Category Archives: Adolescence

Yes Sir, No Sir, Thank You Mam, Please

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Yes Sir, no Sir, thank you Mam, please. 

A proper southern boy was taught to address folks in particular ways.   Being the eternally curious boy I was I asked why and was told that saying sir and mam was a way to show respect to my elders.  The next time I happened to be introduced to another little boy, I asked him how old he was, and since he was a year older than I, I addressed him as sir, since he was my elder. My parents told me to stop it.  I knew of course what I was doing; I was being aggravting, bordering on insolance.  They knew I knew that’s not what they had meant.

So they tried to define elder which ended up being impossible; and then I asked should I say “sir” to a criminal since such a person might be older but not worthy of respect.  Intelligence is a mixed blessing.  Half the time—more than that probably—that they thought I was being insolent, I was really asking a question that they couldn’t answer because there wasn’t an answer, except “because I say so.”  I got that one a lot, and “you will know when you are an adult.”

 I don’t think on this particular occasion that I was in a bad mood. Thought it might have been my second year in high school when I was always in a bad mood.  I recollect having been really quite abstracted, off in my own mind someplace.

We were at the dinner table.  I sat at one end, as the number 1 son, and the old man sat opposite; and my mother and my youngest brother still in his high chair sat on one side and the two other brothers on the other side.  Usually Popeye the Sailor Man was on TV. The way the room was shaped and sitting where I sat, the damn TV was directly behind me and I couldn’t see it at all.  But the old man looking over my shoulder could see what Olive Oil, Wimpy and the rest of the gang were up to.

 My father asked me to pass him something.  Like the salt.  So I did, and as far as I was concerned that was over with.  But then the old lady said, “Say Sir to your father.”  What the hell was her problem?  I couldn’t remember having said anything at all; had I said yes with out the sir.  I felt sort of startled like you do when somebody sneaks up behind you and makes a noise and you jump.  It was like out of nowhere….

 And I found myself saying, “I don’t say sir….”  And about there I knew what I was going to say and I decided to say it all….”to people I don’t respect.”  Things would just come over me sometimes.

 So the old man started huffing and puffing and banging his fists on the table and looking like one of those cartoon creatures with smoke coming out of its nose and ears, and then he stood up and lifted the whole table about up to his neck and slammed it down again.  So my favorite meal ended up flying every whichaway and mostly into my lap.  Pork chops with minute rice and gravy and an iceberg lettuce salad with some sort of fucking vegatable out of a can.  If you really want to turn kids off to their veggies, be sure to serve them out of a can.

 I don’t know what happened after that.  The old lady started bawling of course and the two young brothers too.  But I didn’t get hit because this was after the time they had decided to stop beating me.  Probably I was sent to my room and deprived of my one pathetic hour of TV viewing.  Like missing Mannix was going to kill me.

Probably there’s no excuse for what I said except maybe for the fact I was telling the truth.  I had thought about it long and hard and concluded that the old man, while my elder, was not worthy of my respect and thus did not warrant a “Sir.”

My Aim Is True

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“Authorities report that Jeffry Trent Bit killed his mother, his father, and his brothers while they slept.  Each was killed with a single arrow in the heart.  Neighbors expressed surprised.  “He was such a good boy,” one neighbor said “He was a model student,” said another.  Bit was a straight A student, an Eagle Scout, the leader of his Church Youth Group, a semi-finalist in the state wide spelling bee, an all league player in football, and an Olympic Quality Archer.   Although injured in several places, Bit’s attempts to kill himself with a bow and arrow proved futile.”

 When I come across a story like that I, depending upon the morbidity of my mood, either turn quickly to another page or read all the lurid details.  I passed a good deal of time in my sophomore and junior years in high school having fanaticizes about killing my parents.  Actually, it was pretty much the same fantasy.  For some reason, unknown to me, the massacre always happened in the kitchen.  My parents would be bound and gagged.  The fantasy did not include how I bound and gagged them; they came in fantasy land prepackaged for massacre.

 First I would cut mother’s throat.  She would bleed out, as it were, while slumped against our pea green refrigerator.  The idea was that the old man might suffer even more if he saw his wife dying.  So then I would cut his throat, and he would slump up against the cabinets under the kitchen sink.

