My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 1

(From Lookout Pinnacle, a view of Cumberland Gap (and the junction of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee)

“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.” –Ralph Ellison

In my youth, American media seemed to embrace Appalachia, which was often presented playfully but unironically as a both uncouth and undiluted version of America. The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show on TV were wildly popular.  In the comics section of the newspaper, Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith were prominent. Sure, we chuckled at the antics of Jed and Granny Clampett and their clan, but the sharpest barbs were saved for the Beverly Hills banker Drysdale and his wife. I have my own connection to a small town in Appalachia.

In July 2020, I planned a road trip to Roanoke, Virginia, to spend time with my daughter, Emma, and my two grandsons, Oscar and Linus. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I decided it wouldn’t be wise to spend a night with my 87-year-old mother in Columbus, Ohio, as I usually do, so I looked for a different Iowa-to-Virginia route. I realized I could go south from Indianapolis on I-65 to Louisville, head east to Lexington, and then south on I-75, which would take me near East Bernstadt, the Laurel County town where my father and his brother grew up. My gramma Duer is buried there, and I’ve long wanted to pay my last respects to a woman who played a major role in my early life (which I will elaborate on in Part 3). She died five days after my youngest son, Jesse, was born, and I made the difficult call to be with and care for my family rather than make that long mid-December trip for her funeral and burial. 

I have good memories of East Bernstadt. Although it’s a mere six-hour drive from Akron, my family visited there only a handful of times. But when we did, I could sense the powerful pull of geography and history on a people and place, something I came to appreciate over the years, that tarot deck of culture. In 1880, a Kentucky immigration commission sent land agents to Europe to promote the state. And the Swiss colony of Bernstadt was first settled one year later by a group of immigrants – including my great-grandparents, Jacob Muster from Bern and Amelia Blunschi from Basel – who had bought land, sight unseen, and made that leap. They named it after Bern, that city on the fertile plateau west of the Swiss Alps. I imagine they were a bit disappointed by their acquisition, which was better suited to coal mining than farming, but they made do.

Through my own experiences, I became drawn to the romance of the hollers of eastern Kentucky, those narrow valleys tucked back in the mountains. I once paid a visit to a family who lived in a holler, following a dirt road that eventually became the creekbed at the heart of that landform, until we reached a farm nestled between two steep ridges. Even in the middle of summer, maybe seven or eight hours of sunlight could reach the bottom of the holler. Driving around Laurel County, one could happen upon Wildcat Hollow, Salt Log Hollow, Possum Strut Hollow, Copperhead Hollow, Angel Hollow, and of course, Dark Hollow. These were not terrifically telegenic scenes, but they had their charm. Tacked to telephone poles, metal signs advertising Mountain Dew reminded us that “It’ll tickle your innards!” Often used for target practice, they were peppered with buckshot or perforated with .22 caliber bullet holes. And barns painted with Mail Pouch chewing tobacco ads declared, “Treat Yourself to the Best!” – sometimes the only painted surface on the weathered siding.

During the summer of 1967, I turned thirteen and spent a couple weeks in East Bernstadt with my cousin Jeff from Cleveland, who was two years older than me. We stayed with one of Gramma’s brothers, Paul Muster, who grew tobacco on the acreage behind his house. In the early morning, we were tasked to patrol the tobacco rows and pick off fat juicy worms and squish them in the red clay. We’d cross the railroad tracks into town and visit the general store and post office run by Gramma’s youngest sister, Frieda Casteel. We’d hang out and play pool at the home of our second cousins, the three Casteel sisters, who were cute and joked with us about being our “kissin’ cousins.” On hot afternoons, we’d take a rowboat out on a deep murky pond shaded by tall trees, watch for water moccasins, and fish for catfish and bluegill in a lazy, desultory way. We swam at the country club pool in nearby London with our Curry cousins. We waded in the shallow Rockcastle River and picked off leeches. We walked the woods, where I was thrilled to find a twelve-inch-long fossil (later identified as a fossilized fragment of a giant club moss from Mesozoic forests). I think this all was my dad and uncle’s idea to initiate us into the world of their childhoods, and something about it did stick with me.

Saint Sylvester Cemetery, where Gramma is buried, lies behind the little Catholic church atop Muster Hill that I remember attending when I visited. Google Maps helped me get to East Bernstadt, but I happened upon the church on my own, seeing a sign and then looking up the hill at the white clapboard structure, jarring loose memories from fifty years ago. Paul Muster’s tobacco farm across the road is no longer there, and trees have grown up around the church, but surprisingly, East Bernstadt itself hasn’t changed much. Interstate 75 passes within a few miles of the town, as the crow flies, but I had to drive over ten miles from the nearest interchange to get to it, a forgotten town in the Dan’l Boone National Forest. The cemetery is half full of my kinfolk – Musters and Blunschis and Currys and Casteels and Duers. There were six graves of family members who served in World War II. Counting my dad, at least seven of my relatives, from a town that has never numbered more than 700, fought in that war. Army Air Force Lieutenant Henry Muster died in the South Pacific on January 3, 1945. All the others returned home.

Being there felt comfortable and comforting, like lounging on a weatherbeaten couch on a front porch. I drove the five miles into London, the county seat. When I stopped at a Burger King to grab dinner, the woman handing me my change wished me “a blessed day” and the teenage boy who took my order and then handed it to me addressed me as “bud” in a way that made it seem as if we’d always been the best of friends. I camped for the night in Levi Jackson State Park, just south of London, and began the next morning with a walk through fern-flooded woods. I packed up my camp, filled the car with gas, and headed south for twenty miles on a narrow, winding state highway through national forest land, at least two Confederate flags along the way obstinately and obscenely flying from front porches.

I then picked up the Cumberland Gap Parkway going east, which not surprisingly, took me to the Cumberland Gap itself, a V-shaped breach in the Cumberland Mountains ridgeline through which European American settlers had trickled and then flooded west in the late 18th century. I pulled off to take a look, saw signs for Pinnacle Overlook, and drove the steep cutback road to the top for an amazing view from 2,500 feet to the east of that passageway that had been a buffalo trace and a Cherokee and Shawnee trail and then the Wilderness Road.

The story of Appalachia is one of people bound to the land “by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition” (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America). But it’s also the story of a land that for the last 130 years has been far more exploited than nurtured. Maybe I’m drawn to the potential of the beauty hidden within that tragedy. I reckon, after all’s said and done, the place is still right pretty.

Trees of My Youth

My youth was spent in a two-story cross-gabled house on Lakeview Boulevard in Stow, Ohio, in the middle of the Western Reserve, that gift to the Connecticut Yankees (as we learned in our seventh-grade Ohio History class), and on the land of the Kaskaskia and Erie peoples (which we didn’t learn about). I lived there from the time I was five until I left home in the fall of my eighteenth year. We moved there as a family of five – my parents, two younger sisters, and me. When I left, we numbered twelve. And I was happy to reduce the population by 8⅓ percent.

Our yard is still firmly embedded in my memory. That was our domain, offering the potential of a self-contained world that satisfied my budding curiosity. It was a half-acre lot, but it always seemed like more because the house was positioned on the south part, leaving a large side yard that slid down a short hill into the backyard. That was the neighborhood sledding hill, always well stocked with the fresh powder of lake-effect snow. A tight row of red pines delineated the north boundary of the backyard, between the Ingrams’ yard and ours. That row of pines then elled into a privacy fence on the west property line between the Rubels’ yard and ours. When the hill got icy from heavy use, or a novice sledder was making a first try on the slope, the trunks of those pines became dangerous obstacles, inflicting a fair array of stitches over the years. Tucked along those back pines was a row of red raspberry canes that we were expected to tend in the summer, picking off the Japanese beetles and dropping them in a jar of gasoline.

In the middle of the backyard towered a majestic tuliptree – Whitman (in Specimen Days) called it “the Apollo of the woods” – which served as second base on the kickball-wiffleball-baseball diamond that dominated the yard, where the neighborhood kids gathered in the summer to play till dusk. The tuliptree, or tulip poplar, is one of this continent’s largest trees, and ours was no exception, over eighty feet tall. This meant that most balls hit to center field would get knocked down in mid-flight. The savvy kid learned to hit or kick to right or left field. The tree had no conveniently low branches, so we rarely climbed it, unless we wanted to get a good look at the large yellow-green blossoms that would emerge in June. We couldn’t see the orange sherbet swirl at the bottom of the flower’s tulip-like cup unless we got up in the tree. I raked up a lot of those lazy four-lobed leaves over the years.

Two sweetgums flanked the south half of the house, one in the front and the other in the back, arboreal single quotes. They too were tall lovely trees, rising above the steeply pitched roof, so close to the house that some adventurous members of our family were known to have snuck out of the second-floor bathroom by clambering out the dormer window, onto the roof, and over to the tree, then climbing down into the front yard. The sweetgums were fascinating specimens, and comfortable trees to spend time in. Their glossy green, star-shaped leaves were distinctive, as were the small, woody, prickly balls that held the seeds favored by mourning doves, among other songbirds. When I shared the south-facing second-floor bedroom with two of my brothers, I often awoke in the summer to the gentle alarm of their monotonous laments.

The tree’s branches were decorated with corky ridges that we’d pick off during moments of summer idleness. I discovered my first walking stick while sitting in one of those trees. The sweetgum in our backyard was located at the top of a rise that slalomed down to the sandbox, swing set, and tetherball pole that essentially served as the home team’s dugout. I loved climbing to its topmost branch, above the peak of the roof, so high no one knew I was there. I would quietly survey the neighborhood – the Mariolas’ enticingly blue backyard pool, old Weezy’s big kitchen garden, often raided for its tart treat of rhubarb stalks – and, farther off, the magical and misty distances. It was a great way to escape from my life and daydream. Each autumn, these sweetgums would give an impressive final performance, each leaf singing its own part in an elaborate round of gold to orange to scarlet to burgundy.

Our backyard was also home to a pair of Chinese chestnuts, cousins to the beautiful American chestnuts that had been all but wiped out by blight. In contrast to the grand American Chestnuts, these natives to China and Korea were rather scrubby. Nevertheless, the long sprays of white catkins that bloomed like floral fireworks in June always fulfilled their promise of a good nut harvest. The one next to third base had a long low branch that even the littlest kids could hang from or sit on. The runner on third had permission to step off the base to sit on it and swing his or her legs until someone hit them home. Those were the ground rules. 

