CHAPTER ONE

I Am Born

You are there. Miami Valley Hospital, October 20th 1937, I am born in Dayton, Ohio, Montgomery County. The Depression is still a serious business but F.D.R. prepares to do something about it, to restore hope to America with liberal, socialistic ideas that put the average citizen above the interests of the few and the powerful.

From my birth through the 1950s, Dayton was the 50th largest city in the United States. Dayton was the tool making capital of the world with more than 300 shops up and running. Then, like much of the rust belt in the Seventies and Eighties of the 20th Century, Dayton fell on hard times, losing maybe 60,000 jobs when National Cash Register pulled its manufacturing facilities out and moved them south, leaving only its headquarters in the Gem City. My first mother-in-law worked there most of her life after her divorce. She never remarried. Like my grandmother on dad’s side of the family, once was enough.

At one time the National Cash Register Company was the leading maker of cash registers in the world. They monopolized the business! You could find NCR’s huge cash registers all over the world. When I was in the Navy, stationed on the tiny island of Antigua in the British West Indies, I found a massive brass NCR cash register in one of the shops in the city of St. Johns. I saw these giants everywhere in Puerto Rico when I passed through there while in the Navy.

Other companies closed down in Dayton too. Delco Products, where my grandfather labored in the tool crib after moving from West Virginia and where one uncle worked for a good part of his early years at a punch press, followed NCR’s lead as jobs disappeared by the tens of thousands. Job shops folded by the hundreds. Germany became the tool making capital of the world. Then, I think, and still, Japan.

Not to be outdone by other cities, Dayton’s downtown retail business died in the Seventies and Eighties. Recently while visiting Dayton on the Web, I found a desktop picture of the explosive destruction of the Rike’s building and put it in my computer files. Rike’s was the premier department store during my childhood and for most of Dayton’s modern Twentieth Century history.

As a rambling preteen I made special trips downtown for the thrill of riding Rike’s escalators up and down, and I remember my frightened first stumbling toddler steps off and on those escalators, clutching mom’s hand. I clearly recall once dangling and twisting by my arm from mom’s grasp when I missed an early attempt to mount and dismount the magically moving steps. Some success and some failure during the escalator learning curve but always a delicious thrill in the pit of my stomach.

I remember the nervousness as I neared where the teeth of the lurching, climbing steps meshed into the zipper at the top. A challenge, a thrill every time and, then, I master it, and one more piece of excitement disappears from my life forever on my journey to this bored moment at Starbuck's on Hamilton in Spokane, Washington. Elevators were never the same after the coming of escalators, but I remember standing at fart level, crowded butt to face in those crowded boxes and having my stomach tickled with the elevator’s momentary flights of weightlessness. It’s probably only imagination that I remember the smell of some of those farts.

More frightening than farts, and emerging out of the past as I write this, is the memory of being lost in Rike’s. I remember crying and stumbling around on the first floor and somebody finding me and taking me to where my lostness was announced over the loudspeaker system.

At age one, I won Rike’s “Most Beautiful Baby” contest. I have the tinted photo that won the contest for me and my mother. I still recall the day I accepted the award and, standing tall at the podium next to my thrilled mother, with a huge blond curl rolled proudly atop my skull, delivered a one hour oration on the benefits of Woodury soap for my baby complexion. It was my first experience with public speaking and I believe I did well for a child of one. Of course, it was all a con job to get mothers to spend money on fancy portraiture.

Rike’s was still doing business downtown when Sear’s, where I bought my first ever rotary power mower, closed its downtown building and moved into a suburban mall, still doing business when Lowe’s, Fox and Paramount theaters dimmed their screens, shut their doors. Long gone before the theaters’ closed was the Purple Cow where my mother took me in the 1940s to drink thick, very-malt-tasting chocolate malts and hear Glen Miller on the speakers and the boogie woogie beat of the “Flight of the Bumble Bee”; long gone the dark, thick-carpeted, royal purple King Cole restaurant where a woman complimented my mother on what a well-behaved tike I was, for my age. Five? Six? My mom was much on etiquette, but she made it like a game, and, after my folks were divorced, I so wanted to please.

