CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Last of the Road Shows

Eventually, my restless dad, liking the money of road jobs, the road life adventure and the companionship of the men he met during the war, set off on road jobs again, dragging his little family along behind him. So, after a few contiguous years of respite in Dayton in the Belmont district, attending Belmont elementary and junior high schools, I found myself on the road once more while I scrambled to complete junior high and my first year of high school. As I said, I’d already been on two road jobs during the war with my dad by this time: St. Louis, Mo. and Des Moines, Iowa.

During this final period of wandering, we lived in Grand Rapids near a river (the river’s name is unknown to me), in Minneapolis, Minnesota for a year and in St. Paul Minnesota for another year interspersed with returns to Dayton. I think I attended Monroe High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I remember, also, riding a school bus to St. Louis Park Junior High in St. Paul—another first and only experience for me. What school I attended the year in Minneapolis I don’t remember. After that 9th year at Monroe, my grades got so bad, as I’ve reported elsewhere, that my dad and stepmom decided not to move me anymore.

I have lied to my readers, and, now, I must admit to it. Last night I did do some research into the three cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota and Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am very much confused about where I went to school at Monroe High School and in which city I played a lot under the bridge over the Mississippi. I found that St. Louis Park, Minnesota is south southwest of Minneapolis, yet I always think we lived in St. Paul when I went to St. Louis Park Junior High. I found a Monroe High School in Michigan, but it lay near Detroit and not near Grand Rapids. I couldn’t find a Monroe High School in Minnesota, yet I don’t quite trust that finding. Maybe that high school, like Dayton’s Stivers High School, is now out of business.

As you can see, much of those final road years are a blur to me. Many of the things in this chapter may have occurred in other cities than which I credit them too. I can tell the Dayton things from the road stuff, but I can’t always distinguish one road city from the other. You would think I’d remember more, but those years, except for a few high points, aren’t very clear. One time we came home from one Minnesota job, and I entered school in Belmont, but after five weeks, we turned around and went back to the other Minnesota (or Michigan?) road job and to my third school during that one year. As I said many chapters back, I was in and out of school so much for a couple of years that I managed to cover the Civil War twice, and I still have an interest in that War. In fact, I’m currently and slowly working my way through Carl Sandburg’s three volume biography of Lincoln.

I felt so lonely and I had to act so tough in all those schools for some reason! The way I see it now, thinking back, I was already so damaged by loss of my mother and by an abusive stepmom and by drifting from school to school that I failed to develop a personality capable of winning friends and influencing people. I can see that my persona was already being bent to the role of the loner, even among the Belmont kids from whom I was so often separated and who I didn’t join until the third grade anyway. They’d already been bonding since kindergarten. If I take my whole school experience, I was frequently, starting in kindergarten at Washington Elementary, the newcomer.

As with so much of any human animal’s earliest life, I am only guessing at many of the deepest, hidden influences which made me what I later became. In mid-life, I had to struggle hard to integrate my fragmented self into what I feel is an authentic personality. I think some of my early overpowering sensitivity is hidden in the DNA of genetics and also with pressures and influences from before my growing into conscious life. I can only conjecture what my life was like with my mother in the early years when we spent time in Brun's Tavern and in St. Louis when her misery drove her to seek the arms of men other than my father. I also know, as I have pointed out, that her own father often called her a whore, beat her with coat hangers and locked her in closets as punishment when she still remained at home. The fact I can’t recall where the closets are in the St. Louis apartment speaks volumes to me.

I recall two pretty serious road fights in those final road days. They symbolize for me the whole process of entering into and out of schools when one is in junior high and high school. One battle took place at Monroe in Michigan, I’m pretty certain, and maybe both fights did. That may be why my folks were concerned and thought it was time for me to put down roots.

The earliest fight took place just before class in a classroom. I don’t know why I was fighting. I bet I hadn’t been in school more than a week. It was probably just my mouthy personality which rubbed the guy the wrong way. Suddenly I’m thinking it was a Swede who I fought because that’s what I always told people when I described the fight. I’d say how tough Minnesota Swedes were. I’d say, “Man he knocked the stuffing out of me. I used to think I was so tough until I fought one of those Minnesota Swedes!”

