Men who played football and basketball were my teammates. I felt pretty special. Competitions to make the team were intense, and I remember how gracious football seniors were to me when I took their place in the mile.
My running strategy was immature and flawed. I always ran against my opponents. My goal was to hang in close to the leaders and then try to kick at the end. Most always, I finished 2nd or 3rd, rarely 1st. Then one day I ran the mile against Phil Moler from Oakwood High School who went on to win the state meet that year. He really took off, running against the clock I now realize. He wasn’t even running against me. He was running against himself and his own times. Soon, my fear became that he’d lap me, so I ran hard with no one ahead of me to compete against, only to finish second almost a lap behind Phil. I probably ran my best time that day, pulled along by Phil.
As always, I have one or two big memories from my competitive times. One was my great comeback run in the mile on a quarter mile oval. I think it was against Wilbur Wright High School. For some reason, I was lethargic and didn’t feel like running or competing that day. I quickly fell behind all five runners. After lap one, Larue yelled at me to get my butt going as I passed him near the finish line. Then I heard fans in the stands yelling my name. My adrenaline kicked in at the thought of those girls watching and rooting for me, calling my name. I was nearly three-fourths of a lap behind the leader when I took off. I ran hard for three laps, slowly overtaking one after another of the runners. Each time I passed the stands, I heard the girls cheering on my comeback, but....
I finished second. On the backstretch of the last lap, my view turned blood red from oxygen starvation, my lungs ached and burned and my legs wobbled. My knees knocked together once, I was so unstable. I couldn’t make up the last twenty-five yards. I was still gaining when I finished, but I’d waited too long. Man that was a thrill, though, my all out effort cheered on by fans.
Coach Larue entered me to run the half mile in the District Meet. The top six finishers would receive medals. We ran in the evening, under lights. My dad was in the stands. He’d come home from the Michigan road job for the weekend, and my stepmom encouraged him to come to the meet. I wanted to look good for him, but I’m a Nobody. What could happen good? One time a few years before that, he came to watch me play softball, and I never got off the bench. Anyhow....
In the straightaway following a staggered start I found myself in seventh place. During the first lap, I passed one runner to get myself into sixth place. The adrenaline flowed as I passed him. I thought I’d win a medal for sure. A huge crowd was cheering, I had kick left, and I was nicely positioned where I liked to be, but, coming into the final turn, I heard runners pounding and gasping behind me. I didn’t have as much kick left as I thought. The first five runners weren’t slowing and I saw I wasn’t catching up. Fatigue set in with that realization. Entering the curve, a runner passed me and the fight went out of me like I’d been slugged in the stomach. As I came out of the final turn, another passed me. I finished out of the money, in eighth. I thought of my dad in the stands, watching my failure again.
I wore my white, pullover letter sweater with huge black-edged, orange “S” on my chest part way into the summer, even when it got so hot I sweated like a stevedore. I was so aware of my courageous image in the eyes of everybody who passed me. Like, yeah, sure, all eyes were on me. I was such a kid as a kid. All kid all the time. Eventually, I did have to put the heavy sweater away until my senior year.
I only got to wear my letter sweater a few months that senior winter at school, to be the big letterman in my own eyes, because that spring I quit track when sophomores started to beat me, the mighty senior, in practice runs. In fact, after a practice in which two sophomores beat me was when I left my track gear in the locker room and knew I wouldn’t return. I never faced Coach Larue or explained anything to him. I just quit. I think I told a fellow teammate I was done and let word of mouth tell it to the Coach. It’s not the last time in my life I came off as a quitter in my own and others eyes. Coach Larue was so furious with me, he never spoke to me again, and I was too ashamed to wear my letter sweater after I quit track.
Over the years, I keep trying to identify all the reasons why I quit track. It’s a lot more complex than just saying I’m a quitter, as I used to say when I was still drinking and beating myself up on a regular basis. One primary cause, not so clear to me at the time, was my heavy smoking, already a pack a day, which was shortening my breath and my long distance stamina, thus causing me to lose to sophomores. I started smoking a pack a day during the summer between senior and junior years. (Remember Sandy, the ring collector, who I “just had to” show off for?) Increasingly, I was also drinking a bit.
Another huge and immediate cause is I finally had a steady girlfriend, Sue (not fifth grade, movie Sue), who I desperately needed to spend as much time with as possible. I just had to. I just had to. I just had to. Tongue out, panting, you know?
She was a year behind me and attended the Catholic girls high school, Julienne. Her parents were strict about her getting home for homework and chores right after school before she could do anything, and so they discouraged our relationship. In fact her mother never accepted me (I was a bad influence, you know, and not a Catholic) and twice she tried to end our dating, but Sue and I had a plan when we first met. From day one, we were plotting against her parents. Who, in the Fifties, wasn’t plotting against the strictness of their parents? Why was “Rebel Without A Cause” such a big hit and why did Elvis start a whole lot of shake up going on? Anyhow....
Sue and I both caught city trolleys to go home, and many kids from Catholic schools transferred to home buses at a central stop in downtown Dayton. So if I wanted to see her every day (and I needed to see her every day) I could walk from Stivers downtown (not very far) and meet her every afternoon right after school at a downtown drugstore where kids from lots of high schools mingled on a balcony restaurant for pop and cigarettes before transferring to homebound trolleys. This drugstore, by the way, installed the first electric eye door opener I ever came across. When a patron broke the light beam, the door swung open quite forcefully. Sue was there with Henry’s sisters and that’s how I met her in the first place, through Henry’s sisters. Henry lived in another neighborhood than the Kenview Street people, but he was within easy walking distance from my house. In his basement, Sue and I first swapped spit, as they used to say. Again we were sneaking around. She told her parents she was going to Henry’s sisters’ house which was partially true, but she was really coming to meet me at their home near my stomping grounds. More intrigue later....
A final reason for quitting track is even more evident to me the older I get and the better I understand the dynamics that influenced my life. I didn’t realize until just recently that my dad was out of town on that road job I mentioned earlier almost my whole junior year. He came home only on weekends and the major holidays. All this time my obsession with my stepmom’s body continued and intensified. I tried to catch her undressing or dressing. I think I even went out in the backyard and peeked through the curtains when I thought she might be changing clothes. Coming home at night from my adventures, I’d stop by her bedroom window if the lights were on in there. When my dad was home, I wasn’t interested in peeking.
Although my voyeurism (and early cross-dressing) is now evident to me, surprisingly, it didn’t spill over to my neighbors. I did become extremely conscious of lighted bedroom windows during this time, but I didn’t go into neighbors’ backyards to peek. In retrospect, I can see that not too many of my buddy’s mothers interested me at all. They were just unattractive adults in aprons. Other than my stepmom, only my sexy Texas aunt would have had the power to draw me to a bedroom window. However, I did stare at bedroom windows back between houses as I passed out front on the sidewalk... hoping, just hoping a shadow might pass over a drawn blind....
