human potential

It wasn’t unheard of for college-bound kids to spend the summer after high school doing factory work. What was unusual was for one to remain there after the new school year began.

In the weeks when I was unloading trucks, I hadn’t really seen the factory beyond the room adjacent to the loading docks, where we cleaned the machinery after the last of the trucks were unloaded. But when I went from temporary to full time, I moved into yet another world. The factory floor was dark, one huge two-story room, with adjoining locker rooms, relatively dimly lit by overhead fluorescent lighting. The walls, which had no windows, were concrete block. The floors, also concrete, were grimy from the tracks left by the forklifts, and often wet after being hosed down to remove that grime.

I was as out of place among the factory workers as I had been in high school. Within the factory there was a rigid if unspoken class distinction. The offices, housed in a separate building, were the civilian equivalent of Officers Country, populated by the executive and secretarial staff, coat-and-tie people, white and apparently educated, whose day’s work left them clean. You would think I belonged among them, and perhaps I did, but I certainly didn’t identify with them.

The people I worked among were Negroes, and Puerto Ricans, and poor whites from exotic places like West Virginia and rural Virginia or Kentucky.  They were a long way from the bottom of the heap: They were holding down steady jobs, and had a stable place in the world they knew. But in those days, TV never portrayed Negroes or Puerto Ricans nor poor whites.  I had known some migrant farm laborers, and some of my father’s tenants. But this was the first time I saw how the other half lived.

Any class structure is more clearly seen when looking upward from the lower decks. It was as though something wanted me to see the world from that angle, before I left home. It was a far cry from anything I knew, and a far cry from anything I would see in college.

I try to remember that time and I have only a few memories.

• Old Bob, at least he seemed old to me, a grizzled black man, entertaining those around him in the locker rook with his unending series of humorous, R-rated stories and sayings.
• The very slight casual friendships I struck up with a couple of boys more or less my age, Harold and Doug, brothers from someplace out of state. I wonder sometimes what happened to them.
• Continually playing over my head, trying to do the simple jobs I was assigned as the newest and least skilled person there.
• Mostly, the paddles. How I ached! Certain kinds of soup could not be stirred by electric mixer, but still required continuous stirring while they cooked. I was given a six- or seven-foot long aluminum paddle, and set on a metal platform, and assigned to do the stirring as they cooked. Half an hour at a time, perhaps, 1200 gallons at a time, and then another kettle, same thing., all night with only a break for a meal. Toward the end of the night, I would need to throw my weight on the paddle to keep on stirring, because my arm muscles by themselves wouldn’t do it any more. By the end of that long winter, I had developed considerable upper-body strength, and I never lost it. But I had paid for those muscles!

It was a bleak time. I had nothing I wanted to do, beyond getting through week after week I would go to work in the afternoon, get home sometime after midnight, sleep for a while, waste the few hours of the solitary day, and go back to work. In March came a big layoff, for reasons management never bothered to explain.  (I remember taking a certain pleasure in finding a pencil and correcting the ungrammatical misspelled notice they posted on the bulletin board, but I was still laid off.) A couple of months later, i hired on at  a nearby glass factory, employed at casual labor, doing the odd jobs that had to be done, but weren’t worth detailing shift-workers to do. After a while, a few college boys came in to work for the summer, visitors from a world I hadn’t yet seen.

I can’t remember which factory i was referring to, but years later, my mother reminded me that at some point i had said to her,  “Mom, these poor people! i don’t know how they can stand it.”

i still don’t.

People without marketable skills and without education basically sold their lives, one shift at a time, to keep body and soul together. “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” notwithstanding, the work was repetitious, their labor interchangeable,  their job satisfaction mainly their endurance and competence. Their function was to be cogs in a vast machine. there was satisfaction in not causing the machine to jam up, but that’s about it. Not much job satisfaction there.

Oh, did I mention that management tended to treat them like children? Did I mention that this is a great temptation to live down to expectations? Experiencing this world, not as a college boy working a summer job but as a high school graduate with few social or mechanical skills and no self-confidence, was the best preparation for college I could have received.  A couple of years later, a friend drove me home for Thanksgiving and I showed him the factory floor as it looked to the factory worker. It was an eye-opener to this son of a music teacher. “It puts a new light on my Thanksgiving,” he said.

