Life at 8

1966 to 1967 was the year that gravity exerted it’s full force on me and I became aware that the idylls of my childhood would not last forever and that there was a VERY SERIOUS world out there that I being trained, whether actively or passively, to be a part of. And along with that realization, it began to dawn on me that those who were preparing me for said mission themselves had significant deficits in their understandings of life and that I would have to seek the missing pieces elsewhere. Despite it’s indubitable charms and history, Fort Smith, Arkansas was NOT a place to find the needed mentorship to fill in those gaps during one’s formative years. And so caught between the yin-and-yang

of a family life that I was increasingly becoming cognizant was tilted far to the right on the gauge between normal and fucking insane, and the abysmal lack of any but the most pidgin awareness in the world around me, I began to retreat, as only a Cancer can, deep into my shell.

This picture of Liz and I was taken in the summer of ’66. You might notice, dear reader, the formerly svelte redhead of ’63 had ballooned up to a considerable degree. To explain this, I will insert a brief astrological primer. To those of you who may be unlearned or skeptical about the science that gave birth to modern-day astronomy, why are you reading this in the first place? Look in the mirror, and repeat to yourself “I am a tool”. Ok, that’s dealt with, now having lost over half my audience I will continue. Those born under the sign of Cancer tend to be quite sensitive to the emotions of those around them, and experience tension in the midsection/stomach area. At the same time, the Achilles heel of Cancer (every sign has one, for instance Capricorns have problematic knees) is the stomach. So double-whammy, emotional tensions arise, Cancerian’s stomachs go awry, and the first logical thing is to stuff the problem with food to calm it down. Since my parents didn’t ask if I needed Maalox or Rolaids, I went to my personal medicine chest called the refrigerator, and found my Rx – Wurtz Crackers and Foremost milk - both produced locally, and perhaps the best of both substances that I was to ever find to this day.

This worked like a charm, but the payback was fat which accumulated, a problem which would remain and cause me to be an object of ridicule for the next decade.

As I noted at the end of the last chapter, my birthday was lost in the wash, since we moved again, this time across town to the northern side on Kinkead Avenue where we would once again have our own standalone house. I remember the smell of fresh paint when I first came through the doors, a scent that I have ever since associated with uncertainty, a state which accompanied our many moves of household. It was a 2 bedroom frame painted white on the outside with a true backyard, and I was generally ecstatic about the change, though I did feel the separation pangs for the first time in leaving my first friend Anthony behind. But the consolations were many – in addition to more room, play space outside, and a Boy’s Club only a block away, there was a convenience store a few blocks away that had on of the early ICEE machines, and in that era

the syrup was formulated with real cane sugar instead of the vile high-fructose corn syrup crap. My first encounter with this heavenly delight came just a few days after we had moved in, since the store was now going to be my Dad’s source of beer given that there were no bars in the residential area. I may be fooling myself, but I believe I can still remember the first thrill as the slurry made its way into my mouth. There’d been no way to express it this way then, but with the perspective of time it was clear what had happened – I had experienced my first esophageal orgasm! Every chance I got to tag along, badger, or find loose change to take with me to buy the small cup, which I believe was only 15 cents, I did. My repertoire gradually grew over the years to expand my treats to include a Milky Way bar and bag of Bar-B-Que Frito corn chips, a triad of awesomeness that I was proud to share with my children 30 years later when they were roughly the same age.

An event occurred in August that still resonates for me, since it is circumscribed within one of my passions in life, my pursuit of paranormal experiences. One night that month, we experienced in Fort Smith (later, I was to find that it included as well most of the entire Western Arkansas/Eastern

Oklahoma area, and for weeks later the entire Southern United States) what was termed a “UFO flap”. My interest in lights in the sky that did not fit the parameters of normal airplanes had been whetted on the steps of 418 N. 6^th, where some of the boarders would tell stories from their World War 2 days about “foo fighters”, the code used in that time for unexplained flying objects. My dad was fascinated by these talks as well, and occasionally on clear nights all of us would see lights moving across the sky too fast to be even the swiftest human jet plane, and some even would veer at angles impossible for normal banking turns. To this end, he began to scour the secondhand book stores searching for books on the topic, and before long 20-30 of these volumes were scattered about the house, and after he was done I put my precocious reading talents to work devouring titles such as “Flying Saucers – Serious Business” and “Incident at Exeter."

