Category Archives: Childhood

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.

Piano Lessons

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After class one day, as I was headed to the bus, my third grade teacher, Mrs. Cannon stopped me, handed me a sealed envelope, and asked me to give it to my parents.  Her tone was friendly; still my stomach got knotted up with anxiety wondering what was in the letter.

My father was home and stood there as my mother read the letter.  She started talking immediately to my father, and I was not sent away because they forgot I was there. Otherwise I probably never would have heard what was in the letter.

Miss Cannon had written that she believed I had some musical abilities and that I might benefit from piano lessons.  Some parents might have been made happy by such a letter and thinking that their child might have some talent.  Not mine.  My mother immediately became upset.  Lessons cost money.  And how would they get me to the lessons.  My father had work, and my mother didn’t drive.  And surely I would have to practice.  That would require a piano, an upright of course, and they could not afford one of those.  But they could rent, she imagined, but where she wonder could they put a piano in that tiny house; the front room—well, there was no room there either.

My mother became such a wreck thinking about all the reasons I couldn’t have piano lessons that I wished I hadn’t shown a talent in the area.  Later, she asked if I would miss having piano lessons, and what with her pathetic whining tone and what I had heard before, the only answer to that was “no.”  She said I was wise because musicians lead horrible lives, never make any money, and become alcoholics.

So it’s just as sociologists have said.  The musical instrument of the middle class is the piano.  Some educator, in an article about struggles over homework, mentions how his mother sat and listened to him encouragingly while he played and how he was doing the same thing for his own son.  What!  The idea of my mother sitting and listening to me work on my scales fills me with terror.

 I have a guitar now—just a 300 buck one–; that’s the instrument of the working class.

 Someday before I die I will buy a Martin.

The Prisoner’s Diet

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I believe that the psychological metabolism of a person is pretty well established by the time he is two.  Basic set points have been installed about such things as one’s ability to love or to accept love, to trust or to accept trust, to idealize and to accept idealization.  The thermostat tolerance levels for anxiety, fear, and rage are also established.  I developed the metabolism of a starving person; or at least a person on very short rations.  I learned to get the minimum daily requirement of nutrition out of the poison I was fed.

I have a hard time finding an answer when I look around in amazement and ask myself why I am not already dead and buried or locked up in a loony bin.  One answer might be nature; I was brought up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, and bushes and birds, and I was able to spend a lot of time outdoors.  One of my brothers describes our stay in South Carolina as idyllic.  I don’t think so, but whatever of the idyllic there might have been perhaps helped to sustain me.

But most important—I am now convinced—was my Aunt Addie.  She lived those days 100 yards away in her mother’s house.  During my first five years in SC, she was a teenager, and a mother in training.  She spent time with me; read to me; and talked with me.  I won’t say it was love at first sight.  But she was a decent young woman who liked me. I was always smiling, she said, polite, and endlessly curious; and I was happy to see a person who looked at me welcomingly and called out my name with excitement.

 The misery of this for me is that I don’t remember a damn bit of it.  I feel sad that I can’t remember if she held my hand while she read or ruffled my hair or hugged me goodbye.  But anxiety is a memory killer and I was in a perpetual state of inward anxiety.  Still, when I returned to SC after having been away for 35 years, as soon as I saw Aunt Addie, I knew I knew this person and that I liked her.  So while I can’t remember, I am certain she played a central part in keeping me on the sane side of the sanity-insanity spectrum.  This point was hammered home for me when I happened to look and see that my wife and my Aunt were two peas in a pod in height and weight.  So, I thought, I married my Aunt and not my Mother, and that was a good thing.

I think people want to grow and to change.  Some souls are so stomped into submission that they are fated to endure life only or to give up entirely.  We are all sort of like potatoes forgotten in a dark drawer, sending out pale sprouts, looking for light.  The lucky have light aplenty; the unfortunately very little.  But even a little, at the right time, can mean a great deal.  My Aunt was for me this little light.

I must have taken it in as a kind of promise that I would not always be lost in the dark.

Corn Rows

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The old man built a concrete block house with four rooms, and, as I have indicated, no bathroom facilities.  We were located, through a line of trees and across an empty field, about 100 yards from Grandma Tingle’s house.  I spent 10 years right next door to her out in the middle of nowhere and I never really got to know her.  Certainly I was not fond of her.  She was not exactly a font of warmth and affection.

She was tiny, about five feet tall and less than a hundred pounds, and mean.  She smoked cigarettes but pretended not to.  Proper ladies don’t smoke; if somebody came to the door, she would stick her cigarette in the oven of her wood burning stove.  She was also a mean chicken killer.  She would grab the bird by the neck; hold the struggling bird at arm’s length, stick its head in this little noose she had hanging from a tree and give the bird a twirl.  Then she’d dip the thing in some hot water and go at plucking the bird with a will, digging out handfuls of feathers with each pull.

