CHAPTER TEN

Mostly Girls

Physical and rough as a kid, I remained emotionally immature for a long time. Though I went on my first official dates in the fifth grade (my folks thought I was a wunderkind), in retrospect, my relationships with the opposite sex during grade school seem always confused, full of longing and incompleteness. Before my fifth grade dating period, I shared a third grade classroom with a tiny blond, named Beverly, to whom I was drawn like motorcycles to Sturgis, South Dakota. My courtship of her seems to follow a sort of Tom Sawyer, roughhouse routine. One day as we were filing out of school at the end of the day, I shoved her down the last stone step of the porch. She didn’t fall. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I wanted to get her attention and couldn’t think how to go about it until this stroke of genius possessed me.

Stumbling, she turned around, and, given this wonderful opening, I introduced myself. “Hi. My name’s Nobody. I shoved you down the steps.”

She was pleased, and for awhile, we chased each other exclusively around the school yard, playing tag during recess. Later in high school, like so many of my past lovers, she put on a lot of weight. Putting on weight is often a defense mechanism for women who are victims of abuse and/or molestation. I’ve heard it from their own lips, so I believe it. If one is too fat to be attractive, one doesn’t have to deal with her sexuality. Being as how men are fatefully drawn to those who remind them of their mothers, Beverly may have been my earliest attraction to a victim of abuse.

There was also a girl named Stephanie. We were either in the third or fourth grade when she became my valentine. I once brought her a chain I’d found in a trash barrel on my walk to school. I can see the chain’s weird linkage to this day, but I don’t know what it could be or what it was used for. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t costume jewelry or anything like that. It might have been expansion chain for tub plugs or something like that. Anyhow....

When the teacher saw Stephanie with the chain, she asked where Stephanie got it, and when Stephanie, the little squealer, told her I gave it to her, I was made to stand beside my desk and explain. The teacher demanded to know where I got the chain. I hemmed and hawed, mortified. I didn’t want to let Stephanie know I gave it to her from a trash barrel, but any other explanation might seem like an evasion, like theft. I resisted while teacher’s threats reached a frightening level, and I wasn’t a good liar, but I didn’t tell, and I was punished for it.

Years later, at the first high school class reunion I’ve gone to since that time, I told Stephanie about the chain’s origins. She was charmed by my courage, and we flirted and danced the night away. We were in our late 50s, and, you know, I couldn’t see how old she was anymore than I could see my own age? She seemed sexy and mysterious, suspended in time between then and now. My first and only, to this time, class reunion was an affair of fantasy and imagination rather than a dance in reality. My only class reunion was a lot less frightening than I imagined it would be.

Valentine’s Day in grade school? What a torture that was to the insecure little tough guy I was! We tacked brown paper sacks to the sides of our desks with our names on them, then went around, dropping our valentines into the sacks of the ones we loved. My god, we had to put them into guys bags too, if they were our friends, but, actually, I don’t recall being able to tell the difference, at that age, between the feelings for liking a guy and liking a girl. My main concern—Who liked me? Who didn’t?—was all that was really important. Did the girls I liked also like me? If I put a valentine into a girl’s bag, my liking for her was exposed to her. What if she didn’t return the gesture? What a mess! Both sides of that coin happened to me. I was already pretty certain in those days that I was unlikable. I’m not sure that we were required in those days to put a valentine into everyone’s bag. I think kids nowadays are. Maybe we were, but if we were, then I sure suffered a lot of unnecessary pain, but I do recall these feelings of vulnerability and insecurity during this orgy of liking and not liking. I faintly remember, sitting down with my stepmom and making decisions about who would and who would not get a valentine from little Mr. Nobody. It was like early practice in running for class president or voting in a class election, an ordeal I never exposed myself to.

This same third grade teacher who grilled me about the nondescript chain, later caused another terribly shameful thing to happen to me. I must have been a lot of trouble for her, just coming from a new school and that tough neighborhood. I think I got out of class a lot by excusing myself to the bathroom, so she started to resist letting me out. One time I really had to do a Number Two and held my hand up. It was near the end of the day, but, also, the last two periods of school, they were going to show a movie. We’d leave the auditorium after the movie and go straight home from school. The teacher refused to let me go to the bathroom, so I shit my pants. Then I had to go to the movie in the auditorium with shitty pants and sit in my stink right next to Stephanie or Beverly (I don’t recall which was my girlfriend at that moment) while I filled with shame. When I got home and told my stepmom about how I got shitty pants, she and my dad were mad about it. My stepmom went to the school, and the teacher heard a piece of her mind. I hated this teacher and my grades suffered for it. But I got even... later....

