MY HUMBLE EFFORTS TO give you, my descendant, a picture of my life will fall short, no doubt, and it will bore you, most certainly. Who takes notice of the ramblings of a kid, a non-special kid, and what he experienced through the tumult and turmoil in the latter half of the last century? I can’t possibly do justice imparting this mesh of thoughts and feelings from experiences I had as a youngster, a teenager, or even into my college years.
Those were days of unappreciated freedoms. Of responsibilities that seemed so ponderous and restrictive at the time. Only now, as I have passed what society might term ‘my productive years,’ do I have inclination to revert my memory to those days. To hopefully avoid rose-colored glasses, though they were rose-colored in many ways. Please forgive me for the lack of consistent storytelling, but I will do my best to cover these activities in somewhat chronological order as they come to mind.
It was a world of discovery. Perhaps every kid reflects in awe of the day or week or year. Perhaps not, though I know I did.
I previously detailed some of the most egregious, onerous, and unfortunate circumstances in which I found myself. Yet there was much more beyond that. Much, much more about the wonder and experience of living in those non-special times. Like staring into space through that thin-atmosphere sky, when few city lights obscured the Milky Way and its cousins. I imagined so much potential out there, of civilizations come and gone, existences lived and yet to live, and I carried that night sky image in my mind through every day of my life, even to this day.
Beyond the wonder of the sky, I also actively participated in what I am about to divulge. I was not simply a bystander, and I was both saintly at times and not so much at others. At that younger age, there was an innocence to it, the innocence of learning. However, I lack such innocence these days, assuming I’ve learned much of what there is to learn.
My understanding of heaven and Earth and God and human motivations and failings has carved me firmly into the marbled bust of an aging man to whom nobody listens, nor should they. I am utterly biased in my sense of right and wrong, of humanity’s failings and inability to discipline its collective mind, greatly limit its indulgences, and strip away all burdens of individual fear and entitlement.
As mentioned earlier, I am cynical of our species’ ability to successfully pass through this next Great Filter. Yet there may still be time, at least some time left, for you to understand and appreciate these other lives, these lives of generally unsupervised and somewhat fearless existence. Perhaps it was the last great window for so many in which to do so.
1962. A Catholic family with five kids our ages just moved into our neighborhood, and we took no special note. With few exceptions, the norm seemed to be five kids per family. Some families sprouted like seeds into double digit numbers, helped considerably by the preponderance of Catholics and Mormons in town.
The slowly growing hamlet was classically segregated for the times. Blacks and Hispanics lived ‘south of the tracks’ while Whites lived north. They all met up at the only high school in town, creating various tensions one might imagine.
Despite my father’s Latino heritage, we lived on the north side of town, farther north than most. Sure, crazy shit was happening in my family’s life by either intention or circumstance, but I’ve covered some of that already and care not to indulge further. Instead, I’ll focus on the surrounds, the life outside the blue brick walls of our small, hastily constructed post-war home.
“Did you see the broken glass in the hallway on the way in from recess?” My best friend Jeffrey was asking. He and I had a bond, a strong bond, since we were the two ‘out’ kids in our class of fifteen boys and a similar quantity of girls.
What made us the ‘out’ kids was my longstanding friendship with Jeffrey, brought on by his unmatched physical skills, especially at football. His abilities were so outstanding that the class bully Douglas selected Jeffrey as his mark, the person he would vilify and harass with the cowardly comfort of having his little thug gang trailing behind him. As much as Douglas tried, however, he was no match for Jeffrey in any competition, and this bugged the hell out of the jealous, tormented youngster.
Douglas was a recent immigrant from Texas. Arizonans widely perceived the state as a different land with its own history, people, and lifestyle. Given that New Mexico kept Texas at arm’s length to Arizona, most felt much more aligned with California than that oil-soaked mystery land to our southeast.
