Category Archives: Auto-bio

Baby Box

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The college I went to had a five day indoctrination before you actually started classes.  I got a list of activities and such, and also we were supposed to read a book for discussion purposes, B.F. Skinner’s Walden 2.  I couldn’t figure out the 2 part because I didn’t know about Walden 1 yet, but I read it anyway, immediately, of course in my eagerness for higher education.  I got the feeling they had assigned the book for some reason and that I was supposed to think something about it, but I wasn’t sure what.

babyboxTo me, the idea of a society constructed along rational, scientific principles didn’t sound all that bad.  I read a bit more too about the Skinner box, this plastic box, with air conditioning, and other features that made life more comfortable for an infant.  Like, in the box, you didn’t have to wear diapers because of the special absorbent pads and air condition that would dry the baby off so that you cut down on diaper rash.  And you didn’t have to worry about the infant rolling out of the box onto the floor or having something fall on it because it had a plastic lid too.

Skinner’s idea was that people are animals that adjust to their environment and that if their environment is screwed up they will accordingly become screwed up.  But if their environment is constructed according to scientific principles there was less chance of that happening.

Given what I already knew about my infancy, I figured I might have been better off raised according to scientific principles since I had been raised in a pretty fucked up environment.  I was born early—as I have already noted—with jaundice, and then my mother’s breasts caked so that it was painful for her to breast feed me, so she took to feeding me by bottle according to the clock for her own personal convenience and to spare her nipples wear and tear.  And since I still got hungry and cried a lot, she concluded I was “excessively needy.”  I think I would have done better with a Skinner’s box.

Maybe a lot better because, according to the old lady who is not to be trusted, I had shown no signs of being ready to walk and she had gone off to the kitchen or probably to the bathroom and I suddenly got up and WALKED straight out of the room, down a little corridor, and put my hands directly on one of those old fashioned wall heaters thus burning the living shit out of them.  Then, according to the old lady, she took me to a nurse who put cotton balls or strips on my hands, and taped them up, so that when all the blisters burst they had to go through and pull out strands of cotton that got stuck in the pus.

So according to my mother the first time I took that elemental assertive step known as WALKING I burnt the shit out of my hands.

Lord knows what damage this did to my primal psyche.

Realist

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While, as I have said, my father was no philosopher king.  He did say four things in my presence, if not directly to me, –folk or class wisdom, I guess I would call it—that stuck with me over the years and that have given me reason to ponder in an attempt to understand my father’s zietgiest as well as my own.

Once, he sang:

 Skeeter fly high, skeeter fly lowworker
If that skeeter bite my peter
That skeeter ain’t gonna fly no mo

Well, this isn’t wisdom exactly, but I pondered it wondering when a person would give a skeeter a chance like that to bite his peter.  We forget so easily! Our own Heritage.  These are the verses of a people accustomed to pissing outdoors in thick skeeter country.  Like Orlando, Florida, in 1955.  The land of a thousand lakes, or as we dubbed it on our swing through in 1955, the land of several trillion skeeters.

He also said:

 “Same shit, different bucket.”  This is a saying of rather universal dimensions, seeing that it can be applied to any two things—or pieces of shit—that are the same but have different packaging.  This might be said for example of whatever difference there is between a Big Mac (piece of shit “a”) and a Carl’s Junior burger (piece of shit “b”).  Or of most so called celebrities say, Brittany Huston (piece of shit 1) and Hilton Simpson (piece of shit 2).  But I feel it most effectively applied, as my father did at the time he spoke it, to the two political parties.  It bespeaks, when coming from the mouth of a working person, the great distance he feels between the affairs of his daily life and the mucky-mucks up there on capital hill who cannot tell shit from shinola.

Additionally:

“Shit’s like cream.  It rises to the top.”  Considered aesthetically, the co-mingling of turd-like brownness with milk like whiteness (along with the suggestion that one might accidentally drink a turd along with one’s milk), this statement is somewhat disgusting.  But it is a point well made, even more so in our present day, where well packaged shit dominates the movie industry and men of the lowest, shit-like qualities, appear to run the country and the globe.  In fact, the theory expressed in this saying seems so representative of experience as to be irrefutable.

