The Southern Boy
Chapter 2: I'll tell them you had a doctor's appointment
This is the second chapter in a proposed fictional look at growing up in the South during the 1970s. If you like it please consider subscribing to this page. All future chapters will be behind a paywall. And as I promised, once the manuscript is published, all subscribers will get a free copy . . .
Chapter 2
I’ll tell them you had a doctor’s appointment
The first day of school in 1975 reminded me of Mr. Doug Schmidt.
He was a hard man to forget. He lived two-doors down from my grandfather. Schmidt was a thick-necked, ruddy complected old German. At one time I’m sure his hair was more blonde than white, but when I met him, his short-cropped white hair looked like the bristles on a brush. He always smelled of beer, though he swore he never drank.
He moved to the United States when he was in his 40s – chased here by the Nazis I was told, but I was convinced that was a lie. I figured he worked for Hitler, and when the rumor went around that Hitler was alive, I believed it - because of grandpa’s neighbor. He sounded like a Nazi. Hell, for a while I wondered if he was Hitler. He used to get under my mother’s skin by saying Hitler had the right idea about (fill in the blank) – anyone that wasn’t German apparently. He and my grandfather fought constantly, but also considered themselves friends. They shared a garden between their two unfenced yards and bonded through that. I don’t know how, Schmidt often said the Kayrouz family were “mongrels.”
One of their biggest arguments I witnessed as they were gardening one day was over one of the city’s favorite sons; Muhammad Ali. Ali’s first trophy was a Golden Glove local championship named after my great-uncle Paul – my grandfather’s younger brother. Paul died young in 1953 - just the third person to ever go under the knife for a bypass surgery. The doctors said after his death what they learned from his surgery would eventually save the lives of millions of others. That wasn’t the comfort for the family the doctors thought it would be.
Paul was a famous local youth sports promoter. A first-generation immigrant who saw children waste away in Lebanon with no hope and no outlet for their physical needs, he was determined to change that – and because he put so much effort into it, when he died the community named several awards after him.
Grandpa had known Muhammad Ali since Ali was a teen named Cassius Clay. He and Grandpa lived in the same neighborhood. When Clay became Ali, Grandpa started calling him Ali. Mr. Schmidt wouldn’t do it. “A man has a right to call himself anything he wants,” grandpa said. With grandpa it was personal. We had family members like Foch, Boutrous and Bulous, who had changed their names to fit in. Grandpa thought it was admirably funny Ali had done the opposite.
The argument Grandpa and Mr. Schmidt had one Sunday morning while pulling weeds in their shared garden between their two yards included the epic use of my favorite curse words in a variety of combinations in English, Arabic, Yiddish and German. I got a beautiful lesson in cussing that day.
Ali influenced my life in other ways. He may have shook the world, but he also grew up in my hometown. I met him once. Dad enrolled me in boxing classes run by the local police athletic league. I was a freshly minted nine-years-old and my dad said I needed outlet for my anger that I didn’t know I had. One day our teacher, Sergeant Yates brough in his prized pupil – Ali. We got a group picture taken with the champ and then each of us got two minutes in the ring, shadow-boxing him. I was scared shitless. Years later I heard Richard Pryor doing a routine about getting in the ring “for a benefit” with Ali. Pryor said he didn’t want Ali to have a “Joe Frazier flashback” in the ring, punch him in the head and cause brain damage.
I knew the feeling. I was nine. I was scared, but I wanted to impress him, so I growled and clinched my teeth and got in my stance. Ali just smiled. “Look at this white boy. He looks so gritty, but I’m big, Black, beautiful and oh so pretty,” he said.
I looked around for witnesses before shadow boxing a few jabs while he laughed.
I was just happy I didn’t shit myself.
***
The first day of school in 1975 was a brutal day in the Kayrouz household. Mom propped herself up for about an hour in her bedroom in front of the makeup mirror getting ready for work. I swear that woman had more intimate knowledge of makeup than everyone employed at Revlon and Max Factor combined.
