There was a seemingly endless silence. I stared down at my empty plate, dying for someone to say something—anything. Finally, Dad realigned his napkin, which he hadn’t even put in his lap, yet.
“Well, we appreciate your telling us, John,” he said. “This is quite a shock. None of our children has ever been arrested before. I don’t know quite what to say.”
“Do you have to go to jail?” asked Steven, wide-eyed, almost gleeful.
“No!” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.
Steven’s smile died.
“I have to do twenty hours of community service work.”
“Is this Judge Duffy’s new program for first offenders?” asked Mom, a newspaper junkie always up on what was happening in Milwaukee.
I said it was.
The word “offender” sounded so harsh. It seemed to bring home to my dad the reality of what I’d done.
“So, you just went into the bookstore and stole a book, huh? You couldn’t just wait and pay for it, the way decent people do?”
“I told you, Dad. I needed it right away. It was less than a dollar and I didn’t think the store would miss it. I needed to read it for an English test.”
“I thought you weren’t worried about tests and grades and that kind of thing? Yet, you’re ready to steal so you can do well on a test? I just can’t figure you out, son.”
“There’s nothing to figure out. It was stupid and impulsive. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“I’ll say,” said my mother. “You kids think you can do whatever you want, these days. There are some rules you have to follow, you know.”
“I did a report on shoplifting for my economics class,” said George. “Did you know that prices go up because merchants have to make up for what they lose through shoplifting? You’re not just hurting some big, rich company or institution when you shoplift, John. You’re hurting all of us— including yourself.”
For all his stodginess, George sometimes had real insight. In fact, I did justify my shoplifting, the few times I’d done it, as an almost Robin-Hood-like activity, stealing from the rich, who didn’t need it and wouldn’t miss it, and giving to the poor, in the person of myself. What he said destroyed that self-serving rationalization.
“George is right,” said my dad, in a less combative tone. “You can’t just think of yourself. Maybe your community service will help you consider others more. What are you planning to do?”
“There’s a place called the Social Action Center, down on Brady Street. They run a soup kitchen and a halfway house for runaways. I think I’ll volunteer with them. The good thing about Judge Duffy’s program is that, if you stay clean for a year afterward, you don’t have any police record.”
“You should thank God for that,” said Dad. “I just hope you’ve learned your lesson from this experience. And I hope you other kids have learned from it to. Your brother is lucky he didn’t have to go to jail. He would have had a hard time finding a job if he had a criminal record.”
Dad looked back to me and there was real tenderness in his eyes— something it seemed I hadn’t seen for a long time.
“We really appreciate your telling us about this, son. We’re not happy about it, but we’re glad you didn’t try to hide it from us. And we’re glad you’re making amends for it. Community service will do a whole lot more for you than jail, anyway.”
The rest of the meal was unusually relaxed and enjoyable. I felt closer to my dad than I’d felt for some time. I knew it wouldn’t last, but it was good to reclaim the warmth that once characterized our interactions. Sometimes I wished I was a little kid again, looking up to him as a hero, instead of seeing him as a man with questionable social, political, and religious ideas.
I slept well that night. The next day, in-between my morning and afternoon classes, I took the bus to the Social Action Center. The entrance to the building was on Brady Street. It opened onto a set of wooden steps so old they had wide grooves where people had tread on them. The steps led up to a long, narrow hallway. The Social Action Center was behind the first door on the left.
I opened the door to a large, unkempt, and sparsely furnished living room area. It had a bricked up fireplace, a threadbare, fake Oriental rug, a battered green sofa, two director’s chairs, and a huge industrial cable spool, set on its side between the sofa and chairs to serve as a coffee table. Boxes of literature lined the walls and spilled out into the room. A large bulletin board across the room from the door displayed notices and hand-scrawled notes. A bay window to the left looked out over the busy intersection of Brady and Farwell.
“Hello,” I called out.
Carl Lindstrom appeared in the doorway beside the bulletin board. He had on worn blue corduroy pants and a torn gray V-neck sweater over a yellow, button-down shirt. Again he was unshaven. And again I was struck by how thin he was, like someone with a debilitating disease.
“John,” he said warmly. “I didn’t think I’d see you here so soon.”
I was amazed—and flattered—that he remembered my name.
“Well, you got a little help from Judge Duffy. I’m here to work off my debt to society.”
“I see. Do you want to tell me what you did, or would you rather not say?”
“I don’t mind telling you about it. Can we sit down?”
“Sure. Come on into my office.”
I followed him through a small kitchen area and into a room that had once been a small bedroom. Now, it held a huge old wooden desk, piled with papers and magazines, and, along the walls, more boxes of literature. A narrow rollaway bed was tucked into a corner.
“Do you live here?” I asked.
“I do. It’s not much, but I don’t need much. And it’s free.”
“Not a bad deal.”
“No. Except on nights when there are community-organizing meetings in the living room that go on until the wee hours of the morning. I can’t go to bed until they’re out of here.”
“You rent that space for meetings?”
“Not rent, give. It’s available to anyone in the community who wants to use it for a non-commercial venture. We have everything from writing groups to communist cell meetings. It’s lively. Now, tell me about this debt to society you’re obliged to pay.”
