CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Veering From Job To Job

Okay—so I’m prejudiced! I said in the last chapter I left American Optical because a “hillbilly” came to run the branch, and I didn’t like him. It’s true I got as many prejudices as the next man, but I was struggling with more than a prejudgement of a guy who spoke with a southern twang. I spoke with a southern twang myself, so I was fighting myself and would soon be fighting my whole culture, my working class roots, everything, as the Vietnam mess unfolded.

New Englander’s (my stepmom’s Connecticut folks among them) often pointed out my twang to me which my ears didn’t even know I had. I was stuck in my voice, my time and my place with my own hick history, burning me alive, but I wanted to be somebody special. I didn’t want to be a Nobody. I didn’t want to be a hick no more’n Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy” did. Hicks talk funny. They are stupid. Hicks get the bottom end of the stick too. Look at the Joads! To be a hick is to let the world walk all over you.

The “southern” accent is easy enough to explain. Recall—my family was from West Virginia in the first place, and Dayton, in fact most all southern Ohio (a Northern state which gave the Union cause Ulysses S. Grant), from earliest days, was continually settled by immigrants from West Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee too. In the last century, as Ford’s auto industry boomed in Michigan, a tool industry arose in Ohio to supply tooling and parts for automobiles. People from impoverished Southern states flooded North to good paying jobs. They moved into Ohio, into Dayton, and farther north into Detroit itself, so we southern Ohioans sound pretty country to hear us talk.

Even when still a high school kid, I disliked country music, which to me was hillbilly music, dumb music, a sign of ignorance and backwardness. That terrible nasal whine sucked, that beat down loser’s mentality, that spiritual miasma sucked big time. To like country music, specially the country music, full of whine and roses, of my high school days, was to acknowledge hickdom.

My family, showing reverse pride, often referred to Dayton as the biggest little hick town in America. People say the same things about Spokane now. An old joke runs, “What’s so bad about working in Detroit?” The answer, “You gotta go through Ohio to get there.”

So, during the next fifteen years after my departure from the Navy, I was tripping over my roots. As I earned my B.A. in English and fell short of a Masters at Southern Illinois University, as Vietnam and Civil Rights heated up, as women burned their bras, while the American culture sizzled and fumed, shorted out and metamorphosed, as I wrote short stories and bad poetry, while skirts lifted and police night sticks fell, and American soldiers dropped in a wrong war, Dayton, my personal hicksville, came to represent a prison to me. I became a California dreamer who never went to California. I couldn’t go to California; I had a wife and kids, and, so help me, they came to feel like so many balls on a chain around my ankle. I grew to resent my country twang, my country roots, and anything remotely like a responsibility. The one thing I certainly was, I didn’t want to be—a middle class kid with a wife and family.

Some of my dissatisfaction came without doubt from the movies I watched as a kid, movies full of New York and bright lights. Chalk up some of my escapism to a kid’s natural ambition and desire to move on and up in the world, away from his roots, but part of my rebellion grew out of the real cruelty, superstition and ignorance of the populace I grew up in which I experienced personally and witnessed too and which I couldn’t come to terms with. Cruelty still eats me alive, even my own. Of course, grownup now, I understand that ignorance, cruelty and superstition pop up everywhere.

There’s an Indie film, called “Gummo”, important to my understanding of the cruelty I felt threatened by in the culture of my childhood and teens. Written and directed by Harmony Korine, that film, as much as anything else, reveals how my childhood, my youth in Dayton, influenced me. Despite how bizarre “Gummo” might seem to the uninitiated, it represents exactly how I subconsciously felt about myself and my culture for much of my life when I look back at the cultural influences that haunted me and, in all honesty, probably still do. The first time I watched that film it clobbered me into silence.