Another downtown store which is part of my special memory is Metropolitan Clothing. When I first got out of the Navy in 1958 and had nearly exhausted my unemployment benefits, I began work at the Metropolitan Clothing Store as a window decorator. The Met, as it was called, was one of downtown Dayton’s upscale clothiers. Eventually, as downtown Dayton crumbled, it moved its operation right across the street from Rike’s on Main Street. I don’t know what happened to the Met after that. Whether it closed before or after Rike’s is unknown to me. Now Rike’s is long gone from downtown and so am I. The last time I passed through Dayton, downtown was mostly office buildings and restaurants. The many-storied YMCA building was still downtown beside the Great Miami River though.

I can’t tell you what time of day on October 20th, 1937 I entered into this lifetime from the birth canal of my 5’ 5’’ short mother. I’d have to look it up and that would go against my announced plan of serendipity, of relating my history as spawned from the falsehoods, tricks and truths of memory. All I can tell is that I weighed 10 pounds 8 ounces, and my mother endured a 16 hour labor while I tunneled that last short distance from semidarkness to daylight and, during that long struggle, first experienced the unconscious, lifetime attitude that life must be a grind, full of toil, trouble and pain. My karma of struggle was probably not helped by the fact that Guernica was bombed in April of 1937 when I had lived about two months in the womb. Sixteen-hundred of 7,000 citizens were killed by the fascists on that day, and I have been antifascist since the day I became politically aware.

The birthing experience was so horrendous, my 18-year old mother (married at 16 to escape a horribly abusive childhood in which she was beaten with coat hangers, locked in closets and called a whore by her jealous father) must have sworn off having children from that day forth. My dad went on to have another son with his second wife. My half brother.

I sense that birth and womb experiences impact the earliest formation of the human animal’s basic attitudes toward life. Why would any body forget, totally, such a violent experience? A violent experience is a violent experience and all violent experiences lodge in the synapses and jostle one another in memory and fuel unconscious reactions to similar anxious situations.

Not too long ago, during one of those transcendent moments which occur in good counseling, I traced certain combative or flight feelings I’d been dealing with most of my life back to my 16 hours of labor to get out of the mother and into life. Later stressful experiences then blended into those feelings of danger and combat until I experienced enough conflict and trauma from birth onward to become an manipulative, controlling and combative person without ever consciously confronting what had happened to me. Take my word on this. I’ve been there and done that.

Some people, usually male, deny that counseling experience is valid or helpful. Most interesting in conjunction with my own refeeling and tracking of traumatic experience is my understanding the fact that the most aggressive and punishing sorts of human animal, usually male, are conditioned in exactly the same way, but they are not aware of it. They’re unable to take responsibility for their own victimized and abusive natures. They’re the ones who victimize victims by denying the victim’s experiences or by telling the victim “to get a life” or by speaking dismissively of people who “refuse to take responsibility for their lives”.

It’s all well and good to expect people to take responsibility for their lives, and one should try to be as responsible as one can be, but those who are most adamant and angry about those they deem irresponsible are usually not very aware either of who they are, and they act in very instinctive, unconscious and abusive ways themselves. Their abuse of the abused, their inability to identify with the abused, proves their own abuse is nestled in the nerve pathways within themselves.

Abusive people are just as influenced by their pasts as anyone, but they are blind to their own experience because they are afraid to feel and release the fear and pain recorded in their synapses. They think by suppressing their pain, they are dealing with it. Actually, they allow it to fester in themselves and pass it on to the next generation. It takes a lot of denial to make a terrorist, but they are still being created. It is not by forgetting pain and experience that one masters one’s life. It is by never forgetting the past that one becomes a human who understands and remembers what it is to be both human and animal in this savagely soothing life.

