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