Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

by John Callahan

  Sister Joseph of Mary’s emotional needs were evidently not satisfied by her role as a Bride of Christ. She was a frustrated mom, and I was unlucky enough to be chosen her surrogate child. I probably got the part because I was a straight-A student, and was installed by her as fourth-grade class president. She kept telling me I was special; I reminded her of Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. She insisted I write special essays, and once I was obliged to write one comparing and contrasting myself with the imaginary rodent. She did her best to cut me off from the rest of the kids—I could not play at recess but had to sit beside her on a bench. “You’re so much more special than those other kids,” she would whisper. “Why don’t you try to make Toby X and Mark Y feel better about themselves?” One was grossly overweight and the other abysmally stupid. I can imagine myself sitting on that bench and thinking, Boy, this will be called child molestation twenty years from now. I was held up as a good example. One day she noticed that I looked a little pouty and depressed and announced that nobody was going out to recess until the class made John Callahan smile. Needless to say I wouldn’t. I was damned if I was going to smile. So we missed recess, and I was damn near hung from the school shrine.

  I really felt at the time that this woman was being cruel to me. I drew a caricature of Sister Joseph of Mary, grossly naked except for her headdress, with stretch marks all over her stomach added skillfully with a red pen, and passed it around. Inevitably Sister Joseph of Mary saw the ripple of laughter. She took the paper away and instantly saw that it was the work of the talented and diplomatic John Callahan. My days as a surrogate child came to an abrupt end.

  Sister Joseph of Mary was crushed and betrayed, as only an ugly person who has given love can feel crushed and betrayed. In later years she resigned her vows and became a radical lesbian, but then she worked hard to reinforce the feeling that I was personally responsible for the Agony of Christ. At least.

  I had no reason to doubt that this was true. I was at the age where I literally ran upstairs because I had been told that the Devil was waiting to catch me by the heels. At the same time, though, I got satisfaction out of finally having pissed off Sister Joseph of Mary enough to get her off my back. I was readmitted to lizard-catching society.

  Then there was the matter of being an altar boy. This was not optional. Either you made it to the Altar Boy Picnic or you were considered to be a fag from Hell.

  This meant wearing cassocks so short that everybody could see my pale shins and hours of memorizing unintelligible Latin under the red nose of Monsignor McCarty, who would have tested .066 blood alcohol.

  “Ah, ah, adeumque pontificat avem tutem mea . . .”

  “No, no! litificat,” you little idiot.

  He was often so drunk during mass that he swayed his way along the communion rail, slapping the host on the tongues of the faithful with trembling fingers. I followed along holding a golden pallet under the communicants’ chins to catch any crumbs of the sacred wafer that might fall and amused myself by seeing how close I could come to their Adam’s apples.

  In spite of such low comedy, we lived in a state of pious fear in which Satan could have his way with any boy who didn’t do his math assignment. In my family, anyway, Death and Judgment were always at hand. We spent the weekends visiting dying grandparents in nursing homes in Portland. Although The Dalles was surrounded by great hunting and fishing country and was a camper’s paradise, my father was not interested in such things; though once he did take us to a “pay ‘n’ fish” pond—we didn’t get a bite.

  Instead, he and my brothers were obsessed by team sports. Hours and hours were spent practicing; even more time was spent in front of the tube. I tended to tune out when the jargon started. Sacks and slam-dunks held no interest for me. Ironically I was the best athlete in the house, a pitcher with a natural screwball while still in grade school. I played on the all-star team and was carried off the field when I struck out the final batter to win the big game. The family doctor once spent hours trying to convince me to aim for the major leagues. But, perhaps in resistance to my dad, I dropped sports before high school, even though that would have been the route to popularity.

  I craved popularity because I knew myself to be a black sheep, a total stranger in my own home, fearful and neurotic. I hid in the basement when we had guests. I felt guilt over my lack of family feeling, guilt over the insomnia that kept me awake in the library reading Turgenev and Tolstoy and Chekhov when everybody else was sleeping, guilt over the artistic impulse that made me a loner, writing or drawing for long hours. Just before high school, things were compounded by a case of virulent acne. It was so bad my classmates played Connect the Dots on my face.

