Chapter 38 Private Lessons
My desires to get away from my abusive mother sent me running away and into endless amount of trouble. I had been arrested numerous times by the time I turned 13, and she had enough. She called my dad and made arrangements for me to go live with him in the upper peninsula of Michigan at the Air Force Base where he was stationed. Dad returned from his second tour of Vietnam and had been sent to the 46th Air Refueling Squadron where he worked with the KC-135 Stratotanker. He picked me up in Arkansas during Christmas break from school, and we drove back to the base in the freezing weather. The snow was already knee deep when we arrived at K.I Sawyer Air Force Base. I remember thinking I would never have to go to school. For a southern boy growing up in Arkansas, snow meant no school. The state and cities have small budgets for winter weather, and when snow falls, most everything shuts down until it melts.
Life goes on in the northern states no matter the weather. Base kids attended school in a small town named Gwinn. The elementary, middle and high school campuses were all within walking distance of each other. When school resumed after the holiday break, I was a little shy of my surroundings in the middle school. I was teased some for my southern accent, but I was a pretty big kid, so no real hassles came my way in the beginning. Jokes about how I talked came from the locals more than the base kids. They were more traveled and understanding of the world outside of Gwinn.
Within a couple of weeks, I started to become friends with a few of the base kids and some of the locals, but there was something between the base and the local kids that kept them from befriending each other. Occasionally, there would be a fight or shoving match between the two groups. “Big Mike Shaw,” a local, was a giant compared to his comrades. He was the bully who tried to keep the base kids in line while I was there. We had a couple of run-ins but nothing major because I knew to stay away from him. Some years later I was working a show in Atlanta, Georgia, and I ran into him. He was working as a stagehand. We had some good laughs about Gwinn. Small world we live in.
Gwinn was a unique American small town that survived mainly in the shadows of the base. Federal money helped the town with schools and other things. I met the school bus in the mornings at the corner of Voodoo and Dart streets. I lived on Dart, which was named after the fighter jets that were stationed at the base. (The 106 Delta Dart Aircraft are no longer in use.) Those bus drivers made their pickups every morning no matter what the weather was doing. Some mornings it would be snowing so much you wouldn’t see the bus until it pulled right up to you.
Tucked on a corner about a half-mile from school was Gemma’s Sub Shop, a popular lunch spot. In my first year there, Gemma’s moved down across the street from the high school, and we made trails there several times a week. In the early ’70s, there were no sub shops in the South, or at least not in Arkansas. Gemma’s had more than 50 different kinds of sandwich combinations, even a peanut butter and jelly one. I loved eating there.
I discovered that the cool kids would head over to an old bar called The Gwinn Inn during lunch. Kids would gather around and play the pool tables in the back. The bartender would sell and heat prepackaged hamburgers and chips. Around noon only a couple of the locals would be there drinking, and no one seemed to mind the kids being there. The jukebox only had a couple of pop songs on it with the rest being polkas and country. Every day when the lunch crew got to the bar, the pop songs were loaded into the lineup. It must have driven the bartender crazy to hear the same songs over and over. Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” “Reason to Believe” and “Mandolin Wind” were on that jukebox, and they became some of my first anthems.
An old bowling alley was around the corner, and Forchini’s Grocery Store was across the main street that went through Gwinn. One of the Forchini daughters was in my grade. I had such a crush on her. She was friendly to me, but she knew that like most base kids, I wouldn’t be around long term. I could never get her attention. I eventually started liking a girl named Kathy, a base kid like me. Dad had never given me “the talk,” and one day after some heavy petting in my bedroom, she said something to my dad on the way out.
“You need to have a talk with your son,” she said. Pretty fucking embarrassing, huh?
One night just before my 14th birthday, Dad came home with a tall, slender black man named J.T. with a younger white woman in her early- to mid-twenties. At the time, I thought the girl was J.T.’s girlfriend. While dad and J.T. were talking in the living room, the girl looked at me.
“Why don’t you show me your room?” she said.
I thought she was bored with the men’s conversations, so I took her upstairs to show her my model cars. Before too long while we were sitting on my bed talking about various things, she leaned over and kissed me. The unexpected kiss scared the crap out of me. My first thought was that J.T., who was two ranks above my dad, would beat my ass. She assured me it was all right, and we continued. As she continued to kiss me, she undid her shirt and unhooked her bra. Her breasts seemed huge and like nothing I had ever seen or touched. She guided me to kiss her nipples, and I was overwhelmed with excitement and confusion. I was still nervous, but after a few minutes or so, I started thinking she liked me more than ol’ J.T. with some of the things she was saying.
I was too apprehensive and nothing else happened, so she finally went downstairs, and she and J.T. left.
The next night she returned with J.T. and came up to my room again. As she closed the door, she turned toward me and removed her shirt. She quickly undressed me, led me to the bed and started giving me a blowjob. I will never forget that first one. I was so scared J.T. was going to come up to the room, but he never did. As she undressed me, she teased me and played with me throughout the entire encounter. She was so patient with me and did all the things boys dream of, even a few things a boy couldn’t imagine. This girl knew how to “honk a bobo.”