She was also a stage actress. When I was younger dad took me to the local Catholic Theatre Guild to watch mom in a production of “The Night of the Iguana”. She played Maxine Faulk. Pop was smitten and declared mom better than Ava Gardner – who played the role in the movie. Dad said he was lucky that he’d fallen in love with a movie star.
Mom was no movie star, but I guess she was the local equivalent. She was a weekend and substitute anchor on the local NBC affiliate. After dad died, she also found additional work as the promotions director for the local public television station to make ends meet. That meant she worked seven days a week and her kids were left to fend for themselves. We were the original “latch key” kids.
For one week each year mom anchored a televised auction for the public television station. She organized and produced it, and was on the air for 10 hours straight each day. I think the job paid her about $15,000 a year. Her boss, a man, made seven times what mom made and did half the work she did.
She loved the job and hated the pay. I used to sit at home, watch the televised auction, and bid on stuff that I thought I could get cheap – and occasionally I’d even pay for it. I still have an antique coffee grinder to this day – Why? I have no idea.
Mom used to gripe about her hours, naturally, but that and her weekend anchor gig kept a roof over our head. I know Dad would have felt bad for her. I did, but also got angry at her for working so much. What did I know of oppression? I thought that was having to go to bed when I didn’t want to.
I really hated mom’s PBS promotions job. That’s because the station manager, whose name was Richard Weasel, (okay it really wasn’t, but that’s how I’ll remember him – Dick Weasel) once made an ugly pass at her and chased her around her desk. There wasn’t much she could do about it.
I wanted to kick the guy’s ass. Mom was mortified when she heard this. I guess she thought I might actually do it (like I said, I was big for my age), and so she told me never to say anything to the married moron. But, I couldn’t help but be upset with the thought of some geriatric weasel with a massive bald spot and combover chasing my mom around her desk. It was an insult to my dad.
On the upside, mom being gone so much gave me the freedom to do things I couldn’t do if both parents were around; like this party I had in eighth grade. I played on mom’s guilt to make it happen, but she insisted I have it on a Friday night when she was home. I used some well-wrangled funds and a kid who had an older brother in the neighborhood to purchase Vodka, orange juice and Boones Farm Strawberry Hill wine, along with sandwiches, chips and soda. I had saved for a year to throw this party. I wanted to be an impeccable host, after all it was the first party I ever hosted in my life.
I knew mom might walk through the house, playing chaperone, but I figured I could pass of the Boones Farm as Koolaid or grape juice and the “Screwdrivers” as orange juice – especially if I had half-filled bottles of those drinks in the living room.
Sometime during the night it got out of hand. Fifteen friends turned into the entire eighth grade, it seemed, along with kids from other schools and girls I hadn’t seen before or since, but tried to flirt with that night. It probably would have been fine, but Bobby Henley came upstairs from the basement and puked all over the shag carpet, at about the same time mom woke up and took a big swig of what she thought was a glass of orange juice. She nearly threw up too.
I can still remember her turning off the record player by yanking out the plug, shouting at the top of her lungs “Party’s Over! Everyone Out!” Then waiting while some parents came to pick up their drunk children, and even bedding a few of them down for the night when the parents couldn’t be reached. Mom had always said she didn’t mind me drinking – as long as I did it in front of her. That was from dad’s idea about the “cookie jar syndrome.” Dad was convinced that if you tell kids everything is fine, but you had to stay away from the cookie jar, then logically kids like me? That’s the first place you’re going to go.
A year and a half later and it was still a sore spot with me and mom.
Her morning rituals also got to me more than I care to admit – especially once school started.
She didn’t seem to care whether I was late or not. In mom’s mind time was not only relative but very malleable. If an appointment was made for 9 a.m. mom thought it was perfectly acceptable to be there at 9:30 a.m. or even 10 a.m. I know her producers and her secretary at the station always told mom she had to be some place at least 45 minutes earlier than was necessary so they could get her there on time. There was just one exception: mom was never late when she had to be on camera. In fact she was always early. This really fried my giblets, as Fog Horn Leghorn might say.
She never cared if I got to school late. “I’ll write you a note,” was her inevitable reply when I queried her on the matter.
“What are you going to say?” I asked.
“I’ll tell them you had a doctor’s appointment.”