So now, after that realization, I’m not sure if Monroe was in Minneapolis or Michigan or if the fights took place in different schools. That’s memory for you! Anyhow, I was no longer king of the hill on Kenview but was now alone in strange territory, an intruder to the early teen minds of the home folk. I don’t remember who the guy was or what he looked like. All I know is I was standing in a classroom aisle, facing room front, and he approached. Both our fists were up like real fighters, and....

That’s all there is to this story. He hit me in the eye so fast I didn’t see the punch coming. Lightening bolts shot before my closed eye! Jesus, it hurt! The pain stabbed through my eyeball so hard I began immediately to cry. I thought I was blind for sure.

“I’m blind,” I moaned several times, putting my fighting hands over my eye so the fight would be over. Would he hit a crying man whose hands were over his eyes? I think not! I think that was probably my plan. To elicit pity. It worked many times in my life, specially with women.

It worked in this case. Everybody turned immediately solicitous, even my protagonist. They’d probably never seen such a baby. This fight, I now see, shows me that both the bully and the bullied resided in me simultaneously, maybe in many of us. I think of the movie, “A Christmas Story”, and see that I am both in sheep’s clothing. Aren’t most of us capable of both? Aren’t most of us covering fear under anger? Anyhow... when the teacher came in, we all immediately explained that we were goofing around when the guy accidentally hit me in the eyeball, so no one got in trouble.

The second fight never broke into fisticuffs, but we wrestled hard and fell to the linoleum tile in the hallway while a crowd gathered, and we both ended up before the principal. I’m pretty sure I was in high school and so the fight marked the end of my road days. The kid was furious at me and for good reason, and I know that this fight took place at Monroe in Michigan because the reason for the fight had something to do with a metal working shop, a high school class. You see, I’d just entered school, and I was way behind in shop class, and I didn’t have any notes so this good kid lent me his notes which I promptly lost and concealed from him by explaining that it was taking longer than expected to copy them.

When, a few weeks later, I learned we were leaving Michigan because dad’s job ended suddenly only shortly after arriving there, I tried to conceal that the notes were lost until I could skip town without facing the kid’s rage. Somehow he learned I was leaving town and showed up at my locker at school day’s end to demand I give him the lost notes. So, of course, a fight started because of my deviousness. Later, It felt to me as if everybody in that school must hate me for losing the kid’s notes and for trying to conceal the loss and escape. These two fights mark the beginning of the end of my being the toughest guy around. I feel as if I was moving from bully to coward in those days.

All this fragmented school experience is why I so clearly identified with James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” which came out not too many years after my return to Dayton to finish high school. Remember? He plays a boy coming into a new school when the movie commences. A loner. An outsider. And he has to fight even though he doesn’t want to. This is me, already, even before alcohol intensified my estrangement from my peers, this lone boy without friends who “needs” a woman to console his pain and whose few friends are loonies or, at the least, the eccentric, a boy always outnumbered, always on the defensive, always prepared to lose, even to the point of setting himself up to lose. The last conclusion was many years in surfacing into my consciousness. That people can choose to lose and not be aware of it is one of my Ten Commandments of Human Animal Behavior.

Eventually, cushioned by a woman’s love, Dean’s character remains aloof, but he never belongs. He’s mad at his middle class family too, and for reasons not hard for me to fathom whose father never wanted to get to close to his son and in whose home the female spirit dominated. Imagine, too, how the movie must have echoed in all American homes which lacked fathers who were absent because of war. If you ask me, blown up buildings and damaged economies are the least of war’s ravages. World War Two and its dead and missing or psychologically traumatized fathers led as inevitably to the drug culture as Cheech leads to Chong.

Even moreso I identified with Dean’s character, Cal Trask, in “East of Eden” who’s lost from his mother and father and seeks the truth about his mother and who finds a slut with not so quite a heart of gold. She’s a bit like others might categorize my mother if they didn’t get to know her first and only knew the barest outline of her deeds. Only, my true mother was never a toughie. She was always softhearted and naive. I recently bought “East of Eden” on the Internet, and as I watched it, I understood exactly how all its plot elements and conflicts dovetailed into my own psychology as a young and grown man.