In the fall, we all knew better than to walk barefoot under those trees – the green chestnut husks were painfully spiky and hard to see. But when they started dropping, we knew it was harvest time. We’d gather up the chestnuts and take them over to the Kempell’s backyard fire pit two doors down, get a blaze going until we had glowing embers, put an old grill over it all, and then set our chestnuts on that. When they were ready, their thin shells would pop open, roasted chestnuts flying everywhere. Nothing tasted better – like tiny sweet potatoes.

The empty lot directly behind our house was waiting to be developed, but meanwhile it was our little patch of wild. I remember once walking into a ground nest of yellow-jackets there. I ran like crazy out of the lot and around our house, wailing and howling until my mom came out and ripped off my t-shirt (beneath which a crew of yellow-jackets were trapped) and then patched me up. A stand of sassafras grew in those woods. Gramma Duer, who was born and raised in eastern Kentucky and whom my dad brought out from Akron to stay with us every weekend, would ask me to dig up the roots so she could steep them to make sassafras tea for us. We thought of it as root beer tea. The large, soft leaves came in three forms – egg-shaped, mitten-shaped, and three-lobed – and carried a hint of that root beer smell when crushed. I took to eating them whenever I had a hankering. I got a fair amount of grief from my friends for this quirky habit, but I stuck with it. The soft leaves had a mild flavor, almost creamy when slowly chewed. Years later, I learned that the Choctaw people of the Mississippi Delta famously dried and ground sassafras leaves to make filé powder, used in Cajun dishes such as filé gumbo. I hope this vindicates me. Or, as I might have said back then, “So there!”

Are any of those trees still standing? Have they been cared for as well as they cared for us? I like to think the tuliptree, at least, endures – its species has been known to live for up to three centuries. In Neil Young’s “Helpless,” he sings about his memories of youth, transfixed by their beauty, unable to return to the past or change it, perhaps unable to be anyone other than who he was becoming. That sweetgum needed deep roots to hold its singular forty-foot trunk in place. I may have swayed in the wind but I knew I was grounded. I don’t remember wanting to grow up to become anything – firefighter, baseball player, president – but I wanted to become something. In that tree, I could rise above my years and gain perspective. The view from the lookout of that tree’s spire, the blurry promise of that horizon, thrilled me in a way that’s hard to explain. I had no idea what kind of life lay ahead, but I knew I was being asked to pay attention to the possibilities, and to say yes.

Where I’m From, Part 1

The ubiquitous Goodyear blimp over downtown Akron

Sometimes I use poetry to excavate and examine my life. I admire how Adrianne Lenker, of the band Big Thief, connects her art to memory. In a New Yorker profile piece she said, “I like my songs to be reminders of certain things that I don’t want to forget.” And in a Song Exploder podcast, she talked about her song “Cattails”: “It’s encapsulated in my memory in this beautiful way that I can return to.” 

A third-grader in 1962, I became an altar boy amidst the changes of Vatican II. In eighth grade, I was tapped to serve funeral masses, which would get me out of class, offer me plenty of chances to sling the incense, and sometimes result in an envelope of tips from the grieving family. This poem was written in response to a prompt I’d handed to my students, based on a poem by George Ella Lyon.

Where I’m From

I’m from the six o’clock mass assignment

the sleepy stumbling five-minute walk from home

to enter the dark silence of the sanctuary

I’m from the black cassock buttoned to my knees

and the loose lacy sleeves of the white surplice

I’m from the lighting of the tall candles

throwing a dim flickering light over 

the widows with their rosaries and novenas

and the rows of empty wooden pews

I’m from the balancing of the weighty Missal in my hands

so Father Archibald could read the prayers and rituals

the presentation of the crystal cruets of water and wine

the lifting of the clutch of altar bells

their sudden ring piercing the silence

signaling the miraculous transubstantiation

I’m from the small black disk of incense

we lit and placed in the censer, which we then 

swung from its chain with sober abandon

the holy smoke rising to the vaulted ceiling

the acrid smell of some burning plant resin

some sandalwood or frankincense or myrrh

I’m from bowed heads and genuflections and 

overheated by the vestments and hungry for breakfast

growing faint and woozy on the altar

I’m from the Pater Noster qui es in caelis

the Latin memorized in third grade

the Dominus vobiscum and the Et cum spiritu tuo

And I’m from stalling after mass as we disrobed

waiting for the priest to leave 

so we could sample the communion wine

to see what God tasted like

In Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful novel Housekeeping she writes, “There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

Hide and Seek

Immersed in the act of hiding,

finding the unlikeliest nook. Then I become

tiny, silent, still, inconspicuous, invisible,

inside the willow thicket by the swing set,

becoming a part of the background, or 

nothing, a secret never whispered.

When footsteps approach,

breathing is postponed.

The art of camouflage.

One by one, the others are discovered;

they too join the search, increasing the numbers

seeking the lost lamb or lone wolf, who becomes

more removed from this world, more

distant, until he abandons his body,

there in its hiding place,

and joins the search.

As the summer dusk gathers and thickens,

he waits to hear the song that calls him back:

“Olly olly oxen free!”

In the way that memory sometimes works, swinging from scene to scene free-associatively, I’ll turn to another vestment of my past. And another lovely quote from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: “For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”

Concerning a Pair of Pants

They are floating there in the closet of my memories from some fifty years ago, so palpable that I can almost reach out and touch them. I was sixteen when I bought them at one of the hip boutiques sprouting up in Midwestern cities such as Akron, reeking of patchouli. It was an audacious purchase for a little white suburban Catholic-school kid.

They were silvery and shimmery and sheer, made from some space-age material. Polyester? Rayon? Sprayon? Hip-hugging and bell-bottomed, they felt like nothing and yet seemed to express everything I aspired to be. I figured I had nothing to lose except my virginity.

Occasionally, I wore them to school, but it was hard to feel studious when so attired. Instead, they were my go-to party pants, a costume that put me in the mood to be somebody else: the distant cousin of Ziggy Stardust. I felt Funkadelic and Superfly. I was ready to “take a walk on the wild side.” 

Without thinking, I strutted and sauntered and slunk as if a soul brother – as if! I usually got into some kind of small-time trouble, something involving a carload of guys and a mooning incident or a bottle of peppermint schnapps or a girl named Patty or Sally or Megan. On a particularly fortuitous and far-fetched night, all three.

What became of those pants? Who knows? I literally or figuratively outgrew them the summer after my senior year.

I was born in the Rust Belt city of Akron, Ohio, and until the age of five, I lived with my parents in a third-floor apartment on the corner of East Voris Street and Wolf Ledges Parkway, in South Akron. This poem was certainly paying attention to Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago.” 

I Sing of Akron

Rubber Capital of the World

I’m talking tires, my friend – vulcanized tires

B. F. Goodrich, Goodyear, General Tire, Firestone, Seiberling

Those vast smoky factories making tires for Motor City’s madness

“Wherever wheels are rolling, no matter what the load

The name that’s known is Firestone, where the rubber meets the road”

Friday night high school football games were played at the Rubber Bowl

The working class crowd’s rumbles and cheers rolled out of the stadium

And steered the steep slope of Derby Downs, home of the All-American Soap Box Derby

Not far from the hangars that housed those bulbous leviathans of the sky, the Goodyear blimps

I remember driving across the long high viaduct over the Cuyahoga River Gorge

The orange neon lights flashing A-C-M-E ACME FOODS, teaching me how to read

But in the shadows beneath that bridge, what perverse versions of torture took place?

What did you do to your sons and daughters – your winos, your whores, your day laborers with their glazed eyes?

Afterward, did you give them a bottle of Norka pop – your name spelled backward in all the colors – grape, cherry, lemon-lime?

Do the West Virginia hillbillies who escaped the coal mines, coughing up black lung, still live by the factories, in Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park?

Do the Italians and their ravioli-and-cannoli families still live near St. Anthony’s on North Hill?

Even now, the voluptuous syllables of those Italian names haunt me: Gina Iacobucci, Gina Iacobucci, Gina Iacobucci

Do the Ukranians still live on the south side, within walking distance of Holy Ghost Church?

Debbie Ukraniec and those other beautiful dark-eyed Ukraine girls made me sing and shout

And what magic inspired that hardcourt hero of the Fighting Irish, Saint V–St. Mary’s LeBron?

Meanwhile, the Wops and Micks and Polacks and Bohunks mix it up

In Akron, city of factories and working class neighborhoods

City of tires, city of rubber

Chrissie Hynde’s song “My City Was Gone” will take us out. A couple years older than me, she went to Firestone High School and then Kent State before moving to London and eventually putting together The Pretenders.

Friends of the Devil, Part 3

(Hitchhiking sign from a comp notebook. On the way to see Tony in Ithaca, NY, Summer 1978. I used the Greek spelling of Odysseus’s hometown.)

To reset the scene: It’s a couple days after Christmas, 1975, and I’m hitching back east, from Phoenix to New Orleans, to hang out with my friend Tony Hoagland before heading back to Iowa City to start my second semester at the university. This was not the most thoughtfully planned trip – getting turned away at the Mexican border threw a monkey wrench into whatever itinerary I’d envisioned. But a true vagabond rolls with those punches. I would often use a sign when hitchhiking to suggest that I had a destination in mind, to give the appearance of being goal-oriented, but whenever an interesting detour presented itself, I almost always took it. 

Somewhere in the middle of West Texas, a Volkswagen van pulled off the road to pick me up. The sight of that blocky two-tone body rolling to a stop was always a good omen. Two long-haired brothers from Oregon were on their way to New Orleans – it’s hard to imagine a more perfect ride. To add some frosting to that carrot cake, after we’d gotten to know each other and gone a few miles down the road, they pulled out a big bag of weed and tossed it to me, along with a pack of Zig-Zags, and asked me to roll some joints. I should point out that besides being able to fill the miles with conversation, a good hitchhiker should be able to read a map and navigate and to roll a big tight doobie, both valuable life skills. (And yes, I know that GPS, Google Maps, and the “pre-rolls” at the pot dispensaries now make those skills superfluous.) As we passed around the jay and rolled through the bleak West Texas landscape, I was feeling mellow and decided to share with the brothers my “getting high is an act of consciousness-raising” rap – that pot enables one to see the world and the people who live in it with more insight and compassion. This got no response from the brothers; I assumed they were just taking it in, mulling over the ramifications. But about fifteen miles down the road, they pulled off and told me this was as far as they were going … with me. I was flabbergasted, and obviously disappointed. I guess they weren’t ready for that message.

