Monkeyshines
chapter eight

It was the summer of 1965. School was out and my quarantine was over. I was broke and bored. I called up a friend from high school, Dick O'Leary, and we went up to the North Woods together. My grandma's house sat empty, so we stayed there, but the charm was gone, along with most of the furniture. The place had run down while my family's life was centered in Chicago.
Dick and I worked in the woods, stripping bark off trees destined for pulp mills. We earned a nickel a stick. A stick was an eight foot section of a tree. We had to work fast to keep up with the old geezers who cut the trees, and faster to earn any money. We had to work faster still so horseflies, deerflies and mosquitoes didn't drive us crazy. If we stopped to swat every insect that fed on us, we'd slap ourselves silly, and we'd get no bark off the trees. The best way was to work like hell and hope the sweat would wash off the bugs.
I bought an old beat up Ford for $20 in order to get to work. I paid half in front and half on time. On the way to work one day, I drove through a field toward the sound of the chainsaws and got a flat. A twig pierced one of the ancient tires. A few weeks of this drudgery, and we left for California. We figured it'd be more interesting to starve on the road than die of boredom and malnutrition in the woods.
We answered an ad in the newspaper from a guy wanting drivers to deliver cars to the west coast, the bait being an offer to pay expenses. There were four cars altogether. The guy loaded them with parcels which we delivered along the way; when we reached Sturgis, South Dakota, the guy switched up, and announced the trip was over. The paid expenses were a few hot dogs and a night's sleep in the cars. After a few harsh words with him, O'Leary and I started hitch-hiking.
We passed the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, crossed the Bighorn Mountains, and entered Yellowstone Park through the east gate. We stayed in a cabin occupied by summer staff, mostly female. O'Leary got lucky, and we split up, planning to meet at the west gate.
As I walked along alone, hoping for a ride, I came upon some bears. They were hanging around the road, probably waiting for a tourist to toss them food. I imagined these bears were some of the female summer workers, and looked at them longingly. They paid no attention to me. Shortly after passing the bears, I saw some moose. I always thought of moose as big deer. They're really quite a lot bigger, enormous animals with huge antlers. One was very close, and I saw that my head was lower than his shoulders.
I met O'Leary at the West gate, we left Yellowstone, followed the Snake River basin down through American Falls and Twin Falls, then headed south from Idaho into Nevada. Rides got tougher to get, so we separated again. We planned to meet along the road or in Sausalito, California at the fisherman's pier. O’Leary had a friend who worked there.
For a while we leap-froged each other. Our last ride together was with an inebriated cowboy driving a beat-up truck that looked like he’d built it himself. An assortment of bags and boxes were spread around the driver's seat, each containing a different kind of alcoholic beverage. A bag held warm beer, a box held bottles of Rock and Rye, and so on. O'Leary and I each drank a warm beer, but that didn't ease our anxiety as the cowboy's truck pitched and lurched its drunken way across the desert.
This cowboy was super friendly. After a little conversation about life and times, he blurted, "Hell, my philosophy is 'Everybody 's right'."
This was a rare philosophy in my experience. Nearly every one I'd met seemed sure that some people were right and some were wrong. And there seemed to be a pattern to this.
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Monkeyshine #9 People who flatter you, are accepted and liked. People who criticize you, are rejected and disliked.
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After this ride, I was on my own. As I went from Nevada into California, I remembered Dawn from Madrid. I called her from Sacramento only to find that I'd passed the town in which she worked. I backtracked to Lake Tahoe to visit her. I wanted to stay with her, but something held me back. Sometimes I thought I was shy. Other times I thought I feared rejection. Something was wrong inside me. I said hello and good-bye to Dawn as though I lived six blocks away and could see her anytime. I was still puzzled about how to act with women. I thought about the way my parents treated each other and looked for cues there, but their example didn't seem to be a very good map.
I remembered one day when my dad came home from work, and all four of us kids were sitting at the dinner table with clean hands waiting for him. My mom had worked extra hard to have the house clean and have one of Dad's favorite dinners ready. He complained a lot that dinner was never ready and that the house was messy. Well, everything was perfect this day. A hot steaming bowl of polenta (corn meal, butter, onions and ricotta cheese) was put on the table as Dad walked into the house.
"Dinner's ready, Pete," my Mom warbled softly.
My dad walked through the dining room and into the bedroom. "I think I'm going to take a nap before dinner," he said. My sister, Barbara, my brothers, Peter and James, and I all looked at each other. My mother turned different colors. My dad must have sensed he'd gone too far. He stuck his head out of the bedroom just in time to see Mom pick up the bowl of polenta. He broke for the front door. Mom was breaking right behind him with the bowl of polenta in shot put position. I followed them out the front door.
"Not the polenta," I yelled; but she didn't listen to me.
The polenta crashed in a muddy heap on the sidewalk two steps behind Dad. He escaped to the tavern. We ate toast for dinner. Nope, Dad was no blueprint for building a successful relationship with a woman.
