Monkeyshines
chapter 17
Cunningham Children's Home was a five acre park with picturesque Oak trees and vast green lawns set on the edge of Urbana, Illinois. A winding path cris-crossed the campus, and it looked to us like a safe place for Adam to play. I'd heard claims that thousands of little kids disappeared each year, and been incredulous. I looked into it, and learned that many little dead bodies were found each year, and we got very safety conscious. When Adam said he liked the place, we decided to get hired. Cunningham was looking for houseparents to share ‘cottages’ on the grounds. There were five cottages, each housing eight or nine disturbed teens in a family setting. One of the boys' cottages was an old brick structure near the administration buildings, one of the girls' was a modernistic house near the edge of the campus, and the other three were cross-shaped ranch homes centered in the wide open west side of campus. Chris and I got the middle one of these, a cottage named Inez Rose.
Our interview was unexpectedly video taped. Jan, the supervisor conducting the interview, introduced staff members, Murray, Glenn, Bob, Tom and Ruth and Will Szikaly, then asked, "Could you start off by giving the other staff people some of the info that I got from you in our first interview, in terms of, ah, well, let's just start off with some of your backgrounds in terms of your growing up, your educational backgrounds, and then we'll move from there into your employment histories, Okay? Michael, do you want to start off?"
"Argh, yes, how far back do you want me to go?" I said, trying to tear my mind away from the camera and remember the length and breadth of the question. Jan gestured, seeming to mean start anywhere, so I named the schools I’d attended and said, "My first job in human service was at the Blessed Beatitudes Home in Chicago while I was a student at Loyola. I thought it was a good education in how not to do human service. They gathered every kind of client who received a government check, geriatrics, retarded, mentally ill, alcoholics, felons on work release, what have you, and stuck them all in together with very little program, where they seemed to share symptoms and get sicker together. I was the night attendant, and had a room there, actually lived there myself. The owner, Berny O'Connell, told the residents I was a doctor."
Then my mind ran away from those ghastly memories and locked onto the camera that ogled me from ten feet away. "I think I'll do a lot better answering questions, ah...," I said zestily, and everyone chuckled in agreement.
Chris was asked to recap her story. "I went to Trinity High School, and while I was there I organized a reading program for ghetto kids, and got the city to donate buses to take kids to class on Saturdays. I went to the University of Illinois, and then got my degree at Lake Forest College. My first teaching job was, ah, like Michael's in that it was an experience I thought showed how not to do the job of teaching. It was on an Indian reservation in Arizona, and the principal gave all the teachers ping pong paddles, and said to use them to deal with any problems we had. The school had been an internment camp for Japanese during the Second World War and it still had the high barbed wire fence around it.
"Later, in New Zealand, I worked at Te Kainga Playcenter and at the Roseneath playcenter. That experience really opened my mind to how to teach effectively. The kids were a cross section of New Zealand society. There were Maoris from the native population and middle and upper class English kids. There didn't seem to be an underclass.
"The Wellington Adventure Playground looked almost like a junkyard; it was a fenced square block that had once been a materials re-cycling center. There were car bodies, tires, drums, ropes and countless things that the kids seemed to find much more interesting than the usual back-and-forth swing or teeter-totter. I was reinforced in the idea that getting a kid's attention, from the things in the environment rather than through pressure from authority, is all important in efficient teaching. Michael and I also worked at Mary Poppin's Home Care Agency as substitute parents, and then, back in America, for our first two years at Deborah House, I substituted in the Chicago Public Schools.
"I was lucky and, after a lot of one day stands around the city, I was asked to replace an eighth grade science teacher at one school for the rest of the year. It was my weak area, I mean, I know little about biology or chemistry, all I knew about was ecology, but the teacher who was leaving advised me to do what I knew with the kids, so I organized a cleanup of a nearby vacant lot where trash was accumulating. Every day my class worked on the lot. Besides picking up debris, we built gardens, planted trees, designed small landscape features, and we painted a large mural on the wall of the adjacent building. Michael brought some of the Deborah House residents to help. It all worked out pretty well."
Bob Ekes then asked, "It sounds like you have a lot of experiences. I'm wondering how you establish yourselves with the different kids; I mean, do you have your own system of running things or would the parents tell you how to proceed?"
"Definitely the latter," I said, "We'd get a map from the parents."
Bob continued, "What's your experience with anger problems or restraining kids?"
Chris and I looked at each other. Adam climbed into Chris' lap, so I fielded the question. "Not a lot. Most of my experience with kids has been with my sister's kids who weren't disturbed, the kids I worked with at Illinois State Soldiers and Sailors Children's School were disturbed and did a lot of acting out, but I was only there a short time.
“What I was looking for were cues that would tell me if the kids' problems were being exacerbated by staff procedures. That's what I saw at ISSCS. The staff were involved in organizational wargames, that seemed to sabotage their work with kids. They were very stern, which has value in working with kids, but they seemed to carry it too far. It seemed to be all structure and no relationship. The staff didn't seem to have any personal openness left for the kids. Staff approached Chris and me during our first days, and it quickly showed that factions were feuding, some calling others communists and claiming they were trying to wreck America's family structure, others claiming born-again staff were nutty zealots, a third group seemed to feel most of the staff were just there for the paychecks regardless of their apparent philosophies. It was nuts."
"Yeah, they were going through a reorganization at the time, I remember that," Jan said, "They're closed now."
Bob returned to his point, "So, suppose you had kids who challenged you a lot, how would you discipline them?"
Adam was still on Christine's lap, behaving beautifully, but still a distraction, so I plunged ahead, "Well, first, I'd like to say that while we've had significant experience working with mentally retarded adults, I don't want to give the impression that we think we know it all. We'll be looking for help if we get involved with the kids here. That said, we have definite ideas about disciplining kids. Chris and I pretty much agree that the key is taking a positive line and establishing that we're on the same side. We try to take a role as allies not opposed authority figures."
Chris said, "I feel strongly that there is never a justification for hitting or spanking. Sometimes a kid may run into the street or something, and you may have to grab him and shake him a bit so he knows how important it is that he understand, but otherwise, I would suggest staying with positive language, and if that fails you might use time out or withdrawal of attention, or just leave the room."
Bob said, "Well, many of the kids in our population are tough angry kids who may press you hard, and they might see your leaving the room as a surrender."
Will said, "Yeah, our girls used to walk on us, I mean, they'd go nuts and be pulling all kinds of things, and we'd be in our room crawling the walls. We had some real blowups and finally the girls understood where we were coming from, but they'll get to you."
I said, "I think Chris would agree that leaving the room is only a last ditch move in a circumstance where you haven't got a positive technique in mind, the point being that it's better to leave the room than let your parent be hooked, if everyone understands what I mean by that..."
Nodding heads and quiet but affirmative sounds indicated everyone understood this reference to Eric Berne's theory of Transactional Analysis, wherein each person is described as a composite of child, parent and adult response patterns, the adult being the success-oriented one.
I continued, "We fail if our parents are hooked. We're no longer influential once the kid's disruptive behavior gets inside our emotional system. Salesmen recognize the subtle magic of positive language, and disciplining kids is really a matter of selling them on the idea that certain choices are better than others. Salesmen know to set a positive image in the prospective buyer's mind, strictly avoid disputing, and concentrate on reinforcing the value of things being sold. Effectiveness in disciplining kids seems to increase as we identify with the kids and use positive language to get them to believe that they want what we're selling. If we decide they don't deserve that much energy or respect, and that they should just do what they're told or else, we reduce our productivity."
Bob added, "We do have an approach here that you might consider an additional option." He gestured to Murray Rodnick sitting next to him, and everyone chuckled, Murray most of all. "Murray is usually available for crisis intervention, for those times when you think you have to separate yourself from a kid who's having an anger or violence problem."
Murray turned out to be our safety release valve. He was a patient saint with kids, but he was also a wrestler and could quickly and painlessly immobilize a kid who'd run amok and become a danger. And he never got angry in the process.
I said, "I think some primitive principles apply. We're influential according to the well being we project. If we get angry, bully, bluster and demand, the kids may obey us when we're watching them, but that's only external control. They'll sense we're weak and confused, and they'll disregard our instruction when they think they can get away with it. If we're fair and genuinely concerned, we can be strict when it counts, and still develop the kids' own internal controls that they'll use when they're out of sight. They'll see us as healthy animals who have something inside us they instinctively want. They'll pay attention to us."
Chris said, "Paying attention is a concept we used at Deborah House a lot. We told the staff that the most severe punishment they should use was to withhold attention, because attention is like money, and you get what you pay for. We literally pay kids to do whatever it is we give them our attention for. If we pay attention mostly to kids' bad behavior, then that's what we'll get."
Jan Carter then asked, "To what extent were you involved in administrative matters at Deborah House, in terms of grant writing, dealing with state monitors, intake policy, etc.?"
Chris said, "We actually started six months before any residents moved in. CARC had already opened one of the first independent living training programs, but it was in a dormitory building, not the home-like atmosphere they wanted; so they found an old mansion on the north side of Chicago, and we spent the first six months fixing the building, meeting with parents whose kids were to be involved, working on the grant proposal, and interviewing applicants."
I said, "It was critical to start with a core group of high functioning, well- behaved applicants, because we expected that 80% of what new residents would learn, they'd learn from the old residents."
Bob asked, "What kind of staff approach did you use? Did you have teams?"
Chris said, "Yes, we're definitely team people. We think you can do much better work with a number of people working together than having one person telling everyone else what's what."
I said, "We had eight activity therapists, a speech therapist, whose position was later up-graded to communication therapist as we looked for improved ability to communicate ideas as well as to speak understandable words. We had a nurse who helped each team determine if a physical condition needed more attention than it was getting, and a social services coordinator, or social worker, that job title kept changing along with the regulations. It was definitely a team approach, but the team was pretty much the same people, except for the activity therapist. We had each activity therapist focus most closely on a couple of residents, and then attend the meetings where their particular resident was being considered."
Ruth asked, "Was there much turnover with your clients?"
Chris said, "It seemed there were three groups. A third were there at the start and are still there. A second came, quickly failed to adapt, and left, like one woman from the north shore who wouldn't even consider washing the floor. She said her maid had always done the floor. She didn't last long. She went back to her maid. A third group stayed for a time, seemed to learn what they needed to learn, then went on to their own apartments. That was the plan for all the residents, but we never put a time limit on their graduation."
Jan said, "We're about out of time, so if anyone has any last questions... ."
Bob said, "Just a couple of points; what strengths and weaknesses would attend your working at Cunningham and why are you working in this field? By strengths and weaknesses, I mean what can we offer you, in terms of a place to work, and where do you expect difficulty."
I said, "I think our life experience would be good for Cunningham, and as a weakness, I confess to a concern that I might be too old and tired to gear up to the energy level needed to care about these kids. I'm 35. After the stress of Deborah House, I don't know if I've got the spit left to do it again. If we were talking about our living with 18 people instead of 9, I wouldn't be at this table now. My reason for working in this field, well, ah, it sounds corny, but it helps me stay humble. It keeps me in touch with reality. Doing service to fellow human beings, I know how corny it sounds, but that's what has kept me interested over the years."
Bob said, "I know exactly what you mean."
Everyone mumbled rather sheepish affirmation of similar motives, almost as if they were admitting to a kind of lunacy, so I added, "Actually, I do it for the money." Everyone laughed, then I said, "Seriously, I used to tell our poorly paid staff at Deborah House that, while it was true we were paid poorly, we couldn't disregard the fact that we were paid; we weren't volunteering our time. Checks came regularly."
Jan said, "Chris, do you want to finish on that question?"
Chris said, "Like Michael said, I think our experience would be good for Cunningham. I work in this field so Adam will learn that we're all part of the whole world, and not just isolated individuals. And I don't expect any problems at all."
Amidst chuckles and smiles, Jan concluded the interview.
For the next two years we lived, ate and slept for Adam and the boys at Inez Rose cottage. It would be a full year before we took our first day off. Of course, it served us as well. It distracted us from our personal fears and failures. There wasn't time for them. We had work, friends, a living wage, and a sense that we were helping.
My first day on the job, I was called out of a meeting and told to sit on a snarling, cursing, apoplectic kid on the lawn outside the administration building. The assistant director, who currently sat on the kid, was required in the meeting. Mike Butler was the kid's name. He spit at me, called me vile names and threatened to kill me if I let him up. So I didn't let him up. After 15 minutes, I told him I felt stupid sitting on him, particularly as we were on the front lawn where God knows who was watching us through windows or even from the Convenient store half a mile away. Eventually, Mike burned up all his energy, stopped struggling, and agreed to sit next to me peacefully while we waited for instructions on what to do next.
The assistant director came out and introduced the kid to me formally. I was his new houseparent. We shook hands and walked together to our cottage. I thought it was a pretty short honeymoon for a new staff.
Life in the cottage was fast paced, but kind of fun. The kids were always testing limits by going off on one harebrained tangent or another. It wasn't surprising to learn that the local police referred to us as animal tamers.
There was Mike Butler, Larry Clare, Mike Green, Jim Huebotter, John Reynolds, "Rex" Smith, Kris Tompson, Jimmy Curtis, Ramiro Bosquez, Mark, Antwuan, Jerome, Marvin, John Bollinger, etc.
