CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Three Years Digging the Escape Tunnel

I spent my last three years of high school in one school, finally, from age 14 to age 17. I was 14 when school started in my sophomore year and 17 when I graduated June 5th, 1955. Ten days later, I went away to the Navy.

Stivers High School, the Bengals, the Stiver’s Tiger’s, we were, the same school my dad and all his brothers attended. One teacher, Mrs. Coblentz, the geometry teacher, was still there from their years. Her white-haired head shook with palsy but her mind remained sharp. It was Coblentz’s geometry class I mentioned flunking back in Chapter Eight and had to take over.

By this time, I’ve been four or five years with my new stepmom, and I’m deeply embroiled in family dynamics. One time, my stepmom and I are having a fight. We’re in Ohio, but this memory might come from the days when we’re still coming in and out of Dayton on a regular yo yo schedule, during junior high (middle school in some parts of the country). However, I’ll put it here. At some point in our battle, sad, near tears, defeated, I tell my stepmom, “I’m going to run away.” I’m pouting, sitting on the floor, my back against our Naugahyde armchair.

“Good,” she fired back. “I’ll help you pack your bags.”

Bluffed, I sulk. “No! I won’t go.”

“O, yeah? Why?” Her nose is in the air, an attitude of disdainful superiority she often puts on.

“I don’t want to leave my DAD.”

For some reason, I know the firmly stated exclusivity of my supposed love for one parent, her husband, will hurt her. But why? That day I didn’t leave, but, eventually, I did run away. For one day.

I didn’t know where I was going; I just cut out on foot without any bags and no food. I think I read about hobos some place. As I walked, reeling my movie experience into mind, I thought of myself as a “bindlestiff”. I pictured a stick with a bandana tied to it on my shoulder, holding all my supplies, but I didn’t create one. You must know that even though my great escape was in the late 40s or early 50s, the American consciousness was still full of the Depression and hobos. Depression experiences were at the root of the compassion many Americans felt for those less fortunate than they. They all knew that hard times can strike anyone, and that any Nobody can find himself, through no fault of his own, homeless and hungry. We’ve become less compassionate as a nation since then.

I told no one. I just left on the spur of the moment. It was a Saturday morning. I walked and walked. I passed through the fairgrounds near downtown, and I think I went through the stables and looked in awe at some big-eyed horses there. I crossed the Great Miami River on one of the several downtown bridges. I climbed down to the river bed, between the high levees built after the great 1911(?) flood and skipped stones into the shallow, summer waters. I scrambled up the river embankment and walked for more hours, clear out into the country.

I walked down narrow roads with corn ten foot high on either side of me. Well... it seemed that tall. It wasn’t as tall as an elephant’s eye though. In someone’s wood lot, I trudged into deep shadow to pee. I looked around me, at the green brush and tall maples, the bright summer air. I suddenly felt great.

That’s when I decided to turn back. I’d gone far enough to feel empowered, I think. At some point in my walk, I was momentarily freed of the torment which had driven me to this point, and I felt a sense of freedom, knowing that I could go away and walk long distances any time I wanted to. It was a freedom of the road experience that only intensified when I owned a car of my own. I felt less trapped by my home life. I’d run away, no one knew it, and I realized I could do it anytime I felt really trapped. I didn’t have to run away; I just had to get away.

I can’t help mentioning here that my daughter was also a runaway, and when she ran, she ran into an entirely different world than I ran away too. She met perversity and cold streets and drugs. When I think of my runaway, it’s into a safe world, a world full of sunshine, trees and tall corn fields. When I think of my runaway, I smile a bit about it. It smacks of a different age and a different time. Except for the real pain I felt, it’s almost romantic.


I escaped in other ways too. One morning on my way to school, I ran into Jim who later did time and who is part of another incident, one that gets my nose broken. He has some beer and a car, and we spend a little time in a gravel pit, drinking and scrambling around the hills. The details are hazy, but I get to school late and with booze on my breath. The teacher secretly sends a note to the Principal; a student appears and passes a note to the teacher who then tells me that the Principal wants to see me. Very clever.

