Juvenalia

Branded was a short-lived (1965-1966) western I watched in re-runs as a kid in Sioux Falls, SD. Chuck Connors stars as Captain Jason McChord, a West Pointer who is unfairly accused of cowardice in battle and drummed out of the military. He wanders alone bearing his shame, but strength of character carries the day and he generally transcends. I didn't remember most of that until I looked it up. But I did remember the parody of the theme song that we found so screamingly funny on the Saint Mary's School playground.

Stranded, stranded, stranded on the toilet bowl,
What do you do when you're stranded, without a roll?
To prove you're a man, you must wipe with your hand,
so be brave! Stranded.

The Prophetic Imagination

Just noticed that my hero Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist Church was in the Ballard News Tribune a few weeks ago calling for churches to pro-actively stand for the poor by providing alternatives to camping in the city's greenbelts.

"You can't solve homelessness without talking about housing. The church has a moral obligation to work with the state for common wealth," said Lang.

"As a representative of a church, I see no reason whatsoever, why every church can't house someone who is homeless, with 1400 church buildings (in Seattle) empty at night," said Lang. ...

"When you see neighbors naked, give them clothes. When they are hungry, feed them. They are not animals. Begin rebuilding the person to get them back in society."

God I love this guy. My own disenchantment with Christianity began in the fourth grade at Saint Mary's School with Monsignor Sullivan's Mercedes Benz. Each year, the Monsignor (this is the middle rank between priest and bishop) upgraded to the latest model. "He works hard," my mother explained. "He deserves it." Even as a fourth grader, his job looked pretty cush to me. I didn't buy it.

The lawn at Saint Mary's was known as "Monsignor's salad," as in "Don't walk on Monsignor's salad." The utterly radical and infinitely appealing message of the Sermon on the Mount, to my young eyes, was displaced by the hypocrisy of the late-model Mercedes driving old fart with the sanctified and apparently edible lawn. This, I decided, was Christianity in action. A harsh assessment, but sadly accurate.

Since then, I've met enough real Christians to overcome my precocious dismissal of God, but my opinion of most churches remains unchanged. Lang's different. He's the real deal. Were more churches to take Christ's message to its conclusion — as opposed to reflecting the narcotized, self-indulgent consumerism of our time — the world would be a very different place.

The church can't replace government's responsibility to provide a base-line level of human dignity and economic security for those who are otherwise abandoned, but they can help, and they can mobilize their resources and congregations to build the power it will take to change the rules of the game.

Is that an audacious vision? No more so than Jesus.

Everybody Must Get Stoned

By thirteen, I was well on my way to my new identity as a pothead. In 1973, I was all about Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Yes, Pink Floyd, and getting high as often as possible. My best friend and I worked as dishwasher/busboys at the Canton Cafe. School nights we were home by ten, but Fridays and Saturdays the place closed at 2 a.m. We'd finish mopping the floor and leave at around 3. We got high before work, on our breaks, and after we got off when we'd go out for breakfast.

At Saint Mary's, my chronic truancy began in the seventh grade. I hated everything about school. I was physically clumsy, emotionally immature, and near the bottom of the social food chain. My homework was never done, since most evenings were spent huffing Pam or finding other forms of trouble. I was behind in most things and couldn't really focus very well on course work anyway. Life at home was a nightmare. I got good at being checked out in almost any situation where adults were involved.

One fall, there was a tragedy at nearby McKennan Park where a kid chased a kite into a tree and came in contact with a power line. He died instantly. I would often fantasize about following his example. Obviously, I never did.

As shut down as I was, I was still precocious, but mostly in ways that didn't help. In social studies we did a segment on systems of government. I said that Communism and Christianity had a good deal in common on paper, but neither really lived up to their promo. This merited a trip to Monsignor Sullivan's office, where I listened to a sanctimonious, late-model Mercedes driving old fart ramble about lost sheep. My mom said, "You never had these ideas before you started hanging around with Jeff Thompson."

