Let's Go to the Slide! Aimlessness

When was it? Forty-two years ago? Or 44. Before I went to the Peace Corps. It must have been afterwards. Bud would put it to me: "Let's go to the Slide!" It must have been in the summer of 1965, after I got back from Ibadan and D.C. and Indianapolis and Tucson and El Paso and Ciudad Juarez* and Las Cruces and wherever in hell else I meandered that aimless year.

That's about all I remember from those trips to the Hillside Hotel cocktail lounge. Warm, sweaty nights with crickets and things. I recall one night when we were there a guy passed out and put his head on a table. John David Lucht, the owner of the bar and the bartender, with a white short-sleeved shirt and black necktie there night after night (Bud and I were there night after night and we knew how faithful John David was to that job), needed the table and he leaned the passed-out drunk on his chair up against a wall and took the table for some more genteel clients and they didn't mind and John David didn't mind and the drunk didn't mind and it was funny. Reminded me of the corpse in "The Real Inspector Hound" or Bernie in "Weekend at Bernie's." We laughed quietly and politely and went on with our merriment. The guy slept it off the entire evening we were there. He might still be there. Bud knew how to pick what my mother referred to as "saloons." We'd sit in the lounge and look out the window at night and it was a nice view, kind of like San Francisco -- I've sat in bars in Frisco and looked out at the night lights too. That's about it. Just a reminiscence.

We'd plummet down that little hill after a beery night (for me: Bud drank manhattans) and drive home in the still darkness hours in little old Madison (we both slept at our parents' house that summer) and sleep it off and the next day would come, and we were young and all of us were alive -- both parents and I had no idea that the old man had a bad heart (actually not a bad heart but blood vessels like mine, clogged up with plaque, and there was no Plavix then and no CABG) -- not thinking about croaking, you know, and life was damned good.

I'd have bacon and eggs next morning as soon as I could tolerate them and those were the days I'd do two drunks a day: I liked to take off shortly after noon to a bar in Chelsea, a "wide place in the road" en route to Louisville, beyond Hanover, in the early afternoon, where I would drink three or four beers, and then come home and sleep it off. I recall driving back from the "3-N-1" one afternoon and encountering some joker who was driving on the left side of the road. Just for the hell of it, I reckon. I got off the road and let him go by. Crazy somebitch.

Then there'd be the evening of drinking with Bud at the "Slide." He wouldn't go to the redneck places like the Crown Room. I would go there and because of my big stupid mouth would come close to getting the shit kicked out of me. Them t'backer farmers/factry workers liked to fight. Don't know why I went to that shit-kicking place. The sweetheart of the jukebox was Brenda Lee. I did/do despise her singing. No Anita O'Day, it goes without saying. Or Roberta Peters singing the "Queen of the Night" aria from Die Zauberfloete. Finally I got a job as a biochemistry lab tech at Muscatatuck and my wild-assed drinking continued in Miller's Tavern in North Vernon and in a dorm on the campus there. The to-be superintendent and I enjoyed getting fucked up in that saloon. It is my recollection that he was removed in disgrace later on. I believe the same principle applied to this chap as to me: One should not attempt to manage other people when one cannot manage oneself.

More reminiscences to come. Gentlemen: Goodnight.

* In that city across the Rio Grande from El Paso I met an incredibly beautiful Mexican woman. I'd marry her in a Madison minute if I had the perspective then that I have now. Now, I know which women are the keepers. I was too young and callow to marry anybody then and, to my credit, I knew it. I hope this lovely muchacha got out of that hellhole she was in. I hope she is alive and well and now a great-grandmother and prosperous and all her family is prosperous. She was a righteous lady. Vaya con dios, amigos y amigas.




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Capriccio Italiene by Tschaikovsky

By golly, I can spell! The three words in the title above are all acceptable spellings. There are variations in the transposition of the Cyrillic alphabet to the one we use in English, so some folks spell the surname of the composer, Peter, son of Ilya, differently. Anyhow, I'm listening to Tschaikovsky's Italian Caprice right now from Minnesota Public Radio, resurrecting the memory of my sojourn 49 summers ago at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. God, how I wish I were there and it was then! Just for a little while, just a short while: the smell of the smoke of Camel cigarettes and Kiwi shoe polish, the evening sun coming in the unshaded barracks windows, the sarcastic banter I traded with Stavins, the lawyer from Chicago, and the music emanating from his portable 33-and-a-third, either Cappricio Italiene or the 1812 Overture. How I wish I were there and it was then!

This Date in 1974

August 8, 1974. It is my recollection that I was on my way back from New England to Columbus, Indiana in a 1973 gray Pinto two-door sedan. I heard on the radio of the resignation of Nixon. By the time I got home to our house on Newton Street in Columbus, Indiana, Gerry Ford was president. Hillary Clinton was shy of 27 then, Barack Obama was 13. Irwin Miller was 66. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was 52. I was 35.

I think that was about the last time I tried to run away from my duties as a husband, father, and provider to the three I was then responsible for: a wife and twins, a boy and girl then not yet three years old. Oh yes, I'd tried to run away before that.

I'd been employed as the public relations flack for a small college in Ohio up to the time that I walked out, got in the Pinto, and headed east through Pennsylvania and finally to Providence, Rhode Island. An unusually dry, cool batch of weather prevailed in those parts and I remember eating a lobster-salad roll on Narragansett Beach on a sunny afternoon with blue sky and pellucid air that is not usually found next to the Atlantic Ocean. And it was autumnally cold. I spent that night in Providence, going to a certain meeting where there was a man who looked like Paul Newman, spoke with that New England accent so different from my own, and seemed hostile because he was clearly the cock of the henhouse and perceived me as somewhat of a cock myself. I headed back to Indiana the next morning.

