CHAPTER SEVEN
A Bully Comes To Kenview Avenue
A Bully Comes To Kenview Avenue
July 15, 2003, 90 degrees promised, sitting at McDonald’s with my trusty iBook and its nearly 6 hours of memory. Kids scream and parents yell. Characters come and go. The local psychotic comes in and goes out with the wild look on his face, and I’m glad for medications. Sitting, his feet shuffle, his mouth hangs open, and he stares at me. The loud old guys meet for senior coffee and discuss politics at the top of their lungs, and I have to listen or move or leave and seek quieter ground. It’s great to be alive. I’ve made it into the 3rd millennium. Trying to imagine the next thousand years gives me a tug in my gut.
For days now, I’ve been plodding through the following pages of Kenview memories. At my age, I don’t have as much control over the elements of my narrative as I used to. I forget what’s in place and what’s not there yet. I repeat myself and my wife catches my errors, thank goodness. I forget why I’m rereading a passage, what I meant to do there or where I came from in the text, so I can’t go back to where I came from. Sometimes, it takes all morning for me to come fully alert. In my frontal lobes I feel a pressure, like a weight which pushes to lower my brows until my eyes close. I’m groggy. I’m not sure whether it’s allergies, old age or lack of sleep, fogging my concentration. For that’s what it is, a weakening of my ability to concentrate. This pressure in my forehead comes between me and full engagement with reality or with the page. I hate it.
Suddenly, I’m sick to my stomach. It’s noon and I’ve been going all morning on coffee without breakfast. I hop up to the counter and order a fish sandwich. I’ve got to quit soon and do some chores before going to work. I’ve got to shop for groceries and do the dishes.
This chapter and the next will be terribly long as I’m trying to cover from mid-third grade until I enter high school in the 10th grade, and that’s a lot of material, plus the fact that all of the Connecticut vacation trips happened during these years before I went away to the Navy when I was 17, but fortunately, I’ve already covered Connecticut in the previous chapter.
And my chronology will be fractured by dad’s continuing to go on road jobs. Road jobs paid good money. After the war, respected tool designers like my dad would be loaned out by Dayton-based design companies to design and oversee various complex jobs around the country, building production lines and production processes, and to design special tooling to get things done. After WWII America was supporting the entire world, plus itself. Things were really booming for the U.S. of A.
Dad had many friends on the road. They’d run into each other in this city or that and party together and play golf until the job ended. They had met one another traveling around doing war work and became good and lifelong friends like combat buddies who stayed in touch even into their dying years. They all eventually settled in one city or another east of the Mississippi so staying in touch required a bit more than reading the local obituary pages.
As I said, the next couple of chapters cover the time in Dayton up to 10th grade, dad’s last wartime road job with a brief stop off in Des Moines, Iowa. The next will cover dad’s road jobs, our time in Grand Rapids, Michigan (a few months), Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota (a year each). We went in and out of Dayton so often and moved around so much for a couple of years that my sense of chronology is seriously confused. One time, we blew into Dayton for no more than six weeks before speeding out again. I popped in and out of school so much that year that I ended up covering the Civil War twice because the history class in one state was on a different schedule than the history class in another. I seemed pretty damn bright the second time I took it.
Eventually, my dad and stepmom decided they had to stop moving me around because my grades were falling pretty badly, and I was having trouble in school. I hated homework and wouldn’t do it. So, my stepmom and I remained fixed in place while dad went on one last road job while I was in my junior year at Stivers High School (the Bengals, the Stiver’s Tigers), then he stopped all road jobs, or the road job business ended for everyone. Back to the apres honeymoon period.
After my dad married my stepmother and after our mutual honeymoon, we either settled into the white frame house on Kenview for a few months before we moved into a motel in Des Moines, Iowa or...? we moved straight to Iowa.
From an old set of report cards which end at Washington school in mid-third grade, I know I was halfway through Grade 3 when they pulled me out of Washington School, and I seem to recall being enrolled at Belmont Grade School, but I’m not certain of this sequencing. I may have just skipped the second half of third grade. I was pretty bright for your typical Nobody. Anyhow... my dad’s new war work eventually landed us in Iowa, and I know that America had already celebrated VE (Victory In Europe) day because I still lived with my grandparents when Roosevelt died and my grandpa cried.
A warm summer it was, in Iowa, after the honeymoon, living in a motel room, sans air conditioning, on two beds, with a kitchenette and bathroom. Not our last on the road temporary motel room stay but our first as a newly constituted family. A more important motel stay in Michigan or Minnesota comes up when I’m into puberty.
We must have been on the outskirts of Des Moines because I ran around among scattered trees, in tall weed fields and played down by a creek in a shallow gully. I don’t recall playmates in Iowa, and we didn’t stay in Iowa very long, but I played with another cool toy that I remember from this time. It was a sturdy cardboard castle, painted with stones, and cardboard German soldiers to defend it. A rifle came with the castle and soldiers. You could load up about six tough rubber bands on a spindle with cogs and shoot at the soldiers with them. First you’d hide the enemy in castle doorways and in windows and behind parapets. Then you’d kill ‘em.