Paradoxically, the only path to taking responsibility is by first accepting that one is a victim and by going through a period of deep and pitiful whining. Yes, what I am saying is that your George Bushes and Rummys and Cheneys, your Hitlers and Stalins, are just men who are afraid and stuck at about age 12 when men bump dicks about as hard as they’ll ever bump dicks. Much current adult life in 2003 is just the adolescent dick bumping of world leaders who don’t understood themselves. To me, it’ll be a wonder if the world ever escapes the behavior patterns of adolescence because so many people are afraid to look into themselves and to re-experience the terrors of infancy and childhood which have frozen their emotional development.

So ask yourself. Was your birth quick and relatively painless or a protracted struggle? If you came easy into a welcoming motherworld after an uncomplicated pregnancy, ask yourself if you can really take any credit for your “life is a bowl of cherries” philosophy. But if your body’s memory of entering the world is of long struggle, darkness, tremendous pressure, the distant terrified screams of your mother, of pain, maybe drugs, its trauma may explain a lot about your own hyper vigilant, defensive and controlling attitudes.

Then, did the pain of birth so traumatize your frightened, inexperienced, uninformed mother that she could not fully welcome you into her world with gushing effusions of love and gentle cooing word music for your shell like ears? Did her own lifelong, anxiety-racked body’s adrenaline, coursing through your joined bodies, condition you to accept fear’s chemicals as a normal body state so that fight or flight feels normal to you and calm an abnormal state of being? What is that like, to enter into the world, battered and bruised, chemically addicted, drenched in the adrenaline of fear to a cunt-torn, unwelcoming and fear-drenched mother figure? A most beautiful baby launched sideways in a straight ahead world?

I became an easily frightened and startled child, a sensitive babe who cried easily and sometimes so deeply that I lost consciousness, fell down and peed my pants. (My daughter also suffered from crying that deeply.) I remember running and crying until I lost consciousness when I was four. I feared the semi-dark of night like a womb. I feared the dark far into my 40s. I speak only for myself, but I believe my fear-based attitudes were so ingrained in my consciousness before I was jettisoned into air that I never knew anything but anxiety and could no longer separate my consciousness from that hyper alert state of body, or even recognize anxiety for what it was until I lived far into my fifties.

For others, let’s say their fearful, dysfunctional mother drank booze like my mother did, smoked, shot up heroin or snorted coke while they were in the womb? Bathed in the chemicals of fear, abused by drug poisons and addicted to alcohol before they have a chance to choose for themselves...? Think about it, as you look around yourself disdainfully at the wreckage of lives early lost. How much credit can anyone take for the robust state of their mental health and list of social accomplishments if birth and pregnancy are so out of their control?

(Strange that on this date, June 9, 2003, as I rework these passages, I come across an article in the Spokesman about rats. Seems that mother rats who lick their offspring four to five times more than other mommy rats raise adult rats which can deal with ordinary rat life with much lower levels of stress than their fellowrats. The licking behavior causes permanent changes in the baby’s genes that create additional receptor sites for the intake of happy chemicals from the bloodstream. Strange too, in this Bush-league age of anti-drugsturm that we are becoming ever more aware that good people and bad people and all the range between behave well or ill based very much on the drugs in their blood streams. Think about it! All our behavior is based on the drugs in our body systems, yet we have criminalized people for trying to make corrections to the lack or presence of chemicals in their bloodstream so that they can live happier lives. What’s the real difference between heroin and Lexapro, a good long daily run, a brisk walk and marijuana, other than what we make criminal and what our culture calls legitimate? It’s all about chemicals. People can become addicted to running too.)

Too many Americans never stop to count their blessings. Born healthy, with average intelligence, to welcoming parents and raised with basic standards of health care and mental encouragment—many people I know seem not to count their blessings or thank “goodness” that they got off to a good start. Instead, they spend their days griping about the lazy, the alcoholic, the street bums, the welfare cases, the poverty stricken, the whipped and defeated, about whom they know nothing. Just by accident of birth, they began with a better deal and never suffered most of the mental or physical trauma which leveled their fellows.

