So for two glorious months in the
summer of 1971 we were allowed a taste of the finer things in life.
This statement is proof that all in life is relative, for even though
the house on South 16th was transcendental compared to the
abodes we had lived in prior, it was by modern terms just a solidly
middle-class dwelling. It is remarkable though that a June and July
43 years ago would be memorable at all.
Dad was as I mentioned before driving a
taxi during this stretch, and being off for the summer, most days I
would cajole him into taking me along. This would prove to be an
education all its own, as the majority of the clientele were from the
fringes of society – drunks, hookers, gamblers and probably more
than a few gangsters. It was my job to manage the money, which I did
from the high-tech device of a cigar box which contained the money.
He was charged a flat fee to rent the vehicle each day, plus the gas,
so the challenge each day became reaching the breakeven point after
which all the money was take home. There were definitely days that
was shaved close, since reaching the pickup point for passengers was
often a competitive race with other drivers which the dispatchers
seemed to encourage instead of assigning one driver over the two-way
radio. To get those assignments required stretching the truth,
pretending that we were closer to the pickup spot than we actually
were, and then using speed and shortcuts to close the gap before our
ride was poached. Sometimes we would arrive exactly at the same time
as another driver with horns blaring and he would stave off the other
driver as I ran to the door and ushered our fare into our cab.
One night, we picked up an extremely
drunk man at a liquor store, who told us to take him to a downtown
hotel. I was sitting in the front passenger seat and he was in the
back, I felt his fingers start running through my hair as he slurred
“you sure are cute” Dad yelled at him to stop, but he was too
drunk to care because he then started rubbing my chest and tried to
kiss my neck. Dad slammed on the brakes, grabbed him out of he back
and tossed him on the side of the road. After he took off again sans
my attempted molester, he awkwardly tried to explain about “queers”.
Though I was aware of homosexuals before, this was certainly a
shocking first-hand introduction.
There was a major flood that occurred
that summer, and the low-lying areas which included the public
housing areas were under water. That day, we participated in several
extractions – I wouldn't call them rescues because I didn't
consider our acts risky or heroic – but we helped people who were
stranded on high ground outside their dwellings get to shelters.
Fares were not a concept that day; Dad was just doing what needed to
be done since the police and fire departments were overwhelmed. After
several months of driving 12 hours a day and making perhaps $30 net,
he called an end to his brief life as a taxi driver and I lost my
front-row seat into the seamy underbelly of Fort Smith Arkansas.
Our little two month run of glory was up on the south side; the landlord had reconciled with his wife and wanted his place back. Our next move was back to the north side of town, to a new federally subsidized apartment housing development named Allied Gardens. There were multiple surprises in this new place – it had four bedrooms, gleaming clean white tile throughout, and it had central air conditioning. Valhalla! We were only to live here for four months (I throw up my hands trying to understand why), but it was a memorable period for several reasons. I became friends with a guy who lived in the same building downstairs from us, who was also 13. He and his two sisters lived with their mom, who was always at work it seemed, so they had a revolving door to their place where I and others hung out.
Our little two month run of glory was up on the south side; the landlord had reconciled with his wife and wanted his place back. Our next move was back to the north side of town, to a new federally subsidized apartment housing development named Allied Gardens. There were multiple surprises in this new place – it had four bedrooms, gleaming clean white tile throughout, and it had central air conditioning. Valhalla! We were only to live here for four months (I throw up my hands trying to understand why), but it was a memorable period for several reasons. I became friends with a guy who lived in the same building downstairs from us, who was also 13. He and his two sisters lived with their mom, who was always at work it seemed, so they had a revolving door to their place where I and others hung out.
I liked Max a lot, but was completely
blown away when I met his younger sister Lynn. I will try to describe
Lynn by comparison. An actress who was in vogue in that era was Ali
MacGraw, the star of the mega-hit “Love Story” and generally
regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Lynn was an
almost-perfect distillation of Ali MacGraw, save that she was more
beautiful, had a better body, had deeper more soulful eyes and a
husky voice to match. And she was 12. I'm sure some will look askance
at my memory from my brief intersection with her 43 years ago and
roll their eyes. As the old saying goes, you just had to have been
there. Everyone - young boys, teenagers, grown men – fell in love
with Lynn. Men would roll down their windows trying to start
conversations with her. I remember a 17 year old on a motorcycle
standing outside her apartment begging her to come out to see him. To
add to her ridiculous physical allure, she had an old-soul weariness
that seemed to want to escape the burdens of her physical beauty. I
remained perpetually tongue-tied around her, which seemed to endear
me to her since every other guy was trying to get her clothes off. So
for the first time in my life I was the object of envy from other
guys since Lynn would always find a reason to sit with me while
studious ignoring those with their tongues dragging the ground
lusting after her. I never so much as held her hand, yet her visage
is more remembered to me than some whom I've slept with. The last
time I saw her was several months after we had moved from those
apartments on a church bus. She was sitting in the back, acting
morose and not making eye contact. I asked Max what was wrong and he
said she had gotten into trouble and their mom was sending her to
live with relatives in Kentucky. I've often though of her since as an
archetype of precociousness in a world that wants things to ripen
according to a strict schedule rather than on their own timing.