A typical version of the dreaded Chinese water torture, applied by teenagers with words instead of water, was an exchange I listened to as I sat in our living room. Chris was working in the kitchen and I heard water running in the sink. Jim Huebotter walked past me and into the kitchen. I heard cabinet doors open and close, then he asked Chris abruptly, "Do you mind if I make a mess?"
"Where?" Chris asked.
"It's not going to be a very big mess," Jim said, his voice touched with impatience and mock sincerity.
"Where?" Chris repeated.
"On the black counter," Jim said.
"Yes," Chris said firmly but friendly, "No one can eat until dinner is served, cuzz I'm making a special dinner for everyone."
"But I'm not eating after 5 o'clock," Jim said.
"Dinner's supposed to be ready at five," Chris said.
"Er, I'm not eating after 5 o'clock," Jim stressed impatiently.
"OK, we can eat at one minute after 5 o'clock," Chris said calmly.
"I can't eat at one minute after five," Jim insisted mildly.
"Why?" Chris asked mildly.
"Because I already decided I was not going to eat one minute after five," Jim said, loosing a razor thin slice of his composure.
"What about your decision last night when you told me how nice it would be if you had fresh vegetables every night?" asked Chris, loosing a razor thin slice of her composure, "And I'm responding, and you come to me and say you're not going to eat."
The conversation was briefly interrupted when Little Jimmy Curtis, who we knew was eating out that night, walked through the kitchen saying, "I'm not going to eat." The phone rang, and Curtis answered it.
"Hmmm?" Chris said.
Jim didn't answer.
"Well, if you don't want to eat steamed fresh green beans, steamed fresh zucchini, and a fresh salad with fresh mushrooms, fresh celery, that good hot house lettuce, fresh green onions and fresh cauliflower, go ahead and make a mess on my counter."
The conversation was interrupted again when Dewayne walked in the back door and said, "Chris, guess what, man, I couldn't believe it, man, I was down at rec, and I said, 'Vince, (the recreation director), take us to McDonalds, man,' and Vince said, Vince said, 'Yeah, take 'em to McDonalds,' you know, and I asked him if he was payin', and he said, 'No.' He thought we was, you know, and then Vince, man, Vince tricked us out, man. He said, 'Take these fine young boys to McDonalds.' And he give Tim $6 fur me, Shayne 'n Marty. He took us to McDonalds. Ain't that sumpthin'?" Dewayne left as abruptly as he'd come, and silence returned to the kitchen.
"I haven't been eating at all today," Jim Huebotter surfaced.
After a lengthy pause, during which I assumed Huebotter was rummaging in the fridge and messing up the black counter, he said, "I wish you would have told me about this. I could have planned for it. I do not know, I did not know until now that you were cooking."
"So, not only would you like me to do this, you would like me to inform you of when I'm going to do it," Chris said fully composed again. "Jim, oh, Jim," Chris went on in falsetto, "Now I'm going to cut some vegetables. Oh, Jim, now I'm going to make some salad."
"Exactly," said Huebotter.
"I'm afraid I can't do all that."
"OK, that's fine," Huebotter said curtly.
"It's here if you wanna eat it, fine, if not, far out," Chris said.
"Whatever's good for ya, I like the both ideas... ." Huebotter voice trailed away unintelligibly, and silence followed.
"Oh, I need this," Huebotter said.
"Just eat some processed, over-refined sugar," Chris said, alluding to the many claims Huebotter had made seemingly favoring healthy food.
"Um-hum," Huebotter parried.
"And some processed, over-refined white flour, some dead sugar and some dead white bread," Chris said, then she began humming a tune.
"I thought you were ignoring me when I told you I'd like to have vegetables," Huebotter said after a minute or so.
"Do I regularly ignore you," Chris asked.
"Hm, No," Huebotter answered.
"Then why do you think I would ignore you then?"
"Because... ."
Chris cut him off, and said, "Especially when I like vegetables... ."
Huebotter cut her off, "You didn't say anything... ."
Chris cut him off again, "That's really self destructive." Her tone was light, friendly mocking now.
"Cuzz you didn't say anything, after I got done... ." Huebotter's sentence trailed away to nothingness again.
"Oh, yes I did," Chris closed in on him.
Dewayne was back in the kitchen asking, "What's in here." He was ignored.
"I said, 'Oh, good, I like vegetables, too, I'll try to make them everyday.' That's what I said," Each of Christine's word was a loving hammer blow, evenly cadenced and full of certainty.
"Try, you didn't make 'em yesterday, so I thought you weren't going to," Huebotter said, trying to get off the ropes.
"Yesterday I made 'em, I made fresh green onions, a fresh salad, and fresh zucchini. Today is the day after yesterday."
"Well, I didn't know, I didn't know about that. You didn't tell me that," Huebotter was cornered.
"You were here. You ate it. God!" Chris continued in mostly mock exasperation, "I don't know if I'm going to survive."
After some more silence, I heard what sounded to me like a drawer falling to the floor after being pulled out to far. "Sorry," Huebotter said blandly, "I didn't mean that to be very loud."
As I followed Adam into the kitchen, he said, "Mom, look at me."
Chris squealed, "Adam, you look like Pinnochio." Which he did with his Pinnochio mask on. Huebotter disappeared to his room as Chris told me about the canned potatoes and meat loaf soon to be delivered in the cater caddy from the main kitchen.
The crescendo of my time at Cunningham occurred during the big Christmas party of our second year. After much careful planning, and the miraculous success of all our boys at keeping it secret, our boys and our team showed up at the gala Christmas party dressed in tuxedoes. Even Huebotter, who wanted to wear a sweat shirt, kept the secret and let me badger him into a tuxedo at the last. We fixed it so we'd be the last cottage to arrive, so no one saw us until we entered the main hall. As we walked in, the 150 people already seated there broke into spontaneous, exuberant, extended applause and stood up in salute. I scanned the faces of our boys and saw what a houseparent dreams of. Their faces were plumb flush with pride and soaring self-esteem. They'd never been so well applauded before, and I doubted they ever would be again, but for a moment in their lives they were. It makes me misty just to recall it.
Another happy moment was provided by Jerome and Antwuan. They were the first Black kids we had at Inez Rose, veterans of Chicago's west side ghetto. Both were 15, neither knew his father, and Antwuan had from time to time been tied to a radiator by his mother and whipped with an electric cord. They were both street wise, gristly and tough, but they’d spent some time with Huebotter in a program in Chicago where they had all done well. We were optimistic.
One weekend, shortly after they'd arrived, they came to me with a request. "We been invited to a party, Mike," Antwuan said, sporting a massive, ear-to-ear smile.
"It's a guy from school, and the party's going to be in a motel right down the street from here," said Jerome, with faint apprehension.
"Would it be alright for us to go?" asked Antwuan.
"Ouch," I said.
"We'll be in at whatever time you say," said Jerome.
"Yeah, whatever you say," said Antwuan. They were sitting there in my little houseparent's room, wide-eyed and eager to go to that party, and hanging on my permission. I knew these guys had done lots of stuff without giving a shit about anybody's permission. I liked them, and I didn't want them to stop giving a shit about my permission.
"You know," I said, "This sounds like the kind of party that most houseparents would say flat out, 'No!' Now if I said that, I'd be assuming you guys weren't able to make a reasonable choice about whether you ought to be at that party or not. I think you are able to make that choice. It sounds like the kind of a party, I mean, really, in a motel, the odds are there'll be dope, naked girls, loud music and maybe even a fistfight. All my instincts tell me it's a real bad idea for you guys to go to this party, but I'm going to give you permission. After what I've said, if you still want to go to this party, you go ahead. But look out for yourselves if it goes sour."
"Oh, thanks, Pop," said Antwuan.
"Thanks a lot, Mike," said Jerome.
They were out of their chairs and out of the room in a flash.
"What was that all about?" asked Christine who was entering the room, and was almost trampled as the boys ran out.
"I don't know," I said, a bit forlornly, "I might have just bought a load of grief." Then I explained the conversation with the boys.
"Well, we're supposed to help them learn how to be responsible. I think you did the right thing. Let's hope they do."
Twenty minutes later they were back at my door wanting to talk to me. I was still trying to calculate the total tonnage of possible damage this party might cause. I was already getting a lot of flak and sabotage from another houseparent couple for not being strict enough. Antwuan and Jerome came in and sat down. They both looked subdued and sober.
Jerome said, in the stutter that always made long conversations out of short ones, "We been thinking about what you said, and we decided not to go to that party." He seemed sort of relieved. Antwuan looked almost sick, but he nodded his head in agreement.
"I think you guys have made a very good decision," I said, nearly ecstatic, "I'm proud of you both." They perked up a little from the stroke, and left the room jauntily. For the next year that we all lived together, our relationships thrived.
There were some philosophical problems for me at Cunningham. I thought the policy on drugs was unsound, of course. It was conventional; that is, it was dishonest and counter-productive, and it eventually required us to search the kids with whom we lived. I thought the policy was forced on Cunningham by political pressure from the community. I thought the community had long since married itself off to an irrational, illegal scapegoatist approach to drug use that unwittingly catered to the interests of organized crime, moralistic religionists and members of the law enforcement and criminal justice systems, all of whom had social and economic vested interests in continuing this replay of the disastrous Prohibition policy. I was frustrated to see so many well-intentioned people drawn into this charade, and I worried that, if the truth should ever force its way into their minds, it might destroy them.
The psychiatrist, Milt Blavatsky, once said in a staff meeting, "Well, if you're going to give 'em drugs, we're not going to be able to deal with their problems."
I was annoyed, "Nobody said anything about giving 'em drugs! I said we should be honest. If we lie, the kids'll find out, and then they'll stop listening to us. And I don't like making a kid think I care about him less because he uses drugs."
Milt said, "You can't separate a person from their behavior."
Chris and I thought it was essential to separate a person from their behavior. I said, "I need to be able to love a person regardless of their behavior."
Milt said, "Kids need to understand that obeying the law is the right and moral thing to do. We have to teach them that a good kid obeys the law."
"I said, "Well, laws are political, not moral. What you're saying is what good Germans said in the thirties. I'm comfortable teaching kids it's prudent to obey the law, but not that the law tells them what's good or moral."
Tom Powell said, "Well, we aren't going to declare war on the United States." Tom was executive director, and a major reason why Chris and I wanted jobs at Cunningham. He’d grown up there, and he had consummate skill in dealing with troubled kids, as did Milt. Indeed, most of the staff were highly skilled, but I was convinced ‘political realities’ often kept them from succeeding with kids. Social policy was determined by anonymous forces to whom these generic kids were a peripheral concern. In effect, we often looked for these kids under a streetlight that was far from the dark alley in which they were lost.
One of our kids, Marvin, had a lot of problems, among them a drug problem. Marvin was never far from a giant size jar of instant tea. He drank many large glasses of heavily sugared iced tea every day. He might have had difficulty communicating had he drunk no iced tea at all, but in fact, he seemed to be zonked on iced tea. He looked and acted the way I imagined I would if I drank twenty cups of coffee a day. We knew he was "wired" on sugar and caffeine, but it was legal.
Another kid, Mike Green, was doing well in school and in the cottage, and seemed to be the rare success story. He hadn't done well at anything for a long time before he came to Cunningham. One Friday night, he was caught smoking pot with some kids in the park. He caught a full load of buckshot by our Procrustean drug abuse rules, and then tipped over. His performance deteriorated in every visible area of his life. Killed by the cure, I thought, another victim of our cult of punishment.
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Monkeyshine #14, Punishment, a failure of the imagination where we bully a problem by inflicting pain on "wrongdoers."
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Negative Reinforcement -> Displaced Aggression. It's an inherited, knee jerk reaction. We feel attacked. We need to retaliate. Our righteous hand throws the attacker out an imaginary window, like a bucket of slop that hopefully never lands. Our left hand pockets the cleansed feeling we get from ascribing evil to others. At all costs, we avoid responsibility for that slop; the wimpy child inside us just can't bear the self-criticism.
Of course, it would all work out for the best for Mike, in the long run. And whether I bitch about it or not doesn't make any difference. From my point of view, me being a Judeo-Christian rock and roll, existential hippie quasi-socialist, free enterprise Bhuddist, rhythm and blues, Graeco-Roman pluralist, urban Italian half-breed, born again native American country boy, child care worker - all experience is just grist for our mills.
After two years at Cunningham, my hair was about to catch fire. In 1982, we left, and I took a job at WDZL Channel 39, a new TV station in Florida as the Supervisor of Building and Maintenance, Director of Security, and film editor. We found an apartment on the beach between Ft. Lauderdale and Hollywood, and it was one of our best years ever. Chris taught Adam at home. Our aversion to public schools was aggravated in the case of south Florida where the locals argued over whether to raise the class size to 56 kids per class or hold the line at 52. And we heard disease of the week reports on the radio. Pinkeye, dysentery, head lice, meningitis, etc. Doing school at home left Chris and Adam struggling with the same hard decision every day, whether to go up the beach or down the beach.
I had a company car and refreshing variety in my job. One day I dressed in cover-alls and painted the hallway, the next I negotiated with Honeywell on the installation of a new security device, and the next I edited a major film, like "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" which, for airing on our Romance in the Afternoon movie program, meant putting commercials into the combat portions of the film and preserving romantic dialogue. Returning to the non-institutional private sector satisfied my long-unmet need to see hard, measurable results in my work.