We also had a good share of what we called ‘Okies,’ or recent immigrants from the east still moving westward as late arrivals from the 1930’s Dust Bowl catastrophes. Because Williams was a convenient watering hole along the famous Highway 66, many of them got tired of traveling, or they took notice of the pristine forests and never made it to their planned final destination of California.
Not many of us Arizonans liked Texans. They talked differently, were brash and loudmouthed, and our new neighbors were no different. Arriving in the fourth grade, Douglas had already started his growth spurt and towered well above the rest of our class.
In whatever odd fourth grader logic that equates size and loudness to leadership, the kid commanded respect and was granted such by most. Given the boy’s newly discovered powers, if you failed to kowtow to whatever idiocy he was spouting at the moment, he would place you at the wrong end of his gang’s shit stick.
This was all new to me. I’d never known a bully, not so close up, anyway. Up to that point, all the kids I knew were friendly. There were no cliques or favorites or inherent animosities, only a few oddballs in class who never seemed to fit in.
I was the smallest boy in class, though I had feared nobody because I held a secret power few dared confront – my dreaded headlock. I discovered this effective defensive technique by watching a wrestling program on television.
My little sister allowed me to try it on her one day. After discovering how quickly her face turned red, I understood the deadly fear that occurs when you can hardly breathe. You’ll do just about anything to get out of that menacing grip.
Thursday was the designated day for fighting at the street corner, with an old man’s yard serving as the convenient boxing ring. He had a day job, no wife, and a house that faced the forest. It was the perfect venue for settling quarrels.
On one certain Thursday, I committed some slight that knocked Douglas’ fragile ego into reprisal ‘I’ll show him’ mode. He decided to have my former best friend fight me. I say former friend because Rory was indeed that. Only a few months prior to that day, I was having fun at his birthday party, sans Douglas.
Douglas knew my headlock was widely renowned in the neighborhood, even beyond the confines of our little school, and could be as lethal as he’d hate to imagine. So, like any effective bully does, he declined in his cowardly way to take a direct part in the attempt to humiliate me, knowing that going down in defeat would diminish his standing considerably among his cultish followers.
The gang of neighbors, including some older and younger boys, formed a rough circle in the old man’s front yard. It was maybe the twentieth fight there in the past few years, and everyone knew just how much room to give to the combatants.
A few lookouts were posted at all corners to ensure that no vehicles would be passing by. Normally, once blood was drawn from the nose or mouth, the defeated would typically concede and all would acknowledge the victor who directly or through his proxy would deliver the final statement of supremacy and verbal threats.
Being especially small for my age, fist-punching was no option for me. I cared not for my face to come in contact with some kid’s long arm. Instead, I knew that if I could just get the kid to give up or pass out, we’d require no evidence of shirt-soaked bloodstains and therefore no need to get parents involved.
Poor Rory. He took a few swings at me and missed as I waited for my opening. Rory then turned around to take instructions from Douglas on how to fight the coward’s fight.
That was my chance. I immediately scaled his tall, thin frame from behind like a squirrel scampering up an oak, then placed my arms in the strategic locking pose around his neck.
I looked from atop his crew cut head as the reality of his predicament overcame the poor boy. There was my ex-friend, crouched over, his red face turning purple, and so in fear of his life that he couldn’t speak. Since I was now functionally in control, I peered back at Douglas who continued issuing orders from his corner, flanked by his cadre of followers. I then looked on the other side of the lawn circle at Jeffrey, standing alone and looking as scared as Rory. From his position, he had a clear shot of the boy’s changing colors.
“Hit him!” Douglas ordered. “What’s the matter with you, Rory? He’s a weakling. I could kill him with one punch.”
In what seemed like a heroic span of thirty seconds without a breath, I finally heard words drizzle through Rory’s clenched teeth. “Let go. Enough.”
That wasn’t enough, however, not for me. As kids, we were always out for a little blood, figuratively if not literally.
“You want me to let go?” I screamed,
His entire body shook. “Yes!”
This was still not enough in the scheme of fourth grade hierarchical dominance. I stared menacingly at Douglas.