Speaking of mothers and girls who dominated much of the last chapter (in fact my whole life to this day): my first real real serious as hell, head over heels, crush hit me on one of those road jobs. Something tells me it was the Michigan job which was the last one I went on. Her name was Melody.

Do you know I can’t even remember what she looked like? I only saw her one day, but, man, that was enough! I was so struck by her that it was even obvious to my folks. Just a few days before we left Michigan to return to Ohio, Melody’s family invited us out to a goodbye dinner. We went to their home for the entire day. They had a Ping-Pong table set up on their screened in porch, and I played for all I was worth to impress her. All I can really remember, though, is such a deep feeling for Melody that my chest felt empty and my stomach hurt. The feeling was returned because she and I stayed pretty close to each other through the day, but we did not want to show the feelings we had for each other. We’d share a couch or a room, but never touched, never kissed. Nothing. We’d talk and listen eagerly to the other talk in groups or sometimes quietly to one another, but we never openly shared our feelings with one another.

After dinner we went to the movies with her sisters, friends and brothers. I don’t recall what the movie was because my mind was on her completely and where she was sitting with her female friends. We weren’t sitting together because her brothers didn’t want to sit with their sisters, and I didn’t want to reveal my deep feelings for their sister, so I set with the brothers and wanted all through the movie to be sitting close beside her in the dark behind me. God that hurt and I really couldn’t think of anything but how much I wanted to be sitting with her, near her, not touching or speaking, but just sitting in the dark with her by my side.

Later, as my family drove out of their driveway, and I knew that we were going back to Dayton in a day or two, I slumped in despair on the back seat and tried to learn more about them, where they lived and how far their home was from our home in Dayton. My folks could see how love sick I was because they brought it up and kind of joshed me about my crush. I think I admitted to the pain I was feeling. My eyes were wet with repressed tears.

What gets me about the whole thing is how, like a typical young buck of those days with his first crush, I never spoke openly to her about my feelings. Probably, my feelings scared me so much I was afraid to reveal them. I never saw Melody again or had any communication with her. Vaguely, as I write this, I wonder if I did not write one letter to her in Indiana when they had also returned from the Minnesota (or Michigan?) road job. I seem to recall an answer from her which was not as passionate as I hoped for. But by then, several months or more had passed, and my own feelings were no longer as strong either, but for weeks, I couldn’t get her out of mind and my pain was intense for awhile. My first real crush, for sure.

As I got older I spent some time with my Dad too, a fact which I tend to forget when I’m mad at his memory. For one thing, when I was old enough, I often went golfing with him and his road friends and caddied for his buddies. I earned a little money and got to spend time with him. After golfing I remember drinking a favorite drink, the Brown Cow, which was made from root beer and vanilla ice cream. Later I learned that chocolate ice cream works pretty good too, but the Brown Cow was the best. Because of my experience with caddying for my dad’s friends, later, in high school I made a few bucks now and then by caddying for money at one of the private clubs in Dayton, but I was never a caddy enthusiast.

A caddy memory my dad always liked to tell was one that included a funny, funny man named Elmer who dad worked with. They were very close pals. I often caddied for Elmer. He was skinny and bespectacled and reminded me of Wally Cox. (Okay! You show your age if you don’t know Wally Cox.) One of the holes at a course they frequently played was a short water hole. The tee shot had to clear a fairly large body of water. The green was not far past the other shore. When Elmer’s turn came to hit, he drove a sinker down into the water pretty far toward the other shore. Then he hit another one into mid-lake and a third dribbled down into the water in front of the green. Following that third, truly pathetic shot, after quite an embarrassed frustrated pause, “Nice shot,” I said, leaning casually on Elmer’s bag.

Elmer’s golfing buddies all broke down in fits of laughter. I know it doesn’t sound funny in the retelling. I guess you had to be there. Even Elmer laughed... eventually.

I enjoyed the Ice Carnival in Minneapolis during these years, but, in Minnesota, I learned to permanently hate playing outdoors. Every time I played outside, my fingers ached, thawing out when I came in. The winters were extremely cold in Minnesota. Snowmen, skiing, sledding, tobogganing? You can have’m!

