I was born on 30 October 1956, a stroke before midnight at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Mom was watching the clock; she would tell me years later. She didn’t want a child born on Halloween. (Sorry ‘Ma, this kid was born on Eastern Standard Time.)
I was six weeks premature. My first six months were in an incubator. I was a sickly little rat. Spinal meningitis. Rheumatic fever. Jaundice. At one point a Catholic Priest gave me last rites. God didn’t want me. Still doesn’t. Maybe He never will.
It’s a good thing I was born in a Catholic hospital because otherwise, nobody would have even tried to save me. Hell, these days I never would have made it out of the womb. “He’s technically just a partial-birth kid. We can get rid of him.” YES! (My folks would have done it, too – what with three LOUD babies already at home ages 1, 2, and 3 – I wouldn‘t blame them one bit.)
They say the first few months are when you bond. With the mother. Father. Siblings. With the world. My first bond was with a clunky, stuffy incubator in the Neonatal ICU.
“You think that’s bad, wait for the hospital nursery, Bud.” Constant SCREAMS from other kiddos. Night and day.
Except there was no night because the harsh fluorescent lights overhead never went out. So there I was, SCREAMING in my little plastic coffin. My echo chamber. Desperate for attention that never came.
I learned my lesson. Spartan babies don’t cry. We watch. Wait. Listen. Prepare.
Many years later a therapist told me I lacked a connection to the world. This sounded to me like, “Give up your independence, and become one with the Borg.” I did, however, take her advice to heart – in my own way. The bonding with Mom, at least. I penned a whole series of incest stories of a small boy’s sensual relationship with an older woman.
Great stories, but, sorry. No boding. With the world. With my Mom. With the therapist, whom I saw only the once. Spartans are strong. Independent. We don’t cater to the psychology of the unwashed masses.
Actually, I think I’ve been as connected with the zeitgeist as anybody else. The problem isn’t with me. It’s with the world. I haven’t changed. The world has, and who wants to become one with a world that’s antithetical to everything you believe in and hold dear?
Did the Spartans drop their arms at Thermopylae and let the Persian hordes through? No. I am one with the three hundred. (Plus the seven thousand Greeks with them that Hollywood never tells you about. Shame on them. Greeks fight like the dickens.)
I think I did pretty well, all things considered, looking over my life. I’m smart. VERY smart. I know what happens in my brain and, over time, learned to adapt. Even to take advantage. The problem wasn’t me. The problem was the people who hated me. Bullied me. Talk about infuriating! Who can live like that? It’s a wonder I didn’t turn into a sociopath.
I can picture the house where I grew up, at 2424 Cottonwood Avenue in Baton Rouge. The neighborhood. City Lake a block away. I can see the topography of the neighborhood, too. The hills. The driveways where I used to steal rubber bands off their Sunday papers, tooling around on my clunky red Schwinn bicycle. Ducks in the lake. Turtles sunning along the rocky shore.
Playing a round on the 8-hole public golf course a few blocks away. The lay of the greens. The tees. Water holes. Sand traps. Where Mom knocked a squirrel out of an oak tree one time. The pro shop next to the public City Pool that had long since been closed on account of integration.
Excuse me, but how is a big, beautiful public swimming pool closed down after it’s integrated? If all the white folks stayed away – awesome, we have the whole pool to ourselves! What, whites wouldn’t swim there IF there were Blacks in the pool. And the Black folks wouldn’t swim there UNLESS there were whites. No wonder the parish shut down the pool. Just let everybody go to fat.
(If you haven’t figured it out yet, the only reason I’m writing this miserable tome is because it affords a venue for social, political, scientific, and spiritual commentary. I am one with Nietzsche, who said, “If you criticize one group, you’re a bigot. If you criticize them all, you’re a natural philosopher.” That’s me, an equal opportunity kind of guy.)
Ours was a single-story red brick house on a corner. Lots of concrete curbs I had to trim as one of my chores. My maternal grandmother, Gramm, lived across the street on Dogwood Avenue. The Lorios next to her. They had a son my age Rhett who I never did much with (he was later in the Army ROTC at my high school) – and Melinda, the dentist’s cute daughter I never had a chance to go out with.
