CHAPTER TWO

Grandfathers, Uncles, Dad and Cousins

So much for the time being for the city and movies. Back to the historical linearity of this Nobody's autobiography. You already know I took 16 hours climbing out of the womb with a howling push from my mother, but unlike David Copperfield, I was born without a caul. This must have been an unlucky omen, for I’m still a Nobody though my mother lived longer than Master Copperfield’s, poor woman.

I’ve read David Copperfield three times and Great Expectations twice. I’ve had my Dickens of a time. I treasured my own great expectations, as do all human animals, and failed to achieve them, like most everyone else. I had to learn to put my head above my heart too like Davy Copperfield, though I no longer think so simplistically about “head” and “heart” in the psychology of the human animal. Believe you me, I was naive for the longest damn time. May the Goddess Athena (Goddess of Democracy) grant that I never return to that romantic, Christian and hopelessly Victorian state of mind!

The fraternal side of my family came into America from Wales, I believe, in the last quarter of the 19th Century, a family with coal miner roots. The Welsh were noted coal miners in the land of their origin, and when I was young I enjoyed the movie, “How Green Was My Valley” about coal miners in Wales because of that association. And John L. Lewis, an honored personage in my grandfather’s house, who formed the United Mine Workers was Welsh too.

Two things stand out for me about the Welsh besides their mining expertise. They loved to sing and are often portrayed as singing while they walked to and from the coal mines. In fact, my dad and his three brothers all sang well enough to sing in the Dayton Glee Club, a citywide choir. I have an old picture in which three of them are in the choir picture at the same time. My dad also said that he and his friends really did stand on street corners and sing for entertainment some evenings. A few out of context lines from one old song stand out as referring to my father’s childhood:

When we were kids
On the corner of the street,
We were rough and ready guys,
But O how we could harmonize!

Here comes Jack. Here comes Jill,
Down to lover’s lane.
Now and then we meet again,
But things don’t seem the same.

How I get a lonesome feeling
When I hear those church bells chime.
Those wedding bells are breaking up
That old gang of mine!


The other thing about people from Wales which stands out is a deep-seated Welsh hatred of slavery. I came across a book of collected letters written from the new world back to Wales, and found that few, if any, Welshmen would settle south of the Mason-Dixon line, and they swelled the ranks of the abolitionists. But no one is perfect. In those very same letters which show the Welshmen standing tall above the evil of slavery, one finds long diatribes against the filthy, ignorant, immoral and animal-like Irish.

The Welsh distaste for slavery may be rooted in their own struggle to remain free of English domination. They were the only country in that neighborhood which did not succumb to English conquerors. In fact, a Welsh king conquered England, but I don’t know the details and, according to my plan, I can only tell you this history as it might come up at a table in a bar in bits and snatches without research to discover the details.

My paternal grandfather worked in West Virginia coal mines, down near Bluefield where early union efforts and mine owner resistance generated terrible violence and death. A great film, based on true facts about mine conflicts in West Virginia, is “Matewan”, written by John Sayles, the cool director of “Lone Star”. Watch “Matewan” and you’ll understand why we ought to be troubled at how easily modern young men and women sell short the breaks and benefits, the working conditions, that union men and women fought and died for in those times. Politicians like Tom Delay and George Bush, completely in the pockets of capitalists, are working steadily to return America to those days more than 100 years age.

(Aside: as I return to this chapter on July 11, 2003 while searching for a passage on the funeral parlor, let me report that I recently purchased “Matewan” on the Internet for my collection of great films.)

Today, Americans like to put down the French, but the average French working man and woman still control their economic destiny in more direct ways than American workers do. The French workers can still close down their country anytime they want to. Americans, for all their pride, seem much more docile when confronted with authority. They make a lot of noise, but do nothing. Modern America, if you ask me, with its current religious furor and stress toward mindless patriotism is too much like historical Germany.