Back on course to Sausalito, I crossed over the Sierra Nevada. By dark, I reached San Raphael, a small town on the northern edge of the San Francisco Bay. I was so tired I could hardly think. To find lodging, I took a page from the North Africa trip. In Bengazi one night, Ken and I had slept in the upstairs hallway of a police station. The San Raphael police were a little surprised when I asked them if I could sleep in their station, but they went with it. They directed me to an empty courtroom where I spent the night asleep in the judge's chair with my head on the bench. Early in the morning I continued on to Sausalito.
Eventually I found the right pier and O'Leary asleep in an empty trailer. Neither of us had a thought on what to do in Sausalito that day, so we let momentum take us. We headed south toward Los Angeles. Howard Hooper, a friend of O'Leary's family, lived in Pasadena. He was legal counsel for the Southern California Rapid Transit District. We decided to forage at Hooper's. Of course, when we got to his house in Pasadena, no one was home. He was staying at a rented house in San Clemente for the month.
The neighbors, Herb and Myra Green, saw us nosing around. We told them who we were, and they not only fed us lunch, they packed us into their car and drove us the whole 70 miles down to San Clemente, stopping at San Juan Capistrano Mission on the way to point out to us the famous swallows that lived there. Myra explained that originally missions lay a day's walk from each other in a chain running the length of California.
As we drove along the freeway, my eyes burned and teared. Herb said the yellow L.A. air caused this. He called it smog, and said I'd get used to it. He said his eyes used to burn all the time when he’d first moved to California.
We reached San Clemente, and I met Hooper, his wife and their seven children. We waved good-bye to Herb and Myra. We spent the next two weeks stumbling in the surf and marveling at the California beach girls.
As summer ended, we hitch-hiked back to the mid-west to start another school year. We followed route 66 across the San Bernadino Mountains, the Mojave desert, the Colorado River and the great Colorado plateau that stretched across northern Arizona. We passed through the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon country. Our first real stop was Albuquerque, New Mexico. My Aunt Helen and Uncle Jess lived there. We got a good rest and a wash. Helen had been a front line nurse during WWII. She appeared to have an unlimited supply of internal calm She married a master sergeant who was a demolition expert in that war. He’d defused bombs and seen his men blown up. Once he’d killed a Japanese soldier who'd sniped at his men for two days from inside the carcass of a dead horse. Helen and Jess seemed to regard me as an inoffensive stray cat.
From New Mexico we traveled through Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri back to Illinois and home. O'Leary enrolled at River Falls College in Wisconsin. I went back to Loyola. Either Loyola had changed, or I had changed, or both. It was certainly not the same. And I had not yet gotten to the bottom of things.
As I went through the motions of re-entering academia, I realized I was adrift again. External pressure forced my hand, and caused me to act, or I would just bog down. I felt like a stray cat looking for a medium fast mouse to chase. Viet Nam became that mouse, and the outside pressure that would force my hand. I got a letter from the draft board in June of 1965 ordering me to appear for a physical in April of the year. The letter had been forwarded all over the world before it got to me. I was late. I went to the draft board and showed them the letter's envelope which was covered with forwarding notations. I explained that I'd been on safari in Africa. (I'd received a letter from Bill McGill at the same time that I got the draft notice. Bill said Jack had a car accident in eastern Turkey, and hit a little girl injuring her. A court found Jack one third responsible and the little girl two thirds responsible. In the Turkish way in such things, the court sentenced Jack to three months in jail.)
After I explained myself, a middle-aged Polish women at the draft board held a caucus at the rear of the office. They returned to say that they ought to declare me delinquent.
"Write down the story you just told us about a safari," said one of them.
I did it. They held another caucus in which they read what I wrote. This time they came back and reproached me for having left the country. One said very sternly, "You cannot leave the country again without our permission. Then they renewed my student deferment.
I knew little about the Viet Nam war. I met a guy in North Africa who’d been with a Marine regiment in Viet Nam, but he made it sound like a police action or riot control. He said they'd be driving along a jungle road, and unseen opposition would fire at them. They'd shoot back when they had weapons with them, and drive away real fast.
A woman in Tangier was hitch-hiking to Viet Nam, as a sort of protest I gathered, but I’d thought she must be completely crazy to do such a thing. And I was surprised that the draft board could forbid me to travel.
Simultaneously, a knowledgeable friend from the University of Chicago explained to me that I was suffering through the post-adolescent, German, metaphysical dilemma stage of my life. I told him I was having trouble getting to the bottom of things. I needed something deeper, higher, wider, taller, to which I could dedicate myself; a cause. Or maybe just a medium fast mouse to chase. Something stimulating and inspiring that would capture my attention.
When I quit my job at U.S. Steel, the cold weather was only part of the cause. Management had ‘promoted’ me to a position I didn't want. They took away my funky hi-line job, where I struggled alongside a bunch of dirty workers, and moved me into the superintendent's office. I wore a suit and tie to work each day. My desk had two phones, each with five lines, a typewriter, and a batch of accounting books. I made the coffee in the morning. I was called production analyst. I sat in a room full of file cabinets. The good news was that I could work there forever if I played my cards right. My stomach growled at the prospect. After all those school years, I couldn't wind up working for fat old Superintendent Dead Eyes McDonald in an ugly office where the rules seemed to require that we all pretend we were higher up an imaginary ladder than the guys outside who did the physical work. I doubted I'd ever get to the bottom of things if I stayed there.