It was good to be back home, although like Lucy I had some 'splainin' to do. I got off easy, as I had all my life. No toilet-training at gunpoint for me as the indulged little brat I was, and here I was still making messes that others had to clean up. So what is new?

That was a sweet little neighborhood. There was a lady next door to us who was known as "T," for her last name, which was slightly "ethnic" compared to the short Anglo names of most of southern Indiana such as Long, Hall, Hill, Gray, Lee, and other such monosyllabic, prosaic appellations. First time I met T in the alley between our houses, she cautioned me that she didn't "neighbor much." OK. Then she fell in love with those twins and so much for that. The Flecks and their kids lived just across the street and the Hill kids were up the block.

Newton Street had little traffic and the next summer Natalie would teach herself to ride a bicycle on the street in front of our house. Seems like it was always summer there, mild and hazy and humid and calm. We'd have home-made ice cream and gatherings at dusk with the neighbors and every now and then we'd haul ourselves off to our relatives in Seymour or Petersburg. We also had an ice storm once and some scary thunderstorms. I was afraid of tornadoes and was grateful for the excellent basement of that house. That was the year in April that we'd had a Homeric outbreak of tornadoes and I'd seen the laying waste of the town of Xenia, Ohio. That killing field inspired awe, to say the least.

But then a beautiful autumn ensued. Cummins gave me back my sinecure and we had a nice Xmas and then 1975 brought on its cataclysms in which I went from being a drunkard to being a counselor of drunkards. (Again.) Onward and upward.

Anyhow, August 8, 1974 was a good day, all in all. The prodigal returneth once more.

This Day in 1953 (July 27)

A moment ago I read a NY Times article from this day in 1953: the signing of the treaty between North Korea and the United States. The parties met and signed in silence, and the prediction by many then was that the truce would not last, but somehow we or they have not broken it.

But the Cold War was a grim affair that ground on, and in a way there is now and always has been a cold war in this world. Where there is not a hot one. God! We are a warring lot.

II. Seize the Day. Didn't finish this on the 27th, so here it is the 28th. As the newsreel of that 1953 day no doubt intoned (through the theatrically thunderous, doomsday voice of Westbrook Van Voorhees), "Time Marches On."

What was I going to write? Every time I start to write a retrospective, I think of Kurt Vonnegut's words in one of his fiction-nonfiction curiosities, "Just an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls." Don't have the Pall Malls (praise God!) but those memories are indeed precious as they get mellower and mellower, and I suppose they gradually become all that an old man (or woman) (or fart) has. The realities of the present day are grim enough and for me growing grimmer by the day.

On the day of that armed truce between the UN and Communist North Korea in 1953, I was one month past the magic age of 14. Let's see: that was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. ["Sophomore": roughly, "wise moron"] I'd begun to sprout a little, was preoccupied with my complexion, voice, etc. [Voice didn't change until after the mandatory auditions for the choral club, into which I was happily drafted the next year as an eleventh grader. But as usual I get ahead of whatever story a discourse might contain.]

I don't recall anything specific of that day or even of that summer. I could go to the library microfilm and find out what the weather was here in Happy Valley. The impressions I have had of that day in Korea was that there was great darkness, as there was the day in Jerusalem when Christ was crucified. The Cold War was to continue for most of the rest of the twentieth century, and Korea is still divided into two hostile factions at the 38th parallel. (For the record, the latitude of Madison, Indiana is 38 degrees, 45 minutes -- the exact position of the 38th parallel at this longitude is a ways south of Frankfort, Kentucky; but the 38th parallel here roughly approximates the Mason-Dixon line, or as somebody once dubbed it, the Smith-Wesson line.)

I suspect, though, that the weather here in late July 1953 was about like it has been here at present: warm, humid, with that blue film on the green hills in the distance, and mostly sunny enough to cast a shadow from a pale blue sky above.

We had no a-c in that little shotgun frame house, but the house was well insulated, Mother Vi kept it closed up and dark, and somehow it worked. I don't recall that we even had a damn fan, but we somehow managed to keep relatively cool. Daddy Noble was now working as an insurance salesman, Mother was a babysitter and kept her earnings in a baby sock between her cleavage.

Bud had graduated from high school and was getting ready to go to IU. He flipped burgers and washed dishes at the Stop Lite Grill, was an usher at the Ohio Theater, and I think he even managed to get some construction work with incredible money and a hellacious sunburn. Funds from Vi's sock provided extras, clothes, etc. Anyhow, all of the first year at Indiana University was paid for in full. And I didn't see much of him that summer.

For work myself, I carried newspapers and caddied at the country club. I made visits to Auntie and Sister Sadie in Indianapolis, traveling there on the trusty old White Star bus, a Flxible that was as much of a workhorse on the road as the DC-3 was in the sky. Many of those Flxibles are still rolling, many now rebuilt and appropriated for family RVs. We had public transportation then from burgs like Madison; we even had a B & O passenger train that ran between Cincinnati and St. Louis, alongside US 50, which passed through North Vernon and Seymour. I don't recall any RVs then, but a few silver Airstream trailers were around, enough that we little people weren't too puzzled at the idea of Lucy and Desi honeymooning in one in "The Long, Long Trailer."

Linn and Sadie lived in a paint-peeled, gray frame house with Grandma Josie Hudson in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis, a little ways off East Washington Street. I was amazed at how pleasantly wooded it was there. Squirrels abounded! There was a city park and I think a municipal eighteen-hole golf course that was cheap enough for common folk to play. (Yes, socialism existed in the dead center of Indiana! The course, of course, has been sold to Rupert Murdoch or some other capitalist rat bastard since then, I conjecture.)