A really big moment for a sport struck kid happened while I was in my 9th grade gym class at Belmont. I was always shy in gym class, feeling inadequate, skinny and shy. Ohio State fullback came to our school to practice teaching. For years I recalled his name when I shared this story. Now I’ve forgotten it. It sounded Polish with a “ski” on the end, I think. (Wow! I googled “Ohio State fullback in the 1940s” and got back Heisman Trophy winning fullback Vic Janowitz. That was him.) Anyhow, one day he got the small, round gymnastic’s trampoline out and set up a pole vault bar in the gym with mats on the far side. We’d run, hit the tramp and jump the bar. The class competed, two misses and out. I won and even cleared a few more raises of the bar. I beamed with pride to do this feat of daring-do before a great athlete, but what is more important to me is the memory of sailing so high up and clearing the bar. I loved the sensation of flying up and over. In my mind’s eye, I almost touch the rafters. [Move to Chapter Ten]

In fifth grade, I went on my first dates with Martha. Her great-great-grandfather may have been a Civil War general, or so I’ve always believed. I imagined that another famous Civil War general was in my family, a namesake, but that may all just be hogwash. Anyhow.... I walked to Martha’s house about a mile or more from my house every Sunday and ate dinner or lunch at her house then took her to a matinee at the Dabel theater. Later, we’d play a board game with her family at her house before my dad picked me up to take me home.

I don’t recall how long our affair went on, but not too long. Soon I quit going to movies with Martha. My stepmom told me I decided to quit because I figured out that I could go to the movies twice on my allowance if I didn’t waste money on Martha. Combine that with my love of movies, and anyone can see the affair of the fifth grade was dead.

I saw Martha at the class reunion. She and her husband brought Stephanie of all people. A small world indeed. Specially when you realize that my dad was also at my class reunion. He married a classmate of mine, although he didn’t know it at the time they began dating. She was 20 years younger than he was. I am 23 years older than my current, and I hope, last wife. My third wife was 20 years my junior, and when my dad began dating his third wife, he told me I was his inspiration. He used to tease my stepmom that when she turned 40, he would trade her in for 2 twentys, but he was devastated when she died. He died of prostate cancer when he was 77, survived by me (the Nobody of the family), a granddaughter and two grandsons, an aunt (his mother’s sister) and his eldest, pedophile brother. As far as I know, right at this moment, I may be the guy on the end of the generational diving board, all the previous generation now dead, and me being the oldest of my generation. I feel slightly vulnerable, thinking of my situation in the family tree, but I read about this feeling in a book long before I came to be in the situation myself, so I was prepared for it.

Speaking again of other Nobodys than myself or my family. On my drive here to the coffee shop (two days ago) to write this Monday, hot morning, I passed three drunken indians, wearing bright red bandanas (that’s right, three drunken indians) and watched them laugh and throw back their heads as they walked out in front of cars on unsteady legs and made traffic stop. They wobbled over a boulevard, separated by a grassy traffic island, and stopped traffic going the other way too, each time getting a major kick out of it.

Many a time, drunk myself, I recall the sense of power, a temporary moment of control in my out of control life, that stopping cars gave me. Silly and pathetic isn’t it, but... alcoholism reduces one’s opportunities for real satisfaction. I’d open wide my arms grandly in a “stop traffic” gesture, but I never looked drivers in the eye. People acting like fools just can’t seem to do that. In another way, such careless behavior is a compliment to the generosity and compassion of the vast American driving public. The drunk stopping traffic with his body must have a certainly level of trust in his fellow man, although I think the drunk, in foolish self-delusion, calls other’s concern for him, cowardice. Anyway....

I remember when I learned that I was way behind my peers in maturity, even though I’d already had my dates with Martha, but I guess I really wasn’t very attractive to the more sensible woman. Barbara lived about six or ten houses down from my house on Kenview, and I had a slight interest in her. None of my earlier crushes had been that portentous. The Barbara infatuation wasn’t my first; my first serious crush, the kind that leaves a huge hole in your chest when it ends, was with Melody (it lasted only a brief afternoon before we had to leave town) when dad was on a road job in Michigan, but, anyhow....

I used to hang around Barb’s house and try to talk to her about my inexpressible itch for her, and I recall talking to her one night through a screen window in her dining room while I sat on my bike in her driveway, propped upright with my left arm extended to her chimney. I might have been 13, and I tried to say something about how I felt, but I know my intentions were so vague that I probably appeared inarticulate. She seemed to appreciate what I was saying, but a few days later, she and Dick (the guy I could always beat up) went out on a movie date. They walked, of course, probably up to the Belmont theater which was about a mile from our houses, but he had on a nice trench coat, and she wore a dress, hose and heels. They looked so grown up. For all I know they were on their first date, but they seemed far above me. Those “goody two shoes”, both of them, had left me behind in defeat and ashes.

