CHAPTER THREE

The Earliest, Itty-Bitty, Most Terrible Memories

Used to be I thought my earliest memories came from around the age of four years old, in St. Louis Mo. when my folks decided to get divorced, but, recently, I seem to be recalling even earlier memories, from Dayton, and I’m having trouble deciding which is the very first. Two memories stand out. One memory is a very specific one of pain and a second is of fear. I think the fearful memory is my earliest memory, other than the purely neural transcendental recall of birth pang experiences.

Another early memory is of a tavern, but that tavern seems to be a concatenation of memories, of a place, Brun’s Tavern, and of delicious thick-sliced, cold-onion-covered prewar hamburgers they served there which, like all fantasy memories, have never been duplicated for taste and pleasure.

My reading teaches me that one’s first authentic memory must be a recall that is not based on a photograph or other memory trigger. The memory must arise spontaneously from the brain as something one’s own. So, in my second earliest memory, the one of pain, I’m peddling a trike in daylight. I think we are heading home from Brun’s Tavern because we are coming from that direction. I don’t remember who is with me, mom or dad. They both went to Brun’s with me; they both drank.

We’ve just rounded the corner, turned left onto Kenview Avenue where my home is located. My keeper is behind me, and I’m peddling to beat the band when the right toe of my white shoe catches in the spokes of the front wheel. My ankle twists and the pain is real bad. I and the trike topple to the right onto the grass berm between sidewalk and street. I’m crying very hard. I’m in pain, and for some reason the person with me is not happy. They pick me up and take me home, and I’m afraid because we’re leaving the bike behind. I refuse to ride it, and they won’t carry it, and all this is very frightening. I want my bike. I hurt. They’re taking me away from my beloved bike upon which I can feel as free as a child my age can feel. Help. Help!

That’s my second memory, I think, almost as far back as I can go, a memory of pain and fear and parental disapproval. The parental disapproval may only be a misinterpretation of feelings which are uncomfortable and which I don’t understand. After all, kids experience others feelings pretty intensely and feel disapproval when, perhaps, there is only discomfort in the person interacting with them. I am either late two or early three in this memory, I believe.

The earliest memory of my life now enters in darkness and fear. I think I can say this is definitely at two. The terrible twos are upon me, and I’m stubborn like a two year old in this memory. I don’t think I’m big enough to be pedaling a trike because I’m sitting on somebody’s lap in a movie house, and I’m carried around a lot. In this memory I never know who I am with, but I believe it’s my parents. On screen, a nighttime storm whips trees and bushes. Somebody hides in the wind-whipped bushes to watch a house with brightly lit windows. Then we’re magically inside the house where a party or dinner is going on.

Everybody, like everybody was in those early movies (we’re talking late 1930s here), is dressed in fancy evening clothes, gowns and tuxedos. They chat and are clever I imagine. I don’t know for certain, but as I watched later films, more mature, I know that’s what always goes on in these dinner party flicks, these gowned and tuxedoed films.

It must be a weekend at a summer place because now everyone is going upstairs to go to bed. An older man and a young woman talk about something outside one of the doors in a hallway at the top of the stairs. I think he gives her a gun. Then she goes into her room and retires for the night.

Her room’s dark now, but the young woman is awake and staring at a full length mirror attached to the closet door. From out of the mirror, a pair of glowing white eyes approach. The woman screams and now has a gun which she fires at the mirror. We hear glass shatter. Lights up! People rush into her room, and now they have my full attention. But they find nothing.

Later we’re at a lawn party with japanese lanterns. People are wandering around. Our young woman, I think it’s the same woman from the room who fired the gun, wanders away and goes to a drinking fountain and steps on its peddle. She sinks into the earth. Now that’s pretty scary, sinking into the ground like that! Next she’s under the earth in a small cave from which tunnels radiate like spokes in a wheel. And sure enough, those two glowing eyes are approaching down one of those tunnels towards our young woman.

Okay! That’s enough! I begin to scream for real. They can’t shush me up or take the terror away. Finally, someone lifts me and hurries me up the aisle. But whoever has me doesn’t want to miss the best part so they try to stand at the back of the theater. We’re out of the tunnel now and back at the lawn party. I’m a little calmer. The person holding me is kissing my cheek and sort of rocking and turning with me. A man on screen looks for the lady, I think. Maybe things will be okay. I watch carefully, nervously. But he also goes to the water fountain and sinks into the earth.

My whole body perks up now. He’s in the small cave too where the woman ended up. No eyes yet, but I damn sure know they’re coming so I scream and cry at the top of my lungs. The person who holds me doesn’t want to leave, but I’m firm on this one. You will take me out! You will take me out! I’m not speaking, but my whole body has the language of terror going for it. My screams bother everyone in the theater, and I won’t be shut up. I’m really certain about this. I have to get out of here! You can’t make me stay!

I win. My terror trumps the caretaker’s curiosity. We’re in the lobby now and I’m safe. It’s late afternoon because the sun slants weakly through the windows. The person with me is not happy to be missing the flick. I’m such trouble.

I think we’re in the lobby of the ? Theater. It’s not Loew’s. That was on Main Street farther west. And not the Victory which was almost across the street from Loew’s, nor the Paramount which was on a cross street to Main Street. This theater of the horror movie was one block west of Main and about five blocks south of it. Seriously, I know exactly where the theater is and can see it in my mind, but I don’t remember its name. I broke up with a woman in a small cafe right next door, actually connected by a door to the theater lobby, soon after I got out of the Navy. I used to eat lunch in that cafe occasionally when I worked as a window decorator for Metropolitan Clothing. Had I married that woman instead of the one I did, my life might have followed a different course. Maybe not. I always imagine she’d have been tougher on me and forced me to communicate. With a knack for real heart to heart communication, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble. But, as with all speculation, perhaps not!

So that’s my two earliest memories. Pain and terror and an assertion of my will.


Friendly people cooked and worked at Brun’s. No bad feelings associate with my thoughts of this place in my childhood. And the hamburgers with a thick slice of onion on them were delicious. I sit up at the counter beside my mom or dad and I eat this delicious hamburger and I also think I must eat hot, crispy french fries too and have a chocolate malt or fountain coke to wash them down. My mother takes me there in the daytime so she can get out of the house. She’s a free spirit and her artistic genes fight it out in my body with my dad’s more conservative ones.

Memories of later times remind me that when I am old enough to drink there, Brun’s was for a long time a white frame building with a peaked roof and a left-slanted concrete slab porch that ran the length of the front out of parallel with the building proper. You entered the tavern through a creaky screen door onto an unvarnished, unpainted wooden floor of narrow tongue and groove boards. You had to go down in the basement to go to the toilet. Strangely, in retrospect, several weeks after writing this chapter, while toweling off after a shower, I realize that I have clear memories of the tavern at that time of my life, sitting at the bar, eating burgers, the wooden floor, etcetera, but I have no memories of the interior of my home. The tavern is more real than my home.

I can recall my home on Kenview Avenue too, but, like the tavern, I have so many later memories of the house, it’s impossible to find a specific early memory of my time there. That frame house, with a porch on the right, a bay window in the middle and a chimney on the left side, was built by my maternal grandfather who was a contractor, a trucker and a farmer among other things, in collaboration with my father who put every free moment of his time, weekends and evenings, into getting that house built so he and mom could move out from living with his maternal grandparents. I lived in, moved from and back into that house many times in my youth. The house cost $4500 dollars. Years later I sold it for $18,000 to pay my school debts and help with my graduate education.

Our house is the first house built in the new plat on the outskirts of Dayton in the Belmont area. Beautiful Hill, the plat is carved not far back from the lip of the shallow Miami Valley, out of a recently purchased farm. In fact, the farmhouse remains on the corner of the new street. Sidewalk and street are there, and the Nobody house is built three lots away from the tall two story farmhouse. As I grew in that house, I watched the edge of the city and farmland beyond retreat from a five minute walk to get there, to a ten minute bike ride and eventually to a 30 minute car ride. You probably can’t get there from the house now.

This house would come into my possession when I turned 21 because, after the divorce, the families couldn’t decide what to do with the house which both families had a hand in building, so they gave it to me in trust at my 21st birthday. When I got it in October, 1958, the house was paid for and $2,100 bucks had accumulated in a bank account for me. Mom told me that there should have been much more money in savings, and that my stepmother and father who lived in it for ten years ought to have paid a higher rent than they did.

My mother’s bitterness was still alive after all those years, the bitterness between the Republican family and the Democrats which still surrounds me today, June 16th 2003, as I write this very sentence. The house was built to save a marriage, I’m told later. The marriage was already in trouble and the families were at each others throat. I am told about one confrontation in which an uncle holds my maternal grandpa in the kitchen of this marriage-saving house while another uncle hits him. In a novelistic attempt to write my autobiography, I invent a reason for this battle, but all I really know is that it happened, a dustup in the kitchen between the Republicans and the Democrats.

Of course I also understand how the truth gets distorted. Perhaps my uncle was only trying to stop the fight and happened to be pulling my maternal grandfather back from the fight when another uncle swung at him and hit him. Maybe, it wasn’t meant to be a hold and slug moment, but grandfather would not know this, and he could very well imagine that one Nobody held him while another Nobody hit him. Since he later retired at 55 after a successful career as a builder, selling a 1000 units to do so, he would naturally be offended by being ganged up on by a couple of Nobodys.

The two Nobody uncles involved were, of course, the wild, later to be paratrooper and the 2nd oldest angry one who converted to Catholicism when he married my Catholic aunt who later joined Alanon when he, like the youngest, began to enjoy his cups too much. Right down the line to me, you can see the working class Nobodys enjoying their alcohol. So much for now for Dayton, Ohio where I was born and have my earliest real memory.


The next and severely traumatic memories commence in St. Louis after the Second World War has begun. My dad worked there because that’s where work was as America began to climb out of the Depression. All my life I remembered and told of a tall, seven or eight story, red brick apartment building. Then while I attended graduate school in Carbondale, Illinois in the mid-60s, I drove my first wife north to try and find this apartment building which I knew was right across from Marlon Perkin’s St. Louis Zoo. My wife and I found it, but the building was only three stories high, so, like all neighborhoods of childhood, it is smaller in truth than it is in fantasy. The same experience I have when I see Kenview Avenue where I did some more of my growing up. We played full out softball on its wide streets (and only broke a window once) which now seem only wide enough for bowling.

Our apartment was on Mac Arthur Street. I knew I had found the right building because I called my dad soon after and established that I was on the right street. I also remember a drug store across the street because I see in memory my mother dashing across the street to use the phone there. We’re talking the early 40’s here, and phones aren’t just everywhere. I am watching from high above, through the window, and no one is in the apartment with me. I can feel the emptiness behind me in the room as she disappears into that door.

My mother was beautiful, with a terrific figure when young and long blond hair and she had a throaty voice, deep and golden. A scar cuts across her left cheek. From a farming accident, I think. She’s very artistic. During her life, she sang with dance bands, modeled, played clarinet with the Dayton Philharmonic, tried drawing and interior decoration. The last part of her life, she worked with the St. Petersburg, Florida Chamber of Commerce in its promotion department. She was very cultured and charming and clinging and sensitive, perfect for that sort of work. I only visited twice down there, once on a mad drunk dash with a Mobile, Alabama associate named Preacher and again with my second wife.

Mom and her third husband, M—, lived in a one story, I want to say “white stucco” house in St. Petersburg, well and tastefully decorated by my mother. Reflecting her youth, I think, in the 1920s, she liked Oriental decoration and prints, gold and blacks.

Mom appreciated my poetry and drawing attempts whereas my father didn’t. But that awareness all comes later. Suffice it to say, that they were not at all compatible, and I believe their genetic contributions to me have battled it out in me all my life and that my father, who raised me after the divorce, could see my mother in me and resented the memory of her in me all my life. I know he did not understand or appreciate me as I wanted to be appreciated for my creative and wild side anymore than he appreciated her even though he loved her all his life.

