CHAPTER TWELVE

The Darkness of Puberty Creates Women

Life gets a little more dark and smudged in this chapter. I recall my fourth look at human death while in one of those northern cities. I had the funeral parlor experience first, I think. The kid cut in half by a streetcar was second, and I didn’t mention that on one of our drives to visit stepmom’s Connecticut relatives we passed a car wreck. Several bodies lay under sheets by the side of the road. I picked up the seriousness of that situation from my dad and stepmom’s sober commentary. Those side-of-the-road bodies impressed me very much. Not long after, when I happened to be sitting between stepmom and dad on another trip to Connecticut, a car came flying around a curve in front of us. It tipped to one side with centrifugal force and the guy driving it took the longest time getting back to his side of the road. I was so frightened that I grabbed the wheel and tried to turn us to the right out of the path of the oncoming car. Good thing my dad had a tight grip on the wheel or I might have caused some real trouble. Of course, he sternly lectured me on my error.

My fourth experience with death came in a bus station in Minneapolis. I was old enough to be taking a bus from downtown to my home but younger than 13. As I entered, a group of uniformed people gathered around an open stall door. Inside, two men in white were lifting an gaunt old man off a toilet seat. His skin was gray and his mouth gaped open. He had frozen into a seated position by rigor mortis, his underwear and pants down around his ankles. From my reading, I may have become aware of rigor mortis by this time, and I think seeing it in the raw fixed the concept in my mind.

Also glued permanently to my mind is the image of dead, desiccated bodies in piles, being bulldozed into trenches or tossed onto the planks of wooden carts to be carted off. I don’t know when these images entered my mind. I want to tell myself that I saw it in newsreels shortly after the war ended, but I’m not sure. People were protected from harsher realities in those days, so I don’t know when the terrible reality of the Holocaust entered my awareness. It seems as if the images of dead Jews came with my birth, but that just isn’t so. I may not have really become aware of the Holocaust until, in my twenties, I went to foreign films and saw footage used as part of a fictional tale. But I do know that these horrific images of “man’s inhumanity to man” filtered into my life and thoughts and conscience until, for some long time, I could not stand to bear it. That horror colored my sensibilities and bonded with the writings of existentialists and became my burden. My answer to that “problem of horror”, I’d say, has been the central task of my consciousness to this day.


Somewhere along the way, I think during a Dayton stopover, my half brother, Dale, was born. By C-section in the closing years of the 1940s. I was eleven when a surgeon’s knife cut him into my consciousness. Stepmom was in the hospital for quite a long stay. Kids weren’t allowed in hospitals in those days. Dad took me to see her once. I stood beneath a hospital window and waved to her head sticking out of a window two or three stories above me.

My folks tried to prepare me for the coming of Dale. They asked me if I would be troubled by someone else entering our little family. “No,” I assured them because I could tell that’s what they wanted to hear. I had no feelings one way or another about it. After all, I was eleven years older than he was, so I had an established persona in the world, and we could never be brothers like brothers closer in age can be. Anyhow... how can you tell anything about your feelings until you’re in a situation? But I can say that my feelings about my brother became very ambivalent, and they became ever more conflicted as he grew older and my stepmom’s preference for him became ever more obvious to those around me, like my first wife and my mother-in-law. They told me they could see preferential treatment. I never saw it, but I was certainly acting as if I did long before I got married.

I used to sneak into my parent’s bedroom and stare at Dale as he lay in his bassinet. My feeling was only curiosity at such a tiny being, with tiny wrinkled hands and tiny feet and tiny features. “A human being, but all in miniature,” I think I must have been thinking. Later, and with fondness, I remember him on hands and knees, zipped up in one of those sheets with a head hole in them which were supposed to keep him from rolling into and being injured or strangled by the bars of his crib. I see his big smile beamed at me, and his rocking, rocking, and with that feeling now, I see that I loved him at the time.

