The advent of my sixth year coincided with the start of elementary school and our next rental housing move several blocks away to 418 North 6th Street. This house was unusual for several reasons.
The house in 2000, restored to Victorian elegance
Though when we lived in it from 1964-66 it operated as a rooming house, it was originally built in the late 1800's as a single-family dwelling; a fine example of Victorian-era architecture. After the estrangement from my grandparents and experiencing the opulence of their Newport Beach abode, this once fine mansion seemed but a pale shadow of it's former self. We occupied three rooms in the bottom right quadrant of the house, roughly corresponding to what would have been a parlor, formal dining room and kitchen. The bathroom next to the kitchen could not properly be called ours, since it was shared with the renter across the hall. This could have been a difficult situation to endure, but there was a connection to this tenant that made things easier - she was my Aunt, Lorena Miller Overstreet. Actually, that familial designation is not quite precise, but it would be year 8 before the hidden family secret concerning her was revealed to me.
This would be the first place that I would have extensive memories of and these would haunt my dreams for decades until the present. Though our portion of it was small, the entire house was overwhelmingly large to my young self, and I spent a great deal of time exploring the hallways and outer grounds. Another reason was the eclectic cast of characters that occupied the other rooms whom I was able to observe while we spent many summer nights on the front porch until the heating of the day dissipated enough for us to return to our rooms. (That lack of air conditioning was just a fact of life for all except the most wealthy of that time, and though uncomfortable was accepted stoically). There were factory workers, alcoholics, people living on the fringes, and then there were the Millers. I became a sponge, soaking up their experiences, dialects and affectations, and I am sure the stories I heard on these starry clear hot nights was a huge impetus to my penchant for storytelling. Most profound to my impressionable psyche though was the fact that our historic house was flat-out haunted! I heard many things during those two years that had no rational explanation, saw shadows on the second-floor landing while playing below, and often had my shoulder touched from behind, only to find no one there. I can recall running from the kitchen after one of these episodes to the comforting arms of my grandmother. My interest in the paranormal would deepen over the years as I became less afraid and more curious about the source of these interactions.
My Historic Belle Grove School Circa 1908
My elementary school was only a block away, and it was only a few weeks after moving in that classes began. Belle Grove was ancient even for 1964, with wide wooden boards for floors, the cafeteria in the basement, the smells of literally a million cooked lunches permeated into the walls. My 1st grade teachers name was Mrs. O'Brien, and though she seemed impossibly old to me at the time I now recognize that she was late 40's - young enough to have decades left before retiring, and old enough to be bitter about that fact. Since I was gifted with natural intelligence, and had parents who at least encouraged my curiosity about life, I was far ahead of the other kids and she used me, as I've already foreshadowed, as a tutor for those below the already low bar of expectations for the general cut of young Arkansan. So for most of the school year, during reading time, I would be given the role of helping those daunted by the adventures of "Dick and Jane" and their quest to "See (their dog) Spot Run".