Finally, and mostly sadly and stocially:

“Life is making the best of a bad job.” In the literature I have read, working class people are, over and over again, described as realists.  This saying would certainly take the wind out of the sails of any idealist.  And once again, the distance of the working class person from the forces that control his destiny is suggested.  He works a job he did not create.  He did not plan it, he did not finance it, he will make no money from; he knows moreover that the job is ill-designed, tossed together, constructed from inferior materials, and  probably completely unnecessary.  The one hope one has is a personal hope.  If one is not to be irrevocably stained and ruined by the bad job, if one is not to lose all dignity, one must do one’s best.  If there is any honor, that’s it.

Perhaps along with my tooth pick legs, and my great regularity, I inherited from the old man, as representative of his class and times, a dark realism that when brought into contact with my idealism produces an admixture of rank pessimism.

Who knows?

Lower Back Pain

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I heard the old man’s truck pull up on the gravel out front.  It was about noon on a work day.  I had never known the old man to come home in the middle of a day unless it was raining. But it was summer and it wasn’t raining.  So thinking something might be wrong, I went to the front window as the old man tried to walk down the slope of the driveway—the house being set down below road level—bent over at 90 degrees.

lowerbackHis back had seized up he said, and he couldn’t straighten up.  Then he sat down at the kitchen table and ate his lunch from the paper bag because nothing was going to disturb his routine.  He munched in his Fritos while old lady called to make an appointment with a doctor. He came back still bent at 90 degrees.  The doctor had said that the only thing to do was to get him on his back resting in traction.  The  doctor said it might take 4 weeks, even longer for him to straighten up.

 I am not a fucking ingrate.  I might not have much positive to say about the old man as a human being; but he was a good and steady worker.  Seeing him knocked out of commission like that made me feel vulnerable and rightfully so.  He was the bread winner.  The old lady hadn’t worked since WW2 and she didn’t drive.  Also according to the old lady, we were always teetering on the brink of destitution.  She was an expert at poor mouthing, and if you asked anything about the family money, she wouldn’t tell you or she would lie.

 One hot summer afternoon the old lady told me to go into their bedroom and collect the glasses in there the old man had been using.  He loved canned lemonade.  So I went in.  The room was close and hot and stuffy, and the old man was asleep with his big belly sticking out from under his t-shirt and half of his old, pale and gnarly looking penis hanging out from under the stretched out elastic of his underpants.  He was snoring and drooling.  Flies buzzed over him because of all the sticky lemonade glasses around.

I got this horrible feeling that he was never, ever going to get.  The guy had just died and gone to pig heaven.  I don’t mean he had died really, but he had found pig heaven right here on earth.

But after about six weeks he got up and went back to work.  His back never seized up like that again.  But when ever he sat for while, the back would stiffen up.  When he got up, he would give out a groan and sort of launch himself out of the chair.  About half way across the room he would straighten up, and if he knew you were watching and he had it in him, he would let out a fart.

Farting was his highest form of humor.  He was a good farter, so why not.  I remember hearing a comedian say if something makes people laugh keep doing it till they stop.  I had stopped laughing a long time ago, but if his farts irritated the old lady, I still enjoyed it as a form of masculine bonding, I guess.  About the only thing I inherited from my old man, aside from my toothpick legs, was a vigorous and robust bowel.  I am incredibly regular.  Once when I was constipated and couldn’t shit for three days, I thought I was going to fucking die.

The Insanity of Lawns

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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 whitehouselawnwhatever 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.

