Monkeyshines - beginning intro and chapter one

Monkeyshines - Dedication and Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to the little people of planet Earth - to the children, the people who care for children, and the ordinary people who work every day in the dark, one day at a time, making the best of what they find. Earth is made beautiful by the ordinary little people who overcome their tribal history of fear and ignorance, and create light and warmth from their imaginations.

chapter one

My father didn't tell me very much. He left volumes of ideas and experience stacked up in the dark behind his eyes. Even to himself, he made notes by folding up small, blank sheets of paper which he tucked carefully into his wallet. When he died, he left me a bit in the lurch. I realized how permanently silent he was going to be. In a way, though, he left me the freedom to imagine reality for myself.
I suspect he never had that kind of freedom. He was assaulted by crisis at birth. He awoke to find himself a child of a peasant family fending off starvation in the Tyrolean Alps. . .living in a war zone fought over by Austria and Italy. When Dad was nine, food was so scarce that my grandfather told him to drown his dog, Toby, so they wouldn't all have to watch him starve. Dad did it, and left Toby's body by the river bank. Later, Dad's family was invited to an uncle's home for a dinner of stew. The stew turned out to be Toby. When my dad found out he ran outside and threw up.
His family's unifying principle was, "work to feed the family." So my dad and his dad left for America in 1922. They sailed to New York in the cargo hold of a stink-bucket boat, then took a train to Chicago, where they drove around with a horse and wagon, and sharpened knives from dark to dark. They built a good business, saved their money, and eventually reunited most of the family in America.
In a hospital in 1971, Dad remembered Toby and that nasty boat ride to America. I was visiting him with my older brother, Peter. Dad had always looked hardy and strong to me, but that look had vanished. Now he looked like onionskin, frail and exhausted. Dad used to take hold of me under my armpits and swing me high up in the air, calling me "Mickoly, Mockoly, Prince of Scockoly." Now he couldn't even lift his head.
Peter said to Dad quietly, "It went fast, didn't it?"
My dad answered with a sigh that affirmed that it, his human life, had indeed gone fast. Then Dad looked away from us, and up a bit, as though watching his life replay in brief bursts of super consciousness. Then he looked back into my brother's eyes, and into my eyes. I haven't forgotten that look.
The doctors had given Dad up for dead three times in the last twenty years. He had ruined his plumbing and part of his brain with alcohol. I suggested to him once that he should try marijuana when he had to get loaded or wanted to change his mood. "You could spare your body a lot of damage," I'd told him.
He'd responded gruffly, "What do you think I am -- some kind of dope fiend?"
Even with all the alcohol he drank, he'd survived far longer than the doctors had predicted, which I credited to his mountaineer constitution. Even thinned by disease, he was a tough cookie.
I remember hearing fear in his voice only once. It was when he told me about the time, as a small boy, when he was crossing a great glacier near his Alpine village. He'd gotten stuck on a ridge where icy slopes dropped away from him on both sides.
"I came to a rock that kept me from going forward, and I was too scared to go back. I just sat there, freezing. I thought I was going to die. But after it got dark, my father came with a rope and a torch and saved me. That was the most scared I ever was in all my life."
When I was little, Dad always left his work pants on the floor by his bed at night. His pockets were always chock full of change -- enough for all four of us kids to plunder them recklessly without causing obvious depletion.
Those pants smelled like the shop where Dad worked; like the rancid fat on the handles of the knives that had come in to be sharpened. This was not an offensive smell, but peculiar. It mixed with the equally peculiar smell of the residue from the grinding process, the fine dust from the pumice stone grinding wheel, the tiny steel filings from the knife blades, and the water that trickled onto the wheel to cool the blades as they were pressed against it. The dust, filings and water all melded together into a gritty mist that sprayed from the wheel. It made stalagmites on the canopy that shielded the wheel, and permeated the clothing of anyone standing nearby.
I remember that when someone got one of those tiny splinters of steel in his eye, my dad, or my Uncle Ben, would coax the splinter out with a toothpick or the tip of a knife blade. Cuts were pretty much ignored, even deep, heavy bleeders. Dad would just tie any handy piece of rag around the cut, mostly to keep blood from running onto the knives, and we'd get back to work.