 While entertaining these fantasies, my blood pressure would go up; I would begin to sweat.  Sometimes though I would get all hung up and the fantasy would go bad because I couldn’t figure out which of them I wanted to suffer more and thus I couldn’t figure out which one to kill first so that the other one would have to suffer the death of the other.  My reason with its attempt to calculate pain would get in the way and the fantasy would pop like a worn balloon.

 I don’t know why I didn’t carry out the fantasy.  Thank goodness we had no guns in the house.  And I didn’t have a bow and arrow either.  I didn’t fit the profile.  I wasn’t a straight A student; I was an atheist; I spelled poorly; I played varsity basketball but was not all league, and I wasn’t an Eagle Scout.  I was a “Life” Scout; that’s the one before Eagle, but I never got Eagle because I couldn’t swim well enough to get the “Life Saver” merit badge.

 I was imperfect.

Gopher Ball

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The opening day in my Little League featured each team in the league playing an inning.  So all the players from all the teams were there; a lot of parents showed up, and there was bunting and such stuck in the chain link.  My second year with the Rams my coach said I would pitch the first half of the first inning against some team.  I was a bit PO-ed because I figured that meant his son would start our first real game.  He had started grooming his son for the job, so that we would have 3 strong pitchers rather than the 2 we had the year before (me and another guy).

I could see the writing on the wall; less starts for me.  That meant I would be sitting more on my butt on the pine because I was a rare thing for Little League.  I was a pure pitcher; i.e. I couldn’t do anything else.  Usually guys who pitch in Little League are good athletes and play some other position when they don’t pitch.  But not me.  I pitched and I batted ninth.

I was a little pissed off and didn’t feel entirely honored to get the job of pitching the first inning of an exhibition game.  So I decided I would have some fun with it and take the opportunity to practice my gopher ball; this involved a long stretch towards home, and I would swing my arm so low that my knuckles would sometimes graze the ground.  With the proper spin the ball would go straight up, curve down, and drop right on home plate or right behind it.  It was a pure junk pitch and slow as molasses.  You could light up your cigarette and take a drag in the time it took that thing to get from me to home plate.

So I pitched a gopher to the first guy and he swung and missed.  I struck the guy out, and then I started out on the next guy with a gopher and adults in the stands began to boo.  I was amazed; they were actually booing.  I was stoked.  Fuck the fuckers, I thought.  I was pitching a legal pitch; I wasn’t pitching underhand.  I was breaking my wrist and the umpire could see that.  So if they thought I was throwing a pansy pitch, let their little Johnny prove it by knocking it out of the park.

I struck out the next little fucker too on a straight diet of gophers; and the last one hit a one bouncer that even I could handle.  Three up.  Three down.  And nobody was booing when I walked off.

Hell, I was the most fun they had all day.

I laughed about that one inside all the way home on my bike.

The Scissors Incident

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 While the old man gave up whacking me with coat hangers and broom handles when I was in Junior High, he did not entirely give up all forms of physical harassment and/or intimidation.  He developed what I call the bull rush; he would lower his head like a bull and rush me.  No hands were involved, just his shoulder.  He would lower it and slam into my chest knocking me backwards, sometimes into the wall.

On one occasion, I must have said something—it was always a matter of my saying something, not doing something like burning down the house—and as he rushed me my mother, in a rather calm voice actually, said clearly so my father was sure to hear, “Look out, Bill.  He has a pair of scissors.”

 The old man drew up abruptly because, sure enough, I had a pair of scissors in my hand.  I clicked the scissors together a couple of times, looked him in the eye, and headed on down the corridor.  I felt sort of cold inside.

What had my mother been getting at with her warning?  I thought a great deal at that time about killing both of my parents, so perhaps, I reasoned, she was alerting Bill to the fact that I was holding a potential weapon that under the duress of the moment I might wield in an intentional manner.  Or perhaps she was just warning Bill that some accident might occur because I had a pair of scissors in my hand.