I told him the whole story of the shoplifting arrest and its aftermath.
“I’m glad you’ve chosen to do your work with us,” said Carl, when I was done. “We can use you. Would you rather work at the soup kitchen or the halfway house? The soup kitchen is up the street, in the basement of St. Anselm’s. The half-way house is over near the tannery.”
“The soup kitchen sounds right. I’m not sure I’m old enough to handle teenage runaways.”
“We wouldn’t ask you to take charge of anything, just to help keep the place in shape and spend some time with the kids.”
“I still think the soup kitchen is better. It’s such a tangible way to help people.”
“Okay. When can you start? We serve meals every evening at 6:00. It’s a two-hour gig, so you’ll have to go ten times to cover your service hours. We can work out a schedule right now, if you want.”
“How about Mondays and Thursdays for five weeks?”
He examined the schedule.
“That will work after next week. We’ve got enough people to cover those days through then. Shall I put you down?”
I said yes and then asked him if he could answer a draft question. I said I definitely wanted to drop my student deferment, and asked what I had to do. He dug out two pieces of paper stapled together from among the piles on his desk and handed them to me. They contained instructions on writing your draft board and included a section on dropping your 2S deferment. It still made me nervous to contemplate it.
“You’re sure this will work?” I said.
“I wouldn’t advise you to do it if I wasn’t absolutely certain. Even if there’s a crisis in Vietnam, they have enough draftees still eligible under the current number to handle it. There�
�ll be no more numbers called this year.”
I stared down at the paper.
“Far out.”
6
TONY AND CLAIRE AND I were nearly inseparable over the next few months. Jonah began to be as comfortable with me as he was with his parents. They even joined me at St. Anselm’s, dishing out food for street people. Jonah would sit in a high chair at the end of the serving table while we worked. I noticed Claire looking on anxiously whenever one of the street people approached him, but, from what I saw, no one ever even touched him. They would just look at him and smile, and Jonah, who was an outgoing kid, would smile back warmly. He became the mascot of the group on Mondays and Thursdays. We enjoyed being there so much that, after my five weeks of obligatory service, we all decided to continue.
I still had strong feelings for Claire, of course, but I sublimated them. I dated other women—even brought them to Tony and Claire’s apartment—but nothing clicked with any of them. Maybe I was just going through the motions, trying to prove to myself—and perhaps to Tony— that I didn’t want Claire.
Claire, Tony, and Jonah became a surrogate family for me, and that was good, because things were deteriorating rapidly at home. After a brief hiatus, when I first started working at the soup kitchen, we went back to our old ways.
As I’d predicted, Benjamin Grob’s war against Port Publications for printing Kaleidoscope was escalating, and it became a major bone of contention between my mother and me. It wasn’t long before Port Publications was hurting from the boycott, but they refused to knuckle under to the pressure. My mother called them stubborn pornographers; I called them heroic defenders of the First Amendment. We called one another any number of unflattering names. It got ugly, much to the chagrin of my siblings, who were innocent bystanders. Even George had enough sense to keep out of that one.
The war in Vietnam was escalating, too, much to my dad’s pleasure. He believed that a full-scale invasion of the North was in order. I, of course, believed our troops should be going the other direction, leaving Vietnam to work out its own destiny. I had no illusions about the North Vietnamese. I could have accepted the U.S. aiding the South Vietnamese army, even advising its leaders—which was how we’d started out there, in the early sixties—but neither I nor any of my friends felt Americans should be drafted and forced to fight in a war that had no direct bearing on the fate of the United States.
It seemed that every time Nixon showed his homely face on TV to announce yet another escalation, Dad and I were watching together, just itching to mix it up. The usual result was a shouting match that sent my brothers and sisters scurrying for cover.
By Thanksgiving, things were intolerable. My parents and I were barely speaking to each other. My siblings tensed up the moment I walked in the door. I felt like a leper.
Somehow, at a Thanksgiving celebration with all my relatives, I ended up telling an older cousin about the situation. Jerry was a small-time architect in Chicago, a down-to-earth, practical kind of a guy. So, when he started telling me about the benefits of Transcendental Meditation, as taught by the Beatles’ guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I listened a little more closely than I would have to a lot of other people.
He told me I couldn’t change anyone but myself, so I might as well concentrate my energy there. He promised if I started meditating, I’d bring so much positive energy into the situation everyone would change as a result. He related a number of anecdotes about young people who’d seen this happen when they started meditating. He also said the learning process was simple and quick and I didn’t have to become part of any organization in order to be allowed to learn. If I wanted, I could learn the technique, then go off and meditate alone for the rest of my life.
It was appealing, the simplicity and independence. I was ready to try almost anything to ease the tension at home and inside myself. But the Beatles connection made me wonder if the Maharishi was just a publicity hound. Jerry assured me that the Beatles had approached him, and there was nothing the Maharishi could do about the press’s avid interest in them. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s the technique that’s important. It helped change my life, and it could do the same thing for you. What have you got to lose?”