One female counselor, not too long ago, suggested that my stepmother cooperated in my seduction. A hallway cut our Kenview house in half, front to back, and ended in the doorway to my room. Flanking my bedroom door at right angles, my folk’s bedroom door was on the left and the bathroom door on the right. This hallway “T”eed into our living room at the front of the house through a wide archway. In the corner of their bedroom sat stepmom’s vanity table, with a tall mirror on it, visible at a certain angle from the couch in our living room. At the foot of their bed, an oval throw rug warmed the floor. My stepmom stood on that rug to change clothes. From the living room couch which faced the hallway, I could watch her changing clothes in the mirror. She wore garter belts. Most all my life I’ve been fascinated by women in garter belts, with asses shaped in a certain way. Pear-shaped, I call it. Later I was fascinated by Italian women in foreign films.
The female counselor was angry on my behalf with my dead stepmom’s careless exposure of herself. She assured me that she, at all times when changing clothes, knew where every person in her house was and that she always closed doors when she changed. I kind of question to myself about how aware my counselor was of the presence of others in her house when she is changing clothes. Couldn’t her hyper-alertness be a bit too much in the other direction? Wishful thinking on her part? I really don’t know. My mind seems always willing to entertain different possibilities for the truth of any behavior.
I find it hard to accept that my stepmom did what she did (seduce me) consciously. She was so repressively religified that she couldn’t strip consciously without extreme self-loathing, but maybe she did it unconsciously, and I believe she hated herself pretty intensely. She did have boundary problems, that’s for sure, maybe from living in such a crowded home at her sister’s. I had to tell her during these years in the Kenview house to stop coming into the bathroom when I was taking a bath. I don’t know when or how ministrations of enemas stopped, but they too were embarrassing me before they ended. One thing I do know is that when I re-experience sexual feelings about my stepmom, emerging unexpectedly out of the past, they are overpoweringly strong. All my senses intensify, my nostrils flare, and the flush on my face heats my cheeks and forehead. The tension in my groin is sweet. These emotional recalls don’t happen often anymore, but....
A couple of months ago, a sexual feeling for my dead stepmom, unaccompanied by images, rose up in me and were so intense that, for a minute, I believed I did actually sleep with her while we were in the Kenview house and my dad was on his last Michigan road job without us. I thought, “This is the memory of lust being fulfilled.” But I have no memory of actual intercourse. I have everything but the memory of intercourse. Like all psychological moments, however, it might as well have been intercourse for the lifelong affect it’s had on me. The memory of actual intercourse could hardly be any stronger than the psychological memory of having had intercourse with her. That’s what’s tricky about psychological reality. Reality is what I make it to be. If I feel like an incest victim, then, in the reality of my consciousness, I’m as much an incest victim as any other incest victim.
When I add in the fact that going to the movies also increased at the time of dad’s prolonged absence during those final years in my stepmom’s house on Kenview, I see reason to believe that running track was another way to stay out of the house while my dad was absent in Michigan. I think I feared that my lust dishonored my father, maybe even feared that my stepmom and I would actually fuck. So I stayed out of the house as much as possible. Then, when my dad returned from Michigan for good and, also, when I wooed a girlfriend, my house became safe for me again, and I didn’t have to spend my time, sweating and hurting to run track. Makes sense to me.
So, if I can see my way to take the moral bullshit out of the equation and quit judging myself as a failure, I can see, now, that one of the reasons I quit track was that my priorities had changed big time. I’d rather smoke, drink, and see my girlfriend once I no longer needed to escape the unbearable sexual tension at home because dad was back. It’s so simple, so understandable, but all I felt is shame and failure and humiliation about quitting track.
Of course, people who feel like losers will, unawares, find ways to continue to imagine themselves failures and ways to make themselves into losers. After a time, a loser will be so convinced that he’s a loser and failure that he’ll act that way even before others can judge him. He’ll fail and set himself up for failure. He’ll prove to others that he’s no good before they can discover it for themselves. The thought becomes the reality or a “you get what you see” reflex. I think this process is what is called a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. In those days, I just didn’t know how to please myself without adding a dose of shame. My stepmother had done a thorough job on me. For all I know I was self-lacerating Christian by her default setting.
I still enjoyed competing in card games too. With Henry, with Bob and one or another of Henry’s sisters, I played endless games of Hearts down in Henry’s basement. I loved that game for a long time and was always looking for a chance to “shoot the moon”. By taking all the hearts and the queen of spades in tricks, you gave all your opponents 26 points. That was “shooting the moon”. In Hearts, the object is to be the lowest scorer when someone is forced out with 100 points. Later, after I met Sue, she played too.
Henry had a nice basement room with a card table permanently opened. Sometimes we also played Spades and Euchre. I think today, I’d rather play Spades than Hearts after Pinochle. I’m still not into the very complex game of contract Bridge which was one of my father’s passions later in life. After he entertained Bridge, no other card game satisfied him.
Sue and I had our first kiss in Henry’s basement. I was lying on a couch. Henry’s sister went upstairs for a moment, maybe on signal, and Sue came to sit on the edge of the couch, leaned over me and put her cool lips to mine and breathed into my mouth. Our lips parted slightly. Our psyches joined in eternity. My chest lifted, my spirits soared. Wow!!! That was the most powerful kiss I ever had up to that time. It transported me, and I knew our love was serious business after that kiss. Sue had come to me as much as I wanted to come to her. She took the lead, though every moment together since we’d met, I’d wanted that kiss to happen between us. I can’t imagine the kiss wasn’t in my eyes and longing mannerisms from day one of our meeting.
Sue, as I said, was a Catholic girl who went to Julienne High School, an all girl Catholic high school where the girls wore dark blue, jumpers. Whenever we met, she’d say, “Hello stranger,” which perfectly suited the loner image I was developing for myself. Yes, I was the “lone stranger” passing through her ranch land on the way to meet my destiny, the woman I could leave behind crying while I went off to fight a war someplace, anywhere. And I knew it! I’d finally courted and “won” a woman. Above all men of my time and place, she loved and chose me.
As I said, I never danced in grade school and never went to high school dances, but when I started going steady, I also got lassoed into going to Sunday dances which were staged at the Carousel for fun and profit. Sue loved to dance and was very social. I met Sue through Henry’s sisters. They were also Catholic girls who went to Julienne High School with Sue. They played on the school volleyball team with her.
The Carousel dances were held in a big ballroom on the second floor of a downtown building. Sue and I caught the bus to go or, sometimes, we met there. Big names came in to play and sing at the dances. I swear the Hilltoppers or the Four Aces came in and, maybe, The Four Freshman, but I think the Freshman were too jazzy for a dance? Maybe not.
We did the “Hokey-Pokey” and the “Bunny Hop” up there in the big ballroom on the second floor, and, yes, we often danced to the “Tennessee Waltz” up there too. Now those first two dances, I could do all right. You didn’t have to lead a partner around the floor. I hated all other step dancing, like the mysterious-to-my-feet waltz, and felt awkward and stiff, a half-bent, rusted tin man, shuffling around on the dance floor. I’d sweat with nervousness and my back ached because I worried so much about my “image”. “How do I look?” must have been in my thoughts about as much as anything. “What’s she thinking,” another constant thought. I did learn the box step which sometimes served for slow dancing, and I could do the cradle all right which consisted of nothing more than standing with my arms around Sue, pressing her close, and rocking back and forth. That was more than all right.