Like most kids in those days, I thought that the killing of human beings was as normal as a newsreel. Killing was great sport and great fun, a game that men played; they wore uniforms, drove tanks and jeeps, dug foxholes, threw grenades, flew planes, sailed destroyers, got drunk in bars before shipping out, killed enemies. Killing as a way of life got even more normal for me when the WWII movies began to fill the glowing screen with larger than life figures who I could emulate and wish to follow into death’s door, like John Wayne’s Sergeant Striker killed on Iwo Jima, leaving behind his loved ones.
For most people, the letter to Striker’s kids that John Agar reads to the men after Striker’s death was to inculcate an appreciation for the sacrifice men made when they died for their country. For me, it became a desire to die and leave a lovely woman behind, mourning my death. I think my take on that scene was a kind of “I’ll get even” impulse, an I’ll show you by destroying myself how much I need you. Many people kill others to get even while some kill themselves to get even. Some kill you first, then kill themselves afterwards which is why so many murderers end up on suicide watch. People who are ready and willing victims, who don’t like themselves very much, are ever ready to evoke the mysterious cure-all of Death.
After puberty, if you are the Sergeant Striker type, or like Aldo Ray in “Battle Cry,” you add in premarital sex with the beautiful woman who becomes your wife when and if you get back from the front, baby, back from the war. In some stories the woman is pregnant when you leave. In others, she isn’t. No one blamed anyone for premarital sex in those days or pushed abstinence. It was wartime, my man, and you put normal morality aside for the duration. It’s fashionable nowadays to blame hippies, liberals and the 60s for a terrible decline in sexual mores, if “decline” is what ordinary sexual conduct is and throughout history has been. Well, it began for me in the 40s and 50s with war movies which reflected the reality of the Big One and had nothing to do with the Sixties. I wanted to experience in reality for myself what I experienced vicariously in the darkened movie house: sex, war, romance, distant and strange places, camaraderie.
We didn’t live in Des Moines long. Dad’s war work ended as soon as the war with Japan ended. I remember that moment clearly. I was beginning to notice memories of world events, another step in a youth’s intellectual maturity. When Roosevelt died, I recall it because grandpa cried. The threat about being “stabbed in the back” was connected with fear. I didn’t truly understand what the news commentator meant; I just picked up his fear. But VJ day stands out as my memory, distinctly mine.
Anyhow... I was playing out on the front lawn in front of the motel. On the other side of a tall chain link fence, down a long embankment, a few cars began to honk their horns as they sped by on the highway. Soon, the highway filled with cars honking their horns. Surprised, I went in to find out from my stepmom what was up. It was VJ day. Victory Over Japan while I was living in yet another American state. Born in Ohio, divorced in Missouri, I ended WWII in Iowa with a new mom who didn’t want to be called stepmother. A lot of travel for someone not yet 8.
Dad was at work VJ day. He was always at work, 12 hour days usually. One time I sort of blamed his 12 hour days for the divorce from my “real” mom as I learned to call her when my stepmom insisted I call her mom too. He honestly replied, “Would you rather I died in the war?”
Was I ever ashamed of my dad’s non military wartime service in the war industry? I never thought of that before, until just now. I know I always felt I was a big disappointment to him, but was he a disappointment to me? Did my idolization of my paratrooper uncle come through to him as a rejection of him? Boy! There’s one hidden in my history that I will never answer satisfactorily.
Steven Pinker writes, “In sum, a first born should be conservative and a bully.” I think that’s page 453 in How The Mind Works. First born, not only to my parents but of a whole generation of cousins, I was both conservative and a bully as a child. Competitive, aggressive, sexist, manipulative, cautiously reserved and afraid, and a conformist, I blew eastward from Iowa into my new neighborhood on Kenview in Belmont like a whirlwind. It wasn’t my first time to live on that street in that home, but now I am a conscious eight year old. I’ve got a new mother figure. I’ve survived the divorce of my parents, a move from Dayton to St. Louis, St. Louis back to Dayton, Dayton to Des Moines and back again, the death of a beloved dog, and the loss of the comforting company of my grandmother, and survived a pretty tough neighborhood with its several bullies. And kindergarten too.
I first meet Joe when he approached me as I stood in my driveway, surveying my new stomping grounds, most probably warily wondering what bullies I’ll encounter here.
Joe, a year or two younger, walks up to me and asks, “What’s your name?”
“Nobody,” I say. “Wanna fight about it?”
The tenor of that moment did not change for a long time. I think I terrorized part of my block pretty fiercely, although there was another kid, name of Ross Russell, who bullied me in turn, but he ran with a different crowd.