One of the challenges of hitchhiking was dealing with the occasional unwanted sexual advance. I caught a ride from a traveling salesman somewhere between San Antonio and Houston. Into my second day on the road by then, I grabbed a nap whenever I could, and warmed by the winter sun slanting in through the passenger side window, I dozed off. But I soon woke with a start to find the driver reaching over and fondling my genitals. I quickly disabused him of the notion that I’d be okay with that. It was a gentle rebuff – I still wanted the ride and had no problem with him as long as he understood my lack of interest. It was a bit awkward after that – he was clearly self-conscious about my refusal – and that ride also ended sooner than expected. Oh well.

Getting through Houston was a drag, as it so often was in a big city – dealing with heavy traffic and lots of short rides – but by early afternoon, I was in Baytown, just east of Houston, feeling the warm breezes from the Gulf of Mexico and realizing I might just make it to Tony’s that day. Passing north of Port Arthur, I said a little prayer for Janis Joplin, who grew up there and hated it for how she was treated in high school. Janis, who sang with so much heart and soul, who had died five years before that, who if there’s any justice in the world is somewhere finally being loved by some good man or woman. Just listen to her bluesy rendition of “Cry Baby.” In the adlib solo of an alternate recording of the song (in the “legacy edition” of her posthumous Pearl on Spotify) she says, “There’s this dude, man, walking around the fucking highways of America with a pack on his back, looking for his identity, right? But I wanna say, baby, don’t you know you left your momma here at home – you left your good-loving momma right here at home.” He sure did, Janis.

Late that night I was heading down Louisiana Highway 1. Dropped off at Boogie’s Bar, a roadhouse between Larose and Cut Off (“No Parking on the Shoulder”), about ten miles from Tony’s, I walked in to use a payphone to call him, realizing that everyone in the place was speaking French, more precisely the Louisiana French dialect. I immediately dug the scene. Tony showed up twenty minutes later, and we commenced to hug and spout poetry: “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me.” We regaled each other with stories of what we’ve been doing since we last saw each other in Iowa City, maybe two weeks before.

For the next week we kicked back. I caught up on that sleep I missed on the road. Tony would get up and meditate and I would take the family’s Great Dane for long walks down to the edge of the bayou to watch the shrimpers unload their catch. We wrote poems and read them to each other, and those of the poets we were into at the moment – César Vallejo, Anna Akhmatova, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Tomas Tranströmer. We listened to The Basement Tapes and talked about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, which had just finished its crazy tour. On New Year’s Eve, we hung out in his backyard, sharing a bottle of prosecco, gazing up at the flood of stars and random fireworks in the Mississippi River Delta night.

Over those next couple of years, Tony became one of my most steadfast friends. After he graduated and moved on, we stayed in touch. In February 1980, I connected up with him in Tucson. One night, he and I dropped acid and got lost among the saguaro and cholla in the Sonoran Desert. Slowly coming down later, back at his apartment, we found ourselves gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. It was the closest I ever came to physically loving a man, and some part of me regrets not finding out how that would’ve felt. 

A week before classes would start up again, Tony gave me a lift to New Orleans so I could pick up I-55 and follow the Mississippi, against the current, toward Iowa City. As we were about to part company, we started singing “Friend of the Devil,” trading off Robert Hunter’s verses, joining on the chorus: “Set out runnin’ but I take me time. A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine. If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.” All told, it would take almost four week and just under five thousand miles to get home to my furnished room above the Montessori School on Reno Street.

And on October 23, 2018, Tony passed away. I still miss his sweet brilliance...

(Tony from the mid-1980s. On the back of the photo: “what I look like now”.)

To My Friend Tony

who passed from this world yesterday.

You are already missed, my brother.

I count myself lucky to have known you, to have 

picked the winning Lotto numbers of our lifelong friendship.

I hung out with you when we were young in Iowa City.

Remember walking into Gabe's one night?

A jazz band was playing on the little stage.

You and I seized the opportunity of the empty dance floor

and tore it up – two live wires ricocheting around the room

until there was only room for us,

two unknown poets making up new moves as we went,

unaware of anything else except the sacred chords

vibrating through our bodies.

Every time we crossed paths over the years – New 

Orleans, Ithaca, Tucson, Santa Fe – was a blessing.

And now I’m letting out the dog and standing in the darkness, 

thinking about you and your poetry and your life.

The moon is full of you tonight, Tony.

Friends of the Devil, Part 2

(Summer 1975, at Prch’s house on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, with our friends Tom and Whiskey Stone. One of the few photos of me from those days. )

After spending a few days checking out the Austin scene with my friend Prch and checking in at the Mexican Consulate to get a tourist visa, I was on my way. I continued hitchhiking south on I-35, down through San Antonio to the border town of Laredo. As I got into the Rio Grande Valley and closer to the border, the rides grew harder to come by, but I did make it to the border crossing by that afternoon. The Laredo-to-Nuevo-Laredo crossing was the third-busiest on that troubled and contentious 2,000-mile border. I walked across a bridge to the Mexican customs office and showed them my passport. They asked me how long I planned to stay: “Tres semanas.” What was my purpose for visiting Mexico: “Vagar y maravillarse (To wander and wonder).” How much money did I have: “Cien dólares.” They rolled their eyes and told me I couldn’t enter their country. 

I hadn’t planned on this. Did they want a bribe, the famous mordida, that little bite out of my wallet? I’ll never know. I had no idea how to present such a thing, my Spanish not fluent enough to negotiate the subtleties of such a transaction, and I had little money to spare in any case. Crestfallen, disappointed, somewhat embarrassed, I walked back across the bridge and considered my options. I could’ve tried another border crossing – Piedras Negras was about 120 miles to the northwest – but I’d lost my confidence in this venture. The family of my high school buddy Michael had moved to Phoenix in the past year, and I had their address. He was going to school at San Francisco State, but he’d be coming home for Christmas. I decided to head there to meet up with him and then decide what to do next. So, back to San Antonio and then west on I-10 toward Phoenix. One thing I came to appreciate on this trip was the vast emptiness of West Texas. Between San Antonio and El Paso is a 550-mile stretch of rangeland and Chihuahuan Desert, punctuated by oil derricks and dusty little towns. The soundtrack might be the quiet skittering of small lizards and tumbleweeds, then a single extended bent note on a Fender Stratocaster, then the opening chords of Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Hitching was an art, a practice, and a philosophy, all rolled into one. Of course, hitchhikers depended on the kindness and generosity of strangers, but they contributed something to that transaction. It was their job to be good company. That might entail telling stories of the road, or listening to the stories of the driver, or just participating in a conversation to stave off drowsiness. It was the hitchhiker’s responsibility to be interested in the lives of the drivers, to practice empathy. Sometimes this might involve a good deal of acting, but the best hitchhikers were actually interested on some level in the lives of their temporary traveling companions. 

I didn’t get as many rides from truck drivers as you might expect – many trucking companies forbid drivers to pick up hitchhikers, and truckers had less need for company because of their non-stop conversations with other truckers on their CB radios. But Bill pulled his eighteen-wheeler off the road to give me a lift. In his tall white Stetson hat, he was more gregarious than most truckers, and we talked steadily above the roar of the rig and the CB chit-chat. We stopped at the Flying J Travel Center in Fort Stockton for coffee and met up with a few other truckers. Here’s one story passed around: “Once I was driving a rig with this one kid and we get pulled over in Denver and the trooper pulls out his ticket book to write us up. This fool-ass kid rolls down his window and says, ‘I’ll take a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate malt.’ The trooper was so amazed by his gall that he let us off with a warning.”

I lucked into a long ride from Daniel, a University of Texas student on his way home to El Paso. We hit it off well for the next three hours, and as we were approaching the city and evening was settling in, Daniel invited me to spend the night at his family’s place. His parents were cool – a Jewish couple living in suburban comfort in the foothills of the Franklin Mountains – glad to have their son home for the holidays and willing to welcome this scraggly kid who had tagged along. After having been on the road for two days straight, I was grateful for the sit-down dinner and bed they offered. Daniel gave me a lift back to I-10 the next morning, and I continued on my way.

I had more good luck that day – long rides from friendly folks – and reached the sun-soaked sprawl of Phoenix by the afternoon of Christmas Eve. It took a while to find the home of Michael’s family on West Solar Drive, but I arrived and knocked on the door, feeling a bit like a Leonard Cohen song, like I “was just some Joseph looking for a manger.” Michael’s parents were taken aback at the sight of me. Though John and Kay knew me well from when Michael, Jon, and I lived together in Pennsylvania, they weren’t expecting me, and it turned out that Michael had decided to stay in San Francisco over winter break. There was an awkward moment, but they generously welcomed me in, insisting I spend Christmas with them and their five kids, perhaps knowing there might not be a lonelier feeling than being on the road on Christmas Day. 

As was often the case among couples of that generation, John and Kay seemed an unlikely pairing – gruff Lithuanian American father and tender-hearted mom of Scotch-Irish stock – but they somehow made it work. Michael’s younger brother Steve was home from Northern Arizona University and staying in the garage, which John had rigged up with two beds, a fridge, and a tv. So I roomed with him, essentially filling in for Michael. Steve and I hung out, drinking beer and watching late-night tv (including a new show, Saturday Night Live), but neither of us knew the city, so it was all rather low-key. I took lots of long walks in the evening to give the family some space.

Four days later I was bidding my adopted family a grateful farewell and heading back east. My goal was to get to New Orleans by New Year’s Eve to meet up with my friend Tony Hoagland. This would be a long stretch of hitching – some 1,500 miles – but I would be assured of mild temperatures and I was well-rested from my time with Michael’s family. In September, Tony and I first met by the bulk peanut butter bins at New Pioneer Co-op on South Gilbert Street and instantly connected. We were both young poets and Deadheads and new to Iowa City. I was working as a night baker at Stone Soup Restaurant in the basement of Center East, on the corner of Jefferson and Clinton, and Tony frequented Barbara Welch’s Yoga Center, located on the first floor of that building, so our paths frequently crossed. Tony was a short wild sprite with long blonde hair and a great zen energy (who would go on to become an impressive poet and academic). Thoughtful, upbeat, brilliantly funny, he lived in the moment, and I immediately admired and liked him. His father, a retired Army doctor, had settled in the little town of Galliano, deep in the bayou seventy miles south of New Orleans. I looked forward to seeing Tony and digging the bayou and celebrating the end of 1975 with him. But as I said, that was 1,500 miles away.