One of the last times I saw my dad was in a tavern near his shop. He was drinking with a gray headed vice-squad detective. At the time, I had nearly shoulder length hair and a scruffy beard. I wore jeans and a Mexican serape, and I was barefoot. (I didn't always go barefoot, but on this occasion I wanted to show off an iridescent paisley flower that had been painted on my right foot by a Lithuanian artist named Ligita with whom I went to school. Ligita had actually asked me to go barefoot, because she feared socks or shoes would abrade her flower).
Anyway, the cop was full of street poison, and I heard him snarl to my dad as I approached, "Is this cocksucker your son, Pete? You want me to bust this cocksucker?" My dad seemed blocked from any response. He just sat there, eyed his beer, and waited.
I said, "Hi, Pop. Listen, before I forget, could you lend me a few bucks for gas?" I was between jobs and broke. Actually, I didn't want a job at that time. Working, studying and socializing weren't dove-tailing for me. I felt like I was trying to cram a size ten schedule into a size six boot.
The cop growled sardonically, "All he wants is money! Let me give the little son-of-a-bitch a couple bucks." He took two dollars off the bar, and handed them toward me.
I was still so happy with my newly acquired paisley flower, that I wasn't seriously provoked by this man's anger. "I don't accept money from just anybody," I said mildly. As I said this I detected a faint glimmer of relief in my father's eyes. He gave me two dollars, and I left. "See you later, Pop," I said. "Thanks." That was 1966.
I don't remember my dad ever telling me he was proud of me. He told others he was proud of me, but to me he would say, "You're a bum. What the hell are you gonna to do with that philosophy stuff? Are you gonna open up a store and sell it by the pound for fertilizer?"
This hurt a lot until I learned to understand from his eyes that he loved me unconditionally, and that he showed it as best he could. His second grade education, a battered self-image, and the current social prejudice in America against "Hippies" combined to keep him from seeing me in clearly positive terms, but I do not doubt that he loved me, and I still miss him.
And actually, I was a bum - sort of. I was a student bum, right up until the time Dad died. I'd attended Our Lady of Peace Catholic Grammar School and Mount Carmel Catholic High School on Chicago's south side, then Loyola University in downtown Chicago. It was during my time at Loyola that I evolved from conventional student to student bum.
My tuition was paid by the school because I got high scores on the admission test, and because of a fortunate social connection to the administration. I had no real commitment to any particular field of study, nor much ambition. So, I majored in psychology in the vague hope this might help me understand why I was so confused about everything. I minored in crossword puzzles and gin rummy.
I viewed my future in terms of days or weeks, and yearned for that glorious time I'd imagined all my life, when I'd become a full-fledged adult, be confident and popular, and have lots of exciting sexual experiences. I assumed God was in His heaven. (I remember arguing vehemently in a tavern one day that God's existence was a provable fact). I trusted completely that the adult world was proceeding according to more or less sensible standards and principles. And I sort of assumed that if I needed to know more than I did, someone would advise me.
One day a message on the radio in the student union interrupted activities to say that John F. Kennedy had been gunned down by a sniper on a Dallas street. Hit in the head. The news bludgeoned us all into silence. Then people cried out loud and shrieked in terror. I looked to my companions, Sam and Cyril. Our eyes met and silent awareness blazed between us -- an unthinkable catastrophe had just happened. The secure structure we'd grown up with had just vanished as though it had never been.
No action to deal with this development came to mind. Without discussion we got up and joined the procession across the street to Mr. Jones' tavern. We got drunk. I believe it was then that I began a psychological metamorphosis. I'd feel it more deeply, and would remember it far longer than most other things in my experience. Something serious seemed to have gone wrong in the collective unconscious of America, and I felt an urge to join the search for a remedy.
My first steps in this were difficult and pathetic. I didn't know how society operated, my own or anyone else's. My education in this area had been rote learning. Like the blind man feeling an elephant's trunk, I tried to imagine the entire beast. This feeling the depth of my own ignorance launched me into a sea of hopelessness and depression. I had to go back to basics, and challenge my assumptions. I'd have to take apart the bits and pieces of my thoughts, like dismantling my one and only mental boat. . .somehow stay afloat until the bits and pieces reassembled in a more coherent way. I left the university. I needed to get to the bottom of things.
