The Southern Boy

Chapter four - "Is his name Henry?"

Chapter One Here

Chapter Two Here

Chapter three here

Chapter Four

Is his name Henry?

There was a whole lot that didn’t seem right that first day of school in 1975. People I thought I knew? They acted like violent idiots – like they’d all been infected with a poison.

The whole city seemed drunk on this poison. But I lived in a strange place. I think aluminum foil was invented there and the term “pinball” was coined by local reporters at the newspaper during the great “Pinball Prohibition” days in which local holy rollers equated it with gambling, considered it a moral outrage and believed it to be more of a social problem than drinking. Across the country people got up in arms about pinball and called it a sin. It’s just that in my hometown they took it that extra step. People were jailed for playing pinball!

I kid you not.

You might wonder how we ended up living there. I sure did. Turns out, my family was a bunch of “horse traders” and some of the few “Arabers” who were of Arabic descent. We happened upon the Ohio River valley after spending time in New York City following the family’s migration to the United States.

My great uncle told a story about my great grandfather, which always sounded apocryphal to me. But when my great grandfather first moved to this country, he had a wagon from which he peddled his wares and drove around Manhattan, Brooklyn, Hell’s Kitchen and the like – not to mention points outside of New York. Sometimes he would take trips that would last up to two weeks, and he would take my great uncle with him. According to Uncle Joe, they both slept in that wagon for those two long weeks, wearing the same scratchy long johns and sleeping under heavy wool, very itchy blankets.

When great grandpa Peter got home, the first thing his wife would do is chase him around the backyard with a bar of soap screaming that he smelled worse than the pigs.

She had been rich in the old country compared to my great grandfather’s family. They were uneducated hill people, but after Great Grandpa busted Great Grandma over the head, kidnapped her and threw onto his hay wagon they’d grown extremely close. I’m kidding; it was an arranged marriage. Great Grandma got married when she was 12 to my great grandfather who was 18 at the time and the youngest of 10 children. By the time grandma was 16 she had two kids, a third on the way, and she came to this country with the cattle and couldn’t speak a word of English. She was a plain woman who never wore makeup, but they swear she was a natural beauty. By the time I met her she was wearing those black old lady shoes and support hose and had an apron perpetually tied around her waist. Her house always smelled of cabbage. She’d pinch your chin and called you “ugly” if she liked you and she’d make you walk around the neighborhood with her while she picked dandelion greens for her salads – which I was routinely afraid to eat. After all, I saw how the neighborhood dogs treated dandelions. I sure didn’t want to eat what the local canines used as urinal cakes.

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My dad said we came to this city to avoid the violence in Hell’s Kitchen – and the Middle East. I could only wonder how violent those places were after the fun I had wading through protesters and morons on the first day of school.

Maybe it was my teenage mind, but it seemed like there were city, county, state and even rent-a-cops outside of the building, inside the building, in the bathrooms and taking up listening posts in stray lockers. I was looking for wires in my lunchroom meal. I felt violated. Driving up to what the principal liked to call, “The Loading Dock” where students disembarked from buses and cars to enter school reminded me of the pictures of Saigon when our forces bailed out of Vietnam.

Our high school was a place of learning for about 4500 kids. During the mid-70s it was not only the largest high school in the state, but one of the largest in the country, with more than 1500 of us in the ninth grade. The security concerns with such large numbers of children, many of whom would be going to classes in the suburbs for the first time, were daunting and the feeling of watching this turgid mess was deeply troubling – for the first few days most school buses resembled prison transports.

The governor called out the National Guard to help, but that only seemed to make matters worse and more surreal. What was next, barbed wire and bunkers?

Part of me was more concerned for my little brother and sisters. They were still in elementary school. The twins were in third grade, and it was Patrick’s very first day of elementary school.

I remembered my first day of school – at that very same grade school - which was attached to our high school. It didn’t feel right for my brother to begin his entire educational experience with cops and the National Guard present.

The twins were in tears on the short ride over to school. Patrick didn’t know what to expect.

“Nobody’s going to shoot me, are they?” He asked.

I shook my head. “No. Patrick. The cops are all basketball fans.” I said. That made him smile. He was a huge fan of University of Kentucky basketball.

My sisters, however, were not as easy to console. “I don’t want to go,” Annie said unequivocally. “If she doesn’t go, then I don’t want to go,” Lynnie tossed in.

Mom said flatly, “You’re going to school.”

Oddly enough, that calm delivery reminded me of dad. And, amazingly, as when dad did it, it worked. There was no further discussion. I thought my mom could cast spells. Maybe she was a witch. I hoped she was a good one.

The first hour or so of school went smoothly. There were no acts of violence during morning announcements, other than the fact that we all gagged when the principal welcomed us all “Including our new friends” back to school.

Then he went on to say what a great school we had and how we’d all notice a lot of new things this year. Our high school had just been renovated. The county built a new gym and a new media room. Wes Unseld, who had graduated from our school back in the early 60s even came back to dedicate the new gym – which wasn’t even finished yet, so all of us hormonal youths assigned to physical education class during 4^th period were closeted in the hallway leading to the locker room - for an hour. We just sat in the hall. You could study or talk quietly, but you had to sit there for an hour.

Not even our gym teacher and football coach, Mr. Gephardt could handle that. Fifteen minutes into the period on the first day of school he made up an excuse to go somewhere and left a senior football captain in charge. The senior left a few minutes after the coach and assigned a junior, Tim Stillman to oversee everything.

Stillman was the neighborhood bully, anti-social, criminal wannabe whose older brother was doing a two-year stint for armed robbery at LaGrange reformatory. No one doubted the younger Stillman would soon follow in his brother’s footsteps. He seemed to be so enthusiastic in pursuit of trouble that it was a perverse joy to watch. Dad had represented Stillman’s father on a gas station robbery charge – one of his first cases as a lawyer. Stan Stillman (Christ his initials were S.S.) was a local construction worker whose own father had died when he fell into a grain silo. I wondered if they used the grain afterward. Anyway, that evidently messed up Stan, who dad told me was also later abused by his stepfather. I guess he passed the disease to Tim.

Tim was also a street philosopher, or so he claimed. “You see what is really going on with busing,” I overheard him say to a mutual redneck, “Is that the coloreds really want superiority. They claim they want to be equal, but they want us white people to be slaves out of revenge.”

Some people believed that. “You see they want us to pay for them because they’re too lazy to work for themselves. That’s their problem. The coloreds are like that.” Stillman would preach to a crowd of similar mental wizards who would cluck in approval.

I was amazed he said “coloreds” instead other worse pejorative terms he frequently used for anyone who wasn’t white. I guess he was trying to be an intellectual.

There was no end to his philosophy of how poor white people were worse off than black people. “There is no National Association for the Advancement of White People,” he preached. I thought Stillman was the worst type of redneck: a semi-literate one. He and I never got along. The summer before my freshman year in high school Stillman tried to jump me one night when I was riding my bike home after I spent a day at a friend’s house. I think he was upset because I didn’t invite him to the party that got me in trouble with mom. Anyway, it got dark, I knew I was in trouble, and it was raining. He jumped in the middle of the street when he saw me, and I just pedaled faster. He was pissed and afraid to try and grab a speeding bike, so he stepped back and spit at me from the back of his throat. The miserable prick.

“Ha! You missed!” I remember shouting as I pedaled faster.

He cursed at me and promised to kick my ass.