Cleveland-The railed window well

Richard had gotten used to entertaining himself and one cold, blustery Saturday he took his basketball and climbed the fence to the Charles Dickens playground where he saw some other kids. After whiling the time away playing ball, it began to get colder and sky was darkening behind its usual winter white. Richard started for home. Along the way though, his ball took a wild jump and bounced down into a window well guarded by a double railing. Richard immediately jumped down into this cage after the ball. The well was about five feet deep and was built to give some light to a basement room. It was railed off so that no one would fall into it. Once he was down there, Richard began to see the problems. It was cold, it was dark, it was a weekend, nobody knew where he was, and he couldn't reach the railing to pull himself back up. He was struck with a moment of panic that overtook him until he stopped to think about the problem. First he threw the ball over the rails. Then he maneuvered several different ways until he found he could angle himself in one corner and with a hand and foot on each wall use pressure to shimmy out of the well, grab the lower rail and climb over it. This was important because it was that process, the panic followed by an intellectual grasp of the problem followed by figuring out a solution was to grace him for the rest of his life. It got so that he could depend on it like a friend. He began to believe in solutions.

Cleveland part 1

Within four months of returning to Al and Lillian in Tampa, the family was on the move again. This time the destination was Cleveland, Ohio where Al had bought an Orange Juice franchise by the name of Health Flow. Here Al was a bit ahead of his time. As we know health drinks are big business and even in 1948 the Health Flow product sold pretty well. It was one of the deals where you buy a drink of orange juice while in line at the market or dime store from one of the constantly gurgling plastic dome tanks of juice that sat by tempting you as you checked out. Many were located at dime store lunch counters.

Health Flow's booth at the Restaurant Convention in Cleveland, Oct. 1949
Al and Lillian at right, Mechanic left, hand out free drinks.

The problem was, and there was always a problem with one of Al's get rich quick schemes, the Health Flow machines were always breaking down. Because he wasn't very mechanical, Al spent all his profits driving around picking up machines and taking them in to be fixed. Finally he had to hire a guy to be his full time mechanic. The mechanic made more than Al did. Luckily Lillian had a job.

Richard started school immediately at the rather aptly named Charles Dickens Elementary School.

Tampa part 2

Richard returned to Tampa in May of 1948. There is a telling photo of Nene, Grace Prettyman, and Richard standing somewhere between Moran and the airport in Kansas City. All of them looking stoical while Richard wonders whether or not Lillian and Al really want him back. The flight back was delayed in St. Louis where Richard was placed in the hands of two Stewardesses who took him back with them to their quarters. They made him dinner and then all went to bed. In the morning, thinking him cute they merrily redressed  into their flying outfits and took him back to his seat on the plane. Being with the Stewardesses reminded him of when he would sit in the bathroom with Lillian while she was preparing for a date, back in LA, She'd be dressed in her bra, stockings and slip, applying lipstick and perfume and curling her hair, all the while smoking cigarettes and flicking their butts  into the bowl. After she left the room, Richard would aim his piss at the filterless butts and blow them into smithereens like a gunner attacking a zero. He felt he could almost cry for his mother.

Lillian was so glad to see him but a little worried too.  He thought she thought he might be mad at her for sending him away, but maybe it was something else. Before leaving Tamps for Moran, the family had moved so many times that Richard had gone to three different schools. Home was now a store front next door to a Cuban Grocery. Richard went back to Robert E. Lee School, a racially segregated elementary school. The Cubans next door were not recent immigrants and the two families got along well. They had a few children for Richard to play with when they weren't working at the store. But the grocery brought rats to their side of the building and one night Al killed one and marveled almost gleefully at the size of it while Lillian shuddered. There were a couple of floors of apartments above the store fronts and a WWII one armed veteran lived in one of them. He used to come home from his job at the local newspaper and toss around 20 cents of change on the ground and watch all the kids scramble for it. Maybe it reminded him of tossing coins to natives out in the water off a ship in the Pacific during the war. At any rate he was a fixture until one afternoon when Richard came home from school and found the building surrounded with cops, keeping everyone at least 40 ft. away. The scene reeked of natural gas. Richard found out that evening that the vet had gassed himself to death.

These memories, of rats and suicides, reflected Richard's melancholy at the time. He really felt an outcast around Al. And his mother's depression also affected him badly. To Al's dubious credit, he really thought only of his own concerns and probably saw Richard as just some gloomy kid. He probably never actively wanted Richard out of the way. But Richard was a pleaser, and he could never please Al which made him feel that Al disliked him.