Have you ever heard a frozen river break up in spring? In Michigan, along that nameless to me river, I heard my one and only breaking up of a springtime river. The loud cracking echoed through our neighborhood one morning and frightened me until someone told me what I was hearing. It’s quite a sound. I can imagine that river breaking up centuries before any human lived along its banks, the sharp “cracks” and “booms” sounding unheard before the dawn of human ears. A deer lifts its head, its ears flick, then it goes back to feeding.

The Mississippi River loomed pretty big in those, my final, road days, specially when we lived in the apartment in Minneapolis. The Mississippi River was within walking distance and I was now old enough to walk around a bit without getting into too much trouble. Wooded cliffs dropped down many feet into the valley cut by that big Mark Twain river. In one place, a dirt trail wound down to the river bank and I could climb down and walk around forever in this wooded land. I loved it. I could also walk across the grassy grounds of an old soldier’s home to a huge, concrete bridge. Underneath, wide arching supports curved in big easy loops to hold the bridge up. I loved to climb out on these curves to Mississippi middle and look down deathly drops into the dark waters. From Connecticut times, from my backyard Kenview tree, I always liked being high up, looking down.

In one of these three cities, and I truly can’t recall which one, a gang of us played on a school construction site all summer long. Probably on weekends when people weren’t working. On that site, I learned to scoop out a gob of hot tar from a bucket and chew tar while we divided up into two teams and played war. One team hid in the steadily growing building, and the other tried to sneak in and take the fort. The one rule was that the defenders couldn’t shoot anybody until they were in the building. Anybody killed had to stay dead until the game was over. Last team with members standing won.

The building was huge, three stories and we had tons of fun sneaking through corridors and in the basement trenches awaiting to swallow cables and pipes. You were shot if an opponent said, “bang” or “got ya”, and you were clearly surprised and caught in the open. Most shots were so clear, nobody argued, not even me.

My strategy in attack in this game was to sneak all the way around the building before entering, where the defenders would not usually set up a defense. They usually expected attackers to come in from the same direction they entered since the game began in a vacant lot at the side of the building site where we divided up. My defense strategy was to stay near the side where the game began with a secure escape route behind me. After the attackers entered the building, I’d get one, then scoot out my escape route and pick another ambush site, moving ever further into the building, changing floors to get higher ground. I don’t recall ever having to retreat all the way through the building before any game concluded.

As with most things I did as a child, I believe I was always a little ahead of most of my compatriots in strategic thinking. Only when the world became real and painful, and the games were behind me, did I begin to fail. As with most contests, I have a strong memory of one of my triumphs. One game, the defenders decided to get on the top floor which was still open with only about a half stacked wall of cider blocks around the top and an elevator engine tower in the center which was built taller than the surrounding block walls. They decided to get inside this elevator engine tower en masse and defend there. Well, the game stalemated with neither team able to claim clear shots. My team was hung up outside the elevator room and the other team was inside it. Bang, bang, bang, bang! Endless firing, no surprises, no result.

As usual I was a loner, sneaking around separate from my team. I entered in a side window, between the old school and the new school. I heard all the noise, and crept up. Hidden, I watched the stalemate develop. Looking behind me to the old school which was small but four stories tall, I wondered if I could get in there and get on that roof, looking down on my opponents. Of course, I wouldn’t be telling this part of the story if I hadn’t found an unlocked window in the old school, hoisted myself in, climbed to the top floor and surprised the whole enemy force from my superior position. “Bang! You’re all dead!” Or, maybe, perhaps....

I didn’t really find an open window to achieve my goal. All I did was think of the plan but was unable to complete it. Memory, as I keep repeating, is exactly as slippery as that. Is imagination stronger than reality? I think so. We really can have any reality we make up, specially if it’s based on our so-called memories which are indexed to our emotions.