Soon after he was born, Dale moved into my bedroom. We slept on maplewood, twin beds in a tiny, pale blue bedroom in the corner of our small house. In my bed, separated from his by a few feet and an oval throw rug, I dreamed my dreams of falling, always awakening before I hit bottom and, one night, dreamed of flying. To some dream interpreters, dreams of flying are sex dreams. This particular flight dream I’ve never forgotten. I wasn’t flying, but I was being held aloft in the air, very much like a kite, by a wonderful breeze. The dream went on forever. I was looking miles down into a sunlit valley and at my back loomed a huge railroad trestle. Some of the time, I drift under the trestle, floating among the beams like latticework. This may be the first dream in my life that I remember.

Another dream from this time was an escape dream, from a German prison, which was a lot more like a dormitory than a prison, with many hallways and doors in it. I and my fellow escapees spent dream hours, running through the hallways before we found a door out. Then we loaded into a truck with a canvass cover over the back, like a troop transport. The Germans scrambled onto tanks to follow us, but as they did, they turned into cats and couldn’t chase us. The rest of the dream we’re traveling across what I think is French farmland. Many things I don’t recall happen to us. We lose some people along the way. I don’t think the dream finished. I think I awakened before the escape was complete.

When Dale’s four or so, we play football together. He gets the ball (it’s as big as his chest, the reach of his arms all used up wrapping around it) and runs around giggling and laughing until I gently tackle him in the front yard. I remember a robin’s egg blue snow suit he played in. Then it’s his turn; he tries to tackle me, and I let him, and we, laughing, tumble down in the grass together. And I love him in this image too, but as he gets older, I hang him repeatedly out the second story, attic window by the ankles, threaten to drop him. I wrap myself in sheets and pretend to be a ghost when I’m baby-sitting him for my parents. He is scared or at least frightened by the fact that a lunatic like me is his sole caretaker in the night. Later still, I trap him and his cousin in the basement and shoot my bee bee gun at them. He tells me later that this was terrifying to him. I don’t know whether my brotherly cruelty is normal for brothers or not. Anymore, I just don’t happen to think it is. How he comes to love me I’ll never know, nor how he comes to be my drug dealing, wild ass hero. But here he is, in my Nobody’s life story, a figment of my memory, my half-brother.

During one of our family stays in Minnesota, another notch in my karma belt is added by the father who is me, before me. He’d been partying and came home late and drunk. He’s blind, staggering drunk. My stepmom has guided him to the bed, and he’s laid back now so she can pull his pants off him, and I’m standing at the foot of the bed when he turns his attention full on me, and slurs something which I can’t hear. So I ask him to repeat.

“I love her,” he says.

I’m confused. “Who?” I ask.

“Your mother,” he blurts out.

My stepmom keeps busy and silent, removing his clothing, and she never says a word to me about it, ever. Out of a drunk it flies and enters the silent equation between my stepmom and me for the rest of our lives together until her death. Why would she not resent me, the son of the woman her husband still loves? She’s just a dark-haired, crazy, Italian woman without mother or father by the age of twelve, raised in a family of heavy-drinking Italians, the spoiled darling, the littlest youngest daughter at that. She’s quite the homemaker, quite the doer, the neatnik, quite the codependent and, thus, ever needing to be in control... or she goes crazy.

Then the real McCoy happens. It happens several times over one or two years, and it deeply alters my life. On this road job, we were stuck in a motel for awhile until dad and mom could find a more permanent place. It was probably the road job during which we stopped in Dayton for only five or six weeks and had to turn around and go somewhere else. The room was really small: a bathroom and the room itself with two beds. Dale is about one or two. I must be twelve or thirteen. My stepmom comes out of the bathroom from a shower, nude as a Roman goddess, and stands on a round throw rug in the middle of the room, her back to me. Her ass is beautiful and pear-shaped. Her waist is tiny and figure lovely. I gape at her ass. My brother, Dale, walks around in front of her and rubs his face in her crotch. He steps back and looks up at his mommy.

“Pussy,” he says.

My stepmom and I laugh together. She looks back over her shoulder at me and we laugh, we share an intimate sexual joke, and I am taken in. Her ass begins to be a part of my fantasy life. To this day, I’m an ass man, as they say.