Friends of the Devil, Part 1

(Me with my friends Prch & Jon & the rest of our high school senior class Student Senate. 1972)

A year after my first hitchhiking trip south and west [see Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 3], I pointed myself in that direction again. It was mid-December 1975, the beginning of winter break, and two degrees above zero that morning in Iowa City. I’d just taken a semester of Intensive Spanish at the University of Iowa and was picking it up fairly quickly because of the rather ridiculous fact of my four years of high school Latin. The plan was to get as far into Mexico as I could in a month. So, west to Des Moines and then southbound on 1-35. I joyfully kicked up roadside feed corn and caught a ride from Des Moines to Kansas City before I’d even had a chance to stick out my thumb. By the time I reached Wichita the wind was whipping unabated across the endless rolling prairie and the sun was turning orange and saying goodbye. I stopped at a Denny’s for a cheese omelet and coffee and unfiltered Camels. 

I caught one more ride to the outskirts of Oklahoma City. As deep night settled in, I found myself at a busy highway crossroad with little room for a driver to pull off and pick me up. An Okie state trooper stopped to give me a ride. Although this was a bit unusual – and I was keenly aware of the two joints tucked in my breast pocket – a good hitchhiker never turns down a reasonable ride. The trooper was cool, just helping me out with a ride to a better – and safer – spot to hitch outside of Norman. But it was getting late, the traffic was light, and I was traveling light, with no heavy coat to ward off the winds. It was pitch black except for a fool moon and cold cold cold. I retreated to a nearby Ramada Inn, where I settled into a lobby chair to warm up … and then intermittently sleep till dawn. A man in a red blazer stopped by to tell me his clientele would be around soon, so I should get a coffee and be on my way. Oklahoma was okay.

By that afternoon, I made it to Austin, where the climate was more accommodating. I was stopping off there, hoping to meet up with one of my closest high school buddies, Jim “Prch” Prchlik. Prch grew up in Detroit but landed at Walsh Jesuit High School outside Akron at the beginning of his sophomore year when his dad, a former Detroit Lions defensive lineman, took an executive position at a nearby Ford Motor Company plant. Prch was a hard-nosed linebacker  on the football team, but he was also gregarious, fun-loving, and sweet-tempered. We bonded over our mutual admiration of Jack Kerouac’s novels about exploring the road and all that entailed. We agreed with Jack that “there was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” The summer after high school, we’d hitched back east to Cape Cod, and when Prch started school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor became an important hub of my own hitchhiking trips. In the summer of 1981, we met up at his friend Albert’s apartment in Kassel, Germany, and then traveled together, one more time, for over a month, down through the Vosges Mountains and into Italy as far south as Rome, a memorable story of hitching and backpacking worth retelling some time.

Prch had given me the address of his friend Kate, whom he was planning to meet up with. He had a drive-away from Ann Arbor to Los Angeles, given two weeks to transport the car and $200 for the effort. Kate was going to accompany him on the Austin–LA leg of the trip. The address led me to a little trailer, where Kate lived with her sister Rose and Rose’s partner Frank and their baby. Prch hadn’t arrived yet, but I met Kate, who could simply be described as a sweet, free-spirited hippie. I know that’s a trite cliché, but there’s a reason it exists. One sensed that carefree Kate was up for just about anything, ready to enjoy the transient party that represented our lives then. That evening, I tried to make myself useful by cleaning up after dinner and entertaining the baby.

Not much extra room in the trailer that night, but Kate directed me to a spot in her bedroom where I could throw down my sleeping bag. We talked for a while, comparing notes about our mutual friend, and turned out the light. Before long, Kate was inviting me to share her bed. I felt a bit conflicted – this was the girlfriend of my best friend after all. But how do I explain the ethos of the time? Kate knew what she wanted, and it was hard to argue with her offer of the comfort of her bed. Our generation wanted to try everything. We wanted to know what it felt like to be impulsive, intense, intimate. We wanted to make sure we didn’t repeat the mistakes of our parents’ generation, of the conventional and conservative fifties of cufflinks and cash flow.

The next afternoon, I was scoping out the scene down on State Street near the University of Texas campus when I ran into Prch. We shared big hugs and laughter, celebrated the serendipity of life, and went off to the Armadillo World Headquarters to catch a show by Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the fine rock bands that emerged from the late sixties San Francisco scene. I never said anything to Prch about the previous night with Kate, perhaps because I felt that in the grand scheme of things our dalliance was inconsequential, just a bubble in time. Leonard Cohen explains this feeling best in his song “Sisters of Mercy.” After introducing us to these compassionate sisters, he sings, “And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they’ve sweetened your night. We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right.” 

Before I continued south and Prch and Kate headed west, I stayed a few more days in Austin, spending my days with the two of them, and my nights next door in the trailer of Kate’s friend, Bob Fullalove. In retrospect, I realize it would've been better to be straight with my friend. If there was truly no harm in that one sweet night with Kate, then I should’ve been totally up-front. In fact, when Kate and Prch got to California, she did tell him about our night together, and he was cool with it, that generous sharing of ourselves. Back in the spring, they’d agreed to give each other permission to enjoy the company of others when they weren’t together, that it might even be bonding if they were with someone the other was close to. Still, I wish I’d been honest with my friend, and perhaps this will serve as my apology to him. As I get older, and have a little more hindsight, I can begin to forgive who I was, and realize I still have much to learn.

Back to Square One

(Jolly Times in the Fifties. My father the liquor salesman is on the left.)

I’M STEPPING BACK a moment from stories about life during my early twenties to what might be thought of as origin stories. What events in my early years have perhaps guided the course of my life? This first poem is primarily constructed from terms that Merriam-Webster’s determined to have entered the lexicon in the year of my birth. In some ways, I believe, us baby boomers intentionally took paths that were in opposition to the mundane and passionless Fifties of our parents’ generation. During the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the activist Jack Weinberg was quoted as saying, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” which became a mantra for my generation. I think today’s Gen Z would agree with that: “Okay, boomers, out of the way. It’s our turn.” 

Personal History

I was born in the year of the baby boom

The year of rock ‘n’ roll and videotape

The year of Elvis in Memphis, already turning velvet

I was born in the year of the red scare and the blacklist

I was born in the year of fear and lies (weren’t we all?)

The year of the polygraph and the polygraphist

The year of blockbusting and Brown v. Board of Education

The year of domino theories, air-raid shelters, and UnAmerican Activities

(And I’m not even sure what an American Activity is)

I was born in year of the cash flow escaping to exurbia

The year of the high-rise, the how-to, the soft sell

The year of agribusiness, yellow pages, and teleconferences

I was born in the year of the fish stick

In the year of tie tacks and pasties

I was born in the year of I Like Ike and I Love Lucy

I was born in the year of cha-cha-cha

Elvis in Memphis at Sun Records

Senator Joe McCarthy strangling the mic at a House Unamerican Activities Committee meeting

Some of my father’s ciff links & tie tacks

IN MANY WAYS, my early teen years were defined by a range of rebellious reactions to my father and his opinions about the world. Over time, I’ve come to respect, or at least understand, what made him tick. He was certainly more complicated than this second poem suggests, but it does offer one take on who he was.

Things My Father Used To Say

“Looooorrrrrdy mercy”

His contraction of “Lord, have mercy on me”

A pitiable plea in the face of an unjust world

He would stretch out that first syllable

Injecting equal doses of dismay and disgust

“Oh my aching back” was another of his mottos

The accent anapestic leaning heavily on the third syllable

Although I never knew him to have back problems

Just ten children and a grinding job in sales

That he refused to walk away from

His Kentucky-flavored “Dad gum it”

Dramatic emphasis on the first syllable

The sound-swapping spoonerism made this curse

More acceptable to our uncorrupted ears

Although we knew what he meant

We knew the disappointment and doubt

Expressed in all these slogans

His battle cries strained through gritted teeth

As he engaged aghast in the fight

He had with the world

He was always the younger brother

Trying to prove something to someone

When he’d exclaim “For the love of Christ”

It never felt like love to us

THIS LAST POEM was written to address the theme of and to be performed at one of Drop the Mic shows produced by my friend, the brilliant Akwi Nji. This show’s theme took me back to playing four-square on the grade school playground. I could subtitle it “Confessions of a white cisgender male growing up in northeast Ohio,” as a way of acknowledging or admitting exactly where I’m coming from. Thankfully, this is no longer the only story, or only perspective, that we hear.

Back to Square One

Let me talk a bit about

the cruelty of grade school

lunch recess on the Holy

Family playground

where I was tagged 

with my first nickname

playing four-square

fierce first-grade battle

to become king of the ball

from the name my grandfather

lugged from Austria

from the shores of the Bodensee

from the German or Romansch

or French or Catalan or even Gaelic

the umlaut dumped at Ellis Isle

Dür meaning

hard, harsh, tough, hardy

rigid, stiff, difficult, stubborn

as in durable, duress, dour, like a door

became Du-er and then transformed 

in the scatological minds of my playmates

into Du-Du, a dis or burn which

because I didn't know what else to do

I endured

and learned about the world 

from the playground

liar liar pants on fire

sad tennis shoes dangling 

from a telephone wire

girls on the front parking lot

playing their secret jump rope games

I like coffee I like tea

I like boys and the boys like me

boys like me on the sprawling back lot

monkey business on the monkey bars

in the shadow of the gun-metal grey slide

worn smooth by a billion butts

we each put a foot in the circle

and spoke the magic spell

to decide who was It

eenie meenie miney moe

engine engine number nine 

first through eighth grades

our games were interwoven

and when it snowed

we put on heavy coats and boots

and played smear the queer

and I’d grab that football

and run for dear life

but I endured

the Sisters of Charity

in their grey habits and 

starched white headpieces and

belts of heavy wooden rosary beads

seemed to teach us all but charity

after school I'd clean the blackboard

of our tender-hearted first-grade teacher 

Sister Marie Dolores 

just to get near her joy

but in third grade Sister Augustine

was as cold and unflinching 

as a piece of coal

I endured that too

until I was ten

and working my first job

delivering eighty copies of the news

the Akron Beacon Journal

every afternoon after school

waiting with fellow paperboys

Mike Keller and Bob Greenwald

for our papers to be dropped off

smoking ciggies in the nearby woods

singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”