As all good things are wont to do, this also came to an end. Idyllic as it was in so many ways, we managed to find problems. No kids lived near the ocean, so Adam had no neighborhood friends. Most kids lived inland, in the swamps, or in isolated affluent areas we couldn't afford, and which didn't really qualify as neighborhoods anyway. The station was put up for sale as investors squabbled over whose right it was to piss down whose back, and I saw my days as the owner's loyal assistant numbered.
We left tasty fresh-squeezed orange juice, loaded as it was with heavy metal, like barium and strontium, from the Chicago human sludge that had been used to fertilize the orange groves since time immemorial, and moved back to my mom's, "Gralma's", in Saint Wisconsin. It was a hard time for me. Five minutes out of work, and I felt I'd never earn another dime. I had some annoying surgery and my one and only 24-hour migraine headache. Wow!
We escaped for a while to California. It was another boll weevil period. We drove to Marin County to answer an ad for houseparents in a rural setting among eucalyptus trees on the coast. Chris and I had many fond memories of the area, and the initial phone contact sounded interesting. We imagined the area was inhabited by gray beard hippies who'd survived the pogrom, entrenched, and grown up gracefully. There was some of that, and our interview went well. The program coordinator was from Chicago; we talked easily, and the program sounded terrific. A tiny flag waved when I saw her sign her name and affix a preposterously huge M.A. after the signature.
The kids they served were young. I’d hoped this meant they did more than just socially popular anti-drug programs. I'd tired of the same silly arguments, the same preoccupation with negatives. We needed a positive point in the distance toward which we could march. The agency only placed three kids in each house, and each house was on an ordinary street in the community. We put three questions to the coordinator. Were the kids participating voluntarily? Did the program require corporal punishment or physical intimidation? Could we run the house as we would our home? We got resounding affirmatives.
We almost signed up on the spot, but experience had taught us to take time to consider important decisions. We returned to Berkeley and, after a lot of back and forth on the subject, we decided to return to the Midwest. My reasoning was that, since we were in doubt about the job, we should apply our rule of thumb, "When in doubt, don't." This wasn't an exclusive rule, by any means. It was a neo-John Wayneism. He’d said, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."
Towing a U-Haul trailer behind our '54 Chevy, we drove to Madison, Wisconsin. In a Perkin's Restaurant parking lot, in the middle of the night, Chris said we should take that job back in Marin. "No problem," I said.
Actually, I didn't mind all the driving or the confusion. I just wanted to be sure Chris made the decision. If it went sour, as I assured her it would, I didn't want the dead bird hanging around my neck. Her reasoning was that the job sounded so good, we should try it, even though experience suggested a yucky underside would soon present itself. Chris argued persuasively that we'd always wonder if we'd made a mistake if we assumed the glass was half empty instead of half full. We had to taste test the water. We drove to Gralma's, dropped off most of our things, and headed back west.
The house we got was set on a hillside in the Inverness Wildlife Sanctuary. Deer came into the driveway, and I'd shoo them away when they stuck their antlered heads in our open window. We cleaned up the filthy house, and got acquainted with the kids, Jason, 11, and Kevin, 12. They were human enough, just desperately starved for attention. Adam attended a very progressive public school and did his first pottery. So far, so good.
We bought an old Honda station wagon for driving the boys the 70 mile round trip to the agency school. The road wound along the coast, through hills and woods, and the trip offered a good time for connecting with the boys. The other staff seemed mellow California. Two other new staff, Terry, a New Zealander, and Mimi, a Minnesotan became houseparents at the agency the same time we did. We quickly came to rely on each other for emotional support.
Then the yucky underside appeared. The kids weren't voluntary participants. They’d had a choice of us or lock up. And the use of physical force was also misconstrued. It was a regular feature of the program. Assaults were barely euphemized by staff and kids alike as ‘take downs.’ They were ubiquitous. If a kid didn't brush his teeth quickly enough, he might be tackled, dragged, pinned and/or glowered at. If a kid brushed his teeth when he was told after that, then the operation seemed justified. If the kid tackled, dragged, pinned and tore the clothes off some hapless lady in a park some years in the future, it would be assumed this kid wasn't tackled, dragged, pinned and glowered at enough when he was a child. A foolproof way to analyze behavior.
As a last straw, we had to hold weekly group meetings in our home. We tried to shift them to the school or even out to our garage, but the coordinator held fast. I felt that she’d gotten the idea that we wanted to snatch some of her authority. The fact was that we'd attended more group meetings than a horse had hairs, and were willing to attend more, but the effect on our home life was unacceptable. After the group members had cried, ranted, cursed, sobbed, screamed, thrown things, and threatened each other for the prescribed time, the ‘therapist’ would wobble out to his or her car and return to the sanctity of their home or the nearest tavern. We’d be left in an emotional cesspool, with ghastly feelings stuck on the walls like soft shit that slid slowly down toward the floor for hours and sometimes days.
We checked out and returned to Berkeley. I inspected cargo at the Oakland docks and Chris did child care. Adam studied computer, gymnastics and algebra. We got pretty healthy. Actually, it was more than that. The gymnastics program at "Sportopia" featured expert teachers, Japanese folks who spoke little English, and who were gifted at motivating kids. I watched Adam shed some of his baby shyness, try hard to learn difficult exercises and flash embryonic confidence from his disbelieving eyes after his first successful backflip.
In June of '84, I returned to Wisconsin. My mother was sick and wanted company. The local school served Adam, and the Henks offered me a job selling rubber stamps and office supplies. I raced across southern Wisconsin and Minnesota like a guy delivering hot pizzas, born again, this time a traveling salesman. Christine worked as a Headstart ‘home base’ teacher. She delivered hot educational enrichment to little kids, the most critical work on this damaged planet.
I had a mid-life crisis then, if that's what it is when a 40 year old man looks at his life to see if there's anything of value there. While I was doing this I saw films of starving children in Ethiopia. I felt compelled to go there to see for myself what was up. Upon my return, I gave a report on public radio station, WOJB, at the reservation of the Lac Courte Oreilles (la coo der ay) band of the Ojibwa tribe in northern Wisconsin.

Monkeyshines
chapter 16
In February 1975, Chris and I went to work as program directors for CARC, the Chicago Association for Retarded Children. The executive director was Otto Whitehill. Our immediate supervisor was Otto's deputy, Jerry Friedman. Our job was to coordinate the restoration of an old mansion near Evanston, IL, and start up an ILC, an independent living program. We’d live there, at Deborah House as it came to be called, with 18 mildly retarded (now developmentally disabled) adults. Adam would be born there. It was a perfect. It didn't seem perfect at first, but it was.
One of the apparent imperfections was the way we got hired. Chris pitched the job hard, documenting our varied experience and education, but Jerry still had to call me at the prison for an interview. I was by the bars near the phone waiting for it to ring. When it did, and the gate slid open, my mind went blank. As I answered that call, I couldn't imagine what I might say that would help my chances of getting hired. None of my experiences gave me a clue. Much later, when I asked Jerry how he could have taken such a risk as to hire us, with me being in prison, he said, "You should have seen the other applicants."
Another apparent imperfection was our moving into the building long before it was really habitable. It was in rough shape. Bottle gangs had been staying there. They'd barbequed in the bathtubs, and littered the place with wine bottles, ragged bedding and food scraps. It was rat central. The roof had leaked, and there'd been no heat for two years, so nearly all of the doors and windows were warped and wouldn't work.
The owner considered demolishing it before CARC bought it. We put a new mattress on the floor of the third floor attic, and arranged some orange crates as dressers. Chris hung bits of cloth over the windows, and voila', we had a place. We hung an old cowbell inside our third floor window, and ran a string from it down to a tree limb near the front door, so we had a doorbell. At times the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night for no reason, and winos occasionally dropped by looking for their friends, but it was still a relief to live in that funky attic and chase invading squirrels out through the holes in the eaves. A relief from the angry tirades we'd endured each morning at the Wrona's.
Duke and Marie had allowed Chris and me to live with them in their home after I was released from prison, but they were terminally, hysterically, critical of us. Like plump Tasmanian Devils they screamed at me, a hungry tiger, that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and that Chris and I had better wake up. They said our jobs paid too little and the conditions were bad. But it seemed obvious to me they were feeling that a lifetime's work seeking respect and status was all going up in smoke. Instead of having a daughter and son-in-law they could feel good about, they had us. Worse for us, they had another daughter and son-in-law who seemed to be doing fine. Sue was an artist and taught grammar school, and Jim worked with Duke building gas stations. Chris and I were sore thumbs.
The first time Chris and I met the clients who were being considered for residence at Deborah House, we were shocked. They looked oddly imperfect to us, and we felt uncomfortable with them. We worried that we might be getting into something that would be uncomfortable for a long time. These retarded adults, however, quickly showed themselves to be unique individuals. They were affectionate and accepting, and relatively uninterested in nasty, underhanded schemes. They were OK.
And I found comfort in a fantasy that police raiders, should fate have more of them in store for me, would have to negotiate with the clients before reaching me in my third floor eerie. I imagined the raiders might become confused by that process, and just give up and go away.
Jerry Friedman, our boss, was funny, responsive and smart. He was balding and over-weight, and he joked about it. At a festive dinner, after introducing his gorgeous wife to someone and being struck for the umpteenth time by a reaction of surprise that his wife was so good looking, Jerry leaned close to me to say, "Do I look like a fucking gorilla or something?"
Soon after Chris and I had started, Jerry said two things that always remained in my mind. He said, "To do a really good job, you have to enjoy your work." An excellent instruction, I thought. And in the context of our effectiveness in getting work done, he said, "Every human organization has a formal system of laws or rules that are supposed to govern activity, and an informal system, the underlying mechanics; that's the people involved and their prejudices. Try to remember that the informal system always dominates."
What an idea! It was very enlightening to me. And so simple. It sharply altered my thinking. I grew up focused on formal rules; breaking them was cheating. Now I saw what had been hidden by this preoccupation with the formal system. I felt I was retarded myself and only just learning to put my socks on before putting on my boots. Of course, every child quickly learns to negotiate rules by manipulating adults, and I'd done it myself a million times in every phase of my life, but I'd never clearly conceptualized the principle. I'd taken water from the faucet without understanding the plumbing.
Jerry also suggested that Chris and I take ‘naps’ in every room in the house in order to cultivate a sense of being at home.
One of our first residents was named Gerald R. Ford. He had a low I.Q. and cerebral palsy, and when he was still an infant, his parents were advised to put him in a ‘home,’ because, they said, he'd never be able to respond to them as a ‘real’ son. The Fords felt Gerald already had a home. They raised him in it for 19 years. He came to us a warm, skinny, clumsy kid who wanted to work in a bank but couldn't count. After a lot of practice at counting, he came home crestfallen one day after trying to buy a $120 stereo with 120 pennies.
He could read well, and he read a lot about insects. As our little band hiked in a forest preserve one day, Gerald stopped to pick up a bug. As he peeked at it in his cupped hands, Cyril and I joined him. Cyril had extensive biological and zoological knowledge. He was a bona fide scientist. We peeked at the bug in Gerald's cupped hands and Cyril said, "It's a katydid, Gerald."
"Yeah," said Gerald, in his characteristic booming bass voice that was just barely understandable, "It's a male."
I’d loaned Gerald my extra boots for this hike, and while crossing a stream, he missed the stepping stones a few times. I feared that the new wet boots might be hurting his feet; so, I asked, "How are the boots feeling, Gerald?"
Gerald looked down at them pensively, took some think time, then boomed, "They feel fine." He seemed quite definite about this, so I started to nod a final acknowledgement. Before I could, though, he added, "Except when I walk." Two years later he’d be working in a bank as a maintenance assistant much loved by his fellow employees.
Ruth was another early resident. At thirteen, she’d been diagnosed as mentally retarded, and subsequently institutionalized. She’d spent the next thirty years in a back ward at Dixon State hospital. At Deborah House, Ruth was almost always smiling. She was very happy to have her own room. She was very happy to be able to clean the house. She was very happy to be able to work at McDonalds. She liked to do extra chores, take care of Adam, or whatever. She liked getting to the dryer as soon as it stopped, ahead of the person who'd turned it on, so she could fold the dry clothes quickly and perfectly as a surprise for their owner. Life had suddenly come up roses for Ruth.
Tony Stavropolous, another resident, was raised by his great grandparents who’d come from Sparta, THE Sparta. They’d instilled in him an unerring sense of right and wrong. Every decision he made was between right and wrong. At a weekly group meeting, as we planned the menu for the following week, Tony had to decide between chicken and roast beef for the Sunday dinner.
He labored over the decision for a minute, then turned to Chris and me, and in the wheedling whiny voice we’d all come to accept, he said very seriously, "Well, Mike and Chris, chicken is good. Yes?" He paused, looking around for reassuring signals that he was correct. He got some, thought for another moment, then continued, "And Roast beef is good." He collected more signals. He was obviously stymied by this duality of goods, and then he said, in a struggling, absolutely sincere voice, "Mike and Chris, why is it so hard for us to think, now, when we want to? Can you tell me this?"
