CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A Career Change

At about the same time my dating of Beverly went ballistic for my pocket rocket, I abandoned my sexy mannequins and flashy artistic career in window display for something more stable. My last day with Metropolitan in December 1959, I started a better paying job with the American Optical Company as a delivery guy and clerk in January 1960. I may have departed the Met for financial reasons, but the Christmas Season was ending and, maybe, the Met wanted to reduce staff—maybe they left me.

But first, Christmas at the Met. With all the paper, beads, glue, ribbons and whatnot available to me in the decoration department that year, I wrapped all my gifts with lots of glitter and expensive paper. My stepmom was so blown away by the beauty of my work that she she said didn’t want to unwrap her gifts.

My only and final Christmas at the Metropolitan, the staff drank heavily in the basement clutter in an informal party after work on Christmas Eve. One young man from the Met who drank with us got so drunk that he threw up in my car as I drove him home. I was to pick up Bev that night, and so I was pissed, cleaning up the car in the cold dark. Considering all the cars I upchucked in on Nantucket, the pay back was probably deserved, though I was, as yet, unaware of the concept of Karma.

It was easy to give up my mannequins; I had a real live woman, a knock out looker with an almost perfect body, to hump now. And let me tell you, I couldn’t get enough. I really couldn’t get enough because I was financially strapped and couldn’t afford motels, and we knew no friends who lived independently in apartments who would let a nasty couple like us use their beds for fornication. There were no crash pads with drugs and alcohol around, and I never got used to the twisted position in cars to like car sex. For a long time after our life of intercourse began, winter was our season. Parks and playgrounds in dells where brooks ran musically or on hillsides behind leafy summer trees were out. Besides, I can’t imagine Beverly ever getting comfortable with an outdoor fuck. She always seemed too dainty, too cautious and reserved for that. Young people had so few opportunities to do the nasty in places simultaneous safe from discovery and comfortable.

For all the lust singing in my veins, Bev got me back to church. She was a Lutheran at the time, and I began to take instruction at her tall-spired, brick and stone Lutheran church not far from my old high school, Stivers. It was a beautiful church building, and I joined up before our marriage. Joining was no skin off my nose. I’d do anything the woman of my dreams asked me to do. Besides, it was a part of the role a man was supposed to fill—church going respectability. Okay, I’d do that! I was always ready to try a new role. O boy, how often I attempted to be things which I am not suited to be!

It’s a good thing we were soon to be married because some of our congregating put us into a position of “getting caught” doing it. Several times I urged us into the bedroom Bev shared with her sister Patricia, a small one, to get my cookies off. We had to creep down the carpeted hall to a spot just opposite her mother’s room and slip through Bev’s creaky door. And there, on one half of noisy twin beds, listening to her sister’s breathing to determine whether or not she was sleeping, we’d fuck. I can’t believe that Patricia was always asleep when Bev and I were humping, and, if she wasn’t, I wonder if she and her sister ever talked about it? And, maybe, I wanted sexy Pat to hear us?

I say “we’d fuck” when it may have been only I who fucked. My fiancé, I do believe, may have just been going along to please the man she loved and was soon to marry. In memory, I’m always urging, begging, pleading like the Lacedaemonian Ambassadors with Lysistrata, while Bev resists a lot and relents a lot, but she was only human and, despite her moral reservations, she enjoyed “petting” too, and once the petting began, her sexual urges often got into harness along side mine. I don’t think she was really much into sex though. I have no memory of her climaxes during our dangerous rutting.

Long and short of it, we did fuck, but we copulated in “fear of being caught”. In fear and trembling we’d perform most of our sexual gymnastics on our living room couches, on living room floors, in the cold car (all hand job stuff) and in Bev’s very own bedroom just across the hall from her mother, in the same bedroom with her sister, and just down the hall from her little brother. So much fear. So much fear. No wonder many of the silent generation were liberated by or incited the liberation of the Sixties Generation.


Many young men and women in their 20s in those Fifties' days worried about “getting caught”. We worried about so many damn things. I constantly worried about “getting caught being bad” without realizing that my worry was a phantasm of a childhood I couldn’t and, at times, still can’t leave behind. At 21 my fear was rampant and my fear of being caught having sex with someone’s daughter was just like being afraid in boot camp because I really didn’t know that authority wouldn’t kill me if I was caught disobeying it. Little sin against authority or big—both “felt” and ‘feel” the same to me in my imagination and both are punishable by death. I realize that “punishment by death for disobedience” must sound pretty far fetched to a more reasonable conscience.

I believe less abused people or those who have repressed their own feelings about “being abandoned and abused” almost always wonder how things which happen in the past can still so forcefully undermine someone’s present reality. I completely understand comic Dennis Miller’s reaction when he says he left the liberal camp when he heard liberals say that Rudy Gulliani was a Nazi. I agree that the Gulliani statement sounds completely irrational, but there’s a perfectly good reason why it sounds irrational; it’s an emotional (i.e. by definition, irrational) statement rather than a rational statement.