I wish Bud were here to correct me if my memory fails me, but I believe I visited them at that house during that summer. I recall images from then but not a lot of "hard data." Grandma Josie looked very old-fashioned: she wore her hair in a bun, just like my Grandma Annie did. I was very impressed with the Hudsons' conspicuous consumption. They had a big window a-c and a roomy refrigerator that had ice cream in the freezer at all times. Sadie was carrying in utero the person who would become John Evans Hudson the following October. She smoked like a chimney during both of her pregnancies but had healthy and also beautiful children in spite of it. I was playing with tobacco myself then: I would be a confirmed smoker in another year.

In case you, dear reader, are not aware of it, there is no point to this rambling. "Just an old fart with his memories ..."

To Happy Dog Days. Then and now.

Thirty-Nine Years Ago

Thirty-nine years ago today, Bobby Kennedy, frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President (capitalized this time), was murdered. He'd just made a statement proclaiming victory in the California primary and was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles via the kitchen. There, a man named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan shot Bob in the head. The second Kennedy who was a public servant and victim of an assassin in less than five years died twenty hours later.

I was in L.A. when that happened. The news, including a video of the event, was on the eleven o'clock news. I remember the shot, the screams, the struggle, the confusion as bodyguards, including Rosie Grier, the football star, wrestled Sirhan to the floor and disarmed him. ("Get that gun away from him! Break his thumb if you have to!" someone yelled at Rosie. Rosie got 'er away and didn't break Sirhan's thumb.)) As has always been the routine, they showed the tape over and over and over.

A few days later I was at a job interview next to the LAX airport and from (ironically) a knoll above the road on which a two-vehicle procession arrived, I watched. In the distance on the tarmac was Air Force One -- a Boeing 707 then -- I'd ridden in one of those airworthy ships to Nigeria as a Peace Corps Volunteer a few years before that -- waiting for the remains of RFK, in a huge black hearse, followed by Ted Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy in a huge black limousine.

I saw the two famous Kennedys remarkably clearly in that car that day. It occurred to me long afterward that still a third gunman would have had an easy shot at the third brother then and there. No one was there to protect their slow approach, at least no one I was aware of. My recall is that I stood there alone. For all I know I was in the crosshairs of a government sniper's rifle right then, lest I should turn out to be another of those weirdos who was looking for his fifteen minutes of fame instead of the harmless loser drowning in alcohol that I was, honest-to-god ignorant of the procession I happened on.

In retrospect I envision a mural: brightly colored, a landscape on, say, an adobe wall in downtown Los Angeles. On the left, the two official cars, Teddy with his huge shaggy-haired head downcast, Ethel with her sorrowful face turned up to the strong daylight of the desert next to the ocean that is the L.A. basin. On the right, the behemoth silver-and-blue airship somehow nearly dwarfing the vast tarmac. Brightly colored but surreal, except for the two mourners (and the lone unobserved observer above and at a distance from them) absolutely devoid of humanity, absolutely desolate. Desolation in a desolate nation.

That was 1968, desolation in a desolate year.

I feel as though we are in such a year now.

Memoir of Uncle Bill

I still have this mental picture of him in a "charcoal-green" (it worked) wool suit -- and a hat. In 1958 men were still wearing suits with dress shirts and neckties, and hats, to work every day. Although Bill was only thirty-five then, the impression of this writer, a boy of nineteen at that time, was that he was "middle-aged." He wore glasses all the time, he was "heavy," and he told me that he wore trousers only with pleats to hide an "old man's pot." (Pleats on the front were passe then -- youthful slacks also had buckles -- "heinie-binders" -- on the backs.)

He lived on the south side, near 79th and Racine, in a flat on the top floor of one of those myriad brick apartment buildings with wooden porches on the backs that abound in Chicago. He had a wife named Nancy and a red dachshund named Oscar. (I never gave a thought to the canine name until years later: Oscar Meyer, the wiener dog.)

Nancy and Bill both worked in the Loop when I first showed up there in October 1958. They rode a train (I forget the line; at that time the CTA el came only to 63rd). I stayed briefly with them and then went back to Johnstown and recruited a friend and fourth cousin on my father's father's side of the family, who I will refer to as Jim Dandy. (His name is not far from that.) Jim and I sought and immediately found jobs. "If you can't get a job in Chicago, you can't get a job anywhere," Bill liked to say.

I'd been discharged from my sunshine soldier status (six months' active duty) in October. Bill had cheered and encouraged me during that sojourn at Fort Lost in the Woods, in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, every last damned one of which I'd marched up but never down. I'd been scared by all this apocalyptic horse shit and was afraid I'd be frozen on active duty and end up on that Armageddon battlefield as a poor little dogface who wasn't even a good shot with one dinky little M-1 rifle. Bill said, come now, it's not as bad as all that, Dulles and Krushchev will keep playing chicken with their brinksmanship but the Russians really aren't stupid enough to start it. (And that was in the days when we Americans, at least the naive ones of us, which sure as hell included me, were reasonably certain that we weren't going to invade a sovereign nation.) Anyhow, Bill and I carried on a warm and hilarious correspondence while I was there; summer came with lots of sunshine and exercise and good food and drills and reading Modern Library books and listening to LPs of classical music and PX three-two beer. Well, that beer turned out to be a problem, but more on that later.

Anyhow, back in mufti in the Big City, we set ourselves up in a slummy apartment north of the Loop near a subway entrance and next door to Jazz Unlimited, a night spot that featured Jonah Jones and his band. He played a muted trumpet and I thought his music was pretty monotonous but he was hot in Chicago then. (Somehow I heaped him in the same category as Ferrante and Teicher. Bo-ring.)

My daughter and I were at that corner late last year and I was surprised to realize where we were. There's an insurance building or something, fairly tall, where our three-story walkup and the night spot stood, and the December sun was obscured by the present building's height, such that we were in twilight in mid-afternoon. There had been electric bus lines along Grand Avenue there, where cream and green CTA busses sped, spitting blue fire from the electric wires overhead. All gone now.