  When I was thirteen and on the verge of high school, I discovered that there was a medicine for my guilt, if not for my acne scars. At my grandmother’s wake I pilfered some gin from a table laden with booze. I loved it, and drank until I passed out. I threw up violently in the middle of the night, of course, but that didn’t matter.

  In 1965 I graduated from Saint Mary’s and began public high school. After the standards I was used to, it was boring and so easy that I mostly didn’t attend. My buddies and I spent our days drinking in whatever house was free of parents. When we were licensed to drive, we bought “beaters” and tooled around, swinging past the school where girls were lolling on the knoll to expose their underwear to passing citizens, driving up to a bluff to get stoned on the cheap grass that was becoming plentiful and drinking some more.

  Our clique included Aronsen, a 140-pound, six-foot-six albino with totally white hair. His mom owned a beauty parlor and was never at home, so that was our party house. Then there were Swartzburg, who was crazy and carried a gun; Burns, who loved to taunt Aronsen; Wells, whom we called Bullnuts; Meyers, also crazy; and mild-mannered Foley, my best friend.

  Foley and I were famous hunters, having begun shooting birds with BB guns, then gone on to “below the waist” wars in which we stalked and shot one another, but only below the waist. Unless we got really angry. We then graduated to .22 single-shot rifles and started in on ground squirrels, of which there are millions in The Dalles. We got bored with playing Attack of the Ground Squirrels and with knocking magpies out of apple trees and soon decided to go deer hunting. Once, stoned on pot, we actually drew down on what we thought was a deer and put about a dozen .22 long-rifle slugs into it before we realized we had just slaughtered a nice Angus cow. We had to get part-time jobs to pay back the enraged farmer.

  We went to all sorts of trouble to get to Portland, eighty miles away, to score drugs. In those days you went to a certain park, offered a ten-dollar bill, and either had it stolen or exchanged for half a Baggie of the strongest pot in the universe. It was like LSD. Typically we drove around with the windows rolled up in order not to lose any of the precious smoke. Cops were always stopping us for one reason or another but never seemed to notice the cloud of fumes that billowed out when we rolled down the window. I always imagined the cop would then drive to a head shop and buy a Janis Joplin poster for reasons he never understood.

  We’d gather in Aronsen’s living room, which was entirely decorated with fine antiques. Aronsen was constantly worrying about us bumping into something and breaking it. He always had his eye on us lest we sneak back into his mother’s bedroom, where she kept her liquor, and steal more than we’d already stolen that day.

  I remember one scene where Burns, who was extraordinarily hairy—Aronsen used to put him on mailing lists for women’s depilatories—was taunting Aronsen. “I’m not going to be able to let you ride in my car anymore, Aronsen. You’re frightening away the chicks.”

  Aronsen muttered, “Right.” He was playing with a Zippo lighter, tilting it so that the flame caught the open lid.

  “I don’t know . . . they call you “The Worm.” Did you know that?”

  “That so?”

  “You’ve got to get a tan. Think of your nonexistent sex life, why don’t you?”

  “I know, I sho
uld. You’re right.”

  “Besides, it’s good for the old self-esteem.”

  And Aronsen kept playing with the lighter, which was getting hotter and hotter. I began to have a sense of impending doom about Burns, who was going on and on. Usually Aronsen was not so cool, and I can remember being thrown up against the lockers at school for drawing pictures of him nude with a tiny weenie painstakingly detailed in red pen.

  By now Aronsen was smiling and saying, “Yeah, Burns. Sure, Burns. You’re right, Burns.”

  Finally Burns said, “One more thing . . . ,” but he never finished.

  Aronsen flew across the room, grabbed Burns out of the antique settee, threw him down on the Persian carpet like a polar bear straddling a bald chicken. Then he ripped Burns’s shirt open and branded him on the chest with the white-hot lighter.

  We were horrified and delighted to see such a show. The scar turned out to be in the shape of a fish. It was appropriate in the end, since Burns has recently become a Born-Again Christian.