First I gotta separate liberals (and Dennis ought to also) into at least two camps along a continuum. In the first are average liberals who have only a political agenda which hopes for the advancement of humanity into a state of democratic equality in which a basic economic justice assures that no human suffers the pangs of repression, hunger or cold, but also an agenda which ensures enough upward mobility for those who must have more than their neighbors the freedom to compete, to rise above their neighbors and to have more.

Then there are liberals like me whose pasts are laced with punishment and neglect by parental authorities and who, therefore, often “feel” that any authority has the potential to kill them. Liberals like me find that irrational fear clouds our judgment from time to time. When we struggle to make government authority as loving and caring as we can, we often “feel” as if we’re in a life and death struggle. Our desire to make a just society for everyone to live in gets an extra twist of fear in it so that the political and personal blends until our mere political opponent is blown up into a cartoon Nazi in our imaginations, an object of fear and loathing who may only be a Gulliani in reality.

Now, I understand that my division of liberals into two camps still does not fully explain why liberals in the second camp might “feel” like Gulliani is a Nazi and feel like they’re in a life and death struggle. The reason that the “wounded liberal” group insults Dennis Miller’s reason is that emotion is, of course, by definition, irrational, and in the case of the abused liberal (and conservative), the irrationality has an extra dollop of energy added to it because it is the fear of death itself that haunts him.

A mortal fear can result from being a powerless child raised by an arbitrary and raging authority because the authority’s absence will, literally, lead to his death. At three, the absence of loving care can lead to death for someone who, at 20, can take care of himself under similar circumstances. If the liberal is acting under the influence of that unresolved, mortal fear, and he’s unaware of it, his struggles to make the government that rules him conform to his will will be titanically irrational and full of emotion. For him, the struggle, which others hardly feel at all and can laugh about and enjoy, feels like a struggle for life itself. It’s life and death, wall to wall.

The “feeling” that one will die without nurture continues from childhood into adulthood even after one can tell himself that he can take care of himself because, no matter what I tell myself to the contrary, if I “feel” something is true, then it is the same as being true in the real world, i.e. the world outside my imagination in which I talk to you. In other words, I can look you in the eye and tell you, and believe it as I tell you, that I certainly can take care of myself, but under that assertion (out of sight and mind most of the time) the fear remains that I really can’t take care of myself. Hidden away, my irrational fear festers and can erupt at any moment of crisis to becloud my actions and statements. To someone raised more normally this fear which is there but not there at one and the same time must really sound laughable, but I can testify that fear and reality interact exactly in that manner.

Only someone who’s tried to confront an irrational fear and who comes away further demoralized and full of even more fear can understand how huge fear can grow and how controlling too. No matter what consciously courageous face I put on today, at some unconscious, unspoken level, I constantly “feel” like a kid on the run who lives in fear of death and in fear of everything. This fear when it erupts under the stimulus of confronting uncaring authority (which is exactly how Republican leadership feels to my liberal self) is never rational. Uncaring authority is too big, too murderous, and I must ask myself why my fear was—and sometimes continues to be—that big and so irrational.

I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to get a handle on irrational fear. My current fear has sometimes grown so big that it grows an inept and ignorant George Bush into a potential Hitler in my imagination, so I can tell Dennis Miller that, yes, even as my conscious mind informs me that George Bush is no Nazi, my “feelings” warn me that he is. In other words, Dennis, I could sit with you over an espresso and tell you everything I’ve just said in a rational way and assure you that, of course, I know better than to think that Bush is a potential Hitler. That’s how rational discourse sounds between two adults, talking in broad daylight about politics, but that same night, when I’m lying in bed alone, my wife asleep beside me, when my emotional thinking, which is actually my evolving, animal early warning system, takes over, my premonitions of danger can pile up George Bush’s future activities and the results of his policies into a veritable Reichstag of malevolent intentions. So, I ask myself again, why, for some, is political fear such an intense fear?

First, let’s state the possibility which current research is looking into that some people are genetically wired to be more fearful than others or, to put fear in positive language, that some people can “see” (i.e. imagine) danger coming from farther off; they’re more quick than others to apprehend danger to themselves and to react emotionally to it. In that case, most of us can do very little about our heightened early warning systems other than to take calming drugs. In my own case, I can see a couple of reasons that my normal apprehensions of approaching danger might have been conditioned to a higher state of alert than those of some others. If you add nature (genetic propensity to sniff out approaching danger) to my acculturation, then my fear might be doubly magnified of approaching danger.

Besides my troubling home life which I’ve already partly disclosed, I can identify two other complicating factors that intensified my difficulty with knowing that I can take care of myself in the present and which have always influenced me. And which probably influenced and continues to influence everyone of my generation one way or the other. One is WWII and the other is the Christianity which dominated and dominates the American unconscious world.

