Monkeyshines
chapter twelve

On the morning of February 4th, 1970, I left Sandstone. Christine drove us to my mother's house in Wisconsin. For the next two days, I listened to John Fahey's infinitely melancholy guitar. Mom cried a lot. Christine created an ambiance of springtime. It was the beginning of the rest of our lives. She had an apartment waiting for us in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she'd used her alumna status and implacable spirit to help me gain admission to Lake Forest College. We moved in and I attended classes.
The apartment was above a 31 Flavors ice cream store. We listened to Bob Dylan music, ate ice cream cones, and went to see "Hair" at a theater in Chicago. Good old Marvin visited us. He was a freak. It was good to see him. My sister, Barbara, visited with a priest friend of hers, Father Bill. He looked around the apartment with a kind and sober eye and said, "The only conventional thing in this apartment is that rocking chair." Our bed was on the floor, paisley spreads and poster art dominated the decor, and incense burned in a brass teacup I’d brought back from Egypt.
Christine looked like she'd escaped from the cast of "Hair", except when she went to work at the bank across the street. I’d taken to wearing a diamond stud in my left earlobe, and it seemed to have the desirable effect of eliminating unnecessary conversation. I wore the preposterous shirts Chris made for me or a floor length Moroccan robe. Chris' parents visited, calling in advance to warn her, and I'd go stand outside in my robe while they came and went. They wanted to maintain the illusion that Chris and I weren't living together.
One day I went with the Lake Forest faculty and student body to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center that was a few miles from school. We sat down in the road in front of the main gate in order to block traffic and make our point that the war in Viet Nam was bad. I had intellectual objections to the war, but it was in the feelings and in the eyes of my brother, James, that I found some personal conviction.
Intellectually, I believed all humans were inextricably bound up with each other - we were all one. To wish harm to anyone was to wish harm to one's own self. The decision to kill a person was always superfluous. It became for me a kind of spiritual or psychological litmus test. I used it to determine if a person was sane or crazy. Some thought it hair-splitting or hypocritical, but to me it was absolutely essential to make a choice other than TO KILL. At the time, I thought this was pretty sophisticated thinking.
It became more personal during the time I stayed in Hollywood, and made court appearances. That's when my brother, James, came back from Viet Nam. The morning of this day in 1968, James was in the jungle in Viet Nam. That same evening, he sat in the living room of Melody's hillside home.
In the jungle he was the door gunner on a helicopter. He was shot down two times that he spoke of. A regular duty for him was to fly into enemy territory, drop troops in a landing zone, then fly away. Later he’d go back to pick up the troops, the live ones and the dead ones. Sometimes they were all alive. At least once they were all dead.
James had always been a sensitive guy, maybe too sensitive. I never knew him to be very aggressive, violent or bad-tempered. The James in my Hollywood living room was a tight roll of barbed wire. He smelled of death. I saw blood pour out of his eyes. He told me, like it was a plan he approved of, that the only way to win in Viet Nam was to kill every man, woman and child there. I think he would have made an exception for the South Viet Nam troops and their families, but I didn't ask. This wasn't James. This was my Marine Corps drill instructor. I sensed James was still alive, buried deep inside this android with the callouses on its trigger finger. It was like he was down in a well. I sent my thoughts down to him. I talked as little as possible to the brooding warrior that was holding him down there. They both left the next day.
James was on my mind as we blocked the street in front of the training center, but protesting the war was really just a peripheral event in my life. I was preoccupied with my own personal struggle. It wasn't unlike the one James was going through. My struggle was with the feelings that were still torn from my time in prison. I concentrated hard on themes of love and peace, got high on pot to reduce my anger, and I looked for a parallel world.
I felt like a nuclear reactor was inside me. I had to keep that reactor cool. If I didn't, anger would burn through my ethical containment. Like the China Syndrome. Hate and rage would boil into the atmosphere like radioactive clouds. I felt isolated and rejected. I suppressed fantasies of torturing and killing narcs, judges, lawyers, prosecutors and their families. At night, as I slept, sinister police sneaked into my bedroom, handcuffed me roughly and, while Chris looked on in horror, dragged me back to prison. I’d wake up sweating. When Chris moved in the bed, I jumped up tense and ready to fight.
