‘Please, Daddy, no!’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll be good, I promise!’
‘Too late now,’ he said. ‘I warned you you’d be sorry. You should have listened.’
That’s when I totally lost it. I howled so loud I woke my poor mother. She was heavily pregnant with her third child, but she came shuffling to my rescue in seconds. ‘What are you doing with that knife, Gus?’ she barked at my father, as she scooped me off the table and hugged me to her breast.
My father grinned, a little sheepish now. He could see from my mother’s glare that he’d gone too far. ‘Teaching the kid a lesson he won’t forget,’ he said.
Well, he was right about that. From then on, I never cried out in the night – whenever I was tempted, I’d just bite my tongue and picture that carving knife.
Despite what this bizarre example of extreme parenting might suggest, my father wasn’t really a heartless ogre. He was simply a clueless first-time father who’d been raised as an only child and had nothing but his own narrow experience to fall back on. My dad’s father – a stern Norwegian Lutheran immigrant – had never coddled his son and my father saw no reason to treat his kids any differently. Luckily for me and my brothers, our mother, Teresa, was raised in a large and unruly Irish family, so she was more willing to let her boys be boys. Still, my mom had no qualms about threatening us with a few whacks from my father’s belt if we disobeyed her while he was away at work, and many a night we sat down to supper with fresh welts on our bottoms, wishing we hadn’t given her lip.
I’m sure my father didn’t relish playing the enforcer after a hard day at his factory job, but he was a man who believed discipline mattered and he never gave us a last-minute reprieve. Nor did we expect one. Not from a man who spent his workdays precision-grinding components for navy helicopters. What leeway could you expect from someone who routinely worked to tolerances of a hundredth of an inch? Even when my dad mowed our lawn on weekends he’d cut it front-to-back, side-to-side, and then on the diagonal, leaving not a blade of grass untrimmed. That’s just who my dad was. Meticulous by nature.
Too bad my father never found a way to pass on his self-discipline and single-mindedness to his sons. His ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ tactics kept us obedient while we were children – and certainly toughened us up – but in the long run they produced no lasting benefit. As adults, my brothers and I would all struggle with impulse control and substance-abuse issues. Might we have avoided those problems if the structure in our early lives hadn’t been built around fear of corporal punishment – a structure doomed to collapse as soon as we were free of my parents’ control? That was a question I’d never be able to answer, but that didn’t stop me from wondering about it in those self-reflective moments just before sleep, when the unquiet ghosts of childhood come back to haunt us, like a bogeyman under the bed.
Dawn was already breaking over the Panhandle when I awoke with the creepy sensation that I was being overrun by crawling bugs. I thought it was just a bad dream, until I opened my eyes and realised it was all too real. Tiny red ants were swarming all over me – skittering up my nose, inside my ears, under my clothes, everywhere. ‘Holy fuck!’ I shouted, jumping to my feet and breaking into a twitchy St Vitus dance as I ripped off every stitch of clothing and flailed away at the ants still left on my skin.
Anyone spying me from a passing car must have thought they’d glimpsed a madman. A naked madman frantically turning his clothes inside-out and beating them against a palm tree. It took me ten minutes to rid myself of the little buggers, and I was shivering with cold by the time I got dressed and ran out of the palm grove, feeling like Charlton Heston in The Naked Jungle fleeing the marabunta. Tanner was going to laugh his ass off when he heard this one.
I was still twitching and pinching at phantom ants beneath my clothes as I hiked up the road to a nearby truck stop, where I spent my last fifty cents on coffee and then wasted a half-hour in the parking lot trying to drum up a ride west. No soap, as Sal Paradise would say. Every driver gave me the same excuse I’d gotten from the trucker back in Lumberton – picking up hitchhikers was against company rules – so it was back to the highway for me. But first I scrounged up a length of baling twine from the dumpster behind the restaurant and tied up my heavy overcoat like a bedroll so I could hang it from my backpack. The morning was getting balmier by the minute – after four days on the road, I was in shirtsleeves country at last.
When I hiked back to the interstate ramp, I saw I had competition. An old codger with a scraggly white beard hanging to his belly was already stationed at the bottom of the ramp, with a cardboard sign in his hands and a battered thrift shop suitcase at his feet. It’s Billy Gibbons’ grandpa! I chuckled to myself. The old boy looked like he’d just been kicked off the ZZ Top tour bus.