 I think she’d pretty much had it with children.  She’d been pregnant, I have heard tell, at least 10 times in her adult life.  Seven lived.  How that little woman ever carried a child, I don’t know.  But she was wiry.  Her family had lived once in a place down in Georgia where she had to carry water a mile in a bucket each day from the spring to the house.  But kids, by the time I showed up, she’d had her fill of kids.

One day I was half way across the open field to my house and she took into yelling at me from her porch.  She was going at me up and down about running through the corn rows.  I don’t remember what she said and to this day I don’t know what’s so bad about running through the corn rows.  Put a boy in front of a corn row and what do you expect he is going to do.

 She was giving me a good tongue lashing and I was upset.  As I stood there in that field knee high in the grass, a bee landed on my hand.  And for some reason, unknown to me I did not shake it off, and—what do you know—but it stung me.  I let out a howl and turned and ran home.

Was I already a masochist in training—finding novel ways to punish myself?

Or could be I was becoming a sadist.  Granny didn’t know a bee had stung me; and given the howl I let—instead of my usual polite, yes’em Grandma–out she might have had second thoughts about tongue lashing a child as sensitive as I was.

Dead Dogs

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I had dogs before a boy could properly be said to have a dog.  My parents said it was my dog because I was supposed to feed it.  The dog didn’t come in the house; really it was a yard dog, a good thing to have around as a form of protection.  My Uncle down in Georgia had a raging pack of such dogs living under his house.  These were fearsome snarling creatures.

One of “my” dogs ran off, and another became a chicken killer.  That was the end of him; once a dog gets the taste of chicken blood, it can’t stop.  So somebody shot him.  Then, I got a dog that was more properly my dog.  I was old enough to really have a dog, and he was short, compact, and hairy, unlike the boney tall dogs that were mine before.  I knew him from a pup.  I would go outside and he would come up wagging his tail and he would follow me wherever I went.

I made a little of my own money; I would regularly make a sweep of the gullies up and down the road for about a mile either way looking for pop bottles that people tossed out of their cars.  I could get 3 cents a piece for them.  I didn’t get what people called an “allowance,” so whatever money I had that was my money came from those pop bottles.

One day I was out picking up those bottles and I look around I see that my dog is crossing the road to get to me.  I couldn’t do a fucking thing as a car ran right over him.  I felt awful and came home crying.

I lay face down on my bed and cried and cried, and all my mother could do was to yell at me because she had told me, over and over and over, hadn’t she?, not to go near the road with the dog.  What did it take to make me listen?  A dead dog apparently.  And she hoped I realized that if I had listened to her that the dog would not be dead.  But for some perverse reason I had insisted on taking the dog down to the road and now it was dead just as she had predicted.

She went on and on in that manner and all I could do was cry harder and harder.  I was almost sick with crying.  Sure I remembered what she said, and her idea of comforting me was to rub it in further.  Once again she was right and I was a perverse and stubborn child.

I must ask because I really don’t understand and I have tried so hard to understand, but what could possess a person to taunt (I told you so! I told you so!), humiliate, shame and bury with guilt an eight year old boy who was lamenting the death of his dog and his role in that death.  It is not enough apparently to kick a person when he is down; having done it once one must do it repeatedly.

Within the bosum of our families we learn our capacity for inhumanity from each other.

In Black and White

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 My mother sometimes gave me more information than I needed.  Or maybe it was my fault; my curiosity especially about my self is endless.  But, as I was informed, in April of 1944, my mother went to meet my father back in South Carolina so she could meet his parents.  They had not been married long and Granny’s house having but four rooms, the two sought privacy in the piney woods directly behind the house.

According to the author of Southern Ladies and Gentleman, young men and women in the South have long sought the privacy of the woods.  A true gentleman brings a coat, for the lady’s posteriors, and also a warm Coke, as a prophylactic douche.  I have long thought Coke would kill anything.  But that evening apparently my father brought the coat but no coke for I was conceived in those piney woods.

Those were happening times.  Peace was declared in May of 1945; the a-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as I gestated in my mother’s womb.  In embryonic form, I could not say that was there yet but it bothers me to think that I may have been if only potentially on this earth while Adolph Hitler was still alive.  He killed himself on April 30, 1945.

Not that I believe there is any karmic connection between me and Hitler; but those times seem so long ago and to think there’s any connection between me and them is disconcerting.