When I was younger I would be saying this with a lot of self-pity. Now I’m stating it as a sad fact. Well I remember an evening in either St. Paul or Minneapolis, Minnesota (we lived in both cities during one period of a couple of years because dad worked road jobs a lot; he liked the extra money). Dad came home drunk to his second wife, my evil stepmother. Lying on his back sideways across the bed (I stood at its foot, about 12 or 13 years old), he was letting my stepmom pull his pants off. He suddenly looked at me and slurred, “I love her, you know?”

I was confused, that’s all I recall of emotion, and I asked, “Who?”

And he said, “Your mother.”

He said this right in front of my stepmother. I now imagine, just at the moment of writing this, he might have said “loved” instead of “love”, but I heard it and have remembered it all my life as “love her”. Was it any wonder, then, that my stepmom had a bit of a beef with me? And why was my dad trying to tell me this at this particular moment, when he was drunk, when I’m reaching puberty, when I’m already having sexual fantasies about his wife, my stepmother, who is quite codependent? Had they been fighting? Was he sensing in me some loneliness for a missing mother or was he trying to make an explanation of the divorce between he and my mother?

Being drunk often causes painful and ill-considered remarks to come flying up out of deep memory and through the lips from a guilty conscience. I was drunk when in close cross-questioning from my first wife, I admitted that, yes, I’d had an affair a year or so before, just blurting it out after a year of carrying it around with me. But I’ll get to that later in this Nobody’s autobiography.

Dad also let me in on the suffering and bitterness he felt right after the divorce. He moved to Waterbury, Connecticut after the divorce, giving me over to the care of my fraternal grandparents, to work in the making of bombs and shells. He used to have the fuse of a brass shell, cut apart so as to view the innards, lying around the house when I was young. He told me that he’d run around with his buddies in New York City on the weekends, drinking and being very bitter about women. Women were plentiful; it was the war. He recalls at least one time, maybe more, that he threw his hotel room key into the middle of the table and challenged some woman to come up for sex. He told this as something to be ashamed of. He wasn’t proud of it. He beat himself up over a lot of things that, nowadays, are quite understandable. Part of my life’s struggle was to try and free myself of my middle-class, Welsh, working man sensibility which I think can kill. I have only partly succeeded.

In NYC my dad was part of that big war time party. He danced live to the big bands, the Dorseys, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw, Goodman; you name the band, they were there, and he danced to them. I have always liked big bands myself. Somehow that music got passed through to me, just like the bedrock, hard times, hobo driven depressive feel of the Depression, even though they were not mine, of my generation. Then he met my stepmother in Waterbury, and he danced with her to those tunes and times, and he stopped throwing his keys into the middle of the table. She was eighteen, Italian, dark-haired, big-busted and trim-waisted and he was about twenty-six.

When I was kid and began my movie watching career, almost all movies seemed set in New York City or Chicago, gangster movies and miracle movies, musicals, etcetera. All soldiers departed from Grand Central Station or lunched at the Waldorf Astoria with the woman they’d just met while on leave. Of course, Tennessee Williams gave us plays which became movies set in the South too, “The Rose Tattoo” for example in Key West, Florida and “Night of the Iguana” set farther south than that in the bosom of Ava Gardner.

Hey, though! In my imagination only that one grand city existed for me with its Broadway and Times Square, the Great White Way. In my teens and later, I thought I was going to go to NYC and become a famous author in black and white. I was going to be on the Johnny Carson Show. That is, when I wasn’t going to become a farmer or miner and work my butt off, just a down home guy with wife and kids, picket fence and Budweiser. What other dreams were there for a middle class American like me? My dreams were either all or nothing, huge or tiny, of success or failure. I couldn’t imagine a middle ground which was truly my real stomping ground. The ambition was my reel stomping ground.

Those were my dreams of New York, of the Babe and Broadway. Now I’ve got to return to St. Louis, Missouri where this Nobody is serving his time in life at three and four. I know the war has come because of two clear memories. The apartment has an alcove off the living room, and in the alcove behind a heavy, dark green curtain suspended on brass rings is my crib. Yes, slats, I’m looking through slats. I’m probably too old for a crib, but my folks are just rising out of their Depression era financial situation. It’s the very late 1930s, they’re newly moved to this famous midwestern city (Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis. Or Judy). Maybe the war has begun. America is at least beginning to sell lots of war materials to Britain, thus dad’s job, so why waste a perfectly good, huge crib with plenty of leg room? In my recall I have my legs shoved out in front of me, and I’m playing with very small army trucks, driving them over the hills and valleys of my crumpled blanket. The army trucks are dark, military green, and the fake canvass tops are the same green color. Star shaped insignia are glued on the sides and tops. I don’t recall owning soldiers yet.

The second memory of war is a fantasy I play out with the dining room chairs which are tall, dowel-backed mahogany chairs. The dining room has a window out one wall of the building. I think we’re in a corner apartment because no window opens out the other wall but lots of windows stretch across the living room. The dining room is an L off the living room. Through a dining room door is the kitchen where my mother cooks while I play on the floor in the dining room. On a shelf beneath the silverware drawer beside the sink she keeps the box of glazed donuts. One day I polish off a whole box of donuts when she isn’t watching.

My staging for the war game is quite elaborate. I place one chair face down with its back up and facing to the front, like a fighter plane nose. The second chair is also placed face down but its back points the opposite direction with its legs interlocking with the first chair. Another chair is placed with its back on the floor. There’s a gap between the back of the second chair and the seat of the third chair so I can climb into the cockpit. Its seat is my back rest; its dowels my uncomfortable seat. A fourth chair is face down, back up like the second chair in the nose of the plane, its legs interlocking with the legs of my cockpit chair. This is my fighter plane, and I’m at war, getting in and out of the cockpit, like I must imagine fighter pilots do. I do not remember having seen any war movies at this time nor of having any reason to imagine this combat stuff, but I’m sure my parents took me to gobs of movies. My mother loved them, and the Battle of Britain must have been on the newsreels of the day. I’m three or four. It’s nearing 1941, and that’s when my parents’ divorce comes to me, crippling in on wings of flame, the screams and yells of the dying.

(Now I think, “Coming in on the wings of a prayer....” and look out the window of the coffee house where I, atheist, write this, but all the nostalgia, most of the pain is worked through so I feel only a vague puzzlement. Everyone is really dead now. Only the reel remains and I still go to lots of movies.)

This memory of my waking up crying to a raging battle between my parents is my own memory too. No photograph or story by my parents triggered it. It was a vague memory most of my life. I didn’t put much stock in it, and most of the time it remained unrecalled. All I remember is waking up crying and that my parents are yelling at each other on the other side of the dark green curtain which was pulled shut at night and open during the day. Someone comes through the curtain to get me out of my crib bed, lifts me and carries me in to sit on the couch. That’s it.

Not long before my father died, I asked him if he remembered that moment from my childhood. “Yes,” he told me, “I do. That was the night your mom and I split up. I put you in the car and drove you to your grandmother’s in Ohio and left you there. Then I turned around and went back to St. Louis and got a divorce.”

He did not return to Dayton except for a rare visit until I was nine. Times with mom were also rare and far between. She said, the Nobodies tried to keep us apart, making up excuses whenever she or her family called about picking me up.

Just like that, in one mad and swift weekend drive, I lost both my parents and found my grandmother. I am intrigued by the matter of fact way dad related his brief story to me. All my life I carried around this vague memory of the split up of my folks. I remembered this important moment without context, without knowing it was their moment of rending. Their divorce turned out to be momentous for my life, and I remembered it but didn’t know I had.

One other genuine memory of St. Louis, without photo or parental tale as mind jogger, is of going to the opera with my dad in an outdoor arena near the St. Louis Zoo. The opera stage was at the bottom of a deep bowl. Rows of earthen seats, I think, were cut in descending levels into the earth. Whether the levels were set off by rows of stones or boulders I can’t recall. Maybe there was just gently sloping earth down to the stage and no steps at all. Maybe it was stone steps all the way down and no earth. I do recall clearly my dad sitting on a rock wall at the top of the bowl, one leg straight down to the earth and the other bent at the knee so that his foot rests atop the low stone wall. He’s smoking, his torso against the blue sky. The fact that he’s smoking means, at this very moment of writing, very much to me. I don’t know why. I haven’t smoked for more than 20 years. Suddenly, I want a smoke. I want to sit atop that stone wall, outlined by sky, and smoke. I want to sit with my dad and talk. I want to be him! In fact I am him, now, in mirrors! Sometimes I must check myself in a mirror and tell myself I am really me and not him.

Remembering his moment on the wall, I feel all his sorrow, and I don’t know him at all.... Anyhow, I’m playing below him. The opera doesn’t much interest me, but speak of a cliché moment! The people onstage, which seems very far away, wear those helmets with horns that are the standard cartoon figure for any joke about opera. So am I watching the Ring Cycle of the Niberlungenlungenschaftenhegel? As you can see, my early experience with opera did not lead to a lifetime of opera and ballet. I am, after all, a blue collar working stiff with a college degree tacked precariously over his shop apron.

Finally, through photos of St. Louis, I see myself sitting in front of a window with a huge bib covering me from chin to tummy, sipping coca from a mug, the big mug hiding everything but my eyes; one of my shoes tipped on its side on a windowsill; a dead dog lying beside a railroad track on an overcast day when I am walking with my dad; and, finally, and importantly, myself standing on the lip of a fountain in the zoo park in full military uniform! Four years old! My uniform is complete, brown from jacket to shoes. It sports a Sam Browne belt and a stiff-billed cap too, and I am straight, tall and proud and my salute is as crisp as a brand new two dollar bill!

Strange that I don’t remember much about the zoo itself during this time. I know just enough to know that my folks took me there when we lived in St. Louis. After all, it was right across the street from our apartment, and what kid wouldn’t beg to see the zoo, but I can recall the Cincinnati Zoo and the Seattle Zoo better than the St. Louis Zoo. I know, for example, that much of the Cincinnati Zoo was built by the Civilian Conservation Corp. I remember the feel and rundown look of the neighborhood in which I parked to get to the Cincinnati Zoo in the 1960s and 70s. I recall the gorilla park at the Seattle Zoo, but I don’t remember much about the St. Louis Zoo.

Maybe it’s this.

Over the years, I’ve talked only rarely to my folks about their divorce. My dad told me my mother had cheated on him with other men. He also told me that she didn’t take care of me very well. He said he’d come home to find me hungry, with a snotty nose, my shoes untied and my mother drunk. He said he’d come home from his 12 hour war work days and find me in the care of strangers, of people he didn’t know.

About the time I graduated from college, my mother, up from Florida for my graduation, told me, when I asked about her cheating and the divorce, that the reason she cheated was that my dad suffered from premature ejaculation and would do nothing about it. She said she begged and pleaded with him to go to the doctor with her, probably a psychiatrist, but he refused to go. She was going crazy, she said, nuts, and he wouldn’t do anything about it. So, she said, she cheated, found men in St. Louis and took care of her needs.

Look, my dad (like so many of his generation, and much of mine) distrusted psychologists, would be dismissive about them even when I was going to a counselor to work on my own stuff after my third divorce. He once said, “Why should I pay someone to tell me what I already know about myself?” You can see that he knows nothing about the counseling process by his take on it, so I can believe both her part of the story and his.

My counselor might say, yes, you make excuses for them, but who was there for you? Who was making you feel welcome in the world? How do you feel in all of this? And deep in my heart (which doesn’t exist as a place of feeling in the human animal, it’s only a metaphor) I know that I “feel” that no one cared what happened to me. I spent much of my life a little lost kid, unaware that I felt like a little lost kid, alternating between trying to please the unappeasable and telling the world to fuck off, surviving not very well, looking for parents and not knowing it. At first, as I emerged from my mental darkness, I thought I was looking for the mother only, but I was looking for the father too which took a little longer to understand. What’s the truth of my whole situation? The truth is how I feel it is and what I understand of it, and truth, when it comes to memory, is relative as hell.