‘Fine mornin’, ain’t it?’ he called out when I was still twenty yards up the ramp. ‘C’mon down, I won’t bite,’ he said, and flashed me a toothless smile to prove it. I’d been hesitant to crowd his spot – my father had taught us that you never jump into another man’s fishing hole – but the codger was apparently eager for company, and I was happy to oblige. I had a hunch he’d be a man with a brain worth picking. Someone who could steer me straight on where to score a free meal and a bed down the road. But before I could start pumping him for information, he surprised me by asking if I had anything to eat.
‘Sorry, brother, can’t help you,’ I said, thinking he was asking for a hand-out. ‘I’m tapped. Haven’t had a thing to eat since yesterday.’ Not since Carl the Vermonter had bought me lunch during a rest stop in Savannah.
‘Well then, just a second,’ he said, stooping to his suitcase. Next thing I knew he pulled out a fat bag of popcorn and a packet of peanuts and handed them to me. ‘Here you go,’ he smiled. ‘Should hold you over till you get to the next Rescue Mission.’
‘Wow,’ I said, blown away by his unexpected kindness. ‘You sure you can spare it?’
‘Brotherhood of the road, son. You give when you can, and take when you can’t. Name’s Zeke. What’s yours, young fella?’
‘Pete,’ I said. ‘You just made my day, Zeke. I was starting to think Florida had it in for me.’ I told him about my run-in with the red ants, and Zeke shook his head. ‘Lucky for you they wasn’t fire ants or you’d have been a goner.’
‘Christ, you’re right!’ I said. I’d never even thought about fire ants. I’d got off a lot easier than I could have.
Zeke’s cardboard sign read: MOBILE, ALA. He was on his way to visit a niece there. I asked him how far to Mobile and he said three hundred and sixty miles. Clear across the Panhandle to the Alabama border. ‘With any luck, I should make it by suppertime. No Mission food for me tonight,’ he grinned. ‘My niece stuffs me like a prize hog whenever I turn up at her door.’
‘Speaking of Mission food,’ I said, and asked Zeke if he had any tips to offer on places to eat and sleep for free along my route to California. As I’d suspected, he had plenty, and from what he told me I wouldn’t have to worry about starving. But my lack of ID was going to be a problem. Zeke said most shelters that offered free beds for the night required photo ID.
‘Can’t stay at the Sally without picture ID, I know that much,’ he said.
‘The Sally?’ I asked, not catching the reference.
‘Yeah, you know, the Salvation Army. That’s what everyone calls it. They’re a finicky bunch. Everything’s by the book at the Sally.’
Just then, a dusty old Ford stake-bed truck pulled up beside us, and Zeke scuttled over and opened the passenger door to see if there was room for two. He shook his head to let me know there wasn’t. I couldn’t even hop on the back of the truck because the cargo bed was completely packed with rows of potted Norfolk Island pine trees. So I wished Zeke luck, and the truck pulled away, leaving me stranded in its pine-scented backdraught.
Zeke’s packet of peanuts gave my rumbling stomach something to work on as I waited in the Florida sunshine for the next Samaritan to come along. W
hile I munched I thought about Zeke’s nickname for the Salvation Army: ‘the Sally’. It reminded me of another nickname I used to hear around the house when I was growing up. From time to time, I’d hear my mom and dad talking cryptically about going to see ‘Uncle Benny’. I’d never met any uncles named Benny, and when I asked who he was, my parents laughed. ‘He’s not really your uncle,’ they said. ‘Just a friend we go see once in a while.’ But they never took us kids along when they’d paid him a visit, so he remained a mystery.
It wasn’t until I was in sixth grade that I finally figured it out. I was out running errands with my father one Saturday morning when he pulled over to the kerb outside a branch office of the Beneficial Finance Company and left me waiting in the car while he ducked inside. Suddenly, it clicked. Uncle Benny! It had to be. I’d always known our household ran on a tight budget (I never tasted real butter till I went to Dartmouth; it was margarine or nothing in our house), but until that day I’d never known we needed quickie payday loans to make ends meet. It gave me a knot in my stomach when I realised we were poorer than I’d ever imagined.