******
I borrowed $200 from my father and booked passage to France on a ship that was chartered by a student travel agency. I told Mom and Dad I was going to go to school in Germany at Freiburg im Breisgau, or perhaps I'd get into Loyola's branch in Rome. Actually, I was breaking out of a cocoon. I had no idea at all about the future, except that I wanted contact with the real world. I could no longer accept being isolated from what appeared to be reality for most people. How could anyone think killing the president could do any good? What the hell was going on?
I admit that very little in my field of vision or feelings seemed to be going particularly well at that time. I suspect that, had I been grounded by some regular, practical involvement, like monthly meetings with the Young Americans for Freedom or the local numismatist society or a spelunkers' club; or if my job as the lone night custodian in a sleazy half-way house (jam packed with mostly welfare people who showed me more bureaucratically approved disorders and disabilities than I'd imagined there were; including raging senility, ex-convicts, mentally retarded, psychologically disturbed, psychotic alcoholics, etc.) wasn't so grim, or if Maggie May hadn't dumped me for wealthy, handsome, smart Bob What's-his-name, or if my parents had declared peace on themselves, I might have recorded Kennedy's passing less radically. I had friends who did not seem very affected, and I heard much later that a few people had actually cheered. But I was affected.
I was one-dimensional at the time; totally preoccupied with one personal issue or another. I had a picture window in my mind through which I almost, but never quite got an unobstructed view of the world. Kennedy's assassination was a rock through that window. He was the chief. He was killed by a crazy guy, according to the news. I sensed that I'd never know if the reports were true and factual or just public relations jello. I felt alone alongside a lot of others who seemed equally alone. Either Kennedy wasn't the guy we took him for or the world wasn't the place we thought it was, or...? The assassination of the President of the U.S.A. just couldn't happen. In the world prior to World War II, yes. After that, no.
*****
So, the good ship Aurelia took me to France that fall. It would stop at Southampton and Le Havre. It carried students from all over the world. Old stereotypes and lazy assumptions didn't work well outside my old cocoon. I had to wise up. First I had to deal with seasickness. Bob Hackett, a student from Virginia, helped me with this. He told me that alcohol counteracted seasickness. I tried it and, as the old story goes, maybe it worked, I was too drunk to tell.
Bob also gushed stories from Virginia. He told us one about his grandfather's hired man, an old Black fellow that everyone called "Broadway." One day, while he was driving through rural Virginia, Broadway had been pulled over by a county sheriff, a redneck fellow I think Bob said. In the course of issuing a citation for driving too slowly, the sheriff wanted to know Broadway's full, LEGAL name. Well, Broadway had been born in 1917, at the very beginning of America's involvement in World War I. Broadway's father was an ex-slave, and still joyful at realizing full citizenship, so he'd named his son after the popular, patriotic song of that day that celebrated the American boys who were going off to fight "the war to end all wars". He named his son "Good-bye Broadway, Hello France Williams." And so Broadway told the sheriff.
The sheriff said, "I think you’re drunk, boy. Get out of that car and walk that white line for me." Broadway walked the line. "Now, sing me a few bars of your name, boy," the sheriff had added.
We were all drunk, and laughing and crying at the picture Bob painted of Broadway and the sheriff rolling around in the ditch by the side of the road, when Katya Sarjevich entered the conversation. A big, beautiful, blond, Russian-American student from Grosse Pointe and the University of Michigan, she apparently thought we were stealing a good time at Broadway's expense. She interjected, "Ah do declare, Bobby Joe, you tell the funn-i-est stow-ries." Bob's smile cracked just a little.
I forgot old Bob, Broadway and the sheriff, and found my attention focused on Katya. (Down in my testicles, where millions of microscopic sperm, like tiny track stars, slept in their microscopic beds, a bell rang. Ding-dong. This early warning bell rang pretty frequently, though, so most of these tiny sprinters didn't even wake up. A few threw on sneakers and shorts and started pacing by the door. "Maybe this is the real thing," they might have thought.)
Katya was on her way to study in France for a year. She played the guitar, was very witty, and her smile was infectious. I don't think I only stalked her for a sexual purpose; we actually did enjoy each other's company, but I sensed that an opportunistic grubbing for sexual responses seemed to be inextricably bound up with all of my other actions.
******
Monkeyshine #1, Humans strive constantly for sexual experiences, often hiding this fact even from themselves.