Ross taught me my first dirty joke, maybe by fifth grade, maybe third, but pretty quickly anyhow. Who knows? It might have been as late as seventh grade, but I really don’t think so. By seventh grade I’d seen my first dirty cartoon book with Olive Oil and Popeye doing the nasty. Popeye had a big one under his trousers, and Olive had great legs under that skinny, boney dress. You’d see Olive, skinny and boney in her dress on one page. Then on the next page, her skirt would be over her head, and she’d be a curvaceous woman with great legs and hairy cunt. I saw this comic book porn in an upscale, middle-class, neighborhood school in the late 40s, so please don’t tell me about current schools and how bad and dangerous they are.
Sexual awareness comes around to all kids. When you’re old enough to have the urge, you’re going to feel it. Then there’s all these decisions to make and feelings to feel that would drive even the sanest kid half nutso. Sexual desire is as normal as popcorn and apple pie, and adults must have a handy forgetter if they can’t remember their own days in junior high when they tortured over this damn drive and painful pleasure all wrapped into the opposite sex.
The dirty joke goes like this. (WARNING! It’s stupid and crude as hell. If you don’t want to read a dirty joke, close your eyes and read the next few lines with your eyes closed.)
Anyhow, this boy named Johnny Fuckerfaster had his girlfriend out behind the barn doing you know what. After awhile, his mom called out to him, “Johnny. Johnny! Come home!” Of course, he ignored her. He was having a real good time. After a few more minutes, his mommer stuck her head out the window and called for little Johnny a second time. “Johnny! Johnny! You come home right this minute!” Still, Johnny ignored her. He was having way way too much fun to go home. Well, when Mrs. Fuckerfaster got really mad, she always used Johnny’s last name. That clued him in to how angry she was. A third time she stuck her head out the window. “Johnny! Johnny Fuckerfaster, you better get home right now or there’ll be what for when you do!” Johnny had no choice now. Frustrated, he called back, “Jesus Christ, mom, I’m fucking her as fast as I can!” That’s the joke.
Stupid, eh? There I was, still in grade school, and I’ve seen Popeye’s package and him doing Olive with it, and I’ve heard a joke that’s about as crude, silly and childish as a joke can be.
To show you how young I was when I heard the Fuckerfaster joke, I went home that afternoon and asked my stepmom what “fuck” meant. That’s how young I was. Right there, on the spot, began a typical late 40s, early 50s sex education exchange between parent and child. “O my!” she exclaimed. “Don’t ever say that word on a bus!” Nor can I forget, speaking of sex education, my father, coming to me on the eve of my wedding when I’m 22 and have served four years in the Navy, and asking me, “Do you have any, uh, questions? Do I need to tell you anything?”
Of course, as I tell you this, I almost feel the embarrassment he felt and I felt too, to have to discuss the subject. Suddenly, I’m very old and feel all my 65 years and sad for the world and sorry we have to keep going through this, and sad that we are not just still monkeys without all this burden of consciousness; just display at each other and the best man does it behind the banyan tree with Monkey Maguire.
My faulty sexual assumptions were revealed to me in a dream sometime during a couple of years when a new family moved into the farm house on the corner with a couple of boys and at least one, if not three, girls. They were what many native Daytonians called, with extreme prejudice, “hillbillies.” Watch the movie, “Gummo”, and you’ll come across some of the deepest fears, or should that be “prejudices”, about hillbillies my subconscious held. Those fears, I believe, were planted when I lived with my grandmother in her decidedly underclass neighborhood and I had to fight off bullies, bully or be bullied. Some of this native aggression is revealed in “Gummo”. Anyhow....
I ran around with these two while I was in junior high but not for very long, and I didn’t play doctor with any of their sisters. One stand out experience I shared with these brothers were the games of cowboys we played in their garage which was mostly a big empty two car thing. We’d make up the garage to be a saloon with big pieces of plywood on saw horses for the bar. We had an old beat up card table too. All I remember is our fake fist fights, straight out of the movies. One or the other of us would stroll in real tough and we’d make cowboy threats and grumbles. Then a fight would start; we’d roll over tables and the bar and overturn chairs and make a holy mess of our set up, just like in a “real” movie bar fight.
These fake fights were the beginnings of my other pieces of physical comedy. In high school and after, I learned to enter parties by falling down the basement stairs, always best when carpeted, but I learned to roll and fall without anything more than bumps or bruises showing up the next day. I learned how to walk into a door like slapstick comedians do, and I still do it to this day at work. I learned how to trip one foot with the other so that my stumble looks like a real trip. Every once and awhile I can fool someone with my fakes, but not too often. Now I’m more cautious and afraid of an accidental broken bone, and I never fall down steps anymore, even though I still roll out of chairs and drop to the floor, pretending to be poisoned or to be having a hear attack. At 66 I’m still capable of slapstick.
