CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

My First Big Break That Went Nowhere

My folks threw me a graduation party in their home on Butternut Drive, and David and Monica gave me a book of modern poetry which I still have to this day. It was a book of Beatnik poetry. My Aunt Agnes gave me a nice leather-bound copy of the Fitzgerald translation of the Rubiyiat of Omar Khyam. Those two gifts are about all I remember of my graduation party. I’ve been through both volumes twice in my lifetime.

My four undergraduate college years were the happiest years I would have for quite some time. I was 26 and my future seemed bright when I graduated. My mother came to Dayton for my graduation. She and her third and final husband, Marty, flew up from St. Petersburg, Florida. I first met Marty then.

Marty was a wonderful guy, though I didn’t know much about him for a long time. He was an account executive with the Florida Power Company which meant he had money and, I think that was really important to my mother, and unlike her wealthy, brutal and controlling working class father who beat her with coat hangers and called her a whore (she was an attractive woman with long, naturally blond hair), Marty was a gentle, educated man. He had the kind of money you earn by going to college and training for high paying employment, money you invest and grow over years. He graduated from Yale, played infield for their baseball team and was a dedicated baseball fan. Divorced, his only child, a daughter, got caught up with gangland types and was beaten to death by someone never caught. This was, as you can imagine, a lifelong hurt for Marty.

My maternal grandfather was a hard nosed builder and cold-eyed egocentric and made his money right after the Second World War by some not quite straight up dealing with materials that he somehow got hold of from which he could build houses. Like many builders, he grew rich by being in the right place at the right time. Soldiers coming home from the war and anxious to start families needed those homes that grandpa Mac was ready to build. Just like Levitt with his Levittowns, grandfather, in a smaller way, grew rich on returning veterans. Timing couldn’t be better for him. Before that, he’d been a long haul truck driver and a farmer in Southern Ohio.

Mac, as his acquaintances called him, was a hunter and a fisherman. He traveled all over the U.S. and Canada to kill things. Canada—that’s where he got his moose, maybe the bear too. He had a deer head, a moose head and a bear head on his walls. A bearskin rug lay on the floor of his basement until he moved to a home without a basement. He shot a mountain lion too with Cougar Bill in Wyoming. Or was it Colorado?

Grandfather Mac liked to monopolize conversations and tell tall tales to his grandchildren. Telling tales, he laughed a deep mirthless laugh. Whenever I hear that humorless chortle, I always react negatively to it. It’s the laugh of school yard bullies as they torment a kid smarter than they are. I almost always hear that laugh in the laughter of conservative males I’ve worked with when they’re making fun of what they don’t understand while thinking nothing of their own foolishness. Grandpa was the kind of man who could (and did) travel to Europe, and all he got out of it was how dirty everything was. Nothing else. He was a complete boor.

I can’t find one really good memory about him or any touch of warmth in my thoughts about him. Their was something cruel about him. He could make fun of his own grandchildren. He didn’t laugh at their antics with the warm fondness that women and other, kinder males can. He laughed at them like they were stupid and should know better—an inappropriate response to natural, childish behavior. My thought has always been that he incested his daughters, but neither of them ever said a word about such a thing. Maybe, it was only that he was just cruel and controlling and punishing. He certainly had no patience for any errors but his own, which, of course, he couldn’t see.

Grandpa took all his grandchildren from his daughter Pearl’s marriage and his son Bill’s marriage on hunting and fishing trips. Not me. I don’t know why that was, but it might have had something to do with the family battles. My dad and stepmom probably didn’t want me to be around him. I know he was a mean old cuss till the day he died. Marty hated him for the way he treated my mother when she was a child and the way he treated her until grandpa died. According to Marty, my mom did everything to help her father in his old age, driving hundreds of miles to help keep him in his home only to be insulted to the point of tears time after time. It sounds almost inconsequential when my written words speak of his abuse of my mother, but unless you knew her and saw her lostness and fragility, you can’t appreciate the extent of the damage. These dynamics are painful for me to relate from both my maternal and paternal family lines.

My grandmother on my mom’s side was a nonentity, pleasant but as dumb as grandfather when it came to the larger world. She was fat and pleasant and completely unable to protect my mom from granddad's abuse. I think, like all good codependents, she pretended to herself it didn’t happen. They, of course, were Republicans while my dad’s family were Democrats.
I’m sure my mom was attracted to my dad because he was a Democrat. She used him to rebel against her Republican father. The families feuded as I’ve said. Then when mom realized that being a Democrat in my dad’s family meant never having a lot of money, she found a wealthy Democrat, Marty, to love. I don’t blame her for picking wealth over middle class existence. She wasn’t conscious of any of the drives that moved her, I’m sure. She probably was attracted to Marty’s gentleness and sexuality, and his money made him comfortable, gave him confidence and worth, and his assurance would make my mom feel safe. I don’t think my dad was ever comfortable in his own skin all his life long.

Marty once told me how deeply he loved and missed my mother after she died. He mentioned once that he was a very passionate man and let it hang at that. He was telling me that he missed my mother as a sexual presence as well as for all her other qualities which he loved in her. Artistic, experienced, sexy, she had a deep-throated laugh that could charm the balls off a brass monkey. Marty was quite the real man, and there’s more to come later about what that guy did for me that even my own father didn’t do. According to both of them, she gave Marty quite the run-around before she felt safe enough to give herself to him in marriage. I understand those reservations myself.