Brick layer

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I can say authoritatively that the old man never talked to or with me about anything.  Not about politics.  Or cars.  Or women (thank god for that!) Or even sports.  Come to think of it he wasn’t really interested in sports.  That may be because he never played any.  They had sports in his high bronx brickschool; the basketball coach asked him to try out for the team because he was six feet tall.  But he couldn’t do that.  He was needed at home to work.  He was not graduated from high school till he was 21 because he got kicked back three grades; not because he failed but because he missed more than 30 days of class per school year.  That was a law they had to stop farmers from keeping their children at home to do field work.

He was out picking peaches one summer in that sweltering heat, working his butt off I imagine, and he fainted.  They revived him and he went right back to work, but it happened again the next day.  He was working the orchard of one of the big land owners in the area, and this man, I forget his name, said, “Damn, that boy ain’t cut out for farm work.”  And he offered to pay the old man’s way to Clemson if he would major in engineering.  So off to Clemson went the old man who up till that time had been studying by the light of a kerosene lamp, and he flunked out immediately though he got an “A” in blacksmithing.

That was the extent of his education.  He did read a little in later years, mostly detective fiction with a little smut in it and Zane Grey western type books.  I don’t know if he could write.  I got one hand written letter from him and that was it.  According to the old lady it took him three hours to get those couple of pages down.  He couldn’t spell for shit.  When I last saw him, he was demented and said God had been giving him spelling quizzes and then he said a word god had asked him to spell and then he spelled it incorrectly.  I can only hope God was not a harsh grader went it came to spelling.

 Every boy wants to look up to his father and not because the father feeds him but because of some quality in the father like, maybe, being a good father.  But my father wasn’t one of those.  Or maybe the boy will look up to the father because the father is real strong or because other people look up to his father because of what he does or his place in society.  My mother told a story that Queen Elizabeth had sent a messenger down to Dorset requesting that my mother’s grandfather come to court to be the Queen’s blacksmith.  He didn’t go but sent his son.  And I remember having a fantasy that the President would call upon my father to do some special brick work in the white house.  Because as I said, a boy wants to look up to his father.  He wants to be able to say with pride, “That’s my dad.”  But the President never called.

I remember driving through the Bronx in the mid-80s.  All over the place they were knocking down old ten or twenty story apartment buildings.  Many of them were actually made out of Brick!  Twenty story structures, brick from top to bottom.  It hurt in a particular way to know those buildings were going to be knocked down.  Those buildings will never be replicated.  Not because of the cost of the brick, but because of the cost of the labor.  It hurt to think that all the human energy compressed in those buildings would simply disappear into thin air with one blow from a wrecking ball.

The T-Shirt Incident

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Richie White, the kid everybody beat up on the Boy Scout camping trips, was the kid nearest to me on the hill that was my own age.  So sometimes I would go down to his house, and we would go to his garage that was filled up from one end to the other with this giant Lionel Train layout.

Actually I had never quite grasped the attraction of the Lionel train; once you set it up and run it a couple of times to see if you could get it to run it got old pretty fast.  But Richie would insist on running hi setup a couple of times; it was pretty amazing. Trains cris-crossed all over the place, and Mr. White had made little houses and stores and trees. After that we would do some Boy Scout shit together.  Richie wasn’t so bad as long as you weren’t trying to beat him up and didn’t mind the snot running out of his nose all the time.

One time we were doing some sort of Boy Scout shit that involved pocket knives because I was hacking at something, slipped, and stuck the blade right into the fatty ball of my thumb.  For a split second I can see all the layers of different types of skin and muscle all laid out in nice, neat rows, and then the thing fills up with blood and then the blood overflows into the cup of my hand.  So I walk up the stairs and kick the screen door to the kitchen a couple of times, all the time for some reason holding my hands together to cup the blood, though at about this point the blood was overflowing.  Mrs. White opens the door, grasps the situation, says not to worry about dripping blood, drags me over to the sink, turns roaring hot water into the wound, followed by something that makes me want to scream, wipes the wound and then lashes the sides of it together with a butterfly bandage.  That should do it, she says, and you won’t need stitches either.