We had a basketball goal in our driveway (fronting the Lorio’s house), on top of the carport, hanging over a concrete slab. I’d shoot hoops hour after hour, any damn time of the day. Sometimes playing horse with my sisters. Hopscotch drawn with chalk on among the long cracks in the driveway. Learning my math multiplication tables as I shot hoops.
BOUNCE. Infuriating the neighbors. BOUNCE. Ticking off Melinda, the object of my affection. BOUNCE.
There was a swimming pool in our backyard. A “tree house” on stilts in the side yard. Parallel bars. Tall ligustrum shrubs I trimmed every spring. A mimosa tree in another neighbor’s yard, hanging over the pool. Its hairy red flowers littered the pool often. This made Pop very angry, to the point of wanting to poison the damn tree. He was a chemical engineer, and could well have done just that.
(It occurs to me that I likely thought about doing the poisoned deed myself, just to please the old man.)
The kitchen windows looked out into the backyard and the swimming pool. Pop mixing corn meal, coating fish, to deep fry. Hamburgers were his meal, too. Eggs. Oatmeal. Mom cooked fried chicken, roasts, and vegetables.
I remember Mom in the kitchen in her red one-piece swimsuit eating fresh boiled crabs. I don’t know which smelled worse, Mom or the crabs. She practically lived by the pool, soaking up the rays (sweating buckshot). She paid the price later on, dying of skin cancer.
Mom was very modest with her perfect figure and ample bust. Never a sexual thought passed my mind (until that therapist suggested the idea untold decades later). I pity the young boys these days, how their mothers test their sexy outfits on them. Strut around the house (beach, shopping mall, schoolyard) half naked, showing off their stuff.
I can only hope the young boys DON’T have that mother-son bond. Otherwise, they’ll be sexually arrested for life. But, hey, if people want to stay in low gear for life, more power to them. The world has six billion too many people as it is.
There was a large playroom at one end of the L-shaped house. It was originally a garage, then closed in. One whole wall was floor-to-ceiling cabinets, opening out in a V-shape. One section was mine. Lincoln logs. Legos. An erector set. Cardboard brick-shaped blocks. Pop’s wonderful hand tools. He ended up locking his tools up in a hallway closet.
My three sisters Leigh Erin, Kelle, and Regan (older by 1, 2, and 3 years) had sections of closets in the playroom as well. I can recall them fooling around with Barbie and Ken dolls, cutting clothes out of patterns. The whole family played whiffle baseball in the side yard once in a while. My oldest sister Regan and I, when I got older, would play tennis against Mom and Pop (who played for Georgia Tech) in doubles on clay tennis courts at Bocage on Saturday mornings.
I can remember playing golf with Pop once or twice, walking around the 8-hole City Park course, our golf bags on a rolling cart. I once SMACKED my 3-wood into the ground, bending it. After which time it hit the sweetest shots.
My bedroom was in a short hallway next to the playroom. It was a small room. Wood paneling. Built-in bunk beds to the left. A chest of drawers to the right. A built-in bookcase behind the door as you open it. Tom Swift. The Hardy Boys. Later Boy’s Life magazines. Practically the only books in the whole house, other than a few in the living room.
There was a second door in my small bedroom, leading to a central hallway. So, my room was a shortcut and didn’t exactly afford much privacy night or day. This never bothered me.
I got accustomed to the lack of privacy. To everybody ignoring me. I became an observer. Watching. Analyzing.
I’d bring a whole stack of books home when we visited the public library downtown. Science fiction mostly. Heinlein. Isaac Asimov. Hubbard. Later, the book that made the biggest impression on me was One Man Against Rome, the story of Hannibal’s Carthage versus Rome.
I read the Sunday paper color funny pages. I was only allowed to watch a couple of TV shows. Buggs Bunny. Luny Tunes on weekend mornings. The original Batman. Pop enjoyed Hogan’s Heroes. (Naturally, so did I.) The whole family watched Mission Impossible on the console TV in the living room.