Jeff was three years older, lived two houses down, and was the embodiment of cool. He had Robert Plant hair, knew karate, and played guitar in a rock band. While I was a late-bloomer, Jeff could have passed for twenty at sixteen, and often did. His band, named for a vinyl faux-masonry sold by the yard in hardware stores, was called Z-Brick. They rocked. Jeff had an older brother named Bob who was an honest-to-god hippy, and all the other neighborhood hippies congregated at his house.

Bob had done jail time for what was quite possibly the dumbest robbery ever committed in Sioux Falls. He pretended to beat up the manager of the Pizza Hut where he worked and locked him in the walk-in cooler just before the alarm was tripped. There was a light dusting of snow that night. It was early morning. The cops followed the tire tracks right to his house. Everyone got fired and the whole town had a good laugh.

Jeff and my other friends from the neighborhood were into rock & roll, cars, getting high, and girls, pretty much in that order. I was never cool, but at least they let me hang around. Our house was a place for them to party.

My sister and I learned we were adopted when we found paperwork in a desk at the end of the hall. I was already sufficiently alienated to not much care. My sister, on the other hand, kind of lost it. Within a year she was stealing large amounts of money from my parents by forging checks for cash to the local grocery store. The money went to junk food, pot, and buying the attention of one of the neighborhood boys who pretended to like her. She was morbidly obese. It was sad.

As much as I hated my parents, I knew they didn't have any money. The check writing went on for months and escalated over time. She wouldn't stop. I finally told my mother. She was in the basement doing laundry. I was as clear as I could be. Checks. Forged signatures. Several times a week. A few days later she told me that she'd looked into it, and that I must have been mistaken. I let it drop.

About a month later, my sister and I were smoking with a friend at the rock fireplace behind our garage when we heard brakes screech and a car door slam. It was my dad. "How could you do this ," he bellowed as he struck at her with his fists. "You've ruined me!" His rage had reduced him to tears. Terry was bawling. My stomach turned to ice.

It was arranged for me to leave and spend the night at a friend's.

I never understood how the forgery could have gone on as long as it did without being noticed. Once I'd said something, I figured it was out of my hands. I decided my sister had something on them. Something terrible. Something I didn't want to know about. And that my mother, for her own reasons, had covered.

In 1974, I started ninth grade at O'Gorman High, the Catholic school across town. My sister was already there. She never went to classes either. Neither of us were doing very well. In the middle of my first year she dropped out, never to return. My parents tried various things. Weight Watchers, counseling, Junior Achievement. Nothing took. The idea of her returning to school was soon dropped.

My mother asked our parish priest whether Terry might be possessed by Satan, and he said the problem could be found much closer to home. That was the end of that relationship.

They moved their business to a few blocks from our house and tried to resume their role as parents, but their efforts were ham handed and authoritarian and did more harm than good. They were the enemy, and we resisted.

My truancy became a full-time commitment. I was stoned most of the time. Weekends were spent in detention under the kid-hating glare of Father Wagner, the closeted gay Principal who was fooling nobody.

All the kids called him Father Fagner, or Father Fag for short. But we wanted it both ways. The second most hated teacher at O'Gorman was the woman who ran detention study hall. Apparently, her and Father Fag were an item.

In high school, there were the jocks, the nerds, and the heads. My choice was clear. I loved everything about stoner culture. Nothing was as cool as a forty dollar lid of Columbian.

My friends all had little pipes designed for smokeless hits between classes in the boys room. We passed joints in the grassy quadrangle over lunch. The essential high school car accessories were an eight-track and a bong. School was little more than a series of occasions to get high. I was too bored to even know how bored I was.

The truancies led to a series of suspensions, and finally, a few months into tenth grade, expulsion. As my mother walked me out of the administrative office where we had received the news she turned to me and said, "How does it feel to be a failure?"

I treated it as a rhetorical question.