I felt so sad for my father that day. How could we not have enough money? He’d been working two jobs at a time, day and night, for as long as I could remember. Did a skilled machinist really earn so little? It didn’t seem fair. But I said nothing about Uncle Benny when my dad got back to the car. I was too embarrassed for him.
At least I’m chipping in, I thought. For the past few years, I’d been buying my own clothes with the money I earned delivering Newsday after school every day. Now that I was almost a teenager, I’d been hoping to quit my paper route – pedalling around with a bike basket full of heavy newspapers and getting chased by the neighbourhood dogs had begun to seem too childish and uncool. But after I discovered the truth about Uncle Benny I held on to my paper route right through junior high school and I didn’t give it up until the week before I left for St Mary’s Seminary, where the financial burden of feeding and housing me would fall upon the Redemptorist Order instead of my overworked dad.
In fact, my decision to enter the seminary was influenced as much by my desire to lighten the load on my parents as it was by my tenuous belief that God was calling me to the religious life. No matter what their circumstances, however, my parents never sought help from anyone but Uncle Benny. Like their immigrant parents, they were determined to make their own way in the world, too proud to even consider any sort of charity or public assistance. The only time I ever saw my father accept a handout was during a prolonged strike by the Machinists Union that kept him out of work for over a month. Even then, when we needed help the most, he was mortified to accept the carton of donated canned goods the union rep dropped off on our doorstep every week during the strike. Thank God he couldn’t see his oldest son now, reduced to depending on the kindness of strangers.
It took me all morning to make it forty miles down the road from Baldwin to Lake City, and along the way I got propositioned by a sad old queen out cruising for some strange before breakfast. He plopped a doughy hand on my knee and offered to take me on a scenic tour of the backroads, but when I rebuffed his advances he got pouty and dropped me off prematurely at a farm exit on a deserted stretch of road outside the town of Macclenny. There was nothing in sight but reedy marshland trilling with red-wing blackbird calls. Fearing I’d be stuck there for hours before some peanut farmer came by and took pity on me, I set off down the highway to find a busier exit. I’d probably hiked two miles before I spotted a highway patrol cop cruise by in the opposite direction. I saw him clocking me as he passed. Uh oh, here we go again. Sure enough, he slowed down and then hung a U-turn across the grassy median before pulling in front of me with the cruiser’s blue lights flashing.
‘It’s illegal to hitchhike on an interstate highway in Florida, did you know that?’ he asked.
I pleaded ignorance. I’d never travelled through Florida before. Then he asked to see ID, and of course all I had was a sob story. To my relief, he bought it, and only issued me a warning ticket. I folded up the flimsy copy and stuffed it in my trouser pocket, little suspecting how glad I’d be to have it in the days ahead.
‘This warning will be logged in the system, understand?’ the cop said. ‘If you get stopped again in Florida, you won’t get off as easy. Now get in the car and I’ll drop you up the road at Glen St Mary. Remember, stay on the ramp and you’ll stay out of trouble.’
Glen St Mary was another doldrum town, but when I finally got picked up a few hours later by a bandana-headed guitarist heading to Los Angeles I thought I’d caught the ride of my life. We’d gone a mile down the road when he made it clear he was looking for a rider willing to split the cost of gas on the trip west. ‘I’m definitely not your man,’ I told him, and before I knew it he was dumping me off at the Lake City exit.
At least there’s a gas station here, I consoled myself. Zeke’s peanuts and popcorn had left me parched and I was dying for a cold drink of water, so I scavenged a plastic Mountain Dew bottle from the fuel island trash can and filled my new canteen in the restroom. Back at the ramp, the sky grew suddenly dark and a rain squall blew in, forcing me to take shelter beneath the highway overpass. While I waited for the rain to clear, I amused myself by studying the graffiti scrawled on the curved concrete wall, communing with the ghosts of those who’d sheltered there before me. One message that put a smile on my face said: ‘See America like Charles Kuralt didn’t (couldn’t) – hitchhike!’ Even the road has its purists, it seemed. But there was another scrawl that gave me goosebumps, and its message was much grimmer: ‘4/4/76–4/4/86. Ten years on the road. God help me, I must be crazy.’
Yes, I thought, the road has its tortured souls too.