When I was a little boy who’d just lost his mother and father in a divorce that left me at my grandmother ‘s house, I was immediately turned over to the Baptists for indoctrination. Well—on the one hand, I immediately began to sing, “Jesus Loves Me”. Peaceful, eh? But in the same bucket of Christ slop I was fed, I also swilled the Father with the Son. I learned that the Christian Father God who dominated America and, for all I knew with my child’s mind, the entire world (did I know of the ever much more peaceable Buddhists?), punished every transgression with death and eternal suffering. Didn’t He once upon a time kill off the entire human race just because they didn’t do what he commanded them to do? So right there, Christianity piled another arbitrary and murderous authority onto my psyche which could kill or keep me with as little concern for my wishes as for the wishes of a fence post.


Talk about fear of death if you don’t obey! In America, man, you better obey this Father God. His usually unspoken threat of death is all around us if we’ve been indoctrinated by Christian parents. It could come upon me in an instant. Why shouldn’t I be afraid and timid to assert myself or to act in any direction? Choose wrong and I die.

That unreasoning fear has been a constant in my life—a fear that something terrible is going to happen to me if I continue to do as my urges tell me, a fear that tells me I must obey or I’ll die, a fear that tells me that to chose freely and unashamedly to be who I am will lead to my death.

Now enters a third force of death for the free individual with which to terrify a little self growing up in the Forties—WWII. I “see” that the real damage done me by “life with mother” and “God above” indoctrination was probably intensified by WWII and the Holocaust (when real people were murdered for nothing more than their beliefs or, as in the case of homosexuals, for being who they were born to be) so that, now, I’m always prone to feel (without justification) that I’m a little Jewish boy taken by Nazis into a concentration camp world where the ovens await me. Right now, as I write this, I feel the possibility I’ll soon be hauled off by the evangelicals. Clearly, I feel it. I must, therefore, confront the possibility that my past (which makes me “a little boy in fear for his life” and always afraid that Hitler will kill him) makes my thinking about George Bush irrational.

In my past, I resisted my fear by ducking it with self-destructive, devil take the hindmost bravado. I never faced a real issue or faced my fear head-on. I made a show of being fearless and of calling attention to myself, always resentful of and resisting what I conceived to be a murderous authority that lurks everywhere, as if to say, “Look at me! You can’t kill me! I’ll show you, I’ll destroy myself.” Or an “aw shucks, look, I’m just a harmless fool and no threat to you” presentation in the face of confrontation.

Then was like now when I’m vulnerable at the same time, defensive and wanting a mommy to take care of me. That’s okay, though, to feel what I feel and to remain aware of past and present at the same time. Whenever I’m not aware of the childhood history working on me, I’m prone to act foolishly in the present, to do things that endanger all the positive things I’ve done to take care of myself. The self-destructive stuff comes to the fore when I let myself forget the past. I bridle when I hear someone tell another to “Get a life. Forget the past.” Pretending we’re not influenced by the past is how we keep repeating it. Imagine Hitler or Stalin trying to be what they were if they had remained conscious of the beatings and abuse they took as children and spent their lives attending 12 Step meetings talking their experiences to death. It’s hard to go on and kill others when you’re attempting to be self-aware.

A desire for fairness ought to make conservatives ask questions about themselves when it come to authority. If the unbiased will objectively view my discussion of the second grouping of liberals, they’ll immediately connect how far right and far left activities and hopes spring from similar fears of authority. As for the far right—I suspect an equal amount of abuse from authority has come their way, but in their case, they choose to ignore or forget their abuse as too painful to bear, or, as psychology shows, they embrace the psychology of their abuser in order to placate it (these may become abusive themselves), but their option is not to try and make governmental authority more nurturing; it’s to fight to shrink that authority down to nothingness. They don’t want to change authority; they’ve given up on that. They want to destroy it right down to the ground. The ironic result is that the irrational conservative seeks the freedom of chaos while the wounded liberal seeks to create a loving authority and order. The resultant irony (an irony that Jung explains with his principle of compensation) is that the wounded conservative seems always to cry out for law and order while doing everything in his power to destroy strong central authority while the liberal who seeks a loving order praises freedom from it.

To put another twist in the lemon peel: the liberal young man on the street of the 60s certainly hated government too, as much as Limbaugh conservatives do now. Maybe we ought to see that whoever feels out of power and threatened always blames the authority above him for his troubles. Thus, authority is ever the scapegoat for the dissatisfied; it may be naturally built into an individual’s genetics to fear (i.e. distrust) authority, so....

Though my recent paragraphs primarily expose a liberal’s fear of authority because I’m more in touch with them and have worked hardest to moderate them, I ask that those with unbiased views also understand that most arch conservatives are as bedeviled by similar contacts with abusive authority as any liberal is. Out of their conservative’s fears, they have made different psychological accommodations. The danger from the conservative side is that their wounded ones are the ones who seek liberty destroying, rigid authoritarian governments and fundamentalistic religions because their dogmatic approach to reality blocks them from asking serious questions about their own psychological maladjustments. Just as a wounded liberal might tend to libertine excesses, so the wounded conservative can as easily become your next clean-living, freedom destroying Hitler. At root, the lunatic rightist can leap to imagine a budding Communist in every ACLU member just as easily as a damaged liberal can come to the conclusion that Gulliani is another Hitler. No one has a moral superiority in this leaping of self into conclusive woolgathering.