Why back then everything was in black and white.

A History of Violence

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Recently and accidentally I got in contact on the web with a scholar in England who had written an article on the depiction of white trash in horror films.  I had noticed the connection myself.  I am fond of horror films and think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a masterpiece of its kind, featuring of course white trash cannibalizing people unfortunate enough to stop in their area.  We traded, the scholar and I, a few more academic and theoretical emails.  Then I wrote that, while of course the horror films exaggerate the violence of the white trash household, that violence did occur in such households.  I went on to describe the various attempted homicides that had occurred in my family.

 I never heard from the scholar again.  What did she think: that I was going to go across the Atlantic and cannibalize here.  Obviously, another dilettante academic who really has no idea what she is writing about.

 Note first: the homicides were “attempted,” none proved successful, as of yet.  One was even sort of an accident; Thad my brother killed my father he might have been tried for reckless endangerment, but that’s about it.  Throwing a screw driver in the direction of a person’s head in a moment of rage could suggest reckless endangerment.  But the screw driver missed and (twang!) stuck in the garage door next to my father’s head…just like in the movies.

 Another attempt was mostly just a threat.  My father was out front of the house trying to remove some side mirrors he had rented so that he could see around the trailer they had pulled on their vacation.  But he was having trouble getting them off and flying into a rage began to strike the mirrors with a two pound hammer quite vigorously.  When he began to strike the truck my mother went out and interposed her body between the truck and the hammer.  Whereupon, my father said, get out of the way bitch or I will kill you.  My mother must have believed it because she ran into the house and locked herself in my brother’s bedroom, so he might afford her protection if necessary.

 When my father turned demented, he became more overtly and publically violent.  He went around hitting people with his cane.  He hit my brother’s father-in-law with it.  My brother picked up my father and had him upon against the fence that separated the old man from a 30 foot fall onto rocks.  Perhaps this too constitutes an attempt.  In any case, my brother had to be restrained.

 So I was worried a bit about my mother.  Elders could I knew abuse each other, so I called to ask if she was afraid at all of my father’s behavior.  Oh no, she said, he is afraid of me and went on to tell of the time she had gotten a large kitchen knife, gone into the bedroom where he was napping and attempted to plunge the knife into his chest.  But at the last instant my father flung out his arm; the knife hit the arm bone and its tip broke off.  Another botched attempt, though penetration had been effected and there was a good deal of blood.  “Funny,” she said, “he wrapped up his arm and never said a word about it.”

 Apparently, according to my very unreliable mother, another brother who has spent more time tending to the elders’ needs that anybody, very recently attempted to kill her.  I didn’t ask about the details.  But it seemed to involve having been nearly strangulated by some band of material that is used to stabilize a person in his or her wheelchair but had in this instance gotten up around her neck somehow.

 I think this is an outright lie.

 I wonder has anybody ever killed anybody simply because that person annoyed one to death?

Bingo, Bango, Bongo

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My father was a racist.  He used the word “nigger” freely outside of the house.  Inside, my mother, the proper English woman, insisted on the word Negro.  But it never came out sounding like that.  It came out Nigra, sort of a combination of “nigger” and “Negro.” Or maybe it was just the accent.

When we made a visit back to SC when I was in high school, we stopped in Alabama somewhere for gas.  And my father said to the elderly black man there, “Fill her up, Uncle.”  The black man said, “I ain’t your uncle.”  He was angry, and I was surprised that my father just laughed.  Back in the community of Ora, I sat in the car watching him interact with one of the blacks who was a long time member of the community; he would send Christmas cards to all the white children in the area.  My father had bought a six pack of cokes to give to the elderly black man; and as the black man did his obsequious routine, I could see my father, in his gesture and his tone, swell up with self-importance.  I felt disgusted.

But my own experience suggests how easily one might become racist.  It was just in the air, like the “nigger piles” in the school yard.  Or in songs, the version of “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dina” that we sang ended with: “She’s my one black, two black, honest to goodness shoe black, chocolate to the bone.  You better leave her alone.” And in horrible phrases that stuck in my mind like lint: “nigger-rigged,” for example, to describe a repair poorly and hastily made.

As a child, if I wanted to socialize with kids my own age, I had to bike two miles to the nearest white boy.  But from the top of a tree near my house, I could see past the field, over the abandoned peach orchard to a house that had kids all around.  But they were black, and I knew without being told that I was not to go there.

My father forced me to work with him on a weekend scab jobs; he would sing the same song all day long.  Too frequently, he got stuck on: “Bingo, bango, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo…”  I think this song is racist; but it’s a bit more complicated than that.  It’s not just about blacks not wanting to be made into slaves; it’s also about “savages” not wanting to enter the world of civilization with all its misery.