Stivers was in what we called the hillbilly part of town, a neighborhood in decline. Our Principal knew things about students I had no idea of (I was still naive then, living on the surface) ‘cause he asks me if there are troubles at home. A novel idea to me. Then I picture my evil stepmother, grin, and assure the Principal there are no problems at home. In fact, I really believe what I tell him, but, actually, what confused thirteen or fourteen year old boy of that day, understood what drives boys? Later, when I see “West Side Story” I think of the gangs making fun of the cop who tries to explain them as psychologically troubled kids. They mock the whole idea. Many years later, I read that Bernstein says he wishes he could make some changes in the movie. I believe to this day, he realized that kids were truly troubled by many things and that he’d made a mistake in that scene in which they sing, “Officer Krupke” and mock psychology.

Another high school teacher told me that I was a very bright kid who wasn’t working up to my potential. I recall a blaze of anger that she should lay that on me. Being praised humiliated me in some way. I recall her words clearly, another psychological mystery, but what fourteen year old would know why he was humiliated by praise? I guess I already felt that I was damaged goods in some way, but when I was young and stupid, afraid of psychology and afraid to face the fears that bound me, I agreed with the sentiments of the Krupke song exactly.

At this time, alcohol escape was definitely entering my life. My drinking followed behind more innocent ways of getting high. Recall that I used to jump off grandma’s couch onto my knees to make myself dizzy, and like all kids, I’d spin till I was dizzy. Also, while still 13 or 14, I began to baby-sit a couple of my parents’ friends’ kids while they all played cards next door. I watched Cleveland Browns football games on their black and white TV and smoked unfiltered Chesterfield cigarettes from a box of cigarettes on their coffee table. What a great high that was! The first cigarette I got high, dizzy and almost sick, but later I got the high without the sickness.

At the same time I’m dragging on cigarettes at Carl and Rosemary’s house, I’m sipping Creme de Menthe and Creme de Cocoa from bottles under the family sink. My folks are on a grasshopper kick, a kind of ice cream drink made with those two liquors. Delicious! All my drinking life, I loved to sip a couple of glasses of Creme de Menthe on the rocks after dinner. Once in a while, I partake of the horrible tasting whiskey under the sink, making a wry face, but I’m already getting to the place that I’ll drink anything for the pleasant buzz, the buzz that makes me feel comfortable in my world, more happy than in any normal state of existence. Yes—I do put water in to bring the whiskey bottle up to the mark.

Alcohol had transforming powers for me. One night a couple of us on the way to a football game buy a gallon of 3.2 beer and head for the stadium. The city high school football stadium was by the river on the edge of Dayton. Wooded fields surround the stadium, and we pull into a dirt lane to drink the gallon of beer. We’re on the edge of the wood lot, and, in the glare of stadium lights, we pass the jug around. We all get high and triumphantly enter the stadium. My wit and confidence amaze me. People laugh with me. I can see most of them think I’m pretty rad, smooth, the cat’s meow, cool or nifty. Eventually, I flirt with a young woman I don’t know and charm her so much that she lets me share her blanket with her. The alcohol gave me courage, eased my painfully shy way into her good graces. The rest of the night speeds by. I’m so busy being charming I don’t even know if Stivers won or lost their game. Eventually, as I get more sober, the lady and I realize we have nothing in common and part ways after the game, never to meet again.

At 16 or 17, I find the Arrow Bar in Belmont that isn’t too careful about checking ID. The owner’s first name is the same as my first name. I get to be quite comfortable there. I can’t afford to drink too much so all I ever get is that same old pleasant buzz on, the one that made me fit comfortably into a dizzy and puzzling world. Later on, during a leave from the service, I visited and played Pat Boone’s “Bernadine” on the juke box. I also saw Boone’s “April Love” and liked Boone in it because he, like Dean, also played a juvenile delinquent as they used to be called.

Across the street, a neighbor kid old enough to drink will buy me some beer every now and then. One time, he buys me a whole case so that I can have a party in my basement while my folks are gone on a party which I know will last very late. However, we get too rambunctious down in the basement and break a chair. Also I get so drunk that I’m sick. When my folks come home from their party, my head is spinning in my bed. I have to go upstairs and vomit, so they discover I’m drunk.