I have wondered about this incident and still feel a bit cold when I think of it because, I believe, of its Oedipal Implications.  She, the mother whom the male child wishes to possess as his own, had not warned me, her suitor, as it were, but him, Bill, her husband.  I had apparently failed to conquer the father in her affections in spite of all the efforts I had made to win her over to my side.  I had tried hard in this direction because of her apparently universal misery and also because she was the stick that stirred the drink.  She was the one who usually incited my father against me; she was, as it were, his co-conspirator in my increasingly paranoid universe.

 Penis equals scissors.

Scissors cut off penis.

 I can’t figure it out; it’s too complicated.  I know years later, when I asked a young woman had she really ever felt the urge to murder someone and she said yes, I thought I had found my soul mate.

Pitching Solitary

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Pitching Solitare

 One day, after we got to CA, I was wandering around the neighborhood and came upon a baseball field.  Kids were playing with adults and I saw that the following week Little Leagure tryouts would be held.  As part of my never ending attempt to get out of the house, I tried out and got on a team mostly because they took everybody.

 I had never played the game before and quickly learned a) that I could not hit the ball, and b) if I accidently did, it didn’t go anywhere, and c) I was afraid of being hit by the ball, and d) I couldn’t catch a fly ball, and e) I could hardly throw from third to first.  But I was undeterred;  I was reading baseball fictions for kids and even some histories of baseball teams, and I watched parts of games on Saturday with Dizzy Dean as the announcer.

 Because I knew my limitations and faced them squarely, I decided that the only way I would play on a team would be to become a pitcher.  I had observed that pitchers lost when they could not get the ball across the plate and walked everybody.  So in the backyard, I drew a square on the block wall about shoulder high for a little leaguer and went out back and threw the ball over and over again in the direction of that square.  Over and over again, until I had the control problem under control.

 I had also observed that most Little League batters, about 75%, were in fact just as afraid of the ball as I was.  They were really afraid of big guys or short compact guys who threw the ball fast and hard.  Unfortunately, I was not short and compact or big; I was skinny and gangly.  In my readings, I had become fascinated with the spitball pitcher and generally with pitchers who threw junk.  I decided I would throw junk and further to scare the batters I would throw side arm.  I perfected the motion so that for an instant the poor batter would feel I was throwing the ball directly at him but then it would zip across the plate at the knees and sometimes I got it to drop directly on home plate.

 Something else I think was going on.  Perhaps I had settled on pitching because one could practice at it with nobody else present.  Dizzy Dean threw rocks at a barn door.  Usually one throws a ball to somebody else; but to do that one needs somebody else to throw it to.  I played pickup games of course, but I never recruited anybody to pitch to.  Instead in deciding to be a pitcher, I was beginning to show in late childhood that I was an insipient outsider or solitary.  Moreover, by deciding to become a pitcher—something at which I could practice alone—I was learning how to manage as a solitary.

 Baseball is a game for people who love people (are the luckiest people in the world).  I always loved that walk to the mound.  Alone.  And while I don’t watch baseball much anymore, I hate those commercials that keep us from watching the reliever walk causually in from the bullpen.  Out of nowhere.

optimists

Boy of the Month

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Right.  Boy of the Month!  That’s a pretty long time; seems as if someone should have done boy of monthsomething to warrant being a boy of a whole fucking month.  If I did do something, I don’t know what it was or even how the boy of the month was selected at my junior high.  But somebody said your picture is up in the case by the principal’s office.  Sure enough, there it was.

Later, the same year I was Boy of the Month, I wrote up a petition to get one of our teachers relieved of her duties.  Ms. Purdy had no control over her 7th grade english class.  We had to do oral reports, for example, and she would sit in the very front row! As if purposely situation herself so she couldn’t see any of the spitballing and pencil sticking and monkeying around that was going on right behind her back.

The poor girls who had developed breasts had a terrible time because the boys would just stare and make lacivious faces and the poor girl would be reduced to mumbling and looking at the floor and pulling her sweater over this breast and that breast which didn’t really cover them up and made one even more aware of them.  And when a guy was giving his oral report, the guys in the back row—most of whom I hung out with—would make monkey faces or stick pencils up their nostrils or out of their ears and try to make the kid giving the oral report crack up.  Sometimes one would start giggling and Ms. Purdy would say something like, “That’s alright Johnny.  Now compose yourself.” Having no idea at all what was going on.  When it came to discipline, she was clueless.