I was restless and ill at ease. At school, I felt like an alien presence. I played Rolling Stones tunes on the student union jukebox and tried to feel like I fit in. I consciously crafted a smile on my face, and affected an air of savvy, but inside, I steamed with the urge for vengeance. I constantly reminded myself of the wisdom I'd gleaned from books and conversations, like the ancient Chinese proverb that said, "Before you seek vengeance, dig two graves." And Marcus Aurelius' advice, "The most complete revenge is to not imitate the aggressor." And the book title I'd seen, LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE. "Yeah," I thought to myself, I'd grit my teeth and live well.
Meanwhile, classes required attention I majored in philosophy, because it was the only subject in which I got A's, and my relationship with Christine required attention. We groped in darkness for an example of how to live and stay happy.
I took a trip alone to California to escape the pressure. When I came back, I tried to let myself make friends at school. On the surface this was easy. Many students believed the marijuana laws were brazenly political, and saw me as an ex-political prisoner. There was a special status attached to this, but it did not help me identify completely with anyone except those who'd been imprisoned and had experienced that horrific pain firsthand. I felt no one but a prisoner could know the agony, hate, rage or fear with which I had to deal everyday.
Cops arrested over 600,000 people a year for pot. I assumed many of them felt like I did, and I wanted to turn to them. But I met a few, and I suspected them. I knew some were forced to ‘recant’ or were turned into informants. I tended to avoid them all.
I saw a pathological symptom in myself when I noticed a recurring fantasy that cast me as the heroic seal in a Jack London story. In "The White Seal", Jack London tells a story about a seal that finds a hidden breeding ground where hunters couldn't go. The seal tries to get the colony to follow him there. But they won't. The seal has to fight an endless line of recalcitrant bulls. Finally, they do follow him and, presumably, they all live happily ever after.
I saw this as a Messiah complex. I was imagining that I could lead everyone to a better place. Perhaps I was getting to the bottom of things. I suspected my mind had created this messiah device in a desperate attempt to make sense from all my suffering and degradation. It might have been a guy in a similar state of mind that shot Kennedy. The difference between sanity and madness seemed to shrink. That frightened monkey in my brain raced from limb to limb. It stopped for a moment, looked around, jumped down to the ground, then a shadow shifted or a leaf rustled and he raced back up to the high branches.
I found relief watching movies, and in hard physical activity. I had a passing moment of exhilaration when the appellate court notified me that my conviction had been overturned. A week after that, I was relieved of parole obligations. I was not guilty, sort of. The inevitable sentence, whose agony my judge had not wanted to postpone, was gone away, sort of.
Grouchy old Dean Hoogesteger at Lake Forest College, gave the push Chris and I needed. He called me to his office one day to say that he wouldn't give me his approval to live off campus. He said I had to live in the dorm. Eventually, he agreed that I didn't have to use the dorm room, but I'd have to pay for it. It was expensive, and I wasn't feeling like taking it in the shorts from old Hoogesteger, so I deftly cut off my nose to spite my face and withdrew from the college.
We bought a VW van and Jim, my sister's nearly ex-husband, built a bed in it for us. We drove to my mom's in Wisconsin, picked up my sister's kids, Jimmy, Kevin and Colleen, ages 7, 6 and 4, and took them with us to California. On route we stopped at Sandstone, but they wouldn't let me see any old friends. We reached California out of money. We sold blood to buy food. For Chris to sell blood, she had to drink a gallon of water so her weight was acceptable.
Chris had experience working with kids, and a gift for it. I got an education from those kids. Being with them was new for me, and they tried my patience. But I liked their genuineness. Our struggles were fun. I made a big Spanish omelet one day, but the kids wouldn't eat it, because it had tomatoes in it. Chris told them they didn't have to eat it, but that was all there was, and we refused to prepare anything else. When lunch time came they still didn't want an omelet with tomatoes in it. When dinner time came they decided to try it. They liked it a lot, and wanted more.
The next day Chris and I made tomato sandwiches in the kitchen. The kids came nosing around, and we pretended to hide the sandwiches so we wouldn't have to share them. The kids were begging for bites of tomato sandwich before we finally relented and gave them some.