“Have you had enough?” I yelled.
He halted his sideline commands.
“Yes!” Rory squeaked.
“Do you give up? Are you giving up?”
“Yes!” he muzzled. “Stop.”
I heard what seemed to be a last gasp and knew this should go no further. The fight ended, and Rory fell to the ground, gasping for air. Douglas, too proud to approach his failed conscript, watched with disgust as Rory crawled back on his knees, choking and coughing. God knows, I certainly never intended to permanently harm my former friend, even if he had shifted sides.
That was a rather typical week in unsupervised kidsville. Yet there were also weeks out of the norm. Not-typical but now humorous days and weeks.
“I saw some broken glass on the floor by seventh grade,” I observed early one fall morning before class.
Jeffrey appeared terminally disappointed in me. “You mean you haven’t heard what’s going on?
“No.”
“You know how the fire extinguisher says ‘break glass in case of emergency?’ Someone did exactly that and stole it. The whole thing. Gone. Disappeared.”
As innocent and unsuspecting as a fourth-grader can be, I always tried to look at the positive side. “Well, maybe it was a fireman or someone who needed to put out a flame.”
Jeffrey shook his head vehemently. “No, you aren’t getting it. There was no fire. The extinguisher was stolen, and the principal is raging about it. He already started quizzing the older kids.”
And never was there a better principal to engage those times head-on with his own special sauce of instruction. We were scrappy kids living in a mostly blue collar area of a town in which few white collars existed. With so many kids everywhere and post-war child rearing that was rather indifferent to active parenting, kid anarchy reigned. Pity the poor teacher or principal who had to face that daily onslaught.
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But this one took no guff, and he was a sight. Mr. Gaudio. Two hundred twenty pounds of Hispanic spit and fire, demanding and exacting respect at every moment. On the one hand, he could laugh a great laugh and be as jovial and friendly as you’d like a principal to be. Other the other hand, a hand you did not want to encounter directly, he was indubitably the product of severe Catholic schooling and displayed such in his approach to disciplining.
I recall lining up in his office area one day for a requisite childhood vaccine. A good enough kid to stay out of the that place for other reasons, I never had the chance to gaze around the place.
And there it was, The Beast, dangling ominously by some mysterious force at the entry of the anteroom to his office. The reminder of that which we constantly needed to be reminded about – the infamous “swat” paddle.
I can’t tell you who manufactured The Beast, but there must have been mail-order catalogs at the time where a principal or parent could choose among multiple types of paddles. ‘Desire a smooth handle that doesn’t chafe the palm under vigorous action? Try this. Prefer the grain of oak to birch? It provides a more satisfying swat noise with a long-lasting and memorable butt burn, but it’s prone to cracking and not as pliable. Want a paddle to impress others? We can carve your name and title onto the handle or directly on the sweet spot, guaranteed to leave your enduring legacy scorched proudly on butt cheeks for hours.’
That night after dinner, my mother called my older brother and me into the living room. “Do you boys know what happened at school today?”
Of course we knew. It was the talk of the school. We were the immediate progeny of harsh discipline World War II veterans, and crimes like school theft rarely happened. Such news travels fast among snot-nosed kids.
“No,” we responded in feigned ignorance.
She was a veteran of kids lies and could read into everything we weren’t saying.
“Someone stole the fire extinguisher. Apparently, there was one next to the door by the playground.”
Her mention of playground momentarily distracted me. Sure, a lot of play happened there, multiple times a day by dozens of elementary school kids. And you might loosely term it as ‘ground’ as well. Indeed, if one dug deep enough through the fifteen inches of razor-sharp volcanic cinders, you could actually find good, hard, Northern Arizona soil.
That’s right. Volcanic cinders. The kind from volcanos of the recent type, likely no more than ten or twenty thousand years old, and too new to be edge-softened by weather. This is the stuff the Earth belches into the sky to eject the constant scratching and cutting irritation it creates in the mantle.