“Gummo” was filmed in Tennessee, but its language and ambiance is pure southern Ohio as I remember it. “Gummo” unfolds in Xenia, a small Ohio town, 12 miles east of Dayton where a tornado struck it April 3, 1974, killing 33 and injuring 1600. Very few communities have suffered so much death and destruction by wind spout in America. The movie begins a few years after the tornado plowed through Xenia’s heart. It opens with grainy, real footage of the tornado approaching and the voice of a kid narrating the tornado’s destruction. His throaty twang plucks me right back to my own childhood as I listen to it. His voice puts me right smack in the gut of my childhood. From cat poisoning to mercy killing, from alcoholism to zany punch outs, from child prostitution to cockroaches streaming from behind living room pictures, from glue sniffing to innocent sexuality, it’s a frightening movie smack on true to my sense of my own Ohio childhood.


After all my condemnation of the “hillbilly”, I’m still ambivalent. During those college days of rebellion, I was also entranced by Steinbeck’s novels, by Woody Guthrie and Bound For Glory, by “Matewan”, by Bob Dylan’s music, by Bessie Smith and soul music, by folk music and by labor’s struggle to free itself from the oligarchy which ruled it—on and on—the natural stuff of a man from a working class, liberal nation. How could I escape the nobility of the Joads, and my pride in my coal miner family roots? To say that I was conflicted about my heritage is an understatement.

It’s only recently I’ve come to realize I was brought up in a time and a place that was quite naturally liberal and/or socialist. My roots told me that America ought to be a democratic/socialist culture because it was only in America that social justice and economic fairness had come to reside. The working stiff and his struggles with capitalism were what made the American working class the best rewarded in the world. None of these goodies had been given to workers out of the goodness of capitalism’s heart. Every reward had been earned in bloody battle with the oligarchs of American. My culture brought me up to believe that social and economic justice and liberalism are one and the same thing. Since it was obvious when I was a kid that American and its liberals and socialists were the earliest ones fighting the war against fascist and dictatorial forces (in Spain, for example), how could American socialism be bad?

I’m trying to be honest, here, to reveal something I’ve only recently realized about my psychology. When I was a kid, I think my entire culture believed that economic and social justice are not possible without liberalism or, less obviously, socialism. My belief was almost a matter of faith. The lessons of labor versus capital were and are in every history book, and it seems so obvious, even today, that capitalism is in conflict with labor and does not want to make life comfortable for the worker. In fact, capitalism is currently driving down wages and benefits by making the worker so desperate that he’ll take anything.

The State of Idaho is a case in point; like many southern states, it’s a small Mexico within the borders of the United States. Completely controlled by rich Republicans, Idaho actively seeks employers who want to pay workers less and become richer themselves. In Idaho, they’re told, they’ll grow rich off the sweat of the brow of the worker. Buck Knives is a fine example. A recent Time article pointed out that Buck Knives will pay its workers 30% less in wages than what they receive in California. Since Buck Knives is not a publicly held company, all 30% will go directly into ownership’s pocket. In this case, capital reaches directly into the worker’s jeans and enriches himself at labor’s expense. Nothing complicated in Idaho. Just straight highway robbery.


To this day I define the success and failure of democratic institutions in terms of the relative wealth of capitalists and workers. For me, democracy is working when the economic distance between the wealthiest and the poorest is shrinking and not working when the distance is widening. It’s an easy thing to measure. For me, democracy is failing when the system is set up so that the powerful grow ever more powerful and privileged while the poorest become even less powerful and have even less opportunity to advance.

I’m still looking for conservatives to give me evidence that I should change my thinking. Today (January 2004) I can’t see any evidence that the distance is closing, that democracy is working as it ought to work after 20 years of conservative leadership beginning with Reagan. Don’t forget, Clinton was no liberal Democrat. He sought the middle ground which is far to the right of what liberalism used to be.

