It seems clear that it was never in the cards for me to lead a normal life, whatever “normal” means. When external circumstances were normal, my own peculiarities assured that my experience would be different. When external circumstances were unusual, what I took from them would be even more unusual. Many decades later, I would say that when I ceased apologizing for what I believed, particularly about our psychic potential, i “came out of the closet.”” This was true, but I see now that I was in the closet from the time, whenever it was, that I decided to hide what I was feeling. And when was that? If there was a moment of decision, I don’t remember it, which means it was a long way back. By the time I tried to hide what the murder of JFK had done to me, it was already habit.
Where did that habit come from?
Considered as if it was the result of externals, it was my reaction to my parent’s criticisms and the unfathomable expectations and criticisms leveled at me by my school and my schoolmates.
Considered as the result of my internal composition, it followed from my making so little effort to understand myself or my actions or my surroundings or my effect on my surroundings. I lived in a play without knowing the lines or the plot or my role. Everyone around me seemed to me to be part of a closed society, and there I was without the password. I was always being disagreeably surprised.
I see that I had it pretty much backwards. People found me strange because I was a closed society, and they (to the extent that they cared) were without the password. They saw that I was hiding within a shell, and they had no way to get inside. Most people weren’t all that interested, but some were exasperated. Boys, being pack animals, needed to fit me into the established pecking order, but I refused to accept a place, and lived as if in isolation, and some of the boys resented this even more, which resulted in a certain amount of bullying., especially in my first three years of high school. I preferred being semi-outcast to accepting my place in a pecking order determined by others.
That’s how it seemed to me then. Probably it was simpler than that. The boy didn’t know the ropes. He didn’t have the social skills he needed, so it was always hard for him to fit in. He didn’t understand the demands and the expectations. He was judging others by their actions and himself by his intentions, and of course internal and external reports did not agree.
Memory contains so many gaps. I graduated from high school, a ceremony and a milestone that meant literally nothing to me. Once liberated from the imposed structure of high school, I drifted. I had no idea how to connect daydreams to everyday reality. One of my internal strands continued to assume that my career would mimic JFK’s and Churchill’s careers, only now without the war-hero stuff, and it was only a matter of waiting until I would be old enough.
Enter the outside world, in the person of my father, who decided to convert what had been the main farm building into apartments. Since there I was, unemployed again but still eating at his table, I was conscripted as unpaid labor, helping dad and the two men he had hired.
Probably the summer of 1964 should have been pleasant enough, working in the open air, only a couple of hundred feet from my grandmother’s house where we would have lunch. But I was not in a condition to enjoy anything. Instead, I endured, aware mostly of the irksomeness of being under my father’s thumb. The work, meaningless to me, filled the day. At night, I read or watched TV. I was drifting, without motor or rudder. I literally had no idea what could come next, and I had no idea how to choose what would come. Then came intervention, first from Uncle Lew, then from Bub.
Uncle Lew was a self-made man, and he did it without trickery or sharp practice. At age 15 or so, he had gone to work as office boy at Bray and MacGeorge, a real estate office. After the first winter, he took it for granted that he should quit and help the family work the farm. Grandmom DeMarco used to tell the story: “I said, Lewie, you brought home more money than we made from everything else. You stay right there.” And that’s what he did. Working and learning the business year in and year out, he went from office boy to realtor to partner to full owner. In the process he became a rich man and a community presence, twice city councilman, member of uncounted boards of directors, and pillar of the church.
Throughout this slow methodical ascent, he remained natural and unaffected, generous and easy-going. (Years later a prominent lawyer told a group in my presence that when he had been employed by Uncle Lew to collect some debts, he had expected that this was a hard man, who would exact his due. Instead, he said, some of the debts were so far in arrears that “the interest exceeded the principal!”)
I imagine that Uncle Lew saw how lost I was, though I tried hard enough to conceal it. I see now, he believed in me, and stepped in with one of the kindly unpublicized acts that characterized his life. To encourage me to go to college, he gave me as a birthday present the $100 that had to accompany an application to George Washington University, the only school I considered. So, weeks after the deadline, I did apply, and in late August came a letter of acceptance.
But I was in no way ready to go off to college. It was nearly September by the time the acceptance letter arrived. I wasn’t at all sure that I was ready to start another round of classes. For that matter, although my sister Margaret had just gotten her college degree, college was not yet a tradition in our family, and I had no framework in which to imagine the life. I asked GW to defer my admission, and then I had a year to decide if I wanted to go to college. There seemed to be little point in it, but where was the point in anything else? By now I had been depressed for so many months that it had become my normal.
Besides, college would cost money, a lot of it. I couldn’t attend school without having the money for room, board, tuition, texts, and so forth. I never even thought to ask if my parents could help financially. Money at home was always tight, and I took it for granted that if I went to college, I would have to pay my own way. (And maybe I already sensed that if I paid my own way, I could do as I pleased.) I needed a job. Enter Bub.
In the summer of 1964, he was working as a line foreman at a local soup-making factory, and he got me a job unloading trucks. Every day from four p.m. to after midnight, our crew unloaded farmers’ truckloads of tomatoes, usually two of us to a truck. After the last truck of the day was unloaded, we moved inside and spent hours cleaning the machinery that had processed the tomatoes as we unloaded them. A wet, sloppy job, working with steam and water. I would come home soaked to the skin, my apron covered with tomato juice.
It was a job, it paid money, it filled the time. It was all right with me. Bub’s impact was that he had gotten me the job. Also, one night when I was out on the trucks, he brought me a takeout coffee in a Styrofoam container. When I tried to tell him that I didn’t drink coffee, he said, incredulously, “You don’t want it?” So I thanked him and took it. Laced with cream and sugar, it tasted pretty good, actually. The first in a long, long line of coffees that would punctuate my days and nights.
But Bub and I didn’t see each other outside of work hours, and when tomato season ended, he was off to do other things.
I had nothing better to do. I stayed. They moved me inside and I became a cook’s helper, which meant several months of unending hours spent using a sort of aluminum canoe paddle to stir 1200-gallon kettles of soup while they cooked. That job built strong arm muscles that I never lost. And, unnoticed, those months of working nights broke me of the television-watching habit.
I was still living on autopilot, but my life had begun to move again, because Bub had gotten me a job. I’m smiling, writing this, remembering that sunny attractive magnetic presence, that meteor that flashed so brightly though my early life. Like a meteor, a good distance from me; brief, fleeting, long-remembered. His effect on me was like JFK’s, in a way, that same easy Irish charm. Forty years later, in my second novel, I created an editor named Charlie Reilly and gave him a few of Bub’s characteristics, an affectionate gesture across so many years. But by that time he was long gone. Meteors flash, they don’t endure.