A final piece of my childhood tale fell into place toward the end of my father’s life when I asked him how he discovered my mother was cheating on him.

“You told me,” he said. “You and I were at the zoo and you said, ‘Daddy, this is where mommy meets the sailors.’ That was the night your mom and I had the fight that woke you up, and I took you to your grandmother’s.”

Finally, just like the faintly remembered zoo, I can’t recall where any of the closets were in that apartment in St. Louis, and in that detail hangs much of the balance of the remainder of my life. I can remember the black leather couch, the alcove where my crib was, the green curtain on brass rings, the kitchen, the donut location, the dining room table and its chairs I turned into airplanes, and the bathroom out in the hallway. That’s right, a bathroom shared with other people in an apartment building. Nothing like you’ll find built in modern America.

I can remember all those things about that St. Louis apartment, but I can’t recall where any of the closets are. I can even see a yellow wall just inside to the right of the entrance door right where a closet ought to be, but I can’t see one closet anywhere in the damned apartment.

I’ll get to the closet detail later, in another chapter. For now, St. Louis bye-bye. Goodbye St. Louis until another time. Goodbye mom and goodbye dad. I’m off, just like Little Red Riding Hood to grandma’s house. All of four years old. Can kindergarten be far behind?

CHAPTER FOUR

Wartime Great Grand and Grand Grand Parents:
A Memory of War

Only two, maybe three, females in my life have had my unconditional love, and one of them is my paternal grandmother. Unlike modern, corrupted-by-politics Christians, grandmother was an old fashioned, apolitical Baptist who “prayed in the closet and served others”. That was how she defined Christianity for me when I asked her. She was a peach of a gentle lady, but she wasn’t squeamish. I watched her chop a live chicken’s head off for Sunday dinner. That headless bird ran around in circles for a little while in the backyard before my amazed eyes, so I know first hand the source of the saying for scatterbrained behavior: “He ran around like a chicken with its head chopped off.”

That chicken execution is one of the many things that tell me how much modern America has changed from the days of my youth. While I knew city life, my grandmother, for her part, probably recalled a mostly rural America in which the farm population outnumbered us city livers. By my childhood, that population division was reversed, or nearly so, irrevocably, and we won’t return to those farm heavy days unless a worldwide catastrophe reduces our population to nearly nothing. Survivalists probably pray for such an occurrence.

I don’t have to push my knowledge of history and my imagination very hard to feel connected to the Civil War through living with my grandparents. And I spent a lot of daytime hours, during my stay at grandma’s house with her parents. There, I was certainly in the presence of the Great War of Emancipation, as we Welsh Nobodys call it.

My father’s mother’s parents were still alive and well until I went away to the navy. My great-grandmother and grandpa died while I was in the navy, both quickly, she in her sleep beside her husband in their cozy home of heart failure, he after living many years with his widowed daughter, my paternal grandmother, in his deaf silence, staring at black and white TV images, always in white shirt sleeves and a dark vest. Great grandmother used to make chop suey for me. I loved the dry, crunch of the brown noodles and sweet tang of soy. Great grandpa taught me to play card games like “Casino” and “Seven Up”, and laughed to see me cheat. Patiently he played these card games with me for what seem now hours and hours.

He also taught me to play cribbage. That was a tough game for a kid. I don’t think I was very good at it, I was better at Casino, but I do remember the thrill of 24 and 29 point hands. To hear the points counted up in the standard rhythm thrilled me: “fifteen two, fifteen four, a pair is six and a run of three makes nine”. Combinations of all sorts and colors! I still like the feel and look of three of a kind in cribbage. O, the wonders of the combinations, specially if I had three nines and a six in there. And think about three nines and two sixes: “Fifteen two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve; six’s 18 and a pair’s 20!” Wild! Or three jacks and a pair of fives?

Even today, as I write this, the memory of counting cribbage combinations excites me not a little bit, though I never play cribbage anymore. Cribbage made counting aloud fun. Do I think cribbage games helped me in school? I’m not sure because math was never my strong suit. In junior high, or “middle school” as it’s called in some places, I hated and struggled with my multiplication tables. And here, the card game, bridge, hops in to give me the metaphor, “strong suit”.

My great-grandparents were gentle people and kept a stereopticon in the parlor with pictures of the Seven Wonders of the World for my viewing pleasure. He had been a hostler for a brewery, driving huge dray (draught) horses to deliver kegs of draft to the taverns. He told me of the great 1911 flood in Dayton in which the water rose to the second story in downtown Dayton. True! I’ve seen the pictures, darkened with age. He had to dash down to the brewery and save the horses. They nearly drowned in the quick upsurge of water. Many horses did die. After the flood, the whole Great Miami and Mad River districts got together and collected money and built a series of levies that stopped those floods forever. It’s one of Dayton’s proudest memories of great historical moments when a whole city got together to accomplish an historical task.

My great grandparent’s home was half a block from Washington grade school where I went to school until halfway through third grade. After school I’d visit them. They lived in a long, one story, narrow house with a side door entrance, a step or two up from a patio into the kitchen. This ground level patio under a low roof was always shady and cool, and a free standing porch swing there too, and flowering vines climbed up a chicken wire trellis that closed off the long side of the patio.

Out back great grandpa’s dilapidated wooden shed burst with salvage and tools. Inside, not much room to turn around, shelves, cubbyholes, bins and racks, stuff stacked, piled and crammed, garden tools, lots of rust and bent nails he’d straighten for odd jobs. It’s dirt floor, damp coolness and rusty dusty everything smelled wonderful to me. A grassy alley ran behind the dark red shed on the other side of a black wrought iron fence which, actually, ran all around their yard bordered by flower beds.

Flowers and veggies grew everywhere, greenery, coolness, kindness, gentleness. I’m near tears remembering, suddenly, this feeling of them and their home. Strangely, I can’t remember winter there except sometime being cold in their house. That must have been wintertime and coal furnaces that you had to go down into the dank coal cellar to stoke. Then shoveling the clinkers into buckets to take out and dispose of.

Inside that house lived Victoriana. Flowered wallpaper. The severe rococo furniture, the gaudy picture lampshades with crystal tassels dangling and clinking, or lace-edged, the light purple and rich gold color scheme. Deep reds. Heavy Persian carpets that had to be taken out, draped over clothes line and beaten every spring as part of spring cleaning. Lace and frills and antimacassars on the arms of chairs and sofas. Doilies everywhere like flattened cream and white flowers. No room but the kitchen was spacious.

They weren’t the only great-grandparents still alive when I was born. I’m told I had four complete sets of great grandparents still living when I was entered the world. I don’t know how many fragments of great grand-couples there were. Most of these great grandparents were on my mother’s side of the family, I believe. I don’t remember any of them distinctly except that we had to drive south and east or west out of Dayton to get to their farms. Most were farmers and small town folk.

One distant relative on mom’s side of the family owned a funeral parlor in a country town and that led to an interesting jolt for me. We we’re visiting for a spell. I think we were driving through from a family gathering at a grange hall, and while the adults talked, I explored outside and inside. Poor me, I didn’t know I was exploring a funeral parlor. I didn’t know anything about death. Then I stumbled into this big room filled with flowers and a long box in it. On tiptoe I peer into the box, my little fingers grasping its edge on either side of my face, and, blam, I’m staring at the immobile profile, the ashen face of a corpse. I jolted back and ran from the room. I don’t think I told anybody about it. I thought I’d done something very wrong.

I do vaguely recall one of those farmsteads. The smelly grunting pigs, the tall wide barns, several sheds and barns and dirt roads between them, and the haymow to leap around and roll in, even a rope to swing out over and drop down into a haymow. I recall the trembling anticipation of edging out to the edge of the hayloft to stare down through the front loading door to the earth far below. The house had narrow tall windows and narrow long hallways. A central, gloomy hallway led straight through from front door to back. Dim and dusty this old house, smelling of age and pig shit. I never climbed the thin, steep stairs to the second floor.

A maiden aunt lived in that house, just like a maiden aunt lived in the house my stepmother grew up in. See Hamlin Garland’s short stories; read literature from the turn of the 19th into the 20th Centuries: maiden aunts lived all over America in those days in the homes of their sisters. They were bits of the extended family. Long dresses, slightly hysterical mannerisms, unappealing and, for all I knew, the most lonely people in the world. The one who lived in the farmstead was Gertie, probably short for Gertrude, and she had a thin face, thin nose and granny glasses low on her nose long before they were hippy fashionable. Thin and narrow like the house she lived in, she was. But her most salient feature was her cackly laugh, straight out of the “Wizard of Oz”. She didn’t wear green pancake makeup or fly a bike, but she did cackle heartily, almost like she enjoyed life.

A final memory of this time and farm is the icy water that you pumped with a long handle pump up out of the dark underground into the galvanized metal kitchen sink. I liked the sucking pull feel of the handle and liked to pump the handle almost more than I liked to drink the cold water which could hurt your teeth if they were sensitive enough.

Another big change from then to now that jumps into mind, this from my reading, is a memoir about living in Dayton, Ohio in the mid to late part of the 19th Century. It told about living with no screens on doors and windows, of flies swarming the food, and of putting cloths over the dishes while everyone got ready to sit down to eat. They still covered dishes when I lived with grandma. In grandma’s house, yellow flypaper strips dangled from light fixtures. The little buggers buzzed and stuck on them everywhere, slowly turning the stickum black with their carcasses. I also had fun dashing around, killing flies with a fly swatter. Fly swatters, of course, still exist for the poor who still don’t always have screens or air conditioning, and who live with wide open doors and windows in the summer time. My wife and I don’t have air conditioning. We can’t afford it. It’s good we live in a cooler climate. In the South, we’d be toast. There, also, they get cockroaches big as horses. Screens don’t stop cockroaches, do they?

Also I watched the last of the icemen coming to fill grandma’s icebox. He’d clump in, bent under the heavy, dripping block of ice, and put it in a top compartment so the heavier cold air could press down through the box. He was a friendly man, and with his long ice pick, he’d chip a piece of ice off the block for me on hot days, and I’d let that wonderful cold chip of ice melt in my mouth. Aaaahhhh! Just now, I think of how that moment must have felt for him and for my kindly grandmother, when she told him that grandpa had just bought a frigid air machine. Iceman—disappeared like the horse drawn combination ragman, knife sharpener and produce man’s cart. “Rags! Rags!” he shouted. “Sharpen knives! Strawberries!” Passing down the street before grandma’s house, a parade from the past before my mind’s eye.

Grandmother, of course, gardened and canned, so we had vegetables from the root cellar most of the time. Of course you could buy fresh vegetables and fruits in season from stores and little produce markets too. No frozen foods that I can recall when I was little so you had to wait for strawberries to be in season, etcetera. The ragman brought those too.

By grandfather’s wish, I think, grandma wore her hair long. One of my earliest memories living with them is of standing in their bedroom watching grandmother sit before a vanity table mirror to brush out her long hair which nearly touched the floor when she sat to do this daily task. During the day, she coiled her hair atop her head in a massive bun of braids which she let down every night. For as long as grandfather lived, she never cut her hair. Soon after he died, she chopped it short.

I suddenly recall, popping out from decades of looking at books, a Victorian picture of a woman in a long robe and nightgown with long hair that hangs nearly to the floor. Grandma at the mirror in her nightgown is a figure of the Victorian age, I realize. My emotional feel of her kindness connects me to that distant time and place, probably a connection many of my peers, who weren’t raised by grandparents and active great grandparents, don’t have.

Although the house they bought on McGee Street was modern enough to sport a detached garage that opened onto the alley out back, they never owned a car while grandpa lived. Soon after his death, grandma took driving lessons and owned a small coup for a time, but she never felt comfortable driving and soon gave it up. I remember a moment before automatic shifts when we were on a steep hill, waiting for a light. She was taking me home from spending time with her, and I was in the passenger seat. I was terrified we were going to roll backward. So was she, I think. In fact I believe my fear was her fear. I could pick up on things like that when I was younger. It happened to me more than once that I confused my emotions with my companion’s emotions.