I was enrolled immediately in the downtown public high school. My days were spent a few blocks away at Uncle Earnie's Pinball Arcade, a smoky little store front with about ten machines and a couple of pool tables. When the school truant officer was spotted, an alarm was sounded and we disappeared out the back door or into the basement until the threat had passed. There were a few suspensions, and by the end of the year I was expelled from there as well.

Next, I went to summer school at Lincoln, the high school in the wealthier part of town. A gym teacher caught me smoking a joint on the sidewalk before class, which got me expelled for the third time that year. I made up information for the police about my source, fingering some nobody losers that I didn't need to worry about.

The charges were dropped but I was required to see a counselor. He met with my mother and I together and then with her alone. The next week, I walked to his Augustana College office to see him on my own. Whatever she'd said to him, it must have been a thing to behold. She was bat shit crazy and couldn't feign normalcy to save her life.

He told me I wasn't the problem. My family, he said, just wasn't a good place to be. I needed to get out as soon as I possibly could. I had to hang on for another year or two.

I'd been waiting all my life for that. I could leave. The thought kept me going.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Young, Gifted, and Miserable

I wasn't exactly a socially gifted kid. Prior to starting school, there was one playmate other than my sister, and she was more Terry's friend than mine. I don't recall making any friends in kindergarten. I was overweight and crew cuts were out of style, even for six year olds. There might as well have been a big "L" branded on my forehead. I did, however, always get to be the grocer in our pretend store. I could make change.

In the summer of 1967. I remember finding a button on the ground that sparkled with 3-D reflective circles and said "Have a Ball." This I thought, was the coolest thing ever. My mother took it away. I asked what was wrong and she said, "Haven't you ever heard of a double-entendre?"

School for me was all about social embarrassment and standing out as a sort of a super nerd. I have two defining memories of first grade that capture the period nicely. The first is sitting in Sister Bernice's classroom at night awaiting our turn to go on for the Christmas play. I was stripped down to underwear, keenly aware of being fat. I had been cast as a plum pudding. I would wear a brown sack that resembled a bean bag chair and do a little plum pudding dance. But my mother had forgotten the tights that would complete the costume, and I was to wear the little girl's who sat next to me. She complained that I would stretch them out. My crying only added to the humiliation.

The other was the night that Sister Bernice called my parents to tell them I had attained a near perfect score on the Iowa Basic standardized test. My parents were thrilled. I was a genius, they said. Then my mother tickled me and wouldn't stop until I cried.

This evidence of high intelligence worked against me throughout grade school. My refusal to color within the lines was a major issue, as was my tendency to drift off in class.

Second grade was where it pretty much all went to shit. Mrs. Fahrendorf was on a mission, and there were numerous conferences with my mom. I didn't pay attention. My desk was messy. My penmanship was poor. Penmanship, in Catholic schools, is a very big deal. I was a voracious reader and skipped over all the little kid lit to stuff like encyclopedias and the Hardy Boys. I read the entire box of Agatha Christie paperbacks my mom kept in the basement.

I started to dread school, but home wasn't much better. My dad was gone most of the time to his new job that he hated with New York Life. I defeated him at chess when I was nine and it sent him into one of his red-faced tantrums. My mother was deeply unhappy, but beating my sister and I over small things always seemed to cheer her up. I was a bed wetter. This humiliation added morning beatings to the routine.

Ominously, I have no recollection of third grade at all. Not where the classroom was. Not the teachers name. Not her face. Nothing. By fourth grade, I was labeled as bright but lazy. Myself and a girl named Margaret were always the last ones standing for spelling bees, but my grades were low average and I was the last kid to memorize the multiplication tables.

That year, my parents borrowed money from my grandfather and bought an insurance agency in Madison, South Dakota, a small town about sixty miles out of Sioux Falls. My mother went to work along with my dad. She hadn't worked since she'd been a Conoco girl, pumping gas in shorts during the War. It seemed to agree with her. She was the secretary, but her real job was to try and get my OCD dad to his appointments on time. This was maybe a 50/50 proposition.

