BOTTOMS UP: The Autobiography of a Nobody

Introduction: 1937 to 2006

When I was born a Nobody, TV wasn’t spawned yet, so most everyone still lived in anonymity with no real opportunity to get his or her 15 minutes of fame on a reality show. Unless you lived in the narrow spotlight of small town America where you were somebody to everyone, most everybody was a Nobody while America remained locked in Depression. Now, I’m one of a few Nobodys still alive.

In 1937 only two of five Americans entered high school from the 8th grade, only one of four graduated from high school and only one of twenty Americans finished college with an advanced degree. Seventeen percent of those who wanted to work were still unemployed and two and a half million Americans sole income still came from government programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps or other public works programs.

Most Catholics religiously ate fish on Fridays and practiced birth control through the rhythm method. They took their ritual in Latin. Though not Catholic, I tried the rhythm method myself. I didn’t like condoms, and my first wife didn’t trust birth control pills, so two sons came along while I was still in college before I was in a position financially or emotionally to care for them.

Thirty-one percent of all dwellings didn’t have running water, 32 percent of all households had to dash through cold and rain to pee, and 39 percent still took Saturday baths, if any bath at all, in a tub of water which had been heated on the stove or they sponge bathed with tap water in a sink. Fifty-eight percent of Americans went without central heating and still warmed themselves before a fire or around a wood stove, and, thus, like Herb Shriner, practiced a form of cracker barrel philosophy common in early 20th Century America, that is, a lot of opinion sprinkled very sparingly with facts. Kind of like talk radio is today.

America was still a nation of small towns and farm communities. Blue laws dominated everything in 1937. Homosexuals crouched in the closet where we’d forced them to hide. The Hays office censored free speech in movies. Very few stores were open on Sunday; people tended to stay home and putter around the house or visit relatives on Sunday. People worked hard, but play was not much on their minds. America was Victorian if not still downright Puritan in values, full of the superstition and prejudice that go with those more primitive religious, fundamentalistic and cultural beliefs. The Ku Klux Klan flourished and Ohio, my home state, had had one of the last governors who was openly a Klansman earlier in the century. In the South, Jim Crow laws repressed and disenfranchised African-Americans.

In 1938, one year after I was born, a poll that asked the question, “What kinds of people do you object to?” revealed that 35% named Jews, 27% named “noisy, cheap, boisterous and loud people” and 14% pointed their Victorian fingers at, “uncultured, unrefined, dumb people” while all other types trailed behind. (see No Ordinary Time by Doris Goodwin, p.102) Those are the typical values of Christian fundamentalists (the name for modern Puritans) and people of lofty Victorian standards. Holy cow (or, substitute Jesus Christ or Allah be damned), most modern Americans wouldn’t like themselves very much if those standards still prevailed today, would they? And, is it any wonder that many Jews who wanted to escape Nazism could find no country to take them, not even the United States?

Though I couldn’t know any of these facts and troubling attitudes as I lay bloody and bruised on my mother’s breast after 16 hours of labor (October 20, 1937), I wanted to put them up there on the scoreboard as a baseline upon which to build this tale of a Nobody who lived anonymously while America rose to its full grandeur in global affairs in the 20th Century and before it became the sadly Bush-league nation it is now, in the early 21st Century.

Okay? Then, out with sword and, withall, to work....

Today is May 22, 2003. I told myself this morning as I drove I-90 out to Cheney from Spokane, Washington to get my caps and crowns cleaned and photographed that I’d better start this autobiography before my mind finally goes. I’m currently listening to a biography of actor James Stewart by Donald Dewey which may explain how the idea of an autobiography reappeared in my mind this morning for perhaps the umpteenth time in the past ten years. In this time of Iraq when the phrase “dying for one’s country (or flag)” is on everyone’s lips, Stewart’s biographer reports that Stewart who was WWII bomber pilot had little patience with the “dead hero” concept. To him, like Patton, dead heroes were “mainly dead”. And why, you may ask, should an entry about heroes come up in this autobiography of a Nobody, specially since I’m definitely not one? Well....