The idea of lonership is a strong imagination with me which became a nightmare at another time in my life. During this time between third grade and ninth grade, my uncle who was active in the boy scouts (yep, a heterosexual pederast in a leadership position with the boy scouts before becoming active in the Y.M.C.A.) made a place available for me in a summer camp. I remember several things about this camp, specially the night all us got down on our knees and, bowing three times in unison to the chant, repeated over and over, “Owa tagoo siam.” We repeated this, bowing and chanting, over and over while the leadership urged us to go faster and faster. Faster and faster we went until some of us (not me) began to stop and laugh. I went on, faster and faster and faster. “Owatagoosiam,” bowing like an idiot, touching my forehead to the ground until, mercifully, the leader stopped the game before the one or two of us still continuing made even more complete asses of ourselves. Naiveté was one of my strong suits. If you can’t figure this story out, join the crowd of loner naifs.

Loner again at this camp, we played a massive game of capture the flag one afternoon. The whole camp turned out for it. The camp was divided roughly into two halves by a fairly deep, dry creek bed, spanned by two bridges. The campground was so big, you couldn’t see each others’ flags from the dividing line. Both sides took their flags to hide them as far from the dividing line as possible, then, leaving a couple of guards behind we returned to our imaginary 49th parallel. We wore red and yellow arm bands to show which army we were part of.

The leader’s whistle commenced the game. You learn a lot about guys from watching them play this game. Some guys actually rushed onto the “no man’s land” bridges and began massive tugs of war to try and drag opponents over to their side where they could be tagged and captured. And for hours, they stayed there wrestling and tugging and tagging on those bridges. These were the musclebound. Some sneaks removed their arm bands to try and confuse the enemy while looking for the flag. For me, removing my armband was not an option but sneaking around was. So I went clear out of sight to the end of the ravine, crossed over and began a stealthy search to find the enemy prison camp and flag. I found it after a time, but they’d put it on open ground with many guards. No way in that I could see. Now was the time when one needed comrades in arms. But, also, I liked being alone, watching the guards walking around, shouting, and prisoners being brought in, while all the while I remained close and crawling around without being spotted. That was enough of a game for me. To do nothing and observe. The writer in me?

Eventually, a band from my team came up on the front of the camp and charged it in numbers, tagging prisoners to free them and going for the flag.... And, again, that’s all I remember. I don’t recall which team won the game. Our opponents probably won or else I would have remembered it. Anyhow... I think I may have charged in too at this time, but I’m not certain. I may have been captured, but none of that must be important to me for all I remember is sneaking around in the woods by myself and getting plenty of kick out of that.

One other interesting game I learned during this camp out was the state song game. Stop me if you’ve heard it. We divided into two groups around the campfire. One group began, “What did Delaware, boys, what did Delaware?” And the second group would answer, “She wore her New Jersey, boys. She wore her New Jersey.” Fun, eh? Answer these, if you can. What did Idaho? How much did Iowa (Ioweight). What did Mississip? What did Arkansas? How much did Ohio? I don’t know if there are answers to some of these.

Friday night boxing was big during our stay in St. Louis Park. When dad watched boxing, he leaned into the TV, fists up, to bob and weave with the boxers, totally carried away with the blood sport. There was a young white boxer, not a heavyweight, in those days who boxed and was known for good foot work and stylish, fast fists but not much as a knockout artist. He was hot, won a lot of decisions, and my dad liked him. I think many white guys liked him because he was frail looking and white, and they could almost see themselves in him. That’s what I think now, all these years later.

My dad remembered a childhood full of fights, a rough and tumble Depression Era life unlike the more protected one I lived. He was one of four brothers, remember, and they all attended the same schools and the same Stivers High School. If you messed with one brother, you had to deal with them all. A common fraternal story, really, for that day and age, of brothers who were holy terrors to one another until an outside party stepped in. Then, watch out, Katie bar the door, and they weren’t even Irish.

Road job people drank pretty heavily and partied hearty in this crowd of men and wives. I saw men and women drunk and silly from time to time, some pretty fine looking women drunk, married to dad’s friends. When dad was younger, before he married my wicked stepmother, he’d been in Connecticut, as I’ve mentioned before. All these men were in Connecticut too and went into New York City with him on a regular basis where they listened to big bands, danced jitterbug and drank and got drunk. It was a wild wartime life for them as well as the men in the trenches. It wasn’t their fault that lots of lonely women also wandered around the Big Apple at the time. Some of dad’s married men friends had a tough time being faithful in those times.