Each classroom at Belle Grove had an external cloakroom attached, one that was open to the general hallway but closed off to the classroom proper by a door. This was where we were sent, dragging chairs in tow, while Mrs. O'Brien struggled with the rest. Typically it was only one or two others, and often it would be girls only. Enter phase deux of my toe-dipping into the world of sexuality. After a short time, my female tutees would become bored with printed words, and would try to cajole me to stop the proceedings. Ever the future Boy Scout to-be, I wouldn't agree until one day the ante was upped. "I'll show it to you" "Show me what?" Yes, I was that naive. "You know, down there" pointing to the Southland region. "Why?" "You know why" No, I did not, but I would never admit to being in the dark about anything. "OK" My resolve would wane, and I would agree to the proposition. This transaction occurred in various forms, most often as a quick up-and-down lowering of their pants, but occasionally they would provide an extended view. I, as have all boys since the beginning of time, became mesmerized with the smooth, protrusion-less split peach appearance of their pudenda. It all stayed innocent, no touching or other manipulation involved, but because of the understood risky nature of our enterprise, it was more than a bit exciting. They weren't interested in me reciprocating, which was fine as I couldn't understand why anyone would be interested in the weird, wrinkled mess that was my perception of my and other boy's genitalia. I never received any feedback from my teacher as to whether my efforts were having success or not, but at least I was getting bonus anatomy lessons. I became friends that year with a boy named Anthony who was my age and lived in one of the older houses between mine and the school. In that more innocent age, parents could and did let their children roam far and wide, and though we would often hear our respective Moms yelling for us to come eat or return home at darkness, we pretty much had the run of our area. We played wiffle ball, marbles, and our favorite of all activities - trying to dig a hole to China. Don't know what inspired the idea, but our enthusiasm for the project was huge until our efforts were discovered somewhere around the two foot mark by a neighbor, who royally chewed us out and went to tattle on us to our mothers. Our excavation company was closed for good that day.
Me and Anthony 1965
I spent a good deal of time at Anthony's house those years. It's where I first fell under the spell of football, the college version to be specific. The University of Arkansas Razorbacks were having a
banner year in 1964, one that would culminate in their first and last national championship. Since his parents were rabid fans, I was drawn by their passion to watch the games while at their house, and found myself sucked into the vortex with them. Though I had no idea at the time, two of the players on that team would later become transcendent figures in the sport: then-friends and roommates Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones. Anthony's mom would suffer a terrible accident during this year while riding on a tractor driven by his father as they cultivated land they owned in Sallisaw, OK, just across the border from Fort Smith. Though she recovered, she lost the sight in one eye and owing I suppose to the lack of plastic surgery expertise at the time, it was a very visible asymmetry that both scared me and made me feel quite sorry for her. My most vivid memories of my sixth year were, as I'm sure they were for many, imprinted by entertainment. 1964-65 is when, historically, popular music changed to a more strident, brighter style commonly labeled as "pop-rock". The voices and sounds of Sonny and Cher, the Byrds, Mamas and Papas, the Beatles and so many others blared out of the little AM radio on our mantel. If it had been up to me, it would have played non-stop but there were three adults in the apartment who had veto powers. Fortunately we would all agree on television being necessary and good, and I became an addict of series such as "Bewitched" "Combat" "The Fugitive" and, in a preview of my interest in UFO-ology, the seminal conspiracy theory show "The Invaders".
Flying Saucers were serious business for me in 1964
1964 was my first memories of going to the movies, and particularly it was the avant-garde "Hard Days Night" Beatles film that I remember well. The Malco Theater was an eight
My beloved Malco 25 cent admission Oasis
block walk from our place, but to me it was another world altogether. Constructed and furnished in the old-school style, with a balcony, hand-crafted woodwork, thick rugs and crushed velvet seats, it seemed like an oasis in the otherwise desultory desert of my life. It would become a haven for me dozens of times during my childhood and teen years. Sadly, the last time I saw the movie palace operating was in 1976, it had been reduced by competition from the suburban theater to showing adult films, shortly before it closed for good.
There was much happening with my family during this year but the lines spilled into the next so I'll pass that baton until the next chapter. Suffice it to say that life at 6 was a mixed bag of wonder and terror, and the demarcation between those two states was both thin and apt to change at an instant.
When you almost burn down an
apartment building, it’s hard to call that a “highlight” of one’s year. Yet in
the summer of 1963, that’s precisely what I did and unsurprisingly it remains a vivid
memory to this day. No way of knowing what gave me and the other kids who
participated the idea. Perhaps it was watching the nefarious doings of the bad
guys on TV westerns we slavishly viewed on our parent's black-and-whites, but there was no doubt as to the
raw material that made it possible – tumbleweeds blown in from the desert by
the Santa Ana winds. And what more perfect place to find those tumbleweeds than
in Santa Ana California! I recall being the ringleader, not because of some
innate magnetism, but instead because I had the crucial element to our enterprise
– matches I had stolen from our kitchen.