Not that all mine owners or today’s businessmen were or are necessarily cruel people. “How Green Was My Valley” shows how economic pressures created insurmountable problems for mine owners. Something had to give—wages, or layoffs and mine closings. The conflict could tear families apart as some family members held loyal to the mine owners while others unionized or left the mining communities for greener pastures. Some benevolent mine owners tried as long as possible to keep their workers employed while others went immediately to tougher measures to save their own economic butts. Caring Welsh mine owners could go bankrupt trying to keep their workers employed while others survived on ruthlessness.

In America, events were much more cut and dried and coldness prevailed. In light of those experiences, we should all remember with amazement the New England businessman who recently kept paying his workers while his burned down factory was rebuilt. Ah, you see, I’ve already forgotten this businessman’s name but not the deed! But, if we can recall the deed, we can research for the name.

My grandfather’s chest was crushed in a mine cave-in. The accident resulted in a weakened heart, and angina much of his life, which finished him off with a heart attack in his 60s. I recall from my stint of living with my grandparents that he used to take a raw egg every morning in a shot of whiskey. The concoction was supposed to be good for his heart. He’d slip it down his gullet out of a shot glass. I don’t know whether that was an old wives’ remedy or a doctor’s prescription, but the egg probably didn’t do him much good. And nowadays we know why.

Grandpa’s angina led to another situation that I don’t forget when I think about unions, early 20th Century working conditions, the Depression and ruthless business owners. During the Depression, without medical benefits or sick pay, grandfather’s angina was relieved only when he slept on his knees with his head in the seat of a chair. He’d have to sleep like that all night and get up in the morning and be on the job on time because if he wasn’t there, a line of unemployed men waited at the gate to take the job of anyone who was too sick or too slow to show up and on time. Also recall, he worked through this grueling routine 6 days a week, 48 hours a week, without having a choice about it and without getting paid overtime for it.

Another condition not so nice in those days was that a man couldn’t leave his place at work on the line to take a shit or piss until the official break time arrived. The shitter was a long board with holes in it beneath which flowed a stream of water in a trough. Now this may not sound as bad as grandfather’s heart condition and struggle to get to work on time, but I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome and have also suffered with diarrhea on and off during my life. Certain accidents in my later life tell me that if I lived in granddad's day, I maybe would have faced a repeated choice between being disciplined and fired or shitting my pants.

So grandpa slogged through life, sick and in pain. To some young men I know, nowadays, his struggle for bread sounds pretty romantic. Those tough old days when men were men and women knew the difference! No place for wimps there. Some young men these days may think they’re tough enough to return to those hard times, and many may very well be as tough as those hard-handed old factory workers and miners like my grandpa, but why would anyone in their right minds volunteer to suffer like that while rich CEOs increase their take from 40 times the average worker’s wage to 1,000 times his wage and live plush lives off the sweat of the worker’s brow, plus find enough extra cash to buy the presidency for men who tip the scales in their own favor over and over? Has the average worker grown stupid and turned Bush-league?

Of course it takes courage to pull up your jock and panties and get in there and work and suffer and earn your daily bread! Be happy and proud (if you need to feel pride instead of gratitude) that you are able to pull your daily load. Be like Thoreau’s pitiable farmer if you must: look at him, writes Thoreau, “pushing his farm down the road before him!” But it takes courage, also, to oppose the Alpha-males, to stand up to the fat cats and create a society which is fair to everyone and which takes a compassionate view toward those who crumble and break in the struggle and toward those who from birth defect are not up to the competition or toward those injured along the way and knocked out of competition and toward those grown old and worn down by the very longevity of the competition itself, and for the youth who needs a hand up, not a boot in the face!

