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 . . .

Picture of Club Soda

Club Soda

In third grade I often played after school with Paul Greenberg. Paul was a bright, advanced student with a gifted imagination so we invented interesting games and play scenarios. For instance, Paul had crafted a small effigy of Adolf Eichmann out of rubber or putty (at that time Eichmann was on trial in Israel for war crimes). We hung the effigy from a gallows that Paul had built from cheap wood and the hangman's noose was made of wire. We weren't waiting for judgment to be passed on that monster, we decided to take justice into our own hands, a kind of Wild West justice. Once in the noose, the larger weight of Eichmann's putty body slowly pulled away from his faceless head, stretching the neck to a fine thread until it ultimately slipped off with the rest of the body and just the head remained swinging in the noose -- a gray, gooey pellet.  We watched the hanging process with glee . . . Anyway, that just gives you some idea. Paul and I also acted out skits where we were being chased by other monsters, of the Universal Studios variety, or perhaps Russian spies (it was the Cold War era after all). We snapped make-believe pictures of passersby who may have been potential spies or enemies. We held small flat stones up to our faces and pretended they were cameras. "Click! Click!"

Paul's father owned a liquor store in town. His father was an older man, somewhere in his mid- to late 50s, which seemed old in the early 60s. Mr. Greenberg had been friends with my grandfather before my grandfather had passed.

There was a storage room behind the liquor store lined with cartons of bottles, mostly beer and wine, some hard liquor and a few boxes contained soda of the mixer kind like club or ginger ale. Paul liked to play in the storage room (we made robots out of the empty boxes) but his father didn't like the idea of us playing back there, and they would argue about it, but eventually his father would relent and leave us alone.

The liquor store adjoined a luncheonette and a door connected the two businesses as a convenience to patrons of both. One Saturday afternoon Paul and I ate burgers at the luncheonette and then bought some comic books that we carried with us to the back of the liquor store. Paul had wanted me to try club soda, which I'd never tasted before. He pulled two club sodas out of a carton and we then climbed up onto some boxes with our club sodas and comic books. This was real cool, something different. We were maybe 10 or 15 feet off the ground and it was like a fort among the boxes, an elevated redoubt. Paul raved about club soda, maybe because he felt the beverage was more "grown up." I don't know, but I tried the club soda and didn't much care for it -- it had no taste.


So, as we were reading our comic books and drinking our club sodas, Paul accidentally knocked his bottle over and it fell to the cement floor and shattered into many pieces . . .

"Damn!" Paul said. He knew that if his father had heard the noise and entered the storage room there would be hell to pay. Instead, he decided he would clean the mess up himself, so he climbed down from the boxes and began to search the storage area for a broom to sweep up the glass. There usually was a broom back here, but not today. Overcome with guilt, I was worried that I should get down, that we were doing something wrong, but Paul assured me and said to stay where I was, he would take care of things. He finally gave up locating a broom and realized he would have to face the music and get his father. Before I even saw his father, I heard yelling, and soon Paul's father was in the storage room having a fit about the broken glass, and reprimanding Paul, and pretty much bemoaning the whole ridiculous idea of allowing us to play back here to begin with. And then came the last straw: Paul's father looked up at me sitting on top of the stack of  boxes. "Get down from there!" he hollered.  "Get out of here! Go play somewhere else" he hollered at both of us.

From that day onward, Paul and I played at his house, or in the park, or sometimes we played up at the stores or even in alleyways behind the stores, but we never ventured into his father's liquor store again. And it would be years before I ever drank another club soda.

The Kids Are Not Alright

Although my town of Wayward wasn't too far from New York City, throughout most of the 60s it looked like many main streets in small towns across the country. After dances, or on Friday nights in general, numerous groups of kids hung out on the main street, either in the soda shops or at the pizzeria, or milled up and down the street or maybe cruised with older kids who had cars. Many of these cars were GTOs, Camaros---suped-up vehicles that were loud and sometimes raised way up with big tires that screeched when the driver "peeled rubber." It was all very typical, but by late 60s things had begun to change, and by 1970, when the scene I'm about to describe took place, things had definitely changed.