Moran Cont'd

As Spring rolled around, Richard started having more fun. He found a stick that looked like a flintlock and designed a whole play about pioneers around it. Jacky Harris got some of the lesser rolls. They even brought chairs for the audience down to the edge of the ditch where the play's action was to take place. "Ah nobody's going to come see a play down at that old sewer ditch," Nene said. Grace Prettyman was a sourpuss and thought the whole thing was silly.

One day Richard found some red rocks marbled with white quartz that reminded him of  pieces of uncooked roast. He put one in his grandmother's refrigerator only to have her give him a look that said, "Have you plumb taken leave of your senses?" She had NO imagination.

For special occasions, and Nene always contended that he was born on leap day and Grace Prettyman on Valentines, his grandmother would bake triple layer cakes with buttery yellow frosting and jellybeans all over them. Richard could have passed on the jelly beans; he wanted to get straight to the frosting.

Sometimes they drove out north to Great Aunt Maude Prettyman's house for Sunday dinner. She was fun, not like her sister. But that made Richard think about the sad story of grandmother, how she lost her first son to some kind of illness when he was two. His name had been Scott. Two years later Carl had been born and even Richard knew he was a bad replacement.

Richard never ceased to miss his own mother. Here are some of his letters to her: (add letters)

Carl part 2

There was a weird night visit with Carl. It must have been along about February because it was already dark when Nene told Richard to put together some things to wear in the morning, that he was going to see his father. Carl couldn't be seen in Moran (that's all Richard ever knew about it).  So he was staying with his childhood buddy at the family's farm three miles north of town. Nene dropped him off but Carl wasn't there. Someone took Richard up into an attic bedroom
and told him to go to bed. Some time went by and Richard must have nodded off. Carl must have arrived earlier and been socializing with the family, everyone drinking, because it was very late when Carl finally arrived up stairs and shook Richard awake. Carl would have been about 33 then. "How are you doing in school?" he asked Richard. "Are you making good grades?" It went on like this for about five minutes. Then he told Richard to scoot over so he could go to bed too. "I'm tired," he told Richard.

The next morning Richard woke up alone. He got dressed and went down stairs where someone told him Carl had gone squirrel hunting. Richard waited in the house until Carl and his buddy got back. Then Nene drove up and took Richard back to Moran. Richard didn't see Carl for another 26 years.

Moran

It was put to him gently. His other grandparents wanted a chance to get to know him. Carl's parents in Kansas. So he was put on a plane and off he went. He never thought that maybe one colicky baby was all Lillian could handle or that she might have needed to get a job. No. It was all Al. Al didn't want him around. However, once they were grown, Richard and his brother Noel  agreed that the only thing they had in common was that Al had treated them both like stepchildren.

His grandfather was named Cornelius and was know as Nene. His grandmother was named Grace Prettyman, and she was known as Grace Prettyman. Richard called them grandpa and grandma but he thought of them by their "known as" names. Moran was a small town of 400 souls but served a much larger rural population. Nene was the town's boss. He was mayor and moneylender. Thus he was unpopular except among his cronies. He also owned the town's little store and a group of motor cabins known as "G.'s Cabins." He had a roll top desk by his front door and a rubber mat at the doorway where all the muddy farmers had to stand while he refinanced their notes sitting at his desk.

Richard was eight and started school immediately. He was happy to meet his old friend, Jacky Harris, whom he had known in LA. Even though they hardly remembered each other they were fast friends.

It was very cold in Kansas. All the other kids wore crotch length corduroy jackets with big buttons. But Nene gave Richard an old fashioned man's sort of tweed coat. It was long and exceptionally well made, but it was nothing but embarrassing to Richard. He'd wear it until he reached the block of the school then take it off and crumple it up under his arms and run to school in the bitter cold. He reversed this pattern when he went home for lunch and again back and forth for the afternoon.

Lunch was often a couple chunks of fatback, that was kept in a large barrel of briny water on the back porch where it was cold, along with canned hominy and green beans. There was not much conversation. But when he got home from school in the afternoon, he could lie on the floor in front of the furnace and read the funny papers, legs swinging in the air behind him.

Tampa

A couple of years after the war ended it became clear that things at the base were shutting down. Al and Lillian had to face facts and start looking for new jobs. The first place they turned was to Al's parents who were dislocated Yankees retired to Florida. Lillian and the two boys flew to Tampa in 1947 while Al finished up at the base and drove their car across country. He probably bothered to bring the car since cars were still hard to come by even that long after the war. Lillian was tense during every stage of the trip because she was afraid of flying but Richard remembers particularly flying over the gulf of Mexico and realizing how big the world was.

