Let’s Pause Before We Begin
This chapter was more or less written online,
and copy-pasted from a draft I wrote in 1983 or something.
It's a mess. It contains duplicate entries.
Hasn't been proofed or nothin'.
But here it is, for now, at least.
<drafting as i go>
1 - Getting There (Is Half The Fun)
Okay, here comes the story of how I found myself to be in Boston, where I lived more or less happily - in spurts at the beginnings and ends - from 1962 to 1968.
I'm researching this as I write it - trying to nail down dates by looking for songs and events that might ring a bell. Honestly, though, back in those days I didn't pay much attention to the news unless it was earth-shattering. It turns out that one the most stunning events in history played a crucial role in recovering much of what I might have lost forever.
But that comes later. Now I've just gotta scribble down the circumstances that brought me "back" to Boston in the first place.
I started taking notes for my autobiogrophy some 26 years ago. I remember telling myself that I'd better jot down names, dates, milestones and such lest my memory be shot with age. Except for Charlie and a weak draft called "Tripods" that is too messy to show anyone yet. I have't done much in several years. So now the time has come for me to resume in earnest the story. I refuse to start from the beginning, though, and prefer to jump around, digress, and make a general mess of things as we go along.
Boston is one of the greatest places I've lived in, and one that I would have gladly gone back to and settled down in. It's a little late for that now, however - one can't move across the street these days for less than a couple of grand. (pub 020109)
2 – Setting Out Round One
I think the only reason I remember setting out from Costa Mesa because it was so damn hot. I think it was August of 1962. I had left school early – just before graduation would have been in May. I had a small cardboard suitcase with leatherette veneer. In it were a pair of jeans, some shirts, socks and underwear; nothing of sentimental value whatsoever.
My destination was vague at best, which was probably best. I knew that I would first go to Saint Petersburg, Florida, to visit my biological father, Carleton Wing. I might have been thinking that he would welcome me with open arms and help me re-start my life. The fact that I was wrong about that would turn out to be a good thing, more or less.
I remember a few things about my first cross-country trek, which would be the first of seven such adventures by thumb.
My first stop was for a weekend in Phoenix, where one of my high school friends had moved to earlier in the year. They were good hosts, and dusted me off as I returned to the road.
The only ride I recall was with a family of 4 in a beat up old Ford sedan. And the only reason I remember this one ride so well is because the adults were very nice people to have picked up a stranger on the road, even though there were two small children traveling with them. That was the problem – two small children who cried a lot, no, incessantly, for the entire time I was in that car. I got let out in San Antonio very late at night. I must have walked the entire length of the town, but the only thing I remember about it was being lost in what seemed to be a farmer's market area where, just as dawn was breaking, the sky became filled with bats. It was scary as hell.
The next real memory was encountering segregated drinking fountains in Louisiana. There were no black people back home in Costa Mesa. In fact, I never saw a black person until I was 14, in juvenile hall. My reaction to seeing drinking fountains marked "White Only" and "Negroes Only" was one of curiosity, not outrage – that would come further down the road.
The person who gave me a ride into New Orleans gave me money for a bus ticket to Saint Petersburg. Wow. That was nice. What a relief. My wisdom teeth were acting up and I was in throbbing pain and misery. While on the bus a Negro woman recommended that I take apart a cigarette and press it to the problem area. So I did and so what for. Ouch.
I found my father's house in Saint Pete and knocked on the door. What a dreamer I was. He was shocked to see me, of course, as I had not called in ahead. Instead of welcoming me in, and letting me catch him up on things since we last saw each other 13 years earlier, he introduced me to Debbie and David Wing (who were my half-siblings) as a friend of my brother. His wife, Ruth, who was my step father's ex wife, was even more prepared to reject me than Carleton. She let me know that I cold stay over one night only and then be on my way. She washed all my clothes, so I would have clean stuff on my back. But she made sure that I would not be grateful, as she poured bleach on everything.