Jim Dandy and I wintered there until March 1959. In that windy month in the Windy City I had a melodramatic episode in my continuing life soap opera. Bill came to my rescue. He bailed me out -- literally. I got busted for drunk driving when I popped off to a motorcycle cop, ending up in jail for the first time. I was really quite impaired although I think my BAC (excuse me, blood alcohol content) was less than the very generous level they allowed then before drunken driving was ruled mandatory. That BAC was descending by the time they put me in the cooler and I began to cry -- I, the soldier who had learned to kill, a man, you know.

Bill showed up, grizzled and disgruntled, wearing no tie with a suit jacket and long overcoat. He proceeded to grill me then tell me how stupid and immature I was. After he got me to quit sniveling. He got a bail-bondsman to get me out of jail (I was naive about that and every other damned thing) and I was scheduled to appear in court. I was miserable as I thought about how I had stepped in it up to my waist because I didn't look beforehand. Well, I kicked myself over that until it was all over.

Bill, wanting to help me keep my record clean so I'd not be hindered in my ascent to the top in the world of business and industry and politics and all, and being in the know about official corruption in Shy then, bought off the judge for me. It cost 300 dollars, a sizable sum in 1959 for a boy making 60 bucks a week in a clerical job.

The next crisis for me was soon after that buyoff (about which I continued to think dark thoughts because I realized my morality (and Bill's) was as shabby as the big city crooks'). This one involved an old queen on our floor who I thought was hitting on me, and I became paranoiacally obsessed with this supposed plot to seduce me. I had a way of having a crisis build -- of turning a northern Indiana hill into Kilimanjaro. I've managed to attenuate some of that proclivity over the ages but I haven't forgotten that it was once very intense in me.

Anyhow, Bill was there again. Under his suggestion and guidance, both Jim Dandy and I found jobs in industry and moved to a really nice basement apartment west and north of the Loop. Spring came and I helped Bill move to Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a treeless, muddy tract then with its post office in Roselle. He rented a big U-Haul truck and it was indeed a moving adventure as the slogan goes. I remember that as a liberating experience for Bill, his wife, Nancy, and me too. He had wanted to get the hell out of the city, which scared him. He didn't even lock the doors for a long time in Hoffman.

Things continued to look up. I got a lot of overtime, I paid my bills and saved money, I bought my first car, a 1954 Buick Special hardtop. The German landlords above us were always inviting us to dinner and they fed us well; their daughter, "Rootie" (Ruthie), had a liking for Jim Dandy and he could barely stomach her but he made himself scarce anyway with work and tech school. I decided to go back to "Cragmont College" in "Johnstown" and left That Toddlin' Town in September. Bill had wanted me to stay, saying, "You've got to break that umbilical cord." He urged me to go to Wright Junior College. It was good advice. Sometimes I've wished I'd taken it.

I went back to Chicago a summer later on, working in an industrial chemistry lab again. I even took a second job in a warehouse, amassing as much money as I could and saving practically all of it to go back to school. Bill was my cheerleader as I succeeded in employment and school.

Later I went into the Peace Corps and about the time that career ended, Bill and Nancy broke up. The next time I recall seeing Bill was his visiting me in the hospital. He no longer had a Buick: he'd given that and the house and the red dachshund, Oscar, to Nancy, plus about everything else. She went back to her hometown of Kokomo. He was driving a ratty white Nash Rambler wagon, was somber and crestfallen that I had failed at my great sortie into the world, and I felt sorry for him too. JFK, whom we'd both loved, had been murdered, idealism was dead, and it was every man for himself. Bill sure felt that way because he decided he'd get a disability pension, go West, and live the easy life. Which he proceeded to do.

When I got out of the hospital Bill urged me to go west with him. We took off on the brink of spring and traveled the southern route, which included Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, Texarkana, Dallas, El Paso, Las Cruces, Tucson. I like to name that itinerary because I would like to drive it again before I die.

The high point of that journey, in my recollection, was when Bill's Rambler broke down in the desert. I recall that as a tableau, the sun and sand and mountains and saguaros, incredibly dry air pushed along by a stiff wind. We were on I-10 and a young highway patrolman, long and lanky in tropical wool suntans, stopped to radio a tow-truck from Bisbee and schmooze with us. I have this notion of heaven as a place like that. Perhaps there is a restaurant by the roadside where we can go in and have Mexican food and cold drinks. Adios, ... (allusion to a joke we shared over and over through the years)

I leave Bill at that, I leave him there. Perhaps he's in a place like that now. I hope so. May he laugh over our mutual joke forever. Adios, Bill

Memoir from Junior High -- Miss Blue and Water Girl

Incredible what I dream. Last night, a semi-erotic dream about my junior high school English teacher! The last dealings I had with this old maid occurred over fifty years ago -- that's half a century -- and she has been dead for at least a quarter of a century.

Said erotic sentiments had to do with a tenderness I now feel for a sweet human being who happened to be female, one whose saintly qualities I did not appreciate until she was gone from this earth. I came to sorely regret that I was mean to her, as were all of us demonic little bastards when we were in her classes way in hell back then.

This lady was, as I say, an old maid, and conventional wisdom is that old maids are a miserable lot. Wrong: studies show that, in an analysis by sex vs. marital status, the order from least to most happy is like this: (4) single males; (3) married females; (2) married males; and (1) single females. So, although Miss Blue might have seemed sort of wistful to us, she was probably happier than most.

The dream I had was harmless enough. I helped her across a dangerously busy street in Los Angeles and had tender feelings -- rescue fantasies, I believe the Freudian term was. My classmates would find any attraction to her in the wildest of dreams to be ludicrous, and I suppose they are. She had been an attractive woman fresh out of college but she was ancient by our standards, probably fifty when we had her as our teacher in the early 1950s, a dried-up, ate-up, withered old hag. (Not true!)

