Life at 13

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 16^th 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.

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.

Even this may not do Lynn justice - Ali MacGraw"s sublime perfection

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.

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 8^th 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. 37^th 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 9^th 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 3^rd 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 9^th 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 6^th and E Streets”, “damaging winds at the river bridge”. His next report was epic.

“Tornado spotted at 13^th 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 “13^th 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.

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 14^th 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.