The first movie in a theater I watched was The Guns of Navaronne, in Exxon’s residential compound theater at Sierro Colorado, Aruba. Pop was there. Maybe Mom, I don’t know. I was in college, second year at the U.S. Naval Academy.
The next movie I saw in a theater was Star Wars, a couple years later in Austin, Texas with Pop and my younger brother John. I did see George C. Scott in the movie Patton at the Naval Academy, but it was a required function. That doesn’t count.
As an aside, I’ve spent my whole life adoring that movie and General Patton in particular. What an American hero. Talk about a HOOT and HOLLER at the Academy! I’m not such a big fan anymore, not after I learned that the Russians lost 26 million people stopping the Nazis on the Western Front.
By the time Patton attacked from the shores of Normandy, the Nazi soldiers who remained were tired old men and boys conscripted out of desperation. Those Nazi irregulars were malnourished, poorly equipped, and a total shambles of a military force. Boy, have we ever been brainwashed. Give credit to the Russians, for God’s sake. They’re the ones who stopped Hitler’s war machine. All Patton did was wipe up the wretched remains.
The only other TV I recall was Bonanza when we were living in Spain, circa my junior high years. I remember the first time I saw Bonanza in English. I thought, “That’s not how they talk.”
Most young people would, at this point, say, “OMG. What did you DO all the time?” I played. Read books. Rode my bicycle. I don’t recall ever being bored. Not once.
In the vernacular, I matured. Va-voom, zipped right on through Freud’s psychosexual stages, in perfect sync with the world. The takeaway is that kids who spend 8 hours a day on social media – of course they’ll – never mind.
Back in Baton Rouge, when I was younger. I can picture the whole floor plan of the house. Pop’s tool closet in a central hallway that opened off into my folk’s room. My oldest sister’s room. A common bath (for all us kids), and another bedroom for my other two sisters that was right across from the bath. Around the corners was the kitchen, and at the end of the hall next to my folk’s bedroom was a foyer leading into the living room.
Mom had an upright piano in the dining room off the living room proper. We all had to take lessons. They only stuck for my older sister Kelle. She was quite good and plays to this day. Later they enclosed a porch off the dining room into a dedicated piano room. Mom had a baby grand there. She loved the piano. Played all her life.
The front yard stretched around the corner. There were a couple of oak trees. Raking leaves in the fall. Stepping on stingy caterpillars. Burning wasp nests out from under the eaves.
At one time there was a sandbox in the front yard, when I was a snot-nosed kiddo. Giant yellow construction trucks and tractors for little Bill, alias Bud. (My father’s name was Bill, too.) Mom said I used to call them, “Fucks and fractors.” LOL.
We always had a German Shepherd in the backyard. (Meadow) Muffin went with us to Spain. Never came back, though. I had my own dog once, a puppy we found at the pound, half dead of pneumonia. A Catahoula Kir, which is a hunting dog (spotty skin, one brown eye, one blue). Tiger by name. I nursed him back to health. We had to give him away to a friend of my sister Kelle a few months later.
When we were settled in Benicasim, Spain, a neighbor wrote that Tiger had returned to the house from halfway across town. This made me sad. I missed him.
One of my sisters had a black Siamese cat(s). Oddly, I don’t remember those cats, not one bit.
I had a big metal tub on the porch in the backyard where I kept turtles I netted in the lake. Once I dumped all the turtles in the pool when my sisters were swimming. Scared the hell out of them. (The chlorine probably killed the turtles. Sorry, guys – meaning the turtles, not my damn sisters.)
One time I brought a white duck home from City Lake. Robert. I fed him oatmeal. Pop made me bring him back to the lake. I caught flies to feed the turtles.
Mom would raise a litter of puppies in the summer. I remember spraying them with a mist of water to cool off. Their little tongues stopped panting right away, and they’d go right to sleep.