 

I was 14,, sitting on the school bus next to Ormie House, a slightly older neighbor. He was looking at a full-page photo of a tiger in a book titled Danger Is My Business, in which author John D. Craig described (very entertainingly) the adventurous life he had led in the 1920s and 1930s as a very young man. For some reason, Ormie lent me the book, and in it I read of the time in India when Craig met a sadhu, a holy man, who spent an afternoon talking to him.

“You have come a long way,” he said, “but you have a longer way to go. In your last incarnation you were cooped up in a London countinghouse, as a clerk. In this life you will do all the things of which you dreamed then. Before that you had many lives, but this one is more important. That is, it can be. You have a long way yet to go before you reach The Silence.”

I settled myself more comfortably in the grass and asked him what he meant by The Silence. For a while he looked at me meditatively, probably wondering whether I was worth his time. Then he spoke.

He must have talked for a long time, because Miss Naylor said afterward that she spent several hours in the village …. When she found me the sadhu was still talking, and I was lying full length on the grass, drinking it in.

What he told me is to be found in many book: the theory of reincarnation; the teaching that the cosmic  consciousness, or God, is composed of all matter, all thought, all soul. From the highest element, the creative, has emanated all forms of substance; earth, water, fire, air, ether–the highest and the lowest–each having varying degrees of vibrations; varying wave lengths of different intensities of the same primary substance. Thus substance goes through a series of creative evolutions, rising from grosser to finer, through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms to man. When it reaches man, it contains a portion of the finer vibrations, called soul, and is close to the primary essence itself–God.

The soul of man is, then, a divine vibration caught within the body and mind of man.

But man must go through different planes of existence until he becomes conscious of such a divine vibration. Therefore you may compare his life to a cycle. He evolves through different lives until he reaches that state of being…a consciousness of his very essence, called Zat…which means silent, motionless life–the center–the source of all. In that state of Silence we rise above time and space; thought flows in a stream of quiet power, and knowledge of life is complete. Thus, the sadhu pointed out, in this interpretation of life all philosophies are included and explained: pantheism, which makes all nature God; monotheism, which calls for a single personal God; evolution, which teaches that man arose from lesser beings; Christianity, which prescribes a superhuman, or God-man; and all the other isms and schisms which snatch at a fragment of truth and build a structure of unreason about it.

The sadhu had for some time been an emancipated soul, not bound to continue life. But he was engaged in voluntary service on earth, as were, he said, many others.

“I have been in this body now well over a hundred years,” he said. “I have known others who remained in the same body over three hundred years. It is a matter of mind, as you Occidentals say. It is a matter of knowledge, as some others say. To us it is a state of being which has been achieved. The last life before this, when I died–as you call it–for the last time, I was spiritual advisor to Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal. I remember that life, of course, as I remember all the others, and as I know yours, from reading the record in your soul. Nowadays you have psychologists who call it your subconscious mind, and try to make you think all those things are remembered from childhood.

…

I was afraid of the sadhu’s philosophy for two reasons: it explained everything, and it solved the problem which had been annoying me. My religious training, such as it had been, and my Scottish Presbyterian blood, revolted against that. The world and the universe should be a mystery, and my personal problems should continue to bother me. But should they?

That night I sat on my bed looking with glazed eyes at the floor….

&&&

When I read this little passage, something within went “Click!” and I instantly knew that this is how things work. That’s the only mention of reincarnation in the entire book — scarcely a shot across the bow, so to speak — yet it helped determine my life, for it helped determine what I believe, and hence what would be important to me, and hence what I would act on. Eventually.

Probably Danger Is My Business was merely the excuse “someone within” used to bring my conscious mind to pay attention to an idea it had heard before, though not recently. From time to time, as years passed, I would get glimpses of what seemed to be past lives. (I have since learned that receiving such glimpses is normal and frequent, but is usually dismissed as “only imagination.”) But it was a long time before I found any effective way to do any exploration. Meanwhile there was live to be lived. To be endured.

 

I find it hard to explain how completely isolated I was.