///

My mother took Beverly and me out to lunch while she was in Dayton, and she bought me a two volume set of Plato’s Republic for graduation which I began to read immediately. Later, I lost the set during the transient times amidst all my divorces and drinking. I don’t know where it got to, what hole in my life it fell into. Many years later, my mom came to visit my third wife and I, and she asked about that set of books. She was quite upset I’d misplaced them. Without college herself, she couldn’t understand how books came to mean so little to me as material things. I was always much more interested in the contents than in the cover, and I knew that translations of Plato’s Republic could be found in almost any library. I do understand the sentimental value she placed on their being in my possession, a gift from her to me. She always placed a higher value on my education and everything to do with it than my old man did.

We went to lunch at the dining room of an old, elegant hotel where she’d spent a lot of time during the war with fliers from Wright-Patterson Air Field. She worked at the base during the war. Mom asked for a Waldorf salad which wasn’t on the menu. She tried to describe it to the waitperson who finally went into the kitchen to describe it to the chef. Imagine mom’s surprise to hear that the chef on duty had been at the hotel for 20 years and could make exactly what she wanted. And he did.

At this lunch I first heard about my father’s sexual problems (he came too fast) during their marriage. According to mom, she begged him to get help, to see a doctor, but my dad distrusted psychologists all his life and refused to go see one. Maybe he distrusted psychologists after the divorce because of mom’s insistence he see one. If he began to believe in the work of psychologists, then he’d have to admit the error of his stubbornness in the past that ruined their marriage. It’s all hypothetical now, isn’t it? Anyhow, this lunch is when I first heard my mom’s side of the story about why she’d been unfaithful in St. Louis; she was going sexually crazy with pent up desires.

This luncheon is also when I heard that my dad had held her unfaithfulness over her head in order to take me from her. He swore he’d not give her a penny of support and would ruin her if she tried to get any money. He convinced her that no judge would give her custody or force him to give her money. Faced with nonsupport, she gave in but insisted that my grandmother, whom she trusted, would take me in while dad continued his wartime work which soon took him to Connecticut. That’s how I ended up with my grandmother. Of course those being the days they were, I think my mother might have prevailed had she really forced the issue, but I doubt that her family would have been behind her or loaned her money to fight the case. Anyhow... I ended up in the unusual situation for those days of becoming my father’s responsibility.

///

In the spring before graduation, I took the GRE, and I did okay in the literature part but not too well in the other parts. I recall I had to name Don Quixote’s horse, “Rosenante. That’s all I recall of that test and one of my correct answers. I applied to three graduate schools, and all their answers came back negative. One was Ohio State and the other may have been Xavier. The third was Southern Illinois University, my back up plan, a new and not very large school.
I felt pretty punk after striking out at all three places. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself. Then, along comes an offer from Southern Illinois University. One of their early acceptors found a better offer, and I was high on their waiting list. I snapped their offer up quick as a terrier down a rat hole.

I could feel my life ahead of me like a wide spot in the road. I was full of unspoken ambition and hope which I don’t think I fully appreciated. As I write this, all these many years later, I feel a tug of remorse or sorrow for those hopes and dreams I left behind in those days. I sorrow for the youth who had so much hope, but who had so much failure before him to experience. I was at the door of a lot of failure and I had no way of seeing it or understanding what was happening to me. At times I still don’t understand exactly what did happen to me. Yep! I’m sad right at this very moment. Anyhow... to get on with it....

Toward the end of the summer, my wife and I drove the 500 or so miles from Dayton to Carbondale to see about someplace to live when we moved there, and I had a powerful emotional experience on the trip. We were deep into southern Illinois on a two lane highway, heading South. Bev and my son were asleep, and I suddenly realized that I could see more stars than I could recall seeing in all my life. The sky above me was thick with stars, huge and bright.

I pulled to the side of the road and got out and went to stand in front of the car and lean against it. My whole mind surged into that sky of light and my senses experienced joy.
“Success!” I thought. “I’m going to be somebody. I’m going to be a college teacher.”
I didn’t realize until that moment just how much I wanted the degree, the college teaching position. Remembering that moment, I again feel the sorrow at having failed, at never having achieved that dream.

We got into Carbondale Saturday morning. We had to be back in Dayton by Monday so that I could return to work. Our finances were pretty slim, and I couldn’t afford to miss a day of work. There wasn’t much to pick from in Carbondale. Everything that was left was pretty expensive, and my teaching assistant’s pay was miniscule. We were starting to get depressed when we got word of a house 15 miles out in the small country town of Cambria, and we quickly drove out there and found the owner. It was a completely refurbished one story frame house, sitting up on concrete blocks on a corner lot. The house was excellent for us, but Cambria was an insular little place and I surely didn’t feel too good about living there. I didn’t trust the people to understand a man of my type. I was already to feel like I was somehow different and that I didn’t belong to this world. Nothing was coming easy for me. Not a thing.

Carbondale, by the way, was the home of black comedian Dick Gregory who wrote, Nigger. He reportedly told his mom, “Whenever you hear the word, nigger, from now on, you’ll know they’re just advertising my book.”