******
Katya remained sexually aloof as our inebriated conversation pitched and yawed. She disappeared for a few minutes, and I found myself looking into the soft blue eyes of a tall, slender, lonesome-feeling woman who'd been standing at the edge of Bob's circle of listeners. I introduced myself. She said, "Hi, my name's Alice. I don't know if you should talk to me, you might catch my cold."
I was usually so shy toward women that it made me angry with myself. I felt there were right things to say and right times to say them, but was never confident that I knew either. . .and I feared rejection more than death. In this instance, however, I felt emboldened by alcohol. (More correctly, my anxiety about women was depressed, or squashed down, as it were, by alcohol. I was emboldened by testosterone which squirted into my bloodstream when my pituitary gland received a signal from my hypothalamus. Who knows where the hypothalamus gets its information; why one guy gets sexually excited when he climbs through an open window, and another by tits, perfume or a run of luck at cards. Sex is confusing stuff.)
"I've got a terrific cure for a cold down in my cabin," I said.
"Terrific!" she said. Just like that. I was amazed. (In the sperm dorm, the bell rang more loudly, DING-DONG, DING-DONG! Everybody got up. The PA system announced, " This is not a drill.")
Alice and I reached my cabin, and I locked the door behind us. We kissed and caressed eagerly while tugging at each other's clothing. Years of anticipation and countless sensational fantasies became reality as Alice slipped her brassiere straps off her shoulders. We clambered about in my little bunk, naked and laughing, singing songs to each other through our open eyes. I felt we understood each other completely even without any verbal exchange of biographies.
Suddenly someone knocked on the cabin door, and we got quiet. They knocked again. "Michael. Michael! I know you're in there." It was Katya. "Michael. Michael, open this door! Michael!" We stayed quiet and she finally went away trailing words we couldn't make out.
Alice and I returned to our moment. Alice had wonderfully soft blue eyes, and her voice expressed vulnerability, but gave no hint of fear or indecision. She spoke clearly and calmly, "I just had an abortion. My parents sent me on this trip to get me away from everything. It's really a bad time for me to get pregnant again."
"Okay, don't worry." I said, and I meant it.
I tasted the saltiness of the perspiration on her neck, and breathed her unique fragrance. She bit into my shoulder and tightened her limbs around me. Between our rhythmic rocking, and the rolling of the ship, we nearly tumbled out of the bunk.
Suddenly the exit doors in my testicles were being pushed open. I had a milli-second in which to act. Fanatical sperm charged down the spermatic cord, jogged left at the ureter, and barreled out of my penis just as I withdrew it from Alice's vagina. Screaming and hollering and full of purpose, these doomed sperm leaped into space. They landed on Alice's belly and searched frantically for the entry to her uterus. A few of the more determined ones raged around in her bellybutton, thinking they still had a chance to find an ovum and start a baby. Alice and I just laughed and hugged.
I assumed I'd see Alice again after that night, but I never did. I remember wrestling against a dreadful suspicion that something was wrong with Alice for having sex with me. I'd long since been misled into thinking something was wrong with me on this account.
I'd felt this since my sexual debut at age nine. After dinner at Ann Harmon's house, her mother had left us alone and we played "you show me yours, and I'll show you mine." Moved by powerful new emotions, I earnestly investigated the opening between Ann's legs. More clinically, I wondered how girls kept from filling up with water when they swam or bathed. Ann must have told her mother, and her mother must have told someone else, because two days later, as several of us kids were going into Mary Lewis' house, Mary's mother looked at me very sternly, barred my entry, and said, "I don't want your kind of play in here." I'd walked away alone, bewildered and very embarrassed.
I thought, "Thanks Alice," many times. My previous sexual experience was bathtub hooch, and Alice's "consensual validation" helped restore in me a feeling of acceptability. I hoped her/our somewhat optimistic birth control technique wouldn't let her down.
The night before the boat docked in Southampton, the crew put on a song and dance affair at which they served Bomba Vesuviano. What a taste explosion! French Vanilla ice cream covered with wedding cake, all in the shape of a volcano. The top half of the volcano was heavily coated with a thick marshmallow sauce. The crater was ignited as the waiters ran into the darkened dining room carrying the cakes on trays on their shoulders. Bomba Vesuviano. I'd never seen it before, and I've never seen it since.