Miss Blue was overqualified to teach English to us, having a master's degree in her subject matter then, much more learning than she could impart to us half-literate (and determined to stay so) little hillbillies. The poor dear had one fatal flaw, though: she was no disciplinarian. We were terribly mean to her and she had not a clue as to what to do about it.

My peccadillo was writing a doggerel poem about her flatulence and circulating it to my friends during one of her classes. (It was funny because we could hardly imagine this dignified person going to the bathroom, let alone cutting the cheese.) A fellow rogue showed the poem to her and she discreetly feigned incomprehension.

One crazy day we were sitting in that class of hers. It was a warm, gentle spring day and we had the windows open. She was reading poetry to us or something and we were dozing off, gazing out the windows, passing notes, picking our noses, whispering and giggling, experiencing erections, etc.

Then we heard it: unmistakably, a stream, running on to the floor, somewhere in the room. Everybody in the room was alerted and in a matter of seconds every eye and ear had located the source: a large puddle was accumulating on the floor under the desk of Phyllis Neely. She was sitting right there, PEEING HER PANTS! We sat and watched and listened in horror as that poor girl sat there and peed and peed. And peed! And then, face red as fire, she put her head down on her desk, buried in her arms. That was many minutes before the class ended and we sat there in a state of shock. Miss Blue kept on reading, kept on, valiantly, to the end of that class. I guess all of us kept on too. As for the poem, it could have been my doggerel.

I have talked to friends in that class since then -- never to Phyllis! -- and we all had the same reaction: we wanted to die with embarrassment for her, we wanted to crawl under our desks, we wanted to have the earth open up and swallow us.

It was close to the end of the school year -- back then we quit before Memorial Day and didn't come back until after Labor Day -- and Phyllis did not come back to school. She was said to have "measles." The next year, a class wag made a list of nicknames for all of us and hers was "Water Girl." By then we laughed in surprise because we had forgotten about the incident.

I recall the last social situation I had with Phyllis, a Christmas party when she was now a young woman, in a becoming frock, and we were all drinking and she got drunk and was funny and cute and charming. She went to college and married a college professor and had babies and no doubt has many grandchildren now and we are all old, far older than Miss Blue was then.

But I recall walking home on that day that Phyllis peed her pants in class and I saw Miss Blue driving Phyllis home, to spare that child any further humiliation. The adult was solemn and resolute and charitable and compassionate. Dignified lady in a dignified car, black , I think, an unadorned Plymouth. We mean little shits made fun of Miss Blue. But she was so far above us that we had no clue.

Aimless Exposition on Literary (?) Blogging

I've tried to write fiction, which has been mostly a joke, of course, but nonetheless anybody who wants to write fiction should be entitled to his or her own fictitious world. Mine is "Johnstown, Indiana." Nothing much arcane about that: my name is John and this is my town. (Actually, I am this town's native son.) And there is no real Johnstown in Indiana, as far as my consultations of atlases, geographical dictionaries, gazetteers, etc. show.

William Faulkner has his "Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi" and Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky has his "Port William," which I don't think he has ever explicated in his fiction is in the state of Kentucky, but there is little doubt of the setting. It turns out that Port William was actually the name of Carrollton (a few hills and hollers away from Port Royal) long ago.

And "Jefferson" down the big river is a big, ugly town, burdened with a power plant in Wendell's fiction. (It is burdened with a power plant, true.) Wendell's Jefferson, which is my Johnstown, is certainly no uglier than his Port William, power plant or not. I drove there once (while I was on my employers' clock but that's another story) and it was like a thousand "quaint, rustic" Kentucky hamlets, nothing distinguishing it that I could detect. Gossipy grocery store, hound dogs lying in the middle of the street. Bucolic charm, to be sure.

I've diddled with a number of stories, which are thinly disguised reminiscences of incidents in my youth. They're pretty much all about ME. Can you imagine that? Sure you can. Writers, even obscure ones, have big egos.

And I'm a "literary stylist" (rather than a "storyteller," one taxonomy of fiction writers). Which means I love the sound of my words and as a rule am sedulous in crafting sentences. (I confess it also means that I'm not worth a dang at making up a page-turning tale with an interesting plot.)

For example, I love to use ten-dollar words like "sedulous," as in the sentence above. I hope I'm not being condescending to my highly literate readers in defining the word: it just means "painstaking." Occasionally you might read a synonym, "assiduous," which is slightly more common. In learning to write, Robert Louis Stevenson said that he "played the sedulous ape" to writers he admired, emulating their work until he found a voice of his own.

I've read a lot of treatises on how to write, by E.B. White and Henry James and E.M. Forster and John Gardner. I took them all, like the nuts at Fisher take the nut: very seriously. Other than a couple of my stories getting read aloud at the O-K-I Writers' Roundtable one October, they haven't seen the light of day.

One of the things I've enjoyed about trying to make up stories is thinking up names for towns and characters: Johnstown is in Clifty County, the county to its north is Muscatatuck County. And so forth. I once thought of calling the fictitious town modeled on Madison by the name of "Harrison Bluff." It was meant in a non-flattering way.

Benjamin Harrison was the only U.S. president from Indiana. A surprisingly good one! He of course didn't have much time to mess up, but he was more concerned with true governance than politickin'; intelligent; a reformer; incorruptible; and he did one or two good things during his tragically short tenure -- I read it on the internet!). "Bluff" is a wordplay, meaning (a) a cliff or steep hill (of which there are many along the Ohio River) and (b) a deliberate deception by a show of self-confidence ("all blow and no show").

The "Johnstown" I came up with is less damning. The town it more or less depicts doesn't deserve being accused of bluster. And Harrison, it turns out, was a pretty decent president. Bluff should be reserved for the likes of Chicago or even Columbus, Indiana, although neither municipality varies in elevation more than fifty feet.