My dad is quite amused by my predicament. “Looks like you’re having lots of fun,” he quips as I heave.

My stepmom’s cool fingers hold my forehead while I heave some more. They both think I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t think they ever again catch me drunk or sick until I’m a grown up. Many years later, when I tell my dad I can’t remember them setting me a curfew or anything, he tells me they never had any trouble with me, and I always came home at a reasonable hour and told them what I was up to. I was already developing a brain of two minds or more, two personalities, one in my thoughts and one publicly speaking. I’m sneaky in an honest sort of way.

Speaking of throwing up, I wrote the first story I can remember at this time. In English our assignment was to write a short story. The teacher chose two of us to read our stories aloud to the class. I knew mine was better, but the class voted “hers” to be better. Mine was an original little comedy piece about being in the military and having to eat “by the numbers”. It described biscuits so hard they broke holes in the floor when they rolled off a table and eating utensils lined up with military precision, soldiers sitting at stiff-backed attention awaiting an order to eat. Everything was exaggerated with the culminating scene being the soldiers forced to eat “by the numbers”, faster and faster until “some poor duck” choked on his food and upchucked all over the place. The End! The winning story, I now realize, was a retelling of the “Littlest Angel”. At least my tale was an original.


Another escape for me was to get out of sharing a room with my little brother. For some time I slept in our unfinished attic, but that was very cold in winter. No heat up there, no insulation between the roof and the attic. There was some sheeting on the floor, over partially exposed insulation, and I did have a feather quilt, and I got so that I enjoyed sleeping with my nose and cheeks chilled while my own body heat warmed me adequately under the quilt. During summer, when the attic was too hot to bear, I slept in the unfinished basement, first under the stairway until spiders got to me, then in the middle of the basement on a rug my folks put down to make the place seem just a little bit cozy.

One time in the basement, I awoke in the middle of the night to a tickling sensation on my tongue and lips. As I lurched rapidly into consciousness, I spit a water bug from my mouth and rose to turn on the light. Shiny black water bugs scampered everywhere on the floor, specially thick near the drain behind the washtubs where they lived. Revolted, I began a campaign against the black horde, turning off the lights for awhile while I sat on my bed, bat in hand. Then, quick, I flicked on the light and smashed them with the tip of my bat. I killed them by the hundreds, winning many battles over many nights, slaying them as they retreated to the drain, but I could never win the war. I covered the floor with their oozing white guts, but I never defeated them permanently. There were too many of them. The greatest weapon of the water bug army is the womb of the water bug woman.

Sleeping in the basement became an uneasy proposition, but my alternatives remained sharing a room with my kid brother or broiling in the attic summers. I continued to escape into movies at this time also. Recently, I was walking through the machine shop on evening shift where I worked until a week ago when I retired. I sang bits of show tunes, joyously, at the top of my voice. I suddenly realized how many fragments of broadway show tunes I did know, how inescapably they were lodged in my mind. I’d just read about the rise of musicals on Broadway after the Good War, shows like “Oklahoma” and “Carousel”, “Show Boat” and “South Pacific”. Those shows developed a whole new way of relating music to story lines. Their music was intimately related to the story line, and the story was not just an opportunity to introduce song and dance routines like the old black and white musicals.

By the 1950s those Broadway shows appeared as wide screen, blockbuster movies in an attempt to ward off small screen TV. Singing that night at the shop, I suddenly realized how much I had enjoyed many of those musicals and how much a part of my teens and twenties they truly were: musicals like “Gigi”, “Singing In the Rain”, “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, later “Porgy and Bess” one of my all time favorites, “Sound of Music”, my wife’s favorite, and “West Side Story”. Musicals specifically from my high school years were “An American In Paris”, “Kiss Me Kate”, “Seven Brides For Seven Brothers”, “The Student Prince” with Edmund Perdom lip-syncing for, too chubby to play the part, Mario Lanza, and Gene Kelly’s “Brigadoon”.