  Foley’s father had just bought a drive-in movie theater high on the windy cliffs of The Dalles, where Indians used to dry their fishing nets. He was spending a fortune to fix it up. The screen had been routinely blown down and the place looked beat to hell. We hung around the snack bar in the middle and played grab-ass with the girls. Foley and I would work the ticket office and then join the rest, stoned on cough syrup and sneaked-in beer. When things got dull, we did the Ball Walk. Six or seven of us would expose our scrotums, choking them out through our zippers with our penises tucked out of sight. Then we would line up single file and, with heels together, toes splayed out and pelvises thrust forward, would waddle through the snack bar like obscene penguins. The disgust on the faces of the shrieking girls racing for the exits was delightful.

  It was at this stage of my emotional development that I fell in love for the first time. Paula Sobaczech was parked in the front row with Foley’s sister Jean one night, and Burns and I just kind of sauntered over. After a while we slipped into the backseat, the better to make conversation. After a further while, Burns got into the front seat with Jean, and Paula came back to me.

  A hot summer wind rattled the old movie screen and raised whitecaps on the once-wild waters of the Columbia below, now ponded behind The Dalles hydroelectric dam. When the show was over Jean drove her big pink Chrysler, a gift from her dad, aimlessly around the country roads through orchards and wheat fields. Below, the river shimmered in the summer moon, while in the backseat Paula and I kissed and gazed. In the clear heat of those summer nights the girls wore halters and shorts, while we boys went bare-chested. I felt a tremendous, giddy excitement. Above all, I was flattered, for Paula was one of the cutest girls in school, a fresh, blue-eyed brunette with a nut-brown tan and delicious curves.

  At the back of my mind, I was thinking, This midnight romance is all very well; but in the light of day she’ll see things differently. She’ll see how fucked up I really am.

  But in the clear light of the following morning, Paula, in crisp white short-shorts and a white blouse knotted beneath her breasts, was eager for a long, slow, hand-holding stroll in the woods above town. It was the start of a long summer of country walks, of aimless drives in my windowless ’58 Chevy beater, of envious sarcasm from my buddies, none of whom had a girl remotely as good-looking as Paula. They’d drive by and hoot, “There’s Callahan with his girlfriend—he’s finally fallen!”

  I was a late bloomer. Even at eighteen, part of me would have felt more comfortable pulling a girl’s pigtails or putting a frog down her blouse. But, Paula! Once she put her hand lightly on my thigh, and I almost drove the Chevy off the cliff. I would have been trying to unbutton her blouse on the way down.

  Paula was a good Catholic girl. Passionate kissing was okay, but she allowed no hands on her opulent breasts. So getting her bra off became the main obsession of my life. My brain seethed with deviousness and planning. Perhaps my hand would brush against one of those milky-white love balloons, casually and in passing. A short time later the same accident would happen, but with just a hint of suggestiveness. And again, still very casually, but now definitely erotic . . . and so on, until she noticed what I was up to and slapped the piss out of me.

  A couple of times I got her blouse open, and once I even got her bra off. Since she was very uncomfortable about this, the victory probably had more to do with her devotion than with my seductive skills.

  But in spite of repeated proofs of her affection through the summer and fall, and into the following winter (once we walked through the old graveyard in a rainstorm), I didn’t ever really believe Paula loved me. On the basis of absolutely no evidence, I always felt that I was somehow forcing myself on her. She couldn’t really want me to walk her to school. She wasn’t really glad to see me when we ran into each other in the halls. She didn’t really want to be seen with me in front of her friends.

  In fact, what Paula didn’t like—really—was me drunk. And that was how I was handling my insecurity about myself and about her: I spent almost my entire senior year of high school in the bag. I would show up at Paula’s house barely able to drive and badger her until she got into the car. “Callahan, you’re so impulsive . . .” She must have been terrified, because several times I drove into things while she was with me. On one occasion I drank half a fifth of 150-proof rum, skipping class to do it, picked Paula up and took her to my parents’ house, where she sat and made polite conversation as if she didn’t notice the almost falling-down state I was in.