I had no friends, and didn’t know how to go about making friends. My community had always been my family: my brothers and sisters, really. But John was in the Air Force – had been for six years – and in 1960 Margaret had gone off to Catholic University. That left Joe, Barbara, and Paul – respectively, 15, 13, and 11 – not much company for an 18-year-old, and in any case I didn’t see them much. Working nights, I left the house before 4 p.m. and returned sometime after midnight. That meant I was not there for supper, nor was I up when they had breakfast, and during the week they had lunch at school. And both my parents had jobs at that time, my mother having gone back to work the previous year after 23 years of child-rearing, and dad was selling real estate for Uncle Lewie. I scarcely saw anyone except on weekends. At least, that’s the way I remember it.

My life had been reduced to a few aimless midday hours, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. Looking back, I can see that I might have used that time to advantage, if I had had an aim, but I did not.

It’s easy to forget, today, how few were the resources we had in those days. Radio was on a continual downhill slide, declining from the source of local news into an invisible jukebox programmed from far away, prepackaged without local content. Television consisted of the three network stations out of Philadelphia and the educational TV station in Wilmington, Delaware, a UHF station that didn’t seem to have much to offer. It would be nearly 20 years before the personal computer began to enter people’s homes. There was no internet, no social media, no email. In 1964, we were on our own.

Vineland was a small town with a Carnegie library. That library, and whatever books we had in the house, and the Saturday Evening Post and Readers’ Digest, were all the intellectual resources available to me. We did have one bookstore downtown, which I often browsed, but in those days I had to think carefully before spending, even on books. Prices look incredibly cheap by later standards, but that is because inflation progressively eroded the value of the currency. In 1964 an average paperback cost a quarter, maybe 35 cents, an expensive volume like Winston Churchill’s memoirs of World War II $1.25 apiece – but in 1964 I was making $1.50 an hour. Besides, since I had never had money to spend, spending it did not come easily. And, I was giving half my pay to my parents.

Nor was I in any way prepared to make good use of my time. Instead, I spent the few hours between sleep and work reading history and fiction until it was time for me to suit up for work: white pants, white shirt, white bib apron extending nearly to my ankles, rubber boots. Then I would re-enter the world that I had drifted into, a world that otherwise would have remained forever closed to my imagination.

 

Nothing in my background fits into easy categories.

• Vineland itself was neither city nor suburb nor country. Not quite a farm town, it was very much aware of how different it was from the neighboring cites of Bridgeton and Millville, basically factory towns. Vineland had begun life in 1861 as a planned community. The original one-mile square boro and the surrounding township had merged a few years back, to create a city of 68 square miles, including entire farms, all within a few miles of the central business district. Neither flesh nor fish nor fowl, Vineland had pretensions. Like me, it didn’t quite fit with its surroundings.
• Then there was the matter of class. My father was a farmer, so we were usually cash-strapped, but this didn’t lead us to identify with the working class. Farmers are neither labor nor management, but both. They may be dependent upon weather, market conditions and a thousand other intangibles, but they are no one’s employees; their independence is very real, and don’t think they don’t know it.
• And culturally, was I middle-class or peasant? I was pulled both ways. My parents were not college-educated but they were not ignorant. They were neither rich nor poor, but middle-class in a way that was taken for granted in postwar America. They had grown up in the Depression; they knew what it was like to be unable to find a job, and they were grateful that the world had changed. they shared many values and attitudes, and yet in some ways they were on opposite sides of a cultural divide that they made no effort to bridge.

My mother’s family was solid town-oriented middle class. Her father, having begun life wanting to be an artist, was a successful painting contractor whose children went to the Catholic school and therefore received a first-rate education. (And a lifelong loyalty to the church.) Mom had grown up in a house with genteel manners and wished her children to be refined, cultured. I was bookish, and I had strands within me that apparently remembered upper class life. (As one example, sometimes the shirts I wore to school took French cuffs, and I remember enjoying wearing cufflinks.) But I was well aware of the civil war between my mother and my father, and I had other strands that were on dad’s side.

His family were farmers. He grew up among animals and farm work; he went to the public schools, with Catholicism being mostly a Sunday thing, I guess. Again, he was not ignorant, not uneducated, and a long way from stupid. But he wasn’t particularly verbal – certainly not like his wife and children – and he didn’t care about using correct grammar. He spoke like the people he had grown up among, even if his mental reach far exceeded theirs. (In that, he was something like Lincoln, and I can see now that in some ways he may have identified with the man on his birthday he had born, and whose surname was his own middle name.) Dad was so habitually contemptuous of things that he considered impractical or highfalutin, and anything that he considered affected would certainly qualify. Yet, so strange, to find a high school book report he had written on Ivanhoe. I try to imagine him fitting it alongside the rest of the life he was leading. Parts of me identified with the manners and expectations of French aristocrats, but other parts identified with pioneers and woodsmen.