The apartments were
constructed as an outer ring of housing with an inner courtyard. It was little
effort for us to go out to the parking lot and corral several of those brambled
monsters (ah, the days that parents could let their kids roam freely with the
illusion that they were safe!) and then transport them back into the enclosed
area. There was a substantial palm tree tucked into a corner; at least it seemed as such to my
then-diminutive self though in retrospect it might only have been 6 feet tall
or so. This seemed like a logical spot for us to
construct our fort and soon we had a tall enclosed space. What inspired us to then set it on fire, I have no recollection of, but it was little trouble to light the brush.
What happened next was what
any adult could have predicted, but our pre-school selves had not an inkling of.
The tumbleweed fort became in seconds what I was to learn
Don't Do This at Home Kids
a decade later via
the magic of movies, was called a “Towering Inferno”. Flames shot into the air
far beyond the top of the spherical tumbleweeds. The other children predictably scattered in all directions. I wasn’t far behind as adults
poured out of their apartments yelling that most famous of all warnings –
“FIRE!” I cowered in a corner of the courtyard as people appeared with buckets
trying to douse the flames assuring one another that the fire department had
been called. To make matters even worse, the palm tree also caught fire due to
the intense heat.
By now I realized my little
behind was in for a serious whipping and I looked desperately for escape. One
of my comrades ran into an open door and I followed though it was not mine.
There was a coat closet immediately to the left and I buried myself quickly
into it, closing the door behind me. Minutes, tens of minutes, then an hour
passed. I could hear my father and mother’s voices calling for me once the
general hullabaloo had died down; at first angry, it took on a pleading tone.
Some sort of 5 year old reason finally took hold of me and I emerged out to a
surprised strange family who didn’t know they had a closet stowaway.
My memory of this ends there.
I’m sure there was yelling. Probably abuse of my buttocks, which my elder self
now would heartily approve of. Except for the palm tree, there was no damage to
the apartments, something I will always be grateful for. In the balance of
things, it would be a terrible thing to carry with you through life that an
immature act could cause serious damage or even injury or death. For the remainder
of the time we spent there, which was to only be six months, the dead palm
stood as mute witness to my overreach.
Thankfully there were some
happy times to balance out my fifth year. My dad was a vacuum cleaner salesman
for the Kirby Co. which meant that his work was at night traveling to homes all over the area demonstrating the
efficiency and power of their product. At some point, due no doubt to my
pleading, he began to take me along with the agreement that I would be quiet
and stay out of the way. Eventually I would violate that edict, but in a good
way. Since I was such a quick study, I observed him doing the
entire put
together /cleaning/shampooing/take apart process, and surprised him with my ability to perform in essence
his entire presentation. He saw $$$ in this, and he wasn’t wrong. One of the
main objections to his sales pitch apparently was the relative complexity of the Kirby vacuum
compared to competitors such as Hoover. Well, if a 5 year old could go through the motions
with ease, that sales resistance went out the window. Soon, he began selling double
then triple his normal percentage, and it was good times in the Miller auto on
the way home. Often, he would stop at a drive-in and reward me with a milkshake
for a job well-done. To this day, milkshakes are still my favorite of all
treats.
It was through his job that I
had a brush with greatness that summer also. One of his fellow salespeople was
a then-famous football player for the LA Rams named Deacon
David "Deacon" Jones
Jones. This is
comical to people who have only known of multi-million dollar salaries for pro
athletes, but in 1963 it was not uncommon for players, even good ones – and
Deacon was a Hall of Famer – to make less than $20,000 per year. To supplement
their income from football, most players worked a job in the off-season and
Deacon was no exception. My dad had taken me to work with him one day and I met
Mr. Jones but since I didn’t watch football at the time he was only a giant
dark man to me. He became much more than that with one act. Downtown Santa Ana was having a parade that evening, which is why I
suppose I was there in the first place. Dad had bought me a helium balloon
which not surprisingly thrilled me senseless. As kids are wont to do though, I relaxed my grip
on the string and it flew away into the Southern California night. Death itself could not have felt any worse to
my 5 year old psyche, and I cried bitterly. I felt a hand on my shoulder,
turned around; it was Deacon handing me another balloon he had bought for me.