Another night and I lie on the bed in the tiny motel room between my dad and stepmom. My head is at the foot of the bed and stuck in the TV set. My stepmom and dad are reading the newspaper with their heads against the headboard. I glance back at my parents. My stepmom’s feet are drawn up, exposing her crotch under her print nightgown. She wears no panties. Black, thick pussy hair. My face burns with lust. I’m seeing her pussy. I’m seeing her pussy! Suddenly, she lifts the paper and looks me in the eye. We stare at each other. Nothing happens. She hasn’t caught me sneaking a peek. Or has she? I don’t know. All I know is that she doesn’t slide her feet down, so I watch TV and try surreptitiously to keep sneaking peeks. My groin tickles. I’m coming of age.

Masturbation! Now I begin a new habit. We are in the house at St. Louis Park. I’m prowling around, sexually aroused, thinking about my stepmom’s lovely body. I am trying to sneak peeks whenever I can, now, looking through door cracks, whatever I can do. This day I’m prowling my parent’s bedroom. No one is home but me. I get aroused rummaging through my stepmom’s underwear drawer, looking for the diaphragm, thinking of my dad and her doing it. Let me tell you, though, I’m not sure I knew much about what “doing it” consisted of. As I’ve repeatedly claimed, I was naively aware of so little damn much!?

Suddenly, as I shuffle through her drawers, I begin to focus on her lingerie, specially her panties, lifting them, rubbing them on my face, picturing her ass in them. I’ve actually seen her ass in some of them during my peeking forays, her ass crack showing through some of her more revealing pairs. I pick up one of her brief black satin pairs. Then, out of nowhere, I get another urge and strip naked fast and slip into her panties. Now I have a throbbing hard on, looking at myself in her panties in the vanity table mirror, my clothes on the floor around my feet. I’m in a strange place. I’m not seeing her nor am I seeing me. I’m just in an epiphanic aroused state. I pull a pillow from under the neatly made up bedspread and fall face down over it, and hump the pillow until I come.

What a feeling! It’s my first masturbation, and I’m hooked on it for life. It becomes my favorite way of masturbating, to lay face down on a pillow and rub myself on it till I come. I learn to get a wet washcloth and clean my come circle off my stepmom’s pillowslips. Still, sometimes, the spot where I’ve come when it dries leaves a stiff circle in the material. I never know whether she ever figures this out. I learn to remake the bedspread just as she’s left it after I return the pillow to where I find it. I learn to observe closely how everything is placed in their room so that I can leave everything as I find it.

More than once I slip into my stepmom’s undies for masturbation. I wonder if she notices the stiff spots on her lingerie when she puts them on. I picture her ass over and over in my masturbation fantasies. I begin to look for opportunities to see her naked, to catch her in her underwear, to look up her dress when she sits down to cross her legs. I’m always looking at her in a lustful way. Later, even married to my first wife, I keep a picture of stepmom in a bathing suit that I use to masturbate to. This shows her in a one piece bathing suit, with straps off the shoulder, and her big breasts hanging down exposing lots of cleavage. I am sexually hooked on the female who abuses me verbally and physically. Though later, some of the physical abuse stops because I’m too big for her to safely hit, the verbal abuse never ends. She’s insatiable to change me, to make me not my mother’s son, to make me into my dad’s son. She can’t stand to know that I’m the love/lust son of another woman.

I hate this woman I lust for and so a pattern in my life is established, to lust for the one who later tells me what a selfish man I am, the one who tells me, “You’re not like your dad. You’re not a NOBODY.”

Not a Nobody? Is she trying to take my family name from me, this interloper bitch female whore? I masturbate to her picture and into the raging ass/face of my stepmom well into my thirties. Through my Navy time and through much of my first marriage, I hate and fuck her in my imagination.