Indeed, some genius in playground engineering decided to use these knife-edged volcanic cinders, averaging an inch in diameter, as the substitute for a less damaging substrate upon which kids could play – such as grass or plain old dirt.
You’d think they were telling us something by this. ‘Don’t run too fast. Oh, I guess that’s not possible since you’ll sink down six inches every time you walk upon it.’
Being safety-inclined, that same genius thought the best way to prevent the normal schoolkid scrapes and cuts was to place the worst possible substance for trips and falls right beneath our sneakers. I can’t tell you how many times my mother patiently extracted small chunks of volcanic cinder from my bloody knees, palms, and elbows. The occasional unfortunate kid would fall down face first onto the pile of devil’s delight, resulting in a cheek, nose, or lip full of black and red pebbles that would forever become a slightly visible and memorable portion of his body mass.
But there were some work-arounds. In a few places on the playground, mounds of red lava cinders had been carelessly dumped and dispersed. Red ones. Smaller cinders. Less cutting. Easier to run around in. We used those areas for our football games and generally tried to avoid running in the larger sections of ‘quicksand’ black cinders.
Upon my mother’s inquiry, my brother and I stared at each other knowingly. He knew that I knew that he knew. He was two years older and was not about to tell me the secret of the stealing event, only that it had been made and the culprit confessed to a select few. We both pleaded ignorance, and my mother ended the one-way conversation with the usual threat of ‘swats’ or other form of retribution being proffered by our beloved principal.
It was the times. Corporal punishment was real and even expected. These were people, men mostly, who had endured hardships of the war. Some were seriously injured, and nearly all saw friends killed or maimed. A swat was nothing to them; a blink of an eye. There was no need to question the value of this type of punishment, and they assumed it was righteous preparation for what we should expect to encounter when it was our turn to join the coming war with Russia or its proxies.
The following day at school, the Principal got actively engaged. We weren’t sure why at the time, but he made an unusual, intended visit to every class, fourth grade and above, apparently stopping there because he believed third graders were not possibly so insidious or inventive that they’d steal from the school. At each visit to class, he stared each poor boy directly in the eyes since he knew the perpetrator would most assuredly be a boy, and he asked us individually if we knew anything about it.
By the time Mr. Gaudio reached our class, we had already been to recess a few times. At least among the guys, we all knew somebody who knew who the perpetrator was, but none of us were willing to expose this knowledge for fear of being considered a snitch.
Mr. Gaudio suspected we all knew. In fact, I wouldn’t doubt he had point on exactly who the perpetrator was, and he was hoping some do-gooder would have the courage and stupidity to expose the guy. But that didn’t happen.
It was three o’clock, and we were waiting, impatiently counting the minutes through the last boring half hour of class until the final bell rang. We were all equally distressed by Mr. Gaudio’s earlier visit and wanted the suspense to end. Surely someone would capitulate and we wouldn’t have to endure another day like that.
Suddenly, Peggy, his admin, rapped on our closed classroom door. We thought it was odd that our door was closed at all. When Mr. Gaudio had exited our class after his grilling, he knew that class doors were always left open unless a movie was playing. Yet, the door that was always open had been curiously closed for a few hours.
Peggy entered and strode cautiously from the rear to the front of the class. She whispered something into our teacher’s ear then abruptly left, staring down at the floor with a ghostlike appearance on her face.
My head was spinning. This didn’t feel right. Peggy never came around unless she was calling someone into Mr. Gaudio’s office for a misdemeanor or to leave for a medical appointment.
“Listen up, class,” my teacher, Mrs. Storett, began. “I want all the boys to stand up beside their desks.”
My friends and I looked at each other, suspecting things were getting dicey. The fifteen of us obliged.
“Girls,” she requested, “Stay here and do your required reading assignments. The boys will be back before final bell.”