Speaking of garages, wartime and sex. In the garage next door, I had a sexual experience, probably later than the sexual experience with my sexy auntie on the bed upstairs because now I’m pretty conscious of what’s happening in the world around me, even if it’s only curiosity and not truly sex. It was in that garage where we had a kind of show and tell with the neighbor girl. I don’t know whose idea it was, but Bitty (a friend from across the street), the girl next door (suddenly I think of that girl next door image from my teen years and later, Doris Day) and myself decided we would pee in front of one another. First Bitty, then me whipped ‘em out and peed and, then, the wonderful girl next door (imagine Doris Day) pulled down her panties, squatted and peed. I can still see her splash down that wonderful puddle of foamy pee while it spread out between her shoes on the concrete floor of that dusty and cobwebby garage. It was real exciting, and when I add a grownup Doris Day, squatting in my mind’s eye, doing the same thing, I can still get excited by the recollection.

Things went from bad to worse with the neighbor girl after that. Sometime soon after the pee orgy, me, she and Bitty are in the alley behind her garage, and Bitty and I are really curious now. I know she’s not cooperating because I’m holding her hands over her head against the garage door while Bitty has pulled her panties down and is about to do some exploratory surgery with a finger size, splintery and rough barked twig. The neighbor girl is screaming and fighting because just as Bitty is about to make the first probe, her mother comes around the side of the garage and catches us. She’s mad all right and grandma’s a bit upset too. Two weeks without leaving the backyard for me. I don’t recall what happened to Bitty.

There were other neighbor girls too, and I wasn’t monogamous. At a very young age, I learned that I liked to play with girls almost as much as I liked to play with the boys, if not more so. My dad taught me a variation on a theme when I was in school to counter the taunts of the school crowd. You’ve all heard it. It went like this:

Georgie Porgie pudden’ pie
kissed the girls and made them cry.
I’d add with a shout, “For more!”

When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.
I’d shout again, “With all the girls!”

In another house, on a corner, about two blocks from grandma’s, lived a family of girls. I think I must be seven now or eight, and I ran over there every day for a time to play pirates and damsels in distress. Had to be the movies that were infecting my imagination, although it might have been “Let’s Pretend”, the Saturday morning radio show. “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!” would take us on a whistling wind of magic flight into fairy tale land every Saturday even when I was living on the house on Kenview again.

The girls’ mother was a seamstress, like my grandma after grandpa died, and she had all these brightly colored, ribbon snippets left over from her work that we kids could play with. I’d wear a bright ribbon around my waist to slip my wooden sword into and another ribbon around my forehead, and the girls would bedeck themselves with ribbons too, as I remember. I always played a swashbuckling pirate (whatever that means) and fought sword fights with imaginary enemies. Sometimes I’d be captured and tied up. Sometimes the girls would be tied up.

These girls had a detached garage on a alley too, and one time I was captured and tied up in there. They went away and left me for a very long time. They had truly tied me up in their gloomy garage, and I really couldn’t get loose. I believe I was getting nervous, then the oldest sister slipped into the garage. She didn’t often play with us. I don’t know how old she was, but she comes over and plants a real French kiss on me, with open mouth. I don’t remember whether tongue was offered with my French meal, but her lips were cool and moist, and my groin tingled and I wanted more, but that would be my last French kiss until I turned fifteen and met Sandy E., the friendship ring connoisseur which I always like to pronounce as “kind of sewer”, just like my dad liked to pronounce potatoes au gratin, “potatoes, hog rotten”.


Grandma raised me from age four till age eight or nine when my dad remarried and took me from McGee Street to live with him and my stepmom on Kenview Avenue. Kenview is where I lived with my real mom and my dad before the move to St. Louis. As I said earlier, my dad and stepmom were now paying rent to the trust which paid the mortgage on my house. Any extra went into trust to be mine some day. None of this did I realize for a long time.

For months after the night I awakened to my parents’ bitter argument everything is a blank to me. I don’t remember arriving at grandmother’s house or anything else for months afterwards until my consciousness reemerged out of the fog of forgetfulness that swallowed the pain of the breakup of my parents’ marriage.

Closets in a St. Louis apartment, visits to the St. Louis Zoo and my earliest months on McGee Street are things which I have forgotten, each associated with traumatic events in my life. You can never convince me that the human animal’s brain doesn’t have convenient forgetters which protect us from confronting the pain of life-changing events in our lives. These forgetters sound like a handy thing to have going for us, to get us through rough patches in our lives, but what if escaping from pain in our pasts also keeps us trapped in the prison of our pasts, locked on some childish behavior which is bad for us because we can’t escape the childish behavior which in a limited fashion originally protected us from the pain? Like the sex which comforts us or the booze which softens the pain until both turn into prisons too that perpetuate our self destructive victimhood? Further, a victim, trapped in behavior formed in childhood can become abusive without meaning to.

The adult driver who began drinking as a youth to suppress the pain of having been sexually abused as a child and who then kills someone in a drunk driving accident has moved from victim to abuser in the wink of an eye. At no time did he or she make a decision to become an alcoholic or a drunk driver or to kill someone while driving drunk. Yet, the criminal justice system treats this lifelong series of mental events and physical actions which lead from alcohol abuse to tragedy like a single moment of conscious decision.

The status of the victim in societal consciousness varies widely from person to person and from era to era. Currently, it’s not fashionable to use victimhood as an excuse for bad behavior. In the first place, except in the case of criminal physical or financial abuse, being a victim is a state of mind. Some people may perceive a hurt where another feels nothing. In a sense, we’re all victims of abuse in our lives. Anytime we hurt, we feel victimized. People hurt us all the time, severely or slightly, emotionally and physically, accidentally or on purpose. Historically, society fluctuates between abusive and nurturing attitudes toward the victims of abuse who act out in inappropriate ways which harm others. Gaols cycle between punishing and rehabilitating prisoners. One century and place stones criminals to death. In another place and time, criminals are sailed to the Georgia penal colony in America or to the penal colony in Australia. The message is that it’s okay to be a victim, but don’t act like one.

Personal growth is only possible for those of us willing to search within ourselves and look there for who we are and how we got to be who we are. Of course, eventually, the only way to health is to make one’s way from being a victim into being responsible for one’s own behavior, but that conversion takes time, and the way to health is through recognizing that one has been victimized and screaming loudly about it.

What if the only way to quit being a victim in sexual relationships and to alcohol is to first find out that you are a victim? Suppose you must point out that you are a victim before you can begin to work on the damage in your psyche? Often, you must confront your abuser before you are well on the path to recovery. Naturally, an abusive person doesn’t want to be exposed and confronted, so you can imagine that husbands and wives, politicians, priests, talk radio mouths, generals, police officers, teachers, all who might have power over us and who might also be abusive in nature would do all in their power to silence the public outcry of their victims.

What would the sexual predator do without the victims who surrender themselves to his control for the momentary comfort of sexual release? How could people bent on controlling an alcoholic personality control them if they didn’t keep making fools of themselves while in a drunken state? The abusive person is actually a victim who has not done any work on their own victimhood, so naturally, they want to silence all talk of “people being victims” and, abusively, they like to blame people for not taking responsibility for their actions.

In this particular time and place, Americans seem once again to be supporting the abuser, encouraging the silence which will allow the abusive ones among us to continue their abuse in homes, in prisons and on the job. The personal is always political. George Bush Jr. will always be seeking the approval of his pilot dad in the cheers of the military. The silenced victim is always a sure victim, and a surely silenced victim will become an abuser someday, in some capacity, even in the presidency.



(I’m lightheaded today, June 22, 2003, as I continue on an overcast day in Spokane, Washington with this autobiography of a Nobody. Also anxiety and IBS plague me as I feel a poop coming on. Having a spinach salad at Ripple’s makes me feel better.)

Once upon a time in counseling in my mid-50s, I related a story I came across in the monthly newsletter from our local Union Gospel Mission while sobbing uncontrollably. At the time I was a contributor to their charities and so received the monthly news from them with its tally of their conversions, how many meals served and children housed, drunks bedded, what supplies were needed. But when they honored our local politician, George Nethercutt, at a breakfast, I had to cut off my support for their work because they were honoring a man whose oligarchical votes in Congress make things worse for the poor. Not only that, Georgie Boy had run against Tom Foley on a pledge to limit his reign to three terms, then broke his promise once he got into power. I just can’t support Christian hypocrisy.

But back to the story I shared in counseling. It was a tale about a little girl who proudly took a cap her grandmother had knitted for her to school for show and tell whereas the other students brought pretty dolls, toy cars and electronic games. The other kids thought the girl’s show and tell knit cap was pretty lame, and they teased her about it. I cried very hard as I told my counselor how proud that little girl was because her grandma knitted the cap for her with love and caring. The cap was love and caring materialized. I felt my own lostness at that moment, the loss of that grandmother who’d raised me during a traumatic time of my life. As I had lost my mother, I had lost grandma too when my dad and stepmother took me away from her to live with them.

Until that moment in counseling, 46 years after the fact, I didn’t realize just how much I loved and missed my fraternal grandmother and, consequently, the impact of her support and love on me. My counselor thought her love had, maybe, “saved my ass” even though I wasn’t aware of it until that moment. Fortunately, I was able to visit her one more time back in Ohio where she was living in a nursing home, 99 years old. I sat across one of those narrow rolling trays from her while she sat on the edge of her bed, still very alert, but her voice had grown very tiny over the years, and I said, with feeling and sincerity that surprised me, “I love you, grandma.” I had never felt and meant something so certainly in my whole life as when I said those words to her. My whole body flushed. It was the first time I’d felt love so immediately and unconditionally. And she said to me, leaning forward, in her quiet, frail voice, “I love you too.” Tears filled my eyes at that moment, just as they had at the counseling session a year earlier. She died the next year after reaching 100.

Some people with immediate access to their feelings may wonder how I could not know about and feel the love that my grandmother had for me during troubled periods of my life. The inability to feel life as it happens to us is what happens when one’s life becomes so painful that he shuts down to feeling. If a human ducks any feeling, shutting down the feeler in himself, he shuts down all feeling. Then you don’t have anger to warn you of danger or love to guide your decisions or fear to keep you safe. Without clear awareness of feelings, one is like a ship without a rudder. She sails aimlessly around, crashing into shores and shoals, without safe harbor to go to or purpose to guide the way. One doesn’t even know if he’s on a pleasure cruise or carrying cargo to the Hebrides. Sometimes, in the middle of a cargo haul, the dude forgets and heads off on a pleasure cruise, wakes up in San Francisco in an alley. Another time, launched on a pleasure cruise, the crew gets drunk and ends up in jail, all pleasure blown to the four winds.

Another contribution to my well being that I loved her for was her validation of my troubled childhood at a time when I was struggling to understand the difficulties I created for myself. As I emerged from the confusion of my past, the craziness and alcoholism, I tried to talk to various people and to get information from them about my childhood. Most ducked, were not aware of or had not been observant enough to help much. The pederast uncle completely forgot his own abusive treatment at the hands of his father (or didn’t remember it and, if he did, made excuses for it in a letter to me) even though my dad told me that he’d been surprised to find out that his eldest brother had hated their father all his life. Even my own father denied the truth of some of what I had to say about my stepmother, telling my sons, “It’s all in his head.”

That Depression era bunch truly were in denial and so can’t be held to account as they might be. But they can’t be blamed. No one had yet come forth with the torch of truth about dysfunctional family systems. Then, while talking to my grandmother about these things, about how I was beginning to understand my emotional life, she said to me, “I knew you were a troubled little boy when you came to live with me.”