There were nightly hassles, because the kids didn't go to sleep when I told them to. I got angry, threatened them, and sometimes spanked them. One night I came out of the bedroom they shared, and I was furious with them. I had just spanked them. I still clutched my strap tightly. My knuckles were white and my heart was pounding. I was stopped very still by the recognition that I had been taken over by a rage that belonged to my childhood. I had become my father. I was doing a monkeyshine imitation of his attempts to discipline my brothers and me. The rage he’d picked up from work, my mother, his drinking or whatever, seemed to come out when he tried to discipline us. My brothers and I would jump up and down on the beds instead of going to sleep, and my dad would come in, reluctant and furious at the same time, and spank us with his belt. We’d come to accept that as normal, I suppose.
In any case, I realized, as I stood in the hallway clutching my belt, that I did not really feel angry about the kids' behavior, and I felt no joy or saw any effectiveness in whipping them for it. I cooled off and never spanked them again. I took the experience as a warning that my instincts couldn't be trusted without careful review.
I loved these kids, and I had difficulty loving adults. I was always surprised by adult cruelty and their hidden cunning. Little kids seemed more genuinely responsive, and I became less crazy and more sane as I shifted my attention to the kids and away from my own pains. I could feel it. The fission material was still in me, but it cooled. A lot of self-serving, moralistic judgments stayed in me, and a lot of rage, but I found a place where I could work around them. Each kid was a unique world, a world parallel to mine, and in each of these new worlds, I could live without exchanging hate or condemnation. This idea was only beginning to grow in me. It was a germinated seed that needed nurturing, and it would be years before it blossomed.
When Barbara came to California, Chris and I said good-bye to Jimmy, Kevin and Colleen, and we drove up the coast to Vancouver, where Ken Wells lived with Dometria and their son, Cymbol. Ken had lived in India and become a sarod player. Dometria was a half breed, like me. Her halves were Indian and Black. After a brief visit, we drove down to Southern California, visiting friends along the way.
Our destination was the Indian Reservation on the Colorado River at Parker, Arizona. Christine had been hired to teach at their school. The children were mostly Navajo, Papago, Mojave or Apache. There were also a few children of the Chicano and White migrant workers. The school buildings had been built for Japanese-American civilians interned during WWII. The drab apartment reserved for Christine had been an officer's billet.
Over the next few months, while Chris taught school in Arizona, I cris-crossed the country. I visited my brother, Peter, in Bloomington, Illinois. I helped Susy and Bachir open a store in Evanston, Illinois. I got pneumonia at Noreen's in Chicago. I drove to Arizona to visit Chris, then visited my old teacher Jack Vickers in L.A. I saw Franco and Carol in Berkeley, then drove back to Bloomington, Ken and Betts and I drove out to visit Chris, then back to Bloomington, I went to Chicago, drove Bachir to Hollywood, drove back to Chicago, saw my dad off to New York, drove back to California again, and went to see Chris in Arizona. A dizzy time.
I brought Chris back with me to Bloomington after her teaching job went sour. Chris noticed that, when the kids played Cowboys and Indians, they all wanted to be Cowboys. An insignificant matter, perhaps, but Chris sensed it was a bad omen for the Indian kids. She looked for ways to encourage them to feel good about themselves. The principal seemed to look for ways to obstruct her, and make her feel bad about herself. She decided the principal's philosophy was, "If the Lord thought the Indians had such a wonderful culture, He would have given them the bomb."
The principal of this school was really a basketball coach, and had no classroom experience at all. He handed out ping-pong paddles to the teachers, telling them to use the paddles whenever the kids got out of line. By Christmas, Chris felt her frustrated efforts were a waste, and she decided to go back to Bloomington with me.
We moved in with Peter and Maggie, Ken and Betts, and a palamino horse named Clyde. Maggie worked for a lawyer, Peter and Ken went to school, and Betts was a nurse. Clyde grazed. Chris and I moved into the basement, into a primitive but charming room with field stone walls, a beamed ceiling, real barn wood paneling, and a brass bed.
We decided to get officially married in order to appease Chris's parents, and to get some wedding presents. Duke and Marie seemed in pain, because Chris and I ‘just’ lived together. After the ceremony, Duke and Marie continued to agonize, and the value of the gifts was as fleeting as their relief. The toasters and coffee pots quickly merged with the other household gadgets.