In retrospect, I can see pretty clearly that I was like a James Dean to Sue in her own “Rebel” movie. Sue was one of three sisters in a strong Catholic family and probably felt that I would be the tough guy come in to rescue her from her repressive family. We were pretty serious. I believe we assumed marriage. I am just now imagining the battles she had to fight to get to spend time with me.
They lived in a long, thin, single-story house in a declining, working class neighborhood, not far from the bottom of Wayne Avenue hill where Wesley took his momentous bicycle spill. They were one step down the social ladder from my family I think. May have been because of her dad’s drinking that they weren’t more financially well off. He drank a lot of beer. An ex-jock and a referee, Sue’s dad refereed University of Dayton basketball games. I think he may have approved of me, but he was wrapped in an all girl family so what chance did he have?
Sue wasn’t the first woman who was attracted to me because her father drank too much. Daughters of alcoholics, learning about love from drinking fathers, are attracted to drinkers or other types of men who shield themselves from love by a thick wall of booze, drugs or work addictions. Simple as that. I’ve experienced the situation so often that I know what I say is true. Most of us are attracted to those who remind us of what we felt about love from the earliest loves of our lives. If we think love is distant and unattainable, we select the distant and unattainable because its comfortable and familiar to us.
Wow! Just now, for the first time in my long life, I put my first wife in this “unattainable” category and, boy, what a new look that is for me. No wonder I was so lonely! Coming from a really alcoholic childhood, a hitting abusive father, she was guarded too, protected from real vulnerability with me, and, as usual, I took all the blame for our troubles. I was the lousy alchy who wrecked everything with his irresponsible ways, but she never trusted me or gave herself to me either. We were two damaged people locked in a distant relationship. How could love grow without trust? We’ll come to my first marriage later. Anyhow....
Sue drank too. I recall how I loved to watch her tilt a brown bottle of beer into her sweet lips. God! I just now had a jolt of old love feelings for her as I write about her tilting that bottle to drink along with me. I see how tough she was. Isn’t that amazing, the memory of her drinking a beer, moving me like that! I wonder if she went on to become an alcoholic herself. I also wonder, if, according to my understanding of behavior, Sue was a victim of incest. So many of my relationships have been with women who are victims of abuse or incest. But I doubt it because she was so shocked, later, when I wrote her about my visits to whores in the Navy. (Isn’t human behavior hard to figure out when you’re trying to understand the triggers for behavior rather than just taking a moral stance about it?)
Sue played volleyball for Julienne. I went to her volleyball games sometimes, and she was very competitive. She had a great, long-legged figure too from her athleticism. Wow again! It’s so easy to rekindle long dead feelings for people in my past when I go for the details that made them real to me, the image in my head of them. I don’t think I hate anyone from my past anymore. The more I see life as a series of dances we do with each other, each locked in his own loneliness and bedeviled by her own hurts and fears, the less I can hate figures from my past.
I inhaled a lot of Catholic church incense with Sue. I went to church with her and, sometimes, her folks too, specially midnight mass on Xmas Eve. They still did it all in Latin back then, and I found the smell of incense and the mysterious language, and all that, to be very intriguing. I took Latin in high school (did I already say that?) and can still say, “Puella est pulchra.” Or “amo, amas, amat” and “amamus” and “amare”. (I know! I forgot the second person plural form, ‘cause I couldn’t remember it.) Ah, yes, love. I immediately understood when Dean Martin sang, “Amare....”
I walked Sue to church sometimes on Saturday afternoon and she’d go in and take confession and when she came out, I swear she seemed very holy to me and more serene, as if confession was good for her soul. Confession, of a sort, was good for me many years later, in a different context.
With Sue I became a heavy petter, and I know she must have been very frustrated because she would pant too, but we never had sex, oral or otherwise. It wasn’t because of the strong moral rigidity of my stepmom and my early Bible training. My hesitance was just a nameless fear I couldn’t explain which bound me tighter than chains. The fear of doing something wrong! Wrong! Wrong! “Lions and tigers and bears, O, my!”
I can see how traditionally 50s my repression was. I couldn’t act on what I thought about constantly. All we teen guys thought about was sex, and all we didn’t talk about was sex, except through coarse humor between guys. You know? We had this girl named Dixie who went to Stivers, a young woman with a real figure, and I can remember singing, “O, I wish I was in Dixie, hurrah, hurrah!/ In Dixieland I’ll take my stand to live or die in Dixie!” Thinking sex, sex and more sex. At least that’s the way it feels now like I felt then. Burning inside, a ring of fire, nothing sensible about fear and lust. Just visceral. Just fucking lust juice, in my imagination covering my beautiful stepmom’s ass on the pillow beneath me!
Right behind Sue’s house loomed a hilly, large cemetery. I mean huge! A duck pond was in there too. Lots of trees and evergreens. We walked the hills between the old tombstones on warm days and also secretly met there when her folks tried to separate us a couple of times. More than once I dry-humped Sue, lying in the grass between the tombstones. I don’t know what that means to you, but that’s when I lay on her or stood pressed against her somewhere and rubbed till I came. I got lots of wet underwear that way and wet spots on the front of my jeans, but no children, thank goodness. Imagine Sue’s frustration at that! I doubt that she had any climaxes unless she went home to masturbate, and I do believe she would have little trouble with that. The more I think about my relationship with Sue, the more the old “love” feelings return. And I wonder what would have happened if I went down that path of marriage with her.
Some might wonder what my current wife thinks about these old feelings still arising in me. To me, her ability to understand that past relationships are past and to trust me are why I think we have a great marriage. I sit with her too, when she cries over past relationships, and listen to her disappointments with failed relationships. Secure people can allow their mates to feel their feelings without being threatened. The interesting thing, new in my current marriage, is that I can look at another woman, feel feelings, and know that I would do nothing to hurt my wife. In the past, I have cheated on a wife (more to come), but all I felt was guilt or shame at my behavior. Not at all did I worry about her feelings of pain if she would find out. Guilt and shame are kind of selfish motives to remain faithful. Too many religious people are hemmed in by guilt and shame and not by the more healthy motive of concern for their spouse’s feelings. My wife’s presence in my life means too much to me. She’s gentle on my mind. As an old saying goes, “Feelings come and go. Let them.”
How different I was as a boy and for far too many years after that. I was explosive. One time Sue’s parents made her quit seeing me and go out with someone else. They were really worried about how serious our relationship was. Intercourse was definitely in the wind, but I lacked courage to pursue it which they didn’t know. So Sue dated other guys while we met in the graveyard. My pain on nights when she went out with other guys was intense. I rode around with Bob in his car and tried not to think about it. I’d get him to drive by her house so I could see if she was in yet. My jealousy was terrible.
