Month: April 2006

Venice

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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.

 black panterVenice, 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.

Winter of 69

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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.

report for physicalOne 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 onereakdown guy came around and said spread your cheeks and you did and he stuck his fucking finger up your ass.s b

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.

Imprinting

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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.

Old School

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The old man was a good brick layer.  He was old school too.  They are not necessarily the same.  brick leadAs a good brick layer, the old man knew how to lay brick.  He was a good technician and could read blue prints; most kkbricklayers 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.

A Long Journey of Some Sort

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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 play flat out depressed me.

While they had more money and a lot more style, O’Neil’s family reminded me of my own, though 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’s 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 messing 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 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?

Kleenex

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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 damn 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.

Fetch!

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Back in SC, after his attempt to grow cotton with a mule had proved futile, the old man worked for a pliersman 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  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,channel locks 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 I 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 what?  Was I supposed to be happy that he wasn’t an 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.