How can a reasonable man not conclude that conservatism has nothing but contempt for those who are economically distressed? To the average conservative, in their own words, anyone who’s on welfare and in need has only herself to blame. But, in the very next sentence, he says, “It’s survival of the fittest!” He’s proud of that; you can see it as he spouts the dogma of conservatism. He believes he’s one of the tough ones, the survivors. But there’s a flaw in that conservative’s ointment! He’s just put himself right into the evolutionary camp, and, if he really believes in evolution, then he knows that survival is by luck of the draw, by chance of the genes, and has nothing to do with his self-made grit or will.

We now know without doubt that some people inherit great genes from their parents with just a little more drive and grit in them. Some are born more passive and some more aggressive. Some get big bones, some don’t. Some get a pretty high IQ and others, like W., don’t. Some people are predisposed to thrive and others aren’t. It’s all in the genes. The only real question left to settle is just how much wiggle room does the individual have to transcend his or her genetic heritage?

Backward conservatives are quick to blame others for whatever situation he discovers them in. To the conservative, the wino is a wino by choice, the welfare mother is on welfare by choice. Yet when I challenge a conservative to prove that people can make these basic choices by becoming a wino himself, he refuses to even consider the question. He makes all sorts of arguments about the silliness of my challenge. But, strip away all the excuses and alibis the conservative makes for his inability to choose to become a wino, and you realize that he does not have a choice in the matter. He can no more become, by a sudden act of will, a homeless wino than he can change his gender. He has all manner of defenses that limit his choice. He doesn’t even know how to start down the path.

Not that conservatives don’t become alcoholics. Alcohol is no respecter of persons, but right wing drinkers become homeless winos just like anyone becomes a wino—slowly and steadily over a long period of time by a series of small, passive acts of surrender to feelings of worthlessness and fear. No one chooses to be a failure. Every young person begins with hopes to succeed and make something of himself. No young person chooses to end up in an alley with a wine bottle wrapped in a paper sack. To look back on a life which has led to alcoholism from a point of sobriety is to see how every man’s condition sneaks up on him. Or her. Life is what happens while we make plans for something better. Fortunate are the few who awaken to their condition before it’s too late.

Not that people aren’t driven toward goals and reach them. But the thing we call “will” and tend to admire in others is, maybe, the single-mindedness of a genetically programmed being, a cyborg, which doesn’t even know it has choices. Maybe “will” is a manifestation of the cyborg’s instinctive “fear of death” (i.e. failure) and “desire to procreate” which are so strong it can’t conceive of failing and, so, follows whatever course the culture points it to follow to achieve its continuance. The successful person may be only a being which can’t see outside the choices she is born into. She can’t go toward what she can’t conceive. If she tries, fear of failure and death will pull her back into her animal harness.

Often, I see the less intelligent rise to prominence while the more intelligent are satisfied elsewhere. The more “mind” one has (the more options one considers) sometimes seems to get in the way of the drive which brings others to comfortable mediocrity. The “C” student becomes the CEO of his corporation or president of a country while the “A” student becomes the chemist in a corporation who unravels DNA or the rare novelist who achieves outside the easy path his genes point him to.


Finally, while on this rant: when you read the literature of the fascist nations, you come across a political force that hated liberals with every bit as much venom as modern American right wingers do. Sometimes, if you read an anti-liberal statement by an American conservative and one by a German Nazi, you find it hard to tell the difference between a fascist in Nazi Germany and an American conservative like Trent Lott. Isn’t it natural to conclude that if fascists historically despised liberals and present day conservatives hate liberals that conservatism and fascism are one and the same thing?

Why do conservatives so hate liberals? What do liberals stand for that fascists are threatened by? Historically, liberals have been hated for working for women’s suffrage. Liberals long ago worked to end the lifetime tenures of senators because they were being bought and paid for by the richest Americans. They were hated by conservatives for supporting the rights of labor to have a say in its working conditions and wages, in its safety conditions. Liberals worked for the end of repressive child labor practices. Liberals worked for universal education. More recently, liberals joined in with Southern blacks who were working to make sure that every American could vote. When you tote up the historical score in America, what cultural fairness and freedom did the conservatives not oppose and did the liberals not support? Whatever has tended to level the playing field in society and create opportunity for the underdog has always been a liberal cause. Whatever has tended to maintain and prop up privilege and power, whether man over woman or white over black or rich over poor or one religion above another, has always been the conservative cause....