For one example, mental illness incapacitates 7 to 8 percent of us and gives others a competitive edge over those who suffer from it, and mental illness is not some made up cop out. It’s a well-documented physiological condition, just like a weak heart or bad knees, but it’s even more likely to be dismissed as weakness rather than sickness. Mental illness or poor impulse control create some not so very lovable characters, and others are not likely to want to help such assholes in the first place. It’s so easy to blame the mentally ill for his or her mental problem rather than to create a society which allows for and supports those who struggle to hang on to a place in society.

The American psyche does have a long streak of masochism in it, but some of us would like to soften that tendency which keeps creating conservatives whose own inability to feel suffering impels them to force suffering on the rest of us. I’ll guarantee that if you asked my grandfather if he’d like to have his working conditions back, he’d tell you to kiss his ass. He was a union man through and through.

Finally, you must not imagine my grandfather was a noble and selfless individual. The abusive conditions that made him a tough individual also hardened his responses to those around him, and he sought relief from his responsibilities in booze and gambling. Many weekends a month, even during the Depression, he took precious household money to disappear for card playing and drinking, not returning until Sunday night.

He beat his sons with willow switches, and he demanded they cut their own switches. If the switches weren’t both sufficiently limber and thick enough (a complicated balance) to leave painful welts, he made them cut another and added ten lashes to their punishment. He ruled, literally, with a quick hand over his sons, and more than one of them found himself knocked on his butt from a sudden backhand or openhanded slap upside the head. He was not one to hit a woman, so grandmother escaped the swings of his fist. Even so, after her husband passed, grandmother never sought another mate, did not even date from that day forth.

Grandfather could be generous too. Route 40, the Old National Road along which travelers passed to “go West young man”, passed through Dayton, Ohio and quite near where the Nobodys resided during the Depression. Jobless and homeless men tramped this highway back and forth across the nation in search of work, and if grandpa met one sitting beside the road or tramping along as he walked home from work, he’d ask them up to the house for dinner. After feeding them, he’d pick their brains, asking them where they were from, what they’d been doing, how they’d lost their work. Some of them carried guitars, and my dad told me of hearing these men sing folk songs at the table after dinner.

These tales of hobos and union matters my family passed down to me when I was a kid made me feel I was part of the Depression era. But I wasn’t a part of those times, though I was born right at the tail end of it. I was proud of my working class roots and my family when I was a kid. College and ambition and my mother’s genes changed all that eventually, but until my first marriage and college and early failure, I was damn proud to be the scion of a working man. I sure loved John Steinbeck’s work when I met it in college. Before then, though, I’d met his characters in the movies, in “Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men”, both of which took me in and moved me deeply. My own early loss of family prepared me so that when I encountered Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the Sixties, I was prepared to respond immediately and deeply to the drifter’s feelings.

Later, in the Sixties, when I worked in a small, grimy machine shop in Dayton, I met two of those old drifters directly. Neither was married or had been married for a long time. One was an old railroad machinist and the other was a machinist from Germany who’d come from Germany to escape the Depression only to hit the Depression in America. The German for a long time had worked with the Civilian Conservation Corp. and helped build part of the Cincinnati Zoo. At the time I knew him, he rented an apartment in a house within the fence of a defunct amusement park. He’d have to key the padlock on the gate to let himself in and out, and one night after a night of drinking, I drove him to his gate and remember watching him swing through the tall gate and walk off down the street into a darkened amusement park and thought what a surrealistic place to live, what a way to end up one’s life. I felt I knew his loneliness in my bones, even though my wife and children waited at home for me, but he never talked of being lonely. He was skeptical and hard edged but unafraid to talk about his life. Taking me under his wing one night, when I was talking about romance and pain, this old communist, for that’s what I think he was, told me, “Luff is fuckin’!” I loved men like that when I was young. I imagined they’d seen LIFE in capital letters.

