The Secular and The Religious

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
 
In my early childhood days the Christmas Eve parties had been in someone's apartment with quite a lot of drinking and dancing. The men in their white shirts with skinny ties; the women in heels they slipped off before jitterbugging. They were young after all, in their 20s---brothers, wives, cousins, friends, work buddies. They played the stereo: "Mack the Knife" "Blueberry Hill" "Rock Around the Clock" It felt like wild and crazy times, which probably had more to do with everyone's age and capacity for alcohol than with it being the end of the Eisenhower era. And Christmas parties weren't about the children, our time was Christmas morning. I remember being tired one Christmas Eve at an uncle's apartment and falling asleep on a pile of coats that everyone had tossed on the bed, kind of the way in which a cat or dog will fall asleep on your clothes. It's almost impossible to describe that feeling of warmth and comfort.


My parents bought a house before I turned five. Most but not all of the family Christmas parties from that time forward took place there, a stretch of about 25 years from the late 50s to the early 80s. By my late teens the Night Before Christmas had become more of a happy lark and the WPIX Yule Log set the mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMjTD7c6TCo&feature=related

The adults took the televised yule log more seriously but my generation found humor and absurdity in the yule log and yet still enjoyed it, perhaps even more so. The Christmas Eve parties were still mainly for the adults and "the kids" needed to create our own entertainment. A few of my cousins, my brother and I, and maybe a couple friends would leave the house early in the evening, and we would drive around or walk around to look at Christmas lights and smoke a joint or two, so that by the time we returned to an adult party in full swing, we'd sit together in the combined den and dining area and fire up the Yule Log on WPIX. By now we were all in a peaceful, bonhomie, holiday mood, meditating on The Yule Log, laughing for no apparent reason which puzzled some of our parents, drinking a little wine, or a beer, or maybe a cup of tea as a buffet table was being prepared with turkey and ham and cold-cuts and potato salad and pies, and cakes and Christmas cookies. My mother and her mother knew how to create a spread. The guests varied over the years but mainly comprised my father and his brothers, their wives and kids, my grandmothers, and great aunts, but also neighbors and friends of my parents, and as we got older, friends of mine and my brother's and our girlfriends, and maybe the friends' girlfriends.

Some years, when I wasn't stoned and sitting in front of the TV mesmerized by the Yule Log, I attended Midnight Mass at the Episcopal church a few blocks away. By my late 20s I became more ambitious, and with a couple of friends would head over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral or Saint Thomas's for Midnight Mass.

And there were always people left at the house when we returned, folks to sit with and enjoy a turkey sandwich and meatballs and a little pie and coffee, and a glass of wine or brandy. It was a feeling not unlike falling asleep on that pile of coats many years before.

Have chores to do before the big day, and tomorrow I'm going to pay a visit to "The Two of Us" blog and maybe enjoy a little spice wine.

Kathleen Shaw and The Great Leap Backward and Forward

At one point (or the first of several points) where my life had crashed and burned, I found myself living once again in the town where I had grown up, reluctantly back home after having managed to escape for seven years.

Not only was it a down period in my life, it didn't seem to be a particularly auspicious epoch in the collective life as well. In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president of the U.S. and John Lennon was assassinated. I  walked through a huge shopping mall, Christmas shopping with my father the day after Lennon was murdered, and the usual manifest depression of the season, and the end of the Carter years, coupled with this tragedy, was palpable. The malaise washed over you in soul-numbing waves. It was the end of an era and no one seemed to have any idea of where things were headed. Instead of the usual holiday tunes, the muzak speakers were cranking out "Imagine" and "Instant Karma" and "A Day in the Life" and "In My Life" and "Revolution" and "Mind games" and "Across the Universe"and (Goddamn) "So this is Christmas", and it felt bloody awful amid all the glitter and merchandising and material craving of the holiday season. It felt like the end of the world.

One day in this lost season, I had gone to the local Channels or Lumberama which, along with Rickels, were the "Big" hardware stores in the decades preceding Home Depot and Lowes. I bought some widget and headed to the register to check out . . . and there she was . . . Kathleen Shaw . . . I was 28 and it was nearly half a lifetime since I'd seen her. She had been my girlfriend---the only girlfriend I'd gone out with and broken up with twice---first at age 14 and then again at age 15. She may have been the only girlfriend from those early adolescent years that I'd actually loved, although I didn't know it back then. Kathleen recognized me with my long hair and beard. She'd always been shy. She rung up my purchase and we made small talk. I may have mentioned that I was back in the area for awhile, the Prodigal Son returned. I don't recall if she had worn an engagement or wedding ring, and it didn't seem important. I had no desire to rekindle anything with her. I could easily see Kathleen Shaw and I were worlds apart.

Later I mentally traveled back with Kathleen to the Spring of '67, to a Sunday in late March when the ground was starting to thaw, and there were a few blossoms and a thin wrapper of early warmth around our winter jackets. We were pressed against the brick wall of a public building, kissing, making out, smiling into each others eyes.

 Kathleen:
      "What does your father do?"
Me:
     "He works in a paper mill."

      "A paper mill?"
      "Yeah, where they make paper. Boxboard. What does your father do?"
      "He's a bus driver."
      "Like Jackie Gleason on the Honeymooners?"
      "Yeah, like Jackie Gleason . . . Sooooo?
      "Nothing . . . You're sister still lives at home. What does she do?"
      "She has a job at the bank . . . We have to stop kissing. My lips are chapped."
      "So let's get some chap-stick at the drugstore. I wanna buy some licorice."
      "I'm not going to kiss you if you eat licorice and the drugstore is far away."
      "You said you were gonna stop kissing me anyway, and we can make it to the drugstore. It's a five-minute walk."
       "Ten . . ."
      "Okay, 'ten.'"
      "By the time we get back I'll have to be home for Sunday dinner."
      "So we're just gonna stand here and not kiss? Maybe I should start walking you home now. We can walk slow."
      "You're rude . . . We can talk."
      "But we're already talking!"
      "You call this talking?"
      "One more kiss?"
      "Well, alright . . ."

I said goodbye to Kathleen Shaw and left the Channels or Lumberama and started walking across the mall parking lot, which was only two blocks from my parents house where I was living. Kathleen had been one of several people I'd run into that apocalyptic Fall of 1980 whom I hadn't seen in years, and I was suffering from a sense of dislocation. Things really had changed in Wayward the past seven years, and though I'd returned every now and then for Christmas or the 4th of July, I really hadn't noticed the scope of the change until I'd planted myself for a time. So it wasn't just a strange time ("strange days indeed" as John Lennon had sung) it was a strange place too, because as even a mediocre or novice student of physics knows, time and space are interchangeable, or not interchangeable---they're the same. Time is an illusion.

A cinder block wall roughly 7-foot high ran the perimeter of the mall parking lot along one of the avenues. The wall had been there since I was a kid (when "the mall" hadn't been an enclosed mall) and the wall had a hole in it, and on the side was the street that I'd often traveled to get home. The hole was made from a missing half of a cinder block roughly three-and-a-half feet from the ground, and it had come in handy starting around age 9 or 10, because without having to go around the wall by a hundred yards or more and walk along busy Wayward Avenue, you could instead scale the wall by securing your foot in the hole---quite convenient. Later, in my early teens, the hole was sometimes used as a place to stash cigarettes or other contraband.

I was 28 and wayward in Wayward, but the hole in the wall drew me toward it like an astronomical black hole. Already ignoring the civilized and adult path across the parking lot that would have led me around the wall, I instead reached the hole, maybe wishing for a minute or two that I could somehow shrink myself and disappear inside. But I jumped up, clutched the cinder block with my arms, leveraged my ascent by placing one foot in the still correct place, and leaped over.

Going Up

In the summer of 1965 my grandmother who lived with us took a six-week summer trip to Washington State. It had been her longest and most ambitious trip to date. Normally she took one or two trips a year with her older sister, Jess. They would vacation in western Massachusetts if it was summer and Florida in the winter, where they would stay with their only surviving sibling, an older brother. They were a sight---a pair of 5-foot, 1-inch elderly ladies with their Bingo night hats and valises boarding the Greyhound for Pittsfield, or on this trip, an airplane to Seattle, where they had a second cousin (or was it a first cousin once-removed?) living in Everett.

There had been a resurgence of World's Fairs or Expos in the '60s. The previous summer, my family, along with millions of others, had visited the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The Montreal Expo '67 was on the horizon. The Seattle Expo had taken place in 1962, and of course one of the largest and enduring attractions had been the Space Needle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle

My grandmother and great aunt were excited about visiting Seattle and The Cascades and Puget Sound, and of course the Space Needle. They had both come from Brooklyn, and for a time had been raised by Catholic nuns, because they'd lost their mother at a very early age. Jess never left Brooklyn where she was the matriarch of a large family. My grandmother had married in 1928 and emigrated from Brooklyn to North Jersey, and her descendants were smaller in number.


