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.