The railroad machinist was a tall thin man and rugged looking with a very old fashioned indicator. Its pointer ranged over a plus three, minus three range from a central zero. It was just a spring loaded pointer on a straight brass scale. No fancy glass cover, no circular dial. Very old stuff. We talked several times about his life. I was surprised to find out he was still married but hadn’t seen his wife or family for years. During the Depression when he couldn’t find work down in Kentucky, he’d hit the road to look for work and traveled all over America to find it. He’d also left his wife and family so that they could get welfare. Families with men at home couldn’t get help, according to his story, so men had to do what he did. I asked him why he didn’t go home when the Depression ended. He told me it was too late. All the feeling between him and his wife was gone after all those years on the road. There was nothing to go home to.

A third guy, Frank, an old Italian butcher I worked with when I worked my way through undergraduate school in an imported food store, may not have been a drifting machinist like the other two, but I remember him, like them, as part of that older generation of men who’d been around the world some and knew something worth listening to. Frank boxed in New Orleans as a young man and delivered groceries to French Quarter brothels. He got an early education in sex down there, and I identified with him, let me tell you. My own penetratory sexual experience began with whores in Puerto Rico when I was 18. I could tell Frank had been at one time a lady’s man though he was now happily married. He carried himself with a jaunty manner and sported a trim mustachio and constantly hitched up his pants with his elbows because his hands were always bloody with meat cutting. He told me about whores, gypsies and fortune telling. He’d been madly in love with a New Orleans’ fortune teller and had believed in her powers, but she hurt him deeply in some way. “Buddy,” he told me, “Don’ trust no fortune teller. Ask ‘em tell you what you eat for breakfast. If they can do dat, then they know sometin!”

Yes, I loved those guys and their stories from the old days. Later, in my first attempt at graduate school, a friend from really big city, Chicago, from Capone’s Cicero actually, told me he always imagined me kneeling to pick up handfuls of soil from rolling crop fields and letting it trickle down through my fingers while commenting on its fertility. So I guess my roots and my reading showed.


In talking about grandfather in Dayton, walking home along the Old National Road and of his penchant for bringing hobos home, I’ve skipped ahead of myself. To return to West Virginia and the Nobodys saga in America: jolted by the cave-in that damaged his heart, grandfather Nobody managed two years of college in mine engineering and became a mine inspector for the State of West Virginia. Then, according to legend, he attempted to start his own mine operation, but he and his partners’ mine was up a holler beside a creek, and they needed a barge to move the coal from the mine site. He and his partners borrowed money to build the barge, but a fire burned the barge to the waterline and they went bust.

When the Depression came, grandfather was in or moved to Ohio where he eventually landed his job with Delco Motors in the tool crib. My similarities to my grandfather amaze me. There he was, a partly educated, mining engineer, working angrily but probably gratefully in a tool crib, and I’m a dude with an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing who makes his pissed off way as a machinist in a job shop, arguing too frequently with my mostly Bush-league colleagues.

My dad wanted to be a doctor and took four years of Latin in high school as preparation, but he got married instead, at eighteen to my hot little, sixteen year old mother, and he became a draftsman for a lamp manufacturer in Dayton and, later in his life, a much respected tool designer in the Dayton community of tool workers. He was one of those fortunate men whose first job turns out to be in a field which he liked and which liked him. As for myself, I am seldom satisfied for long. I think I’ve always felt over or under challenged in anything I do. One state of mind bores and the other frightens me. Another trait of the Nobody?

Grandfather also played semipro baseball. Supposedly it was during a baseball game that my uniformed and dashing grandfather met my serious and sensible Baptist grandmother who had worked from the age of 12 in a hat making shop. When have such couples not been a part of the social scene in America? They formed a pair not made in heaven but a very familiar type to those who study dysfunctional family relations. He was the dashing, exciting athlete, a card playing, combative, church eschewing drinker while my grandmother was the codependent, saintly, Baptist lady with 7th grade education, swept off her feet by the boozer's charm and boldness. (Think George and Laura Bush).