Marshall Reifman was another resident. He’d been a working jazz musician until he was badly beaten in a mugging that caused him brain damage. Now, at 52, he was our poet in residence. Discombobulated in most practical tasks, he was always armed with a cryptic comment or provocative question. He dressed like an ambassador. One night, after they’d performed, Marshall held court for a group of visiting musicians. As I passed the assemblage, I heard Marshall say, "Yeah, I live here, I live everywhere. What's the difference between here and there? Just a little ‘t’ or tea or tee, you know what I mean? I'm a golf ball, and this is my cup."
Sam Sagi came to live at Deborah House after he interviewed us. He was nearly blind and his glasses must have weighed four pounds, but he worked effectively as a messenger in downtown Chicago by day. He was an opera buff by night. He’d exchanged correspondence with some of the world’s great maestros, and he knew all of the major and most of the minor opera. His ambition in life was to work for an opera company. His father was a lawyer who’d taught Sam not to waste time in useless competition. Sam accepted any blame that came his way, and he never accused anybody of anything. But he was tenacious and fearless in asking specific, respectful questions until he felt he'd asked enough.
On the subway to the opera one night, we were menaced by two knife-wielding alley warriors. As I herded my clients off the train, Sam occupied these two loonies with totally friendly questions. Are you going to the opera this evening? Do you like opera? What do you like to do for recreation? Et cetera. We all made it off the train safely.
Sam earned more money than us or any of our staff, raising interesting but unanswerable questions for us all.
Duane Cloud was a 22-year-old teddy bear, a chubby Lothario. His independent living training seemed sandwiched between his various romantic escapades. As he and two other residents sat in the bank with me one day, waiting to open accounts, a pretty nurse took a seat across from him. She had no reason to think he wasn't alone when he turned his bedroom eyes on her. His whole body spoke softly to her and she responded. She lowered her eyes, then raised them and looked back into Duane's eyes. Her body took the same languorous pose as Duane's. They seemed deep into shared feelings, and in other circumstances, I’d have thought they might leave the bank together. Then the spell broke. A bank official introduced himself to us, and Duane's status leaked out. In the nurse's eyes, I saw bemused surprise touched faintly by embarrassment.
We worked with a staff of twelve, mostly part-time, highly motivated, college age people. An exception was highly motivated Ann Widrevitz, a retired army major who didn't seem to seek retirement. She wanted to be useful forever. We had a speech therapist and help from the central office on intake and accounting. We were $250,000 in the red and the state had not yet paid us any money. I had to call the state comptroller's office, and tell him that Deborah House was closing because of this. Our residents would be out on the street. The next day, the comptroller's office sent us a check for $185,000.
Chris and I tried to invent a staffing pattern that would allow us to stay involved at Deborah House for many years. To us this meant rotating management teams so each got lengthy periods of ‘normalizing’ time off. We did some trial runs with Peter and Maggie being one team, Joe and Laurie being another, and Chris and I being a third. (Joe and Laurie had met as fellow employees at Deborah House and fallen in love). The rotation system didn't work, but during a trial run, Chris and I took our first time off in over a year for the occasion of Adam's birth.
The Lamaze and LeBoyer birthing techniques weren't yet in vogue, and to get access to them, we had to choose between California and Toronto. We chose Toronto because it was closer, cheaper, and gave Adam an interesting citizenship option. (Later, when he was nine, Adam groused that we'd dashed his chance to be president by having born him in Canada.)
We’d never consciously decided to have a baby. We thought there were so many born kids who needed parents that we didn't need to produce any more. When we learned Chris was pregnant, we chalked it up to poor birth control and decided on abortion. We were as effective planning the abortion as we’d been avoiding the pregnancy. It was serendipity.
Going to Toronto was the best decision we ever made. The process of Adam's birth was positioned properly; it was first. We had integrity. His birth was not super-imposed on other activities. We’d walk five miles a day through the parks and streets of Toronto. At the beach, I'd dig a hole in the sand before spreading out our blanket, so Chris could lie on her stomach and look like all the other bikini’d beachniks until she got up and presented her great belly.
My interest in children that had germinated during our time with Jimmy, Kevin and Colleen now blossomed, and I began to reorganize my whole interpretation of life. I began to see all human frailties as consequences of inadequate birthing and nurturing techniques.
Cyril came to Toronto the day before Adam was born. Adam was born shortly after Dr. Whedham kicked me out of the birthing room, and took Christine to an operating room where he could use forceps to turn Adam’s stubborn head in the direction required so it would fit through the only available exit. I'd begun whacking my stopwatch against the wall when the contractions reached 5'30" in length and 1'15" apart. We’d been told they'd last a minute or two and be two or three minutes apart. Dr. Whedham said Adam's heart was slowing due to the very long contractions, and that he’d have to use forceps, or else.
The Lamaze people had warned us that each birth was unique in some way, and I’d stopped thinking in terms of whether problem A, B, or C would attend the birth. I realized that, while each potential problem had only a remote chance of occurring, there were zillions of potential problems. The odds accumulated, and I saw the matter as, Which of the zillions of possible idiosyncracies will we meet? The forceps worked. Baby was born with black eye, but that was fine.
I encountered a totally new and unexpected set of thoughts shortly before Adam was born. A clear message came to mind, like a vision. I saw myself burying a tiny body in an unspoiled woods. I thought this was showing me what to do if the baby was born too defective to see as having really been born at all. I had a powerful sense that it was my job to see this kid through, and that part of the job might be to decide if he had any chance. What other people might say about it just didn't matter. I could only compare it crudely to the way a mother cat denies food to a severely stunted kitten. I was happy to see this terrible decision mooted as I counted baby's fingers and toes, and checked his little pee-pee and scrotum. All babies are nearly blind at birth, so I ignored his uselessly searching eyes. I inspected the folds and creases of his body until I felt I'd seen enough.
Becoming parents changed our lives beyond any expectations. Our confusion over goals vanished. We became perfectly clear about our purpose in life. Take care of baby. It was delicious. Visitors joined us in our single recreation, baby watching. Gradually, of course, we became hopelessly confused trying to figure out what was best for baby, but we had a distant point toward which to march.
The miracle of Adam's birth was followed four days later by his grandfather's death. I was at the hospital with Christine when we got the call saying Lewis ‘Duke’ Wrona had died. Heart attack. A cruel loss. We'd been getting closer. Duke used to ‘sneak’ over to Deborah House to help with whatever projects we had going. He said we shouldn't let anyone know he did it, but never said why.
We tried to understand it by trying to understand Duke and Marie. They’d both been orphaned early, like a lot of people in their generation, a generation that seemed to me to have run on a fast pragmatic track of continuous crisis. The Cap-Com War started during WWI, then the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, Depression and World WarII. A wild ride and quite a puzzle. It seemed my parent generation found little time to evaluate the phenomenal changes they’d experienced.
Duke said to me, just before he retired, "I took a gamble. I decided to work like hell until I was 60, then retire and do what I wanted. If I live a long time past 60, I won. If I die, it won't matter."
So Duke worked like hell. Leaving many brothers and sisters subsisting in the woods of northern Michigan, he went to Chicago to work. He lived in a church basement while getting started in construction. When WWII started, he was among the first to join the new Seabee battalion in the Navy. He helped build the CIA base in Langley, Virginia, and after the war, he built gas stations in Chicago for oil companies. He only had one speed, full speed ahead. He retired at 60. He hated being retired, so he went back to work. He was dead at 61.
I probably knew Duke as well as I knew my own father, which was not really well at all. Neither seemed to put much energy into the ‘softer’ side of life. They didn't seem interested in figuring out personal feelings or motivations, and they didn't seem very concerned for their personal health or the need for self-expression. They didn't seem to think about the future of the planet or how to make it a more beautiful place, although this was changing in Duke in the years before he died. They were economic combat models, like their fathers and grandfathers I loved them, but they pissed me off, because they didn't leave Adam a grandpa.
Marie was devastated. She’d looked forward to the retirement years, and was suddenly robbed again by death. Her father died when she was a little girl, and at 15 she’d lost her mother. Chris told me that when her mother was a teenager she had slept with a string tied to her own dying mother for years. When Marie's mother needed help during the night, she’d pull that string.
Combining that experience with the Depression and WWII, and the subsequent years of strident upward mobility, Marie's feelings seemed understandable to me. I’d heard Gloria Steinem use a term that I thought fit Marie. "Affluenza" - a condition found in women who've lost their husband, retain wealth that's identified as the husband's legacy, and have a low self-image. Because they were isolated in lives of self-suppression and service? Marie seemed to accept isolation and call it independence.
I had a long-standing habit, an inherited tendency, as it were, to judge all things as if God sat on my shoulder and whispered secrets to me. It needed changing, and it occurred to me, at a time when I was fuming about Marie's obstinate withdrawal, that what I fumed about, and saw as a failure in Marie, was a failure in myself.
******
Monkeyshine #5, the Projected Fault; an emotional criticism of another is usually a misplaced self-criticism. ("It takes one to know one.")
******
What I criticized in Marie is common to us all. The fear of loss and resulting defensiveness. As one textbook put it, "We may plan according to our hopes, but we perform according to our fears." Husbands and wives, parents, even friends may withdraw if they sense they're too dependent on the friend'ship. How much can a person stand? When can we back away, and tend to our selves without fear of condemnation?
I sensed I was still learning to give others what I wanted for myself. At the bottom of things I saw a need in people to decide certain matters for themselves without fear of being roughed up by friends, family, agencies or committees for getting it ‘wrong.’ Defining those ‘certain matters’ is problematic, but it involves a sense of honor, integrity, wholeness, a place where we're perfectly adequate. No civilization has yet managed this, at least, not for long. But a model exists in the parallel worlds of life beyond the fear of a death that comes built into this damned body. A place where souls accept each other without warring or trembling over property or shelter, no ‘or else’ pecking order paranoia or desperation.
So Deborah House was perfect for baby Adam. The residents doted on him, and he heard Chinese, Yiddish, Spanish, English and Greek spoken daily, and Chris and I were always around to cuddle him. Our bedroom had no bed but rather a super thick carpet that made the tiny room into one large bed. I’d lay down with Adam nearly everyday at nap time. I'd close my eyes, and imagine I was zooming from the Earth's surface up into space, and chant until he fell asleep. I sang "Home, Home on the Range" at times.(I heard a fellow opened a western wear store in Japan called Hormone Derange and a restaurant called Buffalo, Rome.)
While at Deborah House, I bought back the double deck bus I’d sold to Steak N Shake five years earlier. John Skille and Peter overhauled its engine in our driveway at Deborah House. Like Peter, John was a mechanical wizard. He'd built bomb sights and irrigation systems, rewired houses, staged rock concerts, and invented special tools. He was one of those human bears from the North Woods, where humans still survive by learning lots of skills and developing thick hides. The high point of the engine re-build was taking turns with a 16 pound sledge hammer to slam the cylinder sleeve out of the cracked engine block.
Later, John managed the CARC re-sale shop, where some Deborah House residents worked to learn a variety of skills, from operating a cash register and making sales, to shop maintenance procedures, general work habits, minor repairs, and dealing with the public (In the course of picking up donations and schlepping them back to the shop).
After nearly five years at Deborah House, still friendly with the organization, but in need of a change, we resigned. We did feel a curious pressure inside our minds to say and think bad things about some of the people and the stressed situation we were leaving, but we resisted it.
******
Monkeyshine #21, when people leave a person or a place, they tend to think up judgmental ‘reasons’ that serve to justify the change.
******
Not that there weren't displeasing elements in our situation. The inevitable office politics had raised Hydra heads. (The Hydra was a nine headed serpent in Greek mythology that grew two heads for each one cut off.) Some people swam like fish in the office politics lake, but we found it distracting. And there was a time bomb in the basement - sex education.
What sort of sex life was ‘appropriate’ for the residents? At meetings with parents, I was intensely aware that we lacked consensus. I didn't think any three people out of our group of forty would have agreed. Personally, I felt that if the sex was flowing, the love might flow better, and that if a person wasn't having any sex, they'd better whack their weasel. I never shared this overly simple philosophy, of course. Most people seemed to think sexual transactions were profound undertakings, or casual and unimportant. (I came to believe that sexual transactions ‘should’ be casual, but hardly ever were.) So I'd nod understandingly when people suggested that their offspring shouldn't have any sex at all, and I'd nod understandingly when people said they wanted their offspring to enjoy full freedom of sexual expression.
When we talked about such stuff, there was usually lots of furtive eye contact and telepathic probing as everyone tried to determine if they were talking about the same things. I attributed the tension around sex to women's historic vulnerability to pregnancy, men's egocentric disregard for this, the community pressure on everyone to conform, a fear of disease, heartbreak, exploitation, and scant positive education.
Some residents had to be instructed that fellating a friend in the living room, with the lights on and other residents trafficking the area, was totally unacceptable. Others could decide questions of sex and marriage as well as anyone. The in-house policy on sex education was to first determine the level of knowledge and interest of a resident, and then tailor a program response. The plan was to address the person's sexuality from a survival perspective. Getting arrested, beaten up, pregnant, raped, sick or heartbroken all had survival implications for our clients. We tried to help them avoid these hard effects, but it wasn't easy to locate each resident's star in the sexual sky.