Summers and weekends, we'd make the trip to Madison with them. We'd hang out in the lobby and read and play, walk around the teeny downtown, or go to the park a few blocks away. There was a lot of sitting in the car waiting for our parents to complete sales visits. When school was in, we'd make our own dinners, watch TV, and go to bed. The freezer was stocked with Morton pot pies, Swanson TV dinners, and fish sticks. Mom and dad would arrive home anywhere between nine p.m. and two in the morning.

Money was desperate and family life was tense. My sister and I both had bank accounts in which we deposited part of our allowances and learned of the miracle of compound interest. Our parents zeroed these out and took the coins from our piggy banks as well. There were no apologies, and that was the end of our savings accounts.

By fifth and sixth grade, we started to go wild. We'd never had any real freedom before, so our newly unsupervised lives felt like a gift from heaven. We started inviting local teens in to drink, and would call Madison to hang up. If they answered, we'd know we had another hour.

My sister and I would take my mom's car on joyrides with our friends. I started to shoplift for fun several times a day. I eventually got caught, and they called my parents at work. No charges were filed. After that, I mostly stopped

By then it was the early seventies, and the counterculture was in full swing in Sioux Falls. My mother was a member of the Catholic Daughters of America, which blacklisted Jesus Christ Superstar over the Mary Magdalene heresy. I listened to it obsessively in my friends basement across the street and to this day can hear it clearly in my head from beginning to end.

We'd ride our bikes to the New World Rising head shop over by the K-Mart and I'd lay on the slanted floor of the black light room and look at the velvety colors of the posters. This was a time when even the K-Mart had a hippy shit section where you could get your incense and beaded curtains and lava lamps and such. But New World Rising had cooler art, bongs behind the counter, and smelled like sandalwood.

One poster of two elephants fucking read, "Don't switch Dicks in the middle of a screw. Vote Nixon in '72."

Smoking and drugs began in fifth grade or so. I learned that if you sprayed Pam cooking spray into a bread sack and inhaled, you would get an intense body-buzz and slip into a hallucinatory dream state. Glue and gasoline did the same thing, but Pam was our favorite.

One afternoon, my sister and I came home from school for lunch and started huffing Pam with some friends. I was laying on the kitchen table when she grabbed me by the hair, which made me want to kill her. She grabbed a knife, and I tried to knock it out of her hand. I laid open the side of my wrist down to the tendon. We called an ambulance, and I got ten stitches to close it up at the local clinic. I still have a horseshoe shaped scar.

I told the nurse I'd been washing dishes and a glass broke while my hand was inside of it. They sent in the social worker. Her huge and glacially blue eyes were magnified by her glasses. Those eyes became the whole room. She asked me to say what really happened.

"I was washing a glass when it broke. I told you."

I knew how to lie. You just stared right back and stuck to the story. Nothing to it.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Beginnings

I was born on September 30, 1960, in Fargo, ND. A mother was involved. At some point, so was a father. Or so I surmise. That's as much as I know.

The transfer was swift. Healthy white American babies rarely linger in orphanages. My sister Terry arrived first. For three months of the year we were the same age. We learned of our adoptions while rummaging through a forbidden desk. We were twelve.

Our parents said it had never been a secret. We must have forgotten.

My first memory is of the Jolly Green Giant. I'm in a small cluttered living room, sitting in a high chair. Dinner is in front of me, and the family is in front of a black and white TV. The Green Giant has a nice smile and a square jaw. Peas are everywhere. Not just any peas. Green Giant peas. His voice is deep but friendly. I don't know how I know that he's green, but I just do. Ho, ho, ho. Green Giant.

My second memory, I've always thought, was later that night, although it may not have been. I'm face down with my pajamas around my knees. My mother has inserted a suppository with a pencil. She's delighted with herself because she's hit upon the right tool for the job. The eraser has a soft tip. My sister is in the crib across the room, and a lamp is on the white bureau between us. It has red felt ship's wheels glued to a white shade. The base is a night light that, with its copper and red glass, looks like a lantern.