These “life’s a bowl of cherries and it’s your fault if you don’t make it” guys are fooling themselves and trying to fool you too. But I’ve told you the secret of the “bowl of cherry people”. The most truly contented people I know do have compassion for the defeated and also know that life is not a “bowl of cherries”. Never has been and never will be. They accept that painful truth and know they’ll be lucky to escape life with only a normal portion of pain and suffering. They don’t expect or seek happiness; they accept life on life’s terms and make the best of what comes day in and day out. They’re not escapists but those who turn their prows into the wind and sail against it. Most of them know that luck is a big part of anyone’s success and that fortune sometimes defeats and sometimes lifts up the individual. Grateful for what they’ve got, they don’t seek out “happy” movies or escapist literature because they want to know who they are and how they got to be that way even if the psychological discoveries along the rocky path bite like rattlesnakes.

May 26, 2003 under an overcast, Sunday sky at Starbuck’s on Grand Blvd., groggy from one-third of a Lorazepam sleeping pill last night, bowels rumbling... (Ah, Bush, our relationship stinks. You stink! Sleeplessness, Irritable Bowel Syndrome plague me. What a life!) ...I continue this Nobody’s autobiography beside a floor to ceiling window which looks out over macadam, parked SUVs and passing traffic....

That was yesterday and another Starbuck’s. Today, May 27, I insert the following.... I sit farther into a different Starbuck’s from similar looking floor to ceiling windows but still look out at traffic and tar on Hamilton Avenue on an overcast Memorial Day Monday. Thinking “tall buildings, traffic, macadam”, I no longer have the energy to complain about “tear down paradise, put up a parking lot” life. The battle’s over. Paradise lost.

I listened to a collection of Jonathan Franzen essays two weeks ago and he concurs. His description of the depression which plagued him after his first novel was published is very familiar to my depression from 1965 to 1976 when I was struggling to escape Nobody status. I’ll get to that. Right at this moment, I just hope to live through this season of Bush-league play into a more gentle and hopeful time. At least I have no more illusions about being famous and getting on the Johnny Carson Show. As Ed McMahon said: And now, wwwheeeere’s Johnny? Franzen at least gets his books published and achieves a minimal celebrity. Almost on Oprah, he was. But I wouldn’t be a Nobody in my own mind if I accomplished that much. What would I call this book? Would I even have reason to write it?

Suddenly I remind myself of the comic in Seinfeld’s “Comedian” who was obsessively worried about his celebrity. I don’t recall his name. (Man, would that hurt him!) He was so open about his craving for fame that I squirmed to watch him. I pretended for so many years, like many of my contemporaries, that to succeed was to sell out. Who has not had to consider that attitude? And, judging from the results, there’s little chance I ever will “sell out”.

I like to think I hid (hide) my own craving better than the Seinfeld comic (Arnie, is that it?) but who knows? From the inside looking out is not the same as from the outside looking in. All I do know is that I craved fame as much as I craved to write something “beautiful”. And I craved that too in my more relaxed moments, to write something as beautiful as some of the work that touches me in my reading and viewing life. I tell myself that if I could write something that I knew to be truthful, that radiated the beauty of life, then I’d be satisfied. Who really knows?

Interesting to me that one can see the same vulnerability, the same “how’m I doing” comments and attitudes, in the other comedians in Seinfeld’s flick, even Seinfeld, but the others aren’t so obsessive/compulsive about their need to achieve. Or the talking about it. And perhaps that’s the difference between making it (whatever it is) and successfully becoming a Nobody. But I’m also reminded of Sid Caesar, Milton Berle and the stories of their lives. And there’s also Lenny Bruce.

And what about Woody Allen’s fabled neuroticism? That Woody Allen existed and created is something I’m extremely grateful for. Same for S.J. Gould, Sagan, Joseph Campbell and Steven Pinker, Scorcese, Yeats, Fellini, Fitzgerald, Bergman, Eliot, Cronenberg and Harmony Corinne, to name a few. I’m glad I’m post-Darwin and Freud also. I’m glad for Alice Miller and John Bradshaw, almost contemporaries. These people pointed the way into the cave of myself and lighted its dark corners or pointed me out into the broad shiny Cosmos and eventually layered me into that wired space between the physical world and the world of the consciousness that we call reality about which I am currently reading, i.e. How The Mind Works.