The assistant minister gave us instructions for marriage and also prepared me to enter the church. I believe my marriage to Bev was my official entrance. Anyway—my entrance into Bev’s Lutheran faith and our marriage were nearly simultaneous. I recall very little of my instruction, but our marital counseling was pretty enlightened for the times. We didn’t get into sex much, but Bev and I took written evaluations as to what was important to us. As I recall, we were reasonably compatible though not a perfect match. And, had we been totally incompatible, what would the minister have done about it?

I also pressed the assistant minister pretty stiffly with hard questioning and cross examining as time went on about the political issues of the day, about the war and about why more ministries weren’t coming out in support of the antiwar movement and why were the churches suppressing the women’s movement for increased autonomy from outdated cultural mores. The assistant minister did eventually examine his conscience and decided to leave the ministry to pursue god’s [sic] work in other venues. Many people of good faith left the rigid church dogma of those days which many are attempting to re-impose currently in two-thousand and three America.

Dogma may feel good as a momentary plaster patch for the wounded conservative and Republican dogmatist, but dogma historically and always cracks in the face of the truths which science discovers in reality. Evidence supported Galilee over the Bible claims and, now, the whole world knows that science had the better facts in his case, and we no longer live on a flat planet no matter what the Bible says about “four corners”, and we can see how something so obviously factual as continental drift supports evolution.

Yes, evolution is firmly supported by facts, and fact will eventually win out as long as the debate is allowed to go forward without a Southern Baptist Inquisition forcing Bible creation dogma down American throats. I can only hope the human animal’s drive to survive will steer the species onward to the truth, no matter how irreligious some truths turn out to be. Sad to say, that when it comes to T-cells, health science is currently being blocked by Bible beliefs about “enrollment”. Men, women and children will die and live impaired lives because of fundamentalism’s religious dogmas being imposed upon science. In this case, American Christians act very much like the Afghanistan Taliban, imposing Bible dogma onto scientific debate while harming many Americans into the bargain.

In fact, purely scientific survival choices may coincide with a certain level of morality. Recent books like The Human Animal go a long way toward demonstrating that moral human choices can favor survival. There’s no doubt that once science uncovered how the HIV virus spreads, most humans altered their behaviors to protect themselves and those they love from becoming infected. Choices for safe sex are scientifically directed, moral choices which result from valuing self and others equally. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

An interesting conflict emerges from the debate with Bible literalists about the “four corners” passages in the Bible. Literalists claim that god [sic] told his writers to write figuratively when he dictated the passages about the “four corners of the earth” and that, of course, omnipotent god [sic] knew all about the round globe when he dictated the Bible to his writers. Literalists fail to realize that figurative language is always false at some level and that their hypothetical superbeing, if he directed the hand of his writers to write figuratively, wrote falsely in many instances. Think of Missus parables about casting seeds onto rocky ground. Taken literally, the passages mean nothing. Taken figuratively, they yield a moral lesson.


Further, the literalist who makes claims for figurative writing in the Bible opens up the whole Bible, from Adam and Eve myths through Genesis creation stories, and everything else in the Bible, to doubt. Once you admit that passages in the Bible are figurative or metaphorical rather than literal, you bring every passage into the possibility of being figurative. Now, the literalist must debate the Bible critic about which tales are figurative and which are literal on equal grounds. At this point, the literalist hasn’t a leg to stand on. Once figurative passages are admitted to the Bible, everything is open to doubt. Sadly, most literalists refuse to be even remotely consistent and logical about matters about Bible inerrancy. They just put aside Bible inconsistencies by claiming that many things with god [sic] are a mystery, not open to human understanding. Too bad that this Christian god [sic] is so weak, full of failings and unable to speak clearly that those he [sic] leads must depend on sophistries like “mystery” to prop him [sic] up.


While I was being prepared to become a Lutheran husband/celebrant, the Sixties sneaked up on America, and I was conservative enough to vote for Nixon in the Fall of 1959—I think—for I may have voted for Nixon by mistake since the Kennedy/Nixon election battle was my first opportunity to vote in a presidential election. In the warm basement of a neighbor’s house with dawn darkness outside, I encountered my first voting machine with those gray metal levers which had to be pulled down over the candidates names, and I may have made a mistake and voted for Nixon when I wanted to vote for Kennedy, or vise versa. Or maybe I did prefer Nixon when I was a lad of 22?

All I clearly recall is throwing the big metal lever that simultaneously finalized my vote and opened the curtain while sensing, for a moment, as I stepped from the booth, that I’d made a serious mistake. But was it a mistake of wavering conscience or the technical mistake of a voting neophyte? It’s a mystery to me to this day. Ironic also, that a man I came to admire more than any president in my lifetime and would have voted into a second term, I maybe didn’t vote for. So much for my first, clear-headed, forceful voting selection for or against the most inspiring and intelligently literate president of my lifetime, outside of Roosevelt whose presidency I could not remember except in its death.