So there I was: Some threads encouraged me to adopt my mother’s values; others sided with dad’s, and will others took advantage of my reading to align me with values and attitudes derived from neither one. How else did a middle-class son of Italians parents come to identify with the English? (If Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans agreed on any one thing, it was distrust of England.) Why else would I have been drawn to Winston Churchill, as unerringly as to Lincoln or Kennedy? None of that came from my parents, or my schooling, or from the people around me. If I was not resonating to invisible, unsuspected inner threads, where did it come from?

Maybe from past lives?

Years later, my wife would say, “You are here, now. Even if you were somebody else before, what does it matter now? What difference does it make?” I didn’t know why it mattered. I only knew that it did. It mattered a lot.

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.

 

Phew! I find it hard to read all that white-hot emotion even now, all these years later. You can see the boy’s attempt to be honest, filtered through so many illusions about the world and about himself. He reaches naturally for the pen to relieve the intolerable pressure, and he has to fight to not fall into stylized reactions. He doesn’t want to be over-dramatic (“would be tempted to play holy martyr”) and he certainly doesn’t want anybody to see what had to be obvious to everybody. Always the intent to hide his true feelings, always the inability to express them, and afterward the difficulty in even knowing what they were.

Note, too, the harsh sweeping unfounded judgments. That was a tendency that continued to plague the boy years into manhood, as, in the absence of self-reflection, it took a long while for him to see how little grounded in reality some of his certainties were. In those days, there was no idea of sending grief counselors into schools. Only after a couple of decades’ worth of traumatic experiences would society begin doing that. But how we could have used it in 1963!

But why should this event have been such a dagger to the heart? Millions of people around the world – hundreds of millions of people – were deeply saddened by Kennedy’s death, and the cutting-off of so much promise. He had touched so many lives, so deeply, in so many ways, for so many reasons. But most people got over the shock. If not right away, then within  months, or even years. But my life was haunted by this crime for twenty-five years!

The boy that I was couldn’t express what he felt in front of anyone, particularly his father, for fear of unspoken criticism. So when he wanted to cry, he wouldn’t, and then couldn’t. He pretended. And paid and paid and paid for it, because, as I would learn much later, unresolved feelings do not change with time. Or, as Carl Jung said somewhere, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” Repress your emotions, refuse to let them resolve, and see where that leaves you.

 

Perhaps I haven’t sufficiently stressed how alone I was. Fortunately, I had my family. My youngest brother and I were particularly close despite the seven years between us. But other than Paul, I had no friends. Then for a few years I had one friend, then no one again.

I was isolated by a combination of factors. First, I was so often sick; second, I spent so much time reading and daydreaming; third, most of my schoolmates in the Catholic school lived in town, a couple of miles (and a different world) away. But mostly I was isolated by – what shall I call it? — my almost autistic self-absorption. It wasn’t egotism, exactly; more that my inner world was so brightly lit that the external world was often merely an inexplicable annoying interruption.

I knew the stories from the biographies and histories I was reading. I knew the world as dishonestly portrayed by the boy’s books of my father’s and my generation; I knew the televised world of westerns and action shows; I knew the fantasy world I constructed out of all that. But I didn’t know much about real life.

And in considering the factors that led to my isolation, I must not omit the mixture of superiority and inferiority complexes that made me strange, and, I suppose, unapproachable.

I knew I was smart: I excelled in standardized tests designed to measure IQ; I read years above my grade level. I could see that I lived in a mental world far beyond most of my peers. The only academic subject that engaged me, history, I mastered easily. (In my Freshman year in high school, I took home the heavy world history text and read or skimmed it in a weekend, because I wanted to know what had happened.)

But emotionally and socially, I was light-years behind my age group, and despite my best efforts to not know it, I did know it. My everyday life was a string of humiliating or enraging incidents. And girls – even though I had two sisters – were unknown country. I knew them more as the lying boy’s novels had portrayed them than as I actually saw them around me in class. You may imagine how close reality came to those portrayals.