No, "Forlorn River," a ripoff of Gary Keillor's Lake Wobegon, better suits "little ol' Madison." The other, truly legitimate eponymous John associated with this burg is its 1809 founder, John Paul, he a genuine three-holer for the ages, not a little ol' port-a-potty like me. So Johnstown it is.

We Call Football "Soccer"

My cousin Joe who lives in Nap Town said he'd watch the Colts-Bears game but would turn it off if the Colts started to do poorly. Wonder what his reaction was when the Bears ran the game kickoff all the way back for a touchdown? Not even a first down. I was doing things and didn't see the Colts make their first TD but I did see them fail to kick the extra point. Then, next I knew, dah Bearss were up 14-6. Wondered if Joe had given up by then.

Next it was halftime and the Colts were leading 16-14, and the music show was on. (I was very attentive to the dancing girls in their black outfits.) Missed those award-winning commercials they all talk about afterwards. I think the Gene Kelly elephant was one of them last year, and they continued to show it throughout the year. Switched over to Cinema Paradiso on Turner and watched it off and on and last I checked Colts were ahead 29-something, and finally at ten I heard firecrackers outside, which I figured meant the Colts had kept their lead to the end.

Sure enough. Saw and heard the fabled Tony Dungy and Peyton Manning accepting the trophy afterwards. Have little patience with the chatty announcers (axiom: you don't like traits in others you don't like in yourself), find it hard to listen to them while the game is played but can't follow the plays without their explanations so it is an uneasy alliance. Went to an IU football game once long ago and never knew where the ball was. Never fond of a game that made me feel stupid. Watched a pro football game with a once college roommate who always made it a point to make me feel stupid: never again.

Recall playing tackle football without equipment when I was about thirteen, fourteen and, miraculously, wasn't hurt -- I do recall a clothesline tackle by a gangly gorilla -- that's catching me by the chin from behind, stopping its motion entirely but having my feet fly out in front of me and gravity doing the rest.

I suppose that was comical to see, the kind of stuff that Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were geniuses for, although I don't remember anyone laughing, including the tackler, and I recall my friend Pee Wee counseling me that yes, it's a rough game, and the tackle was fair, and I just needed to go on with the game. And by golly, I did.

The gorilla -- I'll call him Yogi Yates -- actually had an insidious-onset, degenerative neural disease similar to Huntington's chorea that caused him to gradually lose his coordination and finally took his life. At that stage of early adolescence he was strong, one of the better baseball hitters, and hard to stop when he was running in a base path or down a football field.

Yogi joined the Navy and was soon discharged when his affliction was discovered, and he spent the rest of his ambulatory days trying to get a girl -- any girl -- to pay attention to him, and then he died young. He was amiable and I had no malice toward him for that tackle. May he r.i.p.

I never cared for "touch football" but I liked the tackle games we played Sunday afternoons on the long rectangular yard that was part of the property of the water-pumping station for the insane asylum on the hilltop and the house of the station's caretaker. Seems that man, with thinning sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses and khaki twill uniform, was congenial enough and took no issue with a bunch of rowdy, scuffling, potty-mouthed boys spending a couple of hours on that lawn on those autumn and winter afternoons.

Didn't see much of him or the missus, with her tightly permed, gray-tinged hair, spectacles, in her no-nonsense print housedress, black lace-up oxfords and white ankle socks. They probably watched Omnibus or whatever was on TV on those certain-slant-of-light days and didn't mind the good-natured donnybrook outside.

Or maybe they enjoyed hearing it, as I enjoy hearing the Franks Drive Irregulars on their bikes, trikes, skateboards, jumping on trampolines. And yelling, always yelling. Their hollering -- and in the case of the girls, shrieking -- is always as welcome as sweet birdsong.

Celebs and Washing Dishes as Atonement -- and Auntie

Lifted the following from Garrison Keillor's latest column in Salon:

"People decry Paris Hilton but she serves a purpose. We're a big country and we have so little in common anymore. Television and pop music have splintered into hundreds of niches. There are no singers like Satchmo or Sinatra or Elvis whose voices everyone knows. The audience for even the most successful TV show is a small minority. Most famous persons in America are persons most Americans have never heard of.

"But if we don't admire the same people, at least we can find people to despise. That is the role of ditzy pop stars and rich bimbos and the old tycoons with comb-overs and the home-run kings on steroids -- they are the village lunatics in our ongoing national fairy tale. We check on their comings and goings and then we turn to our work with fresh appreciation. Maybe your feuds aren't widely reported and maybe people aren't mobbing the celeb sites looking for pictures of you without underwear, but you have work and that's a consolation, just being good at accomplishing useful things.

"I, for example, am good at washing dishes. I used to do it professionally and it's still satisfying. You clear away the wreckage and run a sink full of soapy water and make everything sparkly clean again, and you look around the kitchen and get a feeling that money can't buy. Keep your nose clean and make yourself useful. That's my advice."

I became fairly good at washing dishes, at least at home in the last few years. I used to do it professionally too, just once, way back when I was at Cragmont College (that idyllic institution with its beautiful view from above the Ohio River). I was not good at it then, I regret to say. (Damn! I have so damn many regrets!)

My problem was, as it was for so many years, one of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I got in trouble on that job because I wasn't thorough. I had the obsession that the job was trivial and therefore should be done with as quickly as possible. So I tried to get it over with fast and be on my way to chemistry lab. That didn't work.

The problem was that I wasn't fast, never have been, and I couldn't be thorough when I tried to be fast. Thorough and fast are mutually exclusive in my case. If you need a job done fast, don't hire me. The extra time it takes me is necessary. But I tried over and over to take shortcuts. You can't take shortcuts in washing dishes, especially dishes on which the old-time cooking of Mrs. Hayes reposed (she used bacon grease as liberally as my mother did) and a case of the trots for fellow students was in the balance.

I shall carry my failures, all of them, to the grave. No exceptions. Crappily executed jobs as a breadwinner for my family and as a social servant to the community, not just as a jackoff college kid; shameful antics when I was drinking; failure as a husband and father; my botched dishwashing job. No exceptions.