“Isn’t it going to look strange that I always get to school late because of a doctor’s appointment?” I’d ask angrily.
“Hand me my lipstick,” she’d say calmly.
All I could think was that everyone in the county must’ve thought her four children were the sickest beings on the planet – what with the endless reams of paper telling school administrators we were 10 to 15 minutes late to school because we had “to go to the doctor.”
Once I actually got to school things weren’t much better. My dad was well known in the community; a civil rights leader, an attorney and a volunteer youth football coach. I was “Coach Kayrouz’s kid” and after he died that changed to “the kid whose dad had died” and everyone wanted to take pity on me, or in some cases they wanted to start some shit with me.
I was not a fan of either option. And, I didn’t like that, for a while, I didn’t recognize my friends. At first, Bobby Henley acted like he owed me money. He’d duck when I’d come around, avert eye contact and once I even watched him turn the other way when he saw me in the hall. And dad took a skyrocket for him. Thankfully, that didn’t last long with him.
Bobby was the product of a broken home. His mother was dirt poor, and his dad was a defrocked Baptist minister who got caught shagging (one of my favorite British slang terms) a young widow. But after dad died, Bobby was one of the people who felt sorry for me. I hated it. I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t supposed to feel sorry for me.
Patrick, my little brother, and my two little sisters were really too young to remember much about dad. He died when the twins were three. Patrick a year and a half old. Of course, that meant starting at 13 I was often called on to baby sit them – which was about as much fun as having toothpicks driven into your ears with jack hammers. Talking to my siblings was pointless. Talking to mom was painful. I found myself longing to have the toothpicks driven into my ears by the aforementioned jack hammers.
Patrick, my little brother, used to ask me all the time about dad. “What was he like Jimmy? Did dad like me? Did he tell us stories?” I guess I wasn’t that great of a big brother because I never wanted to talk much about pop and I didn’t really like spending time around my little brother. Patrick usually asked me these questions in the morning right after we got up to go to school, so I wasn’t always that talkative. He didn’t care. He knew the morning was the best chance to get me alone to talk about dad.
To keep the family on time, when school was in session, I normally got us breakfast while mom tweaked her appearance in front of the mirror and got dressed. She could wade through the piles of clothes in the guest bedroom – which she had converted into a room-size closet – and forget everything. She grew up a poor tomboy. Dad helped her to find herself, she said, and after he died, I think the clothes and makeup helped relieve her grief. Sometimes she’d try on three or four different outfits before she decided what she would wear. She’d put on one dress or a pants suit, then parade in front of her full-length mirror and ask me if I liked it. Often, before I could say “that looks great”, which was what I often said because it was true, she’d find some reason not to like whatever she was wearing. “I don’t think this goes with the weather,” or “I don’t look good in pink today,” something like that. The only thing I saw her wear that I thought was silly was a short black pill hat with a lace brim. It looked like insect netting to me. My morning goal was to make sure mom got dressed quickly and didn’t look like she was wearing insect netting.
At that time, my brother and I were sharing a room. The girls were sharing a room, and mom had one whole room set aside for her clothes. Well, she called it the guest bedroom and when she had relatives over that’s where they stayed. But mom mostly used it as a dressing room.
After her inevitable dismissal of her first clothing ensemble choice, my beautiful mother would disappear for a few minutes and come back wearing something else. Occasionally it took a third or a fourth visit to make herself comfortable. Why? I have no idea. One of life’s mysteries.
The whole time, I’d be making breakfast. With mom it didn’t take too long to cut up a grapefruit, sprinkle sugar over the top and serve it to her with some buttered toast and hot tea. The stooges were easy too. In 1975 my twin sisters were almost nine, and Patrick was closing in on a very fat seven. He ate anything you put in front of him – literally. His ability to consume wild onions, grass and mud pies made him a living legend in our neighborhood. His ability to chew and consume certain types of plastic made him a God. G.I. Joes? They feared my brother. He used them to floss.
With me running the sideshow, we once made about five bucks one Saturday when he was five-years-old by demonstrating his iron-stomach capabilities to our easily impressed and more well-heeled neighbors. I think that day we got Patrick to eat a bunch of ants and a few crickets. When I think back I know the real reason why I didn’t take him fishing with me when we were younger; he might eat the bait.