As I lay in bed that night, I seriously considered trying meditation to help relieve the tension as home, but, as it happened, help arrived in another form the very next day. Tony called to inform me that he and Claire had a line on a four-bedroom house for rent on Downer Avenue, just a few blocks south of the university. The rent was reasonable for a place that size, but it was still much more than they could handle alone. They had a friend of Kolvacik’s committed to one of the bedrooms, but they needed somebody else to commit in order to make it go. He said they knew I wanted to get out of my parents’ house and he and Claire would be pleased if I would live with them. We could all move in on New Year’s Day.
I was flattered to be asked. It reinforced my feeling that Tony and Claire and Jonah were family. And the idea of moving into a house was much more appealing than moving into an apartment. It would give us all room to get away from one another, when the need arose. Figuring it quickly in my head, I calculated that, on my part-time income, I would just be able to make the rent and have enough left to pay for food and school. There wouldn’t be any extras, but I found my entertainment with people, not expensive activities, so I didn’t foresee a problem. And, if worse came to worse, I could work more hours. I accepted on the spot.
It wasn’t until I got off the phone that it hit me. I was moving away from home for the first time in my life—probably forever. My stomach fluttered. Could I really make it on my own? Was I really that grown up? I had my doubts. But then I recalled my most recent fight with my parents.
I’d been arguing with my Mom over the Kaleidoscope boycott and made the mistake of swearing at her. My dad happened to be walking into the kitchen just then and he exploded. He pinned me to the wall with one of his huge hands and started screaming in my face, like a prison guard reading the riot act to a recalcitrant inmate. I think he came closer to hitting me at that moment than he ever had. I was truly frightened, as was Mom, who tried to pull him away. But he wasn’t going anywhere until he was through. When he was, he stormed off to his room and slammed the door.
At supper, he looked thoroughly shaken. Right after grace, he apologized to everyone in the family and broke down in tears. I cried, too. So did Mom and Marion. After that, it was a long, quiet supper. But the handwriting was on the wall. I had to get out of there, for everybody’s sake.
I announced my decision at the supper table the day of Tony’s call. There was almost an audible sigh of relief from all gathered before the protestations began. They’d miss me; it wouldn’t be the same family without me; would I really be able to make it on my own? It was kind of them to say those things, but I knew their heart wasn’t in it. Inside, they were jumping for joy, and trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a household that wasn’t in danger of blowing up at any moment. It was tough to be thought of as the troublemaker, the thorn in everyone’s side. I felt more on the outs than ever.
We had an unstated holiday truce from then until the end of the year. Neither the war nor Kaleidoscope was mentioned. Dad offered to lend me money for school, if I came up short. Mom kept finding old things around the house—dishes, glasses, towels, silverware, and so on—and insisting I use them at my new house.
I found special Christmas presents for them—farewell gifts, I guess you’d have to say—expensive perfume for Mom and a big illustrated book on the Green Bay Packers for Dad, in which I wrote an inscription about how much I’d miss watching the games with him. They gave me a generous check—to help me get started the card said, since they wouldn’t be there to look after me, day to day. The momentousness of what was about to happen hit home as we sat around the family Christmas tree. We all cried over our gifts. Their card said I was welcome to return, any time I wanted to, but we all knew I wouldn’t be coming back.
On New Y
ear’s Eve, Claire and Tony and I went to a party at Kolvacik’s. He and Mina had gotten married over Christmas and moved into a rundown townhouse apartment near her family’s home on the lower East Side, which Kolvacik immediately dubbed “The Mansion.” Usually, New Year’s Eve was a meaningless holiday to me, marking the end of one arbitrary division of time and the beginning of another. But that year, when the clock struck twelve, I felt the weight of the world fall from my shoulders. I was no longer eligible for the draft and I was moving out of my parent’s house. No longer would I have to face the prospect of exile from my own country. No longer would I have to answer to someone else for the way I lived my life. I was safe. I was free. My life was my own. I kissed Claire, I kissed Mina, I kissed everyone in sight. I felt ready to take on the world.
The next day, on an overcast, frigid January 1st, 1970, the dawn of a new decade, Claire, Tony, Mina, Kolvacik, and Jonathan, the other roommate, and I were at the new house, unloading the truck Tony had rented. We’d partied all night, but we were so excited about our new home that we were ready to work all day to set it up. Tony put Jonah in a playpen, borrowed for the occasion, situated so he could watch the action as we brought things through the front door. This kept him content most of the time, and when he wasn’t, one of us would take a break to entertain him.
The house was wonderful, the kind of house I’d always dreamed of living in. It was a late Victorian covered in olive green clapboards with huge windows and a porch that ran around two sides. The front door was solid oak with a beveled glass window on top. The foyer was paneled from floor to ceiling in gumwood, a soft burnt-honey color that glowed in the light of a glass hanging lamp.
Straight ahead was a hallway that led to the kitchen. On the right was the staircase to the second floor with gumwood paneling all the way up. To the left was the living room, and beyond it, through a wide arch, was the dining room. The dining room had gumwood wainscoting, while the living room used the same wood for the moldings, top and bottom.
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