That’s all it took, someone trustworthy outside myself to authenticate my own sense of the troubled childhood I was dealing with. I was so grateful for her support. I was not at all certain of anything that I was feeling about my childhood and to have someone near to me at that time validate my sense of the troubles I felt as a child was wonderful and freeing. Everyone in trouble could use someone like that, someone who just says, “Yes, I see that you hurt.”

One time, a few years back, I was involved in a chat room, and a Nazi was giving everybody hell, and he was taking a lot of abuse in return. I’ve known a few American Nazis myself when they were having a good day. Many of them are victims of male abuse, their fathers or some other close male relative. They’ve got manhood issues. Some are even victims of sexual abuse at the hands of males. Anyhow, putting their ideas aside, I just typed in my regard for some of the Nazis I knew, and the chat man Nazi thanked me, softened, and forgot the rant. I sensed real gratitude. People are always at their worst when they’re in fear or pain and in battle with their fellow man. I’m no exception, though I’d sure as hell like to be.

Like I said, people don’t want to hear from victims in this culture. To hear from victims reminds people of their own pain which they constantly try to escape rather than face. Thus, perfectly normal people side with abusive types to keep victims in their victim roles, and, together, they keep culture the abusive place it is rather than a nurturing place where children really are safe in a sort of global village.

Some social critics and psychologists argue that it is perfectly normal for people to shy from the sick and to negate them. Shunning the downer is an animal thing, part of our evolutionary baggage. Richard Wright in The Moral Animal discusses that idea. In his book, Wright uses Darwin’s life to illustrate his points, a novel concept. What he shows is that even an intelligent and sensitive animal like Darwin changed his social contacts as he moved up the pecking order of fame and notoriety, leaving behind less successful acquaintances and gravitating to the more successful.

Living in a society in which abusive and unaware people at all levels of society try to blame you for emotional problems which you did not create for yourself is no help in recovering from them. Most of us, most of the time, are operating with behaviors we learned as a child. They’re survival tools and not always suited to adult situations. To realize that you are using the tools of a victim and that they keep you down as a victim is one of the first steps in changing those behaviors. But first you must understand that you were victimized. Then you start to treat yourself with some compassion, and from compassion for yourself, you can begin to make changes in the self destructive behaviors you learned in childhood, behaviors which worked in childhood but which don’t work for adults.

As I said those abusive types who want to dominate you and your culture are only too glad to keep you confused, demoralized and down. That way, you’ll be self-defeating, giving them the victory, never giving yourself a break by realizing that you were a victim and not the lowlife, most horrible person in the world, you’ve always thought you were, which is exactly how victims feel and exactly how abusive, controlling types want to make them feel. Don’t forget, abusive types are also victims who have never dealt with their own pain. They don’t want to be reminded of their pain. They alleviate their own pain by identifying with the abuser and by causing the same pain in others that they have suffered. Giving pain temporarily eases their own pain. Abusive behavior is as much an addiction to escape painful feelings as drinking alcohol.

Again, I want to emphasize that we all eventually must accept responsibility for our own behaviors. The only behavior we really have any control over are our own behaviors. Until we do feel responsible for what we do and say, we can’t change anything about our lives, but it’s a whole different ball game to approach these changes with compassion for ourselves as victims rather than with the blame and self-loathing most victims feel.

What victim hasn’t had his or her share of self-loathing? Self-loathing can be so frightening and painful that some of us animals can’t even feel it or recognize it anymore. Thus, I think, enters the sociopath and the serial killer and even the casual bar brawl murderer and the wife slayer. You almost aren’t aware how much you hate yourself till you kill someone else to alleviate your own self loathing. After the deed’s done and you’re caught, the cops have to put you on suicide watch because the self-loathing’s back, intensified by the murder guilt you’ve added to your self-hatred and multiplied by fear of punishment. So you want to kill yourself or have the state do it for you.

I think a lot of killers find peace (they attribute it to finding god, but I think they’ve finally found themselves) on death row because they can see their suffering is going to end at last and finally. No more pain, baby; I can remember when death seemed like a good solution to me, but I was too much of a coward to put the gun straight into my mouth. Yes, cowardice saved me from myself. It’s just my opinion. You don’t have to agree.

Only recently have I reinterpreted something between my grandmother and me that illustrates how accepting she was of the troubled four year old who tore like a cyclone into her house. I would tell this tale, along with a couple of others, in bars, for the laughs. I used to laugh at many kinds of abusive behavior during my blind time.

Grandmother owned one of those dustpans with long handles that allowed the sweeper to stand upright while sweeping dirt into the pan with a straw broom. Those dustpans may still exist for all I know; I just haven’t seen one myself, recently. Of course that may say more about my minimal involvement with house cleaning than with that dustpan’s presence or absence in the current housecleaning world. In my household, I’m the dishwasher, straightener upper, organizer, and I share cooking honors, and do the occasional load of laundry. My wife occasionally cuts the lawn, but I’m the flower man. I love gardening and can’t wait to retire and take it up almost full time. Anyhow....

The pan handle was made of a single piece of heavy gage wire, doubled, then twisted in the middle for strength and at the top to form a handle. The wire ends near the bottom arched to both sides of the pan and were bent the last half inch to fit into the pan through holes on either side of the pan. The back of the pan was a space enclosed on all sides but the front. When you lifted the pan after sweeping dust into it, the pan’s weight imbalance levered it backward, catching the dirt in the enclosed space. Perhaps the tech writing above is of far too much detail for the female reader and an interesting sidelight for the men. Is it? Anyhow. The attachment of the handle to the pan was pretty flimsy. Two short straight ends held by spring tension into holes in the side of the pan. No fasteners. It was this material flimsiness that gave me the memory I witness of today.

I was having a temper tantrum. I had quite a few in those days. As I said, I could easily cry hard enough to pass out and pee my pants, so to have a loss of control to the point of tantrum is also easy to understand. My rages were, I imagine, pretty frightening for all concerned. They were for me, for sure. Being out of control is always scary. This day, I raged beside the side door that opened onto grandma’s back porch. I was beating this dust pan I’ve just windily described against the house above my head. Crash. Crash! Crash!

I can remember the intense, flush-faced, breathless terror I was releasing through my angry outburst. You all know, I hope, that most anger is a symptom of a hurt or frightened animal. Even when bar brawl anger leads to killing, the killer is almost always acting from pain and fear. There’s no premeditation and no plan to murder. You’re just an animal with animal instincts, lashing out as hard as you can from the fear and hurt inside yourself. In self defense, you lose control and strike as hard as you can to save yourself. The murder happens as a side effect of the overwhelming pain and fear which cause an overwhelming and, for some reason, unquenchably spontaneous physiological reaction in some of us human animals. Who knows why some people can’t stop themselves from lethal self-defense and those who know some limits? I personally know more than one angry young man today who, if he got into a brawl at the wrong time and in the wrong place and with just a little too much booze in the tank, could easily strike hard enough to turn a fight into an unplanned killing.

Anyhow, to get back to me. The damn handles came out of the pan. I can still see, in slow motion always, the pan do a rising flip above my upturned face before dropping down, sharp edge first, to strike me across the bridge of my nose. A permanent scar, for many years vivid, now almost faded to nothing, recall my attention to that moment while my screams of rage turn into wails of pain and fear.

At this moment of fear turning into pain is when I become grateful for my grandmother’s awareness that I “was a troubled child.” She stood inside the screen door, I now recall, a shadowy figure within the house, watching me but taking no action. Some caretakers might have been driven to rush through the door and punish the little bastard having the temper tantrum. More physical or emotional pain than I was already giving myself might have come down on my head. Instead, my grandmother stood quietly inside the screen door watching me, letting me have my temper tantrum. She let me have my anger. She let me feel my pain. For that sort of thing, in retrospect, I’m so grateful to her.

Later, in another time and space, during all the hippy and long-haired days of the Sixties and Seventies, grandma never said a mean or critical word to her grandchildren, never mentioned the length of our hair or the color of our clothing. Many of us led some troubled and/or dangerous lives, still she did not interfere. Vicious arguments between parent and child, niece, nephew and uncle/aunt, fueled by holiday cheer and beer, could develop at the drop of a Nixon or Johnson or Vietnam. Her refusal to meddle may have had as much to do with her principle not to come between parent and child as with her loving and uncontrolling personality. I know she cried tears of joy many years later when she learned that I had stopped drinking and found a spiritual program also so there’s no doubt in my mind that she cared what was happening around her to her family.

Years later I asked her about her hands off approach. How did she do it? She told me that she just prayed a lot for all of us.

CHAPTER FIVE

School, Neighbors, Adventures on McGee Street

I begin this chapter on June 30, 2003 on a sunny day in Spokane, Washington. It’s Monday and my day off. It’ll be a short week, what with me only working four 8s and the owner of my company always having a 4th of July picnic at work to celebrate when he bought the company about 16 or 17 years ago. He’ll give us a tee shirt, and we’ll get to go home half a shift early this Thursday, and Friday’s the 4th, so I’ll only work 2 and 1/2 days this week, and that makes me happy as I begin to cut into the days of my fourth to last month working as a machinist.

Grandpa Nobody was a inveterate record keeper and card player. On reams of brown butcher paper, every night, he’d sit at the kitchen table and record in a very small print the box scores of every baseball game played that day, and he’d also record the weather. My guess is that he kept those records to aid him in betting on games. He may also have dropped a dollar or two on the horses besides gambling on card games like poker, cribbage and gin. One of my uncles, I believe, got hold of those records when grandpa died. I no longer know where they are or who might have them.

It’s strange I don’t recall much about grandfather during all my years there. After I left his and grandma’s house to rejoin my dad and stepmother, then I recall pinochle games being fought at grandpa’s mahogany kitchen table with uncles, my dad and him. I hear the windy chatter sound of cards being shuffled on a wooden table. They slam down cards with exclamations, grunts and sarcastic comments. They quietly lean back in their chairs to finger flip a card right smack into the piled trick. They don’t expect to win that trick; that’s why they’re leaned back in their chairs.

A favorite refrain of my dad’s was, “Winners sit around, joke and laugh while the losers groan, ‘Deal damn it, deal!’”

One uncle, the second born of my dad’s generation, the one with five sons, liked to snap his trump cards down, accompanied by a bang with the side of his hand. Some liked to slap the card down without the hand thump. You could hear it in the next room. Card games could sound pretty violent, like contact sports, and more than one night I fell asleep on the couch to the sound of a card game only to be picked up from that couch at dawn and carried home. The Nobodys were card playing fools. So were my stepmom’s family up in Connecticut, but my stepmom wasn’t. She disliked cards and only played when nobody else could be found. My dad played pinochle and gin rummy a lot. Then he learned bridge and there was no going back.

McGee Street was an international street. Right next door to grandma’s house lived Mrs. Feller with her deep-voiced German accent. In her back yard grew a pear tree and some of its branches extended into grandma’s yard over the rickety wire fence between the yards, so every fall I’d pick warm, sweet, juicy pears off the ground and eat to my heart’s content. Sticky fingers, wet chin, wow! How many tiny green worms I ate without knowing, I don’t know, and Mrs. Feller didn’t care if I came into her yard to gather more to eat. I was too young to even wonder if she was ever insulted by neighbors for her nationality during the war which was going on when I lived next door to her. I know grandma was friends with her, but I don’t know about grandpa.

Up the street a few houses on the other side of grandma’s lived the little old guy with the Italian accent. Arching over the sidewalk that led from his screened back door to his garage was a grape arbor, and, man, did it grow huge, dark, juicy grapes! Walking home from school down the alley, me and Bitty or me, myself and I would sneak in and grab a grape or two. Finally, one time, the Italian man came barreling out his screen door, yelling at me in a terrible loud voice. He scared the crap out of me! Terrified, I ran home to grandma’s house. Later, he came down and told grandma he’d been kidding with me (it was supposed to be a mock friendly growl) and hoped he hadn’t frightened me too much. Even though he supposedly wasn’t mad at me for eating his grapes, I don’t think I went into his yard anymore. He just didn’t know what a tender-feeling child I was, scared of my own shadow.