Whew....


And then I hired on with Blackie....

Before I entered college in the Fall of 1960 after quitting AO, I spent three months selling and installing DraCool Awnings. I don’t recall how I got the job with DraCool and Blackie or even how I came to hear about it, but a good guess would be from the classifieds of the Dayton Daily News. I think Blackie hired me because summer was on it’s way, and he was setting up for the spring Home Show and needed extra help to man the booth.

Blackie called his awnings, “The Cadillac of the awning industry”. Everything was the “Cadillac” of something or other in those days. Cadillac was the American metaphor for quality after the war. Blackie himself drove a Cadillac. You could buy these heavy gage aluminum awnings in several nice colors, and the “beauty part” of these babies was that you could louver them, like blinds, to any angle to block out the sunlight from inside your house with a crank installed through the wall beside the window.

Blackie was a man about sixty years old with a full head of gray hair. He was a real salesman who I got to observe close up, and I’ll never forget what he showed me about selling, even though I didn’t learn to duplicate his ability in the short time I worked with him. He loved his work and had been a salesman of one thing or another all his life. I don’t think he ever worked for someone else. Sales was his life and colored all his views of life. Everything he knew about the world was filtered through his experiences as a salesman. He even evaluated people through a salesman’s eyes as if a man’s worth could be judged by his ability to sell a product. Of course, maybe we’re all like that, aren’t we?

Blackie’s approach to selling was so smooth you could barely tell the difference between selling, BS—ing and socializing. The line between having a friendly chat and making a sale was very thin indeed. He’d chat with anyone as easily as spreading butter on hot toast and always called back on his sales to see how things were going and, also, to pick up leads for future sales. I came to believe that to him everything was about sales and that sales was all that really interested him in the world. He loved selling, BS—ing and being independent so much that everything he knew became grist for his sales.

He talked with anyone easily and revealed a wide range of the kind of knowledge that men love to talk about—tools, cars, plumbing, electricity, hunting, fishing, gadgetry and home improvement, to name a few. This chatter came effortlessly to him. He was so smooth. It was a pleasure to watch him work with people. I could never get that relaxed with people myself.

Another salesman who worked with him was Henry, a dark skinned guy who I think was from Lebanon, like Danny Thomas. And Blackie employed a huge guy with limited intelligence who installed the awnings for him. I’ll just call him Bull. Henry always brought a set of blue coveralls to work with him so that he, also, could sell as well as pitch in to install awnings. In mid or late afternoon, he’d slip out of his coveralls to go on sales calls. I asked him how he could labor on installations all the hot summer afternoon long and not sweat. He told me the secret was to never drink water, and he didn’t.

Bull used to take me to his favorite bars for lunches near our job sites. One bar, he kidded the gape-mouthed waitress and me by telling her, “Hey, Ruby! Wipe dis guy’s burger on your snatch. He likes it. You like it, don’tcha, Nobody?” Ho, ho, ho, he laughed. The waitress knew him and took it with a laugh herself and a shy glance for me, but I was embarrassed. I wasn’t used to talking to women like that.


According to Blackie, I set a new record for getting leads during that Home Show. I know I had well over 100 phone numbers, about 145 of them. I was a fast talker and used my nervousness to drive myself to strike up conversations with people who drifted onto our site at the Show and to reel off the qualities of the awning—the handle on the inside, the range of colors, the strength of the pebbled aluminum construction, the fade proof, baked on enamel paint, the look and the quality.

“Of course,” I added, “You gotta pay a little more for these awnings ‘cause they’re the “Cadillac of the awning business.”

