Category Archives: Adolescence

The old man was no philosopher King.  Once they were on my ass about something I had done or hadn’t done or did and shouldn’t have.  Lord knows what.  But they could make a guy crazy, so this time, I don’t know why, I launched into my existentialism trip and started neurotically nattering on about what was the point of it all, sure you do this, so you can do that, and then you get a job and work till you die, and could they tell me what the point of all that was.  Was the point simply to do whatever came next?  Whereupon or thereabouts the old man put his hands over his ears—like the hear no evil monkey—and said, I can’t think about this shit.  If I had a shotgun right now I would shoot myself.

And let me tell you what, more than once I wished I had a shotgun to give him to see if he was as good as his word.

 When I read Waiting for Godot I decided that Beckett must have been in our house or lived in some stinking suburb in sunny SoCal.  Where nothing fucking ever happens.  Instead people plant lawns—can you believe it—and then the grass grows—well, what do you fucking expect—and when it gets TOO long—whatever the fuck that may be– and then you fucking actually CUT the lawn—in my case with a totally non-powered push lawn mower—so that it is the RIGHT LENGTH—and then the fucking shit GROWS RIGHT BACK.  And sweet god in heaven, you have to cut it again, and again, and again endlessly until you or the fucking lawn dies, whichever comes first.

Whoever thought of the so-called lawn was fucking insane or had a lot of servants to do his dirty work.  Because not only was I required to cut that little piece of fucking shit assed lawn, I had to pick up the DOG poop from it.  I hated to pick up that fucking dog poop.  Keeping a dog in a tiny little lawn area is another idea dreamed up by some fucking stupid person.  Where else then is the fucking dog going to poop but on the fucking insane lawn?  I ask.  And you have to pick it up because the DOG poop actually kills the grass.  And if you have a female dog, her piss will kill the grass.

And then in the winter, the lawn would die out, after all my work, mostly of its own accord, and I would let the poop just sit there till sometimes it became covered with green fungus.  There’s no sight quite like green fungus on dog poop on a dead lawn.  Our neighbors had a better idea.  They had a dog but they didn’t have a lawn out back—like us civilized people; they just had dirt and in the middle of that dirt they had driven a spike and attached to that spike was a chain about twenty feet long and attached to the other end of the chain was their dog.  A bull dog.

It would lie around in the dirt sleeping or licking its own ass.  And every once in a while it would walk to the end of its chain, point its asshole away from the spike and poop.  I would look over the fence and see in our neighbor’s backyard a perfect circle of dog poop.  It was quite amazing, that circle of dog poop.  That dog knew his geometry.

Our little bit of California was called Casa De Ora. That wasn’t the official postal name but that’s what we called it.  Back in the 20’s they had tried to put a tract out there.  You could still see the layout for streets, and as you drove towards where the tract was supposed to be, on both sides of the roads were brown turd like mounds of plaster of paris with the words Casa De              Ora spelled out on them in gold lettering.  I guess they were supposed to suggest a gateway into Casa De            Ora.

Just beyond the gates, stores had sprung up on both sides of the road.  The stores were set back from the road leaving a dirt area for a person to park his car in front of the store whatever it was: a couple of gas stations, a bar, a drugstore, a barber shop, another bar, an independent market, a car mechanics place, and later on the Hires root beer barrel.  The root beer barrel was made out of metal, shaped like a barrel,  painted to look like a barrel and about ten feet high.  The root beer barrel didn’t last as a root beer barrel for very long.  Next,  it was a chicken barrel, and then a fish and chips barrel, and finally, before it was torn down, it was for a long time a Mexican food barrel.

The houses on our street that headed up the side of the hill had all been independently built.  No tract homes, one looking like the other.  You figured that people who had come out our way to live—and we were the boonies back then—either didn’t have much money or were attempting to escape their past.  In some cases, I think both.  Half of the deep south seemed to have moved out our way, to where they could have a little “elbow room,” that being very important, and a little bit of land on which to recreate the southern lifestyle.

Peope kept big gardens, and sometimes livestock, pigs and an occasional cow.  Chickens too, but they were frowned upon because of the racket.  People stuck up “out buildings,” a tradition in the south. We had outbuildings and also collected cars down back as was also a southern tradition. At one point, we had three cars out back with anis weed growing all around them.

But one day, this man in a uniform came to our door. He said he was from health and sanitation and showed us his papers.  He said we had to get rid of the cars out back.  Something about this guy annoyed me, so I said, “Why.”  Because vermin might be growing there, he said.  Vermin? I said, are you talking about rats.  Because I have never seen a single rat down there.

