April 2006 Archives

During my seven year stretch in the green hole, I had various jobs and also collected unemployment.  That was after I got laid off from the brick layer tender job.  And because that was a union job that paid maybe seven bucks an hour, collecting the unemployment, $65 a week, was worth it.  (How much you get from unemployment is based on how much you earn)  I didn’t try to collect unemployment when I got laid off from the Newberry’s Department store because the pay was so low that the 30 or so bucks a week I would get wouldn’t be worth the agony of getting it.

You had to go to the unemployment office on a particular day of the week and sometimes the line would stretch clear out into the street.  You could stand in that line for hours as it slowly moved into the building and toward the three or four clerks, I guess they were, that stood at the their posts behind the counter.  And then you had to wait in suspense since it was a single line to see which of the people behind the counter you got, and that did make a difference because one of them, at least, made me feel like shit when I walked up to the window.  When he asked me if I had been looking for work and where I had been looking (which I hadn’t been doing), he made me feel like a lying thief.

I had enough problems in the parasite department as it was.  I had gone off to college to stand on my own two legs and flopped instead.  I paid my parents, when I had some extra, for my roach infested room and the food I ate.  But I didn’t pay them regularly and mostly used the money I made to pay for gas for the car and insurance and to buy cigarettes and some clothes now and then.  They never asked me for more money which was good of them, I guess, but I still felt like a parasite and a loser of the first order.  And my parents sure as hell didn’t do anything to assuage that feeling.  They didn’t speak once about or ask questions about my so-called “mental” problem.

But collecting unemployment I sure felt like a parasite   I was a cigarette smoking parasite that, at times, looked pretty much like a derelict, with my untrimmed beard and my hair sticking out every which away.  And I had real bad BO and also terrible dandruff both in my hair and my beard.

So I was a chain smoking parasite with real bad dandruff.  The appearance situation was made worse by my inability on occasion to go into the barber shop because if I did the barber would know I had come in for a hair cut.  I guess you could say that the barber made me self-conscious, but it wasn’t exactly like that.  I felt he could read my mind maybe, or see right through me, as if I were made out a very thin plastic, to my real intention which was to get a hair cut.

So I felt real shitty collecting unemployment and I guess I looked pretty shitty too.

When I was starting to plow through that list of the 101 greatest books, I was taking biology.  I don’t remember finding many science books on those lists.  Maybe Darwin’s Origins or Newton’s Principia.  But that was about all.  I couldn’t have said it then but what I was studying by reading those 101 was human beings; or in a round about way, I was studying myself as a human being. I didn’t think of myself as studying culture; I didn’t feel uncultured or decultured.  Those books were a great bounty, an overflowing of the human spirit. Gifts.  That’s how I saw it.  Manna from Heaven.

I liked biology because it too was mostly about human beings, at least the biology we were taught.  We had the beginnings of some ecology stuff and that was interesting, but what we had mostly was the human body and its diverse and intertwined parts.  How could one not be interested in the pancreas since one had one. Or the liver, with its intrequing name.  One cannot live without one’s liver. So I studied hard and it was easy and interesting to know the names for the parts of one’s body.

 And what do you know but the teacher—he did know his stuff--, an ex-military little punk with the vestigial remains of a flattop in his thinning hair, said, “Well, one of you got a 100 percent on this last test.  So I guess I am getting soft and that test was too easy.  Maybe I will make another and have you take it.”  Well everybody knew who had gotten that hundred, and for a second, I felt really put on the spot by the idea that my success would make everybody take another test.  But he was joking.  If you can call that a joke. Kind of sick military humor, where whoever you might be you have got to be the toughest, especially if you are boss or a teacher.

And we had to write a research paper on some biological topic for the class, so I decided I would research blood.  Human blood, I mean.  And I enjoyed looking into it; blood was a happening place.  Lots of shit was going down there.  But I rapidly ran out of good sources.  I must have been inspired because I called a guy at the state university that one of my neighbors knew and asked him if I could visit him and get more information on the blood.  So one Saturday I rode my bike clear over to the university and the guy showed me all kinds of periodicals stacked up there in his office.  He asked me a bit about what I knew and gave me periodicals or copies of things he thought I might understand.

And I whacked out an organized 15 pager on human blood.  I had a hard time in spots understanding what they were saying.  But I cut out what I couldn’t understand or put in some quotations when I couldn’t understand what they were saying enough to put it in my own words, though I did think I understood it in their words, or let’s say I understood the need for their words at this particular spot in the paper.  I worked about as hard as I ever worked on a paper in high school.  And I can remember getting it back and slowing opening the cover to see I had gotten a fucking B+ and the single comment: “You could not have understood what you wrote here.”

Now what the fuck was that about?  I’d really like to know.  Had he accused me of plagiarism that would have been one thing?  But if it had been plagiarism that shit-heel would have given me an F, so what the fuck was he saying.  I couldn’t have said--and I knew it--that at the moment I got the paper back I understood everything I had written in it.  But at the moment I had finished the paper I did.  It had taken him a fucking month to return the papers, so sure I had forgotten some stuff.  That’s the nature of biology.

That grade hurt in a bad way because I tended to idealize my teachers, and felt maybe he was right rather than the fuck didn’t understand what I had written so he had decided that I could not have possibly understood it given his nature superiority.  What a fuck!  Completely lacking in any generosity of spirit.  Had I received a paper from a kid that looked like he had written what he couldn’t understand and I couldn’t understand it either I would give the kid a break and give him an A.  Why the fuck should he be knocked down for my ignorance.  Not my biology teacher.  Since he as teacher was superior to any student in that room, he couldn’t admit he didn’t know something.

Every body should be required to read those 101 books.  It doesn’t take long to know that you don’t know shit.

We were visiting one of my wife’s old friends from back in her college days.  She was married to an FBI agent.  We went out for Chinese food and I remember it seemed like a damn long drive for Chinese food.  But this was their favorite place where the Chinese food was real Chinese food, I guess.  Anyway, on the way back, their kid, Katie, who was maybe 4, started asking questions.  She had been listening to my wife and her friend talking about the good old days back in college, and Katie piped up, “Where was I?”

The other adults seemed a bit confused; they wanted to know what she was asking exactly.  Me, though, since I can regress at the drop of a hat am usually in tune with children and knew what she was up to.  “She wants to know where she was back when you were in college.”  “Honey, you weren’t born yet?”  But this kid had her teeth into something.  “I know but where was I?”  I tried to joke, “You were a gleam in your daddy’s eye.”  But she wouldn’t have any of that, so finally I just said, “You weren’t anywhere because you were not yet.”  “OK,” she said and seemed satisfied. Kids can be pretty logical philosophers; apparently she wasn’t freaked out by her metaphysical question.  She just wanted an answer.

What she was asking really wasn’t where she was but how the hell was it possible for anything to be going on before I got here.  Kids assume that they “create” everything; mommy and daddy didn’t really start until they get there.  Maybe we outgrow that idea at some point.  Maybe not.  I think I see lots of adults around who think the world did not exist before they got into it.  These people hate the idea of a past or if there was a past the present is a fuck lot better than back there in the past, whenever the fuck that was.

The idea of “progress” is a psychological defense mechanism against the idea that there was a past that might have been better than our present.  I once sat through a series of lectures in social psychology for undergraduates.  The professor was really pretty good, energetic at least.  She gave three lectures on the Freudian theory of aggression; and then she started lecturing on the modern sociological theory of aggression.  Before she did thought, she said Freud was mostly wrong.  “Shit,” the kid said next to me, “then why did she lecture on him three times?”

Good question, Dude.  My answer would be that modern academics believe in the progress of their so-called disciplines.  If Freud was right, then somebody back there in the idiotic past might have got it more right than a bunch of sociologists in the present.  Modern and post-modern academics kill the past by pretending they have got the answer and all those dumb fucks before them were looking up their assholes.

So this pretty much reams history.  The question isn’t really whether Freud was right or wrong; but what can we learn from what he says about when he was and what can we learn about what he says about when he was that might help us to understand better where we are.    