I wonder if my father didn’t in some way identify with those who did not wish to leave the Congo.  Perhaps the South was for him the Congo, a backward part of the world and not civilization proper, so that in, a twisted and convoluted way, his racism was an expression of self-hate.

As a brick layer, he had to wait sometimes from a call from his boss to learn where he would work the next day.  He would call the boss to find out, but sometimes he could not get through.  He would slam down the phone; one evening he slammed it down over and over.  We all retreated to our rooms.  My mother pleaded with him to stop.  Finally, the boss called, and my father’s tone was as obsequious as could be, as if he had not been raging for two hours at how late he was having to stay up to hear where he would be going at 5 am the next day.

Being a “nigger,” in the vilest sense of the word, is not entirely a matter of skin color.

90% Mother

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Were I to quantify my mother’s identity I would say she was 90% mother and 10% other (wife, sister, relative, friend, house keeper, cook). Unfortunately, for her self-esteem, she lacked any nurturing capacities whatsoever.  She mothered as it were by remote control; in her later years, she did much reading on the subject of being a mother and so kept up to date by that means.  But given her nearly complete self-absorption she was unable to recognize her children’s’ feelings.  If one was sick, one had to tell her.  If one was upset, one had to go around sighing deeply or groaning.

She did of course observe us.  She noticed when we tracked dust onto the hard wood floors.  She noticed when I did not empty the catch in the sink after washing the dishes. She noticed when we did not pick up the dog poop on the back lawn or when we had not taken out the trash. She noticed especially our language.  She noticed if we had crap behind our ears.  She noticed when we did not observe proper table manners.

She kept a log of my first year of life on which she noted having noticed many things.  She noticed there that I was bowel trained before the age of one.  Several persons to whom I mentioned this considered it an abomination.  Why, one person said, a baby isn’t physically equipped to be bowel trained before the age of one.  Nonetheless I was.  When a child should or shouldn’t be bowel trained seems to be determined by the fad of the moment. And my mother is on record as having found the experience of feeding me at one end as I pooped at the other “disgusting.”

Also her breasts caked making nursing a very painful experience.  Mostly I was bottle fed and since she got most of her nurturing tips from reading she actually tried to feed me by the clock.  I consider this practice an abomination; a form of torture inflicted by the so-called parent upon the infant.  People so readily give up their simple human sense when some bug of an idea gets into their empty heads. How could a parent let a child wail in its crib at night, knowing the child was crying because it was hungry, and not feed the child because it was “not the right time?”  Would a human being do this to his dog?

But my mother had no extended family; no one to help or counsel her.  Her husband was off in the Army somewhere washing out as a pilot.  And her Aunt Kitty had died sometime during the months of her pregnancy with me.    So her breasts were caked, she was alone and in need herself, and I was jaundiced and starving to death.  No wonder she experienced me as “needy.”

Overgrown Babies

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My mother is on record as having indicated:

            a. that I was a very needy infant;

            b. that she thought I was “the Devil’s Spawn Sent to Torment Her.”

To find the basic reason my mother was unfavorably inclined towards me one need look no further than my pants. I was born with a penis.  My first great mistake.  Some women love men, as men; my mother did not.

            One need not look far either for the reason for that.  Her father was a cad, a philanderer, a cheat, a Mason, and a member of the Klu Klux Klan.  Blessed with the gift of gab and some culinary skills, he started and drove a number of restaurants into the ground with his fondness for the ponies.  He was married six times and abandoned my mother, her mother, and sister for brighter prospects.

            She would, always tearfully, tell her tale of the Marston Clock, how she had been standing next to it, when a man came up and asked the time.  She pointed to the clock; the man walked on.  She was 18 years old, and the man, her father, failed to recognize her.

            When my mother was 12, her mother died of breast cancer.  She was then put with her sister under the wing of her mother’s sister, Aunt Kitty, a tiny yet pugnacious woman who had once been the tutor for the children of Count Zeppelin.  She was married to an alcoholic who spent most of his time sleeping in a room with curtains drawn while she did her best to make ends meet.  Still, they had to rely on the dole.

            Finally of my father, my mother said, that he was not a real man.  She was not referring to the libidinous since in that area I was told, “Your father is like a rabbit.”  She was referring to something deeper, her desire probably for the complete protector and provider.  My father proved a failure there by taking her back to SC, to a place near the edge of the universe, where he tried in 1946 to raise cotton with a mule.

             My penis made me one of those: idiot creatures, untrustworthy, unreliable, those men who are overgrown babies and worry a mother to death.