How can I ever forget “Brigadoon”? When I was in the Navy, stationed on Antigua in the British West Indies, one week our supply ship didn’t get in, was probably delayed by a Caribbean storm front. So for five or six days, the only movie we had to watch that I remember was “Brigadoon”, and being the movie buff I am and not having an awful lot to do with my time on Antigua (I never got into the toothless hag who waited outside the main gate to give two buck blow jobs through the fence), I must have sat through that film four or five times. Seriously! Ahhh, escape to a simpler time and place! Already a movie theme after my own heart.

I loved almost any movie type you could throw at me: at the same time I was being danced off my feet by musicals in high school, I was taking in the serious dramatic fare which eventually won out in my psyche over the image of a man dancing in the rain on a faked Parisian street:

1952 High Noon
1953 Shane
1954 The Wild One
1954 On The Waterfront
1955 East of Eden
1955 Rebel Without a Cause

1955 Oklahoma (I mention this musical again and in this short list because I identified with Judd as portrayed by the recently deceased, Rod Steiger. Later in life that scene, when Judd is mocked and humiliated and tricked to sing “Poor Judd” by the “hero”, came to represent for me the cruel psychic state that exists between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I’ve felt like the prole, Judd, more than once in my own life. Even as I write this, I can recall some of the shame for my roots that grew in me as I educated myself in my feelings for Judd, the simple unsophisticate. I think I see why Steiger who was also a prole in his roots could be so effective in the role of Judd. In his life, Steiger was a Judd too, and I just recently read a Steiger biography which revealed, for me, his constant battle with himself for recognition. He always looked for approval outside himself, trying always to pretend that he didn’t care. Well, I understand that struggle. I don’t think Steiger ever effectively made it to the inside where the real battle for proles like us can ever be effective.)

1955 Blackboard Jungle (The most powerful scene for me in that movie is the one in which the teacher with the collection of jazz records is beaten up while rampaging students smash his priceless collection. I could not imagine anything more devastating than having a treasured item destroyed by uncaring thugs. Here, I think I was identifying with the bourgeoisie. My emotional roots drifted all over the place in those days, and I certainly was not up to understanding the psychological subtlety of ambivalence either.)

1955 Marty (Another personality I could identify with. Not criminal, but a complete nerd, his shyness killed me. I felt so much like Marty when he and the gang are standing around trying to decide what to do. “What do you want to do, Marty.” I stood around too, bored, on neighborhood street corners with listless friends. O, man, did I want to escape! Also Marty’s mother was as much of a tyrant as my stepmother, so I could identify with that Marty all right.)


My stepmother always said that the Navy changed me for the worse, but I think the change commenced with those darker movie themes when I truly began to understand that the world was a cruel place and didn’t, at the same time, know what a man or woman was supposed to do with that knowledge of the world. I suppose at the time I assumed some hypothetical superbeing would take care of everything in an imaginary afterlife.

I discovered a few more habits of escape that were slightly dangerous but not so self-destructive as booze, unless I slipped. Not too far from my house, a water tower, surrounded by a ten foot high fence, had been built in the middle of a city park. On warm summer nights, when no breeze blew near the ground, I’d climb over the fence and up the steel ladder to the top of the tower. From the top, since the tower was close to the peak of that Wayne Avenue hill where Wesley crashed his bike, I could look out over the glittering of city lights and, usually, a breeze could be found up there to cool my sweaty cheeks. I felt very powerful up there, master of all the world I surveyed. I wiled away hours, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.

One time I got foolhardy on that tower. At the seam where the top half of the tower connected to the bottom half, a foot wide, steel flange ran around the tower. About 50 feet from the ground, I’d say. For most of the way around the tower, a metal conduit about shoulder high to the flange carried electrical wire to power the lights at the top of each of the eight legs of the tower. One night, to show off, I set off to circle the tower on that ledge, sliding my feet, stomach against the cool metal, hanging on to the metal conduit. Then, seven-eighths of the way around the tower, I came to a place between the last two legs where the conduit ended. Carefully, I stretched my right leg around the tower stanchion and most of my body. There I stopped because I realized that once I brought my left leg around the stanchion too and let go of the conduit, I’d be trapped on the ledge with no conduit to hold onto and would need to make a long reach to grasp the conduit and stretch a leg around the stanchion at the other side. A cold sweat directed me to go back where I could safety cling to the conduit. Needless to say, I never became a mountain climber either. I was not my Uncle Dick.