After she finished with me, we got dressed. As we were leaving the room she explained that my dad and J.T. didn’t have to know what we had done. I felt weird as we walked downstairs. I couldn’t look at J.T., but he and my dad were grinning from ear to ear making little comments. They knew.
Some years later, I confronted my dad about what had happened that night, and all he would say was “Happy Birthday.” He did say it was an expensive present, but he felt it was money well spent. After that, I didn’t have too many problems with girls.
Chapter 39 The Not So Great Escape
My dad was sent overseas on what the Air Force calls TDY, Temporary Duty, for four to six months in Germany. That left me with my stepmother, who I was not getting along with very well, even when Dad was around. After several months of staying with her, it was obvious she had no parenting skills.
I had befriended a kid my age whose father was a civilian employee of the base. For some reason, Bobby had started losing his hair at 14 years of age, and he made as much fun of himself as the other kids did. He was funny with his jokes about baldness, calling himself “Chrome Dome.” Bobby and I hung out just about every day talking about chicks, the turbulent times in our society and mostly how we hated the cold weather.
One day during lunch, he invited me to go with him and a few others behind Gemma’s to a wooded area with several other kids we knew. When we got into the woods, someone pulled a joint of weed out and lit it up.
I had never smoked marijuana at that point, but I knew all about it from the fear factor that was being tossed around. Still, I didn’t hesitate when the joint was handed to me. The weed was simple compared to some of today’s varieties, and I was so nervous, I don’t think I actually got high. Bobby knew someone from Marquette, Michigan, who had access to it, so it became almost a regular trip behind Gemma’s at lunch hour each day. As winter progressed our conversations varied about girls, weed and how we hated being stuck in Gwinn.
Sometime after my 14th birthday, my dad bought me a car, an old Plymouth Valiant that was black. The day we went to look at the car, I was surprised that Dad had a
car for me on his mind. He had been teaching me to drive for years. I had actually been driving my Dad’s car since I was 12. He found it in the paper, and when we went to look at it, I was just thinking it was going to be for him. The Valiant had a red interior with a six-cylinder motor and a push button transmission on the dash. It had several mechanical problems, nothing too serious, that my dad said we would fix together. Little did I know at the time that there was a different lesson in store for me with that car.
One night when Dad came in from work, I was standing in the hall. “Dad, some n****r stopped by here to see you a few minutes ago.”
In the blink of an eye, he grabbed me by the throat and threw me to the floor. He landed on top of me with his knee on my chest. His entire weight was on me, which seemed a lot even though I was slightly taller than him by that age. He slapped me a couple of times and got down into my face so I could feel his breath.
Living in the South, that word is frequently spoken, and I heard it a lot in my mother’s house. The history of that word and what it means to so many people was lost on me until my dad drove the point home with his knee.
“If you ever say that word again, I won’t stop beating your ass!” He didn’t stop there. He punched me a few more times and sent me to my room.
He was very angry with me, and I could see spit coming out of his mouth as he dispatched me to my room and I ran up the stairs.
A little while later, Dad appeared in my room calm as ever. I was lying on the bed still hurting and whimpering when my dad started to explain why he became upset when I uttered that word.
“The fair meaning of a person isn’t his color but who he is. When you start to realize that, son, all people will become more important to you. I was in Vietnam with everyone of all races dodging bullets and hiding in bomb bunkers. We all lived with sniper and mortar threats. Everyone shared the same fear. We are all the same! We’re all the same, no matter the color of our skin. Our family is not racist.”
Many of his Air Force work friends who came to our house were of a different race. I didn’t speak that word anymore, and I gave new consideration to the entire subject.
One of the things I took from that night was how my dad had just lunged at me at the drop of a syllable and assaulted me. It was very close to how my mother would react when she attacked me. I thought that I had gotten away from that, and it would never happen again. I was very disappointed about it. Now I started developing ideas about escaping before the abuse became daily ritual. Bobby and I were talking about it, and I had all but decided to leave in my new car. We talked about heading out to California. He said he wanted to get away from his problems too, and we made a plan.
When the time came, I snuck my things into my car after Dad had gone to work. At dark, I headed down to Johnson Lake near Gwinn to pick up Bobby, and our plans were to head west. Bobby chickened out. It became a weird scene, me trying to convince him to go. It really threw a kink in my plans. I had already left, and it wouldn’t be long before it was discovered, so I decided to go it alone.
With my car loaded down, I drove up to Marquette to catch the highway west toward Minnesota. But on Highway 28 close to Michigamme, Michigan, my car broke down. The drive shaft fell out of it and started dragging on the ground. I got it off the road when a Michigan State trooper came upon me. Busted! No license and all my shit in the car. He took me to Michigamme and called my dad. They didn’t lock me up, but we waited for hours to pass until my dad arrived.