Here is an interesting site about Worlds Fairs and their history.

http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/

My grandmother lived on the second floor of our house. You could hardly call her living space an upstairs "apartment"; it was more of a semi-finished half floor, or attic, with stacked up cardboard boxes and random junk, with an overwhelming odor of mildew and must. There was a plain bedroom, a practically unusable bathroom, and a central room with torn red linoleum flooring, an old sofa, TV, a mahogany coffee table and end table with lamp. That was it. My grandmother lived downstairs with the rest us during the day, but spent her evenings on the second floor. It was an enchanting but usually off-limits place for me. Sometimes I would  sneak upstairs at night and sit with her for awhile. A crucifix hung above the TV and another one over her bed. Nan (as we called her) would not smoke her beloved Kent cigarettes upstairs, but would instead eat hard candy as she watched Lawrence Welk or some other variety show of the era. She would always give me candy, and she also pressed dollar bills into my hand with the stern warning not to tell my mother, as if I were a spy and the money was some secret code or plan I needed to carry with me behind enemy lines . . .

While my grandmother was away my mother often took the opportunity to clean out the years of detritus that had accumulated over a few family moves and the blending of stuff from her mother's house with her own. Occasionally I dared to venture upstairs myself. I had never been in the bedroom before. I remember a rosary on her bureau, and  an old photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, possibly in her teens. She looked quite pretty in that portrait. The ceilings sloped, the wallpaper was corrugated and yellowed from dampness, the bed was a twin. My grandmother, now in her mid-60s, had been a a widow for over 10 years and had only one child who'd been stricken with polio at the age of 12, and then the child later married at age 18, already pregnant . . . this room was a lonely place to be.

But unlike most of my friends, I had never lived on a second floor, and I was always mystified at the way in which more of the world was revealed to me from the two small windows in her bedroom and two more throughout the floor. I would watch the cars and buses---altered and scaled down---as they passed below on the street. I could see a greater number of houses and yards, and people going about their daily routines, and I felt more omniscient and privileged gazing down from this second-story, almost dizzying, height . . . I must have been seven or eight years old when I'd first come up here, a time in my life rich in epic dreams. There were storage cubbyholes below the sloped eaves, and you could enter them through a weirdly-angled door, like a door in a play house, a little skewed and unreal, and the space in there was dark and dusty, and you could not see too much. Soon after discovering the cubbyhole, I had a recurring dream of entering these tight spaces, but the spaces would expand into long passageways that I would follow and eventually emerge onto a higher floor, and then reenter the passageway and come out on an even higher floor. On the third floor all the furniture was draped in long veils of light blue silk, and on the fourth floor there appeared enormous beds and sofas and ottomans of fine linen with green and gold embroidery---white, open and airy rooms---and by the sixth, or maybe seventh floor, I would emerge from the passageway into a realm of mostly formless and heavenly illumination.

When my grandmother returned from Washington State (and the Space Needle), I remembered asking her about her trip.


"It was such beautiful country out there," she'd said, elated, her life changed, her horizons broadened, "and every place you go the people treat you so nice."

She lived to the age of 94.

Halloween '74

I had been in Portland, Oregon less than two months, living in the upstairs of a house with the Lane Brothers and Sam Clemens when we had a Halloween party for the neighbors. As newcomers in a strange city some 3000 miles from where we'd grown up, we had thought the party would be a good way to meet some people (girls) and gain some new friends (girls).

We had gotten friendly with a pair of guys who lived on the first floor. In those early days in Portland we'd spent many a night at the Belmont Tavern playing pool and eating bar pies. The downstairs neighbors both went to Lewis and Clark College. Dale was a music major and Mark was studying Serbo-Croatian language. They had lived in the neighborhood longer and suggested some folks to invite to the party.


It wasn't a large turnout. I remember we had a keg. Sam Clemens had a bozo mask and another friend showed up dressed in drag, which had proved interesting because at the time no one guessed that a few months later he'd come out. There were a couple of girls from the neighborhood and one was very pretty, but they were local and homespun, and our shared experience diverged in a number of ways. Still, it hadn't been a bad idea to invite them.

One of the strangest characters at the party was a poet who'd looked as if he'd stepped out of Medieval or Renaissance England. He had long neat hair cut like a knight's (or false representations of such) and a finely trimmed Vandyke beard. We had recently met his girlfriend in the neighborhood and invited them to the Halloween party.  I recalled seeing the poet with his girlfriend playing pool at the aforementioned Belmont Tavern. The poet (a composer of sonnets, or vilanelles, or epics, I guess) told me he'd been reading all the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His girlfriend, who was beautiful and Jewish, made me think of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, which as we all know, was a thinly concealed attack on antisemitism in England dressed up as a tale of knights and jousting. Had Rebecca been the reincarnation of Sir Walter Scott's girlfriend for that reason? I couldn't tell. I noticed he seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on people, especially women. He also coveted my collection of Poe's complete works, 10 pocket-sized hardbound volumes printed in 1904 with an illustration or engraving, some by famous artists, on the front of each book. I had acquired the set in 1972 for 50 cents (a nickel a book) at a flea market. The poet held one or two in his hands, and with a wicked gleam in his eye, not unlike Rasputin or Svengali, or Mesmer or Manson, he offered to buy the collection for considerably more money than I had paid. It was a little uncanny and disturbing the way he tried to will the Poe books away from me. And it was Halloween, after all. I stubbornly held firm and refused to part with Poe. I still have those books.

But the biggest and funniest and scariest star of the party was a full-sized skeleton we had named Abdul. I forget the connection but the skeleton was on loan to us from someone Lane knew at Reed College and supposedly the skeleton was of a middle-eastern man, but to our untrained eye that would have been difficult to corroborate. For the Halloween party we propped the skeleton (Abdul)  next to the keg and he was a big hit. And we kept him for a few weeks after Halloween which gave us further amusement.We took lots of photos---the skeleton sitting on the couch with us, wearing a hat, a lit cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other. Or the most bizarre thing we did was to take the skeleton with us on joy rides through the city. We would seat Abdul in the passenger's seat, one "bony" arm crooked on the open window. This play of the unexpected got quite a few reactions from other drivers, especially the ones stopped to the right of our car at a traffic light. Looking back on it, the humor seems in rather poor taste, and juvenile, but we were adolescents, or post-adolescents back then and in a strange far away rainy city on Halloween.

Saturday Odyssey

On Saturday mornings in September and October I would often wake up early and meet up with two or three friends to have breakfast. There was a Walgreen's near my house and at the time Walgreen's had a soda fountain and grill connected to their drugstore. They served a "breakfast special" 2 eggs, bacon, home fries, toast and coffee for only 59 cents. I was smoking back then, at the age of 13, and usually, after one of these fine breakfasts, I would get a coffee to go and have it outside the store with my cigarette. It's almost impossible to recapture the sensory rush of smoking a cigarette with a steaming cup of coffee on a cool September or October morning.

What was best about Saturdays at this time of life, and younger, was that the day, unencumbered by school, or church, or Sunday dinner, was an 8- or 9-hour Odyssey. If you started out around 8:00 in the morning, you found yourself by 4:00 in the afternoon at a place you could not have foreseen. The location was unimportant: maybe you were at the stores, or in the park playing football, or helping a friend rake leaves, or walking home from the woods or those fields I had once burned down. The fascinating part was trying to recall how you got there, realizing how many different stories, and connections with different kids or people and changes had occurred since early in the day, the less eventful spots already nearly forgotten, discarded from the narrative, or maybe kept for the purpose of transition to a more eventful scene---say, an hour or two with a girlfriend.

 

Like in the Spring, the air and light by late afternoon had taken on a mystical quality, which made the concatenation of scenes and experiences and sensations (and the linking of scenes), made the recollected Saturday Odyssey all the more compelling, all the more transcendent and mysterious. And years later, with any random play of light and shadow, or a change of season, or a stray sound or a smell, a gesture even, we return to the old places once again. We never really leave them, do we?

Paper Oy

Traffic increases on the Memory Highway at certain times of the year. September and Fall would be one of those times, with being back in school, night and darkness coming on much earlier, games of manhunt in the chill air, and the sounds of marching bands coming from a football field somewhere . . . Although much of what follows used to take place in the fall, it also spanned the other seasons too.

Larry Leeper was the paper boy in my neighborhood from the time I was in 4th grade through 6th or 7th grade. Leeper was three years older than me and for a couple years I helped him as an assistant on his paper route. "Helping" him amounted to my doing the majority of the work, after he'd come back from the dispatcher with the two pannier baskets on his bicycle loaded with folded papers and a burlap bag stuffed with folded papers slung across his handle bars. I would take the heavy bag and lug it down the street, pausing at each customer's house to either place the paper on the front porch or, if there were special instructions, leave the paper inside the front door, or side door, or breezeway or patio. I helped Larry Leeper every day after school during the school year and often in the summer when we delivered papers in the early afternoon. He paid me a paltry fraction of  what he made from his route, abused me with little games of torture which will be disclosed, and, to rub salt into my wounds, made me go around door-to-door with him when he was collecting on Thursday evenings as an inducement for my getting a measly dollar or two, if that. I needed the candy and soda money.