Later, a local TV affiliate (Channel 7) built a tower and station about five blocks from my Kenview home. People could freely go in, sit on cloth-covered seats like in a movie theater and watch local programming being put on from their sound stage. There wasn’t a lot of local programming except news. Most of the time, we’d watch network television on a TV monitor in the soundproof room, and it was not much more fun than being at home, watching TV. But, can you imagine having almost unlimited free access to a local station in this day and age?

One night, in a mood to show off, I told my friends I was going to climb that TV tower. I could get at least twice as high as on the water tower. Then Vince and I went to climbing the security fence around the tower and clambering up the tower ladder every once in awhile for the thrill of it. Some people didn’t believe we’d done it. I got the idea to find a sheet and plant it up there like a flag to show what we’d done. Vince stole a sheet from his house, and we hung it up there, and it stayed there a week or so before someone took it down. We proudly pointed it out to our friends who wouldn’t believe we’d climbed the tower.

Vince was another good and Catholic friend, an Italian, one of 16 children born to a union official. His house bulged with brothers and sisters, mostly sisters. I don’t recall ever being attracted to any of Vince’s sisters. Vince was the toughest of the four of us. Sometimes, we called him Vince. Even the name suggests toughness. He was dark-haired and, later, had the good fortune to be a passenger in my first automobile accident. He, like so many of my closest friends, went to Chaminade High School, the parochial school. Many of my pals on Kenview went to Chaminade.

Bob, my very closest high school friend, went to Patterson Cooperative High School where students worked and went to school at the same time. He owned a car, a Chevy. Don’t ask me what model it was or its horsepower or how much he’d customized it, nor what kind of carburetor it ran on. I cared not at all about such things since I didn’t own a car of my own. My folks wouldn’t sign for me to get a license. Bob did have a knob on the steering wheel and a nice shifter knob too as I remember. None of his auto details are clear to me, but I was the guy who rode shotgun in his car, always. We were best of buds.

Bob’s dad, like so many dads in my neighborhood, like Joe’s union dad, was a friendly, beer bellied, multiple pack a day smoking, working stiff during the time when blue collar, working stiffs in factories were the glorious middle class, fast disappearing now. Their good paychecks allowed them to buy homes, campers, vacations, big cars, electric appliances, porch awnings and swings, barbecue grills, lawn mowers, the first TV sets, and steak and eggs for the table. Their paychecks painted the houses and planted the green lawns and brilliant flower gardens that made my neighborhood seem so orderly, comfortable and safe. Their taxes paid for my K-12 schooling and eased my college debt by subsidizing higher education. They kept the buses running so that I could ride down to that free NCR Saturday morning movie and stage show for kids.

Bob’s dad died of heart failure caused by emphysema. Eventually, I ran screaming from that nightmare heaven I felt was smothering me. Think about Todd Haines’ movie, “Far From Heaven”, and you know what I felt about middle class life as I experienced it. I think my mom’s genes have got something to do with it. My dad seemed perfectly at home in that milieu, but it nearly killed my mom. Right now, at this moment, I’m very sad about what has disappeared from America that was my youth, but nothing is sacred. Who cares what I think? Youth comes marching on, the endless DNA of life, pouring out of the womb. What’s immediately pressing in a youth’s life today will become fodder for her nostalgia tomorrow. The generations pass blindly by to an alert observer. Those who don’t know history are like the flies of the summer, focused on the manure pile by the backyard fence. My goal has been to let go of the past, stay in the now. It’s healthier, I think, to live in a bitter reality and to know the lessons of history rather than to clutch to the dregs of the past. A knowledge of history adds balance to the moment, but the moment, informed by the past, is all there is.