I decided these nuggets were worth saving, so I dug into my backpack and pulled out the Wonder Bread bag I’d been using to store the road notes I’d started at the Pine Tree Inn. Take good notes, and the story will tell itself, my Uncle John used to say. Father John McGuire was my mother’s older brother and the only published writer in our family. I always envied him his job at the Redemptorists’ quarterly magazine, The Alphonsian, which took its name from the Order’s founder, St Alphonsus de Liguori, a much-read author in his time. The pieces my uncle wrote for the magazine were mainly inspirational stories of faith and perseverance that he gathered from parishioners during his visits to Redemptorist churches around the country and in Puerto Rico, and his clear, unstuffy prose style always impressed me. The cadences of his natural speaking voice were so faithfully captured in his writing that reading his pieces was like sitting across from him at the dinner table, listening to him tell his story in person.
I wanted to write like Uncle John. More accurately, I wanted to be Uncle John. What a life that would be, I’d thought as a young boy. Travelling around the country, collecting stories to retell. So it was hardly a surprise to my family when I began to express an interest in going to St Mary’s Seminary to follow in Uncle John’s footsteps. My uncle was happy to help, and he pulled strings to make sure I was offered a full scholarship so that my parents wouldn’t have to worry about scraping together the cost of tuition. I was halfway through eighth grade when I received the news that I’d been accepted to St Mary’s, and after that the rest of the school year seemed to drag on interminably. I could hardly wait for summer so I could start packing my clothes and school supplies into the steamer trunk my parents bought me for the trip to the seminary’s bucolic campus near Lake Erie, in the tiny town of Northeast, Pennsylvania.
I was fourteen when I entered St Mary’s in 1963. I had never spent a night away from my family, so I went through a lot of Kleenex in my first few weeks on campus. But once I got over my homesickness, I settled nicely into the regimented routine of seminary life. Except for the long periods of mandatory silence each day, it wasn’t much different to living under the thumb of my strict father. Learning Latin was easier than I’d imagined, and it was fun to discover how many English words had their roots in the language of Caesar a
nd Catullus – words I began putting to work in the poems I was writing for Father Sharrock’s freshman English class. The hard part, of course, was finding something worth saying, and my early efforts were all examples of what Ezra Pound called ‘hunting for sentiments to fit your vocabulary’. What more could you expect from a callow fourteen-year-old?
Then came 22 November, and the news that President Kennedy, our first Catholic president, had been assassinated. A dark day for America, and especially devastating to the nation’s Irish Catholics, like my mother, who I knew must be taking it hard. I wished I could have been home to share her grief, but I couldn’t even call to comfort her – at St Mary’s, students had no access to telephones. Still, I had to share her sorrow somehow, and in the days of mourning that followed I wrote a poem about the pain of being separated from those you love in a time of common grief. It was the first thing I’d ever written with any emotional commitment. Father Sharrock liked the poem so much he passed it on to Father Duffy, the faculty advisor for the annual literary review of student writing, and to my surprise that spring I became the first freshman to ever have a piece selected for the anthology. I could hardly believe it when I got the good news. After years of dreaming, I was finally going to see my words in print – just like Uncle John!
When the rainstorm at Lake City blew over, I caught a hundred-mile ride with a college kid in a souped-up red Toronado and when he dropped me off at Tallahassee late in the day I took a shot and asked if he could spare a little coffee money. I was hoping for a few quarters, but the kid shocked me by handing over a five-dollar bill. All he asked in return was that I say a prayer for him to do well on his final exams. I promised I would, and as soon as he pulled away I hot-footed it to the Golden Arches for supper.
The sun was dropping fast when I returned to the highway, anxious to get moving again before dark. Tallahassee was less than halfway across the Panhandle, and I still had nearly two hundred miles to go before I reached Pensacola. The first ride I caught didn’t help much. The businessman who picked me up was only going down the road a few exits, to the western outskirts of Tallahassee. I took the ride anyway. I thought maybe I’d have more luck at the edge of town, away from the local traffic. Climbing into his Eldorado Caddy, I felt a blast of cold air hit me in the face and I realised the guy had his air conditioner cranked – a pleasant reminder that I was now in the Deep South and wouldn’t have to worry about freezing out on the road overnight. Or so I thought.
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