Then, one date, Bob and I drove to her house just as she arrived home from a date. I’d been drinking a bit and told him to park. An unlighted alley ran behind Sue’s house, and she and the guy sat in his car in the alley dark. I felt awful that he had a car and I didn’t. Why wouldn’t she want a man with a car instead of a boy she had to date on the trolleys? Cars were the biggest thing in the 50s. To have one was to be on top of the heap, above the stupid mob.
The guy with my girl: his car faced the street where Bob and I, like detectives on a stakeout, waited. They must have noticed us right away ‘cause the passenger door opened pretty quick and Sue got out of the other guy’s car, and cut across her lawn in a hurry. I leaped from Bob’s car and angled across the street toward her to cut her off from her front door. The guy in the alley, fearing confrontation, I think, peeled out. I stopped Sue as she reached her door and grabbed her by the shoulders, backed her against the wall and raged at her. I don’t remember what I said to her or what she replied, but I don’t think I heard from her what I wanted to hear. She was crying, backed frightened against the bricks of her house, her folks inside and me outside, so....
I slapped her face.
I say nothing in defense of my action. Nothing. I was in pain. I couldn’t think straight. I was immature to a greater degree than most kids. I blamed her even though I knew she was blameless, that our situation was the doing of her parents, but, still, I hit her. I couldn’t attack her parents so I hit her... blah... blah.
Not long after that night, Sue and I were allowed to resume going steady. I can only imagine the battles that went on in her house. I don’t know what she said to her parents or why they relented, but they did, for awhile, at least until the time came when I was about to graduate from high school, then they tried to break us up again, forbidding her to see me at all, and that had some results which surprised me and Sue and eventually led to the end of our affair.
One very strange moment stands out in my relationship with Sue, and Bob was along for the ride in this one too. It was early afternoon, and Sue and I were in Bob’s car, going up toward Belmont from Sue’s house. She sat between Bob and me. Suddenly, I got it into my head I wanted Sue to lift her skirt and show her legs to Bob. I had absolutely no idea why I wanted her to show Bob her legs, I just did. I did think she had the most gorgeous legs I’d ever seen. They were long and athletic from her volley ball playing. I think I may have wanted to show the power I had over her to Bob or it may have been part of my voyeurism. So I told her to do it, and she refused. Again, my rage soared all out of proportion to the moment. I demanded it, but she held out. Finally, at a stop light, I jumped out of the car and said I was walking home unless she did as I commanded her to do. She relented, and I got back in the car. (Just now, I realize that Sue had an Italian size nose like stepmom’s and wore her hair short, also like my stepmother. I never noticed that before. I get lot’s of insights writing this tome.) Anyhow....
Sue lifted her skirt high up on her thighs and I can still see Bob tilt his head down and to the side to take a quick peek.
“See?” I say. “Aren’t her legs great?” But I felt shamed after I’d accomplished my purpose. It makes me feel bad right now to remember it, but in so many ways I was a driven kid, doing one thing after another without any rhyme or reason that I understood at the time.
It’s obvious now, isn’t it? I’m a bad kid and a bully and... I hit girls. At least I begin to think I’m a bad kid. The thought’s been growing in me all those years that I am. What’s going on here? Where’d the darkness come from inside me? Why do I do what I do? I don’t know. I’ve certainly been taught not to misbehave. I’ve been hit and punished and told over and over how to behave. I oughta know better. What’s wrong with me? Why am I the way I am? Please don’t tell me posting the Ten Commandments on every public wall will help. I know the Ten Commandments. Posting them in the schools or the courthouse certainly won’t change anything. My stepmother knows them for sure. In fact she’d just as soon beat me to death than let me escape her clutches without knowing, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Is there any excuse for me? There’s worse to come, I assure you.
I’m a bright kid. Don’t forget, I’ve already discovered plate tectonics by this time and the principle of the sundial, and they tried to move me from kindergarten straight into 2nd grade I’m so smart. All through this period from about 8th to 12th grade, my discontent grows. My parents trust me and don’t set curfews because I’m so adept at seeming the good kid. I’ve already got the three standard personalities of the budding existentialist: the self and the observer of self and the observer watching the observer. I know what’s up and what “they” want and how “they” expect me to behave. I just don’t know what I want, no one asks me, so I lash out at “them” behind their walls, in their safe little fucking ticky tack houses.
Fuck’em. Gimme a beer.
By this time, I’m knocking out street lights with bee bee guns or small rocks. Just mischief. In the fall, one of my favorite activities is to run down the streets in the better neighborhoods near Kenview and set leaf fires. Everybody piled their leaves in the street gutters in those days, and the city picked them up. I’d run, stoop, light a pile and run and repeat at the next. At the end of the street, I’d squat behind bushes and watch an entire street of leaves got up in flames, the fronts of the houses dancing with tree shadow, the undersides of stark branches tentacled like octopuses into the dark space sea above.
During this time, frustrated by resentments toward my own neighborhood, I throw a rotten tomato through the glass storm door of a stranger’s house and run like hell, thrilled with fear, through the shadows. Mischief and more mischief, a kind of revenge I don’t understand on a way of life that squeezes my spirit like an Iron Maiden. There’s nothing really wrong, I tell myself, just everything wrong. On the other hand, it’s so middle class, so teenage, my ineffectual anger, like a gargoyle, spitting on the world beneath it. Rarely acting, mostly reflecting, my anger stalks the dark. Walking many nights, I boil with anguish.
The intersection where I exit the city trolley after school, which by now is a gasoline fueled bus, becomes ever more traffic busy, a major intersection for that part of town. The trolley lines disappear from above me. A bank sprouts up, and a furniture store, across the street from Brun’s Tavern and the Liberal Super Market that put Judy’s folks and all the other individually owned, neighborhood grocery stores out of business. A gas station appears, a shopping center plows under the greenhouse where two huge Dobermans once scared me when stepmom sent me to buy tomatoes. They leaped up and put their paws on the screen door. They towered over me. I never went back. I was too scared.
Junior and senior tough, I begin a running feud with Harry who owns the Parkview Pharmacy where I get off the bus. Harry is a short, rotund man with a pitted, red face who wears shell rim glasses. In Harry’s store, I find detective magazines and the Policeman’s Gazette where I drool over women in torn blouses, ripped skirts, who show a lot of skin, tied to chairs or lying on beds. Playboy is only a few years away. These magazines teach me that all around me in the neighborhood, key parties go on practically every weekend. Married couples flock to them, and husbands throw their car keys into a dish, and, later, each man pulls a key out of the dish and drives to a home not his own to plug the key owner’s eager wife. I imagine the neighborhood streets where I set fire to leaf piles humped before houses that burn with another kind of fire in the bedrooms. My hardons itch and ache like a long tooth under my belt. My stepmother’s ass is fucked by more than one lucky key holder. About this time, I wish there were cheap hotels where people with little money or power can go to spend an hour or two alone.