One fellow, Teddy, who always wore a suit, and was able to borrow his mom's car for dates, was seen by the other residents as a sexual mover and shaker. He was surrounded one night by a group of residents eager to question him about a recent date. They wanted all the salacious details. "How far did you go?" one resident asked point blank, as the others leaned forward to hear each syllable of the answer. "All the way to the museum," was Teddy's dead pan response.
From Deborah House, we drove the bus to Berkeley to visit Jimmy, Kevin and Colleen. We recruited them and some of their teenaging friends for a bus trip to Bloomington, Illinois, where we bought the McLean County Jail. It was a hundred years old, built of 8' square, 12" thick pieces of granite, had an attached twenty room Victorian mansion, and 36 cells, divided into two sections with 18 cells stacked in each. It was a fortress. I planned to re-name it the Avanti Popolo Space Center, retro-fit the building, and establish a hospitality center. I felt like Noah.
The bus was my ark. The old jail was Mount Ararat. Chris my guardian angel. Some tenuous links remained connecting me to the practical world, which I saw as increasingly and terribly Procrustean. I dreamed of establishing the first tavern in space, the Star Bar. An ancient and revered friend, Max Taverne, had this same notion, before me or after didn't matter. He'd go into space on such a venture. Ivy League schools were already developing electromagnetic tunnel type mass drivers that suggested the imminence of relatively low cost space travel. I had friends making movies who could do a science non-fiction project like this on a special effects budget. And I had friends on reserve for Sky Lab. They'd be interested.
The old jail could serve as a headquarters. All I needed was 50 million bucks. Failing that, $75,000 would float the jail retro-fit. The bank liked my plan to fix the building and install shops, but would only loan me $30,000. (That worried me, because the guy I bought the jail from was influential at the bank and stood to gain handsomely if I spent the $30,000 on repairs and then defaulted.) And the local unions threatened to picket me if I worked with teenagers and hired no union members. And the municipal electrical, plumbing and building authorities kept equivocating regarding the sort of work they'd approve; e.g., one week I'd be told I could repair a certain bit of plumbing, the next week I'd be told it had to be replaced with new.
The daily struggle to make ends meet pushed the Star Bar deep into the recesses of my imagination. As the Avanti Popolo Space Center slipped under water, Chris and I applied for jobs at Cunningham Children's Home in Urbana, Illinois. It wasn't so bad. I lost a few thousand dollars, but it was well spent. I considered it tuition. Cyril's cousin, to whom he referred as Gyro Gearloose, lost his home and every other dime he had in a failing attempt to market an automatic dishwasher for space ships.

Monkeyshines
chapter 15
Indiana State Prison was a harsher experience than the federal prisons. Being separated from Chris was agony. I had no firm release date under ten years, and the population was more violent, some of the prisoners even going around armed with pistols. Peter and I quickly exploited our college experience, and got assigned to Grant's Writ Department. It was named after the judge who ordered the prison to permit a writ department to operate. James exploited his military experience to survive in the kitchen.
A large, self-educated Black prisoner named Marcus Kingsberry, called King by the inmates and guards alike, was chief of the Writ Department. He assigned us clients from a list of inmates seeking assistance with legal problems. We’d listen to their problems and help them if we could.
My office was an empty cell in the defunct Death Row. To relax, I’d watch a TV that was plugged in where the electric chair used to sit. One of my first clients was a guy from Kentucky who was furious because he hadn't received a fair trial. Prejudicial pre-trial publicity, he said. He'd returned from the Army in Europe with a bad ‘speed’ habit, found his wife in flagrante delicto with another man, shot the man to death, then killed his wife by firing his pistol into her vagina several times. The papers reported these facts, which convinced the guy that his chance for a fair trial was shot. He wanted me to help him get his conviction overturned. We had some pretty weird conversations before his fried brain failed totally, leaving him wandering the prison incommunicado.
I did calisthenics in my cell to keep fit, and to send a message to the population that I was disciplined and dangerous. But I also cried myself to sleep occasionally and this was dangerous. If other prisoners found out, it would be like blood in the water, and soon sharks would come. I did get caught once by our tier attendant, the guy who sort of managed the cells on the sixth floor. A seemingly super-hardened, vicious dope dealer from Gary, Indiana, this guy, Floyd, had often shown animosity for Whites. He passed my cell one night as I lay in my bunk wracked by emotional pain. Floyd heard me stifle a sob and he stopped. I peeked toward him, saw a look of disgust form on his face, and heard him start to say something. It was going to be something like, "You pussy motherfucker, shut your honkey face." But it came out, "Man... !" Then Floyd's face softened as he recognized my feelings. He erased the scene from his mind. He walked away and never gave me any hint he remembered it.
I finally came to the conclusion that my life wasn't worth living. Emotional fatigue, embarrassment, shame, the knowledge that Chris was in anguish on the outside, and that my family was falling apart, and the irreversibility of it all, and the horrific atmosphere my brothers and I were forced to breathe every day; it all ganged up on me. I decided to end it the only way I could. The big S, suicide.
I lay in my bunk considering the techniques I could use: drugs, a razor, rope, or maybe a leap from a high place. I could go alone or I could take some worthy subject(s) with me.
I knew a hillbilly chemist who could make explosives from damn near anything. This chemist, Billy ‘Goat’ Flanker had lived beyond the pale for a long time. A tall lanky country boy, unflinching, and called Goat by most of his friends, I called him Billy, because it seemed to bring out his more thoughtful side. He was almost 40, and serving his third term in prison. His first followed a bank robbery he committed when he was 18. He’d run out of a bank with a pistol in one hand and bag of money in the other. Easy as pie and goddam exciting he thought at that moment. Then he crashed his getaway car and ran on foot. He hid under a parked car on a residential street while police searched for him. They missed him and went away, but a guy watering his lawn remained on the street. Billy watched him from underneath the car. When the guy went to turn off the hose at a faucet that was low to the ground, while bending down, he saw Billy's hiding place. Billy saw the guy's look of disbelief turn to astonishment then resolve. The man ran toward his front door screaming, "Police, Police!"
Like a cat, Billy propelled himself out from under the car. He was going to catch the guy and shut him up, but the guy beat him to his front door, and slammed it in Billy's face. Billy shouldered the door a couple times, then a grim voice behind him shouted, "Police, drop the gun!" He turned around quickly only to see three uniforms aiming guns at him. One shouted, "Freeze, asshole!"
Billy thought he froze, but actually he'd extended his hands, as if handing their contents over to the police. "This is going to be a damn hard thing to explain," Billy had thought, as he focused on the spectacle of himself standing on that porch holding a gun in one hand and bag of money, marked Bank of Rapid Falls, Kentucky, in the other.
As the police approached, one said, "You're lucky you're still alive, boy, next time you hear the word 'freeze,' you better freeze. Now drop that gun."
Billy dropped the gun and the money, saying, "Thank God you're here, officers. The guy you want just ran in the house. He dropped these." Then the redoubtable Billy Goat charged straight into the cops. It was a big surprise to them, because Billy didn't have a chance.
Billy told me, "Sheeit, I went through them cops like shit through a goose. I was still runnin' down the street, must a been a mile from that house, and my chest was on fire. It was just after sunset, you know, just barely light out, and there were a lot of old oak trees on that street, and the sidewalk was old and cracked, and that's when I felt that first bullet hit me. It was a kind of soft thump, like gettin' hit by a high speed marshmallow, then I did a belly slide on the sidewalk. I was still thinkin' awright, I mean, it didn't hurt like I thought it would, but I was through runnin'. Then I felt more a those thumps, and I passed out. I was shot six times in the back. My lawyer proved it happened after I was down, 'cuzza all them concrete chips they dug outa my chest."
I played chess with Billy occasionally. Ordinarily, I stayed in my cell to read, and anyway, Billy was hooked up with the KKK guys. I got along with them alright, but I didn't want to be identified with them. Billy was smart, though, and I was curious about his attitude toward Blacks. I learned a bit about this one day in the course of Billy's telling about a killing he did. Peter and I had stopped by the soap factory where Billy was the chemist, and I’d mentioned the story about Billy being caught with a smoking gun.
"Smoking gun? Sheeit! I never fired that gun," said Billy, "You wanna hear about smoking guns? I was escaped from Tennessee State Prison a few years ago, and me and some friends went in this bar, and these two niggers came in with some white girls. They was the only niggers in the place for a start, and they was really sportin' those white girls, talkin' loud, you know, and my friends, well, to me niggers is just like anybody else, I mean, you know all their talk about, 'Yo momma' this and that. Well, they can fuck my momma, and I don't care if she don't, but these friends of mine, they hated niggers. So they went after these two, and the niggers pulled out knives, and it looked bad for my friends, so I had my gun, and I shot one of 'em without takin' the gun outa my pocket. Shot him dead.
"Then the lights went out. Somebody musta called the cops when the fight started, cause they showed up the same time as the lights went out. I had to get rid of the gun, but the hammer got snagged in the lining of my pocket, and I couldn't get it out, and when I fired it, it started my coat burnin'. So there I was in a dark bar, cops runnin' in the front door, nigger layin' dead on the floor, gun in my pocket, and my coat's on fire. That's a smokin' gun, brother."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"They took me in, and later that night they took me to a meeting with some guys who said they were the mayor and the chief of police. They said they didn't want the expense of a murder trial, and they didn't give a shit about me or that nigger I killed, and that if I left the state for good, I'd live, but if I ever came back, I wouldn't."
"You're shittin us," I said.
"I believe it," Peter said.
"I didn't believe it either," said Billy, "but that's what happened."
Anyway, I was sure Billy would build me a bomb if I decided to go that way. The effect each method might have on others needed careful consideration. If I bumped off the warden or someone like that, I might get a trial that I could use as a forum to rail against the hypocrites who’d persecuted me/us, and give 'em the finger. But I still saw killing as an ultimate failure. I might kill someone who was on the verge of doing some real good thing. Whoever was in charge of this Earth experiment might take off the lid, lift me out, and explain that I'd been doing real well until I’d fallen apart and killed the guy who'd been sent to help me.
For a while, I thought death by hunger strike might be interesting. As I thought about this stuff, an old feeling crept back into me. I felt empowered. I realized that my decision to kill myself was itself a vital act, a kind of determination to live on and have impact. It eased somewhat the fear of failure and pain of rejection that had been torturing me. I was positioned to create. I didn't have to worry about an agenda set for me by a cruel fate. I could take my time. I left my body in my cell, and traveled abroad to imaginary fields beyond fate.
******
Light years above my head, in the direction of Sirius, the Dog Star, a dis-corporated spirit, a soul, if you will, initiated a communication. "Lor Davit Yoway reporting to Central Registry." Central Registry lay just a few light years away from Sirius toward Betelgeuse.
"Central Registry here," was the telepathic response.
"Sensors monitoring Earth's parallel system signal the presence of threshold awareness."
"Thank you for your report, Lor Davit Yoway."
Lor had reported this many times over the past 10,000 Earth years. The response from Central Registry was always the same. Not having been asked to report more fully, Lor had always felt restrained from doing so. This time, however, Lor pressed on. "The presence of threshold awareness in Earth's parallel system is a milestone for the Earth Project. Do you understand, Central Registry?"
"A milestone, yes, I understand, yes, Thank you for your report."
Seeing no sense in getting cold feet at this stage, Lor continued, "Central Registry, I've reported this many times. I need to consult on the future management strategy for the Earth Project."
"Yes. We can do that. Could you explain Earth Project?"
"Is this the only Central Registry for data on Central Galaxy Development Projects?" Lor was slightly startled at the thought of Earth Project reports going astray for 10,000 years. That was only eleven galactic cycles, but it was still a long time for reports to be misdirected. Lor hoped the project wasn't compromised. "I used to report to a senior spirit, God. Where is He now?"
"Yes, this is the only Central Registry for data on Central Galaxy Projects, and I remember you used to report directly to God, but I don't know where God is right now. I was asked to monitor reports while God was on the far side of the galaxy with some other senior spirits. I've been looking for Earth information since your first report eleven cycles ago."
"I understand," thought Lor, deciding immediately to give a brief synopsis of the Earth Project as requested.
"The Earth Project was initiated 9,000 cycles ago, when God implanted a custodial gene in a simian life form on Earth. The program's objective was to develop a caretaker species for Earth by modifying one of its naturally occurring life forms. It took 8,000 cycles for the experiment to bear fruit. I was that first fruit. My Earth name was Eve. I realized self-awareness quite unexpectedly as I ate an apple one day. I shared the experience with my counterpart, Adam, and a period of consciousness development began for humans. God recruited me when my body died, and I agreed to monitor the Earth Project.
At the Earth Project Symposium and Picnic eleven cycles ago, some senior spirits, with God as coordinator, installed themselves in the minds of humans in order to evaluate their progress. The site of the picnic was Mount Olympus. The agenda... ."
"Lor Davit Yoway. This is God."
"Oh, God, your expectation regarding human spiritual development that we considered at the Olympus picnic has occurred. Do you recall it?"
"Yes. We thought humans might eventually reach threshold awareness and enter the Earth's parallel system. I saw a few ants at the beginning of the picnic become a torrent toward its end. I used that analogy to explain the need to watch for early arrivals of human spirits."
"Yes," interjected Lor, "And you suggested I direct sensors toward the Earth's system and inform you if they began to arrive."
