He was the paymaster and normally gave out the money in the afternoons, but on this day, for no particular reason, he decided to pay in the morning. So everyone was at one end of camp getting their money, while at the other end, a driverless, booby-trapped garbage truck was rolled into the compound and exploded. Most of the hooches where the men lived were destroyed, and the woman who cleaned the officers’ quarters was in Larry’s hooch and was killed. His quarters were destroyed. If he hadn’t decided to pay early that day, a huge number of soldiers would likely have died. Running back and finding the maid in the rubble of his quarters was horrific for Larry.
He also told stories of being out in the field for weeks, living in a tank without a shower or clean clothes, so constantly wet in the rainy season that when they finally came in to base and took off their boots, their skin came off with the socks. They always had to be alert, even when asleep, and they never could trust anyone. The man who gave you a haircut in the morning could be the one setting out booby traps at night. The Vietcong even strapped bombs to children begging for food, who would then explode in the middle of a group of men handing out candy bars. Someone might leave a lighter on a bar top one night, and the soldier who picked it up and flicked it on would have his hand blown off. No one can live like that and be the same person he was before. Larry was not one to display his emotions, even to me, and Vietnam stayed buried deep inside him, where it gnawed a big ragged hole, one he tried to ignore.
Not long after he came home, his mother died. She’d had colon cancer and had worn an ostomy bag for quite some time, but it was still a shock for us. She was a funny woman, always cracking jokes and making fun of her bag, trying to make the best of things. She had raised nine children on a farm, and was a tough old bird. She’d had a soft spot for Larry, her baby boy, and he loved her a lot.
We and several other members of the family were in the hospital waiting room, taking turns going in to sit with her. Matt was a baby, and I was trying to amuse him while we waited. The doctors had told us Larry’s mother didn’t have long, but somehow we couldn’t accept that—as one never does, I suppose. Her daughter was in the room with her, holding her hand when she died. It was frightening, and of course the daughter ran out into the hallway calling for the nurses and doctors, who came running with the crash cart, put the paddles on her chest, and shocked her back to life. It was so insane. They knew she was going to die, she had no hope, but they just wouldn’t let her go. Doctors seem to look upon every death as a personal failure, when it is just simply nature. We don’t play God when we take terminal patients off life support; we play God when we put them on it.
After she came around, we all crowded into the room, crying and nervous, but she was calm and peaceful. “I lifted up out of this bed and went to the most beautiful place,” she told us, with a faraway look on her face, “where there were flowers in colors I never saw before, and there were trees and creeks that were like the ones here, except a hundred times better. I can’t even describe them. I was on a path walking through this beautiful country, and I felt so good. I didn’t have any pain at all, I had a lot of energy. I felt young. Across the path was a fence, and behind the fence were my mother and daddy and my relatives and all my friends who have already died. They were so happy to see me and I was happy to see them, and just before I got to the fence, I was jerked back here. Please don’t let them do that to me again. I want to go back. I’m not afraid. I want to go.”
We were all dumbfounded. I had only ever heard of one other near-death experience. They weren’t widely written about yet, and the other person I knew who’d had one was my uncle B.F., my daddy’s brother, who said almost the same thing when he was on the operating table having heart surgery. His heart stopped, and he saw his mother, and he was never afraid of dying again after that.
It was strangely comforting for all of us, what my mother-in-law said. A couple of days later she died again, and this time they let her go. Her death opened up a whole new world for me, if what she said was true, and I do believe it was. Death wasn’t the scary hell and judgment scenario the preachers had always told us about. It was lovely and loving, just as I’d always hoped it would be.
Nevertheless, the death was hard on Larry, just coming from Vietnam a few months before. I tried to comfort him, but I didn’t know how, and he was never much good at talking about feelings. He went to bed and stayed there, turning his back to me and sleeping until two or three in the afternoon, then eating, watching a little TV, and going to bed early at night. It was worse than the darkest times he’d had at Fort Campbell. Nothing interested him except hunting and fishing. Maybe it was a cure of sorts, spending long solitary days in the woods alone. It was an escape, and I guess he needed one.
Matt came down with a bad chest cold that the doctor said turned into pneumonia. While we were in the doctor’s office, the baby threw up and aspirated his vomit, and the doctor hustled me out of the room. I sat outside for what seemed like an hour, as nurses rushed in and out. I tried to get someone to at least tell me if he was alive or dead, but no one would talk to me. Finally, they let me see him and he was more or less okay. After a while they let me take him home, but for that whole night we had to sit up with him and take his temperature every half hour. If it went above a certain number, we would have had to take him to the hospital. Larry had planned a hunting trip for that night, and to my horror, he went, leaving me alone with the baby. Maybe it was a way to handle the pressure. I can’t judge him now, although at the time I certainly did. I called my mother and daddy, who came over and stayed up with me, and thank God the baby’s temperature never went too high and he recovered.
Although I was only twenty-three, I felt like I was as old as my parents, and saw nothing stretching ahead for me except more years of the same—getting older, working for a low wage, and watching my husband constantly go out the door, to work or hunting or fishing, shutting me out of his life.