“no no no it ain’t me, babe”

they rechristened me Du-Babes

they dubbed me Du-Babes

and in the fourth grade Mrs. Voltz

whom none of us liked

neither her nor her mustache

called me out of my name

“I thought you were a doer!”

because I was talking in class I guess

engaged in the task of mastering

the witty aside, the flippant quip

because talking is not doing?

and so she changed the seating chart

surrounding me with girls

my favorite audience

and I avoided the looming presence

of our principal Sister Marie Pierre

and thereby endured

I learned to never wear

white socks with dress shoes

we called them parmas

because only the auto workers

from Parma did that

we wore blue oxfords

with button-down collars

and pencil-thin clip-on ties

and the girls showed us

who they liked by yanking off

the bozo button or fruit loop

on the back of our shirts

and the girls wore blue plaid 

jumpers and white blouses

but when Michelle Micale

came to our school in seventh grade

she did something to that blouse

that made us all think a lot

about the word bosom

and when someone spray-painted 69

on the back wall of the school

we studied and studied that number

until it revealed the mysteries of sex

by then I’d become simply Du 

the syllable affectionately elongated

some element on the periodic table

a noble gas perhaps

some musical note 

an invitation, an affirmation

the buddy you 

and I was finally ready for high school 

because I’d had enough of grade school

Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 3

(US 40 between Steamboat Springs & Denver, Whiteley Peak in the background)

That summer after Bobbie and I broke up, we both got busy with the rest of our lives. Our paths didn’t cross often, but when they did, it was sweet and comfortable. Because we’d developed this habit of writing letters to each other, these epistolary connections, Bobbie and I stayed in touch for the next ten years until we each became too busy with our growing families, me in Iowa City and her on Long Island. But recently, we started writing letters to each other again, picking up our “deep friendship” where it had left off 35 years ago – some kind of grace.

Bobbie and I did meet up in Denver again the year after our breakup. In early October 1974, I left my hodcarrier job in Kentucky and drove to Des Moines, where my family had moved. After I’d touched base with the fam and parked my VW Bug, I started hitchhiking. For anyone who came of age during the sixties and seventies, this wasn’t an uncommon experience, as it would be today. I started hitchhiking in high school out of necessity, walking down to Graham Road when I missed the bus and hitching the seven miles to school. I appreciated the practicality of it – filling an empty seat in a car going where I’m going, having a conversation with someone to pass the miles – as well as the mutual trust the act required. For someone “on the road,” a car can be more burden than convenience. With my backpack and sleeping bag and pup tent, and without a car, I was mobile and agile. Without expenses for gas and motels, what money I had could take me further, in terms of both distance and time.

The goal of this journey was to see the West Coast I’d read about in Jack Kerouac’s novels. Because it was early November, I picked the most southerly route, south to Austin and then west on I-10 to Tucson, stopping in those college towns to see what was going on. On a whim, I crossed into Mexico, catching a ride down through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a wilderness reserve, and walking across the border now vandalized by a 30-foot-tall steel-barred fence. Late at night, I crossed over, untouched, unquestioned, into the Sonoran border town of Sonoyta. I spent the night in a little cafe, waiting for a bus to take me the 60 miles southwest to Puerto Peñasco, a Gulf of California fishing town. No passport, no visa, virtually no Spanish, I camped in the dry hills north of town and swam in the sea. I just wanted to see what it felt like to be out of country, to be an outsider (if a white man can ever be such a thing).

A few days later I crossed back into the U.S. the same way – nothing to declare, other than the experience, and nobody to declare it to. I headed west to Laguna Beach, to the home of the oldest sister of my next-door neighbor pal, Pat Flowers. I spent a weekend in her and her husband’s apartment, finding an unlocked window after I realized they weren’t coming home. I checked out the ocean and hung out on the beach. As thanks for their unwitting hospitality, I baked a couple of loaves of bread and left them with a note. I headed up the coast to San Francisco, taking the Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu to Big Sur. I remember getting dropped off in Santa Barbara; the entrance ramp to the highway was stacked with young hitchhikers. I just went to the end of the line, knowing a ride would eventually come. I crashed at the apartment of my high school buddy Michael, who was a student at the University of San Francisco. Golden Gate Park and the Presidio were an easy walk away, but I spent my days wandering all over up and down that convivial city.

By mid-December I was heading back to Iowa to stay with my family while I worked to save money to take a second crack at college at the University of Iowa. I crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and headed east on I-80. The plan was to hitch straight through to Denver. I lucked into rides that took me through the night, catching naps along the way. I switched from I-80 to US 40 east of Salt Lake City. By the evening of the second day I was standing under a streetlight beside the highway in Steamboat Springs. The weather had been kind to me so far, but a snow front was moving in. I stood in the valley of this ski town ringed by mountains, hoping for one more ride to Denver, just 160 miles away, where I knew I would find rest and refuge at Bobbie’s apartment.

Just as I was thinking of giving in and finding the cheapest motel in Steamboat, a car stopped. This woman – let’s call her Tina – was heading to Denver and looking for some company into the night. She was a few years older than me but had lived much longer than I had. She wore an earned wariness and a ragged determination. She was escaping something, and I know she told me what it was, but the current stage in her escape plan was the only thing on my mind. We had just crossed the Continental Divide, and the snow was starting to come down, heavy flakes swirling around us. Talking a mile a minute, she reached across me to open the glove compartment and pull out a bottle of pills. I didn’t get a chance to read the label, but I didn’t need to; I knew these were going to help her get to Denver tonight. There’s a reason they’re called Co-Pilots, Coast to Coasts, Truck Drivers. 

As we drove deeper into the night, the traffic thinned out and the road got harder to find in snow now up to our hubcaps. She finally asked me to take the wheel; it would have to be on me to get us through. We begged for a semi to come along so we could follow its tracks. Beyond the headlights, blackness. Was that a mountain side beside us or empty air? I milked the radio dial for something to focus on. I like to think I found this song Bob Dylan recorded the previous year. Somewhere out there loomed Bear Mountain, Lawson Ridge, Whiteley Peak. No roadside rest stops, no gleaming neon high in the sky to guide us to Stuckey’s or Howard Johnson’s, no golden arches. We eventually connected up with I-70 in the smallest hours of the night – not much more traffic to guide us, but the snow had let up, that weather front stalled somewhere in the mountains.

As dawn was breaking in the east we crested a hill, and laid out below us, lights twinkling, sun glinting off the buildings, was Denver. We laughed, bleary, exhausted, relieved. We coasted down to the edge of the city, stopped at the first roadside breakfast diner we came upon, and celebrated making it through the night and out of the darkness with omelets and hash browns and coffee. A three-hour trip had taken over eight hours. We sheepishly looked at each other, unfamiliar in the daylight. I gave her Bobbie’s address near the University of Denver campus and we figured out how to get there. Of course, I never saw “Tina” again. I wonder if she was able to escape whatever trap she had found herself in. I wonder if she received as good a welcome as I did. I was lucky, catching Bobbie as she was getting ready to head out for her day. Her laughter of surprise and delight, my laughter of relief and wonder. We hugged, we talked. When she went off to classes, I took a long hot shower, pulled out my sleeping bag, found a comfortable sofa, and slept until she came home.

It’s amazing how our lives have run in parallel these past 35 years, raising kids, deciding in the middle of our lives to veer off our career paths to become high school teachers, responding to the direction our country has taken in recent years to march, protest, take action. That first letter from Bobbie was a gift. She wrote, “Your letter has made me think back to the people who shaped me. I know you and your love helped give me the confidence to know that I could be whoever I wanted to be.” Girl, that feeling is mutual.

Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 2

(Driving into McConnellsburg PA on the Lincoln Way)

By the beginning of September 1972, my girlfriend Bobbie had started school at the University of Denver, and Jon, Mike, and I had traveled on the Penn Turnpike to McConnellsburg, a little south-central Pennsylvania borough nestled in a valley in the shadows of the Tuscarora Mountain ridge of the Appalachians. The plan was to do volunteer work with a small Catholic order, Glenmary Home Missioners, on a project called HOPE, Homes On People’s Energy. Specifically, we were helping Brother Ralph build houses for and with the Black families that lived in a community a mile outside of town known as The Ridge. As much as I admired Brother Ralph and enjoyed the construction work and getting to know the families on The Ridge, I leaned heavily on the support of Jon and Mike to get me through the rough patches of homesickness and sore muscles.

We shared a second-floor apartment that seemed to overhang the busy and historical Lincoln Way (US Route 30). Living directly across the street from the church rectory, we always felt Father Wolf was keeping a close eye on our activities. Jon had impressive culinary skills for an eighteen-year-old lad. When a church member gave us some squirrels that he had shot and dressed, Jon figured out a way to cook them, and we all figured out a way to eat them. Lord knows Mike and I would’ve been hard-pressed to make a decent meal with even the most basic ingredients.

We all pined for our girlfriends. I seem to recall that we each had a song that somehow evoked our absent loves – such as Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Carole King’s “So Far Away” – but that may be a false memory. I do know that whenever I got a letter from a Bobbie, you could count on me playing Side A of John Denver’s album Rocky Mountain High, which included the title song and “For Baby (For Bobbie).” (Bobbie’s given name is Georgiena, but when she was a newborn, her older brother called her Bobbie – as close as he could get to Baby – and the nickname stuck.) I do not listen to John Denver’s high whiny schmaltz anymore, but this story isn’t about him.

We all returned to Akron for Christmas break. That Christmas after high school was imbued with a complex array of feelings. Our classmates had finished their first semester of college, returning with stories of unfettered independence on campus, aware that those experiences were taking us all in different directions. It seemed there was a party at someone’s house every night. I tried to spend every minute with Bobbie that I could. Her father had arranged for her to be among the young women presented to Akron society at the 70th Charity Ball for the Children’s Hospital – a debutante ball. Bobbie asked me to escort her, and I readily consented, even though I had no idea what that entailed. We both made private jokes about our unlikely participation. But I was just glad to be there with her, mostly watching from the sidelines in my borrowed sport coat and keeping her company when it all got pretentious or boring or silly.