Richard was seven and Tampa was a shock to his desert-bred system. It was lush and humid and full of bugs. He thought even the soil was poisonous so often did he battle bouts of impetigo. Robert and Edith were Al's parents. They were starchy New Englanders from Lynn, Massachusetts. Robert had worked in the downtown financial district of Boston. It was hard for Lillian to meet Robert and Edith at the airport because she had never met them before. Lillian was a West Coast girl by now. She sewed beautiful, fashionable clothes for herself, wore lipstick, curled her hair, and smoked. And she was divorced. Edith wore sears sucker house dresses and made Robert go outside to smoke his evening cigar. They both spoke with such a strong Boston accent, Lillian had a hard time understanding them.

Edith and Al had always had a contentious relationship. There was a story about how Edith had shown up at Al's prep school, Moses Brown, and dragged him off the basketball court in order to go home and do his homework. All three of her other boys had good careers but all Al cared about was sports (he had been the high school's quarter back). And much to Lillian's growing dismay, betting on sports, particularly the horses. Tension was high in the house while Richard stayed with Al's parents. And soon Al and Lillian took the kids and moved into a single room closer to Tampa bay where Al got a job as a clerk at a hospital on Davis Island, a partially man made island in the bay.

Richard was almost eight and he quickly learned how to get around, exploring by walking or even riding the bus. He used to like to walk down Swan Avenue which circled the bay and lead down to a sea wall which he could walk through to get close to the water. Several times he watched the bay fill up with jelly fish as every wave rolled in with more of the viscous creatures than the one before. Sometimes the jelly fish would experience a massive die off creating a terrible stink along the shore.

He also discovered the mystical Silver Springs, an old style bathing facility where for a dime you could swim under trees hanging with Spanish moss in one of the rivers that ran into the bay. Down stream a bit there were old fashioned bleachers which seemed to indicate there had been a natatorium in use at one time.

He started school in Tampa. He knows that because he remembers one terrible teacher that tortured another student in the class by calling him nothing but "the little heathen." "Will the little heathen stand up; Will the little heathen read his lesson; will the little heathen move to the back of the room." Soon the little heathen was sitting at a desk isolated on all sides by several feet. One day he just broke down. He put his head down on the desk and started crying and wouldn't stop. The principal came and took him away and he was never seen again.

The little heathen had the last name of Cohen but it took Richard years to figure what that had been exactly about. But he was familiar with the meanness of it. It reminded him of the day one of the boys arrived in Herlong dressed by his parents in a dress for some kind of punishment. He remembered how the kid came reluctantly off the bus into a school yard of jeering savages. He remembered thinking how the bus driver should not have let him on the bus in a dress. How he should have made the kid go home and change. What would the parents have said to that: he can't come to school in a dress. Period.

Herlong part 3

Throughout the war Herlong had been home to a compound of Italian prisoners of war. Sometimes Richard would walk along the chain linked fencing to see them. After a while some of the men would push a paper cup through the fencing and ask Richard to walk along the road and collect cigarette butts for them. He collected cigarette butts a number of times for the men, some of whom knew a few English words or could make themselves understood. They were thin, shabbily dressed, stubble bearded young men whom Richard thought of as old at the time. But they seemed overall to be contented and Richard knew they had no idea they were in Herlong. He could tell they thought they might be in the middle of Mongolia, they were that lost.

An older kid started hanging around the gang of wild savages. One day he suggested they all create a buried treasure. So the gang brought their best toys, proceeded to dig a hole and then buried all their things. Not two hours later they went to check the treasure spot only to discover all the toys had been looted, every one. Later they spotted the same older kid out in the sage brush and went to confront him. That time he told the gang that if they's take turns sucking his dick, he'd get them into the cub scouts. The immediate reaction of each of the gang was eeewww. Not understanding what the whole thing was about they scattered in all directions only to meet back in town to tell the parents. The adults made a search of the area but were never able to identify the culprit.

All that year Richard tried to be a good older brother to little Noel. He remembers especially holding his arms out and Noel taking his first few steps into Richard's outstretched hands.