Suddenly there were a lot more VW buses, MGs and motorcycles and less, if any, candy-striped or chrome engine fast cars. Tough guy or clean cut looks had been replaced by long hair, beards, Fu-Manchu mustaches, bell bottom jeans, beads and peace medals, denim or fleece jackets and tie-dyed shirts. Clusters of kids hung out in each others VW buses, and in this scene, April 30, 1970, radios were turned on and the voice of Richard M. Nixon was coming across loud and clear, also for the benefit of kids standing on the sidewalk or in store entrance ways. In his speech on the Vietnam War, Nixon announced that he would immediately begin bombing Cambodia as a way to "bring peace" and soon end the conflict in Vietnam. Although the number of troops committed had been decreasing, Nixon's message sounded more like an escalation and moreover an indiscriminate bombing of civilians, of innocent people. Few of my generation back then were buying into the Cold War Red Menace, or The Domino Theory, that seemed to have had our parents, the generation of World War II, firm in its paranoid grip.

Before Nixon's speech had even ended, many kids on the street began to protest, to riot, to shout and raise hell, to curse and inveigh against this ridiculous president and the sanctity of our nation right there on the main street of our heretofore staid little town.  There had been this incredible surge of energy and collective spirit, and a sense of solidarity among large numbers of kids that only a few years before had been divided along lines of group, class or academic identity---greasers versus jocks, academic preppies versus arty types and musicians---all these false boundaries had more or less dissolved in the wake of the Woodstock Nation. We had idealism and purpose, we had drugs and the Village Voice and the Filmore and so much great music. And we were all still in high school or a little older and basically mimicking the behavior of our slightly older brothers and sisters in college where anti-war protests had been going on for years now. But in 1970 the anti-war movement was reaching its peak and spreading out beyond college campuses and right into the comfortable homes of middle America. And everyone now was draft-eligible. Any philosophical division among us was more about whether political engagement was necessary or not. A smaller percentage of kids who were also opposed to the war did not choose to protest. They were more passive, with a more spiritual worldview and had decided to stay non-engaged, which caused an argument or two.


Naturally, as we grew larger in number and became more noisy and unruly that night, as we took to making soapbox speeches and railing against our government, the police inevitably showed up. Cops at that time were all white males, some of them ex-marines and green berets, and they didn't like or understand what they were seeing on the streets of America. They had understood tough kids with Marlboro packs rolled up in their shirt sleeves who liked to drag race cars, because they had been those kids too before the military and police academy, but they did not understand what was going on now, they had no context for it, it was something foreign and communist and evil. At first, although visibly angry, the cops shook their heads and watched us with pity.  Then we began shouting back and forth at each other as they tried to disburse the crowd. To aggravate the situation even further, the cops searched some kids for drugs as a way of getting us to move on. There wasn't a great deal of talk about politics, but mutual antipathy was very much in the air. After a period of resisting the cops' orders, we slowly dispersed. Our outbreak had little to do with police anyway.

The following night I tripped for the first time in the West Village (psilocybin). While that experience was memorable for other reasons I won't go into here --- and belongs in a later post --- the experience I mentioned on April 30, 1970, is somehow more deeply ingrained in my memory, because I had never seen or felt anything like this before while growing up, and I never saw anything like it again in my hometown. There were demonstrations everywhere that weekend including a massive one in New York. But it was a peak period of consciousness raising in the American suburbs too. I think it was the fact that we were even listening to the speech while hanging out and then the spontaneous outburst that most resonates with me.

The anti-war movement was coming to a head in tragic ways. Four days later was the Kent State Massacre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_state_shootings  and the nation witnessed a horror it didn't believe was possible. You had to be around over those several crazy days to feel like everything was unraveling and nothing would ever quite be the same again.

Like I said, I will never forget it....

Dog Catcher

The dog catcher lived only a few blocks away from my house. He lived with his son, who was about my age, in a small rundown house filled with cats and dogs, and there were kennels in the yards and the whole scene was squalid and noisy. The dog catcher drove a questionably official vehicle, a van for transporting stray animals, and the van was littered with carbon papers, forms and an assortment of trash. Large, corpulent, with a walrus-like gray mustache, the dog catcher supposedly drank a lot, and spoke with a cockney (Yorkshire) English accent, and was divorced or separated and trying to raise his only son. The son was too intelligent and academically gifted for that sort of environment, and would hopefully be able to attend a high-ranked college on an academic scholarship and be lucky enough to move far away from the life he'd been unfairly dealt.

I began wondering if there is such a "trade" as a "dog catcher" anymore. I didn't think so. As mentioned in the following Wikipedia post, there are now "Animal Control Officers" and their role is slightly different.

