CHAPTER THREE

The Earliest, Itty-Bitty, Most Terrible Memories

Used to be I thought my earliest memories came from around the age of four years old, in St. Louis Mo. when my folks decided to get divorced, but, recently, I seem to be recalling even earlier memories, from Dayton, and I’m having trouble deciding which is the very first. Two memories stand out. One memory is a very specific one of pain and a second is of fear. I think the fearful memory is my earliest memory, other than the purely neural transcendental recall of birth pang experiences.

Another early memory is of a tavern, but that tavern seems to be a concatenation of memories, of a place, Brun’s Tavern, and of delicious thick-sliced, cold-onion-covered prewar hamburgers they served there which, like all fantasy memories, have never been duplicated for taste and pleasure.

My reading teaches me that one’s first authentic memory must be a recall that is not based on a photograph or other memory trigger. The memory must arise spontaneously from the brain as something one’s own. So, in my second earliest memory, the one of pain, I’m peddling a trike in daylight. I think we are heading home from Brun’s Tavern because we are coming from that direction. I don’t remember who is with me, mom or dad. They both went to Brun’s with me; they both drank.

We’ve just rounded the corner, turned left onto Kenview Avenue where my home is located. My keeper is behind me, and I’m peddling to beat the band when the right toe of my white shoe catches in the spokes of the front wheel. My ankle twists and the pain is real bad. I and the trike topple to the right onto the grass berm between sidewalk and street. I’m crying very hard. I’m in pain, and for some reason the person with me is not happy. They pick me up and take me home, and I’m afraid because we’re leaving the bike behind. I refuse to ride it, and they won’t carry it, and all this is very frightening. I want my bike. I hurt. They’re taking me away from my beloved bike upon which I can feel as free as a child my age can feel. Help. Help!

That’s my second memory, I think, almost as far back as I can go, a memory of pain and fear and parental disapproval. The parental disapproval may only be a misinterpretation of feelings which are uncomfortable and which I don’t understand. After all, kids experience others feelings pretty intensely and feel disapproval when, perhaps, there is only discomfort in the person interacting with them. I am either late two or early three in this memory, I believe.

The earliest memory of my life now enters in darkness and fear. I think I can say this is definitely at two. The terrible twos are upon me, and I’m stubborn like a two year old in this memory. I don’t think I’m big enough to be pedaling a trike because I’m sitting on somebody’s lap in a movie house, and I’m carried around a lot. In this memory I never know who I am with, but I believe it’s my parents. On screen, a nighttime storm whips trees and bushes. Somebody hides in the wind-whipped bushes to watch a house with brightly lit windows. Then we’re magically inside the house where a party or dinner is going on.

Everybody, like everybody was in those early movies (we’re talking late 1930s here), is dressed in fancy evening clothes, gowns and tuxedos. They chat and are clever I imagine. I don’t know for certain, but as I watched later films, more mature, I know that’s what always goes on in these dinner party flicks, these gowned and tuxedoed films.

It must be a weekend at a summer place because now everyone is going upstairs to go to bed. An older man and a young woman talk about something outside one of the doors in a hallway at the top of the stairs. I think he gives her a gun. Then she goes into her room and retires for the night.

Her room’s dark now, but the young woman is awake and staring at a full length mirror attached to the closet door. From out of the mirror, a pair of glowing white eyes approach. The woman screams and now has a gun which she fires at the mirror. We hear glass shatter. Lights up! People rush into her room, and now they have my full attention. But they find nothing.

Later we’re at a lawn party with japanese lanterns. People are wandering around. Our young woman, I think it’s the same woman from the room who fired the gun, wanders away and goes to a drinking fountain and steps on its peddle. She sinks into the earth. Now that’s pretty scary, sinking into the ground like that! Next she’s under the earth in a small cave from which tunnels radiate like spokes in a wheel. And sure enough, those two glowing eyes are approaching down one of those tunnels towards our young woman.

Okay! That’s enough! I begin to scream for real. They can’t shush me up or take the terror away. Finally, someone lifts me and hurries me up the aisle. But whoever has me doesn’t want to miss the best part so they try to stand at the back of the theater. We’re out of the tunnel now and back at the lawn party. I’m a little calmer. The person holding me is kissing my cheek and sort of rocking and turning with me. A man on screen looks for the lady, I think. Maybe things will be okay. I watch carefully, nervously. But he also goes to the water fountain and sinks into the earth.