After Crime and Punishment, I decided I wanted to read more good stuff.  Up to that time I had been reading stacks and stacks of science fiction when, unlike today, stacks and stacks of science fiction were not available.  So I bought and read some of those science fiction magazines made out of some grim grey paper that paid their writers like 2 cents a word.  I had sort of dipped into the “classics” like the Deerslayer—Fenimore Cooper stuff--; but from that I had moved to more popularized juvenile versions of Fenimore Cooper stuff and read a whole series of novels that seemed mostly to involve Indians chasing white persons or white persons chasing Indians through miles and miles of forest  for days on end. Guys back then could sure run.

But after C&P I decided to go for the real thing; but since I didn’t know what the real things were I started checking out books with titles like 100 Greatest Books of The World; or 100 Greatest Books of the Western World; or, maybe my favorite, 101 Greatest Books of the Western World.  That extra 1 seemed to acknowledge the futility of making a list of the 100 Greatest books of the Western World. But I needed guidance and having none I did the best I could with those books; I went down the list and started checking out the ones that looked most promising.  I planned to read the whole fucking lot and to come to know all that there was to know about everything that might be known.

Now of course the “canon,” or any sort of consensus about the 100 greatest books of the Western World is probably out of the question, unless you are one of those persons that likes to list things.  The “canon” has been all busted up.  Voices not previously present are.  Plato is an old dead white guy.  Obviously back then I was mislead in my reading materials by those lists and read stuff that some now consider merely testimony to the stupidity of a society dominated by white dead men.  I acknowledge the stupidity of that society.  But honestly, I don’t think the world is necessarily better off when one can go on line and find lists of the 100 greatest books of the western (as compiled by newspapers responding to the voice of the people) and find the that the Lord of the Rings listed as the number one greatest book of the Western World.

The Lord of the Rings was popular back in the 60s too.  My girlfriend read it and recommended it to me.  I read a bit and decided it was pseudo profound mythological claptrap, though I didn’t say that to my girlfriend.  Those lists I read back in the early sixties didn’t have Harry Potter on it either (as some of the web lists do) and I maintain that Harry Potter is also pseudo profound mythological claptrap.  I make this judgment not as a protest against the breaking up of the canon or because I oppose the vox populi, but on the basis of my having read an awful lot of the work of those dead white men who represent the western tradition of informed barbarism.

Viet Nam vets are now old and gnarly.  They are a sort of passé cliché.  But back then they were young.  They were my age and coming back from the war.  I was working at a Broadway Department Store unloading the trucks and doing other odds and ends.  We got there early and all the guys on the dock as well as other people who worked there would gather by this one door and wait to be let in.  

We would knock on the door, or bang on it, or kick it, and start hollering and eventually this really old guy, with a belt of keys, would come down the aisle, about as slow as he could go and let us in.  Joe waited there with us.  He had been in Viet Nam, had long dirty looking dark hair, and looked like he was wasted a lot; he worked somewhere in the store, but not on the docks.  For some reason, that old man just got on Joe’s nerves and he would start to cussing the old man when he took his time getting to the door; Joe would cuss him every step the old man took down that long aisle.

 One day, out of nowhere, Joe didn’t cuss the guy but reared back and before anybody could do a thing kicked the fucking door with his steel tip work boot and broke it to pieces.  I didn’t know you could break a door like that, but Joe did.  He had strung telephone wires through the bush in Viet Nam.  He would creep along in the bushes with the wire so that people up at the front fighting could phone back.  One day he got shot and his left forearm was shattered.  Somebody said he was shot in two places, but I never saw the other place.

 I was a dishwasher at restaurant in a shopping center.  We had three cooks.  One big fat guy, an old lady who passed out from the heat a couple of times, and a young guy, who was mostly American Indian, who had a fine sharp featured face and thick black hair brushed back in an Elvis pompadour.  He had been back from Viet Nam for almost a year, and sometimes when I was washkng dishes, I turned around and he would be going like ack, ack, ack with a broom like it was a machine gun at me.  And once he stuck it right up to my asshole and did that and I almost jumped out of my skin. 

 He had been on one of those boats that go up rivers like in the movie, Apocalypse Now, and one day they got off the boat and were checking things out, and he said he saw the guy who shot him up in a tree, and he was hit in the stomach.  But, he said, somebody on his boat had got the fucker.

He had married this white woman who, from the picture he showed me, looked like she was maybe 300 pounds.  He had a child by her, and then they had split up.  She said he had emotional problems; he said she had cheated on him and he had emotional problems.  He wouldn’t pay child support, so most weekends he would check into the county jail and put in time for failure to provide child support. 

He asked me to go out drinking with him a few times, and in a way I sort of liked the guy.  But I am not a drinker.  And he told me that he had been in jail because he had been in a bar room fight and poked out a guy’s eye with a bottle, but they had put it back in. So he really couldn’t understand all the fuss. Really the guy scared me.

I liked the sciences pretty much.  I liked biology quite a bit.  I saw a TV show about a guy who traveled all over checking out the health of the world’s bat population.  I thought that was a pretty good job.  But my career in the sciences was screwed up by the Sputnik.  The Reds sent this up in 1957, an unmanned satellite that in pictures looked out as big as a basketball.  The Reds had got a jump on us.  We were behind in the technoscience race. And you’d have thought the sky was falling.

Somebody got the bright idea that the reason the Reds had got the jump lay with the backwardness of America’s school children.  So the experts got together and decided to cook up a whole new science curriculum based, no doubt, on the most advanced principles.  This new curriculum arrived at my school, not in the form of books, but copied manuscripts tacked together with humongous staples. 

The first time I got one of these books was in geometry.  We had a pretty good math teacher, but that whole year of geometry I never knew what the fuck was going on because the teacher didn’t know how to teach that stuff.  To scare us into trying, he told us our final grade for the course would be based on an exam the government was going to give us.  I got 28 right out of a 100 and was sure I had failed my first class.  But it turned out 28 right was pretty high and I got an A- for not understanding a damn thing the whole year.

Next year in chemistry was even worse.  We had another of those Xeroxed books and the teacher couldn’t make heads or tails of it.  All I remember about that class was staring at the periodic table above the teacher’s head.  At least in geometry I had learned about triangles and obtuse and acute angles and such, but chemistry I got nothing out of.  That’s too bad because now I understand, at least remotely, that the bridge between the animate and the inanimate, the living and deadness, consists of blind biochemical reactions and reductions.  I mean it could have been interesting.

 And my senior year trigonometry class—well, it didn’t have one of those new updated books.  We just had an idiot as a teacher.  We had maybe 15 people in that class; and again I struggled along trying my best to understand, but the teacher only seemed interested in telling us about what he had done the last weekend. 

I guess even back then the world was getting smaller because something the Reds did fucked up my possible career in the sciences.  So when it came to college, I went with my strengths, with what I thought I could do well at, and became an English major, not having the slightest idea what that was, and did not become, like a number of people at my high school, an engineer, a sensible thing for a working class student to do.

The old lady said that in polite company three things were never discussed: religion, politics, and sex.  I guess we had an extremely polite family because none of these things were ever discussed; sex especially was not discussed.  I assume the old lady knew her four sons came equipped with penises.  But I don’t remember the word penis ever used.

Back in SC lacking bathroom facilities, we had a bath once a week whether we needed it or not.  In the summers, I remember we were lined up and one after another would step naked into a big wash tub and the old lady would more or less hose us down.  I can’t remember if she washed our male members; I am sort of glad I can’t.

When I arrived at the age of growing sexual interest, I knew I believe accurately how babies were made but that was about it.  And at that time, magazines and books on sexual subjects were remarkably absent.  “Playboy” magazine started coming out in the 50s, but it was kept in a special place in the drugstore and was covered with a plain brown paper wrapping.  Additionally, practicing safe sex could be awkward for a shy boy since condoms were not displayed out in the open but were locked up somewhere in the back and one had to ask the druggist for them explicitly and openly.

Being literarily inclined, I did more or less by accident lay my hands on Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even though both were banned at the time for obsenity.  The latter was hard going, sort of murky, and hard to find the good parts.  Also there was stuff about sticking flowers in pubic hairs and the male figure had a number of names for this penis.  The book seemed a bit artsy-fartsy.  Personally, I have never named my penis.  Cancer was considerably better, clearer, more vivid and direct and I even liked reading some of the parts around the good parts.