Grandfather Nobody had that early 20th Century mix of political liberalism and moral conservatism which made my own life difficult when I began to struggle to reconcile those two traits in myself. It’s not hard to understand that anyone can hold liberal ideas with a conservative, religious fervor, or how one can be socially liberal and financially conservative, or vise versa. Grandpa could be an FDR loving, liberal Democrat in one breath while in the next he could call my mother a “whore” for walking me over to visit him and grandmother in my baby carriage unaccompanied by her husband. I think I’ve become a more liberal person than he by realizing that much morality is essentially relative and by joining that to my liberal hopes for working class Americans. But as I truly get older now and read more about the science of biology, I feel less certain that the human animal can escape his biological determinism. When I was younger, the fear that nothing would change could depress me to no end. Now, I realize I’m not the one that has to worry about it. It’s my poor damn kids turn!

My dad, like his father, tried to start a business too, a tool design business in 1959, and went bust during that 1959 recession, the one that eventually helped elect JFK because Americans at the time wouldn’t stand for an unemployment rate over 3 percent. My oldest son has been struggling with his own advertising business for four or five years. The only business I ever started was a literary microzine, thanks to my maternal genes (more later), which never made any money and, when I started it up, I knew I had no chance to make money. America is slipping into illiteracy so why should a literary endeavor succeed? Illiteracy also explains the growth of conservatism and religiosity in the current American culture. The abusive conservative and the superstition of the religious always swell like cancers out of ignorance and repression.

We were a male-dominated family. By the time the Great Depression struck, grandpa’s family had grown to six. He and grandmother had four sons, no girls. My dad spermed two boys. Another uncle spermed five boys and no girls. The youngest of my dad’s brothers managed one girl and a boy. I sired two boys and, finally, in my mid-40s, a girl. My next oldest cousin has two boys. The other cousins I’ve sort of lost track of.

This youngest brother, the one my father (next to the youngest) was closest too, was killed in a boating accident when my dad and he and some of my dad’s friends were drinking and playing chicken with power boats in the early spring on the Mad River. In two boats, they swooped and drove at each other and swerved at the last minute until someone miscalculated and they crashed. The prow of one boat struck my uncle in the temple where stood by the motor and killed him before he hit the water. They knew this because he didn’t have any water in his lungs.

My dad dove in to save his brother, into muddy, ice cold, spring river water. He could see nothing and dove and dove, blindly feeling in the rushing, murky water, until he was pulled out of the Mad River in a state of shock. He doesn’t remember being pulled from the river, and he never found his brother. Something tells me that they had to troll and use hooks to retrieve the body, but as I said, some of my memories are suspect.

It’s no wonder my youngest uncle on dad’s side of the family should be killed while horsing around in a dangerous situation. He and dad were best buds and ran around together everywhere. All four brothers went to the same high school, Stivers HIgh School, so they got to know each other pretty well. Dad told me that my uncle when very young did back flips off of high flying swings. Then one day, he didn’t move fast enough and a wooden-seated swing hit him in the head and knocked him cold. He bled pretty bad, my dad told me, but he survived to get his switching for costing the family the price of stitches with his foolishness. A little older but hot wiser, in the Belmont swimming pool, my uncle would bounce from the 20 foot diving board onto the ten foot board, then bounce to the five foot board and finally jackknife into the pool. You can imagine how that trick would go over in a modern pool where too aggressive splashing can lead to banishment from the water for the day.

This favorite uncle had one other close call with water while a kid. Every spring they and the boys my dad and uncle ran with set up a diving board on the Mad River by jamming a piece of planking into rocks on the bank. They’d get my uncle to go out on the end of the board to test it. Which he proudly and daringly did, being the youngest of the crowd. One spring the board wasn’t lodged under rocks well enough and tipped my uncle into the river. Again the Mad current ran swift and cold, and my uncle was rapidly disappearing down river, yelling for help. The gang ran along the river bank, not knowing what to do. Eventually, he caught hold of a low hanging bush and hauled himself ashore. The funny part of this adventure is that one of the boys, Peanuts, threw rocks at my uncle as he was being swept away. After he clambered to safety, they asked Peanuts why he was throwing rocks at my uncle. Peanuts said he was trying to splash my uncle into shore.