Chris and I promised we'd never let ourselves turn mean toward each other, and on January 31st, 1971, we were married at St. Giles Church in Chicago. Father Bill Barry officiated and Marvin was the best man. We spent our wedding night at Marvin's house in Glenview.
The next month my father died. He had three sisters in New York, and he was divorced from my mother, so he was buried in New York near his parents. My mom, sister and brothers all went there together for the funeral. We lined up one sunny morning in a traffic jam in a treeless cemetery, and waited for some other burials to take place ahead of us. It felt like a supermarket check-out line. Between that ambience and my own reluctant spirit, I wouldn't allow myself to grieve his loss for years.
The Italian side of my family, including my aunts Minnie, Nell and Lena, all gathered with us at a restaurant for the ritual feast that followed a funeral. It wasn't as raucous as the old-fashioned Irish wakes where the stiff was stood up in a corner with a drink in his hand while friends told jokes and slapped him on the back, but it wasn't all crying either. There were some memories of happy times with Dad. I got the impression that people who've lived through really tough times felt more joy at wakes and more sorrow at baptisms. They knew the pain left by the dead awaited the infant.
The month after the funeral, Chris and I traveled to Europe. It was a belated honeymoon. We stayed first with my Aunt Julia in Carisolo. I'd go out drinking with my cousin, Mino, while Chris was forced by local custom to stay home darning socks and learning Italian phrases. We hiked to the year-round glacier where my father had long ago been rescued by his father. Chris took pictures of the knife grinder statue that graced the town square, and I took pictures of clouds. Chris was most impressed by the 14th century frescoes on the church wall. I was impressed by the food. After ten days, Mino dropped us in Munich, and we hitch-hiked from there to England.
Ken, Dometria and Cymbol had left Canada and now lived in a communal house in Camberley, Surrey. Chris and I stayed there in a room called Purgatory, just because it was the least desirable room in the house and was reserved for newcomers or visitors.
We wanted to tour England, but couldn't afford a van, so we followed the suggestion of Paul Harvey, a resident in the house, and bought an old double deck bus. It was cheaper than a VW and equally cost effective in fuel use, and it had plenty of room. We needed the room, as Christine turned out to be an avid speculator in collectibles. We hired an insured driver from the local garage (it was cheaper than insuring ourselves), and he drove our group from second hand store to antique shop to rummage sale.
Our honeymoon turned into a commercial adventure. Ken was a professional painter, and he agreed to paint the bus. Chris filled it with collectibles, and I arranged to ship it to New York. It was lucrative and fun. On the way, we got our pictures on the front page of the Camberley newspaper, watched the tower bell ringers play their unique music in a church in Stratford-upon-Avon, ate fish and chips with peas at Victoria station in London, where the Irish waitress, when asked if she had fresh, cold milk, replied, "Sure, now don't you go thinking our milk isn't fresh and cold. Why it's as fresh and pure as any milk that ever was. We have it delivered every single morning, and we keep it in a beautiful refrigerator that was bought brand new just last year, and we serve it as cold as anyone in their right mind would ever want to drink it, and, sure, now, I'll be gettin' you a glass, and I'll be back before you know it.", and we rode back and forth from Camberley to London on a train with private compartments with velvet seats, hinged doors with brass handles, curtains on the windows, and a Van Gogh copy hanging on the wall above the seat. We expected Basil Rathbone might be a passenger on this train.
In the communal house we shared, I was struck by the fact that everyone kept separate sections in the refrigerator and in the kitchen cabinets for their personal food. This was unlike our experience in communal houses in America. It required the most precise calculations of square inches per shelf per person, and some ingenious techniques for getting stuff to balance and fit together. Besides Ken, Dometria, Cymbol, Paul Harvey and his girlfirend, Linda, Chris and me, the household included Paddy, an Irish-Protestant construction worker from Belfast in Northern Ireland, and Molly, a fiery, red-haired, Irish-Catholic woman from Dublin. I thought it was a good idea that everyone was careful about limiting their invasive behavior. In the three weeks we stayed there, I never heard a harsh word or felt serious tension.