I experienced my first tornado in Minnesota one spring. Roofs blew away not far from our apartment in St. Paul. A young tree in our backyard split at the crotch of two branching trunks. A trash can blew by as they always do in wind storms. I watched a young tree bend to the ground and a trash can blow by in Puerto Rico too, during a hurricane, when I was in the service. One time when stepmom was gone, dad took me to see “The Thing”, the original. He also took me to see the Minneapolis Lakers with George Mikan at center. And I recall some ice shows too. Where else but in Minneapolis during the two week Ice Carnival to see an ice show?

In Minneapolis, we lived in an apartment, and I did have a pretty good chum that one year. We used to play this baseball game I had. Not electronic. From behind the score board, the pitcher would select a pitch, good or bad, by moving a lever. Then the batter could either swing on not swing by moving his lever. If he swung at a bad pitch, a strike would be revealed in a tiny window. If he held off a bad pitch, he got a ball, and obviously, if he swung at a good pitch, he hit the ball. Then, by throw of dice, I believe, what happened to the hit ball was decided.

At some time in my young life, I got the Kodaco photoelectric football game which ran plays by pulling out a slide that let light show through the overlapping defensive and offensive selections of the opponents. Jeez, how do I explain it? Okay. Each player has a set of plays on sheets of extremely heavy paper. The offense sheets contain lines to indicate the runner’s path through which light can show when lit from below. Dotted lines are passes, long and short, or laterals. The defensive player’s sheets bear the line markers and many dots: a few red, most black.

First the offense places his sheet face down on the playing field box with a light bulb in it. He can shift three markers to the right or left. Then the defensive player places his sheet face down over the offense’s selection. He can also shift. When the slide is pulled out beneath the playing sheets, the runner’s path is revealed, moving between the defensive dots. When the runner’s path strikes a dot, he’s stopped. Yardage lost or gained is determined by the yard markers on the defensive player’s sheet. Passes are blocked by dots intersecting the dotted line of the pass. You get an interception when a dot lies over the spot of reception, indicated by the end of the dotted pass line and the solid run line which commenced at the point of reception.

The offensive player had several kinds of plays to choose from: long and short pass, lateral, line plunge, end run, option play, etcetera. The defense had defenses for every offensive play, but fewer to select from. If he chose the defense that matched the offensive play, he had a good chance to intercept or cause a fumble. If he shifted too much off the center of the offensive play, he could cause himself a lot of trouble. If I remember strategy at all, it was to select the correct defense and place your sheet centered on the offensive sheet, but not shifted more than one mark to the left or right. Defense got in less trouble that way.

At first, players would slowly pull out the light shield to reveal the path of the runner, moving upfield, through the dots, but after days of play, the opponents knew what was going to happen before the whole play unfolded. The offensive player whose duty it was to pull the shield would just snap it quickly, disgustedly or triumphantly, all the way open. “Touchdown,” he’d crow, or “twenty yards” or “shit, fumble”, depending on what he knew would happen by the defense’s selection and sheet placement.

But my favorite football game which I played a lot during those times was a simple dice shaking game. I think I liked it mostly because I could play by myself and not cheat myself too much. I could enjoy an evenly fought game between two teams because chance was so much a part of that game. The game had a football field with a sliding, football-shaped indicator to show ball placement and a ten yard long side line marker. Score wheels, down and quarter wheels were set in end boards that were propped between board and box at both ends of the field. Each player used identical, long, thick, rigid cardboard information sheets divided into many columns. The columns were numbered from three to eighteen down the sides and a couple of places in the middle of the cards.

The columns included all the offensive options to play a game of football. Passes, long and short, line plunges, end runs, punts, kick offs, punt and kick off returns, penalties, fumble recoveries with lost or gained yardage. All plays came from the offense’s point of view and his dice rolls. The other player could only sit and wait until his turn to go on offense. The more risky a play the offense called before he rolled the dice, the higher the gains possible in that column but also the more damaging the consequences if the dice came up with the wrong number. You fumbled less with line plunges, but the gains were mostly two to five yards. Once in awhile, with a throw of 15 or something rare, the offense could get off a 20 yard line plunge gain. Maybe a role of 18 or 3 could get you a touchdown. Long passes were more likely to be intercepted than short. Etcetera. The game played more real to me than other football games because players were more likely to try a line plunge or off tackle slant for short yardage than to try and outsmart a defensive player with an inappropriate long pass.

