Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 15          New Jersey/ creased pants and the locker-room failure
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New Jersey was more like contemporary life is today. Everything is so far apart that it makes car-world omnipresent. I only rode a bike a dozen times that year, but walked many miles across the Great Swamp near where we lived.

We visited a doctor that year who looked at my painful knees and he told Mom that I’d be in a wheelchair by age 40. I laughed, but she was a nurse and took it seriously. It’s amazing the doctor could see so far into my future.

The summer before my senior year started, a little bell went off in my head and told me to save money to buy shoes the following year. It was an odd intuition because my father had a good job and paid for everything.

I didn’t know it then but my family was going to change.

The year in New Jersey was hard on everybody. My father’s former traveling-sales job kept him away all days except weekends, but now he had a second big promotion and a bigger paycheck, and he was home almost every night. We embarrassed him.

He was a shiney-shoe bastard ... always buying me shoe polish and showing me how to buff it out just right. Hell I was street. I bought my first power saw when I was 14. I built treehouses, collected salamanders, climbed around abandoned quarries, crawled through drainage tunnels and caves. I was never going to polish the apple and make good, and he reinforced that real well, telling me repeatedly I would ‘always be a day late and a dime short.’ He probably heard that insult somewhere, and was proud he found someone to use it on.

That summer I got a warehouse job at Two-Guys and worked ‘carpet’ for a while, getting a taste of warehouse lifers who barely made it from paycheck to beer. The radio was constantly playing the number one hit, ‘whose doing your old lady while you’re out making time,’ and my mind has forever burned that slogan together with those people. The air, the streets, everything … everything was dirty … even the trees looked absolutely ‘lived-out’ in that land.
 
I buddied up with another guy from ‘tile’ and we took alternating days sleeping 2 hours in the morning behind the carpet rolls. My mind went dead, until inventory came up. Wow I loved that. I got the department half counted in a one day, but the shop steward and some other guys rushed me in the parking lot. They wised me up, saying the job had to be slowed down or the company would fire one slaggard who drove in from East Orange. Hell, it was his job, I didn’t want it, so I went back to sleeping.

That year the country had military plans outlining how they would cut off rioters from leaving Newark and East Orange, and I guess I felt good about that. It also helped me understand why corporations mechanize everything because you can’t trust the people.

My senior year started and I liked the new school. These people were rougher somehow, and enjoyed a good rowdy in the lunch room. I never heard stories like these guys. They were open about the hardships in their lives, and I listened at the ‘trouble’ table during lunch. I was relegated lowest on the peck list, but it didn’t matter, I had a spot.

I ‘tried out’ for the basketball team because I was tall and strong, but I didn’t have any talent and couldn’t jump. The final cut came down to Barry or me. The coach decided we could both stay, even so, I was a better player, but everybody liked Barry, so a day or two after that I quit the team … but that wasn’t the reason.

Hell what was the use, I couldn’t even take a locker in the same room as the other guys. They gave me an ‘athletic’ locker, but I used my regular gym locker instead. It wasn’t a shower thing, I took a shower with everyone. No. It was a sharing thing. I didn’t want to share time with people or something.

I don’t know what it is, I’ve had it my whole life, the loner syndrome; always wanting to be with people but locked away and unable to bridge the gap.

Afterwards I joined a church intramural basketball team, and played out the rest of the season. I don’t remember how I met those guys, but we traveled around playing other church teams and I played every game. It was fun and we had one guy who could shoot all-night-long and he led us to a winning record. 

These were real people. They weren’t mechanized by coaches or school colors or familial hoo-ha-ing from the stands, and nobody ever mentioned the church. It was goog because there was no role within the school paradigm and I could remain anonymous.

The last game of the season was against a Black team in west or east Orange. We were winning in the last seconds until the lights went off, and when everything came back on, another minute was mysteriously put on the clock. Yes these were real people, down and dirty and gritty and wanting to win. Their whole school was there, with cheerleaders and everything. The guys were probably 3rd stringers who couldn't make the regular team. They had everything on the line, but we came in an old van and it was just the 7 of us white people in a sea of Black faces.
Some of our guys were nervous. The coach was scared. I wasn't. We lost the game ... probably lucky for us.

I found a friend at school, Trevor, and he was positively into Ginger Baker. He introduced me to music and stereo equipment, and that year I bought records and became a groove-dog. He was just an ordinary ‘I’m going to Georgetown and major in History’ kind of guy.

Late one night Trevor and I were coming home from an ice cream store, he caught a sheet of ice that put his father's car sideways around a telephone pole. I wore a seatbelt so I didn’t have a scratch but he bashed his leg pretty good when the pole smashed in the driver’s door. It wasn’t too bad; Trevor could still use his leg after we got out through the passenger window.

Our parents came to the hospital to get us and I got into trouble with my father over that wreck, but don’t remember why … but I do. He told me not to go out that night because it was icy, but I went anyway. What I really remember is Trevor’s parents were pissed off about the car but glad that he was ok. They talked to him like a person and I felt so left out. My father was just pissed off. The accident was more proof that I was a nothing person.