So I wrote up a petition that said something like, Ms Purdy is a decent person but an ineffective teacher.  Consequently, we, the undersigned felt she should be relieved of her duties, for the sake of her emotional wellbeing.  Pretty much like that, with some heretofores and whereass thrown in for legalistic effect.  I thought what I had written was pretty funny; the whole idea tickled me.  So I passed the petition around and people signed it because Ms. Purdy’s inability to mange the classroom was a topic of conversation among us seventh graders.  Not that we wanted a disciplinarian or anything, but Miss Purdy made it just way too easy.

I had maybe 20 signatures when I was called out of class and told the principal wanted to see me.  He was pretty stern and said he had heard I was circulating a petition about Miss Purdy and that doing so was completely inappropriate.  I said, OK.  And then he told me either to give the petition to him or tear it up myself.  In any case, it was to disappear and the whole petition thing had to be dropped. Given my treatment at the hands of my parents, I guess I had come to expect this sort of impersonal treatment from adults.  He didn’t care at all about the substance of the charges and he didn’t ask me what I thought I was up to.  

Boy of the Month! Ha!

You’re Invisible!

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About a year after we arrived in San Diego, we started attending Trinity Presbyterian Church.  Set jutting from the hillside, the bottom of the church, under the part that jutted, housed the Sunday school, and on top of that the Church proper.  An A-Frame structure, somewhat futuristic looking, in a Disney Land way.

GodMore troubling than the non-traditional architecture were the sermons.  While I can’t say I understood the sermons delivered in Ora, S.C., I had the feeling they were generally gloomy and featured Calvinistic ruminations on grace and damnation.  But in California, we received, as I slowly came to understand it, heaping dollops of Sweetness and Light.  This was the pap upon which Sunday Morning Christians Suckled.

God was no Yahweh bent upon retribution for sliding from the path; he was instead the God of Forgiveness.  In fact, He would forgive almost anything.  He was not I felt a God John Wayne could respect.  His Son moreover loved everybody.  Nobody need feel unloved as long as He was around.

 This whole sickly conglomeration was mixed up with grotesque and macabre events featuring persons rising from the grave and being tortured to death.. The whole business was distasteful, even vulgar; I couldn’t make any sense of it either.  I could find no connection between the macabre events and the meanings assigned to them by the Bible as interpreted by our Minister.

How did getting strung up on a cross when one could have easily left town equal “dying for our sins.”  How did dying and then rising from the dead equal “dying.”  Deadness by definition is infinite.  At best the Son spent a brief three days in the other place.  And what was the big deal about a God becoming human.  Was it so awful being us?  Had God humiliated himself by assuming the form of what he had supposedly created?  And to top it off, he returned for a while to this earth as a ghost.  I am probably wrong; lots of odd things happen in the Old Testament but I don’t remember any ghosts.

I would sit at the sermons trying to understand but feeling more and more repulsed.  How could the Minister use such word as “but” or “therefore” or “however”—those precious logical connectors—to create an edifice of unreason?  I tried to understand.  But that was difficult, not only because of the subject matter, but because the year before while a sophomore in high school, I had decided, not that I did not believe in God, but that He had not ever existed, for to say I did not believe still implied a disjunctive relation to Him.

I don’t recollect having been in any particular way upset that Sunday morning, but rather than get ready for Church I continued to read my novel.  When my mother asked why wasn’t I getting ready, I replied calmly that I was an atheist and that going to Church struck me as hypocritical and a waste of my time.  Perhaps I suffered a temporary lapse of sanity or maybe it was something like hope.

 In any case, I should have known what would happen.  My mother reported that I had become an atheist to my father.  She then fell to weeping and wondering aloud what she had done to deserve such a son.  He, having stopped striking me directly sometime before, thundered around the house, slamming doors, and cursing up a storm.  Whereupon my youngest brother who was 14 years younger than I and about two years old began to cry at all the racket.  The din was unbelievable.  I was then informed by another brother that nobody would be going to church that day unless I went and we would all accordingly go to hell together because of my action.

 I put on my church clothes, went to the car and waited; they all came out and got in the car, as if nothing had happened; the incident was never brought up again, nor did they ever ask me if I had changed my mind or why I had become an atheist or what my reasoning was if any.  Really, they were not in the least concerned with what I felt or thought only with how I “behaved.”