My whole body perks up now. He’s in the small cave too where the woman ended up. No eyes yet, but I damn sure know they’re coming so I scream and cry at the top of my lungs. The person who holds me doesn’t want to leave, but I’m firm on this one. You will take me out! You will take me out! I’m not speaking, but my whole body has the language of terror going for it. My screams bother everyone in the theater, and I won’t be shut up. I’m really certain about this. I have to get out of here! You can’t make me stay!

I win. My terror trumps the caretaker’s curiosity. We’re in the lobby now and I’m safe. It’s late afternoon because the sun slants weakly through the windows. The person with me is not happy to be missing the flick. I’m such trouble.

I think we’re in the lobby of the ? Theater. It’s not Loew’s. That was on Main Street farther west. And not the Victory which was almost across the street from Loew’s, nor the Paramount which was on a cross street to Main Street. This theater of the horror movie was one block west of Main and about five blocks south of it. Seriously, I know exactly where the theater is and can see it in my mind, but I don’t remember its name. I broke up with a woman in a small cafe right next door, actually connected by a door to the theater lobby, soon after I got out of the Navy. I used to eat lunch in that cafe occasionally when I worked as a window decorator for Metropolitan Clothing. Had I married that woman instead of the one I did, my life might have followed a different course. Maybe not. I always imagine she’d have been tougher on me and forced me to communicate. With a knack for real heart to heart communication, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble. But, as with all speculation, perhaps not!

So that’s my two earliest memories. Pain and terror and an assertion of my will.


Friendly people cooked and worked at Brun’s. No bad feelings associate with my thoughts of this place in my childhood. And the hamburgers with a thick slice of onion on them were delicious. I sit up at the counter beside my mom or dad and I eat this delicious hamburger and I also think I must eat hot, crispy french fries too and have a chocolate malt or fountain coke to wash them down. My mother takes me there in the daytime so she can get out of the house. She’s a free spirit and her artistic genes fight it out in my body with my dad’s more conservative ones.

Memories of later times remind me that when I am old enough to drink there, Brun’s was for a long time a white frame building with a peaked roof and a left-slanted concrete slab porch that ran the length of the front out of parallel with the building proper. You entered the tavern through a creaky screen door onto an unvarnished, unpainted wooden floor of narrow tongue and groove boards. You had to go down in the basement to go to the toilet. Strangely, in retrospect, several weeks after writing this chapter, while toweling off after a shower, I realize that I have clear memories of the tavern at that time of my life, sitting at the bar, eating burgers, the wooden floor, etcetera, but I have no memories of the interior of my home. The tavern is more real than my home.

I can recall my home on Kenview Avenue too, but, like the tavern, I have so many later memories of the house, it’s impossible to find a specific early memory of my time there. That frame house, with a porch on the right, a bay window in the middle and a chimney on the left side, was built by my maternal grandfather who was a contractor, a trucker and a farmer among other things, in collaboration with my father who put every free moment of his time, weekends and evenings, into getting that house built so he and mom could move out from living with his maternal grandparents. I lived in, moved from and back into that house many times in my youth. The house cost $4500 dollars. Years later I sold it for $18,000 to pay my school debts and help with my graduate education.

Our house is the first house built in the new plat on the outskirts of Dayton in the Belmont area. Beautiful Hill, the plat is carved not far back from the lip of the shallow Miami Valley, out of a recently purchased farm. In fact, the farmhouse remains on the corner of the new street. Sidewalk and street are there, and the Nobody house is built three lots away from the tall two story farmhouse. As I grew in that house, I watched the edge of the city and farmland beyond retreat from a five minute walk to get there, to a ten minute bike ride and eventually to a 30 minute car ride. You probably can’t get there from the house now.

This house would come into my possession when I turned 21 because, after the divorce, the families couldn’t decide what to do with the house which both families had a hand in building, so they gave it to me in trust at my 21st birthday. When I got it in October, 1958, the house was paid for and $2,100 bucks had accumulated in a bank account for me. Mom told me that there should have been much more money in savings, and that my stepmother and father who lived in it for ten years ought to have paid a higher rent than they did.