My sadness flipped to joy almost instantly, and he now was a giant dark God to
me. Years later, when I finally started watching and understanding football, I
watched Deacon then at the tail-end of his career still wreaking havoc with
opposing quarterbacks, whom I intuitively understood also saw him as a giant
dark God, albeit for far different reasons.
Year 5 was also the last time
I saw my grandparents, my mother’s parents, before their death. To understand
the significance of this, I have to indulge your patience by retracing events
before my birth of my Grandmother Helen’s family, the Stewarts of Springfield,
Illinois. To say the Stewarts were among the wealthiest of their era might be
under-reporting. The family owned a substantial part of downtown Springfield including the block that the 1st National
Bank sat upon. The Stewarts would winter in the Florida Keys, packing all their living and having it shipped on
train cars until the nastiness of the season had passed. Helen married my
grandfather Ralph Baker, whose family was well-off in their own right, in the
1920’s and they moved to start a new life in the promised land of So Cal. My mom was born in 1930, and one of her earliest
memories as a young girl was her neighbor, Walt Disney (yes, that one) giving
her a handmade toy for her birthday. Eventually, the Bakers would birth 4
children, each of whom had their own personal nanny. Yep, that kind of rich. In
1963, they lived in a house on Newport Beach that could be charitably be
described as a mansion, with a private beach in back, dock, and the obligatory
yacht moored to it. Uh-huh, that kind of rich.
I had a great emotional bond
to both Ralph and Helen, but things even to my naïve 5 year old mind seemed
always a bit off-center. It took many years forward and my maturity to situate
the disease. Helen and Ralph believed my mother had married beneath her by
procreating with my Marine enlisted man father, James Robert (who later morphed
into “Toby” a high school nickname which eventually became so used that most forgot his real name). They had offered Mom a chance for the two of us to live
with them, the caveat being she would have to leave my Dad. The story would
have had a far different ending if she had taken the offer. I would have had my
own personal nanny, grown up with every advantage a person could have, gone to
an elite college, bedded debutantes left and right, and in general been a West
Coast playboy. Mom chose love, or whatever it was, and so our lives descended
into the unique Hell that only being ridiculously poor in Arkansas can create.
Helen and Ralph Baker
But I jump ahead of myself.
My last memory of my grandfather was a day trip from the Newport house to Catalina Island and
back. It was as though I was being given one last glimpse of a life that I was
so tantalizingly close to, but would forever be shut off from. I wish to this
day I could squeeze more than a few fleeting memories – sea spray foaming over
the bow, Ralph with his mariners cap at the wheel – but at least I have those.
With Grandmother Helen, it was my favorite activity, going to the beach. To my young mind,
the Pacific was a deep dark mysterious creature whose power was unfathomable. I
loved playing in the surf, looking back occasionally to Helen in her broad
bonnet for reassurance. One last image of her remains: me sitting in the front
seat looking at her steely gaze surveying the road.
A seminal event in October
was the birth of my sister Elizabeth, who as soon as she could protest
verbally, demanded to be called Liz. Yes, my mother was pregnant during my fire
starter shenanigans. Hey, the vagaries of stress on pregnant women were unknown
to me then. This picture of
me was taken the day she and Mom returned from the
hospital. I look at this and wonder if that little 5 year old had even an inkling of the future to come. It would be another 4 years before the next Miller,
my brother James Henry came into the world, so Liz and I would develop a strong bond over
the years that still remains, despite often being a tense relationship during those younger years as it
was hard to keep my socially hyperactive Libra sister from being up in my business 24/7.