Bay of Pigs

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Back in the early sixties I thought a great deal about the a-bomb.  We had an a-bomb scare going back then.  I was looking at a “Life” or “Look” magazine and found a picture of Steve McQueen’s bomb shelter.  It was really impressive, multi-leveled, and it had a pool table.  I was a bit pissed off.  The bomb shelters for the average person—one I saw not in a picture—looked a lot like a septic tank.  You dug a hole in your back lawn and dropped a concrete box down into the hole and bthen covered the whole thing—except the part where you crawled in—with dirt. 

Really, these weren’t bomb shelters.  If a bomb hit your shelter you would be mincemeat; they were, more properly speaking, fall out shelters designed to afford protection against fires, high winds, and lethal fallout.

 One day the San Diego Union—long know as the Daily Nixon—published right on the front page a fallout map.  They projected that if the Reds sent a bomb our way that they would aim at the military bases out on Coronado Island.  And outward from that point they drew concentric circles.  In the first concentric circle, for example, you would just be vaporized.  The map was not very detailed, but the best I could figure where we lived way inland in East County a person might be blinded from looking directly at the blast, most certainly we would experience high winds and then, of course, fallout.

 I had heard about the a-bomb before I read the paper or the magazine.  Every Monday at noon, they tested the a-bomb siren, and at school, we did the getting under the desk business.  Maybe it was puberty, but reading that paper I began to realize this whole business was serious.  Like they weren’t kidding; there really was an a-bomb.  

I had horrible fantasies about it.  I would sit in school and wonder if the a-bomb went off should I run back to my house or run towards the mountains—because running towards my house would mean running towards the blast.  As usual, I sent through this emotional crisis on my own.  Teachers didn’t talk about the a-bomb, and my parents did even seem to notice that there was an a-bomb crisis.  No way, at dinner, could I casually say, “And what do you think about this a-bomb crisis?” 

Besides, my father was an idiot.  He probably didn’t know anything about the a-bomb crisis.  One day, he was talking about something and I realized he couldn’t point to where Germany was on a map.

God’s Frozen People

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ora

I became a Presbyterian, one of God’s frozen people, before I was two years old. I went every Sunday to the little ARP (Associate Reformed Presbyterian) Church; until I was five maybe I went to the basement where Sunday school was.  But after that I had to go upstairs and sit with the adults through the service.  About the only thing to look forward to was the singing.  So as soon as I sat down I would check the page numbers up on the bulletin board sort of thing and see what songs were on for that day.

When we got to California my parents decided I should go to catechism class. I had no idea what that was for, except that it had something to do with being a Presbyterian.  My parents never bothered to explain a damn thing to me, and I had learned long before that asking them to explain an order was a sure fire way to get into hot water.  And I didn’t mind all that much.  It was on a Saturday morning, the walk there was about a mile and a mile back, and plus the class.  So if I fudged a little I could stay out of that stinking house for about two hours.  Not bad.

I was worried though that I would have to sit down in front of that red-faced Minister and answer tough questions like why do you want to be a Presbyterian, or what does it mean to be a Presbyterian, or how is a Presbyterian different from a Baptist.  I didn’t have answers to any of those questions, so when I got there I was relieved to see (of course, why didn’t I think of that) at least a half dozen other boys and girls were there and the class wasn’t run by the minister but some pimply faced high school kid.

All that was involved really was reading and a little memorizing, and on the last day we met, the minister would come and talk to us a bit and we would be catechized, or whatever it was.  I figured I would pass catechism class hands down.

One Saturday some women came.  One of them was wearing a red dress.  I don’t remember that sort of thing, so they must have really impressed me.  They started talking about these other people who said they were Christians but really weren’t.  These people were like sheep and when they went into the Church they would actually get on their knees before the top dog, and say the same words he did like they were robots.  And when it came to communion, this top dog would drink actual wine, an alcoholic beverage, and moreover he would drink all the wine for all the people and after two or three services this guy would be drop dead drunk, rolling around and braying like an ass.

I had no idea what these ladies were talking about.  But I figured I would look up the word, papist, when I got home

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