Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 16-17)    Last year of high school: divorce / my family disintegrates
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The greatest insult to my mother came that year in New Jersey when my father started an office romance. I guess his new-found job came with a need to trade up from the ole family. He never liked us anyway.

My father was born in a small dirt-road community in Kansas and his mother wanted him to become the local barber. They had no indoor plumbing and still used hand-pumps to bring water from the well when we visited in the 60s.  My father walked five miles to school every day, and that was the truth because I saw the building. As kids they went swimming in the creek and played baseball and learned the pool-hall games from checkers and dominos to the fine points of nine-ball. But my father rarely spoke about his upbringing. He was offered a chance to try out for the minor leagues as a pitcher, but he never spoke of that either, except to say, he needed to support a family.

My mother was from a college town in Kansas. The two of them met after World War II when my father went to the teacher’s college on the GI bill. She was a gal about town and said the boys were lined up to take her out, but when she met my hick father she knew he was going to be successful and that’s why she married him. Later she told us they were mismatched from the beginning and had a hard time getting their family started because money was tight.

Our family moved all around Kansas; one year here and the next year there as my father moved up the ladder from teacher to principal and then superintendent. I liked the constant change but felt uncertain that we would find ourselves abandoned and relegated to the suffering stench of living in my mom's parent’s basement listening to the warring alcoholics upstairs.

By third grade, my father gave up his career in education and took a job selling school textbooks and we moved to Indiana. After the move, we used to drive back to Kansas to visit the grandparents every other summer but I could feel we left those people behind just like we left the family cat we put out of the car in Scott City. There was never a connection. Our family didn’t make friends or buddy up with relatives; we just tumbled through one town and drifted to the next.

Textbooks were good to my father. He was on the road 5 days a week and the reprieve from his constant correction was the only thing that preserved our family. Despite everything, we finally struck down a shallow root in Indiana and my mother flourished with her collection of antiques and glass collectables. For years she drove the same old 1951 grey Ford everywhere she went.

The one thing most absent in our family, and I know this only by comparison to things I’ve seen since, was the lack of contact with other people. We never had friends over to the house individually or as a family. In fact I can’t really remember my mom having any friends. Nor my father except a weekend golfing buddy.

He was busy with his job and building the stair-steps with people required to move up in the company. And he succeeded. One promotion followed the next until finally they created a position for him at the home office in New Jersey. But the whole time he was doing all that clever work, he never spoke about his life or the strategies he used to become successful. We were just wild savages that embarrassed him with our lack of manners, and for that, he blamed my mom.

He had affairs on the road and I knew it but never said a word. I learned this because he let me travel with him once when I was twelve. Late that day he dropped me off by a bridge in Indianapolis saying he would be back shortly. I watched him drive toward a large apartment building and about an hour later he came back. When I got in the car he was distraught. I could read it across his face and wanted to tell him that not all women are nice. But, I didn’t.

New Jersey was a chore. My father and mother went out for dinner a few times and that seemed odd. Something was different but despite all the troubles, it came as a shock when my mother quietly disclosed they had visited a lawyer and my father was in Mexico that day to finalize some type of divorce. I walked into my room and threw something against the wall and yelled in a typical teenage response.

When my father got back, the eye-of-the-storm was cast over our house. Everything was quiet and I don’t know if it was relief or anticipation, but a settlement was reached. My father was leaving that night to assume an even greater job in Chicago, and the rest of us were returning to Indiana where Mom had already paid cash for a new home. She would have that house plus a yearly alimony from my father, and it seemed okay to me; everybody would land on their feet somewhere. It was a clean corporate buy-out.

I went in while my father was packing and said goodbye; no accusations, no questions, just a handshake. A handshake always met his sense of propriety. He said we’d be apart but not that far away, but nobody saw him drive away.

Mom got the better car and we drove to Indiana. It was simple. Along the way she told my younger brother the whole story about Dad not coming along, and my brother, in his patently indiscreet manner, said, ‘oh good.’ Nobody laughed, but Mom repeated that story for years.

My younger brother was born brain damaged and had difficulties accomplishing things, but he always called it like it was. He was the great disappointment in my father’s life, and got the worst of the abuse from my father, and regrettably from the rest of us too (except Mom) as we pecked on him to save ourselves. It was a horrific family scene but far from the worst. We just never felt anything.

Yet to this day I feel terrible about something I did to my brother when he was eleven. He made a small pillow filled with leaves, and I don’t remember him ever making anything. But it smelled and so I stole it out of the house and threw it down a drain culvert across the street. I wish our family had been different and I wish I had been braver, but maybe nothing could have changed what we were.

My father took the older car and a set of encyclopedias, and that was all he got. He and his new wife bought everything new, but along the route to Chicago, that big 400 cubic-inch engine in the Oldsmobile burned up. I guess my tearing around the country roads in New Jersey took their toll, as least that was my father’s assessment. He had a couple days to figure it out waiting for repairs in Ohio. You really couldn’t get one past him. He read you before you saw it yourself sometimes, and I guess that was his formula for success.