I never made one sale from those Home Show leads. I discovered that people would say most anything to please you at the Show, but once home, they would not let you get your foot in the door.

Blackie came along with me on the follow ups to the few leads that actually resulted in an appointment. I sold only one awning the whole three months I worked with DraCool—a fixed, nonadjustable awning for an attic room which was very hot in the summer. A guy who you could see loved the dickens out of his teen daughter wanted to make her room more comfortable. The sale was for around 125 dollars and I got a 39 dollar commission. Blackie didn’t say much until he dropped me at my car in the building lot where we made the awnings. He just listened to me talk on the drive back, but when he dropped me off, he said, “Nice job.” I felt buoyant.

For a short time at the end of the summer, after all my leads had been called and called again and given up for dead, I had to cold canvass neighborhoods. I experienced an almost overwhelming anxiety during those sorties. I felt a lack of self worth so severe I could remember it and put a name to it, later, when I learned in a psychology course what self worth was all about.

I’d drive into a neighborhood and park. Then I’d sit there, building up courage until I forced myself to get out of the car and approach a door. It took every ounce of courage I had to do that. I don’t know why I was so afraid. I just was. When someone answered a door and said, “No,” in what I usually took to be an angry voice, I was destroyed again and had to drag myself back to my Ford Fairlane and build up courage again.

My head filled with thoughts about what these housewives thought of me. I didn’t like salesmen, myself, and imagined that all these housewives hated me for bothering them at their doors like some Fuller Brush salesman. I had Red Skelton’s movie, “The Fuller Brush Man” (circa 1948) in mind.

Sometimes, I could do two or three houses in a row, if the rejecting voices sounded a little bit friendly, but then I’d have to retreat to the car and psych myself up again. I did have brochures to hand out. At least I could tell myself I was doing something worthwhile with my cold calls by getting the word out about our “wonderful Cadillac of the awning industry”. Finally, after a few weeks of anxiety and dread, I stopped making cold calls. I just pretended to go out and lied to Blackie.

By summer’s end, my circumstances were rapidly deteriorating. For awhile I earned income from installing awnings. That kept me and Bev afloat, but as the summer swept on and I wasn’t bringing in income for the business, DraCool had fewer awnings to install. Soon, I wasn’t even putting in 40 hours a week installing awnings. Bev and I were in a money pinch, and I was experiencing one of the many failures this Nobody has had in life. I wasn’t much of a salesman, no matter how encouraging Blackie was. And he was encouraging! In fact, just like Mike at AO, Blackie seemed to like me and to see promise in me. He was, without fanfare, attempting to be my mentor in business, in the days before the term “mentor” became a business buzzword. Or maybe it was my wife....

Blackie and his wife invited me and Bev over to their house for dinner and cards one night. Later, as we played cards, Blackie disappeared from the room for a minute just before it was his turn to deal. When he returned and began dealing, he dealt from a different deck. Imagine my surprise to pick up the cards and find nude women with hairy cunts exposed in the center of the cards between the deuces and treys. I blushed and Bev blushed but neither of us knew what to say. After awhile, when Bev and I fell silent, Blackie’s wife expressed a vague displeasure, and Blackie put away his deck. Not another word was spoken about it, and we more or less pretended for the rest of the night and summer that nothing had happened. Maybe Blackie’s wife did apologize later for Blackie’s foolishness. She was also the DraCool secretary and bookkeeper.

Later that summer, after I began college, I learned that Blackie had suffered a heart attack and went to visit him in the hospital. He seemed chipper enough in his baggy pajamas, anxious to get out of the hospital, and DraCool was behind him. He told me I had the intelligence to be a salesman, but he said I lacked “self-confidence”. How many more times in my life was I to hear that?