I never got a chance to die for my country. Truth is, though I now realize that I wanted to die when I was younger and that combat would have served as well as any suicide to achieve that end, I was too young for WWII and Korea and in my late twenties and already a veteran of the peacetime Navy during Vietnam. I recall exactly where I was when VJ day happened, and I recall exactly where I lay with a childhood fever during a blackout when the Cold War began for me with a Walter Winchell radiocast about waking up in the middle of the night while being stabbed in the back by an ally. I recall the briefcase-flinging moment when I learned that JFK had been assassinated and the words that flew out of my mouth. “The bastards! They did it!”

In short, this Nobody is a member of the “silent generation” which, according to Gale Sheehy, fertilized the roots of the Sixties revolution. Well? Maybe....

For me, the Fifties were a horribly repressive time, on the cusp of the sexual revolution, plagued by that infamous double-standard, right on the edge of a watershed of so many positive changes, and I know my personal struggle for growth was dampened by the oppressive culture of that time and the repressed personalities of those who raised and influenced me as well as watered by those younger personalities who entered exuberantly into the change. I lived and live always about fifteen years younger than I am.


Today the sun struggles to penetrate a thin overcast as I slip this paragraph into yesterday’s text while sitting in “The Coffee House” in Spokane, at the moment ogling a tall, slender woman’s behind, wrapped in an olive green skirt. Many fine looking women are discovering this place which has been open less than a year.

I’m writing on an almost new, white Mac iBook, and I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (science) and Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men (politics), and I recently finished The Passover Plot (history) and The Illusive Messiah (survey of historical research). Last night at work, while my machine whined its little heart out, I listened to audio books, to Charles Barkley’s I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It (social commentary) and began In Search of America (intellectual and cultural history) by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster. With this list of my current and recent reading and with previous paragraphs, I’m establishing how this autobiography will jump around in time from present to past with asides and digressions. I intend to enter reflections on current events and daily reflections in the text as they occur to me, and as they might or might not pertain to something in a my past. Nobody writes in a vacuum and this Nobody is no exception.

Today, and for five more months, I’m 65, a little more than halfway to 66 when I will try retirement, although, presently, by my request, I’m down to a 32 hour week with benefits, compliments of my excellent employer whose name I won’t mention in order to save him the ordeal of appearing in a book which might embarrass him.

At my age, I may not be too far from that state of half or lost mind I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Lately I frequently discover I misremember big chunks of my life. For years I’d gone around thinking that a young student of mine during my one year of teaching high school had introduced me to Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2”. He assures me that it was I who introduced him and his entire junior class to Fellini. He remembers me bringing it up and talking excitedly to the class about the symbolism and techniques of the Fellini film.

Recently I was talking with the owner of The Coffee House espresso where I spend most of my time writing this book, and he brings up his class reunion. He says that he played in a lot of bands in high school, and, at the reunion, he and several friends got to discussing the various bands they were in, who left them and joined them and why. He said he was blown away by how much their memories diverged. They couldn’t even agree on the personnel in each band. Where he recalled firing someone, one of his friends recalled the guy leaving on his own volition. In fact his memory was so different from his friends’ memories that he ended up questioning reality itself. Currently finishing Pinker’s How the Mind Works, I understand perfectly how and why the brain distorts reality. In short, this book can be described as the most real fiction you’ll ever read, except for all those autobiographies in which the man or woman claims to be telling you the truth. The truth, my friend, is relative.

Further adding to the unreal reality of this book, one of the techniques of this recollection of a Nobody is that I don’t intend to do any research in order to correct my faulty memory. I want this autobiography to reflect exactly how one does talk of one’s past as he sits discussing his life with friends over a beer or espresso, with anecdotes and asides tossed in helter-skelter, errors preserved, enlarged and illuminated, an anecdotal life, replete with the fictions one carries around with him in the narrative his consciousness tells him he is living and has lived, and which, when written down, becomes the literary genre called autobiography. In a way, you might say that Federico Fellini’s techniques are the techniques of this book which may read, at times, like a surrealistic jaunt through the spastic bowels of my Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

I’ve been trying to write this autobiography, the story of a Nobody, for some time now, ever since it dawned on me one morning over a “large, nonfat, sugar free Hazelnut Latte” that I was not going to be CEO and general manager of General Motors Corp. anytime soon, at least not in this lifetime. I tried it first as an autobiographical novel which opened in the late 19th Century with my grandparents and great-grandparents. I also tried to smuggle an autobiography in under the heading of On Becoming An Atheist, another sort of autobiography with a specific and limited slant, but now I’m coming out of the closet and giving my ego to you straight and linearly, with asides, diversions and digressions. I’ve decided to travel in time from I am born until I reach a current moment in my progression from life to death, whatever that stop date is. It might be a heart attack that stops me in mid....