Jon, Mike, and I were soon on our way back to McConnellsburg. In the fall we’d sometimes help Bob Wolford and Harvey Kneese’s roofing crew. They were funneling all the profits into their project to build a modular house factory, and the arrangement was that, for our free labor, Bob and Harvey would offer cut-rate deals to people on The Ridge who wanted to buy one of their houses. Working with the two local guys on the roofing crew, Michael and David Strait, we became acquainted with the regional dialect. Michael or David might say, “Could y’ins bring up another packet of shingles?” It always made us smile. We replaced a lot of lovely old gray slate roofs with asphalt shingles. By winter, the six of us were constructing a sheet metal factory building in a sheep pasture on a wind-bitten hillside. When the site was being leveled and dirt needed to be moved, I learned how to use a stick shift ... while learning how to drive a dump truck. I pretty much killed that transmission. By spring we had put the finishing touches on a sturdy two-story house on The Ridge and were able to celebrate with Bebe and her family as they moved in. And by the end of May, we were packing up and returning to Akron, no longer lonely or homesick, looking forward to the next stage of our lives.

I was back home, but Bobbie was still in Denver finishing her school year. I was thinking about her a lot, missing her laughter and that sweet look in her eyes, the memorable terrain of her body, and the long intimate conversations within which we would entwine ourselves late into the night. I went to a poetry reading at a bar on Water Street in neighboring Kent, and by the end of the reading, in the darkness of that bar, moved by fuzzy romanticism and my vivid memories of her, I decided to drive to Denver to see her – that night. Before bothering to weigh the wisdom of that plan, I went home, told my mom I was leaving, and packed up the sky blue 1952 Chevy Impala I’d bought from Brother Ralph for a dollar, my mom supplying me with a thermos of coffee, a bag of sliced carrots, and words of caution.

I headed out into the Midwestern highway night – Akron to Columbus to Indianapolis to St. Louis – calmed by the rhythms of the road, listening to “Ramblin’ Man” and “Free Ride” on the radio, keeping myself awake by talking to the truckers in their Morse Code–like headlight language. In central Missouri the next morning, I was recharged by the kinetic energy of the passing miles, and outside of Kansas City I picked up a hitchhiking couple. A hundred miles later, my Impala began to falter, hampered by some undiagnosable car trouble, unable to go faster than 40 miles per hour, an easy target for the lions of the Kansas savanna. And so, tantalized by anticipation, we crept across the monotonous map of Kansas and into eastern Colorado until I was blown away by my first view of the Rocky Mountains in the distance, a sublime vision of purple at sundown, and we made Denver by midnight.

As became my habit during those years, I hadn’t given Bobbie a heads-up I was coming. Remember, this was in the days before cell phones, but I valued the liberation from an expected time of arrival, an itinerary, and relished the idea of surprise, of showing up out of the blue on someone’s doorstep. Ever generous, Bobbie slipped me into her dorm room, and for the next few days (when she wasn’t attending classes) we talked of life and learning, and she introduced me to Denver and the mountains. Her friend Jeff helped me find the car problem – a bad fuel filter that we easily replaced – so that I could drive back across the middle of America. When Bobbie came home a week or so later, she told me she had met someone (namely, Jeff the handy mechanic) and fallen in love with him. The news knocked me off-balance; she had done that good a job of hiding this when I was there. I like to think I took it well; I certainly don’t remember feeling even a whiff of betrayal or deception. I was glad she told me in person, glad she didn’t tell me when I was in Denver, grateful for the almost year we had been in each other’s lives. And I got my legs back under me before long.

Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 1

(Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio)

In high school, I was a late bloomer. By the end of my junior year, I was barely five and a half feet tall. I also didn’t get my driver’s license until that summer when I turned seventeen. What red-blooded Midwest American boy waits until he’s seventeen to start driving? Similarly, I was behind the curve when it came to girls. I was definitely interested in them but lacked the self-confidence needed to walk up to a girl and talk to her, ask her to dance with me, invite her to Isaly’s to get an ice cream or Altieri’s to get a pizza or Loew’s State Theatre in Cuyahoga Falls to see Summer of ‘42. I guess I was just so in awe of their physical presence, their beauty, their girlness, and I didn’t know what to do with that awe. I was girl-shy.

This problem may have been somewhat compounded by the fact that I attended an all-boys Jesuit high school, although that didn’t seem to hinder most of my classmates. There was a “sister school,” the all-girls Our Lady of the Elms High School, just a twenty-minute drive away. When Elms girls would come over after school to help us decorate for a dance, a special vibrational energy permeated the campus on the appearance of those blue-and-green tartan skirts with the rolled up waistbands. I think we had all developed a grudging appreciation for single-gender education, but, my god, we missed girls.

My situation vis-à-vis girls began to change by my senior year. I’d grown six inches that previous summer and developed a kind of urgency – a combination of biological imperative and imagined peer pressure. I made a mad rush at Joanne Steffek, a pretty dark-haired girl from the East Akron neighborhood of Goodyear Heights, who seemed to be sending me a signal of her interest. A series of dismally embarrassing phone calls and a few feeble visits to her home ended that. I was so nervous around girls that I occasionally wondered whether dating was worth the trouble. By the spring, something promising was developing with Kathy M—, a cute West Akron girl with sad green eyes and long straight Susan Dey hair. But in making a move on her, I cut in front of my friend Carl Johnson, and (in the messed-up way the mind sometimes works) my repressed guilt for doing that made me act less than my best with Kathy. That romance quickly fizzled.

But in the meantime, I was starting to kindle some true friendships with girls – Cheryl Schlemmer, Patty Burkley, Debbie Ukraniec, Bobbie Cook – mostly the girlfriends of my buddies. I began to appreciate that I could share parts of myself with them that were harder to share with my male friends. Such as, the sensitive poet part, I guess. In any case, a carload of us guys ignored the senior prom, driving around that night, getting high and arguing about whether The Rolling Stones or The Who was the greatest rock band. And yet, some part of us wished we were getting dressed up and going out to dinner and pinning a corsage just above the left breast of the girl with whom we were currently in love.

That summer marked the end of one thing and the beginning of the next. Most everyone was thinking about heading off to college somewhere. I got a job working for the Summit County Roads Department, working around Twinsburg Township. I learned how to handle a wide-scoop shovel and throw a scoop of gravel so that it spread evenly over fresh tar. I learned how to handle the scythes and beat-up mowers as we trimmed the grass around guardrails. I also learned how to lean on that shovel so it looked like I was doing something when there was nothing to do. Occasionally I did work hard. And at the end of the day, I would often head out to Blossom Music Center. An outdoor music venue located in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Blossom had opened just a few years earlier. An enclosed stage and pavilion extended to a long sloping hillside that could fit over 20,000 music fans. The lawn seating was cheap, you could bring in coolers filled with beer and wine, and many of the bands were worth seeing. (I saw Janis Joplin there in 1969.) We kids exerted our presence, permeating the hillside like the sweet cloud of hundreds of joints being fired up.

On one of those nights, near the end of a concert – it might’ve been Leon Russell playing piano and singing “We're alone now and I am singing this song for you” – a bunch of us were kicking back, sharing a big blanket on the hillside, most coupled up. I was sitting with Bobbie. That was cool; I liked Bobbie. She was smart and funny and generous, tough-minded, not delicate, and she had the best smile. We had hung out a lot, and I was completely at ease with her. I may have laid my head on her lap, or we may have just snuggled up under the cooling night air, but suddenly we were kissing. I don’t know if I started it, or she did. Perhaps it was mutual. It didn’t matter. We kissed as if we'd never kissed before (which was not far from the truth for me). And by the end of the concert, as we headed off to a car parked in some distant field, rolled blankets under our arms, I was thinking to myself, My god, why have I never noticed how attractive Bobbie is? Of course, the attraction had as much to do with who she was as with how she looked. And then I thought to myself, So this is how it feels to fall in love. It felt sweet, so out of the blue, so easy. All I knew is that I wanted to be with her as much as possible. 

Thus began our late summer romance, which as I recall, consisted of me getting off work and showering and going over to her house in Silver Lake whenever I could. Maybe I ate dinner with her family – she had six siblings and a great mom and they were a fun household. Maybe we watched some TV. Later in the evening we’d go to her father’s study – the massive desk and dark leather couch and built-in bookcases of a lawyer – and talk about the futures unfolding before us. She was heading off to the University of Denver, and I’d decided to head to Pennsylvania to do volunteer work with Jon Prochnow and Mike Rukstelis for a Catholic order called Glenmary Home Missioners. And then we would make out, Bobbie taking me on these intimate expeditions, leading me to all the bases (except home – I did say we were in her father’s study). I will forever praise the good fortune of falling in love with a friend.

Soon enough, she was heading out west and I was heading back east. And long letters would have to carry our feelings until Christmas. Bobbie was an excellent correspondent. When I think back on this, I realize she gave me an amazing gift. I knew that she was worthy of someone’s love and far readier to love someone than I was. I often mistrust memories of myself, the way we all tend to unconsciously edit out our least graceful moments. I was a typical eighteen-year-old boy, but I like to think I offered something more, that I was worth loving too.

An Alternative Education, Part 3

(“The coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/ And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/ Well they dug for the coal till the land was forsaken/ Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man” -John Prine “Paradise”)

In April, Roger Givens and I started to set up a teen center in Morgantown. I counted on Roger’s connections because – as an outsider, Northerner, and Catholic to boot – I knew I’d have little success on my own. The town’s Kiwanis Club let us use a house they owned. Roger and I cleaned it up, repainted some of the rooms, and outfitted it with a bumper pool table, ping-pong table, jukebox, and some old upholstered chairs and couches. Junior high and high school kids started stopping in and hanging out and trusting me with the stories of their lives. To the theme music of “Bennie and the Jets” and “I Shot the Sheriff” on replay, I was becoming their big brother.

It all lasted less than two months. Our downfall was letting in kids who had been drinking. We made it clear that they could not drink on the premises and that they had to be respectful of other kids and the property. Our thinking was that we’d rather have them sobering up at the teen center than driving drunk on the roads. Word of our leniency eventually got out, and in a fairly gutless move, the Kiwanis decided to shut the teen center down, undermining what seemed to be the only effort to address the problem of teens having little to do in Morgantown other than drinking and then making the inevitable bad decisions.