I was very nervous that a beat down was about to occur, but it never came. I lost the car of course, and I was assigned to years of restriction, but there was no beat down. Of course doing the restriction time was kicking my ass. Just spending time in my room after school, doing chores and putting up with the grief of my stepmother was torture. Bobby and I were still friends, but it seemed we were on a different level. The winter kept us indoors a lot, and one day while grabbing a sandwich at Gemma’s, Bobby once again brought up the subject of leaving. I told him since he had abandoned our plans at the last second, I didn’t believe he was serious this time. He assured me he was ready, and with much reservation, we started to plan another escape. I was determined that I wouldn’t be caught this time. While making plans, we decided we would head to Florida.
In the ’70s, many small-town car dealers would put the keys to the cars in the ignition each morning so customers could start them and check them out. I don’t know when I had discovered this, but it seemed to be a common practice of most dealers. After a lot of discussion and making plans, we set a date, and Bobby assured me he was in this time.
On the day we were going to put our plan into action, I skipped school and hitched into Marquette to find a car. I ended up at the Ford dealership, and where the used cars were parked, I spotted a black 1971 Mustang. The car was loaded with all the options one could get including a 351 Cleveland engine with a four-barrel carburetor and automatic transmission. It even had an eight-track tape player in the dash. As I read the specs, I knew this was the car that would take us to Florida. I removed the keys, and no one at the dealership even noticed my presence. I pocketed them, hitchhiked back to Gwinn and went to school, telling everyone I had overslept. When I saw Bobby and showed him the keys, he got excited and assured that he was still in.
My dad was out of the country on some temporary flying assignment. A few days before he left we had a run in. My bicycle had fallen off the porch, and my stepmother had told me to pick it up while I was out shoveling snow off the sidewalks. I had come in and forgotten. When my dad got home, my stepmother started screaming about my insubordination. My dad responded by punching me in the face with his fist, bloodying my nose and blackening my eyes. He had kicked me when I went down and was screaming various profanities at me. I didn’t think twice about leaving after that.
When it got dark, I grabbed a bunch of belongings I figured I couldn’t live without and I hitchhiked into Marquette again. It was close to 10 p.m. when I got dropped off by the Ford dealership. I walked down the street in front of the sales lot, saw the car, jumped in and fired it up. After a few seconds, I put it in gear and turned out of the lot with no one around or seeing what I was doing.
I called Bobby from a payphone in Marquette, and he said he would be at our pick-up point. His parents seemed a little annoyed when I asked to speak to him. They complained that it was way too late. When I pulled up, Bobby jumped over the snow bank with a bag of his stuff and got in. We headed east on Highways 94 and 28 to 77 and then on to Highway 2 to the Mackinaw Bridge and into the lower portion of Michigan. We had planned on going to Petoskey, Michigan, where Bobby had a girl cousin with a girlfriend. Both were to be Florida-bound with us. We pulled up in front of her mom’s house around 4 a.m. Her mom was out of town, and the girls were up and came out to greet us. They freaked over the car and were giggling about how much fun we were going to have. I hit it off with his cousin right away, making her laugh with my jokes.
We went into the house with plans to rest. We would head out when we woke up. Bobby was sweet on his cousin’s friend, and as soon as we got into the house they took off for the bedroom. I sat on the couch with his cousin and before long we were kissing and petting each other. Daylight was dawning and the TV was just coming on as the stations generally went off the air at night. The volume was low, and as I kissed her on the couch, I heard a police radio come through the TV speaker. I jumped up in a flash.
“Shit! The cops are outside!”
Sure enough, I saw a Michigan state trooper sitting behind the Mustang when I peeked out from behind the curtains. I grabbed my coat and was heading out the back door when a local Petoskey policeman came up the steps toward me with his gun drawn. He yelled, and I turned to run the other way as the trooper entered the front door. Busted again!
The trooper had noticed the car had no plates and started investigating. When he called it in, I heard his powerful radio bleed over into the TV. We all were taken to the Petoskey jail and locked up. Apparent
ly, the night watchman at the dealership had noticed the tracks in the snow not long after I left and had called it in as well. Bobby’s parents had noticed him missing and had called the police. So the perfect plan was not so perfect after all.
In the late afternoon, a policeman came to my holding cell.
“I talked to your dad, and you’re not going home.”
“What?”
“You’re going to be sent to a juvenile detention facility. He said he is giving up on you because you cannot screw up his career in the Air Force.”
Shit.
I was trying to escape my parents, and I did. But it was not what I had planned. Not at all.
Chapter 40 Another Home Wrecked
If there was any link to the life I lead now and the one I had when I was a teenager, I couldn’t think of a better one than my days at a Michigan youth home and my attempt to escape and see the country. Throughout that time, music kept me stable and the potential of travel kept me excited.
Toward the end of 1972, I had been placed in The Harbor House, a facility for youth who were not exactly welcome at home. This was in Muskegon, Michigan, just a small trip from the Upper Peninsula where I had been shipped from and a long way from Arkansas.
I had basically worn out my welcome everywhere I had been before being placed at Harbor House — running away, stealing cars, screwing up every potential foster home and even another youth home — before I got shipped there. I was still clinging to my Southern accent, and it made me stand out... really stand out. It could cause trouble, but it also was a blessing at times. People wanted to help this kid out. Go figure.
Tales from the Trails of a Rock ’n’ Roll Bus Driver Page 23