So I was not an uninformed 8 year old about UFO’s, but was equally as shocked that hot summer night when the local TV station broke into programming with a live shot of a reporter in front of a crowd who was looking into the sky and pointing. Traffic in that area had simply stopped in place and people were exiting their cars because of the amazing spectacle going on above. There were innumerable lights transversing the night sky, some of them stopping on a dime and hovering some hundreds to thousands of feet up. I turned the transistor radio on and the same thing was happening – live reports were coming in from Van Buren across the river, from Arkoma just across the Oklahoma border and from all over Fort Smith proper. Despite my Mom and grandmother’s warning me not to (my dad was out of town delivering furniture), I ran outside and saw a neighbor boy Larry who was a few years older than me shining a flashlight up into the sky. There was a blob of light there that was still, but which would pulse seemingly in response to Larry’s flickering his light. I watched this happen in amazement until the blob of light suddenly moved at incalculable speed and was gone. Our eyes met with excitement at what we had just seen, and we palled together for the next few hours watching a light show of epic proportions above us.

Finally Mom insisted I come in at nearly midnight, and I unwillingly went back in. My grandmother, who slept on one side of the bedroom we shared (finally had my own bed) was asleep in her bed which was directly under a large picture window. I was still quivering with excitement, wishing I could tell Dad about it, when I saw a circle of kaleidoscope lights start to move across the wall. As they got brighter, Maw-Maw woke up and I could see her eyes transfixed on what was shining in the window. The swirling lights became brighter and Maw-Maw’s mouth gaped wide open in shock. For my part, I was frozen with fear (still get chills writing about it to this day) until the lights receded just as quickly as they had appeared. The entire incident had taken maybe 20 seconds

“Maw-maw what was that?” I asked.

“It was big, had lights around it, was shaped like a big dish upside down” she finally answered, and I could see her shaking.

It took a long time that night to go to sleep. The next morning it was as though no one wanted to talk about it, but the paper’s headlines could not ignore the obvious other-worldly event that had happened. I don’t recall anything that dramatic popping up in the days that followed, and I often wonder how adults of that time processed it and found rationalizations to get back into a state of normalcy. For my part, I would never need any convincing about the existence of UFO’s, and I have had several other Close Encounters of First Kind over the years, some of which I will write about in future chapters.

A seriocomic chain of events happened in August before school started, all connected with my Dad driving the

furniture delivery truck. He took me with him on a short run to Russellville about 70 miles away, and we returned with a stowaway – a stray German Shepard. The dog must have snuck up the ramp and buried in the blankets while he closed the door leaving town. We heard the dog yelping when we returned and when it ran out I begged for me being able to keep him since we had a fenced backyard. Dad was understandable dubious, while I decided to name the poor stray "Lightning". It was an apropos tag, because a few minutes later the dog took care of the dilemma by running out into traffic and being flattened by a car, dying instantly. Even though technically he had never been in our yard yet, I bawled inconsolably. My parents felt bad for me so they took me to the animal shelter and adopted a small beagle pup. I was happy again, but that was to be foreshortened as well. Liz, who to this point had never exhibited any irrational fear, became terrified of the pint-sized pup and whenever it would come near her she would beat it with a broom. The pup took one too many shots, crawled under the house, and despite coaxing from all of us, was too brain-damaged to understand the need to drink water and eat and so it also died. 0 for 2 on dogs, and even when I was a young adult and tried again I struck out twice again, making it 0 for 4, which is probably why it was decades later and after some extreme cajoling from wife and kids before I tried it again.