My mother’s bitterness was still alive after all those years, the bitterness between the Republican family and the Democrats which still surrounds me today, June 16th 2003, as I write this very sentence. The house was built to save a marriage, I’m told later. The marriage was already in trouble and the families were at each others throat. I am told about one confrontation in which an uncle holds my maternal grandpa in the kitchen of this marriage-saving house while another uncle hits him. In a novelistic attempt to write my autobiography, I invent a reason for this battle, but all I really know is that it happened, a dustup in the kitchen between the Republicans and the Democrats.

Of course I also understand how the truth gets distorted. Perhaps my uncle was only trying to stop the fight and happened to be pulling my maternal grandfather back from the fight when another uncle swung at him and hit him. Maybe, it wasn’t meant to be a hold and slug moment, but grandfather would not know this, and he could very well imagine that one Nobody held him while another Nobody hit him. Since he later retired at 55 after a successful career as a builder, selling a 1000 units to do so, he would naturally be offended by being ganged up on by a couple of Nobodys.

The two Nobody uncles involved were, of course, the wild, later to be paratrooper and the 2nd oldest angry one who converted to Catholicism when he married my Catholic aunt who later joined Alanon when he, like the youngest, began to enjoy his cups too much. Right down the line to me, you can see the working class Nobodys enjoying their alcohol. So much for now for Dayton, Ohio where I was born and have my earliest real memory.


The next and severely traumatic memories commence in St. Louis after the Second World War has begun. My dad worked there because that’s where work was as America began to climb out of the Depression. All my life I remembered and told of a tall, seven or eight story, red brick apartment building. Then while I attended graduate school in Carbondale, Illinois in the mid-60s, I drove my first wife north to try and find this apartment building which I knew was right across from Marlon Perkin’s St. Louis Zoo. My wife and I found it, but the building was only three stories high, so, like all neighborhoods of childhood, it is smaller in truth than it is in fantasy. The same experience I have when I see Kenview Avenue where I did some more of my growing up. We played full out softball on its wide streets (and only broke a window once) which now seem only wide enough for bowling.

Our apartment was on Mac Arthur Street. I knew I had found the right building because I called my dad soon after and established that I was on the right street. I also remember a drug store across the street because I see in memory my mother dashing across the street to use the phone there. We’re talking the early 40’s here, and phones aren’t just everywhere. I am watching from high above, through the window, and no one is in the apartment with me. I can feel the emptiness behind me in the room as she disappears into that door.

My mother was beautiful, with a terrific figure when young and long blond hair and she had a throaty voice, deep and golden. A scar cuts across her left cheek. From a farming accident, I think. She’s very artistic. During her life, she sang with dance bands, modeled, played clarinet with the Dayton Philharmonic, tried drawing and interior decoration. The last part of her life, she worked with the St. Petersburg, Florida Chamber of Commerce in its promotion department. She was very cultured and charming and clinging and sensitive, perfect for that sort of work. I only visited twice down there, once on a mad drunk dash with a Mobile, Alabama associate named Preacher and again with my second wife.

Mom and her third husband, M—, lived in a one story, I want to say “white stucco” house in St. Petersburg, well and tastefully decorated by my mother. Reflecting her youth, I think, in the 1920s, she liked Oriental decoration and prints, gold and blacks.

Mom appreciated my poetry and drawing attempts whereas my father didn’t. But that awareness all comes later. Suffice it to say, that they were not at all compatible, and I believe their genetic contributions to me have battled it out in me all my life and that my father, who raised me after the divorce, could see my mother in me and resented the memory of her in me all my life. I know he did not understand or appreciate me as I wanted to be appreciated for my creative and wild side anymore than he appreciated her even though he loved her all his life.

When I was younger I would be saying this with a lot of self-pity. Now I’m stating it as a sad fact. Well I remember an evening in either St. Paul or Minneapolis, Minnesota (we lived in both cities during one period of a couple of years because dad worked road jobs a lot; he liked the extra money). Dad came home drunk to his second wife, my evil stepmother. Lying on his back sideways across the bed (I stood at its foot, about 12 or 13 years old), he was letting my stepmom pull his pants off. He suddenly looked at me and slurred, “I love her, you know?”

I was confused, that’s all I recall of emotion, and I asked, “Who?”

And he said, “Your mother.”