As it turned out, "collecting" was a fascinating business interaction with adults, a real eye opener into the harsh realities of the world. Elderly women with gin on their breath, dressed in fuzzy bathrobes, staggering to the door, saying what nice boys we were, but would we mind coming back next week to get paid? Other women and men whining about missed deliveries and threatening to stop service. Loud, bitter-with-their-lot-in-life men, some drunk, cracking ribald jokes or telling endless stories of The Depression, or The War, or past feats of derring-do, their faces flushed with road maps of veins. And there were the every day curmudgeons who didn't answer the door but sent their German Shepherds as willing emissaries. Leeper had a stack of cards attached to a metal ring about as large as a horse tether, but thinner. Each card was for a customer, and when a customer paid for our services and the daily delivery of his/her newspaper, Leeper made a heavy pencil (no. 2) mark on the card. I seem to recall that if the customer missed two weeks payment, they were given a warning; if they missed three weeks, they were warned that delivery would discontinue by the following week, and by the fourth week delivery would stop altogether if there was no payment for the current week and all the skipped weeks. Unfortunately, no one took a kid, or a pair of kids, seriously who were trying to politely persuade them to cough up a few dollars like good citizens for the privilege and enjoyment of having a finely written, finely edited and printed newspaper delivered to their doorstep each evening.

Most evening newspapers, or morning and evening editions of daily papers clearly have left us. In fact the existence of major newspapers and print media in general has been seriously undermined in the Digital Age, and it is no revelation. Around the time I was helping Larry Leeper with his paper route, New York City had at least two other dailies long gone: "The Journal American" and "The New York Herald Tribune"  Extra! Read all about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune

Northern Jersey had the Star Ledger, but right outside New York City where I grew up, "The Bergen Record" was the most popular paper and the one I helped deliver. In the morning, you got "The New York Daily News" and in the afternoon, it was "The Bergen Record." Think they still might be in print.


Larry Leeper treated me as one of his unfortunate charges and told me in a big-brotherly way that he was always looking out for my welfare. Like a big brother, he abused me accordingly. Sometimes, when we were nearly at the end of the route, he would make me stop at a basketball net on a side street near his house and play a game of one-on-one with him. He was 14 years old, about 5-foot, 8 inches tall, and I was 10 years old and 4-foot, 11 inches---a fair match up in Leeper's eyes. He would also make me practice boxing with him: guard with the left, jab with the right, and when you had an opening, swing and punch with the left. I took some shots to the head, but I guess I learned a few things, like stop letting this idiot push you around.

But the cruelest torture was reserved for Winter. My hands were so frozen and red all the time, whether you were wearing your gloves or not (gloves were usually the cheap cloth variety and would become soaked with snow and therefore worthless). Leeper had a good left arm. He displayed his pitching prowess for me by directing a snowball to a high street lamp across the road. The snowball made a lovely arc and hit the lamp with a shatter and brief cascade of crystal powder. As I delivered papers with my freezing hands, Leeper would pack perfectly spherical snowballs with his highest quality gloves---they were really a marvel to look at (the snowballs not the gloves). Then, once I'd dropped the paper in a door or inserted in a mail slot, Leeper would tell me to start running while he counted to 5---fast. I was usually nailed with one of his ice missiles, and the worst spot to be hit was the back of the neck, because even wearing my winter coat and cloth cap some of the ice managed to slide down into my back and even sometimes further down to my waist. I should have worn a hood.

Some years later I heard that Larry Leeper lived near Phoenix and was working as an officer with the Arizona Highway Patrol. No longer having snowballs at his disposal, I guess Leeper had to settle for writing tickets and fines instead.

The Graces

True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer
-- Rilke



I barely knew the Graces family. Rollo and Vincent were both ahead of me in school and well known, and hardly knew me, if at all, which often happens between older and younger kids in school. My first sight of Rollo was the back of his leather jacket with some Greek club lettering stitched upon it. He was at least five years older than me and nearly out of high school, a tall good-looking kid in tight black jeans and boots with the silver zippers on the side, a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. He had wiry-to-curly hair depending on the length and had a darker complexion. His younger brother Vincent was also tall but slightly gangly, and not as good looking as Rollo, but still popular with the girls. My best friend’s older sister, who had a beehive hair-do for a while and then one that looked like Leslie Gore, and let us play her records, knew the Grace Brothers because they were part of a crowd known in those days as “hoods.” Rollo sometimes hung with this crowd and also the club whose letters were embroidered on his jacket, but he had no real affiliations and was his own person---an individual who was popular at the same time.

I didn’t know the Grace parents, or anything about them, until one fall dance at the middle school, some time in mid- or late September. That’s when I heard that the mother, Mrs. Grace, had just died, and I saw their father for the first time because he managed Rollo’s rock-and-roll band and they were playing that night at the dance (there had recently been talk of a record deal). Why the son and his band were playing so soon after the mother’s death was anyone’s guess. No one had any details. It was late 1964, “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” era. The band was very tight with theatrics by Rollo, who sang lead and played bass. During one number, Rollo jumped off the stage, and sliding over to a group of beehive-hair girls wearing silver lipstick, he quickly executed a cartwheel that ended in a split. As if rehearsed, the girls shrieked, and needless to say they were drawn to him, not only for his looks, but for his pain too. His mother had just died.

But before anyone had been let into the dance that night, in the great swelling murmur of conversation outside the doors in the auditorium hallway, a few of those same girls had gossiped among themselves, saying the dance should have been canceled or another band should have played. No one knew the reason. Rollo’s father, one of the few adults present (there were no chaperones), was the band’s manager, and there was talk of a record deal. Vincent was also there, dancing with some lovely girls near the stage. It seemed in poor taste; proper mourning was not being observed. Someone mentioned something about the show needing to go on because this dance was different than other school sponsored dances, the space had already been rented and auxiliary police and firemen paid for the evening. Maybe the real reason was that, even though they were all grieving, the father wanted his sons to continue doing what they did best, which was perform, and this dance may have been a diversion from the tragedy they’d suffered, and possibly would help free their thoughts, however briefly, from the sadness of losing their mother.

I met Vincent Grace once at the house of an older kid who was homosexual and used to prey on younger kids like myself. Vincent was two or three years older than me, the same age as the homosexual kid. I remember him sitting in the kitchen of this house, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. He wore a black leather jacket and large framed eyeglasses. He had long sideburns. I felt like I was meeting a celebrity, and I guess he was by local standards. He had a better known older brother. But though I knew Rollo was talented, I had not yet heard about Vincent.

Vincent Grace attended a county vocational school but he was clearly destined for the stage. Vocational schools weren’t known for putting on exceptional dramas or musicals, it was enough to get students to show up and keep them on the grounds without trouble until 2:30 or 3:00 each day---but this tech school had a drama department and they had staged a production of “Bye-Bye Birdie” and Vincent starred as Conrad Birdie. He garnered rave reviews in the local newspapers. Professionally, he was a cut above the rest of the cast. He was a born entertainer. Rollo and Vincent clearly had performing in their blood.

And Vincent had something else in his blood . . . Leukemia . . .

I’m not sure if this was the cancer that had taken their mother, but there had either been a family predisposition to cancer, a genetic marker, or there was an environmental risk, or both. Much of the south and west end of Wayward on its industrial borders was a toxic waste dump. The Graces may have lived near one of these radioactive dumps (Thorium had been cited in an EPA study some 15 years later). Leukemia often struck younger people, and successful bone marrow transplants were still nearly a decade away. I can recall turning the pages of my mother’s high school yearbook, seeing a few photos of beautiful young girls in the bloom of life, with their sweaters and blouses, maybe a string of pearls, and then a line of my mother’s handwriting beneath their photos: “died, leukemia,” and the year of death. But could it have been something random, a twist of fate, that had caused a mother and her youngest teenage son to die within two years of one another?

As mentioned, the Graces were popular. There were charity drives and benefits for Vincent, but Vincent went fast. He was 16 or 17.

Then, only a short time elapsed between the death of Vincent from leukemia and the death of Mr. Grace, Rollo and Vincent’s father. I must have inquired about the cause, maybe to my best friend’s older sister (who, by that time, had abandoned the beehive hair-do for a dress style that was a hybrid of that earlier period and the emerging late 60s hippie psychedelia), maybe I had asked someone else. There weren’t any specifics, but yes, as with Vincent and Mrs. Grace, the cause of Mr. Grace’s death was also cancer. If there had been a presence of cancer cells in Mr. Grace earlier on, then assuredly the deaths of his wife and youngest son hastened metastasis, pushed him toward the final stage.