I had a girlfriend of sorts that year, Kim S. We were introduced by Paul's sister. He was another friend, except tight and straight-laced. He was the school's running back, and saying that everybody was calling him a humm. Gay I guess. I never treated him or others like that.

I was a senior and Kim was a junior. We were probably same age except I started school a year early. Mom said I refused to stay home when I was young. So they sent me to school.

We only had 1 date. Don't remember where we went, but neither of us liked the roles we had to play in front of our parents. We never saw each other or spoke in school, but we talked on the phone 1-2 hours every night about nothing in particular. She lived for the beach life when her parents stayed at the shore every summer.

My father smashed that because he would try to call home from his business trips, and the line would be busy. What the hell was so important that he needed to call us?

Anyway my phone calls were throttled, and the girl wasn't interested in me otherwise. She showed me a picture of her in a bikini. She looked good. Maybe she was mad I didn't make a move. Maybe I was waiting for her, or maybe I should have ripped off my shirt and rippled for her then jumped on top. I don't know.

Shortly before we moved away, I stopped by her house and were visiting in the basement family room. She said, what do you do when somebody very important is leaving and you won't see them again?

Surprised, I didn't know what to say. We were friends of sort but not magnets for each other.
 
She let that settle in my mind a few moments, then pulled out a picture of some guy down at the shore who was leaving and she’d never see again. I don't know what I said after that, but I remember acting like, yeah I figured that's what you meant.

Why the insult? In retrospect, who the hell was she anyway? Some quiet hate-filled mouse who went through school and nobody noticed.
But who was I? Maybe I was nobody because that's what I believed, and maybe she told me that.
I never pushed her, or demanded her, or took her somewhere she hadn't been. But neither did anyone else. It was a nothing but a 1 wheel cart.

My father and I boiled over that year. He got shiney-shoed with me and said I was going to start wearing ‘creased pants with a cuff.’ Blue jeans were out. No backtalk, the edict had been passed.

Everybody at school wore blue jeans except my religious friend Paul who was pressed and starched-tight by his Radio-Preacher father.

Paul’s family took me to church with them a few times until my father bashed me saying I was only going with them because I liked Paul’s sister. What difference did that make? So what if I liked her, was I vomiting goo-goo on his dress code or something?

He was right I guess, so I stopped going.

I was interested in what Paul’s family was saying and doing. I liked his sister and we had one date and spoke often in school. I bought her a ‘Turtles’ album that she hated, but so what … it was a tiny romance that went nowhere. And I went to their church in part because I wanted to learn what these people were saying … it was new and interesting. But my father denigrated it and I thought I was supposed to do what he wanted.

Paul’s father sat me down in their living room one night and asked why I stopped going to church. He talked to me like an adult, but a seventeen year old boy who had never seen anything but personal-bashing couldn’t possibly explain why. How could I tell him about my father? I didn’t even know myself.

Even though I didn’t understand my feelings, I resented my father’s intrusion over every microscopic piece of my life … especially since I always came up short in his eyes.

And then there were the fucking pants. My father was given to simple logic: ‘creased pants make the man.’ Our family never openly resisted him since there was a level of respectability about the man except he never became a part of anyone’s life. He just stood afar and criticized every nuance and affect of your cough and table manners.

He and I trudged out in the snow over to the men’s store in Morristown where he bought me 3 pair of slacks. Slacks. The word sounds illegal coming off your tongue doesn’t it? Slacks. I told him I wasn’t going to wear slacks. He battled back with squawking and other threats of home-detention and he got so mad that he came to hit me.

My father hit his children. He threw me down a flight of steps and ran after me and threw me half way back up. Mom was screaming for him to stop, but I was unhurt physically … and he had a pretty good throw … he was invited to try out for the minors as a pitcher when he was young.
It was true, I was screaming and out of control, and that’s why he threw me down. He didn’t know what to do with me. I probably needed hyperactive drugs or a drink of water. I was a case without reason.
 
I was kid… how could I see that? We came up in an abusive home where you were expected to get it right … and I mean buddy, you better get it right the first time or you were beat down verbally … and occasionally physically. The great weapon of choice was withholding love; I-can’t-love-you-if-you-don’t-do-what-I-say bullshit.

My sister is still sorely afflicted with the ‘gotta obey – or I won’t love you’ disease, which comes from hell-burnt Christian theology, and may explain my earlier hostility toward religion and their houses of worship.

The final ‘creased-pants’ battle was quick and decisive. My father came to hit me, but I was standing on the first step leading upstairs, and doubled my fist and let him know I would pound him hard. I was bigger than him and would’ve marked that SOB.

My father immediately backed away. He never attacked me again and never mentioned slacks again.
I didn't want it to go that way, but my only regret is not being able to fit into that size trouser.

Chapter 16-17) My family disintegrates
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