It was a Victorian style house with a big, rumpled yard. Chris supported Dometria's claim that the place was haunted. They both said they occasionally felt something brush against them when there was nothing to be seen. A couple huge dogs lived with us. And a crazy Irish poet named Dan almost lived there. At least, he was around every morning. He was screwing the wife of the fellow next door. I thought Dan used our house as a perch to better his position for swooping on the neighbor's wife when the neighbor left for work each morning.
The neighbor discovered the tryst one morning when Dan swooped next door too early. We all sipped our breakfast tea together, watching from the dining room window as Dan and the neighbor lingered in awkwardness by the neighbor's back door. They looked at each other's feet, then, as one tried to find words, they looked into each other's eyes. That triggered a burst of psychic energy, and they looked quickly back at the ground, locating each other's feet again, and start the process over. After 15 minutes, exhausted and confused, they parted.
Chris and I returned to Bloomington in May. Peter and I went to New York the following week to pick up the double deck bus and its cargo. As we were about to drive the bus from the pier into New York traffic, we realized it was too high for American roads. I had assumed that any vehicle in the world could be driven in America, but the legal limit in America was 13' 6", and the height of the bus was 14' 8". We rented a saber saw and cut off the upper deck. Also, the crew that lifted the bus off the deck of the ship set it down hard, opening a crack in the bell housing. A welder fashioned a cradle mount under the transmission, and away we drove toward Bloomington.
The trip was most memorable from the smiles the bus elicited from everyone who saw it, except in Ohio, where people didn't smile as much as other places. And the mountains in Pennsylvania were hard to forget. The top speed of the bus was 39 miles per hour. Going up a mountain reduced that to 15 miles per hour. Time we lost going up a mountain, we tried to make up going down - by putting the transmission in neutral and coasting. We should have put in the clutch and left it in gear. We buried the indicator on speedometer at 55mph and were probably going 75, as the bus bucked and jumped and made shrill creaking and groaning sounds. But there was no getting it back in gear by that point. And steering it was like wrestling a giant anaconda.
While I wrestled with the steering wheel, Peter pulled as hard as he could on the emergency brake. We slowed a little, but it was the next upgrade that we needed to reach to regain control. It felt like the bus might come apart into its elemental components and fly in every direction, but it didn't. We got control back going up the next mountain and, as I put it back in gear, Peter and I said sweet things to her, deciding then and there that we were in the double deck bus business. The old girl was built like a steel hauler. English public safety regulations had kept builders from skimping on construction standards, and we knew there wasn't a vehicle anywhere that could match a double deckers' maneuverability and load carrying capacity. We got 10 mpg from its horsey diesel, and Peter eventually increased its top speed to 52mpg by installing a three speed power divider forward of the differential. I'd reach 39 mph, put in the clutch and shout, and Peter would shift us into the added gear by pulling a lever at the back of the bus.
It was essential to use the buses as containers for antiques in order to realize the profit available through the elimination of breakage, which was a big piece of the overhead in the antique business. The bus springs and cushioned seats made an ideal box in which to ship antiques. The business would die suddenly within a year, because the shippers and unions refused to ship loaded double deck buses.
Over the next months we gardened, sold antiques, were featured in a story in the Bloomington paper, drove the bus in a parade in a nearby town, joined a crowd in front of the jail protesting raids against pot smokers, got a new roof riveted onto the bus, did publicity work with the bus for a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa, sold the bus to a record store chain, and received an order for another bus from Steak 'N Shake, a chain of drive-in restaurants.
My nephew, Jimmy lived with us at this time, and I took him with me to England when I went to get another bus. Susy's sister, Laddie, attended school there and we stayed with her. Jimmy was going through a little fart phase, and got us kicked out of Laddie's, because of his vacillations in behavior. She'd tell him to leave a light on and he'd turn it off. She'd turn it back on and he'd turn it off again, and on, and off, and on this went for two days until Laddie was pulling out her hair. Jimmy and I rented a small motorhome after Laddie ejected us, and planned to live in that. Unused to driving on the wrong side of the road, I quickly cracked up the motorhome, and had to get a friend of Ken's to repair it. Despite all the distractions, I found and purchased another bus and arranged for it to be shipped home.