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