I am writing about the Graces because it is hard to grasp and understand an onslaught of so much senseless and non-accidental loss in a span of a few years in the 1960s. Having lost parents in my 40s and 50s, I can’t begin to imagine what it must have felt like to have experienced that kind of loss so early on, to imagine being an extremely well known kid and musician with a mother and a father and a brother, and by the time you are at the end of your teens, not one of them is still around, and they were all around just a few years earlier. At the point of embarking on adulthood we’re often leaving our families, heading off to college, or perhaps moving out if we can afford it, but what if your family has already left you? Who do you fall back on? How would you know, as you matured, where you even came from? How does this highly unusual spate of dying shape your sense of self and your understanding of the world, when the shadow world, the world where your family has taken up residence, has been a greater force and truth? Face it, at 19 or 20 we're still mostly kids, even if some of us were living on our own, or in the military bound for Vietnam. Having matured way too quickly, Rollo, out of school, working in a record store, was essentially an orphan. Would he ever have a wife and children of his own? Would he ever want to?

A few years later I was hanging out with my girlfriend, and a friend of hers, and her boyfriend at the boyfriend’s house. During the conversation it was somehow divulged that the boyfriend’s mother’s last name was Grace, I asked if she was related to the Graces in Wayward. She said she was, and I could see some resemblance in her face, something around the mouth and deep brown eyes. We briefly talked about her family’s tragedy, the swift deaths that had taken three-fourths of her cousin's family like a modern plague. “It was tragic, so sad,” the mother had said, but she’d had no information or theories as to why the deaths had occurred. “It was just one of those things,” she had told me.

A different friend later told me that for a couple years he had worked with Rollo at a music and record store. According to my friend, Rollo had become quiet and conservative, more reserved, serious, and mature beyond his years. He’d grown up fast obviously. He had a job, a living, possibly attended college at night, maybe was already married. There was little of the former potential rock-and-roll star, or pop music aspirant. I guess at that point you would have described Rollo’s lifestyle as “sober,” not in the main definition entry of alcohol (or sans alcohol) sense of sober, but Devoid of frivolity, excess, exaggeration, or speculative imagination; straightforward:  Marked by seriousness, gravity, or solemnity of conduct or character. Marked by circumspection and self-restraint. (Courtesy of the “Free Dictionary”).

I had recalled seeing Rollo in that record store, managing the audio section, as I was picking up LPs of King Crimson, Jethro Tull, or Derek and the Dominoes, and his behavior totally squared with my friend’s account, and I remember Rollo looked OK; he was working, functioning. But I couldn’t approach him. For one thing, he wouldn’t have known who I was, and even if he had known me, how would I have said to him, “I remember your brother. I met him once. I’m really sorry what happened to him, and I'm really sorry what happened to your parents, too. . .Why did it happen?” 

. . . but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions

Just one of those things. . .

Goodnight Irene ... Oh, Donna ... Hurricanoes

With Hurricane Irene traveling up the East coast this past weekend, I was reminded of another hurricane from September of 1960.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Donna

The elementary school was only two blocks from my house, and one morning, the worst morning of the hurricane, it was extremely dark outside and high-velocity, slant-wise rain repeatedly strafed the school windows. Our third-grade teacher was trying to put an educational spin on the impending disaster, telling us students about the "eye" of the hurricane where everything was suddenly "calm." That seemed troubling somehow. You would think the hurricane would get worse the deeper you penetrated inside it. I guess the whole trick was getting to the center, and then you would be OK.

We were dismissed from school by mid-morning and all the kids had to be picked up by their parents, even kids like me who lived two blocks away from school. I recall a stream of water overflowing the curb and washing the sidewalk, A day or two later after Donna had finally ended, I walked through the local park with other kids looking at all the uprooted trees. There were many willow trees that had fallen because willows have fairly shallow roots. I was thankful my father had removed the willow tree in our yard the previous summer because that tree would have certainly come crashing down our house.

But the most exciting thing about Hurricane Donna for an 8-year-old was the loss of electric power. My parents lit several kerosene lamps throughout the house (I wonder how many people have kerosene lamps in their homes anymore, because kerosene is highly flammable for one thing). My family ate dinner by kerosene lamp or candlelight and I went to bed early, snug under the covers with a flashlight for reading comic books. Naturally I welcomed the loss of power as an adventure, as fun, especially in the dark, while my parents and other relatives and neighbors seemed put out and bothered and inconvenienced. Now, a mere half century later, in the "Silicon Age" with our utter dependency on all things digital, the loss of electricity seems more cataclysmic than ever.

And now for a little bathos. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb9KMnzzAII

Thank you, You Tube . . . Forget Olivier, Jones and McKellan etal . . . I decided to skip them because it would be difficult to compare their stellar interpretations. I love this guy, whoever he is---more of a beer-budget Lear, a working man's Lear, than the vaulted Dom Perignon or Chateau Rothschild performances of The Masters.  It's more like "The Duke and Dauphin" characters from Huck Finn.  And I always liked the Spanish or Italian lilt of "hurricanoes" better than our current, more tin-eared "hurricanes." We continue to say "tomato" and "tomatoes," not "tomates." I say we petition linguists and usage experts everywhere to restore "hurricanoes" to its once lofty place.  But not pronounced Hurri-"canoes" as in those lightweight (but not as light as kayak) vessels we paddle. Hurry, the waters are rising, man the canoes! "Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!"

Where do the Children Play?

Routes 4 and 17 made up part of my childhood playground. There were drive-in theaters and driving ranges. There were stores but it was well before the onslaught of mall mania. Stores like Two Guys, Modells, Great Eastern Mills, Packards and Sears.

My friends and I used to explore the reeds and marshes to pick cattails along Route 4 up in north Hackensack.One of these marshes terminated at a grassy embankment behind a golf driving range. A dozen or more of the balls had been hit beyond the fence and they lay scattered at our feet, like discovered treasure. What was inside of a golf ball? We had taken apart baseballs before, peeling back the hide and stripping off the strata of woven rubber bands until you reached a small and very hard indian-rubber ball. It reminded me of pictures in the science books about the Earth: the hide was the crust, the rubber bands the mantle, the indian rubber ball, the core, but not molten like the core of our planet. But a golf ball was already small and compressed---what could it possibly be made out of?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPrBz5YiLs

As we gathered golf balls, we heard a small vehicle approach. It was a golf cart driven by a young man wearing a hard hat, and the guy stopped the cart and leapt out and began charging towards us. We were laughing hysterically, obviously for being in trouble, but on an unconscious level we were laughing at the ridiculous pose of this helmeted functionary who took golf balls and, by extension, his job so seriously.


On Route 17, at the confluence of Maywood, Rochelle Park, Lodi, we played beneath overpasses to a backdrop of highway noises, a cosmic drone that I could hear from my house a mile away. (actually that cosmic drone was the confluence of Routes 17 and 4, which I liked to call the "Belly of the Beast"). Where we played on 17 was a mixed industrial and residential area. There were the usual tires, hubcaps, shopping carriages, broken glass, newspaper and cardboard that had been jettisoned along the highway. We would find intact, seven-foot cardboard boxes that once held refrigerators. We would crawl into one of these boxes and try to flip the box over, keep it rolling. When the walls of the box finally split apart, we would tear off separate sheets and use them to slide down the grassy highway embankment---cool, sleds without snow! We'd have races to see whose sled went the farthest, and the cardboard sleds became slick with grass stains and the pressure of our weight, their undersides like a gray-green shellac that made them slide faster.

Some time around 1980 an EPA or DOE study discovered that Thorium232 had been getting dumped along this same stretch of highway for about two decades---yes, those same years that we enjoyed our cardboard box recreation, young boys frolicking in industrial waste.

For those of you who no longer remember your Periodic Table:
 
http://www.chemistryexplained.com/elements/T-Z/Thorium.html

 232 of course being a trace isotope (I read that in the link ;)

Ah Stepan Chemical, we hardly knew ye down there in South Wayward  behind all those neat Cape Cods.

http://www.em.doe.gov/bemr/bemrsites/macw.aspx

So Stepan (or Ballod) took over waste removal from Maywood Chemical Works to remove Thorium from the Lodi Brook, and what did they do? They dumped it on their property to spread along Rt. 17 and an AEC Study in 1968 said, "That's OK" So, let me see if I've gotten this right---just move the radioactive material---what, a few hundred feet? quarter mile?---and dump it on privately held, non-residential land. Wow. Sounds like The Daily Show..... Oh, that Thorium232

 
Sooooooo here is the strange black stuff we were sifting through our fingers and flinging handfuls of at one another. And I had thought it was only dust from old roofing shingles. Enough said....

"I've seen the best minds...."