Amazingly, I found this in the 1962 Costa Mesa High yearbook
it's me wearing the same shirt that got ruined in Florida
This is what I looked like at the start of this journey
To be fair, I had arrived completely unannounced. I don’t know what I expected from that surprise visit on the way to finding my roots and what all else that I didn’t yet know I had set out to o find. But one thing I absolutely didn’t expect was to be treated as, and introduced to my own relatives as, a casual friend of my very own brother. It hurt so much that I could not even feel it at the time. That would come later.
And it was years later I would learn that my brother Sparkie (Carleton Wing Jr.) had by great coincidence, telephoned the Wing home while I was there. He and our sister Alaine were in Massachusetts together for a reunion, and Sparkie wanted to know if she could come with him to Florida and stay with his family for a day or so. His request was denied, and it wasn't until Alaine's 1991 wedding and it's accompanying family reunion that the whole story would come out. (pub 021509)
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3 – Lunch at the Drugstore
Before I start on this, I should let you know that in good times or in bad I am mildly retarded (I think that's the word I need to use, anyway), more than somewhat naive, and totally ill-equipped to live a normal, useful life. When my senses are assaulted I usually react in stunned silence. Rarely, if ever, to I strike back or react in any sensible manner. That is why I manage to submerge many of the rough spots, even today. Being innately shy and overly sensitive, I react in stunned silence to just about everything. Thus it may appear to some that I am slow on the uptake. Well, duh, I am, and at least have an inkling why. It is for all these reasons that I didn't cry upon my rejection from the Wing clan in Saint Petersburg. I didn't cry then and I haven't cried about it yet, unless you count the times when I cry about other stuff – during which times it is possible that I lump all the stuff I should've cried about into the background of whatever the current session might be. Now, there are exceptions. I have cried plenty over the loss of my friends Randy Turner (2005), Peggy Noden (1967), Nancy Crumpton (2008). And then there was the time when I cried in public – a lot – during some excruciatingly depressing times in the 1980s, when I couldn't cross a bridge without thinking about jumping off..
The reason I'm bringing this angle up at this point in the story is to explain why I don't generally lash out, hit back, or argue. I just react in shock and sort things out later, at which time (later, that is) I will find an appropriate (or not) response.
Oh – Did I Digress?
I guess I must be nuts. Can't even unspin a story without talking about myself.
So – In shock or not – I made my way from the Wing place to "somewhere else" – in this case a certain drugstore on Pinellas Beach that was operated by a very southern widow.
I took a city bus to Clearwater, but couldn’t find Peggy’s mom. Didn’t know where Peg was living back home in Newport Beach. Couldn’t find anyone. Why didn’t I call Marge? She always knew where everyone was.
In 1962 (and even today, in many good American towns) it was not just places like Woolworth's and W. T. Grant's that sold a variety of merchandise and featured good old fashioned lunch-counter food. Austin still has Nau's – two locations – wooden floors, ramshackle stocking – staffed by the friendly and the cantankerous alike.
In Costa Mesa, where I was raised, there was Pink's Drugstore downtown. There wasn't much of a downtown back then and Pink's wasn't much of a drugstore. But they had malts and aspirin and probably bobby pins and other what used to be called notions. Nostrums and notions and light meals. Those were the days. And Mr. Pink was a person. A stereotype, no less. Like any such small town druggist who might be depicted in any movie depicting any era depicting any locale other than Gotham City. I don't remember if Pink's had real food, but I definitely remember having cherry Cokes, ice cream by the cone or in good old fashioned shakes, malts, sundaes and banana splits.
I'll never remember the name of the Pinellas Beach version of Pink's, but that's where I stopped for a bite, knowing full well that I didn't have a penny to my name. Pollyanna. Yes. Some people have described me as such. Well, whatever. I can take it. Been called Polly Pure Heart, too. (Remember that my second given name was Paul.)
So I ordered a hamburger or grilled cheese, or maybe something even more extravagant. Just like in the movies (Our Gang?) I firmly believed that I could confess to having no money and offer to wash dishes to pay for the meal.