Eventually, the brothers and I fought. Our friendship never fully developed. They were pretty rough and tough, and I think one of the brothers popped me a good one in a fight. I don’t recall I ever felt safe or comfortable around them. Comparing myself to them? At the time, I believe I felt cowed. The old pecking order asserted itself. However, I must have had a crush on one of their sisters because I dreamed about her.
In front of their farm house on an urban street, where the front walk met the sidewalk, two towering evergreen trees whose lower branches drooped to touch the ground rose tall on both sides of their front walk. If you climbed in toward the trunk at the base of the trees, you could be hidden from the rest of world in there, amidst the branches. In my dream, the girl and I meet under one of the trees, and I have what can only be described as that empty tingly feeling in my groin that’s definitely sexual but without an erection. I think I must have been right on the verge of puberty to have these feelings in the dream. The girl reveals herself to me, and guess what? She’s got a penis under her skirt which she has pulled up to her waist for me to see!
As any reader can see, I didn’t learn much from the comic book or with the neighbor girl next door on McGee Street, with her peeing or the stick incident, or from the sexual joke Ross told me. I think it’s interesting that I give the girl a penis and so identify her with my body, as if I have not fully established my own sexual identity. In the dream, she’s part male and part female, asexual or bisexual, hermaphroditic. From birth, you will recall, I have had a hard time separating myself from a woman.
Down out of Belmont into town ran Wayne Avenue hill, a gently sloping but extremely long descent on a busy street. One of the brothers, the toughest and older of the two, had a really bad bicycle accident while tormenting me. The two brothers and I were swooping down Wayne Avenue hill toward downtown on our bikes, single file because Wayne is so busy. By the way, the brothers’ names were Keith and Wesley, and Wesley was speeding down Wayne Avenue ahead of me. Keith’s behind me or ahead of both of us. His actually position is lost in my hazed memory. Anyhow... that day I’ve got a bad case of laryngitis or my voice is changing, and Wesley is leaving me behind. Another challenge to my manly boyhood. These guys are always tougher, faster, stronger than me. It’s the hillbilly in them that makes them tough, I used to think. Dumb and tough.
We are really tearing down the hill, and I think they’re trying to lose me, part of the teasing aggression that’s always going on with them and me, so I’m rushing to keep up. Brother Wesley, just ahead by about 25 yards, is peddling downhill like a shot and is looking back over his shoulder, taunting me, pissing me off, but I see before him, a parked car which is parked a little farther out into the street than the others. I see he’s going to hit it. I try to cry out but my voice fails, breaks. I try twice with voice breaking to warn him before he hits the back of the parked car and sails over it, hitting the hood of the car, sliding over the ornament and gashing his side with that before hitting the street, skidding and rolling until he stops partly under another parked car.
I’m scared because when he gets up, he has to plop right back down on the curb. He acts like he can’t move. He’s hugging his torso in his arms. I can see he’s badly hurt, bleeding from his arms and side and head. His bike is lying out in the street, and he’s so engulfed in pain that he doesn’t notice it. I’m thinking he may have lost a tooth, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know about calling ambulances or anything. It’s pretty scary to be young and to see an invincible, tough fellow being wounded like that, let me tell you. Makes you feel vulnerable yourself.
But, by god, he was tough! Those brothers were tough. He gets up eventually and limps to his bike and straightens it. Its bent pretty bad, but he gets up anyway and straightens the handle bars to the wheels, climbs back on and pedals on his bleeding way. Tough. Let me tell you I didn’t lord it over them! They were one family I didn’t bully, but they moved, or we went on another road job with my dad, and I didn’t didn’t have to stay out of their reach very long nor dream weird dreams about their sisters.
As to the others. I lorded it over at least four of them: Dick, Bob, Joe, and Ronny, though Ronnie was more aloof and didn’t play outside with us as much as the rest of the guys. One time I sat on Joe’s stomach and hit him in the face for the longest time, bloodying his nose and reddening his face. I don’t know why I was angry with him. Probably because he didn’t want to do or couldn’t do what I wanted him to do. Probably his parents, who were very strict Catholics, wouldn’t let him do what I wanted him to do so, in my frustration, I beat him up. His folks were so strict Joe couldn’t buy regular comic books, like “Tales From The Crypt”. He could only read “Classic Comic” books. So I did read a lot of classics when I was a kid. I don’t remember them any better than I recall the comic books with more “bite” in them.
Another time, Dick and I had a huge fight, and his little brother, Bob, got into it too. Dick and I argued and challenged one another to a fist fight in his front yard, then announced the fight all over the neighborhood and drew a crowd. When we commenced fighting, the neighborhood kids were looking on and Dick’s father is watching too. After awhile, Dick says he’s got to go into his house and rest for a minute. He’s near tears, his cheeks red, ‘cause I tagged him pretty good a couple of times. Then, while he’s in the house, his younger brother comes charging at me, growling and wanting to revenge his brother. He’s too little to hit so I grab his arms and swing him around in a circle and let go. He flies into the evergreen bushes that line the front of Dick and Bob’s front porch and goes into the house screaming bloody murder. When Dick comes back out, I hit him a few more times, then his dad stops the fight because he can’t stand to watch his son take a beating anymore.