I got to hand it to the woman, but she did a good job.  Straight forward, absolutely sure of what she was doing, and quick about it.  And she was right about not needing the stitches.  But I was maybe the only person on the whole hill who had anything good to say about her.  Her little Richie, she let everybody know, was a genius.  He had crawled early and walked early and talked early and read early and then they tested him and he came out Genius.  He was going to be a Genius scientist, so they bought him all sorts of science stuff, like chemistry sets, and microscopes, and a real nice telescope for examining the stars.  Her life’s purpose was to defend and protect her little genius.

One day she hears this screaming and yelling and knows, because she has heard it a number of times before, that somebody is beating up on little Richie.  She comes out just as Mr. Hammet, who lived in the house a little down the hill and across the street from hers, was trying to pull the boys apart.  He has little Richie by the scruff of the neck, and she, screaming don’t you dare lay a hand on my boy, leaps right onto Mr. Hemmet’s back. He jumps and she slides off but not before getting a grip on his t-shirt and, as she fell to her butt, nearly ripped it clean off of him.

Such behavior did not endear Mrs. White to her neighbors.  They all thought she was loony tunes.  And this wasn’t the only time.  Another time a father had been trying to pull his son off of Richie and she bit him in the thumb.  He said she had actually broke the skin and that he was going to sue her or something for assault with a deadly weapon.  But he never did.

lionel train

BS Oath

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Being a Boy Scout required some memorization.  For example, I had to recite the following oath:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

I don’t think I gave a second thought to what I was saying, though now I can see I was completely unqualified to be a Scout.  I did think about the Scout Law because it was difficult to keep straight.

A Boy Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

mosesI kept forgetting parts of that or the order of it anyway.  And it seemed like an awful lot of things for a person to be.  I already had to deal with the Ten Commandments.  And even back then I could see I had problems in the Obedience Department, also in the Cheerful area; being Thrifty was easy since I didn’t have any money.  And as for the Clean part I have always had problems in the personal hygiene area maybe because I spent the first ten years of my life without a bathroom.

Mostly though Boy Scouts was about going on camping trips three or four times a year, and having Monday night meetings in the cafeteria of the local elementary school.  One year I was the boy leader of the whole damn troop.  During this time I began to develop my particular leadership style.  Sometimes, I would have to get the whole damn troop stand in a line.  So I would be upfront and I would order them to stand in line and I would do it in such a way as to suggest: really I don’t give a good goddamn whether you stand in line or not but “they” have told me to do this and if you don’t do it I will get my ass in a sling, so please stand in line.

You give some people a little power and it goes straight to their head.  They think the power is their power (even thought it has been given to them) and actually get upset if somebody doesn’t respond to “their” power.  Petty bureaucrats act like that; without the power they have been given, they would be like nothing but a zero.  So in my first year in college, we could only get one piece of meat, whatever it was, for dinner, and if you went back and asked for a second piece from the server ladies they would get their panties in an uproar because you were challenging their power.

Power always comes from above and if it goes to your head it infantilizes you.

Old Man River

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I got as high as Life Scout in the organization; nobody knows about that rank because it’s the one below Eagle Scout.  I couldn’t ever become Eagle Scout because you had to have a life saving swimming merit badge which meant jumping in the water and pretending to save drowning people.  eonoreeI wasn’t likely to get that because I couldn’t swim.  Actually, I shouldn’t have gotten beyond 1st class scout because I couldn’t swim.  But my parents actually paid for swimming lessons for me, and the guy giving the lessons finally had mercy on me and let me get the swimming merit badge by doing it on my back rather than on my face like I was supposed to. No way was I going to be able to save people while swimming on my back.

I really don’t know what the fucking big deal was about swimming.  Back in South Carolina nobody knew how to swim.  We were landlocked and nobody had swimming pools.  Maybe getting me to swim was a way of raising the status of the whole family or something.  I just couldn’t put my face in the water to do the crawl.  Once back in SC we had gone on a family outing.  A rare thing.  Because it was blazing hot they took us down to the Enoree River near Clinton to cool off in the water.  This was a very old river that twisted this way and that.