He said this right in front of my stepmother. I now imagine, just at the moment of writing this, he might have said “loved” instead of “love”, but I heard it and have remembered it all my life as “love her”. Was it any wonder, then, that my stepmom had a bit of a beef with me? And why was my dad trying to tell me this at this particular moment, when he was drunk, when I’m reaching puberty, when I’m already having sexual fantasies about his wife, my stepmother, who is quite codependent? Had they been fighting? Was he sensing in me some loneliness for a missing mother or was he trying to make an explanation of the divorce between he and my mother?

Being drunk often causes painful and ill-considered remarks to come flying up out of deep memory and through the lips from a guilty conscience. I was drunk when in close cross-questioning from my first wife, I admitted that, yes, I’d had an affair a year or so before, just blurting it out after a year of carrying it around with me. But I’ll get to that later in this Nobody’s autobiography.

Dad also let me in on the suffering and bitterness he felt right after the divorce. He moved to Waterbury, Connecticut after the divorce, giving me over to the care of my fraternal grandparents, to work in the making of bombs and shells. He used to have the fuse of a brass shell, cut apart so as to view the innards, lying around the house when I was young. He told me that he’d run around with his buddies in New York City on the weekends, drinking and being very bitter about women. Women were plentiful; it was the war. He recalls at least one time, maybe more, that he threw his hotel room key into the middle of the table and challenged some woman to come up for sex. He told this as something to be ashamed of. He wasn’t proud of it. He beat himself up over a lot of things that, nowadays, are quite understandable. Part of my life’s struggle was to try and free myself of my middle-class, Welsh, working man sensibility which I think can kill. I have only partly succeeded.

In NYC my dad was part of that big war time party. He danced live to the big bands, the Dorseys, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw, Goodman; you name the band, they were there, and he danced to them. I have always liked big bands myself. Somehow that music got passed through to me, just like the bedrock, hard times, hobo driven depressive feel of the Depression, even though they were not mine, of my generation. Then he met my stepmother in Waterbury, and he danced with her to those tunes and times, and he stopped throwing his keys into the middle of the table. She was eighteen, Italian, dark-haired, big-busted and trim-waisted and he was about twenty-six.

When I was kid and began my movie watching career, almost all movies seemed set in New York City or Chicago, gangster movies and miracle movies, musicals, etcetera. All soldiers departed from Grand Central Station or lunched at the Waldorf Astoria with the woman they’d just met while on leave. Of course, Tennessee Williams gave us plays which became movies set in the South too, “The Rose Tattoo” for example in Key West, Florida and “Night of the Iguana” set farther south than that in the bosom of Ava Gardner.

Hey, though! In my imagination only that one grand city existed for me with its Broadway and Times Square, the Great White Way. In my teens and later, I thought I was going to go to NYC and become a famous author in black and white. I was going to be on the Johnny Carson Show. That is, when I wasn’t going to become a farmer or miner and work my butt off, just a down home guy with wife and kids, picket fence and Budweiser. What other dreams were there for a middle class American like me? My dreams were either all or nothing, huge or tiny, of success or failure. I couldn’t imagine a middle ground which was truly my real stomping ground. The ambition was my reel stomping ground.

Those were my dreams of New York, of the Babe and Broadway. Now I’ve got to return to St. Louis, Missouri where this Nobody is serving his time in life at three and four. I know the war has come because of two clear memories. The apartment has an alcove off the living room, and in the alcove behind a heavy, dark green curtain suspended on brass rings is my crib. Yes, slats, I’m looking through slats. I’m probably too old for a crib, but my folks are just rising out of their Depression era financial situation. It’s the very late 1930s, they’re newly moved to this famous midwestern city (Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis. Or Judy). Maybe the war has begun. America is at least beginning to sell lots of war materials to Britain, thus dad’s job, so why waste a perfectly good, huge crib with plenty of leg room? In my recall I have my legs shoved out in front of me, and I’m playing with very small army trucks, driving them over the hills and valleys of my crumpled blanket. The army trucks are dark, military green, and the fake canvass tops are the same green color. Star shaped insignia are glued on the sides and tops. I don’t recall owning soldiers yet.

