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