At breakfast he usually consumed a whole box of Lucky Charms cereal. He reminded me of Jethro on the Beverly Hillbillies. The girls each liked Fruit Loops, so I’d just set up the boxes of cereal and the glass bottle of milk and watch the show. It was quite funny. The stooges would hide behind the cereal boxes, refusing to look at each other, while they ate like mindless mutants.
This ritual was inevitably interrupted on at least three occasions when one of the stooges would shout “Stop looking at me!” to a sibling.
My only problem playing chef was when mom wanted coffee instead of tea. I never could get the strength right. She liked her coffee slightly stronger than battery acid and a little weaker than atomic waste. Long before espresso became popular, mom and dad made it for each other. My grandfather brought an espresso machine over from Italy for mom and dad’s fifth anniversary. “The most modern,” he said. He was way ahead of his time – well not of the Italians, but definitely anyone living in my city. But that damn espresso maker was huge – and fragile.
***
Dad’s parents loved to travel. The went everywhere and Grandpa, on these visits around the globe would pick up the local phone book and track down anybody named “Kayrouz”. He found a lot of distant cousins that way. As for the espresso machine, mom and dad used it pretty much every day. It broke a couple of years after dad died, and I was left trying to make mom her atomic rocket fuel without an atom smasher.
It was another reminder that dad wasn’t around. The only time he’d miss making her breakfast was when he was playing ball. He briefly played pro-football when I was a little kid - backup to Bart Starr at Green Bay. Mostly he was a punter. He had a great foot – emphasis on “had”.
He broke his foot when a teammate accidentally dropped a barbell on it when they were training. It never healed right, and dad never went back to football. A couple of years later the Packers won the first Super Bowl. Great luck, huh? I asked him once if his teammate didn’t make him mad – didn’t he want to kick his ass for ruining his football career? Dad told me I should “never respond to happenstance or ignorance with malice or vengeance. It’s unreasonable and solves nothing,” he told me. I thought he was nuts.
Dad just shifted gears. Mom helped put dad through law school. They refused any financial assistance from dad’s parents. They didn’t rely on mom’s parents either, a fact made easier because my maternal grandmother didn’t have squat and Mom didn’t speak to her own father.
Dad also took a job teaching school to make ends meet. After a couple of years, he got his law degree and license and joined his dad at the family law firm. I think he was a lawyer for about five years when he decided to run for the state legislature – and then he died.
Dad never seemed to care about giving up fame or fortune and neither did mom. I was too young to understand, but old enough to feel bad for them.
***
The first day of school my sophomore year mom pissed me off for another reason. Each school morning, since my first day in Kindergarten, mom would walk into my room at 5:30 a.m., yank the covers from me, expose me to the chilly morning air and begin singing, “It’s time to get up. It’s time to get up. It’s time to get up in the morning,” to the tune of “Reveille.” She even managed to sound like a bugle.
For some reason, that first day of school, after 10 years, the routine wore thin. I told her to leave me the hell alone. Nobody likes having their covers yanked off and then having, “Some dried up old lady shouting at me.”
I guess that got to her all right. She hated being called an “old lady”.
“This old lady can still kick your ass,” she sang back at me with a high, lilting emphasis on the word “Ass”. It sounded melodic. I ignored it.
“Dad’s life insurance paid for the house. You spend all your money on your stupid clothes and makeup,” I shouted. “You never buy any food, except what you want. I’m tired of eating tuna and noodles four nights a week. You didn’t even buy me any new clothes for school. I’m wearing what I had this summer and I’ve outgrown everything.”
She ignored me. She actually bought me a new pair of “Chuck Taylor” Converse, white canvas tennis shoes – and a couple of shirts and pants, but I felt like sticking it to her. Facts never matter in a good argument.
Naturally Annie and Lynnie took mom’s side and told me to “shut up Jimmy,” while Patrick sat through the fight ritual finishing off his cereal and occasionally eyeing mom. Patrick had a sure eye for the fight. He gave mom a wide berth and rarely confronted her. When she got angry, he would hide or let her rant and rave and then brush it off. I never could understand that.