The second memory of war is a fantasy I play out with the dining room chairs which are tall, dowel-backed mahogany chairs. The dining room has a window out one wall of the building. I think we’re in a corner apartment because no window opens out the other wall but lots of windows stretch across the living room. The dining room is an L off the living room. Through a dining room door is the kitchen where my mother cooks while I play on the floor in the dining room. On a shelf beneath the silverware drawer beside the sink she keeps the box of glazed donuts. One day I polish off a whole box of donuts when she isn’t watching.

My staging for the war game is quite elaborate. I place one chair face down with its back up and facing to the front, like a fighter plane nose. The second chair is also placed face down but its back points the opposite direction with its legs interlocking with the first chair. Another chair is placed with its back on the floor. There’s a gap between the back of the second chair and the seat of the third chair so I can climb into the cockpit. Its seat is my back rest; its dowels my uncomfortable seat. A fourth chair is face down, back up like the second chair in the nose of the plane, its legs interlocking with the legs of my cockpit chair. This is my fighter plane, and I’m at war, getting in and out of the cockpit, like I must imagine fighter pilots do. I do not remember having seen any war movies at this time nor of having any reason to imagine this combat stuff, but I’m sure my parents took me to gobs of movies. My mother loved them, and the Battle of Britain must have been on the newsreels of the day. I’m three or four. It’s nearing 1941, and that’s when my parents’ divorce comes to me, crippling in on wings of flame, the screams and yells of the dying.

(Now I think, “Coming in on the wings of a prayer....” and look out the window of the coffee house where I, atheist, write this, but all the nostalgia, most of the pain is worked through so I feel only a vague puzzlement. Everyone is really dead now. Only the reel remains and I still go to lots of movies.)

This memory of my waking up crying to a raging battle between my parents is my own memory too. No photograph or story by my parents triggered it. It was a vague memory most of my life. I didn’t put much stock in it, and most of the time it remained unrecalled. All I remember is waking up crying and that my parents are yelling at each other on the other side of the dark green curtain which was pulled shut at night and open during the day. Someone comes through the curtain to get me out of my crib bed, lifts me and carries me in to sit on the couch. That’s it.

Not long before my father died, I asked him if he remembered that moment from my childhood. “Yes,” he told me, “I do. That was the night your mom and I split up. I put you in the car and drove you to your grandmother’s in Ohio and left you there. Then I turned around and went back to St. Louis and got a divorce.”

He did not return to Dayton except for a rare visit until I was nine. Times with mom were also rare and far between. She said, the Nobodies tried to keep us apart, making up excuses whenever she or her family called about picking me up.

Just like that, in one mad and swift weekend drive, I lost both my parents and found my grandmother. I am intrigued by the matter of fact way dad related his brief story to me. All my life I carried around this vague memory of the split up of my folks. I remembered this important moment without context, without knowing it was their moment of rending. Their divorce turned out to be momentous for my life, and I remembered it but didn’t know I had.

One other genuine memory of St. Louis, without photo or parental tale as mind jogger, is of going to the opera with my dad in an outdoor arena near the St. Louis Zoo. The opera stage was at the bottom of a deep bowl. Rows of earthen seats, I think, were cut in descending levels into the earth. Whether the levels were set off by rows of stones or boulders I can’t recall. Maybe there was just gently sloping earth down to the stage and no steps at all. Maybe it was stone steps all the way down and no earth. I do recall clearly my dad sitting on a rock wall at the top of the bowl, one leg straight down to the earth and the other bent at the knee so that his foot rests atop the low stone wall. He’s smoking, his torso against the blue sky. The fact that he’s smoking means, at this very moment of writing, very much to me. I don’t know why. I haven’t smoked for more than 20 years. Suddenly, I want a smoke. I want to sit atop that stone wall, outlined by sky, and smoke. I want to sit with my dad and talk. I want to be him! In fact I am him, now, in mirrors! Sometimes I must check myself in a mirror and tell myself I am really me and not him.

Remembering his moment on the wall, I feel all his sorrow, and I don’t know him at all.... Anyhow, I’m playing below him. The opera doesn’t much interest me, but speak of a cliché moment! The people onstage, which seems very far away, wear those helmets with horns that are the standard cartoon figure for any joke about opera. So am I watching the Ring Cycle of the Niberlungenlungenschaftenhegel? As you can see, my early experience with opera did not lead to a lifetime of opera and ballet. I am, after all, a blue collar working stiff with a college degree tacked precariously over his shop apron.