But I have tried to make some amends, and once in a while I do all right and I can live with myself as a sadder and wiser man who says to himself, Why in hell didn't I do it this way all along? But sometimes I feel a little brighter in at last doing the right thing. I feel that way now about doing the dishes.

I take my time. At least I have corrected my old strategy of "Ready, fire ... aim." I take a square Rubbermaid dishpan which fits perfectly in the square stainless steel sink, run hot water in the pan, add a jigger of Dawn, scrape everything thoroughly, and I then wash and rinse each and every item -- thoroughly. Then I wipe off the counters and the table and the stove.

My mate, who is as hygienic as "a nurse -- and a good one" can be, does not really like to wash dishes, I believe, and I try to spring her from that duty as often as I can. And the job I do pleases her -- and me.

I had -- (have, because nobody you love dies until you do) -- an aunt who was the counterpart of "Aunt Sister" in the memoirs of Russell Baker, i.e. the family "character." She had a generic name, too, "Auntie." She was unique: you can tell that from the family photos: in a crowd of depressives, surly with eyes downcast, she is always the one who has her chin up, smiling just as if this world were a pretty decent place to be after all.

I bring her up now because she (unlike her sister)liked to do dishes and do them properly. Just before she died she told me where and how she learned the proper task -- and pleasure -- of washing dishes. She was a little girl in an orphan's home in Cleveland, and she took pleasure from KP there. I still remember the excitement of going to visit Auntie on the outskirts of Nap Town: there she'd be, immersed in all the worldly pleasures (playing cards, a Camel in the corner of her mouth, working a stick of Juicy Fruit and drinking a brew as well) but delighted to greet you, startlingly loud and joyous. I hope to hear her greeting me once again after St. Pete lets me through the golden gate: "HI THERE YA OL' SHIT POT!"

Apocalypse Then

In the autumn of 1957 Jim Dodd began his second year at Cragmont College under a cloud of his own suspicion and portent. His freshman year he’d been accepted by a Greek fraternity, very important at Cragmont, and he’d done well enough in algebra and chemistry and analytic geometry and English. As a commuter from nearby Johnstown, and still living at home, he’d been on the periphery of socializing.

In other words, he’d escaped the notice of his peers. That relieved him because he’d begun to feel fundamentally different from them in ways more profound and more ominous than just being too poor to afford campus housing. What those ways were he wasn’t sure. But he was becoming anxious about it. More and more anxious.

The world around him, near and far, looked dangerous. He’d turned eighteen and had to register for the draft. In high school, just after reading Battle Cry, a novel by Leon Uris about the Marines in World War II, he was gung ho to be a warrior. But after high school, while his classmates had enlisted in the Navy or the Marines, he stayed home that summer, with not even a job.

He and his older brother Tom instead watched the Democratic National Convention from gavel to gavel. Jim really felt ashamed and worthless when he stopped to think about this summer of idleness. But during that one week, lying on the couch in the dark, humid living room, smoking cigarettes and drinking iced tea, listening to Huntley and Brinkley and seeing Jack Kennedy and Estes Kefauver, Jim forgot about the Protestant work ethic for a while.

Jim did well enough the first school year and then had a fun summer painting an elementary school with Phil and Dusty, upperclassmen at Indiana University. Their tales of the Big Ten campus with Alfred Kinsey and a cyclotron and pre-med and pre-law students and ROTC and Big Ten basketball and the school of music made Cragmont seem small and boring here in the backwaters.

One of the things Jim and Phil and Dusty talked about was geopolitics. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a cold war, a war of nerves in which one side tried to bluff the other with brinksmanship. When would we step off the brink? It didn’t matter who was first. The brink was so close and the chasm -- bottomless.

And then in October the Soviets thrust Sputnik into the sky, beating us up there with their rockets. Our boasts of military superiority turned out to be hollow after all. Here was proof, coursing across the nighttime sky! Jim was sure that Sputnik meant that the Russians would any day shoot nuclear missiles at us, and we would respond feebly -- and too late.

To add to the malaise, Jim’s dad, a lay preacher who labored by day, was on a tirade about Armageddon. He preached at night at revivals in the country churches around Johnstown and he preached at home to whatever audience he could capture there. Jim would have trouble concentrating on differential calculus after a suppertime harangue of dire prophecies from the Book of Revelation.

Especially grisly was the Rapture, in which the righteous would be caught up in the sky and the damned would stay earthbound, in an act of selective damnation -- and of selective gravity (not likely, by the laws of the physics Jim was now studying, but Dad’s omnipotent and thaumaturgic God transcended those laws).

Dad had damned as unfaithful the whole college in one breath, a school where the Bible professors who wore mustaches and smoked cigarettes taught the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible -- which in one place had translated a reference to Jesus’ mother as a “young woman” instead of as a “virgin,” as the King James had properly designated her.

Jim was torn between the college view and the lay preacher’s view. In Revelation, the church at Laodicea is told, “Since you are neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth.” Those professors, who Jim liked for their refined and gentle ways, frankly, certainly did seem lukewarm. Given to soft-spoken abstractions.

The nukes and missiles of the Russians, in contrast, were red hot. And so was Dad’s hellfire. Hellfire and A-bombs aren’t abstract. They are as concrete as it gets.


Somehow it all came down to Jim’s stomach growling in chapel.

In the presence of Paula Taylor!

She sat in the row in front of him. His stomach gave a roar one morning during silent prayer and -- did she turn her head slightly to him and smirk? -- yes! She did. He reddened all over from the betrayal of his shameless howling gut. He might as well have farted. Oh God! What if he did? They do slip out. An actual fart would be social suicide.