I stand up front in Harry’s domain, by the floor to ceiling window, to read Harry’s magazines and comic books, and he constantly interrupts me. I flirt with his soda fountain girls and drink cherry or chocolate Cokes or cherry Phosphates. I get Sundaes and, occasionally, a Banana Split when I can afford one. I use his phone in a small built into the wall phone booth until it drives him crazy. I buy all the phone time I want for a nickel. I buy one magazine and steal another by folding it into the one I’m buying. Because I buy cigarettes and fountain goodies, Harry doesn't ban me altogether, but he throws me out frequently.
One more time Harry tires of me using his phone booth for an hour at a time. He nags me. I sass back and pull the accordion door closed to shut out his complaints. He goes and gets a bottle of ammonia and pours a line of ammonia under the phone booth door. I laugh and breathe deeply and demonstrate that ammonia doesn’t faze me in the least, not at all. For some reason, I’m not bothered. Maybe the same reason boot camp gassing didn’t get me down. After a time, Harry’s will breaks. He begs me to get out of the booth before I’m injured. I make him nearly plead with me. When I finish he bans me from the pharmacy for two weeks.
In my night rambles near Henry’s house, I discovered a bakery where night bakers rolled racks of hot raisin bread onto a dark back porch dock to cool. Periodically, I’d steal a loaf of bread and eat the hot, soft, raisin center, walking in the dark. Vince often participated in this larceny with me, and Henry sometimes, though he was more afraid, but not Bob. Bob was a mature straight shooter. I was his bad self. Is that why he enjoyed my company? I ask myself.
But I’m not too good to Bob all the time. Over drinking, I hit him one time. I can spot some bad signs already with my drinking, even at 16 and 17 years old....
Bob and I were at some huge city park for some reason and it’s dark. We’re alone and it’s not a park that’s part of my usual stomping grounds. On the other side of the park, I spot a lot of girls around a campfire, having a ball. I long to join them, to find some pussy or something, though I’m still a virgin. I’m still a virgin when I go into the Navy. I’m a virgin until I reach 19 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
“Hey, let’s go buy a six pack and join them,” I say. I know I need the beer to loosen up, to be cool and attractive and funny. I need it.
“No,” he says.
“Aw, come on, Bob, I need some beer.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want beer in my car.”
“Shit, Bob. Come on. I want some goddamn beer, then we can go over and hit on the girls. Come on, don’t be stupid, Bob.”
“No.”
He’s suddenly very assertive about it, this beer in the car thing. I get desperate, pushing against his resistance, thinking about the girls “just over there”, so close but so distant if I don’t have a buzz on to relax me and loosen my tongue. I must have the beer to make an impression. I must be remembering the football game and being so cool with the girl, how easy that pickup was with a little buzz on. I even spin and dance in the pain of my impatience with Bob’s sudden resistance. I gesture large; I used to talk a lot with my hands.
Bob’s sitting on a park bench with his feet on the seat, and I stand before him. His resistance is unyielding. It never was quite like this before. I could usually talk him into anything I wanted to do. I sense that he means what he says this time because everything I try doesn’t change his new found resistance. Then, when I’m sure I won’t get my way, I can’t stand it anymore because some wildness in me is raging in my chest against the “no” in him. My face burns and my forehead has this pressure in it that needs release....
“Come on, come on, come on...,” my voice rises, then, without warning, I hit Bob with a short right cross on the cheek.
He doesn’t react at all except to ask me why, with a lot of pain in his voice, I did it. No anger comes back at me, only this hurt that fills his voice and penetrates the darkness. I immediately apologize, and I forget the girls, my desperation changed to meekness, and he drives me home, and we don’t talk for weeks, but a mutual friend takes an interest, and, that’s how I get a scar on my chin that doesn’t go away for years.
In my mind, as I said, Vince was pretty tough, tougher than me, and so, when he called me a couple of days later and told me to meet him at the bus stop near the Parkview Pharmacy, I was scared. He said he was going to stand up for Bob and fight me, to teach me a lesson. We set a time later that night to meet, and I sweated out the meeting all afternoon, then went to my doom with a fast beating heart. I remember I thought it was like the “High Noon” shootout, like any movie, like so many movies where the moment comes when the loner has to go out and face the tough element. I really did see the moment filtered through the movies of my childhood, only I was the bad guy.
I knew I couldn’t run away. I had to go face Vince. I couldn’t be a coward even though I was sure he’d beat the shit out of me. The bus stop was on the curved end of an island that separated a boulevard which ran back into and through the neighborhood of upscale, red brick houses where I liked to set my leaf pile fires and where Henry lived too, and where my dad and stepmom would live later. When we met, it was so unreal feeling. Here was my friend too and Bob’s friend, and we were meeting in the dark, near a stand of evergreens not far from where Vince and I climbed the TV station tower and put up the sheet flag, to fight. Vince didn’t seem particularly mad, just serious. I almost giggled with fear and silliness. Still, we raised our fists and began to circle like two boxers.
After a few swings and misses and hits on the top of my head and shoulder and his shoulder, Vince landed one on my chin that jarred me, and I went down, probably on purpose, like screaming that I was blind in Minnesota. But maybe I was knocked out temporarily. My face hit the curbing that edged the island. When I got up, I was bleeding. I had a gash in my chin serious enough to require stitches. When Vince saw the blood, the fight was over. I can’t remember whether it was his senior class ring or the curb that cut my chin so badly. He said he was sorry we had to fight, but he had to stand up for Bob who was smaller than either of us. And that was that. Soon all three of us resumed normal relations. You know, these days, a tiff like that could end up so serious that normalcy can’t be resumed because someone’s dead.
The reason I think I might have been knocked out is that in a Stivers High gym class, I was knocked out when a guy hit me smack on the chin another time. I may have what’s called in boxing a “glass jaw”. We were playing basketball in the gym, and I came up behind the guy who was making a drive for the basket after stealing the ball at mid court. I leaped to stop his bucket and blocked the shot but drove his head into the padded wall close behind the basket. That’s all she wrote. I opened my eyes, flat on my back, to see the ceiling far above me. I’d been out cold, and I sure don’t know for how long. Herbie, who hit me, was the fullback on the Stivers team and packed a mean wallop.
I was coming to the end of my fighting days. I started to lose them, and I became more fearful. I feared losing teeth and being disfigured. I fancied myself a look alike to Montgomery Clift with the character of a Humphrey Bogart. A girl once told me that I looked like Monty and, of course, I accepted that until I morphed into Woody Allen in my state-subsidized, black safety frames many years later. I saw myself as a sensitive and quivering soul like many of the characters Clift played. He got beat up pretty bad in some vaguely recalled movie about the Tennessee Valley Authority. He was a government man who’d come to bring electricity to the hillbilly masses. Some nasty brutes, probably secret Fascists, resisted change and beat him up. My movie heroes always got beat up, defending the powerless against themselves or trying to bring them enlightenment, in this movie, literally bring them enlightenment. (I know! I know! But I didn’t know any better at the time.) I even identified with Errol Flynn’s Custer before I came to my senses. But I had to be injured one more time before I hung up my fists for good and rode off into the sunset with Shane.