My clothes came out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Charlie Brown shirts, with wide colored stripes on a white background. A yellow raincoat for all the rain we got in south Louisiana.
That’s it, folks. No designer clothes advertised on Sesame Street that I just HAD to have. Nothing to distinguish me other than my boundless energy and zest.
“Look, the kid has no clothes.”
Summer vacations we motored around in a little blue Buick station wagon. Somehow we always drove west. Don’t ever remember a single vacation on the East Coast. Just packed up and hit Eisenhauer’s new Interstate system. Modeled after Hitler’s Autobahns (built by hand by young Germans, mostly – OMG physical labor, perish the thought) which were so damn good, in fact, that they helped the Allies to defeat the Nazis.
That’s progress. At first, it’s wonderful. And then. It always comes back to knock you flat on your butt.
On our family vacations out west, I was always in the back of the Buick wagon, building castles with everybody’s luggage. Counting cars at the “Holiday Inn,” which is what we called auto salvage yards.
I beat the crap out of the red Corvair Pop drove to work one time. Ball peen hammer. In retrospect, I like to think I heard about Ralph Nader’s crusade against the rear-engine Corvairs being so unsafe. Gotta wonder about this young engineer, don’t ya?
I used this anecdote to entice Mr. Nader into a debate with Patrick Buchanan in the presidential contest of 2000 when I was in grad school at Texas. The PC police (actually, my editor on the campus newspaper) made me cancel it. I had reserved an auditorium, arranged for the Navy ROTC to be ushers, the whole shebang. More on that later.
I never went to kindergarten. Just first grade because I was a year younger than all the other kids (on account of my late October birthday.) Riding the yellow school bus. Mom picking me up from Walnut Hills Elementary School, with an apple cut up, a carrot, celery, and a jar of Hawaiian Punch. (I doubt this was out of love. More like the constipation that’s plagued me all my life.)
Pop showing me the valves on the swimming pool pump/filter. Cleaning the pool with the vacuum filter. Putting the black plastic cover on over winter.
Motoring around the pool on the brick/concrete sidewalk with a little yellow push-pull car – steer with your feet and pump a lever between your legs to go forward. Zoom zoom! Round and round.
I had a couple of buddies in the neighborhood. Stewart. Ray Overall. Skipper Hoover (who died shortly after we arrived in Spain. A farming accident. His father ran over him with a tractor.) They both lived a block away in houses fronting on railroad tracks. We played army in the bamboo thicket along the tracks. Chuck had a house by the golf course.
There was a row of Black houses a block away. Pop forbade me from playing with Black kids. So I never did. This didn’t teach me to be prejudiced. I just, well, did what I was told. Period.
We had a Black maid Lina Mae who would roll up Pop’s shirts in a wet ball and iron them. She did other chores I suppose, helping out Mom – who was coping with four small children in the house.
A yellow canary in a cage with a bone to sharpen its beak. Stealing potato chips out of the freezer in the utility room.
“Don’t stand in the refrigerator door,” I can hear Pop screaming, as I was standing there trying to decide what snack to devour. He was a real energy conservation nerd.
Turn the lights out when you leave the room. Drive the speed limit. Who turned the thermostat up? What do you think long johns were made for? Bastard made me into an energy conservation fanatic.
Snow cones at the Bet R Store down the street. Blue topping. Going with Mom to the A & P Grocery Store: two giant carts full to the rim. The checker ringing everything up. Saving S&H Green Stamps.
Grandpa Howard would drive all the way from Los Angeles every year. There was a kitchenette in the playroom for him. Special bowl for his cereal and sliced bananas. Big black Cadillac. Peppermint candies in the glove box.
We visited Grandpa Howard in LA once. Big house. Steps up to a gazebo. He was rich one year and dirt poor the next. Mom didn’t much like him. Pop never talked about him. But peppermints are the master key to any kid’s heart. I loved Grandpa Howard.
I don’t remember doing much with my sisters. Quiet hour every day after lunch when we were home in the summers. Mom sunning out at the pool. My sisters doing their thing. I read or played with my toys in the playroom.
