My Feminism

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 femistbuttonsunclear 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 mendacity 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 screwed 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.

Sore Feet

As assistant manager in training, my beat was the basement of the Newberry’s Department Store.  electroshockvpBy 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 hell 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 crappy.  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, looking 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?

A Big Yellow Streak

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 another dimension of life as perpetually “fucked up.”

A Career Move

As long as I was draft eligible, no employer with what might be called career jobs was going to look mission valley2at 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 sororities; 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,  “When do I start?”

The End of Reason

lottery

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.

Sisyphus Chokes the Chicken

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.

gate

 

 

Gold Tooth

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.

unioncardThese 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.

Green Room

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.

 space organizerMy 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.

Mud!!!

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.

Funk

I went to a doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me, but she could find no physical cause thorazinefor 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.