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

The role of the Animal Control Officer has changed over the past few decades. Gone are the days of the big bad "dog catcher". Today's animal control officers focuses more on educating the public on proper animal care, and rescuing animals from dangerous or abusive situations. They also pick up dead or injured wildlife and stray animals for disposal or treatment. The position can either be held through the jurisdiction's police department, or contracted to the local shelter (usually the humane society or SPCA)

I recall there were more strays during the period of time when the dog catcher was in demand, and there was more fear of a public health hazard, particularly from rabid dogs who might attack. I'm sure with the proliferation of dogs and cats and other pets in our day, the Animal Control Office is likely more busy than before but with different challenges.

I think the old dog catcher near me had died early, but I'm not sure. I hope his son became successful and moved on.

Is There a Doctor at Home?

A Friday night in autumn about half a century ago. I was seven. I had finished eating dinner and was watching the small black-and-white TV. The TV sat on a hard wooden table. I had gone to the bathroom which was at the end of the hall, and at the other end of the hall was the den with the TV. Leaving the bathroom, I broke into a run with the intention of sliding before I reached the TV set, a 7-year-old's attempt at sliding into home plate. But I miscalculated, must have run too fast, and instead of sliding I slipped and fell, and split my chin open on the sharp corner of the TV table.

My mother was the only parent home. My father was working 2nd shift at the paper mill. I was bleeding quite a lot and stanching the flow of blood with a rag or towel. My mother made a quick decision (even though she'd called my father at work). She decided she would try a few doctors in town and only take me to the ER as a last resort. Mom didn't want me to wait a long time at the ER for one thing, but she also wanted to shield me from whatever horrible sights a 7-year-old might see in an ER on a Friday night. To begin the quest for a doctor who would stitch up my chin, my mother enlisted the aid of a neighbor whose husband was also working 2nd shift at the local defense plant. It was about 7:00 PM.

Think of it:  Three or four of the general practice physicians (family doctors) we were about to call on with an "emergency" a "seriously injured little boy" were all at home, which also happened to be their offices. This was before the days of group practice, or professional care groups who resided in glass medical office buildings, who have limited visiting hours and use pagers (probably cellphones by now) and answering services off hours. Family doctors back then lived in and were active members of the community --- you said Hi to them in the grocery store; one of them sang in the choir where I attended church; their kids were classmates. My father had a fishing boat, and years later I'd even gone deep sea fishing with our family doctor....


.... who wasn't available that evening.... I think we'd called and no one had answered but my mother just wanted to make sure Doc wasn't home.....

.... as it turned out, the second doctor we tried was home, but he turned off all the lights as we approached. Naturally, the office lights were already turned off, but he even shut off some lights in his dining room and other rooms. After a barrage of doorbell ringing and knocking, the doctor finally opened an upstairs window and stuck his head out. He said he couldn't help us, but made a reference to another doctor who maybe could help, and also the hospital emergency room. My mother and the neighbor were furious. They gossiped that this particular doctor was known to have a problem with the bottle. That must be the reason why he wouldn't treat me. Meanwhile I lay bleeding in the backseat, wondering when the ordeal would be over.

The third doctor wasn't answering either. Yes, it did seem a little bit demanding and unrealistic to expect help, even 50 years ago when we were supposedly more inclined to altruism than we are today. However, I remember our family doctor making house calls for fevers and measles and pink eye and other childhood maladies.

So en-route to the ER, we passed one more doctor's office who wasn't on the list. By now my mother and the neighbor (who had kids my age, friends) had squandered somewhere between a half hour to an hour driving around in a futile search for a healer, and this doctor, whom they hadn't heard of, reluctantly agreed to treat me. I imagine that the specter of a lawsuit and malpractice insurance haunted GPs even then, and was most likely the reason no one would see me after hours except in a hospital. This doctor took a small chance, I didn't have a major injury, so I don't think he was overly concerned about anything going wrong and he was good enough to look at me. He used steri-strips to close up the gash in my chin, and this made more sense --- sutures would have left a bigger scar, the cut was mostly on bone so it would likely heal without sutures.....

..... Unlike the scar on my stomach that has 16 stitches, which I've had since the age of 2, the result of surgically removing a ring I had accidentally swallowed and could not pass. Luckily, that surgery was done in a hospital.