 

The rest of that 1963-64 school year is a blur of remembered misery. I did what I was required to do, in school, at home. I’m sure I did a lot of reading. But I was dead inside. I had competing strands pulling me different ways, rarely taking note of each other, let alone coordinating efforts. (This was long before I had any idea that we are as much communities as individuals.) With Jack Kennedy dead, the path I had imagined had vanished, and with it any ambitions I had had. No particular future attracted me, and I was not in the habit of taking my life into my own hands except at great intervals. I drifted through my unsatisfactory actual life.

My sister Margaret, four years older than me, had gone to college, but for some reason I can no longer remember, I had picked up a prejudice against doing that. (Maybe it seemed like more high school.)

My brother John, six years older than me, had enlisted in the service, immediately after high school. It seemed the natural thing to do. During the Kennedy years, I had formed an image of the life I would lead, the same kind of life I imagined Kenney or Churchill had led. They had gone to war as young men, and had made a name for themselves, and that had served as their entrance into politics. Maybe I would do the same. So I decided I would enlist in the Army, become a helicopter pilot, and come home a war hero.

In the Spring of 1964, nobody was expecting war in Vietnam. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson’s re-election campaign would portray him as the peace candidate. Yet I knew, months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, that we would have a war there. My life has been the strangest mixture of impracticality and inspiration.

I told my father that I wanted to join the Army, and he, knowing the local Navy recruiter, arranged for me to take the preliminary test in my home, I doing the work downstairs in our library room while dad and he talked upstairs. (Looking back, I think dad was silently nudging me away from the Army.) I passed, and that was one step taken. Next step, the physical and mental exams.

So on Good Friday, 1964, I took a bus to Philadelphia, presented myself at AFEES (Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station), and got a fast brief snapshot of Army life. All morning, I was processed as part of a herd, one of hundreds of enlistees and draftees standing in line after line, examined for this, examined for that. It wasn’t so different from Catholic school, other than being naked except for shoes. (A sign on the wall said yes, take off your socks.) And then at the end of the morning, at the last desk, when I thought all hurdles successfully jumped, the man at the desk looked at my papers, asked me to confirm that I had asthma, and casually said, “Of course you know…” and told me that this made me ineligible for recruitment. In the Spring of 1964, the services could afford to be picky. We had been more or less at peace since 1953.

And then, in a development Franz Kafka would have appreciated, even though I had just been told that I would not be accepted for enlistment because I had failed the physical exam, I was required to remain and take the mental and educational tests.

“Of course you know…” Of course I didn’t know! I had my heart set on getting into the service, because otherwise how could I become a war hero and run for office? What was I going to do? All the way home on the bus, I was asking myself what now.

At some point I went over to the county seat and asked the Army recruiter if I could talk to him off the record. (Immediately he said, “Trouble with the law?”) But when I told him why I had failed the AFEES admission process, and asked if I should lie about having asthma, his answer was immediate and definite. “Don’t do it.” He said if I got caught, I’d get a discharge for fraudulent enlistment, and if I didn’t get caught, “you’d be a hazard to yourself and to your buddies.”

So that was that. No military career, no war heroism, no obvious way to make a reputation. My 1-Y draft status and I would have to find a different path.

 

Jump forward to October, 1988. Being inspired by Robert Smith’s book Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father’s Business, I told myself that I wanted to open myself to the levels of life that had become blocked. I said, “God, your will, not mine. But if you will it, let me be whole: Remove the barriers that close me off from you, from me, from others. Let me be of service. Show me the way and keep me on the path.”

What you pray for, you will surely get.

On Saturday, November 19, 1988, I awakened half-remembering a dream prominently featuring a rendition of “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.” The previous week, on the occasion of the composer’s death, a National Public Radio piece had put it into my consciousness. But I awakened convinced that the dream was using the song in connection to the upcoming 25th anniversary of the murder of John F. Kennedy.

In 1988, the 25th anniversary year, I as editorial writer and occasionally columnist had said my say in the pages of the newspaper about his many excellences. Others too had poured out their hearts, reminding me that that political crime had done great psychological damage to many unknown individuals of all ages. And by then I had been seeing a psychologist, and with her help it finally came real to me (what my feelings had known only abstractly, theoretically) that 1963 had been a long time ago. In response to that dream, I wrote it all out, the whole ghastly weekend and the blank weeks that followed, and I knew that all things come to an end, even torture and deformation. “Roll out the barrel,” I wrote, “and we’ll have a barrel of fun. Finally.” But that was a long, long time after 1963.