"And they have?"
"Yes. We used to re-cycle virtually all their motivating spirits. When humans died, their spirits released, and came through the veil stillborn, with no consciousness at all. But in the last 10,000 Earth years, an increasing number have arrived with retained consciousness. Many exceed the threshold 1.72 RAM/ROM ratio. (Random Access Memory to Read Only Memory). Millions have passed into the extraterrestrial zone already. Olympus ended before we decided whether to recognize them or re-cycle them with the stillborn."
"Millions of them, eh? The Earth Project has gone well. What do they do after they pass the veil?"
"With no recognition from us, they drift forever on the solar winds."
"Didn't we agree on a recognition configuration?"
"We did, but some technical points arose later. The recognition configuration required a 1.72 RAM/ROM awareness ratio, understanding of paradox, and some spiritual identification with all life forms. A disagreement arose with Procrustes. He sees these spirits as identical and insect-like, undeserving of any recognition."
"Procrustes, please give me your attention. Lor, please describe the actions you recommend."
"Establish a Hospitality Center on the east side of the galaxy that could accommodate 100 billion spirits in their simple molecular form. The Center shall provide a format for recognizing and coordinating spirits that meet standards."
"Procrustes?"
"I am here, God."
"What do you think of Lor's plan?"
"Lor, does your plan require another trip to Earth?"
"Yes. I'd go to recruit some humans to help operate the Center."
"God, I have reservations. Her recent trips sparked new religions, cults and competing mythologies. Your objective was a caretaker species, not the megalomaniacal pseudo-religious adventures elevated human consciousness has shown so far."
"Lor, you began a thought, 'He regards', and Procrustes, you began a thought, 'Her previous trips'. These are gender assertive terms. You will communicate more effectively if you leave your sexuality with your former human selves. It's precisely this question about residual human consciousness that concerns us when we consider recognizing billions of spirits from Earth. You two are the only human spirits yet recognized in this parallel world. The fate of your former species rests in your minds. I love you both. Now, I must attend elsewhere. Farewell."
"Thank you," thought both Lor Davit Yowah and Procrustes.
"Old language infects my thoughts, Procrustes. Truly, I have no wish to dispute you. As a start we could replace the gender assertive pronouns, he, she, his and hers, with they and theirs."
"Lor Davit Yoway, I echo your thought. Beyond pronouns, I must admit to some further residual prejudice. I was the robber of Attica in old Greece, and I tortured people by putting them on a bed of my chosen length then stretching them to fit it, or cutting off their legs if they were too long. I never knew why God chose me at the Olympus picnic, maybe it was because I fiercely strove for honesty. I tortured people to insult their vanity, and some of this tendency remains in me as I consider recognizing human spirits."
My mental wandering was then interrupted by a parole board meeting. Peter, James and I all entered the meeting together. We stood in a line and faced the board members. They were all seated except the young associate warden who stood at the end of their long meeting table. The presiding board member asked, "Did you plead guilty to the charge against you?"
I said, "Yes. Our wives were in jail, one of them being kept away from her new baby, and we were told the only way they'd be released was for us to plead guilty."
Then we were asked if we sold our property as part of a deal. Peter said we had. We were then told that we were very lucky and were being paroled, and that we'd been very careless of the feelings of our parents. Then we were excused. Soon after, we were notified that our release date was set six months from the time of our initial incarceration, the soonest date the parole board was authorized to allow. The associate warden told us later that he’d been asked by the head of the parole board, "How'd they get into this, are they crazy, or what?"
The associate warden said he'd answered, "No, they don't seem to be crazy; there seems to have been some politics involved in the charges."
We began to arrange for a future.

Monkeyshines
chapter fourteen

Chris and I flew to Chicago, and down to Bloomington where we stayed at the house of a woman with whom Chris had taught Montessori school. Chris was a certified Montessori directress, but she took a job as a check-out clerk in an IGA supermarket. I watched the Senate Watergate investigation unfold on TV. I felt the electricity when Butterfield admitted calmly during otherwise lackluster testimony, that he was aware of tape recordings made of White House conversations. The room crackled and the senators perked up.
I also juggled appointments and communications with Clelland Hanner, the Parke County, Indiana, prosecutor, and our own lawyers who were helping us deal with the problems Johnson kept tossing in our way.
In order to get Johnson to stop calling Hanner and complaining about us, Bruce Krell, one of our lawyers, said we had to get the mortgage out of our name. Krell started to put together the papers to accomplish this.
Hunter, another legal beagle, said Lawson had ‘given away the store’ by not getting our deal in writing, and by accepting a lot of evidence without negotiation or reciprocal concessions. Hunter also told us that John Dowd, the son of the local judge, Earl Dowd, was the assistant prosecutor actually handling the case, and that Hanner, the senior prosecutor, had been the judge's law partner for thirty years. This sounded too cozy to us, and Hunter said young Dowd had told him, "Parke County has a lot more money than your clients; they haven't got a chance."
I went to Parke County with Duke and Hunter for a meeting with Hanner. It was a short meeting. Hanner basically refused to predict an outcome, saying things had to run their course. Duke was partly neutralized as it became clear that Chris wasn't going to jail. If Duke defended me too vigorously, he might risk the outcome for her.
Hunter confirmed that our best strategy was to stay out of the minds of the Parke County authorities, avoid contact with police, settle quietly some place, and let him negotiate. Our position was that, if the authorities felt they had to prosecute further, we wouldn't contest the matter as long as the court agreed to sentence us to do community-related work. Hunter said Parke County wasn't eager to try the case, because trials cost money, but that they'd still put a bench warrant on file that the State of Indiana would act on automatically if anyone pressed the issue.
Then I got a call from Peter. They’d reached New Zealand on the 9th of July, and although there were some charming interludes at Washington Island and in Samoa, mostly the voyage was a nightmare. Peter's foot got infected from a scratch he got in Samoa, and it nearly had to be amputated. Also, on the trip south toward New Zealand, the Nam Sang was beaten by mountainous seas and six days of gale force winds. On the 4th of July, 1973, the mast crashed to the deck and rolled over the side. The crew worked frantically to cut it away before the 3/4" stainless steel halyards and mainstays ripped out the side of the boat.
Seriously damaged, Nam Sang motored the final 500 miles to New Zealand. The last days of the voyage had the crew eating raw fish, soaked rice and coconut pulp. They sailed through frigid southerlies blowing from Antarctica to reach Auckland with less than five gallons of fuel left.
When they arrived, Maggie was hospitalized for a tubal pregnancy. Financially embarrassed, Peter gravitated into association with a wealthy, apparently well-intentioned family named Raakes. Peter was offered and accepted money to pay hospital bills and mooring expenses. Peter and Maggie were invited to stay at the Raakes' home while Maggie recuperated. A joint venture company was formed that was supposed to accept the mortgage on Nam Sang, foreclose on it, and repair the yacht. Peter became suspicious when the promised contracts did not appear and the repairs were not initiated. Having accepted money that he couldn't repay, Peter felt obliged to continue to cooperate with the Raakes, but he felt he might have simply acquired another Johnson.
Chris and I lived on a fence. We bought trunks, filled them with trade goods and personal effects, took them to California and shipped them to New Zealand. We went back to Bloomington and got jobs. Some force protected us during many of these transactions. When we needed to take trunks to the west coast, we found a want-ad in the paper for a truck to be driven to San Francisco. After we dropped off the trunks and delivered this truck, we needed to get to L.A. Another want-ad in the newspaper, this time for a pick-up truck to be delivered in L.A. This was during the gas shortage days, and few gas stations were open at night on Interstate 5 south through the San Joachin valley. But the pick-up just happened to have two extra fuel tanks, so we could drive straight through.
On the way back, we drove through Albuquerque to see James. We told him to stand by, that we were going to send the mortgage transfer papers to Peter and hope for the best.
In October, we got another call from Peter. He needed us in New Zealand to ‘resolve entanglements.’ In late October, Chris and I flew to Auckland. A week later James and his fiance’ Dee Ann followed.
The Raakes, Harry and his younger brother, Barry, seemed to be well-bred, English public school kids who had been a bit spoiled by the circumstances of family wealth and social status. They were Rhodesian ex-patriots. It began to look like their business activities included smuggling, grave-robbing, drug trafficking, and the illicit transfer of art and antiquities. They seemed to have political connections and no fear of police. And they seemed to have a knack for manipulating the lives of their associates. I pushed to get our contractual matters resolved, and repairs started on the Nam Sang, while the Raakes dragged their feet.
On my first trip from Auckland to Nam Sang's mooring at Tutakaka harbor, at which time I met with Bob and Barry, and arranged for the boat to be hauled out of the water, our party was stopped by a police roadblock and taken to a police station for questioning. Peter, Barry, Barry's assistant and I were all separated. The police said they were looking for some bank robbers, but it seemed to me there must be some other explanation for this official detour. They were either ‘fishing’ for information or trying to intimidate someone.
Shortly after this incident, Peter was pressured by Harry Raakes to accompany him on an artifact buying trip to southeast Asia. Harry was involved with a local museum curator and his father, Wilfred, operated an international antiquities trading company based on Norfolk Island, a haven for the rich that lay between New Zealand and Australia. Peter's report on the trip convinced us we were intolerably close to a host of illicit operations. In the Philippines, Peter witnessed negotiations over mummies which were said to be hundreds of years old. In his report, he wrote, "The two mummies, 'Nu Nu' and 'Anu Apo', bore striking similarities in tatoo and posture. They differed in condition, 'Nu Nu' being significantly less dehydrated or damaged. The age and rarity of the specimens became questionable when a fully tatooed mountain woman was observed entering Miss Chan's shop begging food and assistance." When I asked him what he meant, Peter said, "That 'mummy' looked like a recently smoked human being to me."
After Peter and Harry returned, I stepped up pressure to get the corporate paper work completed. That would get the mortgage on the Nam Sang out of our name. The Raakes had promised to accept the Nam Sang as an asset in their holding company, and in return, Peter and I would be made officers in the corporation. That would hopefully eliminate Johnson's incentive for attacking us personally. I pressed the Raakes hard to perform. We got their performance at a meeting in the Old Spaghetti Factory Restaurant in Auckland. It was the 21st of February, 1974, a Thursday. The following night, Peter, Bob, Maggie, Chris, James, Dee and I all met to discuss it.
Me: "Peter called them at home and Barry answered the phone."
Peter: "Barry said, 'Paid you guys all that money, and I ain't got nothin'. Where you at?'
'We're at the Spaghetti Factory, meet us.'"
Me: "Ten minutes later, they stomped up to our table, just stomped up, cut the waitress off in mid-sentence and started reading us the riot act. They were going to have us locked up, charged with theft and fraud, thrown out of the country, etc."
Peter: "And then I interrupted to say, 'Do you want to have something to eat?' They were steaming, but they sat down. Then Harry started in on Michael, 'You disgust me. I loathe you. You make me sick. People like you shouldn't be let in the country. If it weren't for you, none of this would be going on. We wouldn't be having any problems at all. He went on like this for ten minutes, in a real mean voice, and all the time he was fingering a knife, you know, sticking it into a cutting board in an obvious attempt to be intimidating."
Me: "Meanwhile he told Peter, in a real nice tone, that he had no dispute with Peter; Peter was all right."
Peter: "I think Harry was asking to get the shit knocked out of him, which would put up a nice assault charge."
Me: "Yeah, I was I was pissed, I don't know how I restrained myself; Harry's sitting right next to me; he was looking straight at me saying, 'don't you wonder sometimes why people think you're so disgusting and terrible?'"
Peter: "Oh, yeah. One of the first things they said when they came in was, 'How could you do it? How could you take advantage of a poor woman and her baby?' meaning Allison."
Me: "Like we didn't pay her enough rent, right; and Harry said I was the sleazy character responsible for that."
Bob: "Well, that's absurd, because I was right there when you paid her the money, asked her if she wanted any more, she said another five or so would do, and you gave her ten more."
Me: "Then Barry started explaining how we had to communicate, couldn't leave town, had to stay in direct contact at all times, couldn't go running off. He said we should be able to understand their concern and trust them. And I said, 'How can we trust you with you threatening to put us in jail for fraud? And you just said we stole your car.’"
Peter: “You wouldn't believe it. It was almost funny."
Bob: "I can believe it after that crazy telephone call."
Peter: "When Harry said, 'You've got nothing to do with it, Bob?'"
Bob: "Yeah, he trying to isolate me."
Me: "Of course, because you're not being blackmailed."
Chris: "Did they say anything about Maggie and me?"
Peter: "No, you're just the womenfolk to them."
Chris: "Did you get the VW title from them?"
Me: "No. At this point, they're holding out the title, pending some re-negotiations of future events, and maybe some past events. They wanted us to come over to the house, but I declined, because, as I told Barry, I knew my limits, and my temper could not have stood much more abuse that evening. I could not have sat still..."
Peter: "We sat still because we were wasted. We'd driven all day, we just got there, got out of the car, sat down to enjoy a meal..."
Me: "And they put me right off my spaghetti."
Bob: "How was the spaghetti?'
Peter: "Bad, really bad."
Me: "Lousy."
Peter: "So we hadn't eaten all day..."