When my uncle finally did die by water, Peanuts, an alcoholic by this time, showed up out of nowhere in a new, pinstriped ill-fitting suit, oversize shoes, sockless and drunk. No one in our family had seen him in years. He lived on the streets. He staggered up to my uncle’s coffin, sobbing, and fell into the casket. He had to be led away and comforted. My dad was further grief stricken to see all this.

My dad couldn’t forgive himself for his brother’s death and was severely depressed every year at the anniversary of the accident for many years afterward. My dad blamed himself for calling his younger brother away from his spring chores. My uncle was industriously putting in screen windows when dad and his friends pulled up, towing boats, and enticed him into a boating excursion on the Mad River with them.

Many years later, my dead uncle’s wife called my dad over to her home late one night and tried to seduce him. After the death of her husband, dad often went over to help my sexy aunt. I think his guilt drove him to bend over backward to help her. She probably wouldn’t have tried to seduce my dad except that she was drunk, as she often was. She drank way too much for a lot of years after my uncle died, and her daughter, my sexy cousin, left home early, like my dear mom, to escape into a first marriage which was no more successful than my folk’s marriage. This seductive aunt, a Texan, big-boned and statuesque was also very sexy to me when I entered puberty and beyond, well built, tallish and a red head which may explain why, soon, after I found Maureen O’Hara to be so attractive as an actress.

My uncle was a paratrooper during WWII and was so good that he went straight from training into being an instructor at Fort Benning, Georgia. One time, my dad and I went down to visit him at Fort Benning and ended up for a couple of hours in the brig. We were waiting for uncle to get done with his duties and for some reason were standing under the wing of a plane, probably to shelter from the humid, intense heat and baking sun, when MPs pulled up in a jeep and asked my dad why he was smoking under the wing tank of a plane. They took us to the brig where we waited for my uncle to come get us out.

For a time after the war, he managed a military housing project for the air force outside of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and was able to bring movies home from the base and show them to us kids when the clan gathered. These housing projects were actually rundown barracks, and my uncle and aunt were pretty poor on army pay in those days and could not afford much in the way of entertainment, but they were special to me when I was little. Later, I got more judgmental about my aunt, but I always thought she was sexy as hell.

The oldest of my dad’s brothers had no children and adopted a boy and a girl, and became the quintessential hyper-Christian pedophile who went to prison in his 80’s for a lifetime of pederasty. He molested his own grandchildren by his adopted children and this eventually caused a split with his children, but his super-religious wife never left him, and she was one meddling, religious woman I never liked. She used guilt like a master swordsman uses his rapier and could shame you at the drop of a hat. So, of course, who else but Mrs. Super-religious would be married to the family pedophile? I can’t tell you how often that is the case in the pedophile’s family. Someone or both is always super-religious.

When I was four or five and living with my grandparents after my parent’s divorce, I had an experience with that aunt I still remember. She lay on her back on the bed, and we were wrestling, with me on top. My sexy aunt was leaning against a wallpapered wall, watching us wrestle, when I got a miniature hard on, a sort of exciting tingle in my groin, and I began to rub myself very aggressively against my religious aunt’s groin. My face grew hot and my aunt beneath me began to catch on to what my wriggling meant. She grew perturbed. “Stop that,” she said and threw me off. My sexy aunt laughed to see such a sight and the dish ran away with the spoon. I recall extreme embarrassment.

Speaking of aunts, foreign films and sex, I recall a foreign movie in which peasant women admiringly discuss the size of a male infant’s penis, and in reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, I came across one tribal culture where there is a ritualistic “kissing [of] the genitals of an infant boy”. (p. 368) My aunts, who I think were living with my grandparents while their husbands were away at war, often bathed me, and I vaguely recall the sexy aunt speaking of my penis in some way or other and perhaps touching me in some laughing way. Just the slightest sort of memory and why would I make that up?