But mostly I got my sex Ed. I think from taking Roman.  I mean Latin, but I like to call it Roman because learning Latin led me to learning about Rome.  You can learn a lot by learning Roman.  I came across Grave’s I, Cladius in the high school library; I read that and found it remotely titillating.  Unfortunately, the old lady who refused to recognize we had any right to privacy happened to pick up the book, read a bit of it, and got it banned from the school library because largely of its mention of Spanish Fly.

 This pissed me off.  In my edition of Claudius, Graves mentioned some of the sources for his book, so I went down to the public library and checked out a copy of Suetonius’ “Lives of the 12 Caesars.”  It had Latin on one page and English on the other, so my mother thought I was studying Roman.  Extra credit, I said. 

I get the feeling Suetonius’ was sort of an early gossip columnist and spared no smut or filthy details in his biographical treatments.  Nero, for example, was a pig of the first water.  He killed his mother I think.  He raped women regularly and married boys.  He liked to dress up at night in the skin of a bear, prowl alleys, and commit sadistic acts of sexual violence upon both sexes.  This might not seem very arousing, but then lines like “he fondled and kissed her breasts” could send me to fantasy land.  And I learned a hell of a lot about other stuff from Suetonius about politics, and just plain murder.

I think in the Bible somebody says nothing is new under the sun.  The Romans ruled by panem et circenses.   The same as today, I think.  We’ve got so much bread people are getting bloated, and as for circuses there’s no end of them.

If a person thinks he can write that’s probably because somebody in the family does or somebody tells him he can.  In my case, it was the latter and the culprit was my 8^th grade English teacher, Miss Tuttle.  She was young, dark haired, skinny and energetic, and she wore makeup in a way that you noticed  Also, I remembering the girl’s giggling at how she dressed; that was because they said she went to France every year and bought stuff over there.  

She read something that I wrote and told me I had talent as a writer and that I wrote like Winston Churchill.  Given my mother’s England background, I knew who he was, though I didn’t know he had written any books.  Miss Tuttle’s way of encouraging my talent was to make me come in at lunch and diagram sentences on the blackboard to get my grammar down.  It did help, I guess, though I really learned grammar by taking Roman.  Years later I learned that Miss Tuttle was a graduate of Columbia Teacher’s College and had for much of her adult life an ongoing correspondence with Bertrand Russell.

 Who knows? Maybe Miss Tuttle was a “leftist” because she was the only teacher I ever had—aside from a couple of lectures as an undergraduate—who lectured to us and had us read stuff about the labor movement.  She told us about the Haymarket Massacre and how our government had held a show trial and put to death perfectly innocent anarchists.  Really pretty heady stuff for me; maybe brick layers had a sort of history too and perfectly appropriate stuff too to teach the kids of working class people, which we were really.

But I think we all thought we were middle class, or middle class in the making, like those people on TV.  So issues of class that have become more important to me as I have aged were pretty much written out of existence, just like Orwell says in 1984.  The people in charge write the histories and the histories that suit the middle class and their employers, the elite capitalist class, are middle class histories, human interest histories, when most of human history has been of inhuman interest only, about goddamn forces that squash people like bugs.

I was reading a labor history and I find it amazing that as recently as 60 years ago or so an actual president could run for office and say stuff like:

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

That was FDR talking in the 1930’s; and in light of today’s politics of delusion and denial, you have to wonder how anybody running for President today could fucking talk like that and still win.

I was in my green hole on May 4, 1970 when I heard four students had been killed at Kent State by the National Guard.  Usually, I think about such things and then swallow it, but that day I felt like I just had to talk to somebody, so I drove 15 miles or so to this gas station where a guy I knew was pumping gas.

We weren’t really friends.  But we had known each other in high school.  He was a year behind me and when he graduated he went off to Harvard.  He was real bright, the son of a postman, and had red hair like me, but more orange.  He had heard about the Kent State thing, and while I went on about it, he didn’t seem much effected.  Finally, he said, leaning up against my car, “You are fucking innocent.”

That sort of stuck in my like a burr.  I don’t know what he had seen at Harvard, but he had seen stuff I had not seen and guess I never will.  I guess he had seen with his own eyes how people at the top act and talk about people that are not at the top.  For years after, he worked with an international leftist, marxist, trotskyite, union movement; he lived in a commune and worked in factories so he could organize workers.  When he applied for a job, he never put down that he had been graduated from Harvard because if he did, they were sure not to hire him.

Somebody back then said, he had learned more about politics from resisting the draft than he had ever learned or would ever learn from any political science class.  I had learned as I think Max Weber said, Society is God.  Or as Sartre said, Society decides who lives and who dies.  And politics is about the use and distribution of power with that society.  Or as Mao said, power comes from the barrel of a gun.  I had learned that when push comes to shove society doesn’t give a flying fuck about the individual, at least not about individuals who have no power and can’t defend themselves.  For such people there is no recourse.  They are like that kid in Tiananmen Square.  The tank just rolls over them and you’re just a red spot on the pavement.

Maybe at Harvard my friend had met the people who drive the tank, for whom the draft and the war was a matter of inconvenience because they had doctors and lawyers and connections and ways to get in the National Guard with no sweat.  And not like it was for so many a ball crushing major mother of a titanic fuck up that altered their lives in significantly destructive ways.

At Harvard I suspect, he met the real draft dodgers.

Everybody in high school complained about going to summer school.  “I am going to fucking summer school,” people would say and I would say it too.  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  But really I was quite happy to go since going got me out of the damn house for about 4 hours each day for six weeks as I recollect in the summers, and it was a sure fire way to get all my “solids,” as we used to call them back then--the courses needed for most colleges.

 One summer I took world history.  A guy I had never seen before and never say after taught it; I think they must have brought him in for the summer.  Three to four hours a day for six weeks—that was a lot of world history for a class that really had no interest in it.  So at one point, he divided us into groups and gave each group a part of the large cork bulletin boards that went all along one wall, up to the blackboard, and then with another piece after that.  Each group was supposed to decorate its part with some “theme” about world history.

My group was all guys, five us that sat together on the far right side of the room, all guys in some sport or other. We got a lonely piece of bulletin board stuck off to the right of the blackboard.  The guys really didn’t have much interest and only one idea, “Hey, Nick, what should we do?”  So I said I would go home and think about it and bring something back to put up there.  They were OK with that.

So the next time, we got together to work on the bulletin board, I pulled out all of these pictures I had cut out of Time or Look magazine.  “Modern art,” I said to these guys, “and this here is Moandrayon.  He uses like these lines and colors.  So we will use this one here and use exactly the lines and colors he uses up there on the bulletin board; and like, here where he uses nothing but white, we will stick one of these pictures.” 

And I pulled out a bunch of abstract expressionist stuff in bright, and dark, and murky colors.  And I pulled out a tape measure I had brought alone.  And they set to measuring and cutting up strips and tried it this way and that and figured out how wide the black strips should be, and a couple others starting cutting the letters to spell out Modern Art.

 And the next time we just stapled up what we had, stuck pictures in the various empty spots and we were done 1, 2, 3, way before anybody else.  The guys really didn’t know what to make of it—the other groups were like painting pictures of pyramids or cutting out covered wagons to go across the plains, and what we had was a bunch of bright color.  But Buddy, my catcher from Little League, eye balled it, cocking his head this way and that, and said, “Our’s the best.”

Later in the summer, I noticed the teacher had brought a camera and he was standing in the back taking pictures of our bulletin board.  And later he got the Principal in to show him the bulletin board.  And then when the class was over, the teacher asked if he could have the stuff we had made our project out of, and we said sure.  And then I heard from a guy who went to the principal’s office a lot that our bulletin board was up in the main offices.  So I went in there and walking down a hall saw they had stuck it up a bulletin board way too small and cramped it all up.

The fucking rubes had no feel for modern art.