The week before school started Dad took me with him on a delivery trip to North and West Texas. It was my first lengthy trip that I have memories of other than the California-Arkansas odyssey through the snow in ’63. I remember nasty old gas station bathrooms in Oklahoma, Dad listening to Buck Owens on the AM radio, and a once-luxurious hotel in Wichita Falls that had became borderline decrepit. I remember running with excitement to the outdoor heated pool of a motel in Big Spring, jumping in the deep end… and remembering I couldn’t swim. My dad dove in a few seconds later to avert a possible tragedy. “Fools rush in …” and all that. But most of all I remember later that night Dad told me a long and complicated story, one that changed my outlook on our family history and my father forever.

My father was born in 1935 near Alma, Arkansas which is a small former railroad stop town 15 miles East of Fort Smith.

Dad, James Robert in early 1940's

His mother Ida Belle (Maw-Maw) was born in 1903, which would have made her not quite 32 when he arrived.

Her first child, Lorena was born in 1919, which would have made her 16. She was married already, not at all unusual for those times. This child was quickly followed by James and Harry. So, Dad was not really even a late-in-life child even for the 1930’s, and he grew up having much older brothers and sisters. That is what he thought until he was 11, when he discovered adoption papers transferring custody to Ida from Lorena. The woman he had thought was his sister was actually his biologic mother, having gotten pregnant out-of-wedlock at 15.

This knowledge blew my Dad’s mind. He ran away and spent the night in an old barn, devastated that who he thought was, was not. Back then, no cell phones, no GPS, no Amber Alerts, so I can imagine the consternation felt by all and the relief when he finally returned. This aspect of my Dad’s personality, wanting to run away when things got psychologically intense, is unfortunately something I’ve inherited, whether by genetics or observation I don’t know. Eventually things settled down. Lorena had moved out of the house and

Lorena and Pauline late 1940's

married a man named Overstreet, and they had a girl who became Dad’s biologic half-sister, named Pauline (She was an interesting person, though not in the expected sense perhaps; she passed away in 2006 and memories of her will surface in later chapters). Dad grew to accept that he had 2 mothers, though it was Ida that had the more-intense psychological grip on him, demonstrated by his blowing up our good life in So Cal to return to Arkansas at her demands.

All of this was part of my coming-of-age: 8 is the age that I can again point to as a division between carefree childhood and responsibilities (if I had only knew HOW MANY to come) of young adulthood. 3^rd grade began at my new school, Albert Pike Elementary, which was different from Belle Grove in that it was much newer and had children from many differing economic levels; Belle Grove only had one – poor (though I suppose it cold have been subdivided into ordinary poor, terribly poor, and “forget it you’re life is screwed” poor). I enjoyed it at first, but I increasingly was singled out for abuse on the playground for three reasons – my hair (obvious), my weight (same), and oddly enough, a speech impediment that I had never been aware of before being taunted for it – I pronounced the word “three” as “free”. Not a playground session went by that I was not reminded of my deficiencies in those categories. My grades were fine; my affect was poor. Compounding this was the fact that at the Boy’s Club, where I often went after school, one of the teenage workers took a disliking to me and would bully me verbally and intimate that he wanted to do physical harm as well. I finally told my parents what was happening, and Dad went there to confront the bully, who like their entire ilk was on their best behavior, acting innocent and claiming I was misunderstanding him. He never did anything overtly again, but I would get daggers sent my way when he THOUGHT I wasn’t looking.