Blackie had confidence. He must have started up and played out dozens of small businesses before I met him. He was the first entrepreneur I ever met, and, unlike so many modern entrepreneurs, he wasn’t filled with dogmatic hatred for liberals and big government, although he was probably a Republican and fiscal conservative. In sales, I observed, you can’t afford to make enemies right and left if you want to put people at ease and make sales as Blackie was able to do. That’s a very distinct human trait—to be politic and keep your opinions to yourself while you service other people’s needs and wants. Which inability is another reason, besides confidence, I could never make it as a salesman. I’m too apt to argue about politics to put a curb on my tongue while I make a sale.

One day, recently, I was drinking a coffee and an obviously unsuccessful human being came into the shop. Soon, over a small thing, he began yelling crazily at the clerks and making a hell of a stink. I must admit I saw too much of myself in him, and I recognized one of the traits that make street people so unable to save themselves—no control over their emotional responses to things.

It’s obvious to me these days that my own excitable personality was not destined to be financially successful in a business world which can produce a book, called, Emotional Intelligence. If you read that book, you’ll see that it is little more than an argument for ass kissing and brown nosing as a way to get ahead. But that ability to get along in society is a talent, useful in some situations, no better or worse than my talent of speaking my mind no matter how afraid I am of confrontation.

Speaking of business talents—I wasn’t too long into college before I began meeting and arguing with conservative business majors about politics. I still recall one fellow I met who was very disgruntled about the new sway of the liberal movement in 1960’s American politics. We were talking about how the banking system was failing to make business loans to poorer neighborhoods. I, of course, said something impolitic about the heartless American economy under Eisenhower conservatism.

“When it comes to money, you can’t afford to have a heart,” he hissed angrily.

That sibilant moment is all I remember about him, that one moment of conversation, though we had other discussions. He was a friend of a friend. Our paths sometimes crossed. Yet, you can see how the mind works. All I recall of him is that moment when the impression of him came to reside in the collection of synapses in my mind reserved for “the conservative” classification. Anger went into my classification, valuing money over people, callousness, absence of feeling for others—they all went into my unflattering definition of conservative as his one came to stand for the many.


I really don’t know why I decided to go to college. I can’t recall any deep thought going into my decision. Maybe it was the dead end feeling I came away with from the Navy, the Met, AO and DraCool where no light appeared to promise at the end of the tunnel I followed through those precincts. Over the years I’ve tended to claim that I went to college for the same reason I got married—it was expected of my role. College was part of the role my culture and my family trained me to fulfill. In short, It was like I’d been burned on one stove, so, now, I was going to switch to another stove—a gut reaction.

Anyway, I made the decision to go to college which meant that I had to ask the renters to move from the house on Kenview so that Bev and I would have someplace to stay, cost free, while I attended U.D. I let my renters stay rent free the last two months of the summer in exchange for his helping me paint the house. We got drunk painting it over a couple of weekends, and white paint was permanently slapped on the bricks of the fireplace chimney at the side of the house. I attended the University of Dayton because it was the only local college at the time, not because I was Catholic. It was run by the Society of Mary, the Marianists. As it turns out, I got a pretty decent education there.

My last task before beginning school was to find part time work so I could afford to go to school, accumulating no more debt than I’d need for tuition and books. I went to the school employment office, and they sent me to Savino’s Imported Foods in one of the shopping centers just coming into existence in those days. They were three brothers, three Catholics, who always looked to the school to find help when they needed it. They were great people and liked to help students out.

The oldest brother was the business personality, the youngest was the coolest. His wife had an fine art degree. One time I went to their home for dinner because Joe thought his wife might like to talk art with me. It felt like a bust. I was awfully conservative in a pretentiously literary way, and visual artists who think with their right brains aren’t always comfortable with left brain, word people, specially judgmental people like myself. The middle brother, Mike, ran the butcher department and was an Army veteran who had fought in the Pacific campaigns. Like many vets of those days, he didn’t talk much about his experiences, but I pushed him to talk. I was truly interested. Soldiers were my heroes in those days.