She describes how it went in to my father, who has somehow wandered into the room. "Ploop!" Later, when I learn the word onomatopoeia, I think of this moment.

My only other memory of our time in Fargo has to do with leaving. Just as I turned two, we moved to Sioux Falls, SD. There is a two car caravan, and my mother has the lead with my sister and I sleeping in the back and our father behind us pulling the trailer. It is night. I remember a roadside conference with his headlights shining into our car.

We moved to a small two bedroom rental house with a yard and a red wooden fence. When we dug in the backyard sand pit we'd find charcoal. I drew big Xs on each of the boards. There was a girl next door named Tammy. Her older brother died in a gun accident in their living room, but we were too young to understand. The adults were sad.

A big family lived across the street with a boy around our age, but our parents didn't approve of them, so we rarely saw him.

My dad sold insurance for Universal Underwriters, and was often gone for long stretches. He was pretty good at it. One day a truck arrived with prizes he'd received as premiums. There was a multi-band radio, a Weber grill, and a three speed english racer. He had a Master's degree in romance languages and could read Don Quixote in the original classical Spanish, but opted against an academic life for a bread and butter career in sales.

He would later say this was his life's biggest mistake.

My mother was of that generation of women who, when asked to describe their occupation, would write "housewife." She ran a pathologically orderly home. Our toys, some wood blocks, a plastic bowling pin set, and some crayons and paper, were stored in a closet at the end of the hall, and would come out when she said so. She was what was then described as "strict."

We mostly played outside. We had red trikes and a wagon. I was terrified of dragonflies, but loved fireworks and the Fourth of July. My dad would sit in a lawn chair, drink beer, and smoke while he ignited snakes and sparklers for our benefit.

The world was an animated place, full of things I didn't understand. I remember squinting my eyes at streetlights in the backseat of the car at night, and asking my mother whether the sharp spikes of light that would grow long and short as I moved my eyelids were real. She didn't understand the question.

My mother slammed on her car brakes once to avoid going through a red right and I pitched into the seat in front of me. From that moment on I thought red lights threw up some sort of an invisible wall that made cars stop. I also thought ear aches were caused by tiny rakes embedded in one's ear.

The days started and ended with TV. My sister and I would get up before our parents and look at the test pattern, which had a drawing of an indian in a war bonnet. Davey and Goliath was always the first thing on. There was also Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo. Early evenings, the local weatherman did double duty as Captain 11, and showed cartoons while managing a live audience of kids. During commercial breaks he yelled at us. It was common knowledge that he was an alcoholic.

He was the original Krusty the Clown, but Nordic, and in a pilot's outfit.

Dinner was usually in the living room. We'd watch the Honeymooners, Gunsmoke, Ed Sullivan, Gomer Pyle, and Petticoat Junction. On hot summer nights we'd get into our pajamas and go for a drive in the family's 1956 Chevy Bel Air.

Christ the King Church was a few blocks down the street. When my mother drove past she would always gently strike her heart three times with the inside of her closed fist. A Saint Christopher statue with a magnetic base perched on the metal dashboard.

My most momentous memories from that time were all from television. On Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In our Catholic home, the TV was on constantly. On Sunday, February 9, 1964, we had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and canned string beans for dinner and watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show along with 76 million other Americans. "Mopheads" my parents called them.

Life was uneventful, and we were mostly happy. My sister went to kindergarten and I was jealous. I was on the cusp of being old enough, but everyone thought it best that I wait so Terry and I wouldn't be in the same grade.

That summer, my parents bought a modest three bedroom one bathroom stucco house about ten blocks from Saint Mary's School, and my sister and I got our own rooms. There was a big crab apple tree in the back yard next to a cement and rock fireplace that had stone benches attached on each side. I went into kindergarten at a nearby public school while my sister started first grade at Saint Mary's.

Shortly after we moved, my dad was fired from his job. The way we heard it was that daddy stood up for something he thought was right, and he lost his job because the people in charge had no ethics. Our lives changed. We kept the house, but things got very tight for a long time.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two