At the end of May, my stint with Glenmary was drawing to a close. They’d been paying my rent and bills and providing a small stipend for food. I was asked if I wanted to extend my stay. I did want to stay on at The Lonesome Pine, but on my own terms, not as a Glenmary volunteer. I got a job working at the wood pallet factory on Sawmill Road, but after a week or so, noticing that nearly all my co-workers were missing one or more fingers, I looked for something safer. I got a job working for a moody twenty-year-old bricklayer named Oval who was putting together his own crew. I soon learned that Oval had a drinking problem. When it wpuld start raining at a job site, we’d retire to the nearest bar to shoot pool. Oval would start drinking, and even when the skies cleared up, we’d never make it back to the job. (I became a decent pool player that summer.) I’d hitchhike into town to meet Oval at his house, knocking on his door at seven in the morning to wake him up, hungover, often still drunk. His sixteen-year-old wife would answer the door, drowsy and grouchy in an oversized Butler County High Bears t-shirt. I felt sorry for her – I could see her slowly realizing that this wasn’t the life she’d signed up for. After too many mornings like this, I walked over to the Farm Boy, the meeting place for the bricklaying crew Oval used to work for, and asked them to take me on.

For the rest of that summer, I worked for the crew run by Wavy Romans and his son Oval (a popular name in Morgantown, I guess). I became their number-one hod carrier. I assembled the scaffolding as we worked up walls. I made the mud (mortar) and supplied it to the bricklayers and kept it at the right consistency for them. Using brick tongs, I delivered twenty bricks at a time to whichever bricklayer needed them. We worked all over Butler County and neighboring Ohio and Muhlenberg counties (the latter made famous by one of my favorite songs, Paradise by John Prine). Driving to a site with our equipment, we’d boldly shout, “Brick job!” whenever we saw a house under construction, as if we could claim it by exclamation. We’d stop for lunch at some rural grocery store that had a small deli counter where a sandwich could be made to our liking. Head cheese sandwiches were popular, but I always passed.

It was hard work, but I enjoyed the crew, which usually consisted of four bricklayers and two hod carriers. One of the bricklayers was a chill laconic character in his late twenties who had a supply of go-to sayings. My favorite was “Act like it, Jim,” which he would say in response to almost anything and never to anyone named Jim. He also liked to say, “This is a revolting situation – reminds me of Southeast Asia.” Over the years, “Act like it” became my favorite non sequitur comeback line.

If I had stuck around, Wavy would’ve given me a chance to become a bricklayer. But by the end of September, I was getting the urge for going. I had fallen in love with a girl – at least I thought I was in love – but she could tell that Morgantown wasn’t in my long-term plans. She did surprise me by making a birthday cake for me. I came home from work that day (July 29) to find it sitting on my kitchen table. I took it over to Ralph and Betty’s to share it with their family. By the beginning of October, I had packed up the pale green Volkswagen Bug Walt had rebuilt and then sold to me. I said my goodbyes and headed north, stopping at Miami University and Ohio State University to visit friends before heading west to Des Moines, where my family now lived. This poem, “The Summer I Turned Twenty,” captures some of my feelings about this time in my life:

The summer I turned twenty

I lived in Butler County Kentucky

In a house with a pot belly coal

Stove but without plumbing

At the end of a dirt track road

A mile from the nearest neighbor

The summer I turned twenty

I learned to like country music

A little and fell in love with a girl

Or at least the part of her that was

Cherokee the part that laughed

And the part that held back

The summer I turned twenty

I planted my Garden of Eden

Sweet corn and green beans in rows

And watched the weeds take over

I wandered the abandoned strip mines

And picked fat blackberries for pies

The summer I turned twenty

I worked for Wavy Romans and his son Oval

Carried hod for their bricklaying crew

Made the mud that binds the brick

Grew tan and wiry

At the end of the day exhausted

I would step out onto the back porch

Strip off my work clothes

Lower the bucket into the well

Pull up bone-cold water

And baptize myself over and over

The summer I turned twenty

I looked down into that well

The water was black and still

I drew the bucket up

The weight of it

Sometimes felt like my past

Sometimes like my future

An Alternative Education, Part 2

(Off the Rochester Road [Kentucky Highway 70] a few miles southwest of Morgantown)

Kent stayed on with us at The Lonesome Pine for at least a month. I remember delivering coal to families in the country who couldn’t afford it, so they could keep their houses heated. We helped folks with the paperwork for filing income tax forms or applying for food stamps and Medicaid. Sometimes we’d just pay visits to people. One old guy that we sometimes visited had sold his house in Boston and acquired land deep in the woods, as far off the grid as one could get. We had to walk a half mile on a trail through thick woodland to reach his shack. He was a cantankerous old coot who had forsaken the modern world, a recluse who insisted on giving us packs (even cartons) of non-filtered Lucky Strikes as we were preparing to leave. I took to smoking them and didn’t really quit until I got married. 

I enjoyed driving around the countryside. Walt would rig up some hooptie for us to borrow. Once we’d had to switch off a bad tire on an old blue Dodge Coronet. I guess I didn’t tighten the lug nuts properly, because the wheel came off about a mile down the road, just went rolling right past us. I wouldn’t call the landscape beautiful but it had character, even the abandoned strip mines being stubbornly reclaimed by vegetation, even the unauthorized garbage dumps located in wooded ravines off the road. The people were the same way – not classically pleasing to the eye but feisty, full of character. When we’d get up to end a visit, folks would say to us, “Now, y’all stay a spell.” It took me a while to learn that was just their way of saying good-bye.

Kent also introduced us to his friend Roger Givens. Roger was not Catholic, but he lived next door to the church. He was divorced, had two children and a reliable supply of pot. We became good friends. We got to know Allen and Pat Berkowetz, a young hippie couple from New York trying to get back to the land. We would have parties out at The Lonesome Pine. Walt and Betty would show up, Roger and whatever woman he was with at the time, Allen and Pat, various other folks. The Glenmary clergy were not invited. There’d be considerable drinking and wild dancing. We would open up a room that we did not otherwise use or heat. The sloping floor would undulate like a funhouse when we danced in there. We must’ve had a copy of Sly and the Family Stone’s album Stand! because I can remember grooving to “Sing a Simple Song” and getting down to ”I Want To Take You Higher.”

A friend of Kent’s from Hudson, Sandy [Ian] Frazier, stopped by on his way from Florida to Ohio and bore witness to one of these parties. He wrote about it in a New Yorker piece entitled “Out of Ohio” (Jan. 10, 2005). I’ll let him tell the story:

In late afternoon, I arrived at the slant-floored mountain shack Kent had rented, and I was so tired that I immediately lay down and fell asleep on a bed in a side room. It happened that Kent was having a party for the entire community that night. As the guests came in, they piled their coats on top of the bed, on top of me. At the party’s height a man and a woman entered the room and closed the door and, not knowing I was there, lay down on the coats and began to talk about the extramarital affair they were having. I emerged from sleep to the sound of the French-movie-type dialogue: “Oh, Roger, I’ve felt like crying for the last three days!” “Oh, Arliss [mumble, mumble, mumble].” Then suddenly the door opened, and from it, like a superloud PA system, the voice of the outraged husband: “Get out of that fuckin’ bed, Roger!” The two men adjourned outside for a fistfight while the woman stayed on the coats, sobbing. I began to stir, poking part of my head out from under. The sobbing stopped, silence; then, in complete bafflement, “Who’s he?”

His account of the scene is mostly right: “Mountain shack” was an exaggeration.

Eventually, Kent went on with his life. Bill also decided to return to Akron by the end of March. His explanation for leaving early was that he was homesick; after all, he had a girlfriend back in Akron. He might have been a bit freaked out by our living situation. A feral cat would sometimes crawl under the house in the middle of the night and yowl. Bill thought it sounded like a baby crying, which it did, but Kent and I built that up into a story about a dead baby haunting the house, inspired by all the ghost stories that we’d hear thereabouts. We even found a chest of baby clothes in the attic crawl space to confirm our story. Bill also might have been frustrated by the lack of focus of our work, which didn’t bother me much because I was just having too good a time living this life so different from the suburban middle-class world I’d known. In any case, by April I was on my own. I decided to plant long rows of sweet corn, green beans, and tomatoes in the garden space between the house and a tobacco barn. And it was about this time that Roger and I began to make plans to open a teen center in Morgantown. Other than the one pool hall, there was nothing for teens to do in town, so they would drive the 25 miles down to Bowling Green, buy a twelve-pack of beer, and then drink it while driving the fairly basic loop around town. Lots of DUIs and car accidents would ensue.

An Alternative Education, Part 1

(Detail from “General Highway Map Butler County Kentucky” [1970] prepared by the Kentucky Dept. of Highways. The Lonesome Pine is marked by the little square above the “u” in Huldeville.)

In January 1974 I began a second stint of volunteer work for Glenmary Home Missioners in Butler County, Kentucky. (I’d worked with this small Catholic order the previous year in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.) I had just finished my first semester at Ohio University, enjoyed my time there and made friends, but I’d run out of money and held no thoughts of asking for help. (As the oldest of ten kids, I’d simply concluded I was on my own.) A high school classmate, Bill Kirk, was interested in volunteering with Glenmary and looking for a wingman, someone who’d join him on this venture. A West Akron kid, Bill had come a long way from the freckle-faced, sandy-haired imp I’d known as a freshman. Coming of age in the late sixties under the guidance of the Jesuits, we had all grown. I told Bill, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “I’m your man.”

Butler County is located in what is known as the Western Coal Field region (on the land of the Yuchi, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Osage peoples), a dry county just north of Bowling Green, home of Western Kentucky University. Some farming, some strip mining, some small industry and small businesses, lots of rural poverty. The population of the entire county at that time was a bit under 10,000, and about 1,400 people lived in Morgantown, the county seat. The Catholic church in Morgantown was not much more than a missionary lifeboat adrift in a sea of Baptists. Glenmary had stationed a priest and a nun there. The priest was forgettable; the Irish-born nun, Sister Nora, was a holy terror whom I learned to steer clear of, as no-nonsense and severe as her grey habit and the silver crucifix she wore around her neck. 

When Bill and I arrived, we were met by another Glenmary volunteer, Kent, who was coincidentally from Hudson, the town just north of my hometown in northeast Ohio. He welcomed us and helped us settle into the house he’d been renting. We called it The Lonesome Pine for the big cedar beside the front porch. It was located on a single-lane dirt road about seven miles northwest of Morgantown and a little more than a mile off the blacktop, near the unincorporated community of Huldeville. The house had a front room, a middle room, and a kitchen. There was a full-length front porch and a back porch that provided access to the well from which we drew water by letting down a galvanized bucket and hauling it up. The other backdoor off the kitchen led to the outhouse. We had electricity and a coal stove for heating. We all slept in the front room, our de facto dormitory. It was all thrillingly rustic.