The guy didn’t look at me but handed a warning citation to the old man. As the guy walked back up towards the road I said as loudly as I could without yelling, “Vermin! I haven’t seen any damn vermin down there!” But the old man and the old lady sort of slunk off; I think they were embarrassed.

I don’t know why I wasn’t.  I thought it was funny, and the guy had pissed me off by using the word vermin when he meant “rats.”  The dark shadow of civilization in the form of bureacratic double speak had just passed over the area.

Fuckers.

Besides Miss Tuttle, the other teacher who seemed to feel I could write was Mr. Moore, my senior English teacher.  He never said he thought I could write, but he did nominate me for that national essay contest for high school seniors.   So maybe I can infer something from that.

He was a thin little man who wore sweaters and a bow tie, and like Miss Tuttle, who had gone to Columbia, Mr. Moore was east coast educated having been graduated from Princeton.  He was a Captain in the Army in WWII and came back changed.  This may explain his having ended up at a teacher at a nowhere high school in California.  Or it could have been his drinking problem that started after the war.

Still, he rode me about my writing and graded me harder than anyone because he knew I was going to college.  I remember getting a B+ on a long research paper.  I had worked hard on that baby.  It was supposed to be on some historical figure; so my colleagues, lacking any imagination, wrote about Washington or Florence Nightingale or Madame Curry.  I wrote about Titus Oates, 17^th century perjurer and sodomite, a man who according to a poll of British Historians was the “worst Briton of the 17^th century.”

Maybe Mr. Moore thought I was being a wise ass by picking Titus Oates, but the name alone was enough to fascinate me, and I had come upon my interest legitimately.  I had been perusing one of the volumes of our 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and came across the final lines of an entry that read, something like, whereupon he lived out the rest of his years in the country where his house became known for unholy and unnatural acts.  I wanted to know more about this person and so first familiarized myself with Titus Oates and the gun power plot I believe it was called.

Titus started his career of crime by being dismissed from the Anglican clergy for blasphemous drunkenness and suspicion of sodomy. He established himself as a world class lier by concocting a whole series of lies suggesting that Catholics had intentions upon the throne and was first rewarded for his efforts with a 600 pound pension.  Later, when power shifted, he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to repeated floggings that should have killed him.  But they didn’t; whereupon part of his pension was restored, following a legal action, and he retired to the country to continue his unnatural doings.

So maybe I was being a bit of a wise ass.

Mr. Moore’s class also furnished me one of the few high school moments that I remember with any warmth.  One Monday morning he turned to us and said, “And just who the heck are these Beatles.”  This was in many ways an unprecedented moment.  I don’t recollect a teacher ever having asked his students a real question,  who asked it moreover in a spirit of curiosity and out of a desire to learn something about the lives of his students.  We sat more or less dumbfounded.  I could see he was going to let the question drop, but since it was my job in that class to answer all questions nobody else would or could, I raised my hand and said, “The best rock and roll band ever.”

Maybe, really, it’s no big deal.  As that horrible song said, we are all just dust in the wind.  Or as that Dawkins—not Darryl, that was Chocolate Thunder—says we are just big watery bags that exist solely that genes may replicate themselves.  I don’t know, if I am gene, I would find some simpler way to recreate myself than by using great watery bags that, on top of everything else, have the curse of consciousness.  So maybe there is no purpose, or maybe there is one but we can’t see it.  I don’t know.  But some people seem a lot more purposeful than others.

 Rosco (short for a long Polish surname) was among the latter.  I don’t know how I got to know him exactly.  He was a year ahead of me in school, but he lived close by on the other side of the hill.  I guess he liked me because he would come over and just appear in our little front yard sitting on a wall right outside the front room window.  He never called ahead and when he arrived he didn’t knock either, but somebody was always passing by that window and they would see Rosco out there, and yell, Nick, Rosco is here.

 I would go out and there Rosco would be.  I didn’t know why he was there exactly and it didn’t help any that he gave the appearance of a stray balloon that had decided to settle in our front yard.  Rosco was taller than me and rounded all over.  He had a round head and a round bland face that didn’t show anything if there was anything to show beyond that bland face.  He wasn’t retarded or anything; he just gave off the impression that he didn’t know where or why he was.

I mean when he came over we never did anything.  Be damned, if I was going to ask him in the house, because then I would never get rid of him.  I would ask him how he was, and he would say he was fine or he had just eaten dinner.  And then I’d ask him what he had eaten for dinner, and it would be like, nothing special.  Trying to get him to talk was like pulling teeth, so then I would launch into talking for maybe 10 or 20 minutes straight and I would get the feeling I was going to pass out because it felt as if, talking to him, I were trying to inflate, or keep from deflating, some giant swimming pool apparatus.  After I had talked myself into torpor, I would say I had to study or something and he would go off just as he had come.