Larry and I were just two different species. He found peace in his solitude, living in his own head, spending hours alone fishing or hunting, while guns scared me and I was repelled by the dead things he brought home. I needed life. I wanted to have fun. I was young.
We both adored our baby son, but we’d met as children and had grown up into two totally different people. We were never going to be compatible, and an unhappy mother and father weren’t good for Matthew. Or for us. As strange as this sounds, I always felt, in some part of me, that I was just marking time until my real life started. The breakup was my fault. I take total responsibility, but I got to the point that I felt like I was going to smother and die if I didn’t get out of the marriage. I left him in October of 1973, and the divorce was final in February of 1974.
I was finally free.
Ten
Larry went back to school and became a senior nuclear operations manager for Arkansas Power and Light, a job he did until he retired, and he remarried a few months after our divorce to a woman with two children, although they never had any together.
I applied for and got a full-time high school art teaching job at Russellville High School in the fall of 1973. I loved Russellville. It was where I had gone to Tech and was much closer to my mother, so taking Matthew there every day was easier. There were two thousand students in the high school, there was more space, more money, and I even had the luxury of a working artist in residence, Polly Loibner, who was a local TV celebrity. She had her own studio where she gave demonstrations and worked with the kids in watercolor and puppetry.
My methods of teaching were the same as in Clarksville, music and no written tests, and the kids loved it. The only worm in the apple was the principal—let’s call him Chip—who was a former football coach and didn’t understand what art was good for when the money could be better spent on new uniforms for the football team. As an added bonus, he hated hippies with a passion, which of course was what most of my students aspired to be. He told me I couldn’t wear jeans to class, I had to wear dresses, and I nicel
y explained it was hard to do that when I had to work with clay on the wheel, or crawl around on the floor, but he was adamant, so I openly defied him, which didn’t help things.
I bought myself and Matthew, then two, a three-bedroom house in Russellville, and I used one of the bedrooms as a studio for my easel and paints. The house had a big backyard and I got Matt a red-and-green swing set. We had a fig tree that produced huge ripe figs. Matt loved to help me mow the yard, and we planted marigolds and zinnias.
Matthew liked to watch me paint, so I set up a little art table for him in my studio. He liked my oil paints in the tubes better, and once he took a tube of burnt sienna and rubbed it all over his body and clothes. I’m sure the neighbors thought I was abusing him, because he screamed bloody murder when I had to put him in the tub and scrub the paint off with turpentine. We smelled for days. But he didn’t give up wanting to be an artist.
I had done a commissioned pencil portrait (for twenty-five dollars, real money) of a friend of mine on his motorcycle, which took several days, and as I had it lying out on the table ready to be wrapped and sent, Matthew got a crayon, climbed up on the chair, and “improved” it. After I redrew the portrait, to my horror the same scenario happened all over again, even though I’d just stepped away from the table for a minute to get some tape, but this time he only had a pencil and I stopped him before he did too much damage, and I could fix it. I knew then he was going to be some kind of artist. (When he was four, he drew several human figures, some of which were smaller than the others. He pointed it out to me and said, “These small ones are the same size. They just look small because they are far away.” The concept of perspective was a difficult one, even to some of my high school kids, and I’d never seen such a young child understand it quite like that.)
Matt under the fig tree.
The kids from my class quickly made our home their headquarters. I would probably be thrown in jail today, but I let them keep bottles of Boone’s Farm wine in my fridge, and they got so comfortable with me that one of the girls pulled out a bag of pot one night and proceeded to clean the seeds and twigs out of it. I didn’t quite know what to do. I didn’t want to seem prim or preachy, but I was uncomfortable. So I just asked her not to smoke in the house because of the baby. I had never tried pot myself, but I didn’t want to push the limits of the teacher-pupil relationship too far. We had great evenings sitting on the floor eating spaghetti, talking, and listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Doobie Brothers, Jethro Tull, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, and the Stones. For me, music ended when punk rock took over, but that’s what every generation thinks. I can hear “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers today and I’m right back there in my hand-embroidered bell-bottoms and long straight hair, living the life.
Me and Bruce, a visiting potter, in art class.
I had, of course, started to date, this time having no intention of ever getting married or going steady again. One guy I was seeing was called John Cool, a bass player who was in a band at the Ramada Inn and had long black hair, a beard, and a day job running a used-car lot named Mountain Motors. He paid some of my students to make a hand-carved sign for his business, complete with flowers and peace signs, which I counted as an art project for them. He was divorced from Cathy, another hippie who owned a head shop called the CAT. John Cool and Cathy and I all got along, and she sold my paintings, as well as paid me to paint a mural on the walls of her shop. It turned out pretty well, and made me all fired up about murals, so I got my gang of students and we painted one on the walls of my bedroom, bright enamel trees and flowers, sun and moon, peace signs and stars, a blue sparkling river flowing through it all. The room had orange shag carpet, and one of my boyfriends—he was named Wild Bill; he grew pot and looked like an extremely relaxed version of James Coburn—gave me his old water bed, where little Matt and I slept snuggled together every night, lulled by the cool water.
Matt and me in our studio.