I know people who say that when they are feeling down or at wit’s end or at the end of their rope they perk themselves up by thinking of good things that have happened and they get a little warm glow that makes me feel better.  I don’t have any memories like that; but if I try I can almost feel warm about that bulletin board.  Things just sort of fit.  I got to use my brains and they did the work.  We did it and we all got an A for doing it.

That was cool.

One of my stock witticisms:  “I favored and will continue to favor for as long as I live all manifestations of woman’s liberation because I hate my mother.”  The logic here might seem unclear or even perverse, but really it’s simple.  I like to believe had my mother been born in more liberated times she might have been at least partially saved from herself.  But she was raised when women were supposed to marry and be mothers and nothing but.  She had a couple of semesters of college.  In the second one she had to drop out because of pneumonia, and in the first she was given a theme, in one of those obligatory English classes, to write on: give 10 reasons why a woman should be married.

This was like 1941.

I probably idealize but I think the old lady might have been a not half bad principal at an elementary school.  I think she was intelligent.  In saying this I know I am on thin ice.  My brothers probably would not agree and insist that the capacity for cold and manipulative mendaciousness is not the same as intelligence; or if she had any intelligence at all she put it at the service of pure evil. So to qualify I would say she had a knack for book learning and might have prospered at it had she had the chance.

Instead her knowledge of things great and small was another weapon in her ongoing castration of the old man.  Partly that was his fault.  He let her keep the check book and forfeited the power that might have come with that. True, he couldn’t read or write much, but he could do numbers.  Or if we got fucked by the phone company or some lemon of an appliance, my mother was the one who launched a mail writing campaign to get our money back and usually did.  He would just run around yelling, if I had a shot gun I’d just shot my fucking head off.  I don’t think they would have ever returned anything to a store, had it not been for the old lady, and all of the life changing decisions, like coming to California, she made.

When the old man’s mother died, he flew back to S.C. for the funeral.  Since the old lady didn’t drive, I had to drive them to the airport.  I just stood there, watched and grew increasingly depressed.  The old lady just kept at him: did he have his ticket, did he know where it was, and did he know his seat number, when he got to Atlanta when was his next flight, had he packed a razor, and on and on.  And standing there, I knew that if my mother had dared she would have put one of those cards on his coat that they put on little kids when they fly alone, like, “Hello. I am WB.  Please help me not to get lost.”

And he—and he—for god’s sake just lapped it up.

As assistant manager in training, my beat was the basement of the Newberry’s Department Store.  By basement, I mean we were underground, not a window anywhere.  Above florescent lighting, below linoleum over concrete.  As a non-union, salaried, administrator I sometimes walked that floor, if they needed somebody to fill in, for 12 hours at a time.  Back and forth, up one aisle, down another, straightening this and organizing that: towels, bathrobes, pots, pans, wash clothes, draperies.   For ten, twelve hours at a time, with breaks running the cash register if we got backed up, which was very rare, or arguing with somebody who wanted to return a dress with huge sweat stains in the armpits (this was in the day before the consumer was always right), or going around with my trusty sticker gun and putting prices on things, or chasing around after a customer to tell him his fly was down because one of the worker ladies said it was down, and he should be told, or running a credit card and saying to its owner, “Onan, your name is Onan!  My that is an unusual name! Onan, I mean.”

I mean who the fuck would name their male child “Onan.”

 And one night when I was going to do the late shift, the real assistant manager sidled up to me and said that the Manager had said that I should fire Suzi, the young woman who worked from 4 to 8, because she wasn’t doing her job.  So keep your eye on her, he said, and when she is screwing up, fire her, OK.  I thought that was pretty fucked.  I didn’t know if Suzi was a screw up or not because I didn’t usually work her shift.  The guy was passing off the nasty firing stuff to me, I expected.  

I walked around all evening, circling Suzi like a vulture, for a moment when I thought she was really screwing around.  What the hell constitutes screwing up in a nearly empty store?  There weren’t any customers to be rude too and the stuff in her area was straightened up and neat.  Was I going to fire her for standing there looking so bored she had gone gaga?  So I didn’t fire her, and felt that right there my career in retail was over because I didn’t have the right stuff for firing people.  I was cool though the next day when the guy asked if I had fired her, “No,” I said, scratching my head, “I mean I never could find a time when she was messing around. I just couldn’t find a moment to pounce, you know.”  And made a little pouncing gesture.

One morning the crazy woman over in draperies and shades takes out two little American flags on wooden sticks and begins to wave them around and to blow one of those kazoo things like on New Year’s Eve when the ball comes down, and she launched into a version of God Bless America.  She had a little storeroom where she hid a lot and had a radio back there and had heard that they had just signed the Paris Peace Accords.  The war was over.

I didn’t know what she was going on about.  I guess she figured we had won that war although I couldn’t see how anybody could believe that.  But many people think we won the cold war and I don’t see how anybody can believe that either.

I was learning though.  In the fall, I was one of a couple of million Americans who voted for McGovern.  What did he win?  One state?  I sat in the break room with the old ladies who worked there, most on Social Security, so they could work only limited hours and still get their government money.  I was outnumbered.  They seemed to hate McGovern and the only reason they gave that I could understand was that he had a squeaky voice and sounded like a preacher.

I mean, good golly, gee whiz, but when a guy’s got a squeaky voice who gives a shit about his views on foreign policy?

In the fall of 68, while I was trying to go to graduate school, I room with my best friend.  He was from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and like myself a working class kid who was ill-equipped to be a working class kid.  During the course of the quarter, he was drafted and reported.  He got through boot camp ok and was made an MP, though I can think of few people less physically imposing.  He was assigned to guard a missile base, in Arizona, I think.  24 hours on, 24 hours off.  He became “catatonic” and the army let him out with the stipulation that he did not claim medical reparations.

Another friend, also a working class kid and much more suitable to be one, since he worked out regularly and was very strong, decided not to endure the suspense, and joined the Marines voluntarily.  He thought it would be the event of our generation and wished to be present for it.  At that time, to get volunteers, the Marines were lopping six months off the tour either at the end or up front.  My friend chose up front, and during the six months fell in love and had a car accident that screwed up his knee.  The Marines would not take him.

Another friend, the son of a car salesman, became a marijuana salesman and decided when the war came along to go underground.  He stayed with me for a month maybe longer right before I dropped my groceries in the parking lot.  He was jailed once for weed and the FBI came and he said he would report as soon as he got out of jail, but he didn’t.  He was at Woodstock.  And drank very heavily.

Another person, less a friend but respected, decided not to step across the line at the draft board.  Funny to think of being arrested for NOT do something.  He was immediately jailed for not doing something first in a minimum security prison, and after he led a food strike there, a maximum security prison off the coast of Washington State.  He said that later somebody approached him about making a “movie of the week” out of his story.  He was the son of a philosophy professor who had been a CO during WWII.

These people, along with John Wayne and my father, both of whom said cryptically, “a man has got to do what a man has got to do,” constituted my moral compass as I agonized and tried to understand what was wrong with me, why I didn’t so clearly want to do what a man has got to do.  Being tough, sucking it up, following orders was a good deal of what my working class heritage was about.  

And those Southerners seem to go off to war at the drop of a hat. I was not a real man like John Wayne, but instead a coward with a yellow streak a mile wide down my back.  And a coward in two directions, for if I truly objected to the war itself and was not just a coward with a yellow streak a mile wide down my back, I should go to jail like my other friend but I couldn’t do that because the idea of prison scared me pissless, making me a coward with a yellow streak a mile wide down my back.

One might here begin to sense the depths of my inward conflicts although these remarks do not do justice to them.  It would have helped greatly had I been sure in my heart that the war was morally wrong in some absolute sense.  But I just couldn’t reach that conclusion.  Now it’s easy to say, oh yea, Vietnam was morally wrong.  Indeed, it just trips off the tongue. But back then the best I could do was to characterize it as a major “fuck up” and in that way an dimension of life as perpetually “fucked up.”