I glanced at the clock. A half-hour away? Where could we be going for a half-hour? Are we walking out to search for the extinguisher in the national forest just steps away? That seemed odd. We might miss our buses or rides. Mothers would wonder why we weren’t home yet. All this to sift through boatloads of pine needles and large boulders in search of the absent red cylinder?
Mrs. Storett marched us out of class, single file, glaring as if all of us possessed a shared guilt that needed expunging.
Douglas, assuming his innate bully qualities enabled him to do so, jumped to the front of the line. Though he was out of alphabetical order, Mrs. Storett let it go.
We walked single file down the long hallway toward the exit doors, assuming we were heading for an outdoors excursion. At the hall’s end, Douglas led the line to the left, out toward the playground doors.
“Wrong way!” Mrs. Storett exclaimed. “Turn right toward Mr. Gaudio’s office.”
That was a foreboding sign. Mr. Gaudio? Why go there? He had just visited our class in an attempt to coerce a confession. Because the classroom door was closed and we had no knowledge of what the other classes might be doing, little did we know he was just about to complete the final stage of his plan.
“Why are we going to his office?” we speculated.
Maybe he simply wanted to have a closer conversation with us. A heart to heart. Boys to boys. Coerce the younger guys to expose the crime. Our delicate age imparts innocence, and not every one of us would understand the long-term implications of snitching.
As we rounded the corner and reached his outer door, Mrs. Storett brushed her hand in the air as if swatting a fly. She signaled to Douglas to proceed forward with the others to follow.
It was a small office, and I was positioned in the latter third of the line. We couldn’t tell what was happening inside. Perhaps it was a ‘man to boy’ discussion. Maybe Mr. Gaudio wanted to look each of us directly in the eye as he asked the question, rather than the group of us. And indeed, that was somewhat true. An eye of sorts was involved as well as a form of communication.
Then we heard a loud ‘thwack!’ and a blood curdling wail from Douglas, followed by loud sobbing and a warning “I’m going to tell my father, and you’ll be sorry.” In my mind, I like to think there was an immediate second ‘whack’ at that retort.
“Thank God,” I thought. “It was indeed the class bully who stole it. Maybe Mr. Gaudio will take care of his toady cult members in the same way. They’re all involved, no doubt. Great news!”
But I heard more thwacking and immediate gnashing of teeth from each kid as I slowly shifted forward in line.
Then I heard Jeffrey scream.
Jeffrey? Why is he getting swats? He’s not part of the evil lair. No way did he do this.
Rounding the door into the anteroom, I looked up at that sacred place where the inviolable object was placed in waiting to violate some poor kid’s ass.
The Beast was missing. Being the shortest kid in class, I jumped upward to glance over my classmates’ heads at what faced us.
There was Mr. Gaudio, swinging the big maple stick. He lifted it up in the air, as high as he could reach, and with fine precision smacked the poor boy’s butt. The kid lunged forward, his hand barely preventing him from slamming his head on the wall after Mr. Gaudio followed through with his wicked, decisive swing.
“Hold it,” I told myself. “This is Mr. Gaudio. He and my dad know each other well. They look alike and could be brothers. He knows I’m one of the good guys, not a deviant like Douglas and his cult. Surely when I get up there, he’ll let me off. ‘Be on you way, Greg,’ he’d advise. ‘I know you couldn’t have done it. I know you’re the best kid in class, the most well-behaved. You’re among the last in line for a reason. No swats for you. Besides, I’m buddies with your father. Been through stuff together. The War. We’re two peas.’”
Suddenly I was at the spot, and I peered up innocently at his dark brown but very tired eyes.
“Drop your pants!” he demanded.
“What?”
With his patience waning at this point after swatting over a hundred boys, he wasn’t about to have this runt delay him. He grabbed at the rear of my pants to expose my cheeks, but my belt was too tight.
“Loosen your belt, boy. Hurry!”
I fumbled anxiously at my belt, but my mind was not on the looming swat. Not by a long shot. My mind was on Mrs. Storett. She had watched intently as every poor male in her class pulled his pants down and received the damage, perhaps ensuring it was severe enough that crying and screaming would be the final result.