I was walking home one night from the Parkview Pharmacy when three guys from Stivers showed up as I passed the very boulevard island where Vince and I fought. One of them was the guy I went out drinking with that school morning when I got caught drunk in school, the one who went on to do time in prison. Another was a tall guy who went on to become a plant foreman at one of the industrial facilities in the Dayton area. The third man was another pretty tough but short cookie.
For some reason they decided they were going to “pants” me right there in that high traffic area. “Pantsing” consisted of forcibly removing the pants from the body of some poor loner (nerd) like myself to embarrass him before god and all the world. So, all three of them came at me and soon got me down. I panicked at the thought of being without pants on that busy corner. I mean, I really went wild and struggled free and got to my feet. One of them was on his knees at my feet, and I must have watched some wrestling recently because I gave him what was called a “rabbit punch” which consisted of bringing the side of my hand down on the back of the neck of my opponent. All I know is that the rabbit punch hurt my hand real bad and did nothing to incapacitate the guy. I know I didn’t hurt him because....
I took off running to save my pants and dignity. However, believe it or not, a movie voice went off in my stupid head, the combined voice of all the movie heroes I was drinking in weekly at the time (I don’t know where else I learned such nonsense). I knew I must turn and fight like Montgomery Clift in the TVA movie I mentioned, or Glen Ford in “Blackboard Jungle” or Coop’s sheriff in “High Noon”. So turn back I did, stopping after only a few steps in retreat and spinning back to my left....
The guy I hit with my rabbit punch, the short mean guy, his right cross, aimed at the back of my head, found my nose instead as it came around to meet his fist in the dark. Blood flowed, more blood than the gashed chin, and, as usual in those days, when an opponent was badly injured like that, the fight was over and the consoling began. My nose was broken. I couldn’t see anything, but they could, and they were scared.
My assailants walked me back to Harry’s Parkview Pharmacy and got some wet towels and dabbed at my nose. I could see myself vaguely in the mirror behind the soda fountain, but I really couldn’t see very well without my glasses. Harry even seemed concerned. My three attackers were really worried, but I assured them I wouldn’t squeal on them. I wanted to be elevated in the opinions of these guys. I really did. I know that was my motivation not to squeal. I wanted them to admire me. I think it’s a common trick of the nerd like myself to belong, to take beatings and ridicule without showing the hurt and pain he feels. Nowadays, though, nerds strike back with bullets. If I were a type-A male, I’d be more cautious about who you push around these days. Your victim might snap at any minute and, like beaten down Moslem young men or gangster blacks, take you down with the newest “equalizer”, the gun. I recall, when I was a kid, people spoke of the baseball bat as being the “equalizer” when two men of unequal size fight.
“If I was you, I’d get myself an equalizer, son.” I heard that more than once in my youth from men supposedly wise in the ways of the world. It was a sort of joke, half believed. Then as I grew older I met guys who used a bat when they felt overmatched, guys whose fathers gave them that advice. Now it’s guns that equalize and very efficiently too, as we all know. And it’s easier to buy a gun than build up your muscles. Anyhow....
When I got home, the look of concern on my parents’ faces as I entered the living room told me how bad I looked. In the bathroom mirror I got to see for myself my swollen nose bent to one side, my eyes blackening and purple too. The folks commenced to quiz me, but true to my word to the conquerors, I didn’t squeal. My stepmom continued the next day, but my dad, I think, understood and let it drop. Of course we got the nose straightened up, but the septum is deviated and now that I have allergy problems and sinus troubles, the smaller passageway is stuffed up more than the other side and causes sleep troubles and headaches.
I never did tell, but the truth came out. Jimmy, the boy who grew up to become a plant foreman, was the source of the leak. Seems he was getting into a lot of trouble, running around with the other two guys, and his parents were keeping a close watch on him. He used his handkerchief to staunch the flow of blood on the walk from the island to the Parkview Pharmacy. He stuffed the blood soaked, snot rag back into his pocket, and his mom discovered the handkerchief and got on his case pretty hard. He told her the story, then she called my mom and the word was out. I think they shared the cost of the nose fix with my parents. Now I had a bump on my nose to go with the scar on my chin and with the scar on my nose from the dustpan flying down on it when I was five.
I learned an important lesson about bad deeds from what happened to those three guys. I decided to do dirty deeds mostly by myself so that no squealers could finger me: a loner again like the game of capture the flag and the boy scout camp. Several times in my life, I was one of those kinds of malcontents who broke into schools and damaged or stole things.
One time, Vince went with me. He knew where there was a ladder so that we could get up to the open widow high in the gym wall that I spotted with my window eyes, so he was in on that caper. (If you notice the Fifties and Forties gangster movie lingo, it’s cause I’m doing it on purpose.) We stole a ladder from beside a garage and slipped it through a couple of alleys to get to the school. On that occasion we merely ransacked the office looking for spare change and got into the cafeteria to eat ice cream sandwiches. But on another excursion into the Belmont school building as a loner, I ran water and stopped up toilets and tried to flood the place and smash things.
A most interesting psychological knowledge came from my breaking into the older school building, the one the Kindergarten through 3rd grade kids went to. My very first school break-in went into that murky, turreted, red brick building. I was passing through the dark school grounds one night after a late movie. I don’t know how old I was and I didn’t understand my feelings until years later. Right at this moment I don’t know how I got in. Maybe a door had been left open. Maybe I broke out a window, but I was inside, prowling the hallways. I have always loved the silent, creepy feeling of being alone in a large darkened building. Anyhow....
Eventually, I started entering open school rooms. Then I went into this one room and a completely unexpected angry feeling welled up in me. I grabbed the huge, round clock off the wall and smashed it on the floor. I smashed a reel to reel tape player on the floor too. I toppled chairs and threw books on the floor out of the short book shelves under the windows. I was going quite bonkers and crazy, losing more control with each passing second. I went to the teacher’s desk and overturned her chair and, at that moment, my ecstatic rage soared when I pulled out the center drawer of the teacher’s desk and slung its contents all over the room and broke its bottom out on the corner of the desk. It was a specially delicious delight when I dumped that desk drawer, burning in my gut like sex. Soon after, I fled the building, disturbed and frightened by what I’d just done. Thirty-something years later, I finally understood the source of the rage that seized me when I entered that room and the ecstasy of destruction I rained on that collection of school supplies. It was the room and the teacher’s desk of that room where I shit my pants because I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom.
Until college, after the first one or two years, I hated school. I hated the discipline, the being made to sit still and quiet and to raise my hand and tell everyone I had to go do Number One or Number Two, and I hated to be forced to read boring books or to dance with girls in gym class. I did like dodge ball games in gym. School was torture, and I hit back. I enjoyed spelling bees, don’t know why, and hated like the dickens to have to go up to the board and show my stupidity before a classroom full of my peers. Gone were the early days when I enjoyed the little green cardboard squares with letters on them and enjoyed being the teacher’s pet. All had turned around for me, and, thinking now as I write this, I see that I was again not so special, because don’t studies show that the pubescent boy will do poorly in school at just about this time?