As long as I was draft eligible, no employer with what might be called career jobs was going to look at me.  I could be snatched by the US Army at any moment.  No sooner was anxiety about being drafted relieved, than it was replaced by an anxiety about what to do with myself in an ontological and economic sense.  I wanted money to get out of the hole, and I wanted a job with prospects.  I didn’t think about going back to school because that cost money and my recent endeavors in the realm of higher education had proven a bust.

I didn’t turn to human resources because I had been there already during my period of unemployment.  The unemployment office seemed to have notices only for the unemployable.  “Real” jobs were advertised in the newspapers.  But I wasn’t an engineer and I wasn’t in business; and men were not yet frequently hired for secretarial work.  I turned hither and thither and found nowhere to turn.

 My father had “contacts” only in the world of concrete, brick, and block.  We had further no family in the area that might have pointed me in a particular employment direct.  My mother, who did not drive and was a possible illegal alien, had zero contacts having not worked a paying job since WWII.  We had no family in the area. I knew that the children of some wealthy and influential people had gone to the college where I had gone, but I had failed to meet any of them.  They all were in fraternities and sobrieties; and I wasn’t.  They all went skiing; I never have.  I had gone to a tiny school.  The names of everyone in my graduating class could be put on the back of a t-shirt, and I had apparently only met a hand full.

In an act of desperation, I went to one of those places that finds a job for you and then takes all of your salary for the first two weeks.  I filled out the forms and within a week they called to say I had an interview.  This threw me into a panic.  I figured that I should wear appropriate clothing for the interview but I had none.  No suit, no dress slacks, no dress jacket, no tie, no shoes.  Underwear? Yes, I had that, as long as I was not required to strip and pee on demand.  So I borrowed stuff from my father, my brothers, and shoes from somebody that pinched.

I cut my hair; shaved my beard, and feeling about as awkward as a person could in my assembled ensemble did the interview.  A week or so later, I got a call saying I had been hired as an assistant manager in training at a Newberry’s Department Store.  I would get a salary and be set on a career track towards becoming one day the manager of my own Newberry’s Department Store

Knowing what I now know about myself, I can only think that I must have been still severely mentally disturbed when I said and when do I start?

I don’t know if it was Nixon’s idea but, in what might easily have been an extension of his benign neglect philosophy, the first lottery went off on Sept 1, 1969.  The politicians seem to be saying they were going to wash their hands of any attempt to intelligently or thoughtfully administer the draft.  Instead, we will exercise a complete lack of reason and let luck make the decision for us.  The lottery decided I was number 9—a dead certainty to be drafted.

I think I had five physicals.  But I never again had to strip or pee on demand; instead I followed a different colored line that took me to the room where they took excuses.  This was like a different world.  White people every where—hardly any black or brown people—carrying letters of all sorts from doctors, and copies of prescriptions, and x-rays  Proof of any sort of any serious or oddball thing that could get them to let you go.  One friend got out because he had a varicose vein on one testicle.  My brother got braces and flew to a place that he had researched as having a very high reject rate.  He walked in, smiled, they saw the braces and he was free.

I don’t know. Maybe I was just worn down, or had given up, or resigned myself.  I don’t know what, but I had stopped taking the meds, and when they called me up for another physical, I had no excuse in the form of an updated prescription.

Actually, I did have one—an excuse, I mean--but I was afraid to use it.  When I first saw the psychiatrist, I had taken the MMPP, the most sophisticated and accepted instrument for determining extent and type of mental illness.  But I had been reluctant to use the results because they said: A) That I suffered from a massive reading defect, or B) I was malingering or C) I was a danger to myself or others.  The report went on to detail this last finding in three or four single spaced pages.  I figured they would look at the reading defect part, see I had a college degree, conclude I was malingering, and not even read about my homicidal, suicidal, homosexual, apocalyptical tendencies.

But I took it with me because it was all I had.  I also took a good number of the various psychotropics I had on hand.  I was determined that I would not, on the long bus ride up to the LA draft board, feel a fucking thing.  I was pretty loopy by the time I got there, though not so loopy as not to notice they had redone the place, that there were now three shrinks in three offices where there had been just two.  One of them was my bald headed nemesis from previous occasions and another—I could not believe my eyes--was a black man.  A long line wound its way towards those doors—one line for three doors, so you had no idea which shrink you would get.

In one of the bolder moves of my life, I did not go to the end of the line.  But stood in the middle of the room, and when the young man then in the black man’s office starting getting up, I marched right into the office and sat down.  I slid my papers across to him.  .    There I was with my red curly hair rising up like a nimbus around my head, my thick beard over my Adam’s apple, my glasses so dirty my eyes were scarcely visible, and stinking like I had not washed my clothes in a month (which might have been the case).

He asked how I was feeling at the moment. I said, fucking shitty, that I had felt fucking shitty for some time and did not know when I was going to stop feeling fucking shitty.  He read my papers, filled out a form, and handed to me to be taken to a secretary for typing up.  I couldn’t believe it; he had let me off for a whole year.

I would not have to report for a physical again until January of 1972, and I would not have report for that because I would be 26 years old, too old to be drafted. 

Go figure…But fuck it, I was free! In a specific sense.

I had to make some money for college stuff, so the old man got me my first paying summer job with Buzzard’s Brick and Block at minimum wage, a buck twenty-five an hour.  I drove forty minutes both ways in my 50 Plymouth station wagon to an abandoned brick plant on the side of a canyon not far from the Pacific.  I say abandoned because there was nobody there but me, the plant, and piles and piles of brick stacked more than 20 feet high.

My job was to unstack those brick and to restack them on pallets of a thousand brick each.  Trucks came and picked these up and took them to the main yard for sale.  I don’t know how I stood it all alone there stacking one brick after another that whole summer.  But I had a little radio I listened to; the Stones were singing, “My, My, My said the spider to the fly.”  And because my brain was still saturated with hormones I could sustain sexual fantasies for a good while, sometimes topped off by an assisted, open air ejaculation.

One day though I was told to start up the dump truck, load it with rock, and back it down to the gate and dump the rock to one side of the gate where it was still possible for a car to drive through.  They must have been worried about some sort of liability thing with the abandoned brickyard.  I was 19 and had never driven a dump truck; true, it was not huge, but it was a dump truck.  And I had failed my driver’s test twice.  

But I loaded it with rock and broken brick and backed it down and got the truck to dump right where it was supposed to.  I guess I got over elated because when I tried to pull away from the gate, I lost control and the truck backed into the metal pipe to which the gate was appended.  I bent the pipe pretty severely with the result that the gate stuck up in the air at about a 45 degree angle, so while a person could not drive around it, a person in a small car could drive directly under it.  

I figured my ass was grass.  But when one of the trucks came out to pick up stuff, the trucker said he would fix it and did by backing down his rig and pulling the metal post almost back to an upright position with a chain.  The fork lift battery gave out.  It was not a minimal forklift; seated in it I was a good six feet off the ground and I needed it to get down the highest brick so I could stack them on the pallets.

They sent out this weasel guy they used to do all the little bitty shit work.  But failing to bring jumper cables, he decided we would push start the rig with his truck, even though the forklift was an automatic and I swear I have never heard of a way to push start an automatic with a dead battery.  But there we were banging along over the rough ground hitting maybe 20 miles an hour when the ground just ran out and I had to make a turn.  But I hit a bump and went flying, as the fork lift went on over the edge and sunk its blades completely into the opposing embankment.

I have gone flying a number of times, mostly head over heels over my bicycle handles, and each time, it’s funny.  When I realize I am flying, I just sort of give up and go limp.  I swear that the three of four times I have gone flying, including the fly from the forklift, may be among the most relaxed moments of my life.  In any case, I was not injured.

The last job I worked as a brick mason tender was right on the beach by the blue Pacific.  On an empty stretch of sand the Navy was building garages for amphibious landing craft.  They would be able to drive the craft straight out of the water, across a little sand and right into their garages. 

These garages were big.  Almost forty feet high.  I was given the job one day of getting all the planks off the scaffolding.  Usually I would just throw the 2 by 6 planks--what were they? 12 feet long maybe--onto the ground.  But if you threw a plank that heavy from forty feet up you could crack it pretty easily.  So instead, you had to walk out to the last layer of planks, bend over, pick up a plank and balance it on the two 2 by 6 that were left for you to walk on.  After this naturally, things go more intense because you had to go out, bend over, pick up a plank, and walk back to dry land, on ONE 2 by 6 while balancing a 2 by 6.  And this was forty feet up going straight down to the concrete floor of the amphibious craft garage. 