My pedophile uncle also entered the service in America’s World War II and rose to second in command of a destroyer in the Pacific. He told me he never saw action but was walking on a Pacific island beach one afternoon shortly after the island had been secured when he tripped and fell face first into the sand, nose very near the gaping neck wound of a beheaded Japanese infantryman. He said that was enough action for him. The more I think about it, the more I think he must have seen some action to be walking on the beach of a newly conquered Pacific island. Perhaps he was one of those veterans who don’t talk about traumatic things.

During the final part of his working life, this uncle was the director of a west coast city’s YMCA for about 20 years. Imagine the damage he may have done there? I don’t know the whole story since I lost touch with this oft moving family member. He was the only one of four brothers who got in two years of college before the Depression flattened his career. When he moved back home, quarters grew cramped for these growing boys in a three bedroom house so my dad volunteered to move out and go live with his maternal grandparents. He once blamed his under supervised time at his grandparent’s home with his marriage at an early age. Of course, I soon asked him if he and my mom had been forced to get married. Who wouldn’t? But he pointed out that they were 18 and 16 when they married and 20 and 18 when I fought my way into the world in 1937.

I am the oldest of these male cousins, first born of my generation. I had those two sons I mentioned with my first wife, and a daughter, at last, with my third wife fifteen plus years later. My only female cousin died of cancer just as she was turning into a most beautiful blond sexpot in her thirties and after getting married to the love of her life. They lived one year together before she died. Several of us male cousins had crushes on her over the years when we were younger.

As I said, the second born male cousin of my generation yielded two boys, and I have lost track and count of all the other cousins and their offspring in my father’s line. Some of my male cousins moved to Florida and others to New York. One cousin was married briefly to the sister of the basketball playing Paxsons. He and his wife had a son. One of the Florida cousins started his own extermination business. Like most American families in the mid to late 20th Century, we Nobodies have been on the geographic move. One of those New York cousins, the one closest to my dead half-brother makes big bucks in the computer world. He spoke at my half-brother’s memorial service. He told us, among other things, that he loved my half-brother’s favorite way of handling a difficult situation. “He’d just say, ‘Fuck it!’” Many years later I heard that “Fuck it!” is the short form of the Serenity Prayer.

Another cousin on my mother’s side is a very rich man in Florida, owning several marinas, and for a time, he was the national power boat racing champion. A crash eventually slowed him down, I believe. As a youth, he led a band and played at my first wedding, but he is not a Nobody, like myself. One of his brothers, another first cousin of mine on mom’s side of the family, went in a different direction. He and his wife have adopted several severely handicapped children over the years, and their names and story appeared in local newspapers when I was still in Ohio.

Another son of my dad’s second oldest brother died barely escaped from a lifetime of alcoholism. A wild man, he lived through the navy, motorcycle and auto crashes, fist fights and foolishness, and married one of the sexiest wives any of my cousins married. She’s now a millionaire in Portland, Oregon. That’s another story which ought to come much later, after I arrive out in the Pacific Northwest myself. The wild man’s brother, the oldest of five males, spent 13 or 11 years in a Catholic brotherhood, teaching high school and living and working within poor communities. Eventually, after years of misery and struggle, he left the brotherhood for a wonderfully alive and funny woman. Together, they have two healthy boykins after their first child was born, in a genetic catastrophe, without a head. It took years before they could accept that this birth catastrophe was not God’s punishment on them for his leaving the brotherhood and her marrying him.