Many many years later, after I’ve been in the Navy and am in college at the University of Dayton, I ran into Bob, the younger brother. He was now an end for the University of Dayton football team and towered over me. We said hello, he told me what Dick was up to, and that was the end of it. Toss him into the bushes? Now I couldn’t even lift “little Bobby” with a fork lift let alone toss him into the bushes.
What goes around comes around. Remember Ross? One day Ross who was a few years older than me chased me home and stood out front and taunted me. He was tall and blond and mean as hell. My dad was home and, like all dads, he doesn’t want his son to be a coward. He insists I go back out and face the bully down. In my memory, Ross is a huge guy, and I’m very tiny. I have no idea what our age differences and body sizes really are. All I know is that I feel terribly young, recalling it now. In fact, the experience with Ross may have come before he moved out of the neighborhood and before I became the street bully. He was enough older than me to have disappeared from the normal neighborhood routine into high school while I was still in grade school, and we lost track of each other just like all kids do when they enter different realms of experience. But Ross was very real now and very much in my face, so out I go and stalk the length of my yard down to the street where he stands waiting, afraid the whole way. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get to him. When I do get to him, I take one wild swing at his chest, not very effectively, and turn, speed right back to the house and through the screen door. And that’s all I remember.
If you don’t think these pecking order fisticuffs are the common experience for male kids, listen. When my oldest was in the second or third grade, we moved into a new neighborhood. He had to fight also to make his place in the neighborhood. Kids used to chase him home from school all the time. One day I was home when he came running into the yard with a neighbor kid in close pursuit. I stopped them both and made them fight it out in the front yard while I refereed. The other boy got my oldest down and hit him a few times. It was painful to watch. Then my boy got angry and redoubled his efforts. Soon he got the other kid down, but before he could hit him, I called the fight. Somehow, I felt I was now teamed up with my son in hurting a neighbor boy. I don’t know why I couldn’t let my son get a few shots in. My oldest still remembers this moment in his life. It’s right alongside his winning the school chess tournament just after his mom and I separated at about the same time.
For awhile our gang on Kenview got into boxing, strung some ropes between poles in someone else’s basement, Dick and Bob’s basement, and got out the big, puffy boxing gloves. I didn’t like refereed boxing. I think one of the dad’s got the idea about boxing because he figured if I was going to be aggressive and keep hitting kids, he’d prefer that I did it with gloves on. Well, one day, we were boxing and one of them gave me such a good shot that I got a headache that lasted for an hour. I never boxed again. I figure refereed boxing wasn’t good for me because I wasn’t juiced with the adrenaline I needed to psych myself up for victory and to scare the others into defeat. I can get pretty enraged when I’m frightened, and a few times, have backed off larger opponents just by the sound and sight of my rage. It’s the display, like an ape!
I decided what games we would play most of the time. I played in their houses more than we played in my house. I was the best softball player and the trickiest in hide and seek, and when we played guns or cowboys and indians, I set the best ambushes so that their was no doubt as to who had shot whom. I always hated the arguing.
“I shot you. You’re dead!”
“No, I shot you. You’re dead!”
I won lots of Monopoly games which we played two and three times at a sitting. Whole afternoons we’d play! I could usually see the best deals or think in terms of where pieces were on the board and make good decisions. I could sense the culminating moment coming on when a few rolls of the dice could make or break the game for me, then I’d trade and build last minute to be ready for approaching pieces. I played by a stiff set of rules. I liked and sought the bright red/bright yellow side of the board. The prices and rewards seemed just about right there. Second best was the St. James/ St. Charles properties if you got to them fast. You could build early on that gold/dark red side of the board.
If I had a monopoly blocked, I’d never let opponents complete those monopolies unless I was absolutely bankrupt and had to or I could see a clear advantage to me in a trade, that is, if I had the money to immediately begin to build and they didn’t. I’d always mortgage these useless properties for needed cash. I was never after the pennies; I wanted the hundreds. I never bought railroads or utilities unless they practically fell into my lap and I had cash to burn. I rarely violated my winning strategies except when a situation seemed to be leading me unmistakably that way.
I still recall a win I got by paying cash for Mediterranean from one player and for Baltic from another when everyone else couldn’t get a monopoly. Fast talking, like the proverbial used car salesman, I tried to keep people from making trades that would seal their monopolies while I got lucky and stole paycheck after paycheck behind “Go”. I was snotty and cocky, abrasive in pursuit of my little victories. I could talk kids out of decisions which were obviously good for them. Soon I had tons of cash and traded a useless, mortgaged Pacific away to a desperate fellow for two yellows and cash so I had cash to start building on my newest monopoly and he didn’t. That broke the dam and everybody began to trade for monopolies, but it was too late for them. It only got better for me from there on. I crushed them after my impoverished start with the lowliest properties on the board. I doubt that any dirt poor American who actually did come up from the bottom could have felt more elated than I did with that victory. I’m sure I felt great partly because everyone despised the lowly Mediterranean and Baltic and I had identified with that feeling and made it victorious.