During the Nixon/Kennedy campaigns, I had more important fish to fry. I had to get my sexy woman into my bed on a permanent basis, into a position where I could legally and consistently lay her whenever I wanted to. She had the engagement ring for some time; she may have had the ring when we started our sex life together. Did I bribe her for sex with the ring? I don’t know, but to this day, I can’t help but believe that most marriages come out of the unstoppable sex drive of the average male and his constant pressure on female chastity to yield. Courtship, friendship, engagement ring and marriage, all flow from that powerful sex drive. That’s what seems real to me.

I conclude people should marry only after they’ve clearly decided that the only reason for them to pair off is to make a safe nest for the children they’ll have. That half of sexual pairings turn out to be wise choices by both partners about who’ll supply the best nurture and physical and fiscal support for children through their infancy is a marvelous testimony that evolution continues to successfully drive the procreation of the human race with an expected coin flip 50 percent success rate. If it weren’t for mother nature driving the way, we could easily have a nest failure rate of 80 or 90 percent. Anyhow....

Bev and I were to be married in June of 1960, but I was a faithless young cock right up till the fateful walk down the aisle. During my courtship and the Nixon/Kennedy campaign, I was in a bowling league with Carl, the first man with juvenile diabetes I ever knew. Carl was upbeat and positive and rigorously adhered to his diet and shots. For all I’ve come to know about diabetes and what they predicted in those days for the diabetes sufferer, I’m surprised at his positive attitude. He displayed good courage, and his soft-spoken sense of humor was dry and wonderful. The only effect in his choices that I imagined I saw as a result of his diabetes, other than dietary ones, was that he didn’t get married until he was past thirty, and when we bowled, he always drank just one beer while they rest of us usually tanked up with beer rounds and whatnot. As you may know, when you bowl on a five man team, any time four team members get strikes and a fifth member does not, the laggard is required to spring for a round of drinks. Carl would take a Coke or Pepsi instead of a beer.

As to his delayed marriage, I read later that any male who avoided marriage past thirty had only a 10 percent chance of marrying. For a short while, I even imagined Carl might be gay, but fear didn’t deter my affection for him. He married long after our close relationship waned. I never met his wife. Carl was the best man in my first marriage.

Carl and his mother came to live next door to my grandmother long after I left her home to go to Kenview Avenue. I met Carl while visiting my grandmother who spoke highly of him and urged me to get to know him. He attended Wilbur Wright High School. He made his living as a draftsman when I bowled with him. We also played lots of penny ante poker with mutual friends when I knew Carl. This was during my probably too brief bachelorhood, filled with loneliness and longing and unfulfilled desire, between my getting out of the Navy in October 1958 and getting married in June 1960. Between living with Mother Navy and dad and stepmom, I never experienced a real bachelorhood in an apartment of my own.

Bowling with Carl almost got me into trouble. Entering the final 30 day countdown till my nuptials (and the end of the bowling season too), I started chatting up a curvaceous, raven-haired divorce, probably ten years my senior, who came with female friends to watch their husbands bowl. Finally, the next to last bowling night before my Saturday marriage, I drove the gay divorce home (she and I both encouraged by her gal pals) and found she lived in a trailer.

Embracing inside the cozy trailer with a hardon, as usual, tickling my ambassadorial chin, I groped her and hinted that bedtime was upon us. Actually, I was breathlessly excited and only mildly assertive, as I recall, grateful to this woman who was allowing me to worship at the altar of her quim. She would be only my second female conquest outside of Beverly and the prostitutes. Noting how she responded to my kisses and embraces, I knew she wanted it too, but I think she was fresh to the single life (there was this husband guy in the background) and, so, she was also hesitant, almost shy, and I sensed a resistance in her that I wasn’t going to overcome that night. She as much as promised me a conquest soon, but not tonight.

In retrospect, I see that she may have been fertile, and I didn’t have condoms, though she didn’t ask me about them (this was before AIDS), or she may have been in the midst of her period and, in those days, most repressed men and women didn’t have sex in the mud and the blood and the tears of that time of the month.... Or she just wanted to wait until next time for another reason, maybe to see if I’d keep after her. Maybe she was confused herself about what she was contemplating. Maybe she was like so many women I’ve been attracted to—she didn’t know how to say, no, so she says, maybe, endlessly.
Anyhow... the next Saturday I was to be married, and the guys and I planned a sort of drinking party after bowling the next week, so I knew that our copulation wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Probably never. Considering the circumstances, I think I surrendered my attack pretty gracefully for a guy with a tube rocket about to explode behind his zipper. My guilt, her tiny trailer, the sinfulness of our situation, the dark woman with the hesitant manner and yet strangely yielding eagerness to do this thing with me, all contributed to my urgent desire to do the nasty with her.

I didn’t think very much about what my attempted unfaithfulness might say about the future of my marriage to Bev or my commitment to her. There I was again, just plodding ahead into something, into a fuck, into faithlessness, into the future without a serious thought in my head, following my dick wherever it might lead. I don’t know that I’m much different from any man my age in those days, many of whom were pretty much fulfilling their assigned roles rather than leading lives full of awareness. I knew so little, and I was too much excited about the “adventure” I saw in life to put a rein to my cheek. My exciting encounter with a female in a bowling alley felt so much like a movie, a Bogart thing to do, how could I resist?