Me: "Listen to this set-up. Barry got Harry to promise that they wouldn't throw us out of the house if we came back with them. And I said, 'Well, I'm sorry, but I'm sure it would be unwise for me to go over to your house. I can't do it. But I'll be happy to walk around in the street with you and talk this out, if there is something to talk about.' Then they got real indignant again and said a friend..."
Peter: "Barry said, 'My friend, Wayne Fry, will arrest you.'"
Me: "Oh, yeah, 'My friend, Wayne Fry will arrest you the moment I give him the word.'"
Bob: "Who's Wayne Fry?"
Me: "He's a detective sergeant with the Auckland police and seems to be handling the Nam Sang, and Barry had some words with him, I don't know..."
Bob: "Does the blackmail revolve solely around Nam Sang, or were there other issues?"
Peter: "They want the whole ball of wax is what they want. They want everything we’ve got, and they want us to sign notes on top of that."
Me: "They want us to sign an unsecured $10,000 loan and give them unlimited power of attorney..."
Peter: "They even told their attorney what they were trying to get."
Me: "And even he winced. We were accepting being blackmailed, if we could pay it, but they made the price too high..."
Peter: "Well, we weren't thinking in terms of blackmail."
Me: "Yeah, we were just thinking in terms of how we could keep them from blowing the whistle on us to their police connection, which is blackmail, but the word blackmail didn't occur to us until later."
Peter: "We were measuring what the cost was going to be. But they're going to fuck us up if they don't get the Nam Sang."
Chris: "So you went to see their lawyer?"
Me: "Yeah, we told him the whole story of what happened the night before at the restaurant..."
Peter: "He got right on the phone to Harry."
Me: "Harry said he didn't know anything about it."
Peter: "He said he knew nothing about it, and put Barry on the phone."
Me: "And the lawyer looked at us and just made a grimace, and Barry got on the phone, and I think that that lawyer realized that things were pretty serious, and he told Barry, 'Barry, what the hell is going on? Things are ready to blow, why the..."
Peter: "We still hadn't realized clearly what was going on."
Me: "Yeah, we still didn't see it, but Blandon, the lawyer, seemed to sense, I mean, we're in there..."
Peter: "Trying to protect..."
Me: "Trying to make some kind of deal, any kind of deal, right? What kind of deal you want to make? A ten thousand dollar unsecured loan? Sure. You want a power of attorney? Sure. You want some fingers and toes? And the lawyer's thinking why the hell are these guys willing to give up so much? And Barry's telling him we're being unreasonable. So, over the phone, Blandon says, 'Well they're being quite reasonable here.' And, 'Well that doesn't quite follow,' and, 'That doesn't make any sense, Barry; you're going to have to prove it. What are all these threats you're making? You're going to have to keep a low profile, Barry. They are cooperating.' 'Barry, we need them to cooperate at least as much as they need you to cooperate.'
You know, this is insane. Peter and I, we're still trying to play the game of 'OK, this is just a deal between a couple of, you know, our group and their group, we're having this business deal, but it's becoming very clear that we're going to take it in the neck, and we're still trying to say, 'Yeah, that's a good deal, we want to do that.'
I asked Blandon, 'Do you think we had anything to do with any kind of fraud here?' And he said, 'Well, I haven't seen any evidence of that.' Then he tells Barry, 'Well, Barry, they drove 400 miles up here to see you; now that's hardly an indication that they're trying to run away.'
Peter: "Ben Hoskins was their lawyer, but he can't be all bad; he unloaded them."
Me: "He backed away from them, because, as an objective observer, he..."
Peter: "Blandon sent us to Hoskins."
Me: "To discuss the American part of the transaction. As we came out of Blandon's office, the Raakes were waiting. They'd raced down from their house, right? And as we get into our car, they come running up and rip the door open, and say, 'OK, goddamit, you guys, I told you not to go see him. Here are four points that we have drawn up, and to which you are going to agree. If you don't, you can start packing for jail.' And I said, 'Go talk to your lawyer,' and Peter said, 'Go talk to your lawyer, asshole.' And Barry started saying, 'You..., I told you...' All the same threats again, and I started to drive away, and he gave the door a good slam, and Harry was standing back there by the sidewalk looking like death, he just, just, watched his empire crumble as a couple of his serfs ran away."
James: "I'm surprised you guys didn't give them a bash."
Chris: "I feel like bashing them."
Peter: "We couldn't do that, that blows our case. Any kind of violence in New Zealand would bring a police charge and prejudice everything else we had to say. Which probably is exactly what they wanted."
Me: "It was really hard, because there were a couple of times when I could taste the bile, I could taste the bile, and I was going to snatch them up..."
Peter: "I remember it. I said, 'Harry,' I said, 'look, you asshole, we're not in southeast Asia now. You're not going to talk to me like that. Go talk to your lawyer, and I'll talk to my lawyer, but don't talk to me like that.'"
Me: "Yeah, you're through, that's it."
Peter: "And when I called him an asshole, his face just dropped, he couldn't believe that happened."
Me: "Like, 'I'm Harry Raakes, one of the smartest guys in town, and I've got you over a barrel, don't you recognize that?'"
Chris: "OK, let's get back to Ben Hoskins."
Me: "When we went over to see him, he had a pretty heavy veneer of, you know, friendly, affable banker-lawyer, and he wasn't showing a crack of who he was, but that's OK, that's the way he comes on."
Peter: "He asked, 'What did the Raakes give you?' Right? He said, 'What have you been paid in this transaction?' We told him, this check, that check, the hospital bill, 500 dollars cash, two airline tickets, a VW van, etc."
Me: "A VW van without papers, so they can report it as ours, theirs, stolen or any way they want."
Peter: "It added up to almost the ten thousand they say they paid us."
Me: "Basically, we told him that under no circumstances did we want to negotiate directly with the Raakes. He was to set a deal, and we'd make it with him. By now he must have been wondering why the hell we were dealing at all, you know, why are we willing to sell for such a small piece. So Hoskins made an appointment with us for later and gave us the keys to his apartment, which he said he didn't use much anyway. He said we could go over there and relax if we wanted. Instead, we went to the American consulate, got a list of attorneys, checked the mail..."
Peter: "Changed the oil, saw Lance..."
Me: "Yeah, saw Lance, Nigel, and a few of the other Raakes' serfs. Then we met Hoskins again. He'd presented the Raakes' four demands which were, one, that we give another assignation to whoever the Raakes chose..."
Chris: "Another what?"
Me: "Assignation. We were to assign the mortgage again to an American citizen. Two was that we sign a $10,000 unsecured loan, a promissory note. Third, we'd give them power of attorney to operate in our behalf, and fourth, we’d sign a back-out clause, so if they failed to secure the Nam Sang, we'd buy it back. Good deal, right?"
Peter: "The boat's ours now, right? But if we sign all that stuff, we might as well kiss it good-bye."
Me: "Now, what Hoskins must have seen is that Peter and I were struggling to find a way to accept this deal. We were going, 'Well, uh, it's a good deal. There are a couple of problems with it, but we can adjust a bit.' And Hoskins is saying, 'Why bother, it's your boat.' And we rapped and rapped and rapped with him about the situation until he finally backed away from it."
Peter: "We didn't tell him what it was that was..."
Me: "We didn't tell him what it was, but he smelled it. He said, 'You and the Raakes are going to have to work out your problem. There's obviously some problem here, and I'm not interested in getting into that, but you guys are smart enough to know that you're making a much better deal than you've got to make.' Then he said, 'If you get rid of the Raakes, I'd like to talk to you, just that; I'm not making any plans, but I'd like to talk to you.'"
Peter: "Yeah, around that time, we figured out what was going on between us and the Raakes."
Me: "Yeah, we snapped to the fact it was blackmail."
Peter: "Pure and simple. I mean, for everything, it wasn't just the deal on the boat, but everything, the personal thing between us was phony, it meant nothing."
Me: "Yeah, it explained an awful lot in terms of why they were asking me if these were all our assets, if we had anything else, and..."
Peter: "It explains all kinds of things."
Me: "For the last two days, we've been mentally rushing over the history, going over to the..."
Peter: "And the lawyers, especially Blandon, must see the danger in the situation."
Me: "Their lawyer, Blandon, when we were leaving, he seemed to be hoping for a miracle. He told Barry over the phone, that if he didn't agree with him, he was certainly free to discharge him from the case, and he shouldn't expect that this would cause him, Blandon, any great grief. So Blandon threw it to Hoskins and Hoskins threw it back to Blandon. Neither of them wants to handle it because it stinks. And that's what blackmail does, and sometimes a blackmailer sets a price that can't be met."
Peter: "We've been working for those fuckers since we got here."
Me: "We've been working for them, and we finally decided..."
Peter: "And they've been doing this, they've been setting this thing up..."
Me: "We finally decided that the only thing to do, the only reasonable thing is not to tell them anything. We're going to a lawyer. We're going to lay it all on a lawyer. We've got to pick the right one. So far, nearly everyone we've confided in has..."
Peter: "Hoskins is smart, and he suggested a guy that we ought to consider. Hoskins said there was some New Zealand law that, as an American Lawyer, he wouldn't want to mess with."
Me: "So we go to the right lawyer, give him the entire story, he'll contact Blandon and tell him we've been skinned, called blackmail, and we want our skin back. If we can't get ours, we'll take theirs. By our skin, I mean that our work and time for the last six months has to be properly accounted for in the company books, our boat has to be returned, and Johnson, or his lawyer if he has one, will be warned about Johnson's attempts to blackmail us, and that every one of his letters are going to come into court, right; let him come up with some way to explain them so they don't look like blackmail."
Peter: "How come you've got a no interest loan? That's one of the things..."
Me: "Yeah, that's another thing, they charge 25% for..."
Everybody gushed half sentences all at once and over the top of each other for a while, then Chris said, "So after you guys left Hoskins, did you come back here?"
Me: "No, we went, oh yeah, we did. It's just been one extra long day."
Peter: "We've been getting blackmailed ever since we left Indiana. The court essentially started it when they put us in a position where we had to leave."
Me: "They said they would charge everyone, including you women, if we didn't plead guilty."
Peter: "That's fuckin' blackmail again. But we can't do anything about that one."
Bob: "That's not really blackmail; it's intimidation, denial of due process, and possibly official extortion, since they demanded you give up your property."
Me: "Johnson blackmailed us by threatening to make trouble for us with the Indiana authorities if we tried to assert our rights under the mortgage..."
Peter: "And he took the shot, he called them."
Me: "Yeah, he called them, at least once, but he chickened at the end of that shot. Hanner said Johnson just claimed to be looking for us. But he was writing us letters at the time, giving specific instructions on what to do with the boat, instructions that nullified the bare boat charter contract and the joint-venture agreement. The meaning of his references to Indiana would be clear to a court. We've got to get to a lawyer quickly, get the case written up, and go after the Raakes and Johnson. We're probably screwed either way, but it'd be better for us to go down with some integrity than scurrying around looking for ways to appease them."
Peter: "The Raakes, you know, they're fucked, too. There are too many people that know about them, I'm sure. I remember transactions with people, you know, their whole attitude toward the Raakes, they're on a hook, too. The Raakes have a number of people on the hook, and their lawyer knows it. There are liabilities for the Raakes, even if they don't know it yet."
Me: "They're vultures."
Peter: "We've been on this hook so long... Well, we're going to ask them to send us their deal in writing."
Me: "That's what Hoskins said is the appropriate thing to do. Have them send the deal in writing."
Peter: "We're prepared to take the deal. Let's see what kind of deal. When we have that deal, we'll ask a judge to consider why we're taking it. They're going to expose us, period, so we might as well expose them."
Me: "We've been operating under the weight of intimidation for so long, we hardly remember another way to act."
Peter: "I managed to get Harry to accept a copy of the whole transaction in Asia, but he didn't want it, he wanted ME. He wants to be able to ring up on the phone and have me jump."
Me: "They were indignant that we were away for two days, and not in direct contact with them. We're supposed to be five minutes away at all times."
Peter: "They made us their niggers."
Me: "I think they've gone berserk. They seem to feel that the knowledge they have about us gives them absolute power over us."
Peter: "They're going to fuck us; all right, they're going to have us thrown out of the country. Well, that's the threat we've been under the whole time; that's why we've been dealing amicably; that's why we've been taking it in the neck. We let them have it all because it was too dangerous to hassle over it. Well, now they get the whole fuckin' routine; we've got nothing left to lose."
Me: "They're totally ignoring our work on the boat and the rest. They'll say they paid us all this money, but a lot of it's just..., and they're demanding we sign notes. And we didn't even get it all, and we aren't allowed to spend what we did get, and at the same time they want us to stick around. All we're trying to do is keep the family together, and find a place to settle down, and we can't go."
Peter: "They took the ball from Johnson and started running with it."
Me: "Yeah. Boy are we stupid! Now we're in a Denver sandwich. We got the court, we got Johnson, we got the Raakes, and they're all blackmailing the shit out of us. I figure by now we’re world class experts on the subject."
Peter: "For over a year, and we never even noticed it. Finally one guy calls for a payoff we can't make, and our eyes open."
Me: "But they said you're not involved, Bob. What have you been doing, just working for them?"
Bob: "Yeah, for ten dollars a week."
Peter: "Do you think a college professor is worth more than ten dollars a week nowadays?"