The accents I hear currently in the Pacific Northwest are Russian, Hindi and Vietnamese.

Vaguely, other houses come to mind with low porches surrounded by flowers, hanging baskets, shady interiors, almost all two storys tall, and they don’t look like homes in a plat. Grandma’s neighborhood was built before the day of the plat. It’s a poorer neighborhood, doomed to sink farther after my grandma moved away. Not too many fences between the yards. Many yards separated by flower beds. There was even a small church on the corner, across the street about three houses down.

The more I think about my childhood stomping grounds, the more I realize I’ve forgotten. No one is alive anymore who I can ask about McGee Street. The last time I drove down the street, it was showing lots of wear and tear. Vague images appear from the recesses of my memory. Houses I went into, but don’t know why, streets I walked down, vistas, sights which won’t quite materialize, fences I clattered with a stick, flower beds I bent to smell, people I can’t picture I know I played with, grownups who treated me well, gave me lemonade and iced tea, and knew about the poor little kid who had to live with his grandparents. I know I was inside the church on the corner more than once, but I don’t think we ever went to church there. Grandpa didn’t go to church anywhere, and grandma was a loyal Baptist. Why was I in there? It’s dark and cool in the basement, that’s all I remember. There’s a passageway with doors off it, and one big dark room.

A couple of blocks behind grandma’s was a tall brick and stone fire station, and the firemen sat out in the driveway in the sun during summer, and they gladly showed kids around the station and waved to see me or any kid walking past. For sure, we always knew when a fire broke out because we were so close and heard the sirens.

At grandma’s I lost the first of two dogs I’d lose to premature deaths. Someone got me the dog, dad or my grandparents. We didn’t have him too long, but as I write this, I can almost think we got him as a pup, and I did get to have him for a year or so, but I don’t even remember playing with him. All I remember is that he was brown and not very big, a mutt, a mongrel. I remember coming home from school and someone telling me he’d been killed up on Third Street, chasing a car. His head run over by a tire. All I know is that it hurt something awful to hear about it, in my gut and chest. Loss, loss, loss, people and dogs. A psychologist told me once, and it makes sense, that all of life is full of loss. We lose childhood, then youth, then teeth and people begin to die, then we die. All loss.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it, but it isn’t. Not if we’re willing to face facts and live with life just as it is. Life isn’t nice at all, and it’s not happy, and anyone who expects life to be anything but one hell of a tough row to hoe is set up for a lifetime of disappointment and unnecessary pain. Take life at face value and then all the pleasant moments come as nice surprises and wonderful experiences. Sex, love, children, friends and a good laugh at the fools who try to make life into a moral straightjacket and try to deprive us of the few pleasures we can have, like a good lay and a laugh or two.

Another thing about grandma’s I want to get in here. She sewed a lot, sewed as a seamstress in later life, made money making clothing for rich women. She had friends and acquaintances in the best neighborhoods in Dayton. She never charged much, and when her sons and daughters-in-law asked her why she didn’t charge more, she said she made enough to keep body and soul together and that was sufficient for her needs. As a wedding present for my first wedding, she made my wife’s wedding dress from a picture in a book. My wife thumbed through pictures, found what she wanted, and, voila, grandmother made it up for her. The dress and my wife were lovely.

Grandmother’s sewing habit led to a happy state of being for her grandchildren. Empty spools! A huge cardboard box full of spools. I played with them, and I think most of her great-grandchildren played with them too. Armies of spools set up in rows to be mowed down or knocked over. Or they could become bricks in a wall of spools. And you could stack up a pretty tall pyramid of spools if you used the larger ones. The spool box also had a big wooden truck with three benches on the back. You could get three spools on a bench and drive them around, load and unload them. Just now I recall another toy I got a lot of pleasure from. They still have it today. It’s the pounding toy. A platform shaped like a bed, like a capital “I”, with pegs and a wooden mallet so you could endlessly pound the pegs through the holes, turn the bed over and send them back through to the other side. I know I pounded them so much that a couple were so loose they shot through with a single smack of the mallet. I also hit my fingers on occasion and cried.

Christmas was a big deal for me at grandma’s house. I recall slipping down the stairs so early in the morning that it was still dark. There the tree would be, lit, and a lot of toys for me under it. I’d stare at the magic sight, the tree of colored lights, shining on my face with almost, in my imagination the heat of fire warmth. Affection there and wonderment, I stare thunderstruck. My dad, probably out of guilt, sent me huge boxes of toys and games, and my grandparents got me things too. Remember? I was the first child of that generation and got lots of special attention. So Christmas was always a time of plenty for me.


Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana are all big basketball states. Someone put up a basketball net in the alley behind Bitty’s house. Bitty’s house was on the other side of the street and several houses down from me. I recall trying my hand at basketball then, but I was too small, and the bigger kids ran over and around me. I couldn’t get rebounds. They rarely passed to me so I seldom ever touched the ball. I just remember being frustrated and giving up pretty quickly. I truly had no idea what I was doing. Later on, I played a lot of basketball. A junior college basketball player who was an officer I met in the Navy told me he thought I ought be be able to play junior college ball after I got out of the Navy.

To this day, my only real viewing sports pleasure is March Madness. Walt Frazier played for Southern Illinois University when I was there, and Jerry Lucas played on the high school team, Middletown, that beat my high school team, Stivers, in the state tournament. My team was supposed to win the tournament that year. What a heart breaking night that was! One guy I rode to the game with and with whom I played a lot of pick up basketball said over and over, “Beware! Beware! This could be a bad night for Stivers.” Or something like that. We teased back and forth, but he was right.


(An aside. I’m currently listening to Bob Knight’s memoir full of excuse making for his tantramic nature. The ex-Indiana basketball coach is an angry guy, and he blithely makes excuses for incident after incident. He’s incapable of seeing outside his own little moral box to see what others experience of his anger. One thing he never does is ask himself why everyone seems to be picking on him. No other coach seems to get in so much trouble as he does. Isn’t that a clue? He’s like the guy with three drunk driving arrests who can’t see that most people don’t get that many and that, perhaps, he just might be an alcoholic, he might be seriously wrong. Knight just doesn’t get it, about his anger.

I don’t think he can get it. Bob Knight fits into that category of abusive types that I discussed in Chapter One. After he lost his job at Indiana, a friend told Bob that he should quit looking into the rear view mirror and start looking out the windshield. Knight readily agreed that the rear view mirror gives a limited view and the windshield is a full vista. That Knight was quick to agree with that consolation advice shows me that Coach Knight is not ready to do the painful emotional work that looking in the rear view mirror calls for. As I said, the abusive type is just as influenced by his past as the victim is. Both the angry abuser and his victim are stuck in past behavior, but neither can begin to get well until he first looks into the rear view mirror and sees that all his current behavior is based on the past when he was needlessly abused. Bob Knight will continue to be an angry, thus explosive, individual until he’s willing to stare into the rear view mirror and try to make out what’s chasing him.

July 6, 2003, Sunday. I’m nearing the end of the Knight audio tape, and he reveals another sad fact about himself. When he describes friends in this final chapter, he describes them as if he “earned” their friendship. A guy would probably have to earn his friendship too. Kind of like Hemingway in that way. I understand that Hemingway would drop you from his friendship list at the slightest step from the line he drew in the sand for you to toe. My experience of friendship is that its a gift, usually unearned, unsought and unexpected. Friends like us in spite of ourselves. There was this guy in the Navy from New York City who used to defend me at parties when I got drunk and mouthed off. He was 6’6’’ tall and strong. I was 5’8” and the only thing big about me was my mouth. I’d black out, mouth off, and he’d stop people from beating me up. To this day I don’t know why he chose to be my friend. It was a fine gift I never earned and which I recall with amazement to this day. Now off the soap box and back to life.)

One time, we kideroos were in the basketball alley and had got hold of a tire. We were rolling the tire down the slope at the end of the alley across the street to the other side. Great fun to watch it roll and bounce to a wobbly, rolling fall down. Suddenly, as the tire crosses the street, there’s a squeal of tires, and a cop car slides into view. Some of us ran, but I, obediently, terrified as usual, followed his beckoning finger to the side of his patrol car. He chewed me out royally, but didn’t arrest me, which I thought for sure he would do. When I tell this and think simultaneously of ghetto kids today, selling drugs and being arrested and everything that goes down these days with kids under traumatic conditions, my infraction and my fear of the cops seems like something from another world. And, of course, it is.

Two blocks down the street, one direction from grandma’s house, was the abandoned Bamberger’s meat packing building on a huge weed-filled lot which we played around and, rarely, in. Two stories tall and brick with holes through the concrete floors for conveyors (I think) you could fall through and kill yourself. Today, that building would have to be bricked and boarded up by law. Can you imagine this huge wonderful place for a seven year old to play in? Hide and seek, capture the flag, and a whole building to do it in?

Now the building’s gone and the lot’s a city playground with safety-proofed, rubber-seated swings. I do think all us kids were warned not to play in that building. I’m sure there were tales about kids getting hurt in there, but we were allowed to run the neighborhood in those days, unafraid and free roaming as a healthy chicken. Nobody could keep that close a watch on us. Personally, I must admit to being afraid in there, but my fear was part of my interest in it. It was eerie to peer down through the holes in the floor to the concrete floor far below in shadows. I was probably afraid because grandma told me not to go in and, second, because it was huge, gloomy, with shadowy high corners. It echoed too with our shouts, so I didn’t sneak in that often, but, come to think of it, I’ve always like big empty buildings that are half in shadow. I think it’s got something to do with their being the opposite of closets.

At the other end of McGee street ran brick-topped Third Street. Streetcars lunged down Third when I was a child. I rode them. Yes, I sat on the woven, yellow cane seats of streetcars and lifted the windows with the small side latches to let air onto my face when it was hot. I held onto their brass poles and lurched toward the back of the car when it started up with a clang. In New Orleans, years later, I sought out the Streetcar Named Desire just to experience the memory ride and to feel connected to that important Tennessee Williams play which excited me as a film with Marlon Brando when I was young.

I may have experienced my first sight of the dead while on a streetcar ride down Third Street unless, of course, it was after the incident at the funeral parlor while I was on that trip with my maternal grandparents to the southern Ohio farms. Of course the streetcar and death scene may have occurred even later in life, in St. Paul or Minneapolis, Minnesota when I was certainly old enough, though still a kid, to ride public transport without anyone going along with me. I would have been too young to be on a streetcar by myself if I am on Third Street when the following happens. But....

My memory says I was alone when my yellow streetcar clanged up behind another streetcar stopped dead in the street. Streetcars didn’t back up like that when I was a kid so it seemed a portentous moment. I stuck my head out the window and saw a sheet over something beside the streetcar in front of my car. It was a body, I was told, the body of a child. The child had raced into the street after a ball which rolled under the car which was stopped to pick up a passenger. No one saw the child. When the car started up, it supposedly, in the memory of what I was told, cut the child in half with its steel wheels. When we finally recommenced our trip into downtown Dayton and rolled by the sheet, I noticed a small pile of something beside the sheet, something strangely colored (red, black, gray?), lumpy, hairy(?) and unidentifiable. All my life, to this day, I imagine they are brains or guts that popped out of the child when it was cut in half, pushed out by the weight of the car.

During the first three decades of my life, Dayton passed through three phases of public transportation. From streetcars to rubber-tired trolleys to gasoline buses, I rode them all. For some reason, the trolleys seem more bouncy and rolling in my memory than the other two while the streetcar swayed and clanged and knocked when it started up and even seems to have had more pickup than the other two. Streetcars lurched at startup and, so, they seem to me to have had more pickup. Maybe not. Buses lumber and lean and jounce, roar at startup through the synaptical streets of my memory.