One thing the Boy’s Club did provide was an opportunity for me to play contact football for the first time. But instead of my dreams of being a QB or running back, because of my size I was relegated to line duty. I didn’t want to engage – I wanted to roam freely. But it was better than not doing it, and the Saturday mornings our games were played were exciting ones for me. After football season, basketball season began, but I was a spectator instead of a player. Westark Junior College (now the University of Arkansas Fort Smith) adjoined the Boys Club property and shared the gym. I would sidle in from my usual activities when a game was beginning and thus began my love affair with the organized team sport that I both love to watch the most and played the best. Small colleges from the area and neighboring states would come in as opponents, and to me it might as well have been UCLA because I was enthralled with these giant men. It’s hard to have perspective when you’re young that the 10 years difference that seems like a vast gulf when you are young melts away so quickly in time. An ecology check on life for me as of this writing would be that all of those 18 and 19 years olds that played the games I watched that year are all eligible for full Social Security Retirement.

Impossibly, one day in December I saw Mom packing boxes, and I knew that another move was upon us. Probably had something to do with money, as all of our moves tended to, since landlords can be flexible but when you don’t pay the rent at all something has to give. The amazing thing was that Dad with his seductive sales-pitch persona would talk yet another new owner into giving us a chance, and it was off to the races. This move took us just to the south side of downtown, into an old house that had been subdivided into apartments at 1501 South H. The place was notable for many reasons, both the things that would happen there, and its across-the-street proximity to a graveyard. Many a night I stared out the front window hoping to see a ghost that never materialized for me.

The rooms we were let was in essence the old formal living room, formal dining room (turned into a bedroom with no doors open to both sides), second bedroom that appeared to have been built as a den, then an impossibly small kitchen and bathroom. I have wondered exactly how my parents had sex there with no privacy, though I certainly am not in need of details. But somehow they did, because I began seeing that developing bump on Mom’s belly, and was told that we were about to have a new brother or sister (hard to imagine a world without ultrasound, right?)

Once moved in, it was time to transfer to yet another school. Belle Point would thankfully become the last stop of my elementary years and so retains a prominent position in my memories. School began after the Christmas break, and I felt as though I fit in fairly well. I don’t remember any fights that year, though they would dominate much of my later years there and on into my junior high days. Paradoxically, the freedom I had enjoyed at the house on Kinkead was taken away and I wasn’t allowed to leave the yard except to walk back-and-forth to school two blocks away. I suppose this was because of the traffic on the busy Lexington Avenue that intersected our house at the corner. With my growing awareness of the world around me had grown a sense that t could also be a dangerous place. None of the “stranger danger” rhetoric was used, just a general waning not to talk to them. Or take candy (why I wondered, were grownups driving around offering kids candy). So a few times I did have people ask me to come over to their parked cars but I dutifully ignored them and ran home.

I retreated into even more of a shell, and as my parents fighting grew more heated and hands-on (yes, this is I sad but it must be reported, there were physical confrontations even when she was visibly pregnant). I sought refuge in whatever fantasy presented itself. Enter professional wrestling. I had first been introduced to it by Maw-Maw who had made the trip from Alma to Fort Smith to see the weekly matches held in a renovated car dealership on Towson Avenue many times with her son James until he died (an event which I will cover next chapter). I believe the first time I saw the theatrical satire of faux combat both on television and in person was in 1965. Maw-Maw’s favorite wrestler was “Irish” Mike Clancy,

Irish Mike Clancy

a fireplug of a man whose head bore a veritable roadmap of battle scars from having been “cut” (back then I of course did not know it, but would later be wised to the fact that the wrestlers themselves would use bits of razor blades on their own foreheads to produce these effects) so many times. Good-guy Clancy’s shtick was to cut himself at the heat of being beaten during the “fight”, then act amazed when he saw his own blood tricking down his face, which would turn him into a Tasmanian Devil who would quickly dispatch of the villain he was matched against. So, she took me with her to the live matches but it just didn’t click for me at the time.