I’ve recently come to think that having all my closest friends in different high schools than the one I attended, just like moving around a lot, helped isolate me from my peer group. Even the girl I went steady with in high school wasn’t from Stivers. She was a Catholic girl who went to the all girl Julienne High School. Until graduation prom, I never attended a school dance. I never ran for office nor joined any club but the “breakfast club”. I did run track and lettered in it in my junior year, but the reason why I did that has only recently become clear to me. Running track became another form of escape from “a sexy stepmother in the house”.

I wasn’t popular nor unpopular as far as I can tell. I was a class clown in some of my classes. I didn’t get to know many people well in my own school. In my journalism class, I spent a good part of my time in the hall. That was part of my legend with school acquaintances. It has been a life long habit of mine to use outlandish behavior to put up a wall between me and those I come into contact with. I think of it as “relationship by misdirection”, like in magic shows. Call attention to my silly self so I don’t have to reveal anything serious. Even in Belmont school, where we ate sack lunches in the auditorium, I’d get up on stage and pretend to fall off of it. And a couple of times, I’d stand near the curtain and have a compatriot reach under the curtain, grab me by my ankles, and, as I did a face down fall, he’d pull me under the curtain. I got that from Uncle Miltie, I think. We got laughs and my pants got dirty, but I didn’t have to sit near anybody and hold intimate chats. I seem to myself, now, all show and no substance then, full of psychological avoidance tactics. By standing out, I didn’t have to stand close.

Cars were one of my first splits from the norm as well as fishing and hunting. My folks didn’t trust me to drive and wouldn’t sign for me to get a license. My dad didn’t work on cars or hunt and fish, so, naturally, I had little interest in them either. Now, in gatherings of average American males, I have little to talk with them about unless they show an interest in literature or films or psychology or history.

For awhile, when I played recreational sports, I was interested in professional sports. Nowadays, I’m pretty detached from sports too. Too many teams, too much money for athletes when teachers get nothing. Probably, my last real interest in sports is with March Madness, but if college players keep jumping teams to go pro, then my allegiance for that last college sport will wane too. I just can’t be loyal to people who make so much more money than I do. I don’t identify.

I don’t blame my father for my plight. He was just being himself, a golfer. Besides, if I wanted to learn about the guy things, I could have. I did fish in the Gulf for awhile in the South, and I had the example of a guy who also knew nothing about cars, but he got himself a Volkswagen bus, a complete book about it, tore it apart completely and put it back together. He knew about cars after that. I know another writer, not a Nobody, who got a young hunter and student of his to take him hunting to learn about that, and who, also, built himself a log cabin, even cutting down his own logs.

Though I think of myself now as an outsider and imagine I acted like an outsider, I was certainly also trying to be a part of my time. I recall a favorite outfit of mine was blue suede shoes, black chino pants and I had a hot pink, ribbed shirt with a wire-stiffened collar that would stand up behind my neck just like Elvis’s collars. Drive-ins (theaters and restaurants), cars, deejays and wrestling were big time concerns, just like in these retrograde early 2000s. The early Fifties were a horribly repressive and conservative time. You could be hauled before Congressional Committee for thinking differently than the majority.

I was about twelve when I figured out that wrestling was bogus, but the major figure of my time, like Hulk Hogan a few years back, was Captain America. He wore a big permanent of curly, silver blond hair piled atop his head and was always the good guy. I think the wrestling I watched was out of Chicago? Did he wear a cape? Don’t recall. I’ll say this: wrestlers nowadays are certainly more athletic than wrestlers from my day. The tricks they do, the bounding, leaping and jumping off rope tops are very demanding so I gotta grant them athleticism.

The top DJ of our time in Dayton was Howard (?). I can’t remember his last name. Only ten years back, I could remember his name. Kids loved him, but I don’t think my feelings were that strong. He took requests and spun records. His theme song was Glen Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”. When Howard was killed in a car wreck, the station swore never again to play his theme song on the air. Yeah, like suuuure.

