Category Archives: Mother/father

My Feminism

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One of my stock witticisms:  “I favored and will continue to favor for as long as I live all manifestations of woman’s liberation because I hate my mother.”  The logic here might seem femistbuttonsunclear or even perverse, but really it’s simple.  I like to believe had my mother been born in more liberated times she might have been at least partially saved from herself.  But she was raised when women were supposed to marry and be mothers and nothing but.  She had a couple of semesters of college.  In the second one she had to drop out because of pneumonia, and in the first she was given a theme, in one of those obligatory English classes, to write on: give 10 reasons why a woman should be married.

This was like 1941.

I probably idealize but I think the old lady might have been a not half bad principal at an elementary school.  I think she was intelligent.  In saying this I know I am on thin ice.  My brothers probably would not agree and insist that the capacity for cold and manipulative mendacity is not the same as intelligence; or if she had any intelligence at all she put it at the service of pure evil. So to qualify I would say she had a knack for book learning and might have prospered at it had she had the chance.

Instead her knowledge of things great and small was another weapon in her ongoing castration of the old man.  Partly that was his fault.  He let her keep the check book and forfeited the power that might have come with that. True, he couldn’t read or write much, but he could do numbers.  Or if we got screwed by the phone company or some lemon of an appliance, my mother was the one who launched a mail writing campaign to get our money back and usually did.  He would just run around yelling, if I had a shot gun I’d just shot my fucking head off.  I don’t think they would have ever returned anything to a store, had it not been for the old lady, and all of the life changing decisions, like coming to California, she made.

When the old man’s mother died, he flew back to S.C. for the funeral.  Since the old lady didn’t drive, I had to drive them to the airport.  I just stood there, watched and grew increasingly depressed.  The old lady just kept at him: did he have his ticket, did he know where it was, and did he know his seat number, when he got to Atlanta when was his next flight, had he packed a razor, and on and on.  And standing there, I knew that if my mother had dared she would have put one of those cards on his coat that they put on little kids when they fly alone, like, “Hello. I am WB.  Please help me not to get lost.”

And he—and he—for god’s sake just lapped it up.

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.

Physical Labour

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The old man treated me like a damn dog.  I don’t think he was cheap exactly.  More like he was doing it the way his old man had done it to him, like my time and energy were his to do with as he wanted, and if he wanted to throw it away, it was no skin off his nose, now was it?

So somewhere he met this guy who wants his driveway repoured.  I get out of the truck and the old man hands me a sledge hammer, points at the driveway—cracked in places—that is still there and says, break it up, will ya.  So I take to it with the sledge hammer and damn I can’t make a dent.  The hammer just bounces off the stuff.  After thirty minutes of that I am about ready to cry.  I feel like a damn weakling.  And my hands are starting to blister.

The old man comes up from whatever he has been doing, probably chewing the fat with strange guy who has hired us, who goes around breathing oxygen out of tank and smoking at the same time.  I guess, I will have to get a jackhammer, he says.  What? The hell, I think.  He had thought, probably need a jackhammer but let’s see if the kid can do it, like I was some sort of experimental human jackhammer.  But it was no skin off his nose, now was it.

Another time, he wants to pull the engine on his ’47 truck to fix it. So he pulls the car under the car port; ties nylon rope to four points on the engine, rigs a pulley, and my brothers and I yank and yank on that nylon cord till it is cutting our skin and we can’t get the engine out.  We can get it up alright, but not out.  So we let the air out of the tires to lower the truck, and we go at it again.  And we still can’t get it out; we are swearing and cursing, my hands are bleeding, and we hear this “crack” because the car port is about to go.  So we give up; the old man rents a hoist and we have the  engine out in five fucking minutes.

I guess he figured, why the fuck not.  Our time was his time, the way he figured it, and it was damn cheap since it cost nothing.

And every spring, we did the chickenshit run.  I would go and I would fill up the truck with chickenshit, and then he would pull the truck into the back yard and I would throw the chickenshit out to where the garden was going to be that year.

I think it says something about my family that I count among our happier outings together going to the dump. You didn’t get to go to the dump every day and it was a blast with all the noise and the big tractors and junk every where and seagulls flapping about and making a racket.  And when we got that truck emptied out, I had a feeling of accomplishment.

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.”

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.

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.

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.