Speaking of halves, of lost and half lost minds, my half brother was in his early-thirties when his carotid arteries leaked, and he suffered a stroke. Whammo! He became an immediate aphasic with a hundred word vocabulary who could play a flawless game of pinochle even though, if one held up a king of diamonds and asked him to name it, he might call it the jack of hearts or the nine of clubs.

He died at 36 from drug complications, of kidney failure caused by the both legal and illegal drugs he consumed to fight the pains and disabilities of the rheumatoid arthritis which was so severe he had to have a hip replacement at age 19. At the end he was taking Black Beauties.

He first smoked Mary Jane at Kent State University to escape pain. He recalled hallucinating that his right leg was made of a glowing red material like a bowling ball, but the marijuana gave him relief, and, naturally, he continued the self-medication. Later, he began to sell nickel bags and then moved to California where he set up to sell drugs on a large scale. I was told, but this is unconfirmed, that he sold drugs in New Orleans, Chicago, Dayton, Ohio and Cincinnati before someone dropped a dime on him, probably a competitor or accomplice who wanted his market share. My Dad paid a ten grand bribe to get a judge who was easier on marijuana assigned to the case. My bro got probation and couldn’t leave Ohio for a year. By that time, he was nearly dead and never left Ohio again until he permanently flew the coop.

That period of my half-brother’s life was in the late Seventies and early Eighties. He was cool. He was my hero even though he was eleven years my junior. I was a married stick in the mud, a Nobody of the silent generation, and he was the hip slick and cool hippy I wanted to emulate. With his cane, his limp, his leather jackets and bell bottom jeans, his long, wild, coal black hair, the gift of his Italian mother, my stepmother, the beautiful women who threw themselves at him, including the porno star he dated for awhile, he cut a figure eight miles wide and ten deep in my imagination.

He gave me my first marijuana cigarette, my first taste of mescaline and my first snort of cocaine. My first acid trip at thirty-six was with a beautiful 18-year-old cellist who was supposed to be my guide, but I ended up guiding her through a bad trip.

Yes, my half-brother was my hero and I was his. He told me one time that when the cops had him after the dime drop and were banging his forehead into a tabletop during interrogation, he kept thinking of something I’d told him years before he fell into the drug business. “They can take everything from you, but they can’t take your mind.” I do recall telling him that when he was a teenager and I was home from college, but I couldn’t remember who the “they” were I was referring to, the ones who want to steal your mind but can’t. Recent events make me remember that it’s people like the Bushies.

Today, May 27, 2003, I insert this letter to the editor I’ve just composed to be sent to the Spokesman Review:

The Dictatorship of Bush is now firmly established in Iraq, and Bush seems quite comfortable being a dictator.
Remember that Sheik who Bush had arrested awhile back who was disappeared off the streets? He’s so far disappeared, I haven’t heard his name since and can’t remember it or the city he inhabited. That Sheik wasn’t part of Saddam’s government nor a terrorist; he was just a local leader that got in the way of Dictator Bush’s oil-scheme for Iraq. And can we forget the unarmed civilians who wanted their school back, who got in Bush’s way, and were gunned down for their trouble? Currently, like Hitler, Bush is disarming the citizens of Iraq. All the signs of a Dictatorship to me.
Bush lies to us, telling us that the type of Iraqi government is going to be decided by Iraqis, but, supported by his Christian coalition, Dictator Bush is now forcing his American style, government by the oil-rich, on Iraq.
But we can’t expect much else from Bible-believing Christians like Bush. They have no model for democracy in their “good book”. Not one democracy in it and not one elected official. They worship kingdoms and princes. In fact, they pray for a king to come rule over all of us. Evangelical Christianity like Bush’s and democracy aren’t compatible.