I sat alone on the curb in front of Dick’s house as like beings from another world they passed. I was dirty and sweaty from a day of cycling and playing. My pitiful childish bike, a Dixie Flyer, sat propped by its kickstand on the grass near by. I was crushed. I was losing my first woman to another man. I suddenly realized very clearly that I wore a stupid child’s striped tee shirt and that my hair was cut in a burr. Not a stylish flattop but a burr! And I still rode bikes! What a kid thing to do! I knew, suddenly, that I was bony and angular and unattractive as hell. I had a huge concavity in the center of my chest from being born with a missing bone there which, thereafter, grew larger every year in my mind’s eye view of it.

I suddenly saw myself as I appeared in the mirror day after day, and in that challenged vision, I was now so childish and immature I could barely stand it. Just a hillbilly bumpkin I was, ashamed for the first time of myself and my appearance and, probably, though not quite aware of that, my heritage. No West Virginia mine scion, Barbara wouldn’t pee in any garage for me. She wouldn’t sneak in to French kiss me while I was bound in a garage. She was in a new league. She was a new kind of woman, a woman who would ask more of me than to walk a fence like Tom Sawyer, more of me than I would be able to muster. I would never fit into the role her niche prepared for me.

Compared to Dick and Barb, I felt quite the boob. I sulked home and, in a few days, began to resist wearing striped tee shirts to my stepmom’s great displeasure. They were cheap and easy to wash, I imagine, and it seems to me that bikes disappeared from my life. I can’t recall riding one after that. I walked everywhere.


The Kenview years cover a lot of ground. I was a child when I entered the Kenview neighborhood the second time and a 17 year old when I left it for military service. By the time I returned from the Navy, my folks had moved only a mile or so to a new neighborhood where they would live until my stepmom and half-brother were dead, and my dad met, married and moved in with his third wife in a town on the outskirts of Dayton. I lived on Kenview again with my first wife and our first son when I went to college.

The years from the middle of the third grade through the ninth grade kind of crunch together for me, specially the later years when we went on road jobs with my dad for years at a time. I went from a child to a young teen. I dropped bike riding, tee shirts and burr haircuts along the way but can’t pinpoint exactly how old I was when these decisions were made. We began going on road jobs again with my dad when I was in the 6th or 7th grade and they ended after a horrible 9th grade year for me. So I may have been in one place, Dayton, from mid-third to 6th or 7th grade. Things blur together. I’ve written about the movies, girls and games first and foremost, and I’ve recalled as much as I can about those. Much memory is completely out of sequence for me. Since memory is stored with emotions in an unconscious timelessness, I suppose all memory is “out of sequence” for everyone which, I suppose, is reflected in the structure of this Nobody’s autobiography that hits upon themes, then carries them out through the years regardless of the progression of years. On the one hand, I seem to be precocious when it comes to the opposite sex, then I see Dick and Barbara going out on that date and my feeling so very childish, and I wonder what’s the truth of this memory. Anyhow....

Painful as mental drifting is, at least it forces one to escape the conformist rationales of the herd. I was often lonely, standing in the tree line, watching my fellow animals gathered around the campfire, telling themselves the normal stories of the tribe, but that, aloneness, leads to finding a meaning for oneself outside the average tales you don’t hear. Life outside the herd was not my choice but became a vision quest in itself, even if I was not aware that I was on a vision quest until some sort of vision was vouchsafed. There’s a great saying I came across: “You can’t think your way into a new way of living, but you can live your way into a new way of thinking.” And still it’s incomplete. Death’s the final event. The story’s incomplete until the last breath of the speaker’s tale is spent.

A busy morning. After roughing out the last couple of paragraphs at Starbuck’s on Hamilton in Spokane, I dashed over to Cancer Care Northwest where I’m part of the Select Trial for prostate cancer. My dad died of prostate cancer. On the way, I thought about the educational elements that set me up to have the vision I am today. The three realms of thought, study and reading which I think can free a mind to seek a legitimate core of reality are science, the arts and (blending science with art) psychology. And I’ve added to those a “born again” experience which is invaluable to understanding the psychology of the believer.

I didn’t chose that either. My addictions gave it to me because I was told I could not recovery without having some sort of spiritual experience. I was told my recovery depended on my maintaining a spiritual condition, a constant contact with god, so I did what I was told. I had a real born again experience (for later chapters) and it changed me forever but did not make me a religious person in the long run. In fact, I don’t believe in a “spiritual realm” any longer, but I do understand a psychological experience that could be mistaken for a spiritual experience if I were less informed by the arts and sciences. In a clear way, psychology is the dividing line between fundamentalists and more reasonable seekers after the truth. Very few fundamentalist dare to read and understand psychology. It frightens them.