Guess what – the lady needed some help around the place. (pub 021509)
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If You’ll Just Wait Outside
I discovered the closest best gulf-coast beaches were over in Pinellas, an Clearwater offshoot. Hung around at the shore. Couldn’t fathom why there was hardly a ripple, much less a wave, attached to the gulf that stretched out before me. Listless waters, lapping the shore. This was not at all the kind of beach I’d even cross the street to see. But in Pinellas I found one of those drugstore-sundryshop-lunch counter places that used to be such a big part of the American culture. I ordered a burger, fries and a malt. Didn’t have any money, and knew it. And I accepted the proprietress’ (yes, darlings, there was an occasion for any kind of genderization you could dream up) job offer. I became her dishwasher, clean-up, errand boy and rehabilitation crusade.
I’d been at it less than an hour when a boy about 13 years old came in and asked to buy a hot dog. The proprietress replied, “Yes, that’s fine, boy, now if you’ll just wait outside, this fellow will bring it on out to you there.”
I think I felt worse about that awful exchange than I did just two days before at Carlton and Ruth’s.
Fran was a friend of the sundry-shop owner. For all their adult lives they attended together Sunday morning services and Sunday and Wednesday night Vespers. Fran had an extra room I could have while she and my boss laid out plans for my rehabilitation.
I stayed there for only a couple of weeks. One day at the beach I met two boys a little bit older than me. They were from Indiana and they’d hitched to the Coast for summer adventure. I took them home with me that night. Fran was probably so upset that she could only welcome the strangers. She fed us and went to bed early so we could have the living room to ourselves. After television signed off, all three of us slept in my bed. One of the boys was like me. Whatever “like me” was, he was. The quizzical look he gave me told me so, even more than the way he snuggled me all through the night. I hesitated when he—they—invited me to hitch back to Indiana with them, and in that hesitant moment he glanced hurridly to his pal, who then doubled and redoubled the invitation, until I simply could not refuse. We broke the news to Fran, who was secretly glad we were going. She could happily go back to her peaceful routine. Our leaving bequeathed to her pride that she’d opened her life, as a favor to her life-long church-going chum and as a signal that it wasn’t an impossible challenge to take in a stranger who needed the shelter her peaceful life had attained. Fran drove us by the drugstore where I got two weeks pay and a big bag of food items, sundries and such, so we’d have what we’d need on the road. These were nice people. Nice white people. I have a hunch they wouldn’t go into it screaming when at last integration became the law of the land.
It was still not even 8:00 in the morning when Fran dropped us by the highway. She protectively waited in her car until we got our first ride.
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Oak Ridge Tennessee
It took us a couple of days to hitch to an over-night stop at an uncle’s house in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The boy whose uncle it was gave us a tour of that once itty-bitty town that the Manhattan Project Built into a city. The strongest memory I took away with that tour was of row-upon-row of tar paper shacks, tar paper houses where most Colored’s lived in Oak Ridge, a city divided almost exactly in two. Half mainstreet and half shantytown. The boys didn’t seem to be racist. They’d grown up in suburban-Indianapolis, in surroundings similar to mine in Orange County. Most of us Costa Mesans never had contact with Blacks, simply because there were no blacks living nearby. These boys were from a white, upper-class suburb of Indianapolis. Their intimacy with Blacks was about as deep as was mine. [I did not see a Negro up close until I was at least 15 years old.] And that kind of estrangement was a spiritual blessing, for most of us never would harbor deep racist views. And yet because Blacks were a completely unknown quantity, we could not help but feel that about them, first, there was something to feel bad about the way they’d been treated and were still being treated. And, second, that there was some unknown facet to our feelings about Blacks; perhaps the edges of fear, but probably more closely related to a trepidatious caution as we began to accept them into our psyche.
All of this is pretty much based on an instinctual feeling I had about us during that summer.
So the shanty-town vista found the three of us on common ground: we were not blind to social injustice and we were intelligent enough to discuss the integration movement and share some of our darker feelings, getting them into the light. Here in Oak Ridge I had found without knowing it, a fairly big hunk of the puzzle I’d be putting together a year or two more down the line. Kind of like the low-Richter temblors that seismologists call foreshocks, foreshadowing increasingly vigorous shakes.