I did ok for a bit.  I would go out and pick up one and walk back on two.  Then I would go to the scaffolding right next to that, pick up one and walk back on two.  I did this for a bit and you can see I was avoiding the part that involves walking back on one and yet it was impossible to avoid because I was running out of scaffolding that had three planks (except for the part of the scaffolding where we were stacking the planks to be lowered down by fork lift).

Finally I steeled myself and went out to the very end of the scaffolding where there were only two planks, bent over and picked up one, leaving myself with one, which I slowly pivoted across my body to balance it and myself.  Whereupon I completely froze—too much aware that I was standing about 40 feet off the concrete on one 2 by 6 while attempting to balance another one across my body.

Fortunately, there was a black guy there who had been picking up planks from the other direction.  He saw me and said, “What’s wrong.”  I said I couldn’t move.  “Drop the plank,” he said.  So I did but I still couldn’t move.  “Get down and crawl,” he said.  So on wobbly legs I got down on my knees and crawled.  He gave me a hand up and began to talk about a job he had in Chicago working forty stories up and one guy was pushing a wheelbarrow full to the brim with mud along a two by six and the wheelbarrow started to go and the guy struggled to straighten it and losing his balance tumbled to his death.  “Always let go of the wheelbarrow” the black guy said. 

He had an interesting grin because he had a gold cap all around one of his front teeth, and a piece of the gold was punched out in the shape of a star, so that the white enamel of what was left of his front tooth filled in the star.  I hadn’t seen that before and I haven’t seen it since.

At the end of that week, I got a pink slip.  I had been laid off.

By a couple of months or so after I got home, my parents got the idea I wouldn’t be going any place soon.  I had no prospects and had apparently gone insane.  In the south, there’s a tradition of taking care of insane relatives.  Joe, who came back from the war addled in the head because he had seen all his colleagues fried like so much chicken when their tank blew up, would be stuck back in a room someplace and pretty much left alone, until he died or blew his brains out with a shotgun.

 My brothers had the rooms in the house, one just a kid, and the other in high school.  So the old man decided to build me a room outside the house under the deck that extended from just outside the screen door to the dining room slash tv room.  The deck was kept aloft by block on four sides.  Down below there was a door that went under the deck.  You entered and saw dirt and all kinds of crap thrown under there.  The old man had in any case been thinking of putting in a bit of basement.  So we dug out the leche and poured a footing on two sides and built up walls out of block.  Then because the roof was a bit low, we dug out dirt from the bottom and poured a concrete floor that we painted with a green water retardant paint.

That was my room from the winter of 69 to the fall of 76.  Seven fucking years in the hole, as I like to say.  Seven fucking years like a fat slab of meat ripped straight out of the middle of my life as I lived in a hole with a two windows and a green floor.  The old man never threw anything away.  So I got an old dinner table, stuck my Smith Corona on it and it became my desk. I got a box springs and mattress from the shed out back and that became my bed.  I managed to drill some holes in the block and set up a couple of levels of boards for books shelves.  For closet space I used the room itself and a steamer truck I got for nearly nothing that had shelves and hangers in it for clothes.

I had privacy too.  My door opened out on to the great outdoors, meaning the strip of dirt and fucking ice plant between the parent’s house and the house next door.  If I needed to take a leak I could go down back or through a door in the room to an area under the house with nothing but dirt and junk lying all about and piss in there.

Seven years of piss produced quite a fucking stink.

Lights out, I could hear the mice running around in the rafters and the cockroaches would spread like a hoard down the walls.  These were big, black suckers, long as your thumb and about as thick.  Sometimes, when I was sleeping they got in my hair.  Usually that would wake me up and I got so I could grab them and throw them hard so that in the morning there would be bits of dead cockroach hanging there on the wall.

The shrink was not cheap.  Forty bucks a shot, not chicken feed adjusted for inflation.  So I had to make some money.

The old man got me a job as a brick mason tender.  Mostly I worked with him; I doubt if anybody else would have worked with me. No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t get any faster or put on any muscle.  It was a job from hell, for about a year as I recollect.

A tender is the brick layer’s servant.  You get on the job and the first thing you do is start the cement mixer to mix up a batch of mud.  The worst thing that could happen was the mixer wouldn’t start and then you’d be playing catch up for the rest of the day.  I hated it when that happened.  With the mud going, you started carrying brick to the brick layer.  I used this device that allowed me to pick up ten at a time.  I’d lug them over and he would start putting up the outer shell of the fireplace.  You would continue lugging brick to the spot of the fire place.

After a bit the outer box would be about shoulder high and the bricklayer would go inside to make the firebox.  He usually mixed the mud for that.  Then I had to lug the firebrick inside.  While he was building up the firebox, you would start setting up the scaffolding.  The scaffolding was usually shit, all rusted and covered with concrete.  They you hoisted up three two by sixes for the bricklayer to stand on while he built up the outer shell of the chimney and stuck down the flu and filled in around it (requiring yet more mud).  Then you put up a mud board and heaved mud onto it and the brick layer would come out and start working on the outer shell again.

That was pretty much it; all day long.  Lugging brick, throwing up mud.  To get it to the top level of the scaffolding, I would stand on top of the wheel barrow, one foot on each outer edge and heave the mud up from there; otherwise it was hard to get it up to the top level.  You had to keep an eye on the mud.  When it started to run out, you mixed more.  When he was running short the brick layer would shout, “Mud.  Mud.”  And sometimes, he would shout, too dry, and you would go up with some water and slop it on the mud to make it easier to spread. 

 And when you weren’t lugging brink, or mixing mud, or hoisting it, the bricklayer would have you rake the joints which you did with a joint raker and/or smoother.  This would go on for 8 hours a day, and the next day also for 8 hours, and so forth and so on, endlessly. And as I said, I didn’t get strong.  In fact I got weaker. 

One day I had to work a retaining wall.  Just me, one tender, for three layers.  It was fucking impossible.  I ran my ass off carrying block; these were the whoppers, twenty five pound each.  It was, “Mud, Mud, Mud.” All day.  They had no mercy and since it wasn’t their job, no way they would help.  On the way home, my hands cramped up around the steering wheel.  I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to get my hands off the wheel if I needed to shift.  They had locked right up around the wheel.  It was a weird sensation.  But they loosened up after a bit.

I went to a doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me, but she could find no physical cause for my inability to sleep, my incessant fatigue, my constant desire to cry, my loss of interest in personal hygiene, the aches and pains in my joints, the electrical sensations that ran over my skin, or my weight loss.  I was down to 135 and could count each rib easily.  So she referred me to a psychiatrist.

Dr. Funk.

He prescribed Thorazine after the first or second visit.  Clearly I had a mood disorder.  I cried the whole first visit just at the idea of seeing a shrink.  He said maybe going into the army would make a man out of me.  The guy irritated me.  He was dressed in a nice little grey charcoal suit.  When he leaned back in his chair, his feet left the floor.  I was turning my life over to a fucking midget.

The next time I let him have it.  And went on and on about how his having become a shrink was clearly related to the fact that he was nearly a midget and he was overcompensating, like Napoleon, who also had been hardly five feet high.  And what the hell was I doing turning my life over to an overcompensating midget who had gone into psychiatry so he could have the legal right to tell others how to live their lives.  I mean how the hell did I know if he knew anything at all or not.  Or was just there to make people as miserable as possible.

I cried through the whole tirade, and when I was done, he asked had I considered institutionalizing myself.  My life, at that moment, teetered in the balance. Had I said yes I could have gone on to be a life time member of an institution; instead, I said no, how the fuck, I said, was I going to pay for that.  My working class background came to my rescue, although I must say I don’t know if I knew they would take you in for observation for nothing.