But at 8, in need of escapism, the never-ending pseudo-drama of rasslin’ was just what I needed. Clancy no longer wrestled in 1967, and with this my grandmother had lost interest, so without an adult advocate on my side, I began pestering my wrestling-hating Dad until he finally relented to drop me off while he went across the street to a bar to have a few hours quality drinking time. It was 2 hours of nirvana for my young mind. Conflict, pathos, adrenalin were the fare that was presented, the actors had names like Danny Hodge, Jack

Danny Hodge

Brisco, the Masked Assassins and Crazy Chuck Karbo, and the theater smelled of popcorn and testosterone. What helped the drama in that era was the fact that adults were still largely un-wised to the predetermined outcomes and faked punches, so it was easy to lose oneself in the orgy of verbal hatred ventilated on a heel like Dandy Jack Donavan as he cheated his way to victory over a popular babyface. If 45 year old men in overalls with tobacco spittle oozing down the side of their mouth thought it was real, who was I to argue?

This interest would ebb and surge during most of my younger life, though I certainly recall being completely smartened up to the produced nature of pro wrestling by 10.

Other entertainment began to grab my attention this year, chiefly the comic booky and/or sci-fi based shows “Batman” and “Lost in Space”. I developed what I believe was my first crush on an actress who played “Penny” on the latter series, real name Angela Cartwright.

Angela Cartwright

Somehow I found an address to write to her, and a few weeks later I received a response to my fan mail – a signed picture of her. I would stare t it incessantly, feeling the first sinking feelings in the pit of my stomach that at that stage had not crossed the Mason-Dixon Line yet. Perhaps my favorite of all was the afternoon soap opera that was Gothic and horror genre based, “Dark Shadows”. My only conflict was, it showed at 3 PM every day, and the last bell didn’t ring till 3:05. I would

Johnathan Frid "Barnabas" on "Dark Shadows

run at breakneck speed from the school to my house and would at least get to see the last 20 minutes of the half-hour show. Vampires, witches, and werewolves – what more could an 8-year old ask for? To this day, I still love vampire-based shows, like “True Blood”, though no “Twilight” for me please. And, there is a part of me that still wouldn’t entirely mind being sexy and immortal.

The most significant event of the first part of 1967 could be entitled “The Year We Had Money (After We Almost Starved)”. Sometime early in the year, my Dad had lost his job and in an era without food stamps, ADC, or Section 8, a family could literally fall off the map. We came close. Only Maw-Maw’s paltry SS check kept the rent paid, but then there was nothing left for food. I have thankfully been spared most of these memories, but two do survive, and #2 was a direct result of #1. Hearing the cries of two children crying, a pregnant wife lost in another dimension, and an older mother/grandmother in poor health, Dad tried to come up with a creative solution – making dumplings, since all we had on the shelves was flour, and the only liquid was the water coming out of the taps. He boiled the paste, and the result was like - eating glue. Seeing my mortality flashing in front of my eyes, I decided to dramatize our plight. I took every belt I had, linked them together and used them as restraints to tie myself to the iron railings of my bed. I began to scream “I’M BEING HELD PRISONER…I’M GOING TO STARVE”. My Dad of course was boiling angry, and I’m sure removing one of the belts and giving me a beating was his first reaction, but them a chilling emotion came over him and something that must have been shame emerged, because he grabbed the tabletop radio and headed out the door, returning later with $5 of groceries he had bought with money borrowed from the pawn shop using the radio as collateral. I may have been overly-dramatic, but we ate that night because of it, and over time life often has seen fit to offer me the role of the one who will speak up or argue when an unjust situation occurs. May not make others comfortable, but the situation always seems to be resolved in a more equitable manner than if I had remained silent.

The unexpected inflow of money came via an inheritance Mom received after the death of an Aunt that she had been close to during her younger years. I believe the amount was $15,000, which for 1967 was the equivalent of over $100,000 today. Rags-to-riches? Ehh, not quite, in fact the money would be largely spent within a year. Without a house bought. Or a new car. Or even a good used car. My parents really could have used a financial planner, but they were unheard of in that day. But at least we had food in our bellies, the electricity was not to be cut off again for a long time, and we were living in the same house without a landlord coming by every day to collect back rent. Could stability finally decide to stay awhile with the Millers?