That night as we all tried to get some sleep, I found myself trying to snuggle with the other boy, the one who was not quite like me and not quite like his friend. And at the same time that he pushed me away he guided me ever-so-gently over to him. It was apparent that these boys were very close friends, so close that their discovery of sexual preferences that bore no threat at all. These boys had been friends since they shared the same play-pen. And they were exceptionally nice to me and very supportive. Without talking it out they instinctively helped me get through a terrifying time. I was so scared, so unsure; yet they had a better idea than I did of what was my true situation.
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Resting in the Heartland
I don't remember the boys' names, but now I've decided to name one of them "Greg," while the other will remain "the boy" or "his friend" or "the older boy." I feel it is only polite, considering that Greg and I had more than a few sexual encounters. Oh but we were so young. We knew nothing about being boyfriends, or even if boys actually even had boyfriends of this kind.
I stayed with Greg at his parent’s home in America’s heartland, just a ten minute drive to Indianapolis. Their home was by far the largest and most modern that I’d ever seen. No matter how freely we roamed through its rooms, it seemed we were always the only ones there. A lifestyle I’d encounter many times later on. But this for me was like some kind of rags-to-riches dream, even though neither riches nor rags had anything to do with it.
Greg’s family was Jewish, and that was another first for me. But the only reason I knew it was because Greg and his friend led me through special preparations the day leading up to a triple date into town. Me on a date. That was almost something new. Another set of feelings welled up inside me, like dawn that comes thundering down from horizons: this whole experience with the Indiana boys—caring for me, were two subtle and forceless mentors who were pretty good hands at it, too, even though it was all intuitively done, not intellectually planned—quite unlike the date preparations would be. In the strongest nice way they ordained that by the time we’d pick up our dates I would be so convincingly Jewish, that my date, and theirs, would in a minute find me acceptable to be acceptable companion for the typical Saturday date. The teenage American dream. Cruising the main drag, having burgers delivered by their roller-skating peers who were lucky enough to have summer jobs, let alone to be working at one of the brightest lit American icons—the busiest drive-in with the best burgers in town.
I'll paraphrase the leading-up-the-date prep-talk. Okay, so now I was Jewish, the first step toward becoming Myra’s first date. Since Myra was very religious, I should be pretty religious as well. I wondered if I should tell her where I went to church. “Not church, Temple. Jews go to Temple. Saturdays are holy. You love to play soccer, not football. You don’t wear a Yalmuka because it just isn’t cool. You don’t have a girlfriend, you were adopted by elderly people who gave you $50 and suggested you spend the summer discovering America. Jews don’t eat pork, I hope you know that (I didn’t), and Myra, especially Myra never says the word God outside of prayer. She’s never said anything stronger than ‘darn’ and she’ll slug you if you use any cuss words.” I held back the admission that I didn’t know any Jewish people. But now, and for several years thereafter, I’d practically become Jewish by association. Growing up in Costa Mesa, as close as it is to Los Angeles, might as well be on the moon when it comes to having windows from which to view the legacy of America’s melting pot.
Our date was anticlimactic. Myra didn’t like me and I didn’t like her. I was “strange” and she let me know it. I kept my mouth shut for most of the night, and Myra decided she didn’t want to go to the movie we’d planned on seeing. She had to be up early for some religious reason that I was certain she’d made up. But Greg assured me that, as strange as it may seem, Myra actually lived every day with one eye on a calendar that listed even the most obscure observations.
The boys were sorry about organizing this date. It was an early night for everyone.
Greg’s persistent nuzzling woke me from a deep sleep which I pretended to return to while he took advantage of me in his own very sweet way.
But school was about to begin, and I had to get on my way. Greg drove me to the highway. He smiled at me fondly and touched me as if to say “this touch is a kiss.” He was openly sad to be seeing me off, while I was still in some kind of shock, trying to assimilate so many new and good experiences that these boys had so gracefully shared. Trying to figure out what some of those experiences really meant. This was not a love affair. We didn't have passionate sex. We certainly never kissed. But all the unsaid stuff had resonance. Those three weeks in Indiana gave me rest from the emotional fury that defined my family ties. Untied. (pub 100309)
End of Chapter - Go To Part Two
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