I also couldn’t understand mom’s frenetic activity on that first day of school. Big deal I was a sophomore. Sure, it was Patrick’s first day of school, but why the drama? I thought she was dense.
“No matter what happens today, I want you kids to be on your best behavior, be nice to the new people at your school, and do not become part of the problem,” she said as we finally headed out the door. “Don’t be afraid.”
Then it dawned on me what mom was talking about: court ordered desegregation. Busing to achieve racial integration. It was the biggest event in my neck of the woods since the ’68 race riots. The news about busing started to gain traction during the summer, and of course I hadn’t paid much attention because I was too busy staring at Jane. I told you I was bright, right?
The courts decided to integrate the local schools by busing inner city black children to the suburban white schools and the suburban white children to the inner city black schools, all based on the first letter of your last name. Seemed arbitrary enough. You know, “Everyone with last names beginning in “B” goes here, and everyone with a last name beginning with “G” goes there.” The idea was that we needed a balanced racial mixture so we could all learn to get along and love one another right now.
I saw a member of the John Birch society on television who said that forced busing was the “Beginning of the end of Western Civilization.” Several local groups of like-minded citizens, including the Neo-Nazis and the KKK promised Hell on Earth in response to the busing plan. “It’s the second-coming of the Civil War,” they warned us. Since I was a Catholic boy the “Second Coming” definitely had a different meaning for me and I had a hard time thinking that Jesus would show up in a KKK hooded robe or wearing a Nazi arm band.
The truth for most kids I knew was we didn’t think about race relations. We just didn’t want to have to spend more time getting to school on a bus and hanging out with kids we didn’t know. It’s not like we all weren’t aware of discrimination. We simply, sometimes, chose to ignore it. It was a lot easier to do if you weren’t the victim of it.
***
My great grandfather came to this country with cattle at the turn of the century. His family was Maronite Catholic and lived in Bsharri Lebanon. My great grandfather, Peter Kayrouz, fled to this country after a dustup with a Turk in the hills outside of his hometown. My great grandfather lived. The Turk didn’t.
When Peter came to the U.S. he was called Wop and Dago because the local residents couldn’t figure out at first what his ethnicity was. He was called worse when they did. My grandfather and my father all got in fights with the local rednecks during which they were called sand-nigger or camel jockey. Sometimes they were greeted that way before punches were thrown – in fact that’s why punches were thrown.
We were Catholic so the local hospitals – many of them Catholic in the area - would accept us. None of the local country clubs would – not that we had the money to join those kind of clubs.
The family bought a cheap parcel of land up on River Road and started our own “Lebanese-American Country Club”. It sported a banquet hall, a swimming pool and some tennis courts, but not much else. The liquor was good though. My great Uncle Joe poured me my first “high ball” of bourbon and Coca-Cola at that club when I was six. Mom and dad didn’t say a word because Uncle Joe was – at the time – the oldest living male member of the family. His word was practically law. Some of the older women in my family bathed in that culture, but some of the younger Kayrouz women hated the patriarchal nature of our family; my progressive mother was chief among them. But old habits die hard. All I can say, is as a little boy I loved it. As the oldest boy in my generation, I was treated as a prince.
You’d think when it came to politics, we’d be extremely conservative. Wasn’t the case. “I do not want rapists getting the right to choose the mother,” was one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings. I didn’t know what that meant when I was a boy or how that was relevant to my life. Her mother was a suffragette, and grandpa was into civil rights. She and my grandfather were so like-minded it was spooky.
My friend Mark Gnadinger had a different experience. His dad was convinced people were no good and some of them were too stupid to be involved in polite society. He said black people, for example, might one day be smart enough to hold public office, but were uneducated and unable to be part of society now. Later I found out his favorite actor was one of mine – John Wayne. And John Wayne said essentially the same thing in the “Playboy Interview” that I read a few months after I heard Mr. Gnadinger quoting it as if it were gospel. I still like John Wayne movies, but I’m glad he never held office. “Mr. Gnadinger son, has had a different experience than me,” dad said of our neighbor. I thought dad was being kind.