 But I had the prescription for Thorazine.  I visited the psychiatrist every three months or so for a year or better and I renewed the prescription.  I had a line of Thorazine bottles along the windowsill.  I couldn’t stand the stuff.  It was like an atom bomb in your head.  It blew away everything—anger, fear, grief, joy—and replaced it all with an intense sense of restlessness.  I took it only when I couldn’t fucking stand it any more. Fuck me.

But the next time the draft board called me up, as they would every six months for the next couple of years, I took the prescription with me.  They looked at it and said, “Come back in six months.”  I was an official and publicly certified nutcase.

It rained and rained in the winter of 69.  Houses slid down hills; hills slid onto freeways.  A record at the time.  My car battery had died some time before, so I decided to walk the four or five blocks to a Safeway.

 Venice, CA, in the winter of 69 was not a pleasant place to walk.  The canals stank.  The place I went to wash my clothes looked like it had been bombed, with huge holes in the wall and armed rent-a-cops protecting the premises.  Elderly Jews lived there and many minorities. As I walked I passed black men standing in vacant lots warming themselves over fires started in 20 gallon drums.  Black Panthers leaned against the walls of establishments.

I waited and waited for a break in the rain to walk back home; when it let up a little I decided to go, but I hadn’t taken a dozen steps when the paper bag with my goods in it ripped open from the wet.  Hot dogs, break, baloney, macaroni and cheese, and a broken bottle pickle relish.  Milk.  I didn’t have the strength to pick it up.  The bottom fell out of my little universe when the bottom fell out of that bag.

I went to a nearby phone.  I dropped a dime, then a quarter, got my mother on the phone and said I thought maybe I was in mental distress and maybe should come home for a bit.  She said yes come along.

Let’s see.  I was 23 by then.  I had received an NDEA Title Four, Defense Act Loan, to attend UCLA as a graduate student in literature.  It was a sweet deal; the first year you got money, and after that you were guaranteed support for the next three years, usually as a Teaching Assistant.  But by then I had stopped going to class because my car battery had died.  I had screwed up the quarter before and done poorly.

I found it hard to concentrate.  They had changed the rules for the draft.  For a while you got out of the draft if you went to grad school, but then they said you could have only one year of grad school and then you were eligible for the draft.  I had my physical and they said I was eligible.  In a matter of weeks my money from the government for that quarter would give out.  And that would pretty much be all she wrote.

I can still see that parking lot in my head.  The pay phone, shopping carts scattered around.  Maybe I had gone unconsciously to the grocery store to get to a phone; I didn’t have one in my place because phones cost money.

In the winter of ’69 it rained a record at the time; houses slid down hills; hills slid onto the freeways.  The ants came marching in making patterns across my kitchen floor.

One morning in December I was up by 5 because I had been called by the army for a physical.  I had to be there at 630; I got up so early because the windshield wipers on my car didn’t work, and it was raining.  No way I could take the freeway, so I mapped out the trip on side streets.  I drove very slowly sometimes sticking my head out in the rain to see what was in front of me and through a narrow space down on the left side of the windshield where the swilling water left a clear spot about the size of a stamp.  I arrived on time a nervous wreck.

We were told to take off our clothes, stow them in a locker, and to place our valuables in a little bag we carried around with us.  So there were all were walking around in our underwear following a yellow arrow drawn on the floor from one station to another where they checked our blood and our eyes and our ears and had us all bend over and this one guy came around and said spread your cheeks and you did and he stuck his fucking finger up your ass.

This was the LA draft board, they accepted anybody.  The guy in front of me had marked down that he had TB and was a drug addict.  The doctor looked at the paper work, asked him to touch his toes, which he did, and the guy said, “You’ll do.”

At one station we had to pee into a little bottle for a urine sample.  Fifty of us all standing around peeing into little bottles.  But I couldn’t pee.  I was in a panic wanting to pee.  But the more I panicked the less I could pee.  Finally, another group had to come in and I left without peeing.  At the last station of the day they checked my paper work and the guys said, “You didn’t pee.”  I said that I had really tried but couldn’t pee.  Apparently I was not the only one who had suffered this problem, because he said, there’s a john around the corner, go in there in pee.

So I went into the john and closed the door and sat down on the toilet because I felt I might shit too.  Also I was tired and wanted to shit.  I still had trouble peeing. As I am sitting there with my drawers around my ankles still struggling to pee,  The door swings up and this guy in uniform takes a look at me and says, “Fucking Shit!” and slams the door.

I can’t today even fathom the degree of shame and humiliation I felt that day at my inability to pee.  Eventually, I peed.  I apologized because it wasn’t very much.  He said it was enough.  A month or so later, I officially received my 1-A making me officially eligible for the draft at the moment my year in graduate school was over.  But it seemed to me that there were a god in the heavens, he would have been standing there and given a 4-F to anybody who couldn’t pee on demand.

We are not free.  Just because our minds run around like rats in a cage—doesn’t make us free.  As much as I might wish to expunge or expel the old man, he is stuck to me every where.  It’s as if I have little pieces of Velcro all over me and the old man just sticks to them.  I pull off little pieces of him and I turn around and they are stuck to me all over again.  Like those little thistles that used to get in my socks and I would pull them out, take two steps, and they would be right back.  As if I had my own particular species of flea that lives only on me and won’t go away till I cease to exist as an environment.

I think of those baby ducks that imprint on the first thing that walks by after they come out of their eggs.  If a cat walks by, they will imprint on it and the cat will have a host of little ducks following it around.  The same with a boy baby and his father; I just imprinted.

I wear a hat and have for years.  Hardly anybody wears a hat where I work and when people ask why I wear a hat I say my dermatologist told me to.  But really I wear a hat because my father wore one, as he was out in the sun all day.  I also for years have carried a thermos with my coffee in it; I always have a Stanley thermos because that was the kind of thermos my old man preferred with his coffee in it.  People ask me to do lunch, but I bring my lunch to work with me in a paper bag.  I don’t understand doing lunch.

Also I am a workaholic.  That’s all I know how to do.  If I am not working or producing in some way, I pretty much am not.  That’s all he did all his life.  Work. What do they say—work, it was his raison d’être. He started at 8; his father found him messing around when his mother had told him to do something, and the father said, if you are old enough to disobey your mother you are old enough to work, and gave him a bucket to carry water to workers in the field.  He did not graduate from high school till he was 21 because if you missed more than a month of school you had to repeat the class.  They had that rule to keep parents from keeping their kids at home on the farm so they could work them.  He studied by gas lamp till they got some electricity from the TVA.

I smoke and have smoked for 40 years.  I expect it will kill me.  My father smoked.  For some reason, I was his son, and my brother was my mother’s son.  So when we drove anywhere, I had to sit in the seat behind him and my brother sat in the seat behind my mother.  The smoke would blow back in my face.  I remember disliking it.  But when I bought my first pack, it was like I knew exactly what I was doing just like those damn ducks following a cat around.

The old man was a good brick layer.  He was old school too.  They are not necessarily the same.  As a good brick layer, the old man knew how to lay brick.  He was a good technician and could read blue prints; most bricklayers can’t.  On any job back then with more than three brick layers on it, one had to be made foreman by union contract.  That was the old man.  He would get the job going by building up the corners of the wall or whatever it was; if the corners aren’t built up properly the wall might lean one way or the other or simply fall over.  He knew how to make the whole thing plum.  On really big jobs a lot of his work was building up the corners.

But he was old school too.  Unlike the newer generation of bricklayers he did not steal from the job; they would drive off in their little trucks playing heavy metal with sand, brick, concrete, flues—since the boss had fucked them, which he regularly did, they would fuck him back.  But the old man being old school bent over the other way.  As the foreman on the job, he was supposed to get 25 cents or 50 cents an hour above scale.  But if he was foreman on a job for a couple of days of a week, and he didn’t find that time paid for on his check, he wouldn’t say anything to the boss.  His way of getting ahead was to take abuse.

 The new guys would arrive on the job at 730, unload their tools, get set up and actually start working at 8.  The old man would arrive at 7 and be at work by 730.  Also the young guys would start laying off, cleaning their tools, washing their hands, twenty minutes before 430.  The old man would work right up till 430 and then clean up his tools and head home.