My first tentative awakenings
with sexuality happened shortly thereafter. A girl next door who was in second
grade and who walked home with me from the school across the street (I was in
afternoon kindergarten) decided she would play with me, and so would come to my
parent’s apartment. I have no idea how it started, but eventually she wanted to
play a game she called “Doctor”. This involved taking the play thermometer from
my kid’s doctor set and testing the temperature at various places along her
body. Apparently in need of more rigorous data, she instructed me to place the
instrument between her legs inside her shorts, and after directing my efforts
finally seemed to be satisfied as she would open her mouth and begin to breathe
fast. From my perspective, this all seemed to be good fun and I was happy that
I could accommodate such a demanding patient. Happy that is until during one of
these exam sessions my mother walked into the bedroom and, seeing what was
afoot, screamed at us. My first response was to dive into the closet and hide
(seems to be a Cancerian trait – under stress seek a shell to crawl in). Her
anger was mostly directed at my chagrined friend who quickly zipped up her
pants and ran out, never to play with me again. I’ve often wondered what effect
this initial negativity about sexual hijinx has had on my psyche: perhaps nada,
maybe a lot. But like the proverbial spilt milk, there’s no way to get it back
into the glass.
November 1963 is a month that
many can remember, of course because of the events on the 22nd. I’ve
read so many missives over the years of “when JFK was shot, I was _____” - fill-in-blank with work, play, on the toilet, etc.. When JFK was shot, I was playing
with toy cars in my living room. My mother was watching the soap opera “As The
World Turns." The show was interrupted by a man who I later learned was Walter
Cronkite, and seconds later he spoke the words that marked a fork in the road
for America, if not the world. My father came home within the
hour full of anguish and shock. He years later would suspect something was not
kosher about the official story of the assassination, and his interest, fed by
books discussing alternative explanations, was my first attractant into the world
of conspiracy theory, a realm that has been part-and-parcel of my life to this
very day. That’s “Conspiracy FACTIST” thank you very much!
Despite things being on the up
tick for our family in Santa
Ana, there was
some undercurrent of disorder in the air. My grandmother (actually my father’s
biologic grandmother, but that’s a tale for another year) was calling continually
begging us to come back to Arkansas
(we had left in ’62). The pleading escalated when she broke her hip. Even
though money was being made and sun was always shining, the Miller family
packed house, piled into a Willys jeep with a trailer in tow, and set out for
the southern homeland. Unfortunately, this late December 1963 was not the
idyllic time that the Four Seasons were to 12 years later memorialize in song,
at least not in the desert Southwest. We encountered one of the worst
snowstorms I have to date seen. The drifts were over the height of the car on
the sides, and we were forced to stop at a truck stop which became home for
over 24 hours until the roads were cleared. When we arrived in Fort Smith two days later than planned, New Years Eve night, my
grandmother was….out dancing with her boyfriend. Guess the broken hip had
healed supernaturally.
“Beside himself” is far too
tame of a description for my dad’s demeanor, more appropriately it was
“frothing at the mouth”. When Mawmaw, as we called her, came back from that
night on the town, World War III commenced. This was probable causation for
selling her house just months later, which for some strange reason I
specifically recall had the very manageable payment of $62 per month. It would
be the last abode that our family would ever call ours, and would begin a
string of 13 years, 13 moves, 13 substandard rentals.