I can’t say at what age I stopped masturbating to thoughts of my stepmom’s ass, but I’m sure it was well into an unhealthy age. One last thing I can recall happened during the last of these three road jobs. It’s not very significant, but she caught me masturbating once. I don’t know if she understood what she saw. Fortunately, I was in my own bedroom this time and not in a pair of her underwear. I was nude, face down on a pillow, and in the act of ejaculation when she came into the apartment and into the bedroom. I couldn’t stop the physiological process. I was fixed in a moment of transcendent pleasure. Her first view has to be of my ass which faced the bedroom door.

She calls out my name: “-------, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, mom (they want me to call her ‘mom’). I just got a stomach ache.”

“What?”

“It helps to lie over a pillow like this. It’s just gas!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, get out, please. It helps.”

She still doesn’t leave. Is she looking at my ass? She continues to make comments to me. She won’t leave!

“Get out, please. I’m okay. I feel better already. It’s just some gas. I’ll be okay.”

I’m going nuts. She’s still in the fucking damn doorway while I urge her to leave me alone. I don’t know how long it takes, but eventually she leaves and closes the door, and I clean up as best I can, stuff the pillow back under my cover, smooth my bedspread and go out. This happens in the same apartment where my dad has told me that he loves my mother. I’m a very confused boy. I don’t even know I’m in trouble yet.

In passing, I come to that “mom” for “stepmom” thing. One day when I was really little, I was walking with my “real mom” in downtown Dayton, when it was still a vibrant commercial downtown. I accidentally mentioned my stepmom to my mom, calling the evil stepmother, “mom”.

My mother looked down at me and said in a scandalized tone, “You don’t call her mom do you?”

“They want me to call her mom,” I told her.

“I don’t want you to call her mom,” she finished.

I think that’s when I started to have both a “real mom” and some other kind of mom inhabiting my head.

During this time, maybe even earlier, during the three year transition of both traveling and being in Dayton, I had two, early, exploratory girlfriends. The first was with a full-figured redhead (for her age), Judy. Her folks owned a neighborhood grocery store, like those that used to exist before super markets came on the scene. They lived in back and commuted to work by shoe leather through a curtain. Their store was only about four blocks from my house, and I think they went under because of a Liberal Markets store that went in not too far from the TV station and tower about six blocks from my home. After Judy’s folks sold it, the building with its central entrance at the top of eight or nine steps and flanked by two large display windows remained empty forever. It may have served as a local headquarters for the George Wallace presidential campaign some years later because I saw his campaign signs in its windows.

Of the many changes I’ve witnessed, the loss of the neighborhood grocery store seems one of the most poignant and pervasive. Stretched out after them, I see the super market and the strip mall and, then, the enclosed super mall, followed by Walmart. The chain of change is easy to see in this context, from personal service, face to face, across a wooden counter for the most impoverished citizen to hunting for a elusive clerk in Walmart by even the most wealthy. This market change goes right up beside the change in phone communications from Maple 0500 to 1-800-000-0000 and from postal delivery to e-mail for being obvious and for producing nostalgia.

Judy and I went to movies on our dates. I had an orange, for Stivers, cardigan sweater, and I let her wear it on our dates and, then, keep it with her as a sign of our being together. I was very proud of that sweater. It was a sign of my being in high school, of being a Stivers student.

One movie date at the Belmont, I sat next to her with my arm proudly around her in a grownup way and boy did she stink. I didn’t know what I was smelling, but I now know it was vaginal odor, probably from her entering puberty. I know I was in puberty, but we were no closer to sex than two rocks on opposite American shores. However, the stink passed by the next Saturday date. On our dates, we held hands when we walked and perhaps innocently kissed, mouths closed.

Then Judy’s family moved to Fairborn, Ohio, not more than 15 miles from Dayton, but for a kid with no car, that might as well be across an ocean. One drizzly fall day, she told me they were moving as we stood in front of her house after a movie date. She’d be gone by next Saturday. She took off my sweater, folded it and gave it to me. I held it in my arms and ached with loneliness, the familiar feeling of abandonment eating me alive. She felt miserable too. I know that, but still I wanted to blame her for what was happening, even though she had no more control over the situation than I did.