I lost games sometimes too but not because of not being shrewd and having a plan. I was very competitive, but the die can’t always be cast in your corner. Where did all my drive go in later years, I have been known to ask myself and counselors. But this was not the real world; it was the world of games and imagination.
I liked Sorry too, and when I dream back far enough, I recall liking the Uncle Wiggly game as well as Shoots and Ladders. At grandmother’s house I learned Parcheesi also. And there was a game you played with color cards. Sometimes you got two squares of colors and could move two color squares on the board. Sometimes one. No! That color card game I bought for one of my sons. It amazes me how my childhood and my children’s childhoods can become one in my mind.
I owned a simple horse racing game too, with eight horses. The inside track contained fewer squares than the outside tracks. If you ran the whole race on the outside of the track you might have to count ten blocks more to reach the finish line, so, just like in real racing, after the race started, you tried to get down to the inside of the track, but you could also be trapped there on the rail and have to fall back, wasting counts, in order to get around the horse in front of you and the one beside you. I only took the rail when I already had a good lead.
The game “felt” like real horse racing to my imagination. I had Man O’ War and Whirlaway on the brain. I could “hear” the thunder of hooves and the horses gasping for breath as I moved my horse which was a pot metal outline of a horse fully extended in a racing gallop atop a small stand. My strategy for this horse racing game was to stay on tracks close to, but not actually on, the rail. I always had more choices each turn, and unless my dice throws were really low for all that race, I could win more often than not. The cool twist of this horse race was that you shook a plastic container with colored balls in it which then settled into a tube. The way the balls fell into the tube decided who would shake the dice and move first that turn. If you were really bunched up, a guy who was last could pass and get down on the rail and force everyone to go around her when they shook their dice. Of course, that rail position could leave you boxed in after the turn was finished. Luck and strategy combined to make an exciting competition.
All those games were about racing first to a finish and I liked them, but I also owned a combat game I played with colored metal airplanes which I really liked. The only thing wrong with the game was that the planes were shaped like cargo planes rather than fighter planes. There were four air forces with four planes each: yellow, red, silver and black, and they flew from, of course, four home bases. A very simple game. You flew from your base and shot it out with the enemy. The last man flying won. You shot a plane down by overtaking and passing it on looping symmetrical pathways that crisscrossed and ran around the edges of the board. You threw two dice and could split the move between two of your planes or use the total on one. When four played and lots of planes were on the board, I thought the game was great fun, trying to escape being shot down and to shoot down your opponent. My strategy for this game was to never bring out all four of my planes at once. Two planes were better controlled than four. None of my planes became sitting ducks because I had too many planes to move so I won more games than I lost. My opponents, I don’t think, ever caught on. They thought the more planes they had in the fight the better.
Today's computer games seem to call for so much more physical skill than mental strategy. The young can always out reflex the old but can they out think them in a contest of strategy? For the most part, shoot ‘em up computer games bore me to death. If I’m going to play football or basketball, let me play the actual thing rather than a pale computer fake, but, again, I’m now too old to hustle in an actual contest of basketball with the young, and that’s okay with me, really. Well....
No, it isn’t. I can remember the feel in my muscle memory of the drive, the extension and the lay up, the turning jump shot, the hook. I guess I don’t need to do it anymore, and, in fact, can’t. Right at the moment, as I write this at the Rocket on First and Cedar, an expresso joint, I don’t feel regret at not being able to be physical anymore. It’s okay. It’s okay. Today, we’re having the first rain in weeks after more than two weeks of 90 degree plus temperatures.
My neatnik stepmom didn’t like kids messing up her house so I don’t recall the guys coming to my house as much as I went to theirs. Of course, I just may have hated to be in my house where my stepmom could get at me, and so I wanted to play in their basements. It’s hard to recall the motivations. We all had full basements, but their parents put old carpets down over the cold concrete so that we could play with toys in the basement more comfortably.
Joe’s basement was a great place to play. His mom could put up with a lot more noise than any other mom. She doted on her one and only child. His dad was a union man. I had one other buddy, during my high school years, whose dad was a union official. They were Italian Catholics, and Eddy was one of 16 children. What a house that was to enter! Like entering a busy espresso shop.