Third Street was a commercial street. Neighborhood grocery stores there, and the Cone Cavern for ice cream and a small, square two story, department store, taverns, dry cleaners, walkup apartments above the stores, lawyer and insurance offices, maybe even a restaurant. I saw my first fire on Third Street, flames and smoke pouring up out of second story windows. No one needed a car to be able to keep the household supplied in those days. I seldom adventured in the direction of Third Street except to go to school or my great grandparent’s house which were both several blocks on the other side of Third and the tracks.

On Third also was grandma’s symmetrical stone and brick Third Street Baptist Church in which I got drowned one day. Grandma was anxious to get me involved in Third Street Baptist. My parents never went to church. My dad walked out of Third Street Baptist one day when he was a youth and troubled greatly by some wrong thing in there; I don’t know what it was, but he never entered a church again for worship, although when he died, he was looking forward to seeing in heaven his mother and father and everyone who died before him. The church insult may have had something to do with his getting involved with my 15 or 16 year old mother and wanting to marry her when he was 18 and she 16. Anyhow....

Since my folks didn’t go to church, I hadn’t been baptized when I came to live with grandma. This knowledge scared the hell out of her. According to her church, I was damned to hell if I died without baptism, so she enrolled me in Sunday school right away. I vaguely remember the basement lessons and learning “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” and that’s about all before, one day, I’m led out onto the stage behind the pulpit, and I descend some steps into a blue painted, very small swimming pool, and the minister gets in there with me and before the entire congregation, attempts to drown me. I come up gagging, having swallowed a ton of water, it seems to me. But that was my first salvation, and my grandmother felt better after that.

Besides teaching me Jesus-loves-me songs, the Third Street Baptist people did me one more unforgettable favor while they had me in their Sunday school power. They took a concept out of the darkest history of human evolution and consciousness and made it live for me in such a way that it influenced my hidden life for years to come. They told me that there was a creature called Satan who ruled a dark underground world where little children would be tortured and tormented for any thing they did that Authority didn’t approve of. They put the Devil in my brain. They taught me to worship the Devil in their perverse sort of aversive way. They gave Him power in my life; they made Him live. These Baptists laid the ground work for the continual good cop/ bad cop routine that goes on in the Christian world today. Bad cop Satan threatens you with eternal damnation and good cop Jesus offers you succor. Caught between the two, it’s a wonder anyone can grow up out of the Christian fairy tale. Without their continual Resurrection of Him, Satan would remain dead to us. In passing, they terrified me of being myself, of being a human being with human desires and thoughts.

Part way through the adult service, the kids from Sunday school, basement hell arose from the stygian darkness into the light and marched down a side aisle to sit in the front pew, left side. The minister would then come stand before us and tell us a morality tale from the Bible. I liked the attention but remember none of the tales meant to enlighten us. Soon after, the collection plates zipped up and down the pews, and I think I always had a coin to put in the plate because of something from my grandmother’s past which is in a poem she wrote in her 90s while in a nursing home. What her poem lacks in form, it makes up in the brevity of a honest reflection.

UNTITLED

I went to a small church in a small town in Clinton, Ohio.
My father always gave me a coin to put into the offering plate.
I was always careful to keep it safe
In my hand until the collection plate was passed,
Then I was proud to have something to drop into it,
Making sure all the other children in the class saw me.

I began school shortly after arriving at grandma’s house. Because I turned five in October, they let me enter kindergarten when I was still only four. This didn’t turn out too well the next year when they wanted to skip me a grade, kindergarten to second grade. All I recall of that fiasco is sitting in the very back right corner of the seats, feeling lost and thinking that all the kids around me were really very big. I was lost. I was mentally ready for it, but, emotionally, I was a wreck. In fact, they couldn’t make me stop crying when they took me to kindergarten. Yes, I was one of those little tikes who cried and cried and whose aunts or grandmother, for weeks, had to sit in the classroom where I could see them or I’d run out after them and have a pass out, drop down, pee my pants crying fit. Of course I had a healthy fear of abandonment. Who wouldn’t? For all I knew, I’d only recently lost my mom and dad. You can’t fool me, I thought: if you go out of my sight, you won’t come back. Like my mother crossing the street in front of the apartment building in St. Louis and disappearing into the drugstore on the corner. Do I look like an idiot? Eventually, though, I learned everything would be all right, and they could leave me alone at school. Took some getting used to, but I did. And I remember the clay, the crayons, the finger paints that went with kindergarten, the cookies and milk and the naps.

Yes, I was pretty bright. I think I began to teach myself to read at grandma’s house. She had a set of encyclopedias which I loved to look through, and a book about the sinking of the Titanic and one about the First World War which had tons of pictures in it that fascinated me. The pictures were of dead, bloated horses and corpses and mud, shell holes, shattered trees and cannons. I’m pretty sure I began to put the printed word “horse” together with the picture of a horse long before I went to school. Books fascinated me.

In first grade, I recall specially the small thick cardboard squares with black letters on green background. I loved to play with them and make words. It was fun, like picture puzzles, moving the letters around and fitting them into the mental picture of a word!!!! I was good at it.

A very weird thing happened in that class where we practiced both handwriting and word making. One day the teacher came in with a huge pad of heavy brown art paper that she propped on a tripod. When she peeled back the cover, we saw she’d written a word on it for us to identify. She was very proud of her handiwork. I have the memory that she worked weeks on the project at home on her own time, but when she asked someone to raise their hand and say what the word on the first page was, no one lifted even a finger. We were all puzzled. She turned another page and asked again for a show of hands of those that knew the word. Then she came around in front of her handiwork to look at it and gasped. I could tell she was embarrassed. She had written all the words in cursive, and we were not ready for cursive yet.

Strangely, she forged ahead, like she didn’t want to give up on all her hard work, and tried to get us to tell her what the cursive words were. My memory is that I identified one of them in a sincere attempt to come to her aid. Good for me! But actually, it might have been that when I failed to identify a word, one of her brightest students, she did finally give up and closed her pad of art paper forever and took it home as fire starter. Again, I have to note how quick I was to pick up on her emotion of embarrassment. There’s a reason for such hypersensitivity, and it’s not all the time good or pleasant for the hypersensitive one.

Why is it that I remember so many negative emotional moments and not many comforting memories? Four more painful moments come to mind in regard to Washington Grade School.

The earliest, I believe, has to do with integration. Washington School was integrated by a few blacks who lived in a neighborhood not far away, but still separate from the white folk, and one winter day, at recess, kids were informally lined up to slide on a long sheet of ice that had formed on the macadam of the playground. No grass on that playground that I can think of, unless it was a narrow strip in front where the offices were. Other kids lined up beside the ice strip, watching the sliders. When it came my turn, I took off like a shot and worked up the momentum for a terrific slide. I had barely gotten started when an older black girl stuck her hand out, face high, and let me run into it. Wham! My feet flew up and I landed on the back of my head. I think the principle saw the episode, though, maybe, and the little black girl in pigtails was called up to the office. But my head still hurt and that’s the only sliding I recall on that school yard.

Speaking of using my head. Another day, warmer, we were playing tag on the school yard, and I was pretty fast, though not the fastest. Someone was chasing me, and I am running lickety-split while looking over my shoulder to taunt the chaser. I turn around just in time to run full tilt, face and forehead first into a stone wall. Knocked myself unconscious and came to in the nurse’s office. They were so worried about me they called grandma to come get me and have me checked for a concussion. My forehead was badly swollen and much skin was missing.

Now things get scarier and darker. Even so young as I was, I walked home from school by myself. It was only five or six blocks, but it seemed longer to a little kid like me. I had to cross Third Street too, but traffic was nothing in those days, even though Third Street ran from Dayton central out toward Wright-Patterson Air Base. During wartime too. I would think there might have been a lot of traffic in those days, under those conditions. The official USAF museum is there now. Anyhow....

... to return to my four tales of school terror, there was a bully who used to bother me when I walked home from school, just like the bully in “A Christmas Story”, he scared me pretty bad. I’d take different streets home to avoid him, but he’d prowl around, looking for me, and every once in awhile, he found me. I’d run away. I hated to fight because I was and am always afraid of physical violence and, of course, my memory tells me that he was older and bigger than me. (Later, you’ll see me in the role of bully too. Aren’t bullies always people who are afraid?) Then one day, as this nasty bully chased me down the sidewalk in the direction of grandmother’s house, I got an idea, right in the middle of fleeing. He always caught me so why was I running? It was hopeless. Then I thought that if I stopped quick and squatted down, he’d trip over me and fall down. So I let him get right behind me; I stopped, squatted, and, just as I imagined it, he sailed over my back. Better, he landed face down on the sidewalk and went home bloody, screaming bloody murder. He never bothered me again.

Last of the four painful school memories: I’m just a little older now, maybe in the third grade, my last half year at Washington School before I go to live with dad and stepmom. I’m walking by the school on the sidewalk, and, beside the school wall, two guys have got this kid between them. One kid says to the captive kid, “Tell me where your homeroom is or we’ll beat you up.” And the other kid says to their captive, “Yeah, and if you tell him where your homeroom is, we’ll beat you up!”

Imagine a childhood packed with moment to moment experience! Why would I remember that specific moment so clearly out of zillions of moments? Why do I forget so many others? Why did the victim’s situation threaten me? Why did I put myself in the victim’s shoes and take on his fear? I felt and still feel, though not so intensely, exactly just how crazy that situation was for him. No matter what he did, he’d lose. It was a classic lose, lose situation. I didn’t have those words at the time to explain to myself all that I just said (and if you don’t have the word for a thing you maybe can’t know it at all), but my current knowledge about situations like that and how memory works in the unconscious, tell me that the moment represented something very meaningful to me that I didn’t understand at the time and that I’m still living with and must continually keep in perspective. It was a marker for me about a psychic condition which only many years later would come clear.

I deeply believe that any recurrent memory from anyone’s youth, which hangs around and won’t go away, good or bad, is there because it means something special they need to understand if they’re going to achieve the enlightenment that Carl Jung suggests ought to be the goal of all humankind. It’s part of the process of getting to “know oneself” that a human history packed with wisdom tells us we ought to seek.

Before I leave Washington School, both at that time and in this writing about it, I want to brag on myself a little bit. In third grade, my home room was on the west side of the building. I can’t recall what the subject matter was of that last class of the day, but I was always bored with it. I wanted to go home and play. I used to study the marks on the desk, the cuts, gouges, curves and scribbles darkened with pencil and body grime, and I’d get to watching the shadows from the windows moving across the desk’s surface. My memory tells me that there was no clock in the room, or that it was at the back of the room, or that the teacher absolutely went ballistic if you were caught watching the clock. I think it was in this hellish room that I had my knuckles rapped for the first time with a ruler. Anyhow, suddenly, with great joy and surprise, I realized I could tell when the bell would ring by where the shadows were in relation to certain marks on the desk. I was no longer a prisoner of the clock or the teacher. I could stare at my desk top and know exactly when the bell would ring!

For a few days I felt powerful and secretive. Predictive power is a wonderful feeling! God like. I told no one, but I soon found out that I couldn’t exactly tell anymore because the damn shadows moved constantly in relation to the marks. My spirits fell. The shadow that I had used so effectively at first now fell in between marks, and I couldn’t predict to myself with the accuracy that made me feel so powerful. I can’t recall whether I figured out that if I made pencil marks on the desk from day to day, I’d almost have my predictive powers back. I don’t think I did. I think I just realized it as I write this Nobody’s autobiography. But, thinking back on my touch of scientific observation and its predictive power, I’m still excited. Here was this little 8 or 9 year old boy on his own, observing and using his own sundial, even though he knew nothing about the turning of the earth that gave him his predictive power. Like a god I was, if there were such a being.