And in front of Paula. He’d had ambitions of asking her for a date. She was a doll. Green eyes and a wide, pretty mouth and ash-blonde hair. And a great figure. She’d bundle up there in her camel-colored coat, and she wore penny loafers or black-and-white saddle oxfords. Her feet were sort of big, actually, but he liked that. He liked everything about her. And now she would never take him seriously because of his bodily functions.

One morning in chapel a churlish minister said, “I’m not much one for levity. If you want chapel humor, I recommend Catcher in the Rye.” Several students, Paula and the English majors, laughed. Jim didn’t get it. He didn’t know the book. (He would read the book with the curious title years later, when this crisis had past, and laugh heartily over the kid who had deliberately committed the gaffe he feared “letting slip” right then, especially when he made the connection between now and then.)

Right now he was in agony. The problem was, chapel was compulsory. They seated the student body alphabetically in the auditorium and took attendance by marking you absent if your seat was empty. After six absences in a semester, they started deducting .05 for each absence from your grade point average. You could get all A’s and land on probation because of chapel absences. It wasn’t fair, Jim thought, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Jim became so obsessed that he dropped courses so that, relegated to a part-time status, he did not have to go to chapel. He was then upset with himself because he was no longer perfect (“Be ye perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect”). He also tangled with his physics professor, a bilious old tyrant, so that one of the two courses he kept ended up with his getting a D. Jim dropped out, and he was on probation if he chose to go back.

As for Paula -- ha! She was going with a Big Man on Campus by the middle of the semester, and she had never known Jim was alive.

All the news, all the talk, all the time now, or so it seemed, was about the threat of nuclear war. Jim was afraid to hear the news on the radio, to see it on TV, to hear people talk about it. He wanted to stuff cotton in his ears, to hum and sing while the fearsome words were bandied. He also was defying his dad’s command to come back to church and be saved before the Rapture and the Second Coming and before all that “tribulation” was upon us all. He was in agony.

One respite from Jim’s pain came in a part-time job he got for the late autumn. He learned bookkeeping from a Johnstown CPA and kept the payroll for a tobacco warehouse. The CPA, Fred Burley, elevated Jim’s frail ego by trusting him with the payroll and not treating him like an idiot, which he certainly was not.

Jim was glad he smoked the same brand of cigarettes as Fred, Camels, and Fred even offered him a Christmas drink, which he declined. Besides being exposed to the manly pleasures of conventional drugs, Jim enjoyed Fred’s sexy secretary who, although several years older than he was, flirted aggressively with him, including once exposing her pretty legs almost up to her waist. He forgot all about Paula in the presence of Martha.

When the job was over, after Christmas, Jim was lost. He lay around his parent’s house for a month, World War Three and Biblical calamities on his mind.


The solution was obvious. Tom had been closer to the draft age and had already taken advantage of the option of six months’ active duty in the Army with a reserve obligation of six years afterward. Jim decided to do the same.

He went to Indianapolis on a cold day in early February of 1958 and undressed for a physical exam in a cold, cold room with other naked males, some of whom stank, and a doctor told him to cough while he fingered Jim’s scrotum, which hurt, and another inserted a finger in his rectum and that hurt too, and they listened to his heart and pronounced him fit and he was fingerprinted and photographed and he signed documents and an officer in new Class-A greens swore him in to the United States Army.

He went to a couple of drills in the local armory in civilian clothes and it was cold there too. The guys who’d been on active duty hazed him about the hell he was about to face. Tom said, “It won’t be bad. Just keep quiet and do what they tell you and you’ll be all right.”

Then one gray, chilly April morning he got on a sooty black B & O train in North Vernon, Indiana and rode it to St. Louis; from there he took an Ozark Lines “motor coach” to Rolla, Missouri. Then an olive-drab school bus with “U.S. Army” and a white star and a stenciled ID number on its body driven by a silent, solemn Spec-E4 in bleached, starched green fatigues and a Fidel Castro blocked cap and bloused black boots drove him and the other recruits the rest of the way.

It was a dull day. On his journey he saw not one pretty girl. Only males rode this bus, young and anxious as he was. And it occurred to him that he wouldn’t see a female, pretty or otherwise, for the next eight weeks at Fort Leonard Wood.

The landscape was filled with plain wooden frame buildings -- at least they were white, not olive drab -- and paved roads and new green shoots of grass. The air was acrid with a smell Jim had once known well -- coal smoke. Every line was on the square, everything had a sign (assumption: you were literate but an idiot), and the grounds were spotless.

Yellow diamond-shaped road signs with the words “Caution: Troops Marching” were present and soon the bus riders saw several platoons of the green-clad troops, in step, more or less, and saw their rifles at 45-degree angles on their shoulders and heard the cadence of their black boots on the pavement, each with a noncom singing “Hut! Tupe! Threp! Fo’! Yo’ lep! Yo’ lep! Yo’ lep, right, lep,” Clop! Clop! Clop!, the boots in unison. More or less. The marchers regarded the recruits with weary, grim indifference.

When Jim and his hapless band got out of the bus, starched sergeants and corporals started hollering at them and never stopped. They bellowed and barked a bewildering number of instructions. They chewed out some of the boys for talking in ranks, sloppiness, and visible lack of fear of the macho, blustering men.

At last the newcomers were in the mess hall. The food was surprisingly good and filling: tender beef and potatoes and cauliflower and bread baked right there on post served with real butter and peach pie for dessert. A day of travel had made them hungry. After the meal the troops were allowed to smoke and gab at leisure a while and then with the ever-present noncoms supervising tended to the business of bunk assignments.

In the top bunk of a big barracks with forty strange young men, between two white sheets and covered with a brown wool blanket, Jim went to sleep soon. He had only fleeting thoughts of Armageddon and the cold war, and remembered that, yes, there was one good-looking girl in the St. Louis bus station. Too bad she went to Memphis and not Rolla.

But there would be more, more girls. How would he look in uniform?