Courageously, for a couple of weeks I caught a bus or thumbed out to Fairborn to visit her. My second trip, school had started out there, and I could tell she was already part of a new group, with new young men expressing interest in her. Giving up, as ever afraid to compete for a woman, I never went back, but at least I didn’t lose my sweater.

With Sandy, my next girlfriend in another short fling, my mouth learned to remain open in a kiss, and I lost something too. Not my virginity. Sandy was hot and sexy, and I think far more experienced than I in the arts of sexual intrigue. She’d learned to do a pretty fair come on. She was a “little bit on the trashy side”, I’d say now. For her, I bought my first pack of Lucky Strikes and, thus, became a steady smoker. It was the summer between my junior and senior year. I bought a friendship ring for her. That was the thing to do in those days. She and her family lived in the back half of that old farmhouse on the corner of the street. People came and went out of that rental all the time.

What I most recall is my becoming a steady smoker to impress her. I recall going over there one afternoon before I bought the ring for her and being sure to light a cigarette and dangle it in the corner of my mouth, Humphrey Bogart style, before I knocked on her door. I know I was looking so cool with the smoke stinging my eyes when she opened the door. As I bought those Luckies, I remember packs of Spuds and Wings behind the glass in the counter. They were cigarettes brands left over from World War Two and now extinct. People still bought them. All decks of cigarettes were still 25 cents.

Sandy ended the affair within a month, after French kissing me and driving me into a tingle. She refused to give me my ring back. Her sister some days later brought down a cigar box, and, standing inside their locked screen door, rattled it for me as she informed me how her sister liked to collect friendship rings. It was a little game with her. She was sorry her sister was such a bitch, but that’s just the way she was so get over it.


Last night, this morning really (September 4, 2003), I caught an early morning rebroadcast of the PBS show about the days of the black list in Hollywood. I wasn’t expecting to see the wonderfully intertwined lives of Arthur Miller and Elias Kazan and how Miller’s “The Crucible” and Kazan’s “On The Waterfront” represented their conflicting intellectual stances in the history of America’s struggle between socialistic ideas and fascist ideas as revealed by the House un-American Activities Committee. I was surprised to see how clearly Kazan’s “Waterfront” defended his squealing, his naming names, while Miller’s “Crucible” reveals the anguish of a man who remains silent in defense of his name.

Miller’s man dies; Kazan’s Terry Malloy lives, but I was surprised to hear that Bud Schulberg, who wrote the “Waterfront” script, planned on the Brando character being killed by union thugs. Kazan wouldn’t let that happen. He had to be and to have Malloy be triumphant which, I now believe, is not how life turns out. Almost all people of true personal integrity lose out in authoritarian cultures which is what the American ideal was supposed to help us avoid: that is, dying in an authoritarian culture.

Both these works haunted me when I read one and viewed the other. I identified with both main characters, but probably, in the long run and for a long time, I went with Miller’s view of the world. You die if you resist authority alone, any authority, and I certainly felt absolutely alone in those youthful years of mine. All of these feelings came to torment me in later life, in my early college years. Was I a coward? Could I stand alone against authority when it came for me?

How many years did I ask myself this question, and in my own mind, knew I didn’t have the courage to face the fascist when he came for me. To my shame, I was rendered powerless to help in the movement to get the vote for African-Americans in the South by my fear. I didn’t go on freedom rides. I stayed in the safe North and only moved my lips and went on safe marches and protests and silent vigils. Like George Bush, I was a coward. My one saving grace was that I’d already done my time in the service and, so, was not escaping military combat as our Bush-league President did.

Many people will probably not understand when I say that I fear fundamentalist Christians because they represent for me the kind of psychology, unbending and unyielding, who would act like fascists and dictators if they were ever given complete power in America. Could you imagine any homosexual getting justice from that Alabama Judge Moore, specially since he puts his Bible above the Constitution. A man cannot have two masters, it is said. We must be ruled by the Constitution or the Bible. The irony is that they see themselves as advanced human beings who have the correct morality to rule over me and themselves. Actually, they are insecure and fearful human beings who should never be put in positions of power.