For a couple of years in Portland in the mid-1970s I became fairly involved in poetry readings---both as a writer and as an audience/listener. I didn't read poetry; I mostly read fiction, or more accurately, prose. I had a few poems in the can but they weren't especially good enough to share except in a workshop or class. Most of the fiction I read was either in the form of short stories, fragments of longer stories, or brief, imagist one- or two-paragraph pieces that one of the other poets had dubbed "word pictures." The clipped pieces were closer to  prose poems (think Rimbaud on a bad day), but they were quite effective. I quickly discovered that not everything written for the printed page worked well as spoken word, and writings that were not especially publishable often seemed a better fit for live reading. I began to shape my material with readings in mind. I felt more like a stand-up comic, using and punching up stuff that worked, and discarding what didn't work, relying more on writings with potential to entertain, as opposed to being merely "literary."

The people who showed up at readings were often more interesting than the poems and fictions being read, and that is not to denigrate the poems and fictions---most of them were not by any means dull or poorly crafted. There were an assortment of characters and something vital about interacting with a community of poets and writers. These characters ran the gamut from the earnest academic to the raging bohemian. There were the local luminaries whom everyone turned out to see. There were older hacks still laboring unrecognized and under appreciated, and you sometimes wondered what would become of them, though you already knew. There were upper-bourgeois patrons and dabblers who veered toward the dramatic in their recitations. There were unrepentant hippies and beatniks. There were men and women of all ages, gay and straight, black and white, but mostly white. In the more informal settings many of us would get exceedingly drunk and there would arguments of great import about the merit of a certain piece, or more so regarding the worth or talents of a given writer. Sometimes one drunken poet would pick a fight with another. There were also readings where poets competed against one another---contests, slams. If you have ever read Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" he delineates these times and passions eloquently and in surgical detail, though he was dealing with Latin America and Spain, and not the U.S.

I recall one reading where I had tried out a new story that I thought was my best effort at the ripe old age of 23. The room was mostly dark and wrapped in a curtain of smoke, and I couldn't really make out any faces in an audience of 20-30 people. But at one point the room fell silent, and I had paused at a section break in my story, when I heard a female voice shout: "What a good story!" And that was enough for me. It felt like I had just done a jazz riff. I finished the story and everyone politely clapped, but I cannot describe the adrenalin surge I received from that single outburst, how in that instant everything I had done in my life with the written word was validated and affirmed. I had similar reactions reading another work.

A few months later I would tape two reading segments of 30 minutes each for the local public alternative radio station. In the second show I also included another writer. Although radio helped me reach a wider audience and gain a little notoriety, my heart wasn't in it at first. At that time I was intimidated by recording equipment, and I missed the improvising one had gotten through reading or performing live. But my radio show had started a trend: the station, having done strictly music or talk until then, was enthusiastic and soon other writers and poets were reading or recording on this station; some sharing their own work, and others reading stories or poems of mostly famous writers.

It was a time in my life I am happy and grateful to have experienced. These days you can also read your work on You Tube, and that seems fine too. I'll close this post on a personal favorite You Tube reading.

tThe Laughing Heart

Honey, I'm Home - Mix Me a Martini

Is having a bar in the home a thing of the past? Growing up I remember a lot of people had bars in their homes. It was the "Mad Men" era and drinking excessively to the point of inebriation wasn't really frowned upon during that time. So maybe Don Draper and Roger Sterling drank a little too much---an occupational hazard---but the culture of out-of-control drinking was a reality, if not a pose leading to sexually promiscuous behavior. 


Most of the family bars were located in finished basements---a kind of swinging party room with a felt turn table record player, a little floor space for dancing, and plastic guitars and saxophones tacked to the painted cinder block walls or murky paneling. We had an unfinished basement in my house, so the bar, an upright, heavily lacquered wood model, was situated in a corner of the den. The den was paneled in knotty pine, with a big color TV, two faux leather recliner chairs, a fish tank and a gun rack. 


When my father worked graveyard shift at the paper mill, he would often arrive home at about 7:30 or 8:00, and as I watched Captain Kangaroo and dressed for school, he would stand at this bar in the den and mix himself a Manhattan, or maybe Scotch on the rocks (J.B. or Dewars). It felt a little strange to see him drinking so early in the day, but I realized it was the end of his day and he needed to unwind. After a few drinks, and a few Marlboro cigarettes, my father would sit down to eat a hybrid breakfast-dinner of steak and eggs, and then head off to bed where hopefully he'd be able to sleep undisturbed until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. But at any time of the day, this bar was always a presence. My father would pour himself drinks at the bar every evening, and on holidays he and his brothers would stand at the bar and consume ridiculous amounts of alcohol, so that by the time everyone else sat down to enjoy the holiday meal, my father and uncles would stagger to the dinner table, and often manage to quickly insult someone, usually my grandmother, their mother. 


The green bottles and brown bottles and clear bottles, the big red "7" on the Seagrams bottle, the clink of glass or ice tumbling into a glass, the shicka-shicka-shicka of a chrome shaker. There was an ice bucket. Scotch, bourbon, blended whiskey, gin, later vodka. There was always beer from the fridge in pilsner glasses. Martinis, Old Fashions, and Whiskey Sours, Screwdrivers---yes, the bar was a busy place, a place to make drinks, pour drinks, and enjoy the mildly pleasant chemistry of it.  And yet a simple glass of Scotch or a Shaeffers with a whiskey chaser was usually the drink of choice . . . and as time passed and the bar looked weathered and cheap from countless spills, there would be more Vodka included, because Vodka was easier to hide.


Years later, after my father had quit drinking alcohol and joined A.A., he may have kept the bar around for a short time, possibly for entertaining guests, possibly as a test of will power, the amber and green bottles like sirens to his Odysseus lashed to the spar. Although I no longer lived at home, I do recall at one point the bar was gone, because my mother didn't drink, and most of the guests they were entertaining were also affiliated with A.A., and it didn't seem to make sense to leave the bar standing unused. Within a few more years the habit of drinking, and especially the habit of drinking too much,  would undergo serious examination, forcing new laws and changes in our behavior: D.U.I. , blood alcohol limits, M.A.D.D. and the designated driver program would raise public awareness about alcohol abuse. I don't need to wonder where all those old, tacky bars ended up.

Age of Unreason

The ambulance would often come in the mid to late afternoon, rarely after dark. Mrs. Frick again. It took little more than a phone call from her husband, or possibly a neighbor, to summon the medics and the ambulance. Usually, but not always, there would be some prior episode: a radio blaring so loud you heard it a block away, (and it was still loud a block away) accompanied by a middle-aged woman's ear-splitting shrieks as she sang along with one of her favorite songs on the radio; or blood curdling domestic battles, and then the ambulance, the opened rear doors, the gurney, the strait jacket. Mrs. Frick wasn't removed from her house immediately. I imagined the two men in white uniforms first needed to restrain and sedate her, and soon everything would become quiet again, that serene suburban quiet which thinly masked the menace, disillusionment, alienation, insanity, alcoholism, domestic violence and a plethora of family skeletons from street to street. In the quiet the ambulance lights continued to whirl, and eventually the men in white would carry out Mrs. Frick strapped down on the gurney so that you could barely make out her face, she may have already been unconscious. Then the siren would wail momentarily as the ambulance sped away, and you knew, even as a kid, that Mrs. Frick was being taken to a bad place.


We seem to be far from the days when husbands locked their wives up in mental institutions or had them lobotomized. Due to the rise of feminism and the mental health de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s, and largely the pharmacology revolution of the late '80s and '90s that introduced SSRI's, the scene just described is something you will likely never see again. It is not just a sad story in American history; it's a sad story in human history. Mrs. Frick was not an isolated example, though she was one of the worst I'd seen. But there were a number of mothers and housewives across Wayward who'd either been forcibly removed from their families to the nearest mental hospital, or were taking tranquilizers or another prescribed sedative, occasionally chased with alcohol, and were trapped in a solemn, soap-opera Daytime-TV Hell. A hit song in 1966 was the Rolling Stones "Mother's Little Helper" which seemed more about amphetamines but was still an effect of the same tortured experience.

During periods when Mrs. Frick hadn't been locked up and was allowed to stay home, she would sometimes cross the street to Nick's house where a group of us would be standing around and smoking cigarettes. Mrs. Frick was a chain smoker, inclined to run out of cigarettes. She would then come and visit us in front of Nick's house to cadge cigarettes. In the space of ten minutes Mrs. Frick would manage to smoke several cigarettes and between us we would donate another 10 or 15 for her to take back home. She was a frightening figure: steel wool hair wild and frizzled; complexion a sepia-ash with darker macules on her arms, wrists and hands, presumably those locations where syringes and IVs had pinched and plunged; her hazel eyes clouded over, enthralled by some distant inner visions, never looking directly at you or even at an object close by. But Mrs. Frick did talk to us, and though at first we were a bit wary of her because her conversation was disjointed and nonsensical, she would somehow manage to utter a few weird but uncannily relevant sentences that would make all of us laugh and the tension would ease up. She was trying to win us over; we had cigarettes after all. What had been done to her wasn't entirely her fault, but you still feared that she might somehow turn violent at the slightest word or action. It was her unpredictability that was most unsettling.