Yes, everyone of us has the world outside us and the world inside us as represented by that animal resource we call consciousness. And that’s all there is, my friends. “As the psychologist George Miller has put it, ‘The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world.... [A]ll [the] fundamental aspects of the real world of our experience are adaptive interpretations of the really real world of physics.’” (How The Mind Works p. 333)

I was pleased to read in one of Woody’s biographies that he considered “Stardust Memories” to be his favorite flick. It’s mine too which is probably because Fellini’s “8 1/2”, the inspiration for Woody’s “Memories”, is a movie that opened my head as wide as the Mediterranean to welcome the foreign film into my conscious awareness where it lodged to lead my consciousness into the totally different reality in which I now happily reside.

Big aside: I want to meet Woody Allen. Hey, Woody, if this autobiography of a Nobody ever makes it into print and you’re still around, can we sit down and have a chat?

To be ruthlessly honest, the first foreign film I recall seeing was “Sundays and Cybele”, and what I remember most about that film is a woman on a bed who, in getting up or getting down from it, revealed her panties. That was enough for me. I fell in love with foreign films, and so followed my unpatriotic penis out of the pallid, predictable, plot heavy, sexless American film of the late Fifties into the aisles of French New Wave cinemas and beyond. By the way, I recently reviewed “Sundays” and got a whole lot more out of it. Not until “The Graduate”, late 60s, did American films mature and yield up anything much more than cliché plots into which cliché.

Eventually, I became a regular patron of the Lemon Tree, the only foreign film venue in all of Dayton’s big city, backwoods environs. I watched “Knife In The Water”, “Black Orpheus”, “8 1/2” and “Blowup” there. Like many foreign film theaters of the time, the Lemon Tree eventually morphed into a porno film venue. From panty crotch to full frontal crotch is a natural progression, isn’t it?

My friends and I also drove out in the country to the sleepy, tree-heavy Yellow Springs, home of Antioch College and John Bryan State Park, to watch foreign films in its narrow, smelly downtown movie theater. I saw Bergman’s “Scenes From A Marriage” there. Another winter in the 60s, The University of Dayton put on a foreign film series every Sunday. There I saw “Hiroshima Mon Amore” among others.

The Oakwood Theater, a single screen theater that tried to save itself with foreign films, brought me and my good friend Carl, Jacque Tati’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” and I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Another single screen neighborhood theater on Sprague Avenue in Spokane, Washington a decade later tried to save itself with foreign films in the 70s and, like The Lemon Tree, moved from foreign films into pornography. I saw Pasolini’s very religious and socialistic Italian film, “The Gospel According To St. Matthew”, there. It is a straightforward presentation of that Gospel which employes peasants in all the roles. Christ’s speeches are given verbatim from the Bible text and, proclaimed plainly and without religious hype, Jesus sounds so revolutionary and even angry that you come away convinced that he was a man preaching social revolution. Two months later, two friends and I enjoyed the sensuous pleasures of “Deep Throat” and Marilyn Chambers in “Behind The Green Door” on the same screen from which Christ proclaimed his doctrine of social change.

Eastern Washington University put on a foreign film series also, when I was enrolled in the mid to late Seventies and early Eighties, and I saw the surrealistic “Guernica” there. In it peasants piss on crosses and little people fornicate with nuns. You get a good feel for how much the peasant communists hated the church and why. That film was so mind blasting that the first projectionist refused to show it, and we had to hunt up a replacement for ourselves on short notice.

Earlier, at Southern Illinois University, I watched the Russian film, “The Cranes Are Flying” and “The Blue Angel” as part of another series of foreign films. I missed not a one of those either. We were very intellectual, me and my Southern Illinois friends, and deeply discussed themes and ideas afterwards. One musician with our bunch topped all comments after seeing “The Blue Angel”, the story of an abusive, middle class, conservative German high school teacher who falls for a cabaret singer, Marlene Dietrich. You can see the psychological roots of the average Second World War German in that movie which are very much like current American, Bush-league trends, but, anyhow, someone asked the musician what he learned from the film. He said, “Man, German prostitutes are really fat!”