 |
| Even this may not do Lynn justice - Ali MacGraw"s sublime perfection |
And she was not the only female who
stirred my interest at Allied Gardens. Peggy was a tall girl of 13
with strawberry-blond hair who was an only child with a single mom.
Peggy liked to play touch football on the playground which often
degenerated into full-contact wrestling where I could hold my own,
but she was quite the competition. One afternoon she invited me to
her apartment on a day that her mom was at work. Under some pretense,
we started wrestling, and only with the passage of time do I now
realize that Peggy was enjoying the physical grinding for a more
ulterior, lusty reason. For my part, I was too shy and too scared to
advance it beyond the innocent pretext it was, but I clearly missed
out on losing my “V” card that summer of '71.
We were no longer in Darby district so
I began my 8th grade year at Kimmons Junior High. Except
for Max and Peggy I knew no one so I went back into my social
isolation shell. But my family's “never stay still” ethos came
through as we made yet another of our “thief in the night moves”
to a house on N. 37th street and I was back in Darby-land.
I have no memory of Dad doing anything to make money so I suppose we
were surviving by Maw-Maw's SS check and voodoo. The house had a
partially finished attic and that became my bedroom. It was a
flat-out eerie place and I had many “bump-in-the-night”
experiences up there. I retreated even more into a world of music and
comfort food, which for me = crackers and milk. Which of course
equaled even more poundage on my frame, which equaled depression,
which completed the circle of the vicious cycle I have dealt with for
much of my life. I was fat, I knew it, as did everyone else, but I
had no goal then to get motivated to move. It would be the discovery of
that insane emotional passion called a teenage crush which would a few years later offer a solution to my lack of motivation.
With little prep, my french horn and I
went to region tryouts and our little team surprised my band director
by making first band. They made quite a deal out of it since the
concert was at Darby that year so I got my mug printed in the paper.
I see that person now and feel so much empathy for him, knowing that
his life would take so many dramatic twists and turns the following
decades. In another plus, I consistently started making the honor roll this school year as I stopped having so many sick days derailing my work.
In a fit of what I now consider insanity, I convinced myself that it would be super cool to run for 9th grade class president. Except for the campaigning, speech writing, speech delivery, and getting votes, I think I did fairly well. It did teach me a valuable lesson, that just because from the outside things looked easy, like speaking to hundreds of people, they definitely were much harder when you were the object of attention. On Election Day during assembly, I pretty much froze and managed to spit out just a few cliches before retreating in shame. And still I finished 3rd out of 4 which says something for the pity factor.
In a fit of what I now consider insanity, I convinced myself that it would be super cool to run for 9th grade class president. Except for the campaigning, speech writing, speech delivery, and getting votes, I think I did fairly well. It did teach me a valuable lesson, that just because from the outside things looked easy, like speaking to hundreds of people, they definitely were much harder when you were the object of attention. On Election Day during assembly, I pretty much froze and managed to spit out just a few cliches before retreating in shame. And still I finished 3rd out of 4 which says something for the pity factor.
In the spring of '72, there were
several tornado outbreaks in our area. Almost every week we would
hear the sirens blaring, which meant little to us because there were
no safe places to go to anyway. One night I had gone to sleep early,
and a storm had developed that was a whopper. A tornado warning had
been broadcast on our local channel 5, and Dad had come upstairs to
wake me up. The suddenness of my sleep interruption was so profound
that to this day I still remember the dream I was rudely ripped away
from. Perhaps it helped that it involved the 9th grade
cheerleaders, and a shower room, and … well, you get the reason for
the lasting memory. I came downstairs listening to the wind howling.
This was before the days of comprehensive radar, so the news channel
relied upon phone reports from law enforcement. The man at the
channel 5 news desk was a recent import from Chicago whose arrival
the station management had made a big splash about. He was furiously
reading reports left and right “funnel cloud at North 6th
and E Streets”, “damaging winds at the river bridge”. His next
report was epic.
“Tornado spotted at 13th
and Grand”. Til this moment, he had been looking down at the sheets
of info that were being handed to him. After this one, he looked up,
stared into the camera with eyes as big as saucers and said in a
panicked voice “13th and Grand? That's where I am!”.