Kids all over the city mourned his death. Many years later, I wondered if alcohol was involved. Back then, details like that might not reach the papers in order to “protect” kids from the truths of life. One of the major things I finally began to accept in the 60s and 70s was that horrible things have always been a part of life, but the human animal likes to pretend he’s safe until the child molester is in his own child’s bed or the murderer’s ax is in her forehead. A brilliant friend of mine used to say that 85% of the people live in reality only 5% of he time. Perhaps, if we animals didn’t put out of our brains how violent and chancy life is, we would not be able to act effectively. We’d crouch in our caves with fear. Still, how stupid our fears make some of us. How sadly true I think it is that most people don’t live in reality very much (afraid of it) but must cloud up reality with addictions to religion, booze or sex or anything like them by which we avoid the immediacy of our emotional lives.

But I understand escape too because I also chose escape for a great deal of my life. Life used to seem unbearable. I escaped into alcohol or sex, I lived in constant pain and stress. I felt I just had to change the world so that life on earth would feel more comfortable and safe to me. Nowadays, I accept, for the most part, that life is pretty terrible most of the time for most of the people on the globe, but I don’t feel so guilty anymore. I do the best I can and try to help out when an opportunity presents itself. By helping one near me, I help the larger world out there. I can’t forget what Thoreau tells me in Walden about not trusting the do-gooder, the one with the big plans for the world, the one who sees evil everywhere, and wants all of us to take up his solution. Yes, we got to watch out for the religiously stern, taskmaster, fixer upper who offers us peace on earth if we’ll only put ourselves in his hands.

Actually, though I see the world as a pretty grim place, each person on the globe probably acclimates herself as best she can to the conditions she finds herself in and makes happiness wherever she can find it. In that way, happiness is relative. Almost everything is an escape from the reality of our mortality, a way to ignore the implications of life to our animal selves.


One or two songs stand out big time for me from my teen years. “Crying In The Chapel” (Les Paul and Mary Ford), “P.S. I Love You” (?), “You Belong To Me” (?), “Unchained Melody” (?) and just before I graduated, Bill Hailey’s “Rock Around The Clock” seemed a new era for American music. I was no Elvis fan. I think I didn’t like Elvis because women liked him, and I was the jealous type. Musically, sometimes I’ve felt like Travis in “Taxi Driver” who knew nothing about music, but there I go again, seeing myself in larger than life terms when all I am is a Nobody. I’m just an average American male with a story to tell. I know a lot more about music than Travis does and a great deal less than many of my peers. I wouldn’t take a classy, first date to a porno flick like Travis does, but I might take her to a foreign flick with some nudity in it. To test her, to find out if we’re compatible, if she’s got a healthy attitude about life. But, in fact, like every Nobody on the globe, I’m a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Over and over, I find out I’m nothing special.

Our neighborhood drive-in was a Frisch’s Big Boy. I later learned that Big Boys are all over America with different franchise names. In Louisiana there are Schonenberg’s Big Boys. Out west, I ran across Azar’s Big Boys. Hope I got those names right. Bob and I spent hours, standing around in Frisch’s parking lots and, sometimes, inside, grouped around a table with others till the wee hours when they closed. People my age know all about this drive-in thing, and younger people I’m sure have seen enough movies about diners to understand.

A fairly sizable group of guys and gals used to gather at Frisch’s, but I only remember Vince, Bob and his car and me... and, of course, Henry.

Henry, or Hank, was a style guy, a preppie, I guess you’d call him now, and some other name by the time you read this. Blond, longish burr hair cut, he wore ties and pullover sweaters to Chaminade High School, and he was not always quick to get out of them when school was over. He was a brown sort of guy, an earth tone man. I don’t remember him being a jeans wearer. His voice was deep and soft and had a lot of smile in it. In fact, he smiled a lot and appeared mature beyond his years.

We listened to “Istanbul” inside that Frisch’s and Peggy Lee’s “Manana”. We had our crushes on the short skirted carhops like every American guy. We flirted with them, and I tried to get Bob to park in the stations of my favorites, but I never took one out. “American Graffiti” tells the tale for all of us 50s and early 60s kids. When I exited the Navy in 1958, I was out of the drive-in loop, but drive-ins and carhops were on the way out anyway, and, now, they’re dead as a doornail except as nostalgia places that pop up now and then, here and there, only to sink once again beneath the waves of public consciousness like a Great White.