One of our other neighbors, Steve McCoy was worse. McCoy (yes, of the Hatfield and McCoy fame) was a garage salesman who lived up the street. He and Gnadinger were good friends and they both went to the same church, the Rolling Blessed Shroud of Mothers for the Consecration of the Holy Church of the Sainted Sepulcher, or something like that. McCoy was as conservative as they came – but dad said the man had a heart.
Whatever. Mr. McCoy was the guy who couldn’t understand why people would protest their own government during a war. “Well, no one protests against peace Steve,” my dad said. But McCoy had none of it. According to him, “The kids are perverted by rock n’ roll and drugs that the communists fed them.” He favored gospel music, Falls City Beer and unfiltered Camel cigarettes. He rolled his cigarettes in the arm of his short-sleeved white t-shirt and still used enough grease in his hair to lube the ball bearings of his 1964 powder blue Pontiac Valiant station wagon which he swore was the “best automobile ever crafted on the planet.”
McCoy thought anyone of a faith not his own was headed for Hell which he prayed hard for in church every Sunday like clockwork before he’d come home, knock back a few cold ones and barbecue in his backyard if the weather was agreeable. I never knew him to be abusive to his family; in fact they all treated him as if we were a wizened guru.
Mr. McCoy told anyone who would listen that freedom was earned, and certain people had earned more freedom than others. He was also against women in the work place and two members of the household working. “That’s the government trying to own us,” he said. “My wife takes care of the family. I work,” he said on more than one occasion.
“What if your wife could make more than you?” Dad asked.
“That’ll never happen. Women are supposed to be cared for and respected,” McCoy said. And that meant doing what their husbands told them, having babies, changing diapers and feeding the babies while the dads went out into the world and worked – and other stuff.
As for busing? Mr. McCoy – who still was our neighbor five years after dad died – said there was no point to force integration. “We mix as much as we want. We’re free people” he said. “Separate, but equal.”
By then I knew what dad would say. “If we don’t have equal opportunities then how can we be equally free?” Mr. McCoy had an answer for that. I heard it all the time as a kid. “They” were fine in their community and “We” were safe in ours and that’s the way it should stay.
As it turns out, my hometown was as divided as it came and I had no idea. Of course, it had been that way during the Civil War - which as it turned out was still being waged - at least in spirit. Half the people in town thought Richard Nixon was the second coming of Jesus Christ and had been hounded out of office by communists and hippies. They vowed vengeance and some even suggested seceding from the Union – conveniently forgetting how that worked out in the 1860s. The other half thought he was a crook who should be imprisoned. Both sides included people who said they supported free speech - as long as you agreed with them.
Our town was even physically divided. The West end of town was for poor blacks. The South end was for poor whites – you know – rednecks. And the middle class and affluent took the Cherokee Triangle and points due east. On some days you could almost smell the smug rising out of certain parts of town – and it was as pungent to my nose as Rubber Town was.
Southern manners dictated that in public, for the most part, people behaved themselves.
The truth is, in my world, none if this meant anything. I was immersed in high school football. If you wanted to start on the football team, then you had to be the best at your position. We recognized color, but if the black kid could guard better than the white kid, then the coach put the best kid in to protect his quarterback. That was my reality. The coaches weren’t exactly progressive, just anxious to win ball games.
When I pulled up to school that first day of school 1975, it was just nuts. I saw this fat kid with blonde hair and a mullet screaming at the buses, “Go Home Nigger! Go back to the Jungle.” I didn’t know him, but I recognized him. He was one of those guys who always hung out in the “smoking area” outside of study hall.
His lips were pursed in anger. His face was swollen with several white heads that seemed to erupt like tiny little volcanoes as he got incensed. He was screaming at people he didn’t know and had never met. And what the hell was he wearing flannel for? That shirt had to be hot as shit. There were dozens of people doing this outside of our school. For awhile it looked like we couldn’t get inside. I just wanted to play football. Goddamn how I hated people.
From one latch key kid to another, I think we had the same mother! Very good Chapter 2. I was in Catholic school so I didn't have desegregation there, but I remember it well. By high school, it wasn't an issue.