And then, he promptly dove under the desk, leaving the camera on an
empty seat.
In the midst of the danger, our entire
family, as I am sure many others across the viewing area, lost it.
His sudden shift from professional control to abject terror had us
dying with laughter. I wish footage of this existed today, I'm sure
it would be an all-time YouTube hit. Once we regained our breath, I
realized there was still a bad situation going on. I went out on the
front porch followed by Dad. It was at that moment that the tornado
passed just houses away tearing a path of destruction down Grand
Avenue. The sound was like a combination of a bellowing bull moose
and enormous freight train. Within seconds the wind went from around
30 mph to gusting over 100. I make that estimation because I was
lifted into the air, and I only saved myself by grabbing onto the
wrought iron corner and holding on for dear life as Dad watched
helplessly since the wind had pinned him against the door. After a
few seconds, the tremendous pressure relented and I collapsed onto
the porch floor. That was a real-life “Wizard of Oz”
experience I never forgot.
experience I never forgot.
When summer came, I signed up for a
program called Neighborhood Youth Corps, which was a grant program
that gave young teenagers jobs for working at schools and parks doing
maintenance work. I was assigned to Tilles Park, which was exactly
one block away from my house. The pay was minimum wage of that time,
which was $1.20 an hour. Though I didn't mind the hard work – and
in an era before power trimmers and edgers, EVERYTHING was done by
hand – the park superintendent was extremely difficult to please.
He was an older man that never seemed happy and always criticized
everything I did even when I had worked hard to make sure it was
right. He was always ranting about “hippies” being the cause of
everything bad in life, and looked at me with suspicion often since
my hair, though not overly long, was starting to grow out. One day,
there was a miscommunication about something he wanted done, and he
chewed me out in front of the other young guy who worked with me.
Even at that age, I had a thin tolerance for people abusing me, so
this time I argued back instead of cowering but this seemed to fuel
his flame, so I walked off the job. My supervisor in the program
called and I explained that the old guy was very hateful toward me
and even though I appreciated the money I couldn't take the abuse
anymore. He brokered my returning the next day, and to my shock I
even got a sideways apology from the old bastard. I had no guidance
in matters such as this, but this experience as with many other
similar happenings in life proved my instincts are correct – it is
always best to stand up and fight back when you are being treated
badly. Tends to lead to a bit of job instability – I've had around
26 give or take a few temp jobs – but I can go to my grave knowing
I never was anybody's bitch.
As my 14th birthday
approached, our yearly ritual of having used up a landlord's good
will returned, and we were booted. The next house, in an extremely old and poor area of the
north side, was perhaps the nadir of my adventures in relocation.
Ugly, small, riddled with holes that apparent steroid-abusing rats took
advantage of to pay us nightly visits – yes, this was the cherry on
top of the whipped cream of the very nasty sundae that was our
housing reality. It was broiling hot in the summer, bone-chillingly
cold in winter, with a perpetual smell of disintegration. To add to
this scenario of perfection, it was on an over sized lot that grew
like an African jungle and it fell unsurprisingly on me to mow all of
it. One day that June right after we had moved in I attempted to
tackle an area that was at least two feet high. I hit what seemed to
be a huge rock hidden down in the grass, but a second later the torn
up remains of a turtle that landed at my feet informed me otherwise.
I promptly retched, left the mower where it was covered in turtle
blood and goo, and it would stay there for 2 weeks until I recovered
from the trauma. By now, the foliage was at eye level so I made a few
token attempts at the edges before giving up and allowing that part
of the yard to be what it wanted. The neighbors never complained,
which I took as a sign that they had sen this scenario go down too
many ties with the revolving door of renters occupying such a crappy
property.
Somehow in the midst of all this confusion Maw-Maw had purchased a car, a small yellow Ford Falcon.
Though we were grateful to have a consistent vehicle with us for the
first time in forever, due to my Dad's incessant disappearances, it
was a scary proposition riding with her since her vision had gone
down the tubes and she couldn't afford glasses. We adjusted by having
me sit next to her to redirect he wheel when she began to veer across
the line into oncoming traffic. In retrospect, avoiding a major
accident during this last period of her driving, which thankfully
lasted less than a year, was itself a minor miracle since when I was
at work 8 year old Liz had to take my place saving the carload of
Miller's from doom.The end of my baker's dozen of years reached, I was caught in that limbo between the last of childhood, and the demands of onrushing adulthood. It was an uncomfortable space for me without guidance or resources, but enough of my youthful idealism remained to stave off the depressive realities of my existence. Barely.