Roz Young’s journalism class was an elective I ought to have enjoyed. She wrote for the Dayton Daily News and might have been a contact for me had I ever awakened to my writing ambitions while still in Dayton. She, like Mrs. Coblentz, also taught back when my dad was at Stivers High School, and my dad would run into her around Dayton from time to time, and she’d ask how I was doing. He could finally tell her good news when I was majoring in English and working toward an MFA degree in writing.
I wonder at this time in American history how many children are attending the very same school their parents attended and learning from the very same teachers? Is this another continuity disappearing from American life? If not. For better? Or for worse? Instead of being a bright spot in my grimy high school history, my sources remind me that in Miss Young’s class, I probably set a record for being sent to the hallway to cool my heels because I just wouldn’t stop talking and cutting up. To her, I was the complete wise guy.
One quarter my senior year, I had a study hall late in the day and learned to pull a pretty nifty trick to get out of school early. When students went to the library during study hall, they informed the study hall monitor where they were by filling out a form and putting it on a library table. A library assistant would gather the forms up and send them to the study hall monitors. The librarian herself stood behind a wide, tall counter next to the door and handed out the forms as students entered the library. A line of entering students always extended into the hallway, waiting to get the forms.
I’d fill out my form rapidly, set it on a table and approach the counter which curved back around the librarian, drop to my knees and scuttle out along the desk, below her line of sight. Out the library door I’d go and exit from the building through a side door far from the principal’s office. No student ever told on me or indicated in any way that a student was floor crawling out the door. They just slid out of the way to make room for me along the counter. Many a spring day that quarter, I enjoyed one hour of stolen freedom before meeting Sue downtown at the drugstore.
But I didn’t always want to escape from the library. In our little high school library, I discovered the multi-volume, official Marine Corps history of its Pacific campaigns in World War Two. Each volume contained a different campaign, and they were blow by blow accounts of the invasions. They read like the reporting on a baseball game: “Platoon C of the 2nd Rifle Company, 4th Infantry Battalion, reached the ridge above the Pango Pango River the evening of June 3 where they spent a hectic night in an advanced position in danger of being flanked. Through the night of June 4th, they came under heavy mortar bombardment and repeated banzai attacks. Twice the platoon was nearly overrun when Japanese troops reached the outposts before being routed by Corporals Smith and Henderson who crept from their positions on the flank with BARs, exposing themselves to enemy fire, to catch the Japanese in flanking fire. C platoon was nearly out of ammunition by the time Lieutenant Jarvis commandeered a passing jeep to bring back fresh ammunition in the morning. Hundreds of enemy bodies were piled up on the bank of the river and on the slopes of the ridge before the platoon’s position.”
What I didn’t read of those Marine Corps histories in library, I checked out to read at home. My imagination could turn those dull history books into fascinating reading. All the war movies I’d ever seen filled in pictures to go with the facts on the page before my eyes. I could see the little tan clad bodies piled on top of each other by the Pango through the bamboo thickets of my position atop the ridge while dawn gave me a minute of relief from the tension and exhaustion of the all night battle.
My drinking intensified during my senior year. I had my first black out while in high school at the Liberal Market employee Xmas party. For a short period I worked at Liberal during the fall and winter of my senior year. I was a part-time box boy, making minimum wage and tips. In those days, all groceries were packed into boxes. I kind of enjoyed the puzzle like job of neatly filling the boxes which we selected from huge stacks of boxes along the wall by the cash registers, but I hated giving up my time for wages, specially on weekend evenings when my buddies were playing pinball at the Park Lanes bowling alley or hanging around at Frisch’s Big Boy.
At the Xmas party, Liberal Market hired a private hall in an upstairs room of some kind of establishment. We weren’t a lot of employees, but there was, I think, a cute girl there from the meat department. So I was drinking and cutting up to impress her. A common activity for me, to drink to impress the chicks, to appear wild and crazy and to cover my real shyness. For awhile, my strategy worked, but, eventually, I went over the edge on hard liquor, blacked out, and finally puked in the parking lot outside the building. I have no memory of what happened with the girl.
I soon tired of working and going to school. I tried, but just like the paper route, I hated it. One Friday night, I knew my buds were going to go to the Park Lanes to play pinball and enjoy themselves, so I told Vince or Bob to call me at work with a message. One of them called me at work (don’t recall who) as planned. I went to answer the phone and returned to the manager with a stricken look on my face.
I trembled with fear which added to the affect. “Mr. Smith, I’ve got to go home! My mom fell down the stairs and broke her leg!”
I enjoyed that evening out. The illicitness of my absence added to its pleasure. Illicit behavior always does, temporarily. Of course for some odd reason, I’d forgotten that my stepmom shopped at Liberal and the manager knew who she was. The very next day she came in to shop and I was exposed as a liar. I don’t think I was fired, but I soon left that job. I couldn’t help it. I just had this itch to play and loved to be out and about rather than to work. In fact for a good long portion of my life, I’d rather play than work. Eventually, as my fortunes turned darker, I came to think of myself as the grasshopper who played away the summer while the ants labored to secure their futures. What awaited me was an early death when the winds of winter blew.
Again, Sue’s parents, in midwinter of 1954-’55, laid down the law. She could continue to date me, but she had to date other boys too. She was a junior and I was graduating. Her parents didn’t like me or trust me. Who knows what they feared other than I’d fuck their daughter? In my experience, parents fear so much that isn’t true and don’t know enough about what is true. Had Sue and I had sex, I’m sure we’d have gotten married so fast, their heads would spin, and Sue, a virtuous woman, would have been my first wife rather than Beverly.
So I added their dislike to Mr. Wilson’s dislike and Coach Larue’s dislike and my stepmom’s dislike and my dad and birth mother’s absentee way of parenting to my intelligence, curiosity, guile, lust for my stepmom’s luscious body, all elucidated for me by James Dean’s way of telling himself in “East of Eden”, “I’m a bad person.” The mix, laced with my naiveté, was poisonous to my maturity.
Sue gave me the bad news one night when she was baby sitting near my house. I walked over to spend time with her in the neighborhood of my leaf fire forays, and she told me, then, she had to date other guys. I got mad at her and stormed out, but I knew I wasn’t mad at her this time. I was mad at her parents and at my powerlessness over the situation, powerless to control my own destiny, the powerlessness of most 17-year olds. On my walk home, all the war movie heroics kicked in, and I decided, just like that, to join the Navy, to be a man controlling his own destiny, I suppose.
By now, 17, “a motherless child” as the song goes, “a leaf on the wind”, a drinker and heavy petter, Baptist demon haunted, a boy full of secrets, of unspeakable lusts and desires, a budding voyeur with a cross-dressing past, I was firmly convinced I was a bad person, that I was lost, though I could not have articulated one of those concerns had I been asked. As I told the principal when he inquired of me if there was any trouble at home, “No trouble.”
To me, this was the legacy of the 50s which years so many speak of with nostalgia as if it were a time of great good, safe, wonderfully admirable people and places. To me, the 50s were a prison full of suffering which couldn’t be revealed. I hated myself and my peers, but all this was not yet quite in my conscious. All of it was working within me, poisoning my life steadily and surely, as I haphazardly decided to throw myself from my boyhood home into the world at large. “I joined the Navy to see the world, and what’d I see? I saw the sea.” But I didn’t, as you’ll see.