The next place we lived was
an older house at 1209 N. 5th. I know, my incessant penchant for
detail is both aggravating and amazing. Three specific senasations/memories
remain from the last half of my fifth year. One was the terrible case of common
measles I developed, which as soon as I recovered morphed into the even itchier
and more painful German variety. For over a week, I turned into Pink Bobby from
the application of Calamine lotion all over my festering red-blotched body. Second
was the amazing aroma of a bakery two blocks away, which sent me into ecstasy
each morning. To this day I have a weakness for fresh-baked smells, I respond
to it like most animals do to sex. Lastly was my persistence in demanding my
family switch its soda preferences to Royal Crown Cola. That company had a
promotion in which you saved a certain number of bottle caps that could be
redeemed for a movie admission. My single-minded determination, which is hard
to understand because at the prevailing prices of 25¢ per child admission even
my family could have afforded a few trips, was
rewarded by being taken by my
mom to see “The Incredible Mr. Limpet." Now that movie, featuring the
inimitable comic stylings of an in-his-prime Don Knotts – better known as
“Barney Fife” on TV’s Andy Griffith – still holds a dear place in my
heart, both for it’s ingenious combination of live action and animation. Okay, it's because I saved those damn bottle caps to earn it!
Right before my 6th
birthday, I amazed my dad and maybe myself by mastering not only addition and
subtraction, but the multiplication table as well. This set me up to
unfortunately be so far ahead of the normal cut of elementary school student
that teachers for years would use me as a tutor rather than feel the need to
teach me anything, since to them it would be remedial. To me, I felt more like
a freak and outsider. It was the first, but certainly not the last, message
from life that be to very intelligent was maybe not the greatest thing one
could hope for. But much of that remained to be lived through – at the
completion of 5 years, there was still hope waiting to be dashed.
“Life can only be understood
backward, and can only be lived forward”. This truism has for me been both a
source of inspiration, while also a coercive force that has constrained my
writing over time. I am possessed of the belief, whether correct or not, that
constructing text is an act of life-affirmation, of creative forces that seek
growth, not regress. Writing to me is indeed “living forward”, and so I have
managed to skirt around the “backward understanding” in my process. I feel
these omissions as virtual dead spots in the texts I construct – though I may
be speaking of an event, fictional or real, from some point in the past my
description is not fully vested with the authority that actual memory can grant.
This is the interweaving between one’s memories and fantasies capitalized on by writers far transcendent of my paltry skills, such as Steven King. So many of his works are
clearly drawn from experiences of his early life in Maine, and though by now it certainly has an “ad nauseum”
feel to it, it is a comfortable familiarity and of course an amazingly
successful one. By contrast, a read of my attempts to bring past events to life
seems placed in a sterile, sanitized hospital-like environment. Mea culpa.
During my academic studies, I was assigned a piece of writing that, while the content left little impression on me, the structure and impetus behind it has remained. Written by an Anglican clergyman in the late 1800's "Apologia por vita Sua" has become a meme that informs the way I evaluate my life. The literal translation - "Apology for my life" is profound and at the same instant ironic because my ultimate belief is that we have very little control over the directions our lives take. For John Henry Cardinal Newman, it was the essence of Christian guilt that drove his narrative; for this "Apologia"of mine, it is to explain the context of external forces that drove my internal decisions which, for better or worse, have shaped my life. I would argue this applies to all our lives. Most specifically, this series of writings is my
act of contrition for the offense of not fully embracing the paradox of the struggle to be responsible for events that in the end I cannot control or even fathom - my best perception of what
happened to shape me into the middle-aged persona I now bear.
There is nothing
magical about reaching the age of 55, any more than say 53 or 61, but it does make
available a certain organizational strategy that dovetails nicely with my goal
of coming to terms with my history. My first fully-fleshed memories of life are
from the age of 5. The concept of this series is, beginning with my 5th
year in 1963, I will advance the narrative forward one year each week, so that by this
anniversary date next year, there will be exactly 52 pieces, and in the process
I will have constructed a sort of autobiography. Sort of.
For me, this is an ambitious
gambit. My writing has always been more of a tsunami event than a steady flow
of a country stream. Past attempts at forging some kind of discipline with
creating text, other than panicked deadlines when I was in college, have all
run aground. But hope springs eternal, failure though stinging is no longer a
monster I run from, and I have surprised myself before, so maybe this time …