Bev had a fling too, but, as far as I know, it wasn’t with the opposite sex. Her fling was an outbreak of resistance to the whole damn idea of marriage. Shortly before the wedding day, Bev broke off our engagement one cold, late-Winter night, returned the ring and dashed off to visit a friend in a nearby town. As far as I can tell, she suddenly panicked at the very thought of marriage. Her fears were rooted, I believe, in her memories of the marriage she survived with her mom and dad, but also, if we put plane old genetics at the root of her fears, she may have been demonstrating a feline urge to escape the male animal who she intuited would hurt and gouge her in the marriage ahead.

I went looking for my bride to be, driving crazily and blindly, as I often do when fearful, through the darkness of a rainy, Spring-cold night, and found the house of her friend. But they were out, and no one knew where they were. Mad with lust and drink, I drove around that country town and stopped in every bar I came across to look around before driving back home to spend a sleepless night.

I don’t recall who said what or who led the way, but Beverly’s resistance was short lived—a day or two, I think. There were tears on her part and something like an apology, which she rarely offered the whole time I knew her, but not much explanation as to why she returned the ring and ran off. Maybe she didn’t know. I was too happy to get her back (yes—that’s the language of those days—”get her back” like a lost bauble) to ask a lot of questions. We were pretty far along the marriage route when she made her frightened dash—the dresses bought and paid for, the bridesmaids and maid of honor (her sexy sister, Pat) selected, invitations in the mail, gifts starting to arrive.... It’s really hard to stop a runaway wedding train.

We plowed ahead into and through Bev’s wedding shower and our wedding dinner and all that prenuptial hoopla until, eventually, we arrived at our wedding day, Bev and I, but not before I added a last ditch and pitiful bachelor party, very tame considering the orgiastic stripper parties some young men have nowadays. Carl and Bob and some other of my buds unleashed a night of heavy drinking (excluding Carl) after our friday night bowling. We drank until the bowling alley’s bar closed. Across the street, a building fire broke out at about 1:30 am so we drunkenly observed a fire truck arrive at the scene and begin to pump water while we drained our final drinks. “Do you think it’s an omen,” Carl asked. I don’t remember driving home.

Bev and I tied the knot on a Saturday afternoon in the Lutheran church, the reception to be held immediately following in a barn building hall on the county fairgrounds. I didn’t shake my hangover headache until an hour before the service, and I was still exhausted and dazed. For about two hours, I walked a dizzy circle through my dad’s house because I was in too much pain to sit down. I recall my dad asking me through the perambulating alcohol haze if, “... you know, do you need any information?” Embarrassed by the near approach of an intimate exchange with my dad, I told him I didn't.

A cousin on my mother’s side of the family, Gene, played at the reception. Blond Gene went on to win a national title in power boat racing. He was a major force in establishing a power boat racing course in Dayton at the site of an abandoned stone quarry. When it comes to stones, Dayton and Spokane have something in common. The glaciers of the last ice age ended in their vicinity. In fact, there’s a Township near Dayton, which is full of rocks and debris pushed south by the glaciers. My Spokane yard is a rock haven. A few shovels full of earth yields buckets of stones which I’m currently using to make loose stone walkways in my backyard flower garden.

Gene sold musical instruments, owned a business, then moved down to Florida where he owned something two marinas and, like his grandpa, my mother’s abusive dad, went on to become a millionaire. Just recently (November 2003), I looked Gene up on the Internet and found he died only a year or so ago after becoming a famous man in his town. Among several civic projects, he built a sports complex for handicapped kids. The city council honored him at one of their meetings after his death. An interest in handicapped children ran in Gene’s family. One of his brothers was written up in the Dayton Daily News for service to handicapped kids. He and his wife adopted several severely handicapped children.

My bride looked beautiful and radiant in the pictures of our wedding and reception. I’m smiling big time too, but who doesn’t smile for wedding pictures? My wife wore a beautiful, white gown that was my seamstress grandmother’s wedding gift to us, made without a pattern, straight from a picture my wife selected in a magazine. My folks invited all my stepmom’s Connecticut people down for the big event and all dad’s business and road job friends made an appearance. It only occurs to me at this very minute that I can’t remember anyone on my mom’s side of the family, except Gene, being there. They were probably not invited.

Dizzy and distant from everyone and from my bride, I disliked everything about the reception. Having to introduce Bev to so many people I barely knew, having to dance before a crowd, having to dance with my stepmom—you name it, and I feared it. Bev and I could only afford a weekend in a major downtown hotel for a honeymoon, and I was so tired and beat that we fucked once before I fell into a deep and much needed sleep. Our brief honeymoon was entirely forgettable.