I took about 10 steps out into the old Enoree River and whap I fall into a hole made by its swirling currents.  I went straight down, and I felt like I do today when I fall; I just sort of relaxed and went with the flow because there wasn’t much I could do about it. I mean I didn’t know how to swim.  I sort of knew the situation was dire and then I was distracted by my life passing before my eyes just like they say it does when you are drowning.  This didn’t last long because my life was pretty short.  I was about 4 and then things went dark and before I knew it somebody had grabbed me by the hair.

A guy had been standing there with this pants rolled up to the knee, and he had looked over and seen me, and then he had looked away for a while, and then he looked back and saw I had disappeared, and then he saw what looked like movement under the water and he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me straight up.

And the way the old lady acted you would have thought she was the one who nearly drowned.  It was boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo, and she wouldn’t stop so once again I had fucked up.  I remember sitting in the back of that car and saying, “Mommy, Mommy, I am all right. I am all right.”  But it was still boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo.

I spent way too much energy over the years trying to make that woman feel better.  But she was like that hole in the Enoree River —bottomless.  You could try and try to make her feel better but it didn’t do a damn bit of good.

And that’s why years later I couldn’t put my face in the water to get that fucking merit badge.

Green Eggs

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I don’t know how I got in the Boy Scouts.  I am pretty sure I was not consulted, and when the old man got involved so he could go hang out with other adult males on the camping trips, doing whatever the hell they did in their big tent, I was stuck.

tenderfootThe high light of the camping trips—aside from getting to crap in the great outdoors which brought back fond memories for me—was somebody or other beating up on Richie White.  Like the whole Troop or maybe it was Pack took turns at beating him up.  He was short and scrawny and wore glasses and had a greasy lank of black hair that flopped across his forehead that made me wonder if Hitler as a kid had looked like that. Also he was constantly snorting, with snot running from his nose, and when he talked he sprayed.

 And he was sneaky and perverse.  In Boy Scouts you get merit badges for doing things like tying knots or cooking a meal; getting those badges is how you move up in the organization.  So one time Richie’s turn to get his cooking merit badge came around, and somehow he managed to cook up green eggs.  So first, Richie denied they were green; they were maybe a little “greenish.”  So kids started like yelling look at the fucking things.  Greenish! My ass.

And then he said it wasn’t his fault something must have been wrong with the eggs.  And then people said like fuck it man you cooked the fucking eggs and they came out green.  And then he said they were good to eat even if they were green.  And people said, well, fuck it, then, you eat them.  Go ahead and eat.  So Richie stuck his fork in them but he couldn’t eat them he said with everybody looking at him.

A couple minutes later you hear this screaming and yelling out in the bushes.  Somebody is beating up Richie.  And there was one of my Patrol, I guess it was, sitting on Richie’s chest and beating him about the head and shoulders because, the guy said, Richie had said he had eaten the eggs and then the guy saw the eggs lying right there in the bushes.  So he had decided to beat on the lying mother fucker.

I was the leader of my Patrol, a smaller group within the Troop; every Patrol had its own name, like Wolfs, or Bears, or something.  I don’t remember the name of my Patrol but I was the leader of it.  So I said, we can eat cereal instead because I knew we had those little boxes of cereal and I knew we had milk.  So we sat around in the dirt and ate cereal; that calmed down things a bit.  But they decided that since Richie had eaten all the eggs himself that he wouldn’t get any cereal.  So Richie sat there and started to holding his stomach and groaning that he had a stomach ache.  I really understood why the guys wanted to beat on him.

Richie was the kind of kid you catch with his arm in the cookie jar, and he would say, you were mistaken.  His arm was not in the cookie jar, even though he was standing there plain as day with his arm in the cookie jar.  But you play that game too often and you can start believing it yourself.

Casa De Ora

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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.

casa de ora