My folks were in the living room when I got home that night, and I told them what I wanted to do. At first, they resisted and threatened not to sign the papers. Since I was 17, they had to sign a release for me to go into the Navy on what was jokingly called, a Kiddy Cruise, or, officially, a Minority Cruise, but, eventually, they gave in. What other ideas did they have for my life? College was never mentioned that I can recall. My stepmom just wanted to beat me into a life-killing morality like her own, and dad was a totally hands off sort of parent. So when I came up with a plan, they had to accept it. They signed and on the 5th of June I graduated and on the 20th of June I would be gone, fifteen days later.
Prom night was the only high school dance I went to other than the Carousels, and I think Sue and I doubled with a guy named Tom and his date; he had a car. So we went and we drank, at least Tom and I got blotto. I don’t remember whether Sue drank or not. I can’t imagine she didn’t take a sip or two. Stivers held our big dance in a ballroom at Lakeside which was the last functioning amusement park in Dayton. It was inside the fence of this amusement park that the German machinist I mentioned earlier rented his room after Lakeside went out of business.
I don’t remember a lot about the dance, the music, who I talked to or anything, but Sue was beautiful in a white, off the shoulder gown flowering out with crinolines from the waist, a flower in her hair. Afterward, drunk, Tom drove us to a teen parking spot, and I don’t even remember where that was, the result of never being able to drive. What car-free person would pay any attention to places to park and to spoon?
Tom didn’t do too well with his date in the front seat, so they talked, but Sue lay down across me on the back seat, and we got into swapping spit hot and heavy. For the first time in our relationship my hand went up between her legs under the stiff crinolines and snaked through the pantyhose and panties (what a tangled web we weave when first we dress up to deceive) and found the hot wet magic wellspring. And she was turned on too, just like me, but I don’t know what we were going to do with two others in the front seat. (In all this time, by the way, of dry humping and heavy petting, Sue and I never talked about where our urges were taking us. We just followed our bodies and the moment like most kids of that time who got into serious trouble.)
So there I was, at last, with my finger in a real girl’s vagina and it was slippery wet and hot... and now what? I burned her with my cigarette.
I’m trying to remember how it happened and none of my memory of the logistics makes any sense. How I’d burn her with a cigarette while using what had to be the same hand to grope around under her crinolines doesn’t make sense. So all I do know is that burning her with a cigarette did happen, and I guess our accident must have seemed like punishment from a hypothetical super being because, after that, the passion died, and Tom, who was getting nowhere, and I took the girls home.
Now later in the night, further lost in alcohol, I went to a party which wasn’t too far from where I lived, maybe a mile. I don’t know what happened to Tom. I think he had to go home, but we ran into some other guys, and I transferred cars to go with them. These guys were some of the upper crust of the school, but I guess they took me along in the camaraderie of prom night and our nearing graduation. So I ended up at this house, and Phil was there, a very short guy who was a class favorite, and he was sitting on a girl’s lap. It seemed so odd.
That’s all I recall about prom night and the party. My next memory is going outside to puke in the bushes, then....
Another blackout. I come to next morning, lying in the front yard of the party house right next to the curb. My head’s throbbing and my rented white coat is grass and puke stained. Cars hiss close by with a sigh on their way to work. I suppose I should be grateful I didn’t roll into the street in my stupor. Then I blackout again, I guess, because I don’t recall how I got home or anything, and that was prom night, full of wonderful memories to cherish in the future of friendship and love.
Somehow I associate this next memory, the last of this chapter, with Sue, but I don’t know. It might have been when her parents weren’t letting her date me. This is the vaguest of memories, so vague....
I’m slightly drunk. I’m in an ill-lit basement party. I don’t even know what city I’m in for sure or what damn year it is or whose basement this is. (For all I know, it’s the prom night party.) I’m very ill at ease because I’m there with no one and a stranger to most. I feel distant and out of place, and there’s a song playing, loud in the smoky basement. I identify completely with the song. It enters my psyche. I’m taking it in with the smoke of my Bogarted Lucky. I’m the greatest of phonies. I am alone in the midst of a crowd again, a prowler in a gaggle of friendlies.
“The Great Pretender” came out in 1955, the year of my graduation from high school. This is the song I am listening to in the basement. I don’t know who I am at the time. I am, in that lonely moment, Marty, Flynn’s Custer, Sergeant Striker, Glenn Ford in the “Blackboard Jungle”, Brando’s Wild One, Steiger’s Judd, “East of Eden’s” Cal Trask, Jim in “Rebel Without...”, “Sierra Madre” Dobbs and “Casablanca” Rick by Bogart, suffering Monty Clift, John Garfield as a boxer, Randolph Scott, Coop’s abandoned sheriff, Alan “Shane” Ladd riding off from the comfort of family life into the sunset, any member of the Joad family, and stevedore Terry Malloy on the waterfront.
Ironically, because of musicals, I’m also Gene Kelly, Gordon McRae and Howard Keel, Pat Boone, as if simultaneously standing off from my real destiny, at a distance on a mountain peak, singing happily while the others of my little, psychic band perish or fight desperate battles that call on courage the happier singers know I don’t have.
Because I was so easily influenced by movies, can I blame them for my emotional situation? No, of course not. Certain movies spoke to and stirred up issues already alive in me, issues I was already troubled by and needed to work through. Just because I was a long way from confronting my “stuff”, and I would hurt people and make many mistakes and borrow temporary solutions from movies wasn’t the fault of the movies I watched. In fact, if it weren’t for the movies which I imagined as chances to try out solutions for understanding myself and living my life, I may have never been prepared to find the answers in myself. The arts prepared me to see life as a series of actions which lead to a resolution or denouement. Of course, life is nothing like a handy drama or Bible story with a tacked on lesson. Living doesn’t have a plot or any meaning other than what I give it, and that was the lesson I eventually found which saved my bacon.
I see now that no Cary Grant or Walter Pidgeon appear in the stage play that was my life, no Robert Montgomery, Jimmy Stewart or Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. There’s something too untroubled in these characters for me. My repertoire is all swashbuckle and embattled loners, strangers in a crowd in roles where they lose or die or take one hell of a beating. Let others play God and win in unrealistic dramas; I’m already enrolled in the ranks of the little guy, the real person, and I’m not sure how I got here, and I feel my courage deserting me. I grasp tightly to any woman/mother who’ll fill the hole inside me and lend me courage, and I bray and crow like any damn fool animal putting up a show.
In that basement as a Pretender, I’m still unformed and, unawares, trying to build a personality out of all the characters I’ve ever identified with. I know now that I’m a bad son who wants to fuck his dad’s wife, though I’m completely unaware of how that’s affecting me. Other than identifying with the Great Pretender, I don’t know who I am; there’s no I in me, but I’m about to leave to go to the Navy. They say, “The Navy’ll either make you or break you.”
We’ll see....