I wasn’t all board games. I also got involved with real sports too. One summer while back in Ohio for a spell, I played left field on our park softball team which went to the finals in the citywide tournament. We lost. At other times on other softball teams I’ve pitched slow pitch and played second base too. My best memory of organized softball at this time is one impossible catch I made on the run, coming in. No one thought I had it, but I did. My run was so hard by the time I reached the ball and bent to take it ankle high that I couldn’t stop running nor get my balance until I was on the infield. Everyone thought it would drop in for a single.

Also, in Dayton, during this in and out time, I played in a couple of full scale, pickup, tackle football games. A couple of older teens came into my life through the park system. They were twin brothers, and, for some reason, they were big on organizing kids into groups to do things. One of them actually borrowed some little league football uniforms with shoulder pads, jerseys and helmets so that we could play pickup football on Oakwood High School’s football field. I don’t know how he organized all these things, getting uniforms and getting permission to use Oakwood’s football field, but he did. We played two, at most, three games one season. Again, the one twin reached out into the city to find other pickup teams to play against. He was a dynamo organizer. I wonder where he is nowadays?

I played halfback on offense (I had speed) and tackle on defense. Always, my defense was better than my offense in team sports. I was just more aggressive and in command on defense. Don’t know why. It’s psychological for sure. I recall how huge the field seemed on offense and that I didn’t always know what to do with my feet once I got past the line of scrimage with the ball. I didn’t know when to cut upfield when running an end run. I’d just keep running out to the side until forced out of bounds or brought down. But on defense, I usually sensed where to go to stop a play. I loved tackling more than I liked scoring touchdowns.

I remember one game real well. A tough on the other team taught me a lesson about how real football is played. We were locked in a scoreless tie after several quarters, but we lost 6-0 eventually. Anyhow, on one of our opponent’s drives, they got down to our 20 yard line, and I was psyched up to stop their drive. Three straight times, skinny me spun or turned sideways to slip through the defense, and I made two tackles in the backfield and turned the runner in for a third. I was hyped to the max.

On their fourth straight running play (we didn’t have place kickers), a new man got down before me, not the guy I’d slipped past three straight times. When the ball snapped, the new man set a cleated shoe into the top of my right tennis shoe, pinning my foot, and lifted his right shoulder pad into my mouth. He slammed me back and down, and I was in a lot of pain with a cut lip and gashed toe. They didn’t score on that set of plays, but for the rest of the game, needless to say, my rushes were a little more circumspect. I had learned how and why linemen in the early going try to establish dominance over the man opposite them.

This is an out of the way spot to sneak in some dramatic experience, but it was associated with this young man who also put together a play that we performed one night at the park behind the bakery from which I stole hot bread. We rehearsed for weeks, and I had one of the leads. I played the father, and there were children, a spouse, etcetera. I have no idea what the play was, only that it was a comedy. The major laugh came when I entered on stage, frustrated with my children, fuming, my face lathered in shave cream. The kids in the audience thought it was pretty funny. All I recall about my dramatic experience was that I misspoke about half my lines. I was so nervous and aware of the audience that I fluffed them, but I did manage to know in general the plot and the gist of my lines so that we kept on track pretty well, and I didn’t feel too badly, because most of my fellow actors also fluffed their lines. Who in the audience knew, anyhow, that we were missing lines left and right, but that was my last organized acting gig. I didn’t have the courage for it. Both the football and acting occurred somewhere during the 8th and 9th grades, I think.

I think it was in St. Paul that I coached a young park team which went to the finals and lost. I had great fun coaching. I liked to watch kids younger than me develop skills and confidence even though I may have been only twelve or thirteen myself. I had the knack of seeing where a kid’s skills would fit on a team and could get the most out of each team member that way. For a long time I felt bad about the conclusion of the final game in which we lost the park championship. We had been down something like nine points but in the final inning (we played either 5 or 7 innings), we stormed all the way back with men on second and third (I think) with two out.