A couple of times he was foreman on really huge jobs, like building a bunch of barracks and out buildings for the Marines.  A government job was always agood job since the government was so wasteful.  But the old man was not a good foreman.  He would almost have a nervous breakdown and around the house he would get positively dangerous.  The boss would put pressure on him to keep on schedule (otherwise they might lose money) and he would go around blowing his top and squawking like an old lady at the men for not double-timing it.  The fussing around and cussing and throwing things and kicking the dirt and throwing his hat on the ground stuff didn’t work outside his family.  So after a while the boss didn’t make him foreman on those jobs anymore.

The old man wasn’t a man’s man.  He didn’t know how to talk to the guys; he didn’t go out for a drink with them, not even on Friday evening.  He was pussy whipped.  Anybody could tell.

Sometime in college, I remember I had to read O’Neil’s “A Long Day’s Journey into Night.”  Or is that the title of a novel by Celine, “A Day’s Long Journey into Night.”  I don’t remember but the play was about O’Neil’s family, and they were one screwed up bunch, and I can remember the afternoon I read it.  It was spring, and pretty warm, and I was lying out on the grass, and when I was done with that play I could have just stuck my face in the grass and started eating dirt, because that fucking play flat out depressed me.

While they had more money and a lot more style, O’Neil’s family reminded me of my own, thought my father was a teetotaler, but I guess I mostly was fascinated by the behavior of O’Neil’s mother and mine.  I don’t remember, but I think O’Neil’s mother was a dope head or ether addict—No, wait, TS Eliot’s wife was a ether head--; but she was in and out, you know, there and not there—inconsistent—one of the worst things that can happen to a child.  You just don’t know what the fuck is going to happen. 

I would come in from school and just stand there by the front door. Listening. If I didn’t hear anything that meant the old lady was taking one of her afternoon naps.  And believe you me, I did not WANT TO WAKE HER UP!  If you did, you had no idea what sort of crap you might walk into.  My mother wasn’t an addict, but she was screwed up.  But she didn’t think so.  Yea, she was sick maybe; she was a hypochondriac and once had 3 of the 4 signs of a fatal pituitary ailment, the last one being open and suppurating sores upon the body.

So after years of fucking with the union health plan, she finally got an appointment with the absolute best brain guy in the whole damn county.  A neurologist maybe, or an endocrinologist.  All of her files were shipped to him.  He came into the office, slapped the massive pile of paper work down on the desk, said, lady, you need to see a psychiatrist.

When the old lady told me what happened, I was fucking spitefully gleeful, like I hadn’t been saying that for lord knows how long; and I could have gone into a fucking told you so, except that all the color had gone out of her face and there were two bright red spots on her cheeks.  I thought maybe she was going to have a heart attack.  But I did suggest maybe she should see a shrink, but she said she just wanted a pill, some sort of pill to help her stop hurting, and then she started into bawling.

Honestly, I didn’t get it.  I mean if you take a pill for it; it’s something wrong with your brain and not wrong with you?  How do you separate your brain from you and still be you.  So as far as she was concerned she had a physical complaint; there was nothing wrong with her, even though the physical complaint was in her mind.  I still don’t get it. Or maybe she really didn’t care whether it was mental or physical—all she wanted was a pill.

Who doesn’t?

School was OK by me..  I was out of the house nearly 8 hours a day and that was terrific.  And since I did well at it, I got positive vibes every now and again from a teacher, and my doing well in school seemed to please the old lady.  So she set a priority on home work.  About the only way, I could get out of working on one of those jobs or chores with my father on the weekend was to say I had a paper to write or a test coming up and that I had to write or to study.

I milked the study thing for all was worth.  I always lied about my grades so my mother would think I was doing worse than I was and that meant in turn that I would have to study more and more.  Mostly, I didn’t study.  I would stick a novel inside a magazine and I would put my feet up on the desk and read what I wanted to read.  I guess had I been a social kid with friends and stuff to do this study routine would have seemed crazy.  But I was already developing an anti-social—leave me alone and don’t bother me, shithead—attitude.

But when it came to writing a paper, I had to write one, and the old lady would insist on getting her two cent’s worth in since she was the official family grammarian and the only person in the whole household who spoke English correctly.  God, whole Sunday afternoons, would go up in flames, as we fought back and forth about whether I should change this word or this phrase or not. Mostly, I didn’t want to change a fucking thing. This was back when people had typewriters and I typed on something called erasable bond which meant you could erase some of the words, though it looked like shit when you did so…

The old lady would tell me to change things, and later she would demand to see the paper and she would see I hadn’t changed all the things she had said I should change.  And then I would have to go back to the room until I did change it.  We like locked horns.  And it just went on and on.  I considered her suggestions for changes picky, picuyne, and pee-dantic.  Though she would catch some of my spelling errors and those I usually changed.

 And she would get all upset and make me feel awful by suggesting I was stubborn and that I was resisting only to upset her and didn’t I understand she was only trying to help and what was wrong with me that I persisted in refusing her assistance, and so on and so forth.  And then she would go to her bedroom and take a nap.  She took one of them every day and on other occasions when she got upset and started crying, which was frequently.  So usually, I ended up making the changes because I didn’t want to sit there in the bedroom and feel bad about having driven her to take a nap.

The woman had pieces of kleenex sticking out all over on her person.  Little balled up pieces of kleenex.  You’d find them dropped all around the house.

Also, she was constipated all the time.  She would disappear for hours into her little, private, half-bath that nobody could use without special permission.  She went with her sister, when her sister made money selling real estate, to England to visit the place where their mother had been born, in Dorset, I think, and she got so constipated they had to put her in a hospital.  Somehow, in there, they got her to shit.

Back in SC, after his attempt to grow cotton with a mule had proved futile, the old man worked for a man named AY, doing pretty much whatever AY said, like digging ditches, or roofing, or framing, or laying block or brick, or pouring concrete, or fixing plumbing or whatever needed doing by way of construction.  The old man always had this old black man as his helper.  I forget his name, but if the old man treated him the way he treated me, I would have killed him.

 For some reason, he just had to have somebody with him when he was working on something.  So it would be, Nick, Nick, your father wants you!  And he would be out in the washroom trying to fix the dryer the barrel of which had come lose or something.  He would hand me a flash light and I would have to turn it this way and that so he could see, and then he would cuss me if I got bored and missed the spot.

Then, it would be, he wanted some tool or other.  If you have ever been around tools, you know there are an amazing number of them and they all have different names.  So it would be: go get me (vice grips, pliers, channel locks).  I would be afraid because he would cuss me, and I would go out and look for vice grips, pliers, channel locks, even though I wasn’t sure if I knew what it was or not.  Then I would come back in and, say I couldn’t find it, and he would say, well it must be in the back of the truck then, because every thing in the fucking universe seemed to end up in the back of that truck.

The back of the truck contained a tool chest—a metal box actually—about six feet long and four deep—and filled to the brim with stuff, tools, and bits of paper, and all of it wrapped up in pieces of twine.  You could grab a piece of twine and pull out any manner of stuff attached to it: hammers, blades for cutting brick and block, screw drivers, socket wrenches, little pieces of metal bricklayers use to link brick or block together, trowels of different kinds, joiners, joint rakers, and plum bobs.  My heart would just go out of me looking at that mess; how was I going to find a pair of vice grips, pliers or channel locks in all that shit, even if I knew what they were.

The relief I felt when I found something was palpable, but sometimes and he would say he meant something else and make like had misheard him or something.  And there was the always immortal, where the fuck is that screw driver, goddammotherfuckingsonofabitch, and, of course he would be sitting right on it. None of which, held a candle to the pure outrageousness of his mashing his fingers while working on an engine and then his throwing the tool across the street or down in the bushes in the backyard, and I would have to go fetch it.

 I figure there are a couple of things in life a man should be prepared to do for himself: wipe his own ass and go get the tool he has thrown into the bushes.  Sure he was my father and he fed me and such, but so the fucking what?  Was I supposed to be happy that he wasn’t a fucking alcoholic or gambling addict? Above all else in life a person is first and foremost a person, and as one of those my father was a dickhead.