The World Turned Upside-Down

When we got back from summer camp in ‘69, August was family time. There were two times in the year when we had family time, in August and at Christmas Holidays. That year our Dad had sold his Chevy 2 and so we took the train to Texas and back. Texas was always the same; sleeping under the stars, catching horny toads (horned lizards), eating a lot, playing with cousins. I still hadn’t realized what the move from Montana had meant.

As soon as we got back to Chicago things started changing dramatically. There were little communes in many of the major cities in the USA and Canada, and they were starting to expand worldwide also, so all of the people in the “Order” were moved around all of the time and stationed in different places. There was a small group who was responsible for making the assignments just before the start of the new school years. They called it being “deployed” and everyone 12 years or older was concerned.

For this year, as it was our first year in the “Order”, we were stationed at the main headquarters in the 5^th City, the Black Ghetto where we had spent the summer 2 years precedent. My brother Jim Ed was 11, so he stayed with us still that year and was deployed just after. Our short stay in the summer of ’67 had already been a shock, but the big culture shock was about to take place. This was our home now. Most of the members were in the big residential buildings on the old seminary campus, but our family was given a leased apartment about a block away that they had labeled “the bowling alley” apartment, because it was very long and narrow. It was divided into “rooms” with drapes, except for two small rooms at the back and the bathroom. It was half-way underground and there was only one outside window in the front room just under the ceiling which looked out onto the sidewalk. My two sisters had the back room, Jim-Ed had the penultimate one, and Ben and I had a bunk-bed in the last space of the “alley”. There were swarms of cockroaches everywhere. We had a chest of drawers for our clothes, and one morning when I opened it there was a huge rat, the size of a cat, snarling up at me. I jumped back in fright and he jumped out and ran away. I can’t even imagine what would have happened had it bit me!

When we started school, at Leif Ericson Elementary School, all of us white kids would keep together as one big group, and even then it was dangerous. We often got rocks thrown at us, or hand-made darts. In school, I didn’t understand almost anything the neighborhood kids said. They spoke their own inner-city dialect. Let me give you a few examples: “I funnuh axe dah teechah” (no breaks between the words of course) meant “I’m going to ask the teacher”, “Teechah he mellen me” meant “Teacher he’s messin’ with me”. You get the idea. I was really like a fish on dry land. To make the situation worse, I couldn’t sleep at night because of all the noise, like in the summer of ’67, but this time it was for good. In fact it was worse. The Chicago riots the year before, after the assassination of Dr. MLK Jr., had made the whole neighborhood an inferno of rage. It was not a good time for a white kid to be living there, to put it mildly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my parents had certainly been aware of the riots, which is why we had stayed in Montana, far from the trouble, in the summer of ’68.

One evening a bit before dinner, very early in the year, all of us "Order" member kids were playing hide and seek in the Chapel, where we had our meals in the basement. (the adults ate all together in another large conference room in the Faculty Building) I hid under a pew in the nave. It was dark, and I thought that I had found a perfect hiding place. All of the sudden there was a hand over my mouth. There were three neighborhood boys who had also thought that it was a good hiding place, but they weren’t playing hide and seek. The boy that had his hand over my mouth whispered to me “Don’ move! Don’ make a sound!” He jabbed the tip of a screwdriver into my ribs to make his point. I could have wet my pants I was so scared. The gong for dinner rang. “Praise the Lord! Let us feast!” came the routine repeating dinner call from an adult making the rounds with a small Chinese gong.

“You ain’ funnuh go nowheah mutha fuckah” he told me.

“But they’ll miss me! They won’t know where I am!”

 “I don’ fuckin’ give a damn yah lil pussie, shudduh fuck up!”

Dinner had started and it seemed that no one would be coming into the nave.

“Now den, yah lil pussie, yah funnuh lift dah munny from a lady’s purse an yah funnuh give it tah me. If yah don’ do it, Ah funnah kill yah fuckin’ white ass! (another poke in the ribs). Yah got jus one week, an we gonnah findjah. You don’ say nothin' to no one, or ah funnah kill ya!”

It was obvious that they were brothers by their resemblance, and it was the youngest, smallest one who was doing all of the talking and giving all of the orders. I discovered soon enough who they were; they were the infamous Cody brothers. A week went by with me scared shitless all of the time, when one morning on the way to school, they nabbed me out of the group and forced me into an alley.

“Yah goddah money?” Jim, the youngest one and the leader, was glaring at me with his face right up to mine and his fist gripping my shirt.

“No, I couldn’t steal from a purse, I don’t know how.”

“Ya wanna stay alive muthah fuckah? Ya funnuh gimmee da money.”