Jean Jewell, my old friend from Tech, lived a few blocks from me on the second floor of an antebellum house. The place had a veranda that stretched all around it, pots of flowers and vines growing everywhere, honeybees buzzing around them in the sweet sunlight, and a porch swing with soft faded cotton quilts to laze around on. She had an ancient pickup truck and would go into the woods to find roots and plants and other natural ingredients for her famous stews. One night several friends had to go to the hospital with food poisoning, but nobody blamed her. She was a true earth mother, the first in town to wear earth shoes, cook organic, and try to save the world from pollution. We and a few other friends convinced her boyfriend to pose naked for us, and we had a drawing class in her apartment every week, which was great fun.
Jean and I went to all the arts and crafts fairs, where I did pencil portraits for five dollars each, and Jean sold her clay pots. We took pictures of each other (sometimes nude) in the woods, standing in a brook or in a tree, or through the open windows of a deserted house. We painted and thought we were great artists. I dragged Matthew along to most things, or my mother would keep an eye on him when I couldn’t.
Matthew and me in an old house. Photo taken by Jean Jewell Moreno.
He was a good boy most of the time—except, like his mother when she was a little girl, he thought it was great fun to run off and hide from me. He did it once in McCain Mall in Little Rock, and I almost went crazy, chasing him through the mall, screaming his name, going into every store. I was about to call the police when I spotted a pair of small red tennis shoes peeking out from under a rack of dresses. I wanted to swat his little behind, but didn’t, I was so relieved to find him. I paid for my raising, as my mother used to say, and wished sometimes I could just put him on a leash. But he grew out of that, thank goodness, and I have nothing to complain about with either of my boys. Neither of my sons has ever said one bad word to me. The worst thing I ever said to them was “Don’t make me have to say ‘Don’t’ to you” or “I’m going to count to three, and then you had better stop that.” When he got older, Matthew once asked me what I would have done to them if they hadn’t stopped, and I answered, “I don’t know. I never got to three.”
People assume I came to New York with Norman because I was dying to get out of Arkansas, but that is simply not true. I loved it there, and was having the time of my life. True to my vow never to go steady again, I had a string of boyfriends, none of them serious. I was seeing a guy named Gary with long blond hair and a thick golden beard, who worked as a potter at Silver Dollar City, a theme park in the Ozarks, and did beautiful work on the wheel. He had a VW van with flowers and peace signs painted on it and a mattress in the back, which was most convenient for going camping. I was also seeing Dick, a lawyer who at thirty-two was the oldest man I had ever dated. He was divorced with two children, and was a golf nut who took me to the country club for nice dinners and formal dances. There was another potter, Bruce, who had studied with the famous Bernard Leach in England; John Cool; Wild Bill; and a few other guys. Some I slept with, at least a time or two, and some I didn’t. (It was the golden era of the late sixties and early seventies, after the pill was invented and before AIDS, when sleeping with someone was almost like shaking hands.)
I was a painter, so when my art class would start a new project, if I could, I would coerce my friends who were more adept in the other art mediums into giving a demonstration. I also made an arrangement with the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, and they sent several artists a year to give workshops for free. (Bruce, mentioned and pictured earlier, was one.) It was always a treat when one of them came. One well-known potter named Scott came to do a demonstration, and apparently I had neglected to tell Chip the date Scott would be there. He drove up in his flower-painted van and parked in the faculty parking lot. He was the walking definition of a hippie—a little on the heavy side, blond hair down to his shoulders, a mustache, and little dirty round glasses. His clothing had a few layers of clay built up on it, and I imagined the shirt and pants stood quietly upright besi
de his bed at night, waiting for him to step into them in the morning. The kids were awed by him, and were fascinated to see the way the clay effortlessly came to life through his hands. Then good ol’ Chip stormed into the room and yelled at me, “What’s this hippie doing here? I’m not going to have any dirty hippies in this school, you hear me? Why wasn’t I consulted about this?” He had seen the van in the parking lot and had rightly assumed I had something to do with it.
I tried to explain that Scott was sent by the Arts Center, which was paying him, and I had indeed told him at the beginning of the year that the Center would be sending a series of artists at no cost to us, but Chip wouldn’t listen. He was so worked up that his face got beet-red and he yelled at Scott to get his dirty hippie self out of there. I had never been so humiliated in my life. Scott gathered his stuff and left, totally shaken. Chip—dried spittle frothing at his mouth—gave me a warning that if I ever tried to bring someone like that in again, I would be fired.
That began an all-out war between us. From then on, he waited at my door in the morning, and if I was five minutes late, he chewed me out. He would pop into my class unannounced and just stand there glowering, sending out poison gas with his presence. I continued to wear jeans, which was a huge bone of contention, and when we had our big end-of-the-year show of the students’ work, he made me take out two or three fine drawings because they were nudes—even though all you could see was crossed arms and legs, a bit of a hip, a slight suggestion of a bosom. Fortunately for me, the assistant principal, Ellis, loved me and my work and stuck up for me. The superintendent, Harvey, also liked me, so they gave me another contract at the end of the year.
A Ticket to the Circus Page 7