By the early '70s the Frick's house had been sold. The gossip at the time circulated around Mrs. Frick having been put away for good and possibly dead, which, to society, didn't make much difference.  The two children were adults and out of the house, and the husband was off to some privileged bachelor life . . . somewhere. But no one really knew for sure.

Living the Dream

I've been thinking quite a lot about retirement lately. The idea, as hinted at in the previous post, was once you were settled with a single company, you would accrue all the pay and benefits possible, and be vested, and at the end of your service you would retire with a nice fat pension. I had been hoping for something like that when I had taken a permanent full-time position with a pharmaceutical company in the late '80s . My wife and I had a child and we had bought a house. And two years later I was laid off. The game had changed and the rug was yanked out from under my feet.

The following incident occurred on the Sunday morning after Christmas in 1970. I was 18 years old and heading to the bus stop to catch the next bus into New York and meet my 16-year-old girlfriend who lived in The Bronx. It was about 8:00 in the morning and the streets of the town were empty. I walked past Mr. Dahl's house as he was stepping out his front door. He vaguely knew who I was, but he liked to talk and he must have decided that I would be his captive audience. Mr. Dahl was one of those men of the old school, who didn't leave the house without wearing a gray jacket, a vest and a tie, and a homburg, and who spoke in a breezy jazz-age language, replete with double entendre, that was sometimes difficult for a young 60s kid to decipher. But I liked Mr. Dahl, and even though I wanted to catch my bus, I lingered and listened to him talk, occasionally nodding my head, or asking him a question. It wasn't really a conversation; it was more about my bearing witness to his verbal stream-of-consciousness. Eventually the conversation veered to the subject of retirement, an idea or stage of life that, at 18, I knew little of. Mr. Dahl had worked for one company (insurance or finance) his entire life, and he'd retired from the company when his time had come. He had looked forward to retirement for years so he could be with his wife all the time. And then, without warning, Mr. Dahl started to tear up. As it turned out, his wife had died within the first year of his retirement and he'd been alone ever since. "Jesus," he said, "You work so hard, and the one thing you hope for most, to be with your loved one, is taken from you. It's not fair," he said, and then he began to cry. And I had no idea what to say, other than "I'm sorry." I saw a man's life story cling to this one theme. Our talk had hit hit a dead end. Mr. Dahl needlessly apologized. He was OK, and I soon left to catch the next bus.

My girlfriend was unhappy when I showed up late, but I had felt that my lateness was excusable. Mr. Dahl was old and lonely (it was the Christmas holidays after all) to the point where he felt the need to unpack his tired heart to an 18-year-old kid, to anyone frankly who'd been walking past his house and had the time to hear his story. And I had grown a little in that half-hour pause---the future would likely not be what you imagined it to be, and my life has borne that out. Even so, we cannot help ourselves from envisioning a happy and easy ending from a present vantage. It doesn't hurt to dream, but maybe we should keep a healthy grain of salt on hand and embrace the unexpected.

Missed Opportunities (or were they?)

For a long time there was only one telephone company---Bell Telephone---and to land a job with them was akin to striking the mother-lode.

I applied for a job with Bell-Tel some time in late 1976 after returning from a month-and-a-half of picking fruit in Hood River Oregon and Yakima Washington, and I recall that omnipresent logo -- on the building, in the lobby, on the stationery, and in the indoctrination film I was forced to watch. At the end of a brief interview, the job boiled down to this: You would have to work as a phone operator for for your first two years with the company (not great, but OK), and phone operators were required to work all shifts, seven days a week, including holidays (you mean I might have to work Christmas? Or 4th of July? Or Thanksgiving?) Yes, you may have to work those holidays, but you will be paid double your hourly wage.

So I declined employment with Bell-Tel because I really wasn't mature enough at the age of 24 to make a serious lifestyle change. Eventually I would come to see the wisdom of working long hours, of sacrificing time for money, and of saving while you were young---but by then I was no longer young. In the absence of any one profession in which to grow and have a "career," it made sense to work 60- or 70-hour weeks while you were able to, and earn time-and-a-half, or double-time pay, pay which you had no opportunity or chance to spend. But hey, I thought I could always try again with Bell-Tel and other large U.S. companies (IBM, GM, GE, etc.), and once you managed to get your foot in the door, you would be set for life . . . and we all know how that turned out . . . I had similar delusions when I'd begun working for a large pharmaceutical firm in the '80s.

I had another offer to make lots of money when I was living again in north Jersey a few years later. The job was with a printing firm, and again it meant working seven days a week in pre-press, stripping negatives and making plates with lots of overtime as the dangling carrot, but even by my late 20's I still wasn't interested in sacrificing all that time. And I already had a 40-hour week job as an editor, and while the editor only paid a fraction of what the printing gig would have paid, I was pretty much doing what I enjoyed and didn't want to give that up. But I do wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I'd had the maturity and discipline to have taken one of those jobs. For instance, I might have settled down earlier---married, bought a house, had kids earlier. I would have had some material success at a younger age, but then Bell-Tel was broken up, and the printing company folded, and the printing industry overall declined and was not the field to be employed in, and the skills I would have picked up in either company would not have been marketable, would have been pretty much useless, like the typesetting and copy editing skills I had which kept me employed through much of the 80's. So who really knows, things might have turned out roughly the same either way, and by not opting to work all those free hours in my 20's, I at least had more of my 20's to enjoy.

Freeway Cars and Trucks

In late 1978 I was out of a job again after the CETA-funded program I'd been working on ran out of funding. At that time, being 26, and having picked up career skills that I thought might allow me to work in magazine publishing, I no longer embraced the idea of being unemployed. Two or three years earlier I would have found some marginal way of supporting myself, like doing yard work, or picking fruit in the Hood River Valley, or selling flowers on the streets of downtown Portland, but those options no longer seemed viable. I had changed.

While looking for a new job on a magazine or local newspaper, I registered with Manpower. Everyone's heard of Manpower, and I figured I might be contacted for a temporary assignment so I'd have some cash coming in. And Manpower did contact me! I was to work a three-day job, from 6:00AM to 9:00AM each day, and I would use my own car. I was supposed to park at a designated lookout point on I-80 North and count traffic.

What were they thinking?

I was provided with two clickers, a pad and a couple pencils.  The clickers had a crude plastic tumbler that counted off a number every time you pressed a metal tab with your thumb. Because I was right-handed, the clicker in my left hand was for counting trucks, and the clicker in my right hand was for cars. From the top of the hour you worked a 15-minute interval and then stopped for 5 minutes, and then at 20 past the hour you started again for another 15 minutes, so that you ended up with 3 counting sessions per hour with 3 breaks of 5 minutes each. At the beginning of your break, you were supposed to write down the numbers from your clickers on to the pad and then reset the counters. The purpose was to monitor traffic volume because a hospital was situated close to the highway and the EPA believed there may have been a pollution risk to the patients. In 1978, late 1978,  it was hard to imagine that there wasn't equipment to count traffic---you know, those leaden boxes that the Highway and Safety Department leaves on the shoulder of the road. And I believe the equipment was available, but maybe it had malfunctioned and the people running the study couldn't get a replacement soon enough. They needed a human car counter, and so they called me.

Traffic was light and easy to record between 6:00 AM and 7:00 AM, mostly trucks at that hour. But between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM I was clicking away like a fool, a perverse and frenetic Morse code. At first I tried to be honest with the numbers, but, hmm... no one was watching me, and I quickly learned that I could extend my 5-minute breaks by averaging how many cars/trucks passed in a minute and then accounting for the half hour in which that minute occurred. It was a little tricky because during the first half hour (6:00 - 6:30) more trucks than cars were counted, but in the final half hour, cars outnumbered trucks approximately 12:1.

The best part of this easy but absurdly demeaning work was that I was treated to watching the sunrise every morning for three days in a row. It was still dark when I arrived at my post to count cars, but in the next couple hours I would study the world as it gradually filled with light, observe the nearly imperceptible changes of shades in twilight, the creeping certainty of dawn and the miracle of each daybreak. What more could one ask for than to witness the beginning of each day? I would bring a thermos of tea or buy coffee. On my 5-minute breaks I'd drink the tea or coffee and read "The Magic Mountain" which usually prolonged the breaks by a few minutes and I'd have to compensate as mentioned for the missed cars and trucks.

And by the time I finished each day, I had already done a little work, gotten a little money, and I still had the whole day ahead of me. When Manpower gave me my next assignment---a dreary bank job downtown checking stacks of computer printouts for a programming bug and numerical errata---I asked them if they still needed anyone to count cars . . . and trucks . . .