I learned one of my earliest lessons about sibling rivalry from their story. The oldest cousin, it turns out, went into the monastery to earn his mom and dad’s love. They were devout Catholics. The second oldest sought and won their attention with his wildish ways. I was present at a Country Kitchen restaurant with my two cousins when they admitted these sneaky motives to one another. I often witnessed how their mom would tell tall tales within family gatherings about the eldest’s scholarly ways and then shake her head with fond amazement over the wild antics of her second eldest. One got positive attention while the other took the negative, but they each earned attention. The other three brothers, because of our age differences, are sort of lost to me except for the youngest who was quiet and obedient. He reached puberty as the hippy days were waning, late in his parents’ child bearing and raising years, and chose not to confront or discomfit his father, my uncle, but his brothers and my half-brother told me that the dude stole just about anything that came his way which was not tied down, smoked pot, drank and used various chemical strategies for life coping without his father’s ever finding out. He was incredibly sneaky and I met two other young people when I was teaching high school who showed me how effective these conciliatory strategies were for doing damn well as you pleased while placating the establishment. I hope I remember to tell those stories when I get to them in this, my autobiography. When I came to family roles in my reading of John Bradshaw, I recognized the strategies in my cousins in the family.

Like father, like son. That’s it in a nutshell for the only son of my dad’s youngest brother, my favorite uncle, the paratrooper. This cousin, like his dad, demonstrated athletic prowess and the ability to dive and do tricks. I think he swam and dove competitively in high school. He went to Vietnam as a navy seal and, more than once, risked his life stopping the men on patrol boats in the Mekong Delta from raping the Vietnamese women on the sampans. He supposedly adopted a family in Vietnam, learned their language and took care of them while he was there, supposedly without expecting anything in return. But, like so many Nobodys gone bad from good and conservative motives, when he returned to the states, he fell on some difficult times.

Originally, my cousin returned from Nam, wanting to “do good” for the youth of America, so he tried to get into police work, much to my disdain. When he couldn’t get immediately into the Dayton police force, he went to the county, he became a “county mounty”, as we called them. But, after a few years on the force, he went wild. I can’t recall what they called it. He went sort of street crazy in a way only policemen can.

Soon he was carrying on a feud with a couple of county hoodlums in a personal way which is not true police work; he developed a kind of Dirty Harry police criminality. Eventually, the three got into a brawl when he was off duty. One of them caved in cousin’s skull with a steel headed cane that the gangster carried around with him. Then my cousin was accused of insulting a woman and her husband in an after hours club when he was in uniform but off duty and that was the end of his police career.

At this time, I have no idea where this cousin is or what he might be doing, but in my memory, he’s a shining kid, one of the good who wants to do good, but whose goodness is the direct cause of the troubling behavior which eventually destroys him. He wasn’t the first to be undone by good motives nor the last. When someone tells me they need heroes, I think of the doom my cousin found pursuing it. As Pinker notes in How The Mind Works, “In real life, villains are convinced of their rectitude.” Not that I think of my cousin as a scoundrel. He’s probably doing a lot of good right now, wherever he is, but he got caught up in the power trap of trying to force goodness on others. Does the name William Bennett ring a bell?


Thirty years ago, I broke free of my hardwood family anchor in Ohio and drifted (by way of the dream-ridden, misty morninged, Spanish moss draped, Loblolly pined Gulf Coast) to the other side of the Continent, to these eastern Washington scablands and Ponderosa pine where, for the most part, I remain aloof. For all I know, my second born cousin who carries on the family tradition of male domination with his two sons is the only cousin still living in Dayton. His mother, my last living aunt in the Ohio country, died a few years ago and since that time, I’ve felt absolutely detached from that time and place. I mourn her most of all aunties because, at a tumultuous time in my life, she was the aunt who thought of me, the first born of a new generation, and who sent me birthday cards every year until she died.

An interesting factual aside to me is that my birthplace in Ohio, before the Louisiana Purchase, was in what was called the Northwest Territories, and I am now living and will probably die in the Pacific Northwest, although my wife and I talk of fleeing Bush-league America for Canada before it’s too late for Buddhists and atheists in an increasingly evangelized and, of course, repressive America.