I didn’t overtly miss my father’s company. He was an abuser and I became one likewise after him, perhaps it’s a learned behavior or maybe it’s genetic but I didn’t live for my father or because of him ...

The longer I was apart from him, the more I became aware that he cemented over me, and had taken the gentleness and love of nature and made me think I could only be a pragmatist. But now I didn’t feel pragmatic or any other thing, I was devastated by my parents divorce.
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Chapter 17     my parents relationship created the boundaries by which I lived, and now that was gone.

It was maybe two months after we moved back to Indiana that Mom got a letter from my father saying he was getting re-married. It was a stunning shock to her. She didn’t tell me outright. She just handed the letter and I read the ‘remarry’ part and she was about to cry, and we hugged.

The way it happened was my friend Ray and I went to mom's house to visit. As we were leaving, she handed me the letter to read. I said, oh, okay, and then Ray and I walked out to his car, and I said I'll be right back and rushed inside and hugged her. It was all I could do.

We never hugged or touched or said ‘I love you’ in our family, and maybe we never did because right then I could feel the pain inside her. And maybe that hurt was always there because her parents were alcoholics. Alcoholics are self-absorbed and abandon their children, and she had been thrown out of so many lives that she stopped trying.

I think Mom waited several years for her husband to return, but of course he never did. She never remarried or made a relationship afterwards and I can’t understand it now but it seemed normal at the time. And when she died it was almost like a relief that her suffering was over … I can’t explain the guilt.

My father maintains to this day that he didn’t meet his new wife until after the divorce. I hardly have a word that weighs against this dead-anchor since they both worked in the same New Jersey office. It’s not important more than it is symptomatic of his pathology that he would lie to make his station more acceptable … it was all about indifference and who cared anyway.

For years the question was a constant companion: how my parent’s relationship created the boundaries by which I lived, and now that boundary was gone. I was searching for answers and I was troubled, but perhaps long before then as evidenced by my delinquency. Still, I had to re-think everything now.

Despite the dread from my youth, art became a way to tell my story. My parents looked at my childhood drawings and said they were no good, but today I wish I’d saved that chronicle from my life. I remember drawing frogmen and castles and tanks and army stuff, and making colored collages. I learned history by drawing the things I read.

My parents were consumed in their battle over ‘what was right,’ and they weren’t concerned with what was needed. Everything had to be straight and rigid; the proper platform from which all good things are built, and there was no abstract variation; a man must draw realistically, and since I couldn’t be encouraged for what I could do, then I must be forced into art classes where somebody would teach me what is right and proper. The socializers were bending me to conform, and like a cow I walked up the field and pretended it was okay.

Oh god, the art class. Of course I didn’t last. My parents enrolled me in a summer art class when I was fourteen. I liked the girls. Cindy and Allison from my neighborhood were in the class. But I became disruptive and didn’t care about texture; it was tedious sissy-work cutting up fabric to learn texture. Maybe if the teacher forced me outside and told me that texture can be anything from gravel to shoestrings, it would've lit me up like fire. Instead, I couldn't intepret the human relationships, and fell apart.

Damn, even from youth I was wondering where the real people were … why hadn't my parents introduced me to Rauschenberg or Pollack? The real artists were using physical energy and pure imagination to create art and that was me, except I never knew it existed.
 
Did my family rob me the opportunity to learn art? Well hell, maybe.

If I had a boy. Yes if I had a boy interested in art I would open that world to him. And I would learn from him about his snake or salamander or whatever. Yes. If my child had an interest in stars I would buy him a telescope and make a vacation especially so he could visit a famous observatory. I would do for him. I would spend time nurturing him. I would not think myself adequate for discounting his papers from school or ridiculing his drawings and telling him he was no good in so many new ways every day. I would not beat up his brothers and sisters and mother in front of him.

I was never going to be my father … so I never had a boy, and decided not to have children.

There was a profound sadness following my life, punctuated by violet outburst, but I only know this from the perspective of today. I couldn’t see myself then. I was just living. I wasn’t sharing. I was unable to share, and my best feelings came from long walks and bike rides and crudely made drawings of what I felt.

The lowly #2 pencil blossomed and became drawing pencils, in all colors, that led me by their volition; it was never me working the pencil, it was the pencil alone that purged my stories on paper.
I was influenced by the surrealists. I was a surrealist, an anarchist, a person untethered by my society. I was not a cow when I drew a picture and not a cow when I rode a bike. I was a free man of the world, and my life became borderless with open reign to express any rage or calm, and both at once if I chose.

Chapter 18-19) The police again
Chapter 20) Bones and Dan the informer
Index of chapters