But back to Joe’s basement! My favorite game down there, specially during long winter weekend days, when bored restlessness would pile up like brain snow, was to play a warlike form of ball tag. We’d cobble together a mess of cardboard boxes, Carom boards, bikes, trikes, garden tools and whatnot into a wall. Then one guy would get behind the wall, into his fort, so to speak, and the other would go to the other side of the basement and toss, lob and rocket the basketball at and into the fort until the ball touched the defender. Then, he was dead and the positions reversed. Lots of fun until you put a garden spade or some other hard thing too high up on the wall and the blade clonked you on the head when the wall collapsed. Blood, sweat and tears, etcetera.
In summers, we played lots of softball out on the street. We’d put down a shirt for first base and an oil spot in the middle of the street might be second. The corner of Joe’s driveway would be third, and a piece of newspaper might be home. I only recall one broken window all those playing years. We broke the window of the house next to my house. We played baseball in close proximity to my house because there was a place in there where trees were planted back in the main yard rather than in the berm between sidewalk and street. This open space allowed well hit balls to fly farther before a tree branch stopped them. If you could catch a fly ball, dropping down through tree branches before it hit the ground that was an out as good as any.
Of all street softball games, I have two strong memories. One is my broken little finger on my right hand from when I caught the ball on the end of my finger instead of in my palm. It’s now the only arthritic finger of ten, and it throbs on rainy days. It hurt like hell for days, and I never told anyone about it. I don’t know why. The second strong memory is of pitching and catching a line drive above my head, a rocket shot back to the mound, to stop a bases loaded rally by the opponents. It was like pitch blam out, the ball rocketed back so fast! And I was barehanded. That rhythm in the sentence duplicates the reality of that moment in my head.
I also developed a baseball game played with a tennis ball. Our house sat pretty far back on our lot so the front yard stretched out, long green grass all the way to the sidewalk. The “batter” stood near the steps and the defensive man stood back in the grass. The object was to throw the tennis ball against the corner of a step so that it would fly into the street for a home run. Any ground or fly ball the defensive man fielded cleanly was an out. Singles, doubles, triples were decided by ground balls that reached progressively longer distances out into the lawn when the fielder fumbled the ball or let it get by him. For example, any ground ball that reached the street was a triple. It almost always paid for the fielder to charge the ball and fumble close to the steps for a single. But if he played too close, line drives or arching fly balls might pass him for doubles and triples. If a ball thrown at the steps bounced like a tipped ball back into the front door, that was a strikeout.
I suddenly recall one last baseball game I owned. I think it was called All Star Baseball. Hall of famers from the National and American Leagues played: Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Joe Dimagio, Enos Slaughter, Grover Cleveland Alexander.... Each player was represented by a die cut circle with a rectangular cutout in the middle. Around the outside radius of the circles, segments of different lengths, like the spaces on an automobile speedometer, were marked off according to the statistics of each player. The Babe’s home run segment was huge compared to Christy Mattheson’s home run space. I believe one pitcher didn’t even have a home run space. Babe Ruth had a bigger strike out “zone” than Honus Wagner. Singles and doubles hitters were represented by larger spaces for those hits. On and on. Anyhow... the fun part of this game was getting the batting order correct. That’s what I learned about real baseball from that game, to get a long ball hitter into fourth and eighth spots and guys who could single and walk at the top of the order. Until that game, I wasn’t aware of that part of baseball. To play, you’d fit the rectangular cutout in the player’s circle over a rectangle on the game board and over the ends of a spinner in its center, then you’d spin and see what your hitter got.
Board and my tennis ball and real games of baseball didn’t quench my baseball imagination. Sometimes at night I’d lie awake in bed and play games of baseball in my head, whole made up games, inning by inning in imitation of Waite Hoyt’s late night radio broadcasts of the Cincinnati Red games and, come to think of it, I invented a solitaire game of baseball played with a deck of cards. A four was a home run, a three a triple, etcetera. Of course I culled the deck of cards to make the odds of hits and strike outs more realistic. When I got scoring that mimicked real ball games, I knew the deck of cards was culled correctly. I could run through a game lickety-split all by myself. I even invented a ball game based on dice throws, but I don’t think it worked out too well.
We played hundreds of games of Scrambled Eggs every summer and fall in Joe’s fenced back yard too, rimmed by flower beds. I enjoyed the wild tangle of Scrambled Eggs. Joe’s grass was the thickest and softest in the neighborhood. Joe’s dad always used manure to enrich his lawns. In that game, someone would toss a football in the air. Whoever caught it was fair game to be tackled by whoever could catch him. Just before he went down under a pile of bodies, he’d toss the ball in the air and someone else would catch it. Then everybody would go to tackling the next victim. This went on till we were exhausted or an injury set someone off to crying. We’d wait for the crier and do all we could to keep him from quitting and going home. We didn’t play Scrambled Eggs in the spring when Joe’s dad manured the lawn; we had some smarts.