Once or twice maybe I went over to Rosco’s house.  He had a couple of younger brothers who were not rounded.  I went over only when Mr. Rosco was not there.  I got the feeling Mr. Rosco scared the Brothers Rosco shitless.  We would go down to their huge basement, and we would hear their mother playing piano music upstairs.  She was always playing the piano.

Downstairs in that basement, as Rosco said, they had everything necessary to re-create the world.  They had machines and tools of all kinds.  They had a big kiln for making pottery and expensive machine tools—I mean the kind of tools that are used to create the parts for other tools, like milling tools, I think they are called, and another machine that made screws.

And at the back of the basement was a really big door with a lock on it.  One day Rosco decided to open it for me; you could see doing that made the younger brothers nervous, like they weren’t supposed to or maybe what was inside made them nervous because, while there was space for people, it was filled with supplies, food and water and everything wrapped in a kind of paper (oil paper maybe) I had never seen, and at the very back of that a row of rifles all strung together with a chain and locked up.  We can’t touch the rifles, Rosco said, as if I were just dying to touch their rifles.

And as I was leaving they showed me around the side of the house a regular big old garbage truck that their father had bought and was remodeling and reinforcing with extra layers of metal so that after the bomb had gone off they would have something to ride around in.

I made up this little story to explain things to myself.  Mr. Rosco had been in the military in Poland and had killed people and seen people killed in World War 2 and knew how people could kill each other.  He had seen masses of bodies piled high.  Maybe he was a Nazi and he had come to America with his young bride, who bore him three sons, and then went insane and played the piano all the time.  And then he set about preparing himself and his sons for the day when everything, but them, would end.

Maybe the little story helped to explain Rosco to me or maybe what I had seen scared me and I needed a little story to explain that.  It got so I just dreaded hearing somebody yell, Nick, Rosco’s here.

Being that my father was a farmer, albeit a rank failure as one, maybe I inherited some man of the soil genes because starting in junior high and through high school and later when I was living in the green room, I was appointed keeper of the family garden.  We had a whole .5 acre down back, so the garden wasn’t exactly a modest affair.

I would start preparing the soil in March when it would be all clumped and hard to work from the rains.  That dirt had a lot of clay in it, but I would turn it over and then make a trip to the chicken shit place and dump the chicken shit all over what I had turned.  In early April the soil dried and became workable.

I planted zucchini and corn seeds, and being a worried wart, I was all the time coming to see if they were coming up or not.  Cause if they didn’t come up when they were supposed to the timing might be off for the summer heat.  So one evening I am sitting there admiring my handy work, and  right before my eyes the finely worked earth around a young and healthy look zucchini bud starts to move and then the whole zucchini disappeared right before my eyes.

Fucking gophers!

I had tried about everything to tame them except poison, not because I was ecologically conscious but because I didn’t want to take the risk of poisoning my self some how.  I had tried the various folk methods.  I stuck hoses in their holes and ran water for hours but to no avail.  Once the area behind the garden sank down and once the water went into a neighbor’s yard.  Then I did the thing with car flares, and went around sticking them in the holes till it looked like the backyard was about to become a volcano.

 The only thing that really “worked” or seemed to produce concrete results was a gopher trap.  So seeing my zucchini disappear I went out and bought a new one.  It looked like a rat trap, though much bigger, and had teeth designed to clamp down and break the gopher’s neck.  I was careful with those damn things.   You’d put some cheese or something on it as bait and then jam the trap as far as you could in a hole, and then come out the next morning, pull the thing out by its chain and see if you’d had any luck.

I swear that particular summer I was like the Great White Hunter of Gophers.  Every morning I hooked something.  I would pry open the jaws and throw the corpse over into our neighbor’s back yard which was all covered with weeds.  I mean they wouldn’t notice it.  Then one day I pulled out the Moby Dick of gophers. This sucker was huge and it had reddish head hair and a reddish tuff beard just like me and the fucker wasn’t dead.

So I went and got a two pound hammer out of the back of the truck, and there I am about to perform the coup de grace when my little brother comes up and goes on, Is it still alive?  Are you going to kill it with that hammer?  Are you going to hit on the head? You know it looks like you? And I just sort of blew and said, would you get the fuck out of here, goddamn it to hell.  And—wham–as he walked off, looking hurt, I splattered the things head.

I apologized to my brother and said I don’t know why but I just got angry for some reason maybe because I felt hoisted on my own petard.

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 remember 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.