Two incidents at Belmont grade school have added much to my understanding, in my later life, of the psycho/social dimensions of the animal human. I always felt sort of nerdish in school, like someone who didn’t quite belong, but if I was nerdish, it was as a sensitive, intelligent sort of outsider, not as the kind with pocket guards and slide rules, the academic success story.

On the school playground there was, of course, a pecking order. It’s so clear when you think about it. And I was not one of those guys near the top. I picture the guys who were farther up the ladder, but I won’t name names because it’s not their fault they were civilized to get along. Whether or not a pecking order exists is beside the point because I certainly functioned as if this pecking order did exist. It’s so clear that I felt I didn’t belong and that I wanted to belong but didn’t know how. These psychological pressures caused me to behave in some nasty ways. One stands out.

Somewhere on TV or in my reading or at a movie, I learned how to flip attackers who are coming straight at you. You grab them by their wrists or collars and simultaneously fall and roll backward while you stick a foot into their bellies and flip them. They pivot like a hinged cellar door by their wrists and land on their backs to have the wind knocked out of them. One day, I got in a squabble with another kid who I normally liked and played with in the school yard, but he was too much like me, and not a belonger either, and he was even more afraid than me. I was aware that several of the cool guys were watching our squabble which soon escalated into physical violence. My friend charged to wrestle, not fist fight, and I used my new trick to flip him. He landed hard and the wind and fight flew out of him. He cried and gasped, and I felt real bad but also proud to have showed off my cool trick. One of the upper guys in the pecking order told me how cool my trick was, but even as I tried to be glad about the impression my cool trick had made in the pecking order above me, I continued to feel awful at how badly I’d hurt my occasional buddy.

I want readers to hear me straight on this. This student I slammed with my flip was a nice guy, a school yard chum, a pal of mine, but in a moment of weakness, through some meanness in me, some need to belong to the pecking order, to find my place in it, I hurt a friend and humiliated him before the crowd so that I could seem larger in the eyes of my society. Thinking about it over the years makes me understand so much more about poor white trash and their relationship to sharecropper blacks and many other instances, worldwide, of a group of underdogs siding with the “master race” to lift themselves up in their “better’s” eyes.

There is no real joy in joining the “pecking order game” either once you have seen through it. Pecking is so silly and unevolved, but to even try and stand outside of the existing order creates major problems for the ego. Playing superior is just the pecking order in another realm, and the majority of people who don’t play in that realm are only too ready to pull your pants down in a crowd for a laugh. It’s no good to pretend you’re above the fray because an astute conqueror can see right through a sycophant’s ploy. The conqueror can also see right through your attacks on your friends meant to curry favor with him. What the sycophant gets is acceptance for awhile, but later he gets scorn and humiliation because no one respects the person who will turn on friends. The sycophant, when no longer needed, gets the same treatment as those who were less powerful than he. Then he is without friends or friendly powerful enemies.

Only in my current state of mind do I understand that moment in the school yard and see how the pecking order keeps those at the bottom fighting one another to look good in the eyes of the master race while the master race goes on controlling the culture and living comfortably. Aggression is built into the male human animal as we all know and always unleashed toward the weaker. The need to kowtow to the upper pecking orders keeps the lower pecking orders pecking one another. Down the line, the aggression comes, from stronger to weaker, until the very bottom man, defeated on all hands, and knowing himself as a hopeless loser, gets his paper sack and wine bottle and crawls off into a dead end alley to drink, isolated forever from the endless combat and sealing his loser fate unto death.

It takes quite an effort to step free from the combat into another sphere of understanding, and most of us never fully succeed in freeing ourselves from the human animal we’ve evolved into. Many religions try to show us the way out, but in those religions are always those who misinterpret the information and who use the religion as another arena in which to continue to play the animal game of “pecking order” and my piss is a better piss than yours. I have in mind, here, the fundamentalists of all persuasions, in all countries, who insist on being right. By being thus divided, the losers keep themselves and others losers, lashing out at one another instead of joining together to broaden democracy’s base. These losers fail and fail again locked in destructive conflict: men against women, darker color against lighter color, Christian against Jew, atheist versus Moslem, poor against middle class... forever, the animal in us defeats us.... The animal impulse we call competition is keeps the pecking order alive.

In this category of early psychological experience I came to understand later, I put the “incident of the slapped girl”. When I was a kid on Kenview going to school, 4th or 5th grade, a littler girl used to stand in her lawn right down by the sidewalk just around the corner from my house. Many times I passed her and an unspoken communication took place between us, a communication I eventually acted on. A poem I wrote in my 40s tells the whole tale as I experienced it:

THE PASSING

When I was ten,
There was a small girl
Who stood on a lawn
In front of a house.

There she waited each day
On the lawn of her house
On the way from my school
To make eyes that said, “Hit me!”

So one day I did
What they told me to do,
Felt good when she cried
And so she did too.