Then one day the prisoners of war were gone. The gates to their compound were left open and over 60 howling boys ran through the prisoners' former quarters looking for something, something interesting or precious to keep. Instead the floors were littered with cigarette butts, strange posters hung curled at the edges on the wall, and other unnamebable detritus lay on the old narrow cots. Richard particularly remembers a movie poster of Cornell Wilde. The whole thing reminded him of the day one of Lillian's admirers, before Al, took Richard and Lillian to "see a deer." The drove out to the Herlong dump and from a distance Richard saw the most beautiful deer poised at the peak of the rubbish. But as they drew closer the deer deteriorated into a torn and shot up taxidermied carcass of some long ago throphy that was now missing its eyes and was losing its stuffing.

Christmas

After the wild summer, time seemed to drag. One afternoon after school, Richard was outside playing with  his trucks, when he dug up an old dead turtle that said, "Visit Nevada" on its back.  He buried it again and never mentioned his discovery to Lillian. Time passed and then it was Christmas. Two things happened. First his mother had a new baby, Richard's half-brother Noel, and second, his grandmother, Mary Edna Walters, came to visit. She was a nice grandmother. She bunked with Richard while Al , Lillian and the baby shared the other bedroom. She had a few strange opinions like, "Catholics are Negros turned inside out." But Richard really didn't get that. That Christmas, even though the baby was colicky, they decorated a tree and on that sunny Christmas morning, the war over on both fronts, Richard got a two piece Coke-a-Cola wooden truck, a ring toss game and a new long sleeved brown yellow and green striped shirt. There is a photograph taken of the whole family that day, Lillian holding the baby, Mary Edna sitting in the only arm chair, Richard with his toys, and Al holding an apple. Richard is looking somewhat beatific kneeling on the floor in his corduroys and new shirt, his hands clasped together between his knees.

Wild savages

By the summer of '45 Richard had a gang, seven or eight other little boys from the base dressed mainly in bib overalls who left home early every morning to play in the sand and sage of the high desert surrounding Herlong. They scampered, like the jack rabbits they chased, through the brush on long quests for the ever illusive horn toads. It is almost impossible to see one of the cunning creatures, and being eight years old, not want to catch it. They are silver gray little toads with horns on their backs that give them the look of a miniature stegasuarus that are not much bigger than a quarter. On the rare occasion that one was captured, the gang marched into town in a victory parade, hopping up and down, the catcher of the prize leading the way, horn toad held high in his gritty little hand.

Then there was the grand march to Turtle Mountain. Turtle mountain was closest foot hill to Herlong of the grand range of the Virginia Mountains that formed the southern wall that had once held the ancient lake. On clear summer mornings it felt like you could reach out and touch it. To climb turtle mountain was an adventure not to be missed and one morning the wild gang of little savages decided it was time. They went home and packed lunches of bologna and cheese, or peanut butter and jelly all on white bread and reconvened to make the trek. The only problem was the closer you walked to Turtle Mountain the more it seemed to stay the same distance away. After a long time they sat down and ate their lunches and then turned around and dragged themselves back to town. But the desire to climb Turtle Mountain never quite left Richard. There remained a keen unarticulated desire to reach and explore that dreamland.

Finally there was the crescendo of wildness that Richard remembers from that summer of endless desert rat culture the gang had developed during that void of adult supervision. It was a dance that started with whoops and hollers in the sage outside of town and devolved into something mysterious, something only an anthropologist could explain. The boys continuing to dance and leap began, for some unknown or forgotten reason, who knew who started it or why, to stick stalks of grass as thin as thread down into the tips of their penises. This dance burned like a hot flame and then died out, leaving Richard worried that he had not pulled out as much grass from his penis as he had put in.

Owl

It wasn't long however before Lillian had an admirer. His name was Owl, and he was the manager of the bowling alley on the base. Richard remembers liking Owl. He remembers trying to impress him. This was around the time that Richard first started wearing big boy BVDs. He remembers trying to show Owl how they worked by flapping the panel in the front open and shut, thereby exposing his penis. He remembers Owl turning away in disgust and never really turning back toward him again. It turned out that Owl's name was Al and Al unrelentingly referred to Richard as "Lillian's boy."

Within five months Al and Lillian were married. On January 17 they went to the Carson City Court House and were duly united by a Justice of the Peace. They were gone for a couple of days and when they returned they brought Richard a live turtle with a stamp on its back that said, "Visit Nevada!" on it. Richard played with the turtle a lot until one day when he came home from school only to learn from Lillian that the turtle had escaped and run away. Richard felt bad. He missed the turtle which had come from the trip Lillian had gone on to get married.