Bicycle Inspection

It was always the Monday or Tuesday following Easter. You had to ride your bicycle to the nearest school and have it inspected by the police, and then you had to take a short riding test, and if you passed the police would affix a tin license plate around the steering column of your bicycle.


I cannot specifically recall when kids were no longer required to have an annual bicycle inspection, but I'm pretty certain this ritual faded out sometime in the mid-to-late 60s if not sooner.

It may have disappeared, like other civic duties of the time, from a lack of cooperation from families and/or the bureaucratic strain. When I was growing up a number of these organized civic activities existed, and town residents, families, were expected to comply, mostly for reasons of public health and safety. I suspect this model of civic responsibility was largely left over from World War II and the first decade of the Cold War. The great polio vaccine was one of these activities, and on a lesser scale the fire house held dog and cat vaccinations for rabies, and there were collective safety programs, and the aforementioned bicycle inspections. At school we all watched astronauts fly into space, and we were also indoctrinated about The Enemy. We had all learned early on that Communism was The Enemy and Khrushchev was The Enemy and that Communists didn't believe in God or Freedom. But mostly we wanted to play our 45s, or listen to transistor radios, or watch Soupy Sales on TV.

One bicycle inspection year I had to stand before the police lieutenant for an oral quiz. I must have been eight or nine years old. The lieutenant was a tall, large and menacing crew cut figure with sharp eyes and a gun and bullets and badges and all kinds of medals and metal clinking and jingling on his starched uniform. The ultimate authority figure. The only equally frightening authority figure was the school principal. Anyway, I had taken the road test---a quick execution around a painted figure-8---and then the brake test, which was to pedal fast and then stop on a dime. (It is worth noting that back then no one wore helmets for bicycles or motorcycles). I was terrified of the police lieutenant, and as I was seated on my bike, he crouched down and asked: "How many can you ride on a bicycle at one time?" I sensed a trick question, but didn't know the right answer. After all, I often rode with two, or even three kids on a bicycle, and while I suspected it was wrong, riding this way didn't strike me as an evil or criminal act. So I took a safe guess and answered "two" which certainly seemed innocuous compared with "three" or "four"

The lieutenant's face turned to stone. "One!" he thundered. "Never, never ride a bicycle with more than one person! Riding double is against the law! And you can get killed or get someone else killed! Do you want that to happen? Do you understand? Now . . . " and the lieutenant asked me the question once more, and the second time I got it right..

Good Friday, Good Fireday

"Let's burn the evidence. . ."

Good Friday, April 12, 1963. A mixed sun-and-cloud day, very windy with flashes of light and shadow, where you felt warm in your jacket one moment and chilly the next. I was standing in a 10-acre field with John Lane and his younger brother. The field separated a residential section from a highway and the shopping mall. John and I were almost 11, playing one of our kid adventures with John's nine-year-old younger brother. We had packed lunches of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and cookies.

When we had  finished our sack lunches, John produced a book of matches and said, "Let's burn the evidence." We crumpled the paper bags and tried to light them. Because it was windy, it took several matches to get the paper bags to catch and they did eventually. Our plan was to burn the bags and then crush them out by stomping on them. It seemed like a good idea . . .

But it didn't work.

Because it was pretty dry for an April day and very windy and new brush hadn't yet sprouted in the field, so the field was mostly made up of the dry brittle grasses that had died in winter. A few flames caught these grasses and they leaped onto other grasses---it was incredible how fast it happened, and we continued to try stomping on the flames, but the flames grew larger and kept spreading.

I wrote about this day many years later, and it was a fairly accurate impression of the trauma. . .

Like some mutation grafted onto itself, the fire grew, a long serpent spine of flame crackling over the brittle grasses. It devoured the remaining dead wood and stalks and seed pods anticipating spring warmth. It was a huge hot whisper, an arid bellows. It rolled a swath through the meadow and headed for the woods, flakes of ash eddying in the coils of smoke. We ran. Fire reached the picket fence, lapping into the wood, crawling up the slats until sections collapsed in rectangles of hectic flames. It streamed towards the backyards and houses beyond the fence, a charred crunching fanning out with violent bursts of orange, green and yellow, blooms of thick black smoke choking off the day. Where were the firemen? Hadn’t anyone called yet? We had to escaped and ran, and took refuge in a woods nearly a mile from the scene. We finally heard the alarms and knew they were meant for us. In the woods we prayed for forgiveness. The fire would find us, its creators, and destroy us. We would burn to death as punishment for what we had done, or at the least be caught and sent to jail. It was Good Friday, a dark day, the darkest day in the Christian calendar, and we had done a terrible thing and God was punishing us. We saw Him in the changeable April sky, and his accusing presence filled us with terror and guilt. He judged us in a loud, condemning voice: YOU HAVE PLAYED WITH FIRE AND LOOK AT THE EVIL YOU HAVE DONE! YOU ARE TRULY SONS OF THE DEVIL AND I WILL PUNISH YOU!

In the woods we prayed. We cowered and shook and our hearts were pounding and there were knots in our throats. What if someone accidentally died in the fire? And why had this crime become enlarged by it being Good Friday? We should have never gone out in the first place. Some of the Catholic kids that we knew had not been allowed out of their houses after Mass; their parents were making them stay in and fast and pray for the entire afternoon (lucky for them!) And instead of acknowledging Jesus Christ's death on the cross, we were destroying property, acres of it. Even if our crime was unintentional, and even if we weren't going to be caught (perhaps no one had seen us, and the three of us made a pact never to confess or tell anyone) we would never escape the judgment of God. He had watched us burn down that field.

We hid in the woods until late afternoon, and then decided to risk heading back to our homes and facing whatever awaited us. I split off from John Lane and his younger brother, and as I approached within two blocks of my house I saw some neighborhood kids standing on the corner and talking. The kids had just gotten back from watching this fire over in the fields. Their talk was animated as they described the many fire trucks and firemen who fought the blaze. The fire had consumed the entire field, and had taken considerable time to get under control because of the wind, and of course it had drawn a crowd. I asked if anyone had seen who started the fire, but no one had been seen. The kids asked me where I'd been. Still amazed at my luck, I told them I'd been playing in the woods all afternoon. I felt extremely relieved and grateful that no one had been hurt (I'd imagined horrors much worse), but I was also shocked by these kids. They had been entertained by the fire, they had enjoyed watching this conflagration a few blocks from their home, and I realized I would have felt that way too had I been with them and ignorant about fire, but I would never feel that way again; fire would never be something separate from me, would never be a voyeuristic carnival of disaster, but something to be feared and respected. I knew I wouldn't sleep later. I was sick with fear and guilt, and the whole day for me had been a sad tragedy, which in the Christian calendar it was. Thank God no one had been hurt, but I still was accountable and so were my friends. We were pyromaniacs. We had caused unnecessary human peril.. If caught I would certainly face juvenile court and sentencing.  


The field was also the locus for a half dozen other stories, a few of which may follow later in this blog. But some time in the 1970s the big field was turned into yet another mall as rampant development and mercantilism blanketed much of the county, destroying the scant open land that remained, concrete spreading like . . . like . . . an out of control fire.
 

 

pre-digital

In the mid 1970s I was living in a large house in Portland Oregon with a group of friends. Five or six of us lived there permanently, but at any time there were as many as 10 people crashing on the couch, or porch, or in the attic, and there were other friends who had their own places but came over to hang out with us. This was near the dawning of the digital age and mass electronic consumption, but at this point in time no one had ever even heard of a PC. There was no cable internet, satellite TV, iPods, iPhones, cell phones, Xbox-64, Blackberries, Pay Per View, TiVo, On Demand, DVD Players, Flash Drives, BlueRay, Netflix.... We had 1 TV set in the entire house, and a couple stereos that played vinyl of course. It all sounds so quaint 35 years later, but we listened to radio and albums at night around the fireplace. We had a ping-pong table that we used religiously, and every couple weeks on Saturday night the ping-pong table would be converted to a poker table. On summer evenings we often played volleyball and drank beer . . . or we played music on the front porch and drank beer . . . or we drank beer . . .

The TV set belonged to my friend Mark and was located in his bedroom instead of a shared communal location, which was actually preferable.to some of us literary anti-vidiots and emerging Luddites. Mark liked to watch TV until late at night and he didn't mind other people stopping in to watch a show as long as he wasn't sleeping. I usually skipped viewing on weeknights but occasionally I may have been visiting, or eating a late dinner and confess to watching -- yes -- "Welcome Back Kotter" or later in the evening, "The Rockford Files" or "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" but I usually didn't stick around for more than an hour or so.

But weekends were something else, more of a social event.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7S_XWuKpHc

On Saturday night we would watch "Saturday Night Live," which was only in its second season at the time, and felt like revolutionary television. A group of us would gather in Mark's room sitting on extra chairs or the foot of his bed, drinking 3.2 beer (Olympia, Bohemian -- no one touched Rainier), smoking cigarettes or maybe a joint or two if someone had pot. In this same year, we saw an episode in which Paul Simon hosted and his guest was George Harrison. Simon and Harrison played some of their songs as a duet and that was quite wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P88kd3coahE&feature=related

And it's interesting that the first clip above with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin is discussing nuclear power plants in light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and how these events have mandated the U.S nuclear power industry reexamine the safety of its earlier power plants.