To jump ahead and make a comment about the power of education to open and close minds, I want to leap from my chronology to junior high at Belmont Grade School where I had a crush on this teacher who wore tight, wool skirts that she wore about calf top high. Her legs were thick and her ankles were thick, but I didn’t care. She was maybe my first crush after Veronica Lake of the beautiful long blond hair, not counting my Texas auntie-in-law. (A long time ago, someone told me that Veronica fell on hard times and worked in a restaurant in NYC. She supposedly had an elevator accident, catching her hair in one and getting scalp damage.) Anyhow, to get back to the teacher with tight skirts and brown hair: she taught geography for one thing, and I’d watch her backside when she reached up to roll down one of those maps that used to hang above the blackboards, front and side of the rooms. I’d try to look up her skirt, too, when she sat atop of her desk, legs adangle, like a princess.

This room was full of sex ‘cause in that very room, I watched a guy, before class, reach around from behind and grab both of a girl’s breasts. She screamed but didn’t seem too mad and didn’t report him. This would be the late 40s, wouldn’t it, long before the sexual revolution? Holy cow, will I never get to the importance of education I began a few paragraphs back?

Anyhow, one day, like Wagoner in the 1920s, I was staring at a world map in a school book and happened to notice how the outline of Britain blended in with Europe and how the shape of the west coast of Africa seemed to match the shape of the east coast of the Americas. Wow, I thought, could these continents have been joined at one time!? They fit like a jigsaw puzzle. I went up to my favorite teacher after class and pointed out my finding. She poopooed the idea. I felt her disdain like a blow. Her response probably wasn’t all that bad, but when you have a crush on someone, their feelings for you and what you think are doubly intensified. So, there you go, folks! This little Nobody, just like a Wagoner, scorned by scientists, at an earlier time, was denied his discovery of continental drift because of the scorn of another little nobody of a teacher, and a female at that, which gave her nay saying a doubled force.

Right now, as I tell this tale, I think about my fascination with the spreading shape of the little girl next door’s pee puddle on the dusty concrete garage floor and of wondering what was beneath her dress in a sunny alley. I think about the fact that I was fascinated by picture puzzles and by the shapes of the little green letter tiles we made words out of in first grade. I had and liked lincoln logs too and I had an erector set at grandma’s, plus tinker toys, and I recall the shape of the marks on the desk that the shadow moved over, and something tells me that my interest in spaces and edges and such, and my curiosity in general, made possible my noticing the edges of continents that seemed, in my imagination, to be related to one another. Step by step, my mind built up those edgy relationships which budded eventually in an awareness of a scientific fact we now know as continental drift.

Kill curiosity in a kid, hit him over the head with the unscientific curiosity killer called “appeal to authority” or make him fear experience, and you kill his chance to know the truth about the world or himself. Needless to say, in the Bush-league world of today, appeals to authority are constant, and appeals to authority, Biblical or otherwise, teach us nothing about the scientific methods any brain must have to arrive at the “predictive truth” I experienced in the third grade at Washington Grade School and the telltale observation I made at Belmont Grade School.


It’s the Fourth of July, 2003, and the sun’s out in Spokane. I’m at Starbuck’s on Hamilton. I was looking at my newly planted section of flower bed this morning before I left to come here, my second year as a gardener. A breeze blew and the yellow orange Tickseed heads bobbed and the Oat grass leaves, the Blue Queen sage, the taller Purple cone flowers, Black-eyed Susans still without blooms, Sun drop Oenothera, the lemon yellow Evening Primroses peeking through the leaves of the taller plants, the whole bed of xeric plants alive and well, and I thought of them as friendly, happy living beings enjoying the sunlight. Then I thought of the new sick Panicle hydrangea with some sort of leaf rust it has caught from the neighbor’s plant on the east side of the house and of my Columbine up front which has failed to bloom for the second year and now is eaten alive with some leaf disease I can’t recognize. I imagined them, sadly, as sick living things, needing my care. A dark and new feeling about non-human living beings. I tell myself I must shake off this codependent sense of responsibility for things natural or all my fun in gardening will be spoiled. Back to McGee Street and a motley collection of final tales.

My first memory of the feeling of deep mortification comes from this time at grandma’s. I felt much worse about the kite incident than about what happened when my aunt caused my infantile coitus interruptus or the neighbor lady caught Bitty and me with her daughter. One fall, windy overcast day, I decided to make a kite. Squatting in the middle of grandma’s Persian carpet (she had a Persian carpet just as her parents had one), with newspaper, sticks and glue, I worked a long time with glue and string to build me a kite. Then proudly demanding that grandmother come watch me from the doorway, I go out on the sidewalk under the trees (kites under trees?), place my kite carefully on the concrete and, holding to the string, I take off like a bat from hell trailing my kite behind me. Within seconds, my kite disintegrated on the sidewalk, never lifting an inch from the earth.

Perhaps, if my “sticks” hadn’t been heavy 1” by 1” pieces of wood glued in a triangular shape with cross pieces to the newspaper, without any connection between them, I’d have had more success. But my shame was real even if my kite wasn’t. I felt so very very bad that I wanted to cry. My cheeks burned, my eyes screwed up to cry, and I probably did cry, but I don’t remember what happened after my kite tore apart, not even what my grandmother did. I just remember her standing in the front doorway behind the screen door, waiting and watching her grandson learn another painful lesson. Much later I wrote a poem about kites that is quite good and expresses the feelings associated with a kite that not only flies, it soars!

A MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I’LL EVER NEED

Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind.
Whipping madly in a rush,
It sought a surface far above me,
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself.
What I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.

For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in that knotted tail
I’d been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
Then that wind was taken from me,
And it began to flutter down
Down to lay my line along the earth.

Grandma’s neighborhood was tough for a kid raised by a mother who probably wanted him to be like Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy”, but who may have cared for him more like a street urchin. Who knows? I kid you not. Though I can’t put my finger on why I imagine it as so, I’m sure she wanted royal purple velvet for me, beribboned hats and pedigree. She wanted these things for herself, I know, so why not for me? Someone I knew must have owned a print of the “Blue Boy” ‘cause it’s pretty strong in my mind, hanging somewhere on a wall in space, but I don’t know where in space that space is.

Bitty’s brother, Russell, was pretty mean, and he used to rough me and Bitty up pretty badly from time to time. We’d play in their dirt backyard a lot, high jumping over sticks, climbing and scampering. They didn’t have a lawn that I remember. I think they were pretty poor. One day, we got a ladder and climbed up on a garage roof, then they all got down and ran away. I think Bitty’s brother was the ring leader and took the ladder. When they returned, I begged and pleaded to get down. I was scared they’d leave me up there forever, and grandma’s house was too far away for her to hear me and come save me. It seemed too far to jump, but later, I learned to drop even farther, from roofs of houses, bending my legs and twisting to roll onto my back. I believe my paratrooper uncle taught me how to cushion long drops or I got it out of a WWII movie.

One day I hurt Bitty pretty good too. We fought about something, and he ran home to tattletale his mom on me. He crossed the street and began to climb the steps using hands and feet. I threw a stone and hit him on the run right in the middle of the back. I felt real satisfaction when he straightened up and his screams redoubled in intensity and echoed up and down the street. What a shot! I’ve never forgotten that moment of pride at my great throw.

Speaking of shots. I can remember very clearly that doctors made house calls. I had a bad fever and maybe a cough. It may have been strep throat, whopping cough, the flu, but in the middle of the night, it seemed, I was brought down from my bedroom in the small back room on the second floor. You had to pass through a larger bedroom to get to the hallway from my room. My room had steeply pitched, low peaked ceilings, like unfinished attics have. I believe it may have been meant for storage, but with four boys, my grandparents needed another bedroom and that became my room when I lived there.

The doctor arrived in shirt sleeves and a dark vest with sharp points at the bottom. He carried the insidious black bag that mawed open to reveal shelves like a fishing box. Out comes the needle and out come my screams. No! You aren’t going to prick me with that needle. No! No! I scream and kick, and it takes 25 men to hold me down my strength is so great from fear. But get me down, they do. And they kill me with the needle, and for the rest of my life I think of this doctor and his vest as a sort of Dracula, a bat man in a winged vest who comes in the night to hurt little boys.

One dentist, I nearly outsmarted. An aunt took me to the dentist one day. Which aunt I don’t remember. I think I had a bad cavity. My teeth are soft, and I had lots of cavities all my life. Now I’m mostly caps and crowns, like a movie star. This dentist worked from a small gray bungalow, a house not in a business district. Anyhow, with my aunt beside me, I sat in his chair while the dentist rooted around in my gums with his long probe thingy, and it hurt like hell. Something was really bad and painful in my mouth, and the dentist was making it worse, I can tell you. He turned away for a moment to root among his tools. My aunt was daydreaming, and I couldn’t imagine a better time to make my escape. Out of the chair I darted, through the office door, out through the waiting room, past seated startled clients, through the street door and down his walk. A left turn put me on the sidewalk, and caring not where I ran, I set out for anywhere but that dentist’s office. I think they caught me halfway down the street. I can’t remember anything else except my near escape. The rest is mercifully hidden in the darkness of unconsciousness.

Speaking of dentists and teeth extraction, I do recall the practice of tying one end of a string to a loose baby tooth and the other end to a doorknob and, then, someone opens the door to pull the tooth out. Whippoosh! At grandma’s house, we did that with one of my front baby teeth. Theory was that the tooth removal wouldn’t hurt if it was quick. That’s what they told me, but it did hurt, and I bled too which scared me even more. Never trust an adult if they tell you something won’t hurt.

This whole time at my grandparent’s was wartime. Grandmother had two stars in her window, to indicate two sons serving in the military. We had blackout curtains we pulled down to keep lights from shining into the dark. Air raid wardens patrolled the streets to enforce blackouts. Test air raid sirens frequently sounded. One night, our Philco console was leaking light through a crack in the curtain, and an air raid warden knocked on the door to warn us about it. He scared me. Many things scared me, as I said, the poor little orphan boy.

The Cold War began very early for me at grandpa’s house. I lay on the couch in the living room during a blackout. I may have been sick too, lying there feverish, where I could be cared for without their climbing the steep steps to the second floor. Either H. V. Kaltenborn or Walter Winchell was warning all Americans about waking up to be “stabbed in the back”. The image this conjured up for me, the vision of someone sneaking into my bedroom, scared hell out of me, and I’m sure the newsman was talking about our ally Russia and that it was an early warning, near the end of the war, to watch out for this enemy to come. Another fear that grew and grew as I grew.

Then came the night that FDR died and for the only time in my life, my grandpa is crying. The grief in the house is thick. I comprehended nothing about politics, but I do know my grandfather has never been sad like this in my view. The tears roll shining down his cheeks, reflecting the glow of the cat eye in the face of the Philco.


Consciousness was growing in me then and confusion and emotional sensitivity. All kids like to spin and get dizzy, and I was no different. I liked to spin and get dizzy, but that was easy to do in summer and harder to do in snow when traction failed, so, ever seeking the altered state, I learned that I could make my head spin by jumping off grandma’s couch onto my knees. The jolt of knee on floor made me dizzy immediately and with less tendency to nausea. So in my grandma’s parlor/sewing room where they put up the tree at Christmas, I jumped and jumped and jumped again, for days on end, making myself high, until one day, my knees began to ache. I thought they’d never stop aching. I don’t remember that I told anybody. I knew I’d done this to myself and they might be angry if they knew so I don’t think I told them. Eventually, my knees stopped aching and the crises passed.

Another thing I didn’t tell anyone about grandma’s house, as far I know, was the day someone smothered me near to death with a pillow. Years later, in counseling, when I am dredging up the past, deep in emotion, I remembered like a flash, the moment so real I knew it was an actual experience, my face coming away from the pillow and a huge gasp for air. I’m sure I’d come to the point of no longer fighting, giving in to death, relaxing, when the pillow was removed. The smotherer is standing behind me, and I’m bent over on the couch which I jump from to get high. To this day, at this moment of writing, I don’t know who tried to kill me or torture me or shut me up. All I remember, as clear as a bell, is that desperate moment of gasping for air, like exiting from a dark, 16 hour ordeal into light, as from a birth canal to gasp for life itself.