Soon we settled into an efficiency apartment with a fold out bed. Bev was now employed full-time as a housewife and me as the quichewinner—just as things were supposed to be done in 1960. The fact we had to unfold the bed for sex meant that more than once, I took my wife in a heated fashion on the floor. That’s right—“took her”, another aggressive-sounding phrase from those male dominated years.

Sex on the floor is always pretty interesting; the female’s pubic bone is supported more firmly than on a soft mattress. The man’s dick can’t penetrate as deeply unless her hips are supported by a couch pillow; he feels the air around his wetted balls and dick more acutely. The ride is different, harder, more bone to bone and, therefore, very exciting as a change of pace.

Our early days married were passionate, that’s for sure. The wall above our lover’s fold out couch soon sported a big gash where a gang of hangers, lashed together by tape, smashed into the plaster. In a heated argument, Bev threw them at me and, fortunately, missed. We settled into an apartment rather than into my house because...? I don’t remember. Maybe the people in the house had a lease we had to honor. That may very well have been the reason.

Beverly had to learn how to cook and, over the years, she became a good cook, but I remember one night in the apartment, I came home to a mixed together spaghetti and chili leftover meal. I was not the kind of husband who could eat whatever his wife served up in order to maintain peace, but, now retired and cooking for my working wife, I do know what it feels like to have the woman I cook for disapprove, no matter how sweetly, of what I’m serving her.

Of course Beverly learned to cook meals which the man of the house wanted to eat: spaghetti, navy bean soup, corned beef and cabbage, chili, burgers, Sloppy Joes, tuna fish on toast. Never any rice, though I like rice now as much as potatoes; never any asparagus, though I like that vegetable pretty well nowadays too. I don’t recall that Bev ever introduced meals from her own imagination or to her own liking. She learned to cook what I wanted to eat, and that’s just another of those things women from my generation accepted as the status quo.

Fortunately for my pocketbook, my daily food tastes were inexpensive, except when we went out to eat and I consistently ordered filet mignon or lobster tails with Martinis before dinner and several Creme de Menthes on the rocks after dinner.


My job with a branch office of the American Optical Company lasted only six months. I always remember Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor when I think of AO. The company Todd/AO developed lenses for the movie “Around The World In Eighty Days” and several other wide-screen shows, and Todd and Taylor visited Nantucket while I was there. Three ships passing in the night.

My job with AO ended right around the time Beverly and I married. Our parting was not amicable though I wasn’t fired. I quit. There was a change in management, and I didn’t get along with the new “hillbilly” boss from some Southern state who took over from Mike, the guy who hired me and who I liked and felt loyalty to. I truly did quit out of loyalty, shortly after the new guy called our first meeting and began to speak of change which implicitly implied that Mike’s way were no good. Nothing fancy here, in my responses. I was really pissed that Mike was being replaced, as if he wasn’t good enough. I often held personal loyalties like that.

Mike was the man who taught me to drive a stick shift on a red Rambler American, our AO delivery car. The American looked like an upside down bathtub, but it was economical for the long delivery drives I was soon to begin, to deliver lenses and frames to the smaller towns around Dayton. I’d never driven a stick shift at the time, so Mike went with me on my first trips to teach me the route and how to use a stick shift. I got the hang of it pretty quick, after a few leaping stall outs, one in the embarrassing middle of a busy intersection.

Near the end of the second day, as we were driving home, Mike fell asleep in the passenger seat. I made one more clutch mistake and abruptly stalled the car. This was before the time of seat belts. Mike’s forehead slammed into the windshield hard enough to raise a knot, but Mike, after he smoothed the surprised anger wrinkles off his forehead, didn’t speak angrily to me. How couldn’t I be faithful to that sort of understanding leadership?

Shortly after AO bought the Rambler, when I didn’t know enough about automobiles to get antifreeze added to the radiator and a sudden Spring freeze cracked the engine block, Mike again showed restraint—though he was a bit peeved. He did ask, with a pained voice, why I didn’t get the coolant level checked when I saw the temperature dropping. It was Spring, that’s why, but I wouldn’t have known to check the antifreeze in the first place. I’d have probably cracked the block that Autumn, if I’d still been with AO. I didn’t know about antifreeze. The only car I’d owned to that time was used and, I’m guessing, had antifreeze in it because I had no cracked blocks prior to the Rambler’s. My dad never taught me anything about cars since he wouldn’t let me drive in the first place and, in the second, he didn’t do his own routine servicing anyway. His dad never owned a car so his dad didn’t teach him either. Like with fishing and hunting, which my dad didn’t teach me about or practice (his dad neither), I remain pretty ignorant about cars.

I really liked to make a living, driving around the countryside. I wonder why I never became a trucker. I felt free on the road, without supervision but loosely tied to a schedule that would get me back to home base in time. Soon, I became a salesman too, taking along frame specials and discontinued lines of frames to offer to the optometrists on my route. I was authorized to haggle from the low prices I began with. One time I discounted way too much, but I did get rid of a whole pile of outdated frames. Again, Mike was patient with me and explained that there was a bottom limit to discounts even on discontinued frames.