It went on like this, and they started beating me up every week. I had bruises everywhere and I went to school every day with fear gripping my insides. I couldn’t even think about schoolwork, but that didn’t matter because the school was far behind the schools I had gone to before. I got away one day and ran all the way to school. The street-crossing guard let me pass and held Jim Cody back from crossing, and then reported the event to the Principal. During gym class the gym teacher came to me and asked me what had happened. I told him the story, and he punished Jim, hitting his thighs hard with a two by four. Needless to say, matters just got worse. Now Jim wanted revenge. That day after school he came running up behind me and broke an empty coke bottle over my head. My brother Jim Ed and ran after him, but didn’t catch him.

I didn’t want to go to school anymore. I finally broke down and told my parents what had happened, regardless of the death threats. I had to anyway, they hadn’t noticed my bruises (or perhaps had pretended not to notice?) but the big bloody bump on my head couldn’t be ignored. I was devastated at their reaction. They took it lightly, as if it was a minor issue for them. But of course, they had a mission to change the world! So, I started faking sick a lot, it was easy for me, and as I had been sick every year since I was born, it was easy for my parents to believe. I learned a lot more that year than I probably would have at school, because books became my one true friend, my ally, my drug, and my only escape from my harsh reality to other worlds. There was a bookstore for the adults with other things like incense, ashtrays, lighters, posters, black berets… but I didn’t have money to buy books, so I started to steal them. It wasn’t long before I got caught by the man who ran the store, Desmond Avery. I really liked him, because he spoke French and always wore a black beret. He was really nice about my shoplifting and didn’t tell my parents. Instead, he did something which I would always be grateful for. He had a big collection of books in his apartment, and he invited me to borrow any book I wanted. I was only 10, but started reading books that were for adults, like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, The Red Pony, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five, Hermann Hesse’s Damian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game. Steppenwolf was also the name of a rock group that I really loved, with their hit “Born to be Wild”. I wanted to see the movie “Easy Rider” that had just come out that year but it was rated R, only for adults. Speaking of movies, on family night we went to see “Yellow Submarine”, an animated movie starring the Beatles as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was preceded with an unforgettable short movie Bambi Meets Godzilla, where the whole film is just the opening credits with Bambi eating grass calmly, until the credits finish and Godzilla’s foot comes down to crush Bambi. The End. In fact, it was kind of a metaphor for my situation. Another film I really enjoyed that year was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. All of these things opened my mind and made me already a lot more mature than my physical age. Still, I would hold a grudge against my father for most of my life for having ruined my childhood. Later, I compared my school photos from the year before in Anaconda with the school photos from Chicago, and the difference is striking. The 9 year old Montana country boy with a huge smile and uneven bangs from his home-done haircut, wearing a homemade shirt, compared with a serious, fashionable long haired 10 year old intellectual rocker. The smile and the insouciance were gone forever. Childhood was already over, way too soon.

My parents, knowing my obsession with France, managed to find a used portable record player and a Berlitz self-teaching French language course on 33 rpm records. I would listen and repeat like a parrot; “Bonjour, comment-allez-vous?” That was great. My parents did think of me, even if they couldn’t imagine the frightful hell that I lived every time I was out in the neighborhood. The French lessons made up for some of the disappointment of not being able to continue my piano lessons.

At Christmas that year, I got a toy G.I. Joe space capsule, and I was really overjoyed. My aviator became the first one-armed astronaut to go on a moon landing mission.

I don’t remember having a crush that year. I was too much into my books. There was a great Black girl who was with us in the “Order”, Tracy. I was smart enough to realize that it wasn’t because the neighborhood kids were Black that they were mean. We had known Black guys from Chicago living with us in Montana as well, student workers. This is good, that my terrifying experiences with the Cody brothers didn’t give me any “racist” thoughts. Tracy and I won a dancing contest together. She was really pretty, and I liked her a lot, but I didn’t have any romantic feelings for her, not that I remember anyway.

During the school year we went on field trips again to the Museum of Science and Industry and the Field Museum of Natural History, like in the summer of ’67, and I really liked these trips. I was really thirsty for knowledge, and that thirst could never be quenched.

In the summer of ‘70 we returned to the same camp in Canada where we had spent the last summer. I was a different person though. My G.I. Joe was the last remainder of the worriless boy I had been. My whole summer was wasted with fear about going back to school again in the fall, and my older brother would not be there to protect me this time.

Now, with hindsight, I know for sure that everything that I lived through was necessary for me to become the person that I am now, but for the child I was, this realization was impossible. I hated my father with all my heart for having moved our family from the beautiful Rocky Mountains, where everything had been bright and joyful, to this horrible grey dirty noisy and above all dangerous place to live. This anger would stay hurting me until I was 50, when I finally found the strength to forgive him. “Anger is an acid that that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Mark Twain