Our mission was rather vague. Brother Al had given me the names of a couple of teenage boys in Morgantown whom I should try to befriend. They played basketball, pretty much the state sport of Kentucky, so I started scouting the outdoor hoops located beside most any free slab of blacktop, looking for opportunities to join pick-up games. We attended Mass on Sundays and visited afterward with the priest and Sister Nora and the handful of parishioners. The Phelps family were among the most active members – Walt and Betty Phelps and their five children lived about a half mile from us. Walt was a gruff, taciturn ex-Army mechanic from Brooklyn, New York, who had been stationed at Fort Knox, where he met Betty. A Butler County girl, Betty was the emotional backbone of the family, warm-hearted and quick to laugh but also solid and unflappable. After Walt left the service, they moved back here. We visited with them often and played with their kids. I wish I could remember their names – the oldest daughter was thirteen or so, the youngest boy was three or four. Walt had a Volkswagen repair shop located in the drive-in basement of a friend’s house. We often hung out with him while he was working on a car. The family surely lived well below the poverty line, but they somehow got by. For all that they didn't have, they did have a wealth of joy and happiness. Seeing this in action was a meaningful discovery for me.

Morgantown has never been served by a railroad line, but the Green River flows through it and was an important means of transportation until the 1920s. There were two main restaurants in town, the Farm Boy and the Kuntry Kitchen. They both featured Green River catfish and hush puppies on their menu. I composed a poem about this, using all the local color and dialect I could muster. In retrospect, the poem’s commentary on the role of women is a bit cringey, but it was what it was. The Phelps kids loved the poem – I think because it celebrated a place and way of life they knew – and almost any time I saw them, they’d ask me to recite it: 

Green River catfish 

got the best taste –

when ya feed ’em to the kids, 

ain’t none left to waste.

Sittin’ on the banks

of the ol’ Green River,

sippin’ from a fruit jar, 

messin’ up your liver.

Catch a couple cat – 

they gonna give ya a fight.

If you can’t fish a lick, 

you might be there all night.

Take ’em on home, 

give ’em to your ol’ lady,

say: “Make ’em taste right, 

I’m gettin’ hungry, Sadie.

Fix me up some home fries, 

a mess of collard greens,

and to wash it all down, 

a pot of sassafras tea.”

Take a chaw off your plug, 

sit right where you’re at,

stay a spell and brag 

about Green River cat.

Carpe Diem Days

The summer of 1973, I had returned from nine months . . .

This piece is dedicated to the eleven friends who shared the experience of attending an all-boys Jesuit high school from 1967 to 1972 and who recently reunited via Zoom and long email chains. (Would this have happened without the Covid quarantine forcing us all to focus our attentions in some way?) One of the emails threads was “What happened to X?” This inspired a memoir of an unlikely intersection with one of my classmates . . .

The summer of 1973, I had returned from nine months of volunteer work with Glenmary Home Missioners (and with high school buds Jon and Michael) in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border. We were helping Brother Ralph (one of the most sweet-tempered men I’ve ever known) build homes for the Black families who lived on the Ridge, a segregated community a mile or two outside of town on the slopes of the Tuscarora Mountain. We were inspired by what that religious order considered a secondary objective: “to lift up and improve the moral lives of the people around us, regardless of their beliefs or lack of beliefs; regardless, even whether they will ever accept the Faith or not.” And we loved working with Ralph and learning the carpentry skills – actually all the skills – involved in building a house. For us, it became a gap year before the concept had really become popular in the U.S.

But now I was back home in Akron, Ohio, having been gently told by my girlfriend Bobbie that she’d found someone else in her first year at the University of Denver, having lost the rough carpenter job I’d held for a month or so. Restless, searching for the answers to hastily conceived questions, I set out in the blue 1952 Chevy Impala that Brother Ralph had bequeathed to me. I returned to McConnellsburg to help Ralph on his next building project. I was then invited by Brother Al Behm to come to Vanceburg, just south of the Ohio River in eastern Kentucky, where Glenmary had a summer camp of sorts for Catholic high school boys looking for meaning or purpose in their lives. I became an informal camp counselor based on cred I’d earned by the physical and emotional work I’d already put in. There I met up with an old high school classmate, News (Jim Ward). We never hung out much in high school. I don’t remember ever sharing a class with him. We weren’t from the same town. But we connected in those two weeks in Vanceburg, those late nights around the campfire, talking about who we were becoming or hoping to become. I discovered more depth to News than I’d ever sensed from our four years sharing the hallways and commons and parties of high school. We made plans to meet up later that summer.

From Vanceburg, I drove up to Ann Arbor to hang and party with Prch, Jimi, Grins, Alain, Keloir, Joy – were they all there? – and then headed to Cape Cod to meet up with Owen, Peggy and Schlemmer – and whoever else might be stopping by – in Provincetown, where they were working tourist industry jobs during the day and partying at night. En route, I got busted coming back across the U.S. border at Niagara Falls with two scruffy hitchhikers and a quarter-ounce of pot that Prch had given me to give to Owen. After letting me sweat for most of a day in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office, looking at posters outlining New York Governor Rockefeller’s new get-tough drug laws, I was released with no charges. (And that, my friends, is called White Privilege.) I had to scrape together $100 to get my car out of impoundment, twice what I had paid Brother Ralph for it, and then was on my way to Cape Cod.

I arrived before sunrise at the funky little beach apartment that Owen, Schlemmer, and Peggy shared. Jon and Billy Kirk were also visiting, and they had barricaded the door because of storms and electrical outages and ghost stories the previous night. After breakfast and tales of the road, I climbed into my sleeping bag and crashed in some corner of the apartment. That night we shared stories and bottles of tequila and got lost in the dark on the dunes. News met up with me there, with plans to drive up to Maine in his panel van and hike the last part of the Appalachian Trail and climb Mount Katahdin. We did spend a couple of days on the trail. I remember stopping in the evening at these sweet little lean-tos and huts along the trail. We hiked up Katahdin but didn’t reach the summit. 

Some of these memories are a blur. I was just saying yes to whatever opportunity came along, with little forethought or afterthought. I was, at the very least, game, living in the moment, which is what you should do when you’re nineteen. News swung back by Provincetown to drop me off so I could pick up the Impala and drive Jon and Billy Kirk back to Akron, where I packed up to start school at Ohio University in Athens. On that drive, Billy talked to Jon and me about working with Glenmary, and because I sensed he was looking for a wingman, I volunteered. News and I exchanged a few letters after that, and then we lost track of each other, as I did with so many of these friends of my youth.

Anatomy of a Neighborhood Gang

When I was five years old . . .

When I was five years old my family moved from our southside Akron, Ohio, apartment on Voris Street to the suburbs, a house on Lakeview Boulevard in Stow. You couldn’t actually see Silver Lake, but it was a mere fifteen-minute walk cutting across the vast manicured lawns of the Village of Silver Lake. We didn’t live in the “village,” but we knew it. At Silver Lake Country Club we caddied for the lawyers and doctors and bankers and assholes who lived in those houses.

But our neighborhood gang centered around the three parallel blocks of Lakeview, Englewood, and Adaline. We were all Holy Family Catholic school boys. Mark and Mike Huscroft lived on Englewood – I could see their front door from our kitchen window. I hung out with Mark a lot until he skipped a grade after third grade. He would kick my ass on a regular basis, but I kept coming back for more because - what choice did I have? I had no older siblings and somehow knew that I needed toughening up, and the Huscrofts were the guys to do it. They were good-hearted bullies.

The Domingo brothers lived on the corner of Englewood and Lake Road. The younger one we called Werewolf because he had the hairiest back we’d ever seen on a kid. Doug Wynn, and his older brother Bill, lived two houses down from the Domingos on Lake. Cattycorner across the street from the Domingos lived Chris Feliciano, and next door to him lived Joe and Beej Mariola. Beej, whose family owned the only built-in swimming pool in the neighborhood, was a year younger than Mark and Doug and me. Jim Harry and Bill Wojno lived up the block from me on Lakeview. Pit Moushey and his older brother Tom lived on Adaline. I remember Pit referring to someone as a “brown-noser” with such sneering disgust that I decided at that moment that I never wanted to be that guy,  even though it took me a while to figure out what the word meant. Mike Keller, who lived across the street from Pit, had flunked back into our grade. One of twelve kids, he became my newspaper route partner. Pat Flowers, two years younger than me, lived next door to me. 

We were far from the wildest gang of kids, flirting with modest acts of juvenile delinquency. Lots of homes were being built in the neighborhood, and we played on the work sites after the construction crews had quit for the day. Somebody would get hold of some cherry bombs and we’d figure out what we could blow up. We made crude skateboards out of one-by-eight boards and roller skate wheels. We played on the concrete storm sewer sections before they were buried, and after, we removed the manholes and crawled through the sewer until it emptied into the creek in Wetmore Park. Football and basketball and baseball and bike riding and fishing. We had a ball diamond in our backyard that worked better for kickball. Capture the Flag, Kick the Can - games that spanned and connected three or four backyards. Because it required less space and fewer participants, we played endless games of Smear the Queer that often ended in nigger piles. And this is how homophobia and racism were woven into our play.

Lots of sleepovers or sleep-outs. I got out of the house whenever I could, not because it was particularly awful there but because I wanted to know more about the world. Because Doug and Mike and Pat had older brothers and sisters, and because we didn’t have a stereo at home, this was my real introduction to rock music. I remember listening carefully to Rubber Soul with Doug in 1966, and to After Bathing at Baxter’s in 1967 at Keller’s house, and to The White Album in 1968 with Pat and his older siblings Jimmy, Jeannie, and Marianne. 

As we got older, we would look up to the Huscrofts and Pit and Wojno and Harry, who were all a year or two older than us. I remember them crafting elaborate nicknames for each other. Mark was Modé or Moders, Mike was Midders. Bill Wojno had an equally obtuse nickname that I’ve forgotten. In the summer of 1964 I became Du-babes, thanks to Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” By the time I started high school, it had been shortened to Du, and that’s what I went by all through high school.

The thing about the neighborhood gang is that those guys were not my only options. I think I unconsciously chose them because they were a little bit rougher and wilder than me, quite willing to get into some low-grade trouble. I can remember the summer I turned eight or nine, sneaking out of the house with a pair of jeans that I changed into behind the woodpile, stuffing the shorts my mother was forcing me to wear into a chink in the woodpile. And then I was off for the day, ready for blue jeans action, maybe grabbing a sandwich for lunch at a friend’s house or picking fruit from an unsuspecting neighbor’s tree, trying to figure out what kind of person I wanted to become.