I had a singular experience while working at AO which I’ve never experienced since. Our small branch building was located behind the Greyhound Terminal, diagonally back in a corner of their parking lot. Our parking was limited, but we were a wholesale business, dealing only with optometrists for whom we ground lenses. Drop in business was rare.

One morning when I came to work, a car with a young man and woman in it was blocking entrance to our small lot. I was already mad when I got to work for some reason. The guy ignored me while I honked angrily at him. After several long honks, I stormed from my car to explain that he needed to unstop the bottleneck to “my” parking lot. I screamed through his open window that he better get the hell out of there—why can’t you read the sign about not blocking AO’s parking—things like that. I had just begun to unload my venom at him when he spit in my face.

What a shock that is—to have someone spit in your face! I went ballistic and grabbed his collar, screaming, “Fuck you, fuck you, you mother fuckin’ sonofabitch, cock sucking asshole motherfucker!” Or words to that effect. But I didn’t hit him. It’s not the first time I’ve been unable to hit someone. I don’t think I threw a punch in my fight with Vince all those many years ago. I just dance till I get hit or something happens to end the fight. I don’t know why. Anyhow....

Now the guy, still silent, starts to pull out through the bus parking lot, and I’m hanging onto his car and him. Not able to hit him, I begin to spit into the side of his face too as he accelerates, staring straight ahead. I didn’t let go of his car or stop spitting till he dragged me into the middle of a very busy downtown street that ran beside the Greyhound Bus Station. He hung a left out of the lot and was accelerating. I realized I would soon be endangered, so I let go.

Coming out of a rage like that is something like the end of a car wreck. Suddenly, everything is still, and I’m stopped still in the middle of the street, very aware of everything around me. I see the cars approaching in the street and imagine all eyes witnessed my spitting and being more or less dragged by my grip on the guy’s window. What did they think, seeing me sweating under the sun like a lunatic? What did they think...?

In Eaton, Ohio which I passed through on my way back from Richmond, Indiana (the farthest western reach of my delivery route), I delivered lenses to a doctor Spitler who ran his own medical college. He had just a few students. I’d see them putting stitches in pieces of beef and liver. He ran a one man operation as far as I could see. His hair was snow white, and a slender, well proportioned older nurse worked with him in his office. Something about her intrigued me sexually, and I imagined that she and the doctor shared a small house somewhere in town. Maybe one of his students turned me on to that fact, that they were lovers with a past. I’m not sure how I drew my conclusions, but I know I felt they had something going on. I imagined they were the unspoken secret of the small town of Eaton, but I had a vivid imagination too. Shades of the small town secrets in Steinbeck novels.

I don’t clearly recall what the doctor looked like, but he was thin and fit, like his nurse, and I swear he sported a stylish, white goatee. Spitler’s office and desk were piled so full of books, charts, graphs and whatnot I couldn’t imagine how he’d ever catch up on his reading. His walls ran corner to corner with glass-doored bookshelves. I always thought I was in a magical place there, a place on the edge of the future, but I didn’t know what to do with this connection or how to seize the day.

Spitler’s students seemed all very bright. I think they were probably the earliest hippies to come along, but I had no name for hippies then. I just sensed they were bright and engaged in some adventure most people don’t risk. I liked hanging around Spitler’s office/college and didn’t want to leave. Once or twice the doctor and I talked. He must have sensed something in me because one day, he opened one of his dusty books and told me to look it over before I left.

At the time I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but now I recognize he was showing me a book with pictures of fertility goddesses, those tiny round, fat-bellied ones that ancient peoples had, the ones found in caves with the bones of wooly mammoths. He was hinting atheism to me, trying to let me in on a truth which was not talked about in those days by people who had reputations to uphold. I didn’t get it then, but I do now, and I appreciate the effort Doc. Spitler made to clue me in earlier than I could get there by myself. I think I may have told him about my brave sorties into atheism to impress women with my dangerous views, and that’s why he showed me the book.

I left AO soon after and couldn’t follow up the opening he gave me to discuss the book. I see him now as a wizard I came across, my own Carlos Castaneda, who I only partly appreciated. It was years before I could get, through my own reading, to the place he might have started me off at. He offered me a glimpse through a door most people fear to look through and will never dare to enter. Before you go through that door, you must shed all your superstitions and face your fears.

In many trades, there’s an initiation trick for beginners. When the guys at AO told me to ask one of the local opticians if we could borrow his “lens stretcher”, I saw through it and never asked. Sometimes, you fall for the tradesters trick, and sometimes you don’t. I must admit I never understand the kick someone gets out of tricking someone who is not positioned to have a piece of information but who will soon enough learn. It’s so easy to take advantage of the naive and the uninformed. And those laughers on the sidelines who risk nothing themselves but are always ready to nick you if you dare to peek through Spitler’s door, they’re still out there, and right now they’ve got the power. They’re sitting by their inoperative pot bellied stoves, smoking their heels and exchanging folk nothings that perpetuate the past and keep the door closed on humankind’s future. The jokes on them, but most are too dense to realize it. I would never send them after a “lens stretcher” when they don’t even have the lens.