But this was Mrs. Storett. She loved me. I loved her. I sat at the front of class. I’d raise my hand, answer questions, and do my homework. She’d call on me. We had a thing. Our thing.
After loosening the buckle, my pants fell to the floor, and I felt a rough thumb piercing along my lower backbone and pulling my underpants down.
Thwack!
I didn’t jump, and I failed to lunge forward into the wall dead ahead where so many kids’ foreheads had landed after the dirty deed. In fact, it was such a surprise to me, not being able to recall the last time I had been spanked, or better yet, not recalling ever getting spanked, that I was too shocked to cry.
And I was pissed. Very pissed. She watched it all. She saw my little fourth grade butt. Exposed. Lily white. God only knows if she saw both sides. Things hanging down. I wasn’t thinking of the pain at all, not in the least. Just utter embarrassment. That, and anger. I didn’t do anything wrong, yet I suffered. It seemed so grossly unfair.
That night, sitting in the same three kitchen table chairs which were again unceremoniously placed in the living room, my mom asked us for the last time what we knew about the missing fire extinguisher.
My brother Colt obviously had encountered a more difficult time with Mr. Gaudio’s maple pride. Colt was two grades ahead of me, so Mr. Gaudio’s arm was fresher and stronger with more vigorous thumping power. Thank heaven he didn’t use the fourth graders for his warm ups.
Colt was shifting uncomfortably in his chair, still suffering from the lingering butt heat of the swat hours before. “Howie!” he blurted out.
I’m not certain if he said this out of pain or anger. All he knew was that he did not want to connect with The Beast again, snitch or not.
My mom nodded. “Yeah, makes sense. Those Okies.”
It wasn’t that we had a bias against Oklahoman migrants, it’s just that they were so different, like Texans. Accents. Carefree. Less socially aware. The kind of people who kept their large Doberman locked up in their car when they weren’t home, with the dog joyously honking the horn all afternoon in protest. Trouble seemed to follow them a bit more than us native-born kids.
She continued. “Heard you both got swatted. Tough, huh? Any idea where the missing extinguisher is?”
Colt confessed. “Yeah. We already found it in the forest.”
Inevitably, she asked, “What did you do with it?”
“Left it there.”
“Then go get it and take it back to school the first thing in the morning. I’ll call Mr. Gaudio tonight and let him know.”
Howie got suspended for a few days, and Colt was so athletically inclined, a major status symbol, that he suffered no consequences from snitching. As for me, I could look neither Mrs. Storett nor Mr. Gaudio in the eyes for months.
I was still pissed. Life dealt me a critical unfairness. Not called for. I was an innocent bystander caught in someone else’s crime and suffered the ignominy of pain and embarrassment in its aftermath.
Any lessons in this? Maybe this was one of multiple life experiences that led me to a fairly certain perspective I retain about life in general. Things are what they are. People live and die. Some are dealt better hands than others. Otherwise great people can get shitty hands dealt to them for a long, long time. Few who deserve punishment ever get their just swats.
In my mind, you use your life experiences to understand what you can and cannot change. To accept that some shit rolls downhill to you, and it is what it is. On the flip side, appreciate and be thankful for the good that comes your way or that you create with your own hands.
The world is full of assholes and will remain as such. Mr. Gaudio was not one of them, by the way. He was just a man of the times. But there are many idiots you’ll encounter, every day. Willfully stupid. Lazy. Imperceptive. Vicious. Vile. Hateful. Deceitful. Greedy. Entitled. Fragile and proud. Flailing aimlessly in a writhing snake ball of grievances and victimization.
You get it. But you can’t focus on them. Stay away from that lot where possible. You might even work to help that lot, if you find such generosity within you. Yet understand they almost always don’t want to be helped because they generally live in abject denial of responsibility for their condition and have no conscious desire to change.