I watched many foreign films in the Sixties through the Seventies and still hunt them out today. Foreign films were a real part of the intellectual revolution many of us experienced during those times, away from TV and plot heavy American films toward symbolism and surrealism, a reality much more authentic than the forced reality that story telling plot lines force onto modern consciousness. They opened our minds to a truer way of viewing reality and actually helped teach us that reality is pretty much what you make it out to be.

That monumental shift in consciousness is pretty frightening to the ordinary sensibility, and I struggled with it for a long time myself. Simultaneously, I wanted to let go and hold on to the working class mentality I proudly inherited from my mine worker roots, but I also couldn’t escape the deluge of information that was on the side of modern psychology as expressed in the arts of the Twentieth Century. I had to go along with those obvious truths.

Part of the bitterness of today’s battles between the left and the right is between those of us who live comfortably in modern reality and those who would like to drag us back to the small boxes of yesterday’s cliché story line realities and stuff us into them and into roles which make us little more than characters in a bad B movie written by an unimaginative superbeing left over from the days of the Hollywood contract system when actors had few choices.

The hippy days were a lot more intellectual than current opinion recognizes. Now foreign films are harder to find, but they’re still getting into America and people who are literate enough to read subtitles as they watch can still enjoy a refreshing viewpoint when they tire of the bang fuck predictability of current American movies and fairy tale entertainment for children, like the Hobbit stuff and the wizard kid and comic book characters, or high tech tomfoolery which tries to make up for intellectual thinness with whiz bang spec effects. Movies that end with a gun battle have the most boring endings I can think of. Not long ago, a great little American movie called “Hard Eight” entertained me to no end until it concluded with a totally unnecessary gun incident. At that moment I fully realized how stupid the idea is that gun battles and death make an authentic ending to life’s dramatic moments.

Today Independent films are taking up some of the intellectual slack. Let me name one or two interesting recent films, foreign and independent: “Gummo”, “Crash”, “Far From Heaven”, “Lone Star”, “The Princess and the Warrior”, “Santa Sangre”, “Freeway”, “Bound”, “Two Family House”, “Crumb”, “Bowling For Columbine” and “Ghost World” or any Lynch film.

Negativism! I try not to fear the future or fall into negativism, but even I must agree with conservative fears about the decline in literacy. The weirdest part of my joining with conservatives who fear intellectual decline in America is that so many of conservatism’s populist, know nothing supporters are dumber than chicken poop. Just listen to the illiterate medium of talk radio for a day. Superstition, wild assertions, claims without proof or merit—you’ll think you’ve returned to the dark ages. We’ve grown so much dumber now, in Bush-league America.

Spring, 2003, in the present and out of the theater darkness and mystery, and two young girls behind me in this espresso joint chatter about boyfriends. One says she’s tired of having her heart broken. Who isn’t? Every time I think about Bush’s America, my heart breaks. Continuous heartbreak. All America’s promise gone and we’re back to Christianity’s vertically organized dog eat dog life. Some of us are trying gamely to alleviate our evolutionary physiology, but the Christians won’t let go of it. They live it out, monkey grin to monkey grin, and can’t see themselves in the mirror truly. They just can’t get past their Darwinian roots.

Aside: if you don’t know that Bush is a dim-bulb, acting mostly out of animal instinct, then you are inexperienced, gullible, uninformed, or blinded by religious prejudice. I’m sorry, but certain levels of experience and education are necessary to recognize dim-bulbs in any culture. So you can call me elitist if you want to, but I’m much less elitist than those who claim they know the one and only true savior and that all the rest of us are doomed to a horrible eternity if we don’t acknowledge their superbeing as our superbeing. Pardon me, but that attitude’s just arrogant ignorance.

Poor girls. Young love’s always painful when you’re not ready to accept the basic nature of the procreative drive evolutionary biology reveals to us. Poets call it love, but that yearning we feel is only the procreative urge our swarming chemicals set us up to fulfill. That doesn’t mean we don’t experience feelings for our mates which we call “love”. I hope, now happily on my fourth marriage, I have no more painful tales to tell on that head.