We had a real competitor on second. He was a dark skinned kid, either native American or of Spanish descent. I can still see him crouched on second, hands dangling by his side, ready to run, his face intense, beaming, excited by the team’s impossible comeback and his second hit of the inning which had brought us to one score behind. He was the winning run and stood ready to fly. Up was a frail player who could field okay but didn’t have a hit all season. He either struck out or hit back to the pitcher. He was just too frail to get the bat around.

Everyone wanted me to let someone pinch hit for him. Even his dad. All his teammates did, that’s for sure. In fact, as the kid stood there, I imagined he knew no one wanted him to hit. If I yanked him I thought he’d be ashamed for a long time. On the other hand, if he did get a hit, he’d be a hero in his own mind forever. I wanted to give him a chance to be a winner. I was thinking about other things than winning or losing a baseball game. Once everyone knew I was going to let him hit, they tried to cheer him on. His dad crouched before him and talked to him a little bit before he went to bat. Well, of course, he struck out and we lost the game.

Who knows how all this is remembered in the minds of all the competitors. I hated to lose as much as anyone, and I don’t know why I didn’t pinch hit for him, but I didn’t. Later on in my life, as I began to see that I often chose self-defeating behavior, I wonder.... If I was choosing defeat, then I apologize to all those who had to lose with me. I don’t think the kid cried about striking out. I think he handled it pretty well, and none of his teammates that I could see gave him grief about it. I’m not sure the game was that important to him. He was just playing softball because that was a thing to do park summers. I’ll let my readers decide how they’d handle it.


I drank my first hard cider in one of those three northern cities. All I recall is going with a school chum over to his house after school and drinking some hard cider. Whether it was any good or not, I don’t recall. I don’t think I got drunk. I don’t think we drank very much of it either, but....

“Hey? You wanna go drink some hard cider?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, silly, naive and game for anything short of easily recognized physical danger.

Looking back over my life, I imagine this penchant to try almost anything. Then, when I think again, I realize I was very much afraid to attempt anything that might make me look foolish or might show me up as not knowing everything in the world. In fact, I often shrank from good healthy activities just because I was not good at them or was afraid I’d look silly in some way. Yet, to get into a car and drink and drive meant nothing to me at another time in my life. Funny (see later paragraphs), as I look back and try very hard to be honest about my life, the truth is really hard to get at. The truth, for me, is more like “on the one hand but on the other hand” with no certainty anywhere. Perhaps the truth ought to read, “He’d try anything when it came to drugs,” but even that’s not true. I never shot up heroin or got into crack. So, even in that, I’m just a middle class Nobody right down to the roots.

I suddenly think, “Maybe some of my past struggle for identity has to do with being on the cusp of the information age, one foot in pre-TV but for the most part raised with TV. And add in my obsession with movies, no wonder I was projected into the larger world, wanted to be known in the big world outside my house, beyond my block and city street. Who else but a fool couldn’t be happy with the life I was given?” Then, I see I’m being too harsh on myself. My struggle was my struggle. Who cares why I had to suffer what I did to learn what I have? It’s okay to have taken the road most traveled to the farthest extremes rather than the road less traveled for a short distance into the woods. If you learn all you can learn from a limited range of experience, it’s as good as learning nothing from a wide-ranging experience.

Funny, I wrote, “Funny, as I look back on my life....” a few moments ago as, simultaneously, a lady of my age at the order counter of The Coffee House where I’m writing today (September 2, 2003), started a comment to the proprietor with “Funny...” just a second after I started this paragraph about the use of “funny”. Not too many years back I became aware how often people of my generation use the term “funny” to preface statements, no matter how serious or humorous the comment might be. At that time, I was also becoming aware of how I used language without much thinking about it. Movies are responsible for my generation’s use of the word “funny” to preface comments. When a black and white movie character said, “Funny...,” you could tell a reminiscence was about to come or an important observation about life. I picked up the linguistic habit and used it most of my life without separating funny from tragic observations. Now, I try not to use it at all, but I’ll probably use it all through this book just to make a point. Who knows? Funny, how life is like that.

Funny....