Me: "We fed their egomania, because we didn't have our eyes on the ball. We had our eyes on getting a safe place where we could live."
Peter: "Their whole line about helping us find a farm was a load of shit. They were spinning webs and wheels and tales, our tails, so the Nam Sang would fall into their hands."
Bob: "I think that's clear from my records from way back."
Peter: "You know, I never knew what 'damages' were in law suits. Now I know what they are, they're what the Raakes owe us."
Me: "For eight months of incredible abuse, incredible scheming."
Chris: "And especially with Maggie pregnant, it's for Maggie's health, too.
Peter: "We're hanging around for months, I'm by his side all the time... ."
I began to feel like a pig in Stalingrad. (circa WW II)
We moved from the Happy Valley farm we had near Auckland to a big house in Wellington. We hired a New Zealand lawyer who'd studied at Harvard, Robert Andrew McGechan. We advised the American embassy we were enmeshed in a highly complicated situation, and we settled in for a siege. From March through August, McGechan debriefed Peter and me and guided our suit through the New Zealand court. Hunter negotiated with Indiana.
Chris and I took jobs at the Mary Poppins Agency as substitute parents, Peter did commercial art work and tutored dyslexic children, Maggie was a secretary at a hospital, James was a salesman for a building and loan, and Dee worked as a clerk in a fabric store.
Peter and I also consulted on the Ohu project with the office of New Zealand's Minister of Lands. The Ohu project was envisioned to be a sort of ‘kibbutz’ system for settling alternative communities on marginal ‘back block’ land. The groups wishing to create residential settings where they could practice their alternative concepts for social organization were often short on hard skills, like plumbing, electrical, etc. Our group was accepted as a likely ‘resource team’ that could be situated among the other groups to provide them with tools and expertise. If we had to walk away from Nam Sang, working in support of the Ohu project looked like an attractive alternative.
We lived in Old St. John's Priory, once the home of the Vicar of Wellington. It was a three story Victorian building with lots of cut glass, varnished wood, curved banisters and fireplaces. It sat on a hillside at the edge of the campus of Victoria University and afforded a panoramic view of Wellington and its port.
I signed up for a foreign affairs class at Victoria University. It was titled, "Should New Zealand Have an Independent Foreign Policy?" I managed to appear for two classes. The second was a lecture given by the teacher, a middle-aged Englishman, in which he described how important it was for a government to keep its foreign affairs decisions secret from the citizenry. To illustrate, he cited America's involvement in Viet Nam, seeming to suggest that America's problems in Viet Nam were due simply to the high degree of public involvement in complicated foreign affairs matters. I was infuriated, objected vigorously, and resigned from the class.
I didn't think I knew more than the teacher, or feel I was personally more worthy than he, but I did carry an emotion about the killing and destruction in Viet Nam and in America. I felt the class trivialized ugly life and death realities by reducing them to clap-trap. Implicit in this suggestion about secrecy was that the White men could work things out for the world, if only everybody would back off and give them room to establish proper chains of authority and inter-agency accounting techniques, and reporting practices, etc. Bullshit, I thought.
Richard Nixon resigned on TV in the Victoria University student lounge, live via satellite. I watched. Later he took a pardon for himself and left the rest of America pointing fingers at each other. More Bullshit. Even staunch Republican Duke gnashed his teeth on the Nixon pardon, calling it a cheap shot. Duke never used words like ‘catharsis’ when he talked to me, but I thought he understood that America needed one.
Bob Moyer held his post guarding the boat, but the situation got complicated and bizarre, and he eventually came to Wellington to stay at our house and get his head clear. We talked for days sorting out details. In the middle of the third day, Peter and I intercepted Bob as he ran through the house, naked, heading for the front door. His pupils dilated from tension, and he shouted, "I've got it, I've got the answer! I've got it!"
He'd been alone too much, and carried too much weight for too long. Bob had been in the military and helped develop voice printing. He was a very smart guy. Months of frustrated intellectual analysis had squeezed his head. When the boat was first moored in Tutukaka, and the Department of Agriculture killed Nemo, our ship’s cat, it had started. Bob confronted many baroque developments, frequently on his own, ever since. He got a Mickey Finn from a woman in a massage parlor when he investigated apparent links between this massage parlour, the Raakes, a security company and Interpol. And on and on.
But it was temporary, and Bob got over it. We’d just plugged into something beyond our understanding and it was electrocuting our nervous systems. It may have been harder for Bob, because he was a volunteer. He’d left Oregon to come with us and collect data for a program he was working on, and to help us cope. When we were confused about who we were, and what we were doing, Bob would say, "We're the eyes, the ears and the conscience of the creator of the universe." It seemed to help to hear that.
Chris and I became members of the New Zealand family life council and, at one of their meetings, we met Wellington's Chief of Police, John Stevenson. In the course of the group's discussion, Mr. Stevenson said, "Even when I have to arrest someone, I do it with love."
I was impressed by his sincerity. Chris and I were generally impressed by New Zealanders. They seemed far less bitter or defensive than Americans. When Chris asked me how I accounted for this, I said, "The New Zealanders long ago stopped the serious abuse of the Maoris, New Zealand was the first country in the world to include women in the electorate, the people haven't slaughtered each other in civil war or stamped out dissident groups for as long as anyone can remember, they also haven't imprisoned large numbers of their young, poisoned their ecosystem or crushed any neighboring societies in recent history. They don't hold atom bombs over the world's head as a hedge against inflation, but otherwise, they're pretty much the same as us."
At dawn, on the morning of July 25th, 1974, a Thursday, the doorbell rang. It was a group of Wellington policemen. They and their German shepherd dog wanted urgently to inspect our house and take us all to the police station. Peter called our solicitors, while the police were still downstairs entering the house. The police came upstairs to our bedrooms, and told us all to dress and go out to waiting vans. As we did this, they searched house. We were told we'd be out of the country before the day ended. That day would last for weeks.
The court granted us bail, and set the matter for hearing. Lots of press and TV covered the event. Later, I called Police Chief Stevenson. He sounded only slightly wary as he assured me that he'd arrested us with love in his heart, and that the information requiring our arrest came from an official American source. We went to see the American Ambassador, Mr. Seldon. Reporters followed us watching for drama.
The ambassador had a report that I was convicted for marijuana possession and had served a jail sentence for it. There was no mention of the reversal, and he was reluctant to accept that his computer information was incomplete. He insisted that he wasn't a source of negative information about us, and agreed there was no federal fugitive warrant for our arrest. He seemed to assume that we'd fled Indiana. (Through the Freedom of Information Act, we later learned the ambassador was exchanging telegrams about us with Messrs. Kissinger and Cisco at the State Department in Washington which wrote us off as criminals.
In a second meeting with the ambassador, a fellow I took to be an agent of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and another fellow I took to be a CIA agent joined the meeting. The drug agent asked about the 800 pounds of hashish found on our farm in Indiana. I never learned if he said that merely to see what my reaction would be, or if he'd been told that story and actually believed it. I asked him how I could prove that 800 pounds of hashish that didn't exist, didn't exist. He said, "What?!" I repeated myself; he seemed to get annoyed, and didn't talk to me anymore.
In a telephone conversation on 24 August, 1974, Hunter said, "Stay put, it's a bad time to make a deal with Indiana, because they see your case as a sleeping dog, and they're content that you're gone. The bailbondsman hasn't been pressed by the court, and hasn't contacted Interpol. The Interpol information must have originated in New Zealand, probably from Johnson telling them you ‘stole’ his boat. Indiana has not requested that you be treated as fugitives, so the only way Indiana can be a problem is if you get stopped by a policeman with time on his hands or through a complaint from Johnson or your friends down there. Also, I'll save you a copy of this Rockford Republican newspaper article I found that appeared around election time in 1972. It features positive stories about Nixon and the KKK on the front page."
I told Hunter, "It's a critical time down here. The embassy is getting phony FBI calls referring to us, and the Minister of Immigration doesn't want to be further involved. McGechan says we embarrassed some people, particularly the guys who raided our house. They stole our files, but missed the hidden third copies of our immigration applications, so when the police charged that we'd overstayed our visas, and immigration backed them up by saying we hadn't re-applied, we immediately produced copies of the applications and, well, you know how that goes."
"Yeah, well, hang on as best you can; these things get complicated; you can never be sure how they'll go." Tom said.
"OK. It looks like a compromise is still possible. The judge sees how hard it will be for us to deal with the litigation over the Nam Sang if we're out of New Zealand, and our friends are pretty solid. And with all the publicity, there are a lot of sailing people in New Zealand saying the government should be careful they don't end up helping some swindlers take our boat. There's hope, I guess, but Maggie's terrified of being separated from the baby. I told you she had the baby, didn't I? Anyway, we're under awful pressure to find a reliable course to take."
"Yeah, well, congratulations to Maggie, hang in there, good-bye."
"Talk to ya later."
Parliament scheduled hearings on our case. The day before the whole crazy story would become public on the floor of Parliament, Prime Minister Kirk fell dead. It hit our legal and political position like a bolt of lightning, and I felt a personal sense of loss for Mr. Kirk. He was a left wing Cap who seemed a most human sort for a politician. He literally walked among the New Zealand people without fear, and I'd heard him on a radio talk-back show answering questions posed by ordinary people. Upon his death, Parliament dissolved into paroxysms of power realignment. Right wing ‘Piggy’ Muldoon rushed to fill that vacuum. New Zealand jerked sharply to the right. We auctioned our possessions once again, and prepared to leave New Zealand.
Our first attempt was thwarted. An officer at the Australian consulate told us that he couldn't allow us to transit through Australia, because we were being referred to as terrorists in a telex message he said was based on information originating either from Interpol or the U.S. State Department. He was very apologetic, but he said he couldn't write down what he was telling us, and there was nothing he could do. I spoke to the American Embassy about this, but, as usual, their responses lacked sincerity.
We arranged for a flight to Fiji, where we could get a boat to Mexico. This was the cheapest way to North America, it allowed us to carry the most gear, and we could get a rest along the way. We landed in Fiji, but weren't allowed to transit. We protested, but a bunch of Fijians wearing colorful sarongs on their lower halves and British-looking soldier coats on their upper halves carried us onto a plane that flew us back to New Zealand. They didn't seem to enjoy doing it, but we didn't like it much either.
Somehow Air New Zealand got into the act, and, as they'd flown us back into New Zealand, they were obliged to put us up at a hotel until they could fly us out again. We went to court where the judge ordered we be allowed to leave New Zealand on travel plans of our own design, but there were new authorities at work who weren't willing to abide that order. We flew to Tahiti the next week only to find we wouldn't be allowed to change planes. The officials in Tahiti wouldn't even speak to us. Guards menaced us with rifles and insisted we re-board the Air New Zealand flight leaving for Los Angeles. One French soldier took me aside and sheepishly explained that his officer was gone and no one would admit they spoke English, because the situation was political; there were no proper documents authorizing them to do what they were doing, that they didn't like it, but they wouldn't give their names or take official responsibility. We boarded the plane for Los Angeles at gunpoint.
There we were arrested. The only discussion I had with any of these new guns-with-neckties was with a young man in a sharkskin suit who sat across a desk from me, identified himself as a Treasury Agent, and asked if I knew where Patty Hearst was. I said no, and asked him if he could release Christine and Maggie and the baby. He said no. Dee took Maggie's baby back to Chicago to the grandparents. Alex and Ilsa had experience with situations like this. Ilsa had escaped the Nazis during WWII, while most of her family was trapped in Germany, and Alex had been a French Legionnaire during that period.
Maggie and Chris were held in the women's section of Los Angeles County Jail, and Peter, James and I were held in the men's section. There was a telephone handy, so I reached through the bars and made a call to Dick Johnson. It was some comic relief to hear the tension spike in his voice as I calmly told him we’d just returned to L.A, and would see him for lunch the next day. Johnson left the country shortly afterward, and went to Saudi Arabia where he took a job as a flight instructor.
We were beyond tension, ourselves. Later we talked about this, and learned that we each simultaneously experienced a moment, during the flight to L.A., when we were so exhausted and confused, we’d hoped the plane would crash. This fatigue caused me to miss a last minute opportunity to dodge the feds and make it back to Indiana on our own. Real terrorists had bombed the international arrivals section of the L.A. airport the day before we got there. Arrivals were temporarily routed through another building. We could have easily walked around that building and out of the airport. Oh well.
We stayed a week in L.A. jails, waived extradition, and were taken back to Indiana by Lloyd Heck and Gary Cooper. They didn't seem to know much about what had happened in New Zealand, and were happy for the free trip to California for them and their wives. And it was good press for the sheriff before his re-election bid in Parke County.
So, pretty soon after that, there we were, standing in front of Judge Dowd, swearing to God that we were voluntarily pleading guilty. Hunter said the prosecutor promised the women would go free, and Maggie could immediately rejoin her infant, if only we'd swear to God that we were voluntarily pleading guilty. Otherwise, the authorities would see to it everybody did ten years, and Maggie could send pictures of herself to the baby as it grew up.
Peter, James and I were taken to the Indiana State Penitentiary for a ten year sentence. We could be paroled after six months if we were good and stayed alive. We were actually in a better position than most inmates entering a state prison. We weren't personally isolated. There were three of us healthy brothers with an Italian surname, college educations, and military training. No problem.