Funny, that point-counterpoint parody was actually a segment that appeared at the end of "60 Minutes" with the liberal, Shana Alexander, and the conservative, James Kirkpatrick. On Sunday nights, after we had ordered pizza or picked up Chinese food, my friends and I would sit in Mark's room again and often watch "60 Minutes" Afterwards we'd usually go for a long walk, or work in the vegetable garden, and then later on, at 9:00 we'd settle down again in the TV room to watch "Masterpiece Theater" usually "Upstairs-Downstairs"  I may not have watched any other shows with my friends for the rest of the week, but Saturday and Sunday nights in 1976 and early 1977 had become something of a ritual.

During this "Dark Ages" I recall a conversation with a friend in which I had said that we shouldn't be at the mercy of network programming---what they made us watch---and that in the future you would simply be able to choose and order the movies or programs you wanted to see on television at any time. It was hardly a brilliant prediction: Early cable service was in the offing and thousands, maybe millions of folks were already sharing my wish. But the fact that the choices were so confined and narrow unintentionally led most of us to some positive, non-isolated moments worth mentioning here.

Unwitting Runners

It's an odd segue from the Rands into this next post.

In the 8th and 9th grades I used to hang out with my friends at the local mall, smoking cigarettes, swearing, and being a general public nuisance. We were punks.

There was a dry cleaners in one corner of the mall where we could gather and smoke free of adult reprobation. A woman named Miriam managed the store and she had a part-time helper, a 20-year-old college student named Kate. Kate was an additional reason to hang out there, just like these pressed suits and shirts are hanging. You could bum cigarettes off of Kate. She always kept a pack of Marlboros by the register.

I'm not sure why Miriam and Kate tolerated a gang of teenage boys. We smoked and pushed and slapped each other, and briefly we pitched pennies in front of the store, which the ladies put an end to, and often when a customer entered the store we were asked politely to leave. I guess when there weren't any customers, Miriam and Kate were bored so our presence might have provided some diversion until they lost patience and we moved on.

One day Mrs. Rand entered the store to drop off some dry cleaning. She didn't recognize me, and I doubted she would have recognized me, or at the least she didn't acknowledge me, which was different than seeing her next door. Miriam waited on Mrs. Rand and after Mrs. Rand had left, I asked Miriam if she knew Mrs. Rand.

"A very nice woman," Miriam said.

"Nice?" I proceeded to run down a list of what I perceived had been Mrs. Rand's atrocities, including the story of the baseball and other scoldings, and the general coldness for a neighbor. Miriam seemed unfazed.

"Well, I only know her as a regular customer," she said. "and she has always been extremely polite and generous, and we talk and we're on friendly terms."

Miriam's husband, Francis, sometimes visited. He was a fastidiously dressed dapper man with a pencil thin mustache, not unlike Mrs. Rand's husband. Miriam's husband Francis wore homburgs and drove an elegant car and for some reason he enjoyed seeing me and my friends maybe because they didn't have children of their own. Miriam would suggest that we sit in the car with Francis, and after chatting a few minutes, Francis would say, "I have an errand for you boys." "Sure" "You know Johnny D'Amato at the bowling alley?" "Sure," we would say. At the opposite end of the mall was a bowling alley and pool hall and Johnny was manager. We would often clean lanes and score sheets for him, and empty ashtrays, and Johnny would let us play some games of pool even though we were underage. Francis took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote some numbers down on the slip of paper. "Here," he said "when you head over to the bowling alley, give this to Johnny." "Sure," my friends and I said, "we'll go right away." and I think Francis may have said something about us being good kids but it wasn't particularly relevant.

Johnny D'Amato seemed a little annoyed when we entered the bowling alley. Apparently someone was there to investigate underage kids in the billiards room.  In fact, you weren't supposed to be in the billiard room watching older guys play (and I should add these players were almost right out of "The Hustler"). So playing pool was out for the moment, but when we handed Johnny the paper from Francis his face lit up and he pretended that we knew what the paper was all about even though we didn't. Then, before he stepped away, he told us we could have a free game of bowling.

So the punks were running numbers, or we were perhaps one link in the chain. Perhaps Johnny was going to bring the slip of paper somewhere else or make a phone call. This was the mid-sixties, and even though the numbers game was a fairly innocuous activity, it was still managed by organized crime. There was no legalized gambling in the United States except in Las Vegas, and state-run lotteries were still a few years away. It almost seems quaint from this vantage think of picking daily numbers as being illegal, but then 30-40 years earlier drinking alcohol was illegal throughout the nation, and there are still vestiges of those laws today in dry towns and dry counties.

Francis was older and a nice man and Miriam's husband. We were just saving him a little leg work. No one seemed to mind.

Some Kind of Neighbors

The Rands were our closest neighbors -- closest physically. The house I grew up in was separated from their house by a 10-foot-wide walkway divided by a privacy fence. We rarely saw the Rands and never spoke with them. Mr. Rand was almost non-existent. I think he drove a Lincoln Continental and was impeccably dressed in well-tailored suits. Mrs. Rand wore elegant dresses and jewelry as if she were an advertisement for Saks. There was a single child, a daughter, who was considerably older than me. Early on, I'd seen a school bus drop her off from Catholic school, filled with girls in white blouses and pleated blue-gray plaid skirts. Then the daughter must have gone away to college because I didn't see the school bus anymore. Mrs. Rand was the only one that seemed to live in the house most of the time.

On the other side of the Rand's house was a field where my friends and I would play baseball. Like most kids aged 7-10, we shouted and made noise, and occasionally the ball would roll onto Mrs. Rand's lawn and one of us would have to retrieve it. Her house had an enclosed patio, and one time someone hit a ground ball hard and fast, and the ball smacked the aluminum siding of this enclosed patio. I ran to fetch the ball and as I neared the patio, Mrs. Rand stepped out and glared at me. She was likely in her 40s, and austere looking, with a considerable amount of makeup. I was terrified of her. She didn't say a word, but still glaring at me, she picked up the ball and carried it inside her house. End of game. Some of the kids hollered at Mrs. Rand once she was inside. We considered getting another ball but also decided on playing somewhere else.

The Rand house was quiet and dark nearly all the time. However, on a few summer nights, when the windows were open and I could see the pale bluish light from their black-and-white television, I heard some ugly fights between Mrs. Rand and her daughter. I assumed the daughter was home from college but I didn't see her around that often . . . A raging battle with vicious arguing and screaming about things I didn't understand. Tears, brittle objects being thrown, crashing. No one argued in my family, and though there were verbally and physically abusive parents in my neighborhood, the recipients of that abuse were often my friends or other kids my age who were too young and small to talk back to their parents. This was different. The daughter was lashing out at her mother with greater vehemence and anger than the other way around, and she seemed so unhappy. I also felt that, no matter how wicked Mrs. Rand may have appeared by taking our baseball, she didn't deserve that much hatred from her child.

I could not understand the Rand family. The didn't even seem like a family, not in the conventional sense that I was used to, like other families in my neighborhood with Mom and Dad and kids, and maybe a grandparent or two. Even if some of your neighbors weren't particularly social, they still waved in greeting to you, and most of them could manage a smile. But not the Rands. My parents tried explaining to me that the Rands had likely been city dwellers previously and did not necessarily interact with their neighbors because some city neighborhoods were more anonymous and impersonal, which paradoxically soon became true of most second-generation suburbs where the homes were more spread out. It seemed as though my block and neighborhood, and the larger part of Wayward, was typical of the working class city or factory town neighborhoods, once removed, where you did interact with your neighbors because almost everyone was doing the same thing: the men went off to work each day at the mill, or factory, or defense plant; the kids walked to school and played in the park after school; the mothers were home and often talking with one another. Today that would be called the same demographic. But the Rands were more in step with the future, because few, if any neighborhoods are as homogeneous anymore as mine was in the 50s and 60s. Most neighborhoods these days are more diverse, and your neighbors may be of an entirely different profession and leading an entirely lifestyle than you.

The Rands moved when I was almost out of high school. I think Mrs. Rand may have moved back to the city. It wasn't clear if her husband or daughter were in the picture anymore. By then a new house had been built on the empty lot or field where we had tried playing baseball. The new family that moved in couldn't have been more different from the Rands: Proles with five kids and a loudmouthed grandma who was always shouting and swearing at the kids. I soon missed all the years it had been mostly quiet on that side of my house where my bedroom was, and I began to think maybe the Rands had not been so bad as neighbors after all, because they kept to themselves and you hardly knew they were there . . . Be careful what you wish for . . .