And I wasn't the only fellow struggling with this kind of conflict. The anti-authority fever of the 60's broke on American society like a tidal wave. It was organic. No rabble rousers were required, or so I imagined at the time. Hopelessness assaulted Baby Boomers. Routines that seemed to squash the joy out of our parents squeezed on us. My instinctive reaction was to survive. A small piece of self-awareness had survived in me since childhood, and I felt obliged to keep it alive. I thought it was my job to keep it alive.
My parents had worked themselves awfully hard, and they didn't seem to be reaching goals which satisfied them, but I wasn't even sure what their goals were. But they seemed to be suffering. Most adults I knew seemed to be suffering. They seemed to be out of love. Out of inspiration. And running out of time. I didn't have the heart to repudiate them. I just left.
I didn't understand why that made some people so angry. I felt I was being rejected and suffocated. It didn't occur to me that my elders might be feeling as insecure as I was.
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Monkeyshine #5 Insecure people put you through a lot of shit.
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U.S. Steel said I could be a production analyst but not a hi-line clerk and stock un-loader, so I left. I went back to school. I drove a cab part-time, and tended bar at Smedley's in Hyde Park. The intellectual and cultural gymnastics of Hyde Park exceeded what my experience in my old neighborhood had prepared me for. People asked more difficult questions in Hyde Park.
I technically lived at my mom's on the south side, but I slept where-ever, usually longing for a sleeping companion. Finally I assumed I'd never find a woman who'd want me. I felt I was too complicated even to be known much less loved. So I'd ride society's boundaries. Forever. I'd try to be a decent human being. I'd try to manage the cravings that seemed to poison people and turn them into desperadoes. I could live in my car or in a house, it didn't matter. (I’d seen Indians living in refrigerator cartons in the deadly winter cold of Montana.) If I was lucky, I'd find wisdom in 30 or 40 years. I still thought in terms of ends and means. Later I’d see that means and ends are the same.
Working at Smedley's, I met another loner, Suzanne, the Queen of the Hippies. (When the word "Hippie" first came along, it applied pretty much like Sambo or Dipshit). Suzanne was the Queen of the Hippies because she was paired to the senior bartender, Peter Olson, who’d long been called the King of the Hippies. I liked them both a lot. They always shared genuine emotion with me, and they never seemed to make trouble for anyone. Suzanne had been a classic juvenile delinquent and was raised in an institution. Her mother and father had abandoned her. She was smart, sensitive and hurting. We became friends.
I started hanging around Blues joints in Chicago, like Mother Blues and Big Johns's. Blues music buttered the crust of life on the edge. It married joy to melancholy.
I dropped out of Loyola, took my savings from Smedley's and poker, and planned a motorcycle trip to South America. I asked permission from the draft board, but they said, "No. Your student deferment was cancelled, and you'll be drafted soon." Shit, this put me in a bind. I had to think.
Viet Nam had not yet received much of my attention. Viet Nam seemed just another tear in humanity's ragged cloak. I didn't feel like being a warrior. I thought and thought until my brain was smoking.
One night, I consulted Suzanne and Ricard. Ricard was black, but looked sort of Mediterranean. He was sensitive and hard to fool. I told them my situation. I admitted that nothing in my life was particularly worth saving. They gave me a small pill and told me to take a nap. I woke up within the hour, with hallucinations blooming full, and riptides of energy tearing around my body.
Suzanne and Ricard smoked a joint, and we all walked to the Museum of Science and Industry, an awesome building in Jackson Park modeled after the Parthenon in Athens. They led me through the park, asking from time to time, "How are you doing?"
I answered, very religiously, "Wooow!" That's all I could say for hours. The sky exploded in different colors. Trees and grass exuded warmth and vivid friendliness. I felt part of it all. Nothing was reducible to literal terms. Nothing was static. The big, green city buses even came alive. One turned the corner into the park bending like a rubber snake.
We sat under the weeping willows by the lagoon, and I floated to the surface of my life. I sensed the universe was beyond description or control. My intellect was humbled. Sitting under those willow trees in the park, I felt certain I should go forward, judge not, and fear no evil.
We walked back to Smedley's and separated. I got on my motorcycle and drove home, an action that convinced me not to drive on acid. The carburetor leaked gas, forming a puddle under the bike at a red light. Backfires from the bike exhaust ignited the puddles in great puffs of flame as I pulled away from each stop. Sometimes the bike seemed to fly up in the air like a plane. Sometimes I felt I was driving upside down or sideways.
When I got home, I tried to hide the motorcycle key from myself. I lay in bed, and watched a science fiction movie on the ceiling. It was about New York City after a nuclear war. The world was devastated, and war continued in the subway tunnels, where survivors organized alliances and fought with clubs. It was essential for national security to control the subway tunnels. I couldn't find anyone else who’d seen this particular movie.