I recall he told me the closest he came to buying it was on a routine trip behind the lines to get water and ammo. An ambush got to shooting at the detail. They were pinned down for quite some time before help arrived. He thought he was a goner. I told him I couldn’t imagine how a man could force himself to get off a landing craft and advance over a beach without cover of any kind. My Nobody imagination has always been strong so I am able to imagine being dropped on a beach and advancing across barren sand into the teeth of machine gun fire while mortar and artillery fire kick up dirt all around me. Mike surprised me and damped down my hero worship when he told me that he survived because he always kept his head down and because, when attacking a beach, he crouched to run behind groups of men sprinting ahead of him.

Not long ago, I read that Eisenhower used as many untested soldiers as he could in the first waves to hit the Normandy beaches because new troops wouldn’t have the healthy survival skills that more seasoned troopers did. Young and stupid—send them in on the first waves. War is hell. War is for the young and stupid. And this doesn’t mean that I hate soldiers. I just hate the venal assholes (read Bush and company) who take advantage of young men’s natural idealism and naiveté to send them on missions unworthy of and useless to democracy.

Also at Savino’s, I met Frank, the white haired, short and stocky ex-boxer with sideburns and mustache and the habit of hitching up his pants with his muscular forearms. He wore red sleeve garters and bow ties over immaculately white shirts. I thought he developed this pants lifting habit from two sources—boxing and butchering. In both your claws are likely to be bloody, and, in the first, your hands are hindered by the gloves. It’s the kind of outside detail I always observed while people watching, the kind that writers are supposed to put in a book, and I was definitely going to be the next Hemingway, later Fitzgerald, later still, Sartre, T.S. Eliot or O’Neill. Later Kerouac, Frost and/or Stafford. Later... later... later... later, ah shucks, Nobody.

Pugilist Frank taught me a useful thing early in my life which I’ve never forgotten. For much of my life, as long as I believed in God, I also believed in lots of other superstitious claptrap. They go together, naiveté, gods and superstition, and I tended to believe in fortune telling, astral projection (my real mother did), angels, miracles, telekinesis, heaven and hell—all that clutter of the unfettered imagination. I was much moved by Dante’s divine Divine Comedy. Anyhow, Frank lived in New Orleans during the Depression. He made a living, delivering food to the prostitutes of the French Quarter. He got a lot of pussy as a young man. The prostitutes loved him, and I could still see a lot of the character of a ladies man in Frank, even in his 60s, happily married as he was.

As a youth, Frank had a French Quarter fortune teller for a girl friend, and she had enthralled him, I could tell, because he still spoke of her with some vehemence. When I brought up fortune telling, he told me, “Don’t trust ‘em. If you want to test ‘em, ask ‘em what you had for breakfast. All the rest of that crap’s so much baloney!”

Frank’s information was the kind of stuff a young man stores away, the stuff that mentors are made of. His history with prostitutes made me feel we were kindred spirits. Knowledge about the occult, knowledge about the darker world of prostitution, straight from the lips of the Old Man in the Cave are not to be ignored.

Bev went to work, too, to try and help the cause, but she found herself in an uncomfortable pickle. She worked as a receptionist for a realtor, and he couldn't stop himself from touching her (though not in erogenous zones as far as I knew) and leaning over her while she was at her desk and standing too close when she was standing. Of course, in those days, we had yet to hear about what was appropriate and inappropriate. Neither of us knew what to do, and we needed the money. In fact, Beverly didn’t tell me about the uncomfortable stuff right away.

Before I registered at UD, I took the entrance tests and did pretty well, scoring in the top 10 percentile in language skills with average math skills. Of course, I took the easy path and went with the skill I showed the most facility for. I told myself I would seek a BA in English. I would become a teacher, a famous writer. I would go on the Johnny Carson show! I always dreamed big. The course of my next four years was set—four years of college, then fame and fortune.