Finally, through photos of St. Louis, I see myself sitting in front of a window with a huge bib covering me from chin to tummy, sipping coca from a mug, the big mug hiding everything but my eyes; one of my shoes tipped on its side on a windowsill; a dead dog lying beside a railroad track on an overcast day when I am walking with my dad; and, finally, and importantly, myself standing on the lip of a fountain in the zoo park in full military uniform! Four years old! My uniform is complete, brown from jacket to shoes. It sports a Sam Browne belt and a stiff-billed cap too, and I am straight, tall and proud and my salute is as crisp as a brand new two dollar bill!

Strange that I don’t remember much about the zoo itself during this time. I know just enough to know that my folks took me there when we lived in St. Louis. After all, it was right across the street from our apartment, and what kid wouldn’t beg to see the zoo, but I can recall the Cincinnati Zoo and the Seattle Zoo better than the St. Louis Zoo. I know, for example, that much of the Cincinnati Zoo was built by the Civilian Conservation Corp. I remember the feel and rundown look of the neighborhood in which I parked to get to the Cincinnati Zoo in the 1960s and 70s. I recall the gorilla park at the Seattle Zoo, but I don’t remember much about the St. Louis Zoo.

Maybe it’s this.

Over the years, I’ve talked only rarely to my folks about their divorce. My dad told me my mother had cheated on him with other men. He also told me that she didn’t take care of me very well. He said he’d come home to find me hungry, with a snotty nose, my shoes untied and my mother drunk. He said he’d come home from his 12 hour war work days and find me in the care of strangers, of people he didn’t know.

About the time I graduated from college, my mother, up from Florida for my graduation, told me, when I asked about her cheating and the divorce, that the reason she cheated was that my dad suffered from premature ejaculation and would do nothing about it. She said she begged and pleaded with him to go to the doctor with her, probably a psychiatrist, but he refused to go. She was going crazy, she said, nuts, and he wouldn’t do anything about it. So, she said, she cheated, found men in St. Louis and took care of her needs.

Look, my dad (like so many of his generation, and much of mine) distrusted psychologists, would be dismissive about them even when I was going to a counselor to work on my own stuff after my third divorce. He once said, “Why should I pay someone to tell me what I already know about myself?” You can see that he knows nothing about the counseling process by his take on it, so I can believe both her part of the story and his.

My counselor might say, yes, you make excuses for them, but who was there for you? Who was making you feel welcome in the world? How do you feel in all of this? And deep in my heart (which doesn’t exist as a place of feeling in the human animal, it’s only a metaphor) I know that I “feel” that no one cared what happened to me. I spent much of my life a little lost kid, unaware that I felt like a little lost kid, alternating between trying to please the unappeasable and telling the world to fuck off, surviving not very well, looking for parents and not knowing it. At first, as I emerged from my mental darkness, I thought I was looking for the mother only, but I was looking for the father too which took a little longer to understand. What’s the truth of my whole situation? The truth is how I feel it is and what I understand of it, and truth, when it comes to memory, is relative as hell.

A final piece of my childhood tale fell into place toward the end of my father’s life when I asked him how he discovered my mother was cheating on him.

“You told me,” he said. “You and I were at the zoo and you said, ‘Daddy, this is where mommy meets the sailors.’ That was the night your mom and I had the fight that woke you up, and I took you to your grandmother’s.”

Finally, just like the faintly remembered zoo, I can’t recall where any of the closets were in that apartment in St. Louis, and in that detail hangs much of the balance of the remainder of my life. I can remember the black leather couch, the alcove where my crib was, the green curtain on brass rings, the kitchen, the donut location, the dining room table and its chairs I turned into airplanes, and the bathroom out in the hallway. That’s right, a bathroom shared with other people in an apartment building. Nothing like you’ll find built in modern America.

I can remember all those things about that St. Louis apartment, but I can’t recall where any of the closets are. I can even see a yellow wall just inside to the right of the entrance door right where a closet ought to be, but I can’t see one closet anywhere in the damned apartment.

I’ll get to the closet detail later, in another chapter. For now, St. Louis bye-bye. Goodbye St. Louis until another time. Goodbye mom and goodbye dad. I’m off, just like Little Red Riding Hood to grandma’s house. All of four years old. Can kindergarten be far behind?