  In spite of scenes like this, she remained willing to sit up on top of the cliff in the windowless Chevy and snuggle with me while the midnight winter wind howled around us.

  I began to drive a stake between us. Although I became frantically jealous at the slightest hint that she was flirting with another boy, I decided that I didn’t really like Paula. Paula Sobaczech, I decided, was really unattractive and bitchy (the strongest thing she ever said to me was, “You’ll never marry, Callahan.”). I saw her less and less and finally cut her out of my life completely.

  I locked myself away in my basement bedroom and sunk into a black depression. My buddy Joe had access to homemade rotgut plum wine his father made, and I always had a gallon of the awful stuff around. I lived down there with the wine and my guitar for weeks, playing Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” over and over, alternately despising Paula (I’d show her, by becoming rich and famous) and yearning hopelessly for her.

  This was my first engineered breakup with a woman, my first confused attempt to get back at my birth mother for abandoning me. There would be many others; but now I stayed away from any involvement with women for two years.

  Instead I concentrated on staying stoned, my main concern, and on raising hell. As campaign manager to student-body presidential candidate (and drinking buddy) Sam Dick, I was the author of the stadium-length “Erect Dick” sign done in hard-to-erase sideline chalk. That rated a three-day suspension. Even more important was that I met a kindred spirit who became my best friend until his death.

  One day a friend we called “Nevada Smith” came up and said, “Callahan, I’d like you to meet Kurt Crawford.” We extended hands, grasped palms, and Crawford pulled my hand down nearly to his crotch. I fell down with laughter. Everybody in those days was homophobic. Who was this guy? In spite of his Saxon name, he had that Irish light of humor in his eyes.

  Kurt and I became good old drinkin’ buddies. He was charismatic and very handsome. He was a real ladies’ man. Kurt always had to have a relationship going; whereas I was just going out with girls. We dated together, drank together, took LSD together. For me acid was not such a hot idea. In fact, I bummed out entirely. My friends drove me home and I could barely open the door, since there seemed to be about two hundred doors. My mom found me cowering in my bedroom in the pitch-black dark consumed by visions of paranoid guilt. A doctor had to be called to bring me down with a giant shot of Thorazine.

  My father, who could be driven into a
poplexy by the ordinary behavior of small boys, now found himself confronted with an over-six-foot-tall drughead and drunk, who came home, often as not, raging with anger. Actually, I had been out of his control ever since the day, at age twelve, when I hit one of my younger brothers in the butt with a baseball during one of our regular sibling fights. The blow was nonlethal but it hurt, and Kip went crying to Dad. Dad came storming down the basement stairs, and I ran away. I got as far as the woodpile before being brought to bay. I picked up a Pres-to-Log and threw it at him, then another and another. I couldn’t believe it; I was actually fending him off. Then I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Since it was a basement bathroom, the window was small and high, and I couldn’t crawl out of it. I heard him screaming, “I’m going to get an ax and chop the door down!” Fortunately my mother was able to restrain him.

  Often my alienation from my dad—I hated his guts from age eleven on—extended itself to the whole family. Not long before the Pres-to-Log incident there had been some disturbance at the dinner table and Tommy, who at age six was some five years younger than me, screamed, “You’re not even one of us!” I burst into tears. I really did feel the pain; but also I was trying to milk the situation and get my dad to beat the living shit out of my brother, which he did, of course. Whenever he punished one of my siblings instead of me, I had a guilt-free excuse to condemn him.

  By the end of high school my relations with my father were chillier still. It was high time to move out; but when it came time to pick a college, I froze solid. Either it would be as dull and repressive as school or, worse, it would require serious work, thus interfering with my life as a knee-walking drunk. So, Kurt and I took jobs as orderlies at the local state mental hospital. My first home away from home was a room in the nuthouse-staff dormitory. This was a spacious Georgian brick building up on a hill behind the nuthouse, with black tile floors that were always being scrubbed and large rooms that came complete with maid service. We spent our time there drinking, playing guitar and sneaking in girls.