Touch football was easy to lay out. The straight sidewalks became sidelines and trees the goal lines. You did have to watch the curbing so as not to trip or sprain your ankle going up and down curbs. Unlike Bill Cosby’s games (he played in urban streets) our games played out in suburban streets, and cars weren’t usually parked in the street itself. The dads parked in driveways. I say “dads parked” because most women on my street didn’t drive. My own stepmom, when she finally did go to work to help dad out, took the bus and never drove. Truth is, I don’t know if she could drive. If she did drive, it was so infrequently that I can’t remember. Anyhow... if cars parked temporarily in the street, we’d just move our goal lines to the next set of trees down. Our plays would say, “Go to Bill’s driveway and cut toward Smith’s tree.”
We sometimes played touch football two blocks away on a corner lot, a well manicured lot with shrubbery and flowers but with a huge open lawn in its middle. Next door lived the Wilson’s. It was their lot. Bob Wilson and his little brother lived there. Their dad wrote religious music for a living. They were the goody goody kids, the middle class, nice guys, not tough, bad guys like me, or so I thought. Though many kids from many streets assembled there to play football, our games always seemed sort of like our Kenview gang against the Wilson gang. Mr. Wilson hung around to keep an eye on things. He and I were always locking horns, and I think he sent me home more than once. And so did Dick and Bob’s father on Kenview—send me home from their houses.
For a short while we found a great quarterback to play for us against the Wilson crowd, but he lost interest pretty fast. He went on to play at Chaminade, a local Catholic high school. This guy didn’t hang around with us, but he knew Dick. They both attended Catholic schools. He started football early in Catholic Youth Organization leagues. I think I admired him pretty much, and I’d go watch CYO football with Dick and Bob’s parents on Sundays. I always looked up to and envied jocks when I was a kid.
We won some and lost some football games to the Wilsons during those years, but I think we lost more because we weren’t the well organized team they were. I sensed their dad organized and coached them so they played like a team. Our Kenview gang was pretty ragtag so I had a resentment about Mr. Wilson too, but their team was also more athletic than most of our guys. I always felt I was playing from the underdog role when we fought the Wilson boys.
My big memory of playing on that lot is a catch I made that came straight out of a medley of plays from pro-football highlights of the year 2000. My play path was straight down the left sideline to the tall flower bush in the corner, then, cut in along the goal line. The guy who became a high school quarterback was, I think, our quarterback for this game. Under pressure, he threw early and gave me a lead so I never got to the cut. I leaped and, fully extended, caught the ball on my fingertips. The bush, normally head high to me, met me at the kneecaps in my extension. I did a complete flip and landed on my back but held on to the damn ball. Wahoo! A touchdown right out of game films! When I came out from behind the bush, waving the ball madly, no one believed I’d held onto the ball. Mr. Wilson acted specially incredulous, and he was refereeing. I swear he didn’t want to let me have my touchdown. We argued.
Things were always touchy between Mr. Wilson and me. When I was about to graduate from the University of Dayton after my years in the Navy, Mr. Wilson came into the imported food store where I worked to put myself through school. I got him his case of beer, and he asked me how I was doing. When I told him I would graduate in spring from U. of D., he said, “Well, that’s great! That’s amazing! I thought you’d be in jail by now.” And he meant it.
I was stunned. He was the first guy to admit to my face how tough I seemed to that neighborhood when I was a kid. Of course, my neighborhood was a perfectly respectable and peaceful middle-class neighborhood, so it didn’t take much to shock it. But why I should be surprised made no sense. In fact I was stealing food from the very store I worked in from three brothers who truly liked and trusted me. Later, I came to appreciate the wildness in my system that led me to so much suffering. “Rebel Without A Cause” appealed to me right off, as soon as I saw it. People make fun of that movie nowadays, but it appealed to a certain sort of malcontent person like myself, and I know why. I didn’t then, but I do now. All I could do in those young days was feel, struggle and suffer. James Dean was full of sadness and anger. Those two traits came through in all Dean’s movies, and that’s exactly how I felt too, sad and angry, but not so very tough. And Dean was not tough either, not like Sergeant Striker. Dean was vulnerable, a real man who could let it all hang out. Mr. Rebel, I guess, I was, but, truly, not so very tough.
As for soccer and hockey, who knew them from Adam in 1949?
We played lots of games on Kenview and could run a lot freer than most kids are allowed to run in many neighborhoods nowadays. I don’t know whether or not we are less safe in our neighborhoods than we were then. I’m sure every sort of perversion was loose in those days too, and before. My own dad was initiated to sex on his paper route by an older woman customer. He kept the details to himself, but he told me he sort of appreciated it, so I don’t take anyone too seriously who tries to tell me that times are worse now than before. Read Steinbeck's novels or John Dos Passos, and try Christ In Concrete or Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I just think we’re becoming so illiterate and stupid in America that we’re overreacting to everything. We don’t have any sense or maturity about life. Michael Moore, in “Bowling For Columbine”, reveals a very paranoid America that we live in. I don’t know if there’s any universal truth in anything, but I do think America is right now too paranoid and armed to the teeth.