Only one memory of my other grandfather. We called him Dadee. He brought me to the construction site when they were building Eisenhauer’s Interstate a block away, and a concrete bridge over Town Lake. We looked down in a deep hole. The glasses fell off his face! The workers couldn’t fish them out of the muddy hole.
Dadee had been a forester on Indian reservations out west. I remember an Apache tribe’s plaque in his garage to the “Great White Father.”
Gramm, my grandmother, was a social creature. She civilized Dadee. He quit the Forest Service and founded the School of Forestry at LSU across town, then was the Dean of Forestry. There’s a bronze plaque to him at the building.
Borden’s would deliver milk at the back door a couple of times a week. Glass jars in a metal crate. With four small kids, I’m sure we went through a LOT of milk. The delivery guy used to call all us kids collectively, “girls.”
I remember Kool-Aid in the house, but never any carbonated beverages. Damn stuff does more than rot your teeth. It leeches calcium out of your bones. Kids these days have such weak bones they regularly wash out of the Army’s Basic Training.
Mom said I used to demand to go see Mike the Tiger in his cage outside the LSU football stadium every weekend. She was well along with bone cancer at that point, so who knows? I don’t remember it, but I do remember Mike’s cage. The smell. Darkness. Being sad.
We went to see an LSU basketball game once. Pete Maravich, one of the best college shooters of all time, was playing for LSU then. He had socks with no elastic.
I didn’t much like going to Church at the First Presbyterian downtown. Pop would give me Dentyne and lemon drops to keep me quiet. Great taste combination, by the way. Never went to Sunday School.
Gramm (who was a big wheel at that church), smelling of powder and all dressed up, usually had dinner with us after church. She didn’t like Pop, not one bit. Dark looks and pursed lips. Gramm clearing her throat. The mother-in-law from hell. Literally. (Small wonder why Pop took so many overseas assignments as soon as he got some seniority at the refinery.) Gramm lived right next door – well, directly across Dogwood Avenue.
My sisters propped me up on a ladder one year to put a star on top of the Christmas tree (I fell down, CRASHING the tree).
Playing ping pong in the playroom one year, the ball went past me . . . right on through a swinging glass door, I chased after the ball and went – CRASHING into the glass. I gnashed my arm, requiring a dozen stitches the clinic for Esso employees across town. Two horseshoe-shaped scars.
Mom and my three sisters gave me a Mohawk buzz cut in the back yard once. Another time they put a bowl on my head for another custom haircut. I thought this was great fun. If this is what it takes to get some TLC, have at it.
Kicked another glass outside door in one time. Not sure why. Damn near split one of my toes in half. Pop, the old Ozark hillbilly, wanted to just tie the toe up with a stretch of twine. Mom brought me to the clinic for six stitches.
Pop grew up on an apple farm at Cedar Gap near Springfield, Missouri. Dirt poor. Had to shoot squirrels for meat on the table. It was just him, his Mom, and her mother – who spoke only German. His father, Grandpa Howard, lived down the road a ways, in a mansion, in Memphis. He was a mover and shaker there.
Never figured out why his mom spoke only German. Who was she? Where did she come from? Maybe she was Hitler’s ex. That was my theory. I have Hitler’s same pale blue eyes. A small boy’s imagination was CRASHED down to reality when I inherited the Family Bible 20 years later and discovered she was Swiss, and emigrated directly.
Or – did she?
That’s pretty much it until we left for Spain in the 2nd grade. No memories of anything special with my sisters. Or Mom. Or Pop. Yawn. A boring, conventional childhood. I even played an unenthusiastic left field in the Beau Bois League – Pop was a huge baseball fan, and this was a great disappointment for him.
Pop and my sister Kelle would watch the Saint Louis Cardinals baseball on TV for hour after hour (he used to peel the skin off grapes while they watched). Baseball didn’t interest me one bit. Never liked watching sports. Much rather play them.
I did my chores – mowing the grass, raking leaves, trimming the lawn and shrubs. Never complained. Never got into trouble (yet). Never got punished. Never needed any help – or got any – with my schoolwork.
I was pretty much on autopilot from the get-go. Seven and a half months in the slammer, then – boom – a lifetime on parole. Can’t make any mistakes or it’s hard time without a work release permit.
Pop worked real hard as a chemical engineer, often working late to start up a new system, at the Humble (then Esso, then Exxon) chemical refinery across town. Mom had her hands full with my three older sisters, who were real hell-raisers. (With two brilliant parents, all us kids were VERY smart, and quite a lot of trouble for poor Mom who needed every bit of her psychology training.)
My sisters caused all the headaches (so far). I just, well – did my own thing. Wandered off to play 8 holes of golf by myself a couple times a week. Tooled around the lake on my red Schwinn. Shot hoops. Read my books. Built things with my erector set and toys.
I wasn’t anti-social. Quite the contrary. At the Beau Bois summer camp one year, I got a small plaque for, “The Most Courteous Camper.” I was a happy, very intelligent kid who was just left to his own ends.
(It occurs to me now, I wonder if my folks thought I was gay. I mean, kids just are NOT courteous. That’s an old Southern virtue that the Yankees fought a whole Civil War to expunge. We’re Ugly Americans now, and proud of it.)
No activities whatsoever with my sisters, that I recall. They evidently thought I had “cooties.” Nothing with Mom other than chores. Same with Pop.
I didn’t ask for more, and they didn’t give it. Problem solved. Everybody’s happy.
Hey, I was weaned in an incubator. Doesn’t take much at all to make this kid happy. Fresh air. Peace and quiet. Dark nights. A room to myself – even if it was treated like an Interstate shortcut to the playroom. No problemo.
Gonna take a whole lot more than that to get me upset.
Later on, my Grandpa Howard died and left some money to Pop, which he used to build a small camp on Lake Rosemound, about 2 hours’ drive north of Baton Rouge. I shot cans off a shelf we built into a tree with a BB gun. Fished off our dock. We had a ski boat, and went out on the lake now and then. My sisters absolutely HATED going up there. Hated.
Me? I – again – disappeared, fished, wandered around with my BB gun taking potshots at birds (very rarely hit anything), mowed the grass, and did my chores. LOL. I was burning branches and leaves once, caught the back acre on fire – and half the neighborhood, too. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing memorable.
I don’t remember any school friends, not in first grade. Fresh buns at the school lunch. Kick ball. My teacher calling out “WILLIAM!!” when she was angry with me. Studying the giant Army Ants in the packed dirt schoolyard. Cops came by to show us their German Shepherd drug-sniffing attack dog once. Mom picking me up in her blue Buick station wagon.
That’s it, folks, the sum total download of my memory banks.
Hey. I’m not trying to abbreviate anything. I. Just. Plain. Don’t. Remember. Anything. Else. Which is very odd because I have excellent recall. Was it me? Or my family? Was this kid BORN schizophrenic (I think so, in retrospect)?!
All I can say is that years later after my Mom passed away, I was cut off utterly and totally by my siblings (and their sundry children). It’s been 20+ years since I’ve heard one peep from any of them. One. Peep. This is how you treat an individual who’s just been rated 100% disabled Permanent and Total by the U.S. Veterans Administration? Okay. This is me – leaving.
Don’t get me wrong. I got no complaints. I was a happy, healthy kid. Just no family life to speak of. And then, right when my sisters were older and behaving better, and things were looking better on the family front. . . Boom!
My little brother John Wesley was born.
Doh! Time to check out an armful of books from the library because that cute, healthy little boy was the new center of attention, and would remain so until – you guessed it, I left home for good to attend the U.S. Naval Academy.
Again. I’m not complaining.
Being an incubator child, I doubt if I wanted any extra attention anyway. Live and let live. My only requirement is stimulation – the intellectual kind. Things to observe. To do. Freedom to be active, always active, always doing things.
No shortage of that – any of it! – at Annapolis, that’s for sure.