 

[Sitting in eighth-period study hall on that ghastly Friday afternoon, writing  on the back of half-used three-hole punched lined paper, which is what I had available:]

[First page]

The President is dead. Kennedy killed. His wife and children. He’s dead. Lyndon Johnson is the President of the United States. [Segueing to the unknown assassin:] Death is too good for that son-of-a-bitch. When they capture him they ought to torture him for days without end.

Dead. Not even fifty. He was forty-six. Never hurt anybody deliberately, took on the toughest job in the world for the good of his country and gets killed for it.

[Segueing to the kids in the study hall around me:] These crazy guys here don’t even give a damn. The girls do, but the boys don’t even seem to mind. Some damn idiot here laughing. Now it’s beginning to dawn. “The most important man in the world.” Leo. “He was cute,” says some girl dazedly. Then she mutters about his wife and kids. Some fool speculates on the next election. Now they realize what happened. Someone has come in and said that he is definitely dead. I wish to God that murderer were here. We’d tear the bastard to pieces. What kind of Goddamned nut will kill a man like that? Some idiots speculating on who takes over now. Can’t they realize that the man stopped living?

[Second page]

Don’t they realize he’s dead? Someone says, “Outlaw the Communist Party. They had something to do with it.” Maybe. Or maybe it was some goddamned nut of a Southerner.

What a shock. I feel like crying, but the tears don’t come. I feel like raging, but I’m numbed. All I can see is the president being shot and his wife and kids. My God Why.

Even the stupidest of these here are now shocked and sober. Some continue writing, some stare into space only I continue this idiot writing, I keep on writing without preparation as they come into my mind. I want to cry very badly.

There is a lead weight in my stomach. My arms are heavy, like when I want to sleep. My eyes and my brain alone continue undiminished. Almost against my will I keep on writing, and the more I write the more hypocritical it seems. And yet

[Third page]

someday I may need a record of my thoughts at a time of crisis and later, in a calm state of mind, I’ll analyze this and see just how rational I really am.

I’m glad I wrote so much. I think I’ve burned myself out. All I feel now is one of apathy to what happened. I can’t even feel intense hate for the bastard, at least not emotional hate. I think though that I’ll carry this hate I have for the rest of my life. Something is coming over the loudspeaker. Maybe it’s a radio broadcast.

[Fourth page]

It is night. The story of the day can be stated in three words. Business as usual. I talked with Cathy, among others. [She was a college student who worked at the drug store I worked in.] She expressed her feelings. When she’d heard the news she’d been driving home, and it hit her like a ton of bricks.  And then she realized that she was still driving, though she had to pull over when the shock wore off and the tears came. Business as usual. The show goes on. I went to church when I got there, left books and all, without really knowing what I was doing, and

[back of fourth page]

stayed there for what seemed eternity. [Can’t remember how I got from the high school to the church.] I wanted to die, and I prayed as I had, in school, I’d give my life for the President’s. Naturally I didn’t get my desire. Finally I realized that I couldn’t stay here and I left, and as I left I heard the four o’clock whistle. I started to walk to [my uncle’s] office [where my father was working in those years], and somewhere along the way I decided Business as usual. I would go to get the haircut I had planned on. I had nothing better to do. Otherwise I might have been tempted to play holy martyr which was the last thing I wanted to do.

I was still stunned, and dazed when I entered the office. I had seen dad in the car enter the lot [behind the building], so I knew he’d be coming in the back. As I went in I passed right by Aunt Mildred and Aunt Betty. I said something, I don’t remember what, and continued on. I met dad coming in the back door and, still distracted, I just told him I was going for a haircut and started to leave, not even thinking of what I would do after that. Dad did, though, and told me to come back when I was done. As I left the office I made some attempt at humor to Aunt Mildred, but as I couldn’t

[Fifth page]

even inject anything into my voice it was a complete failure, not that I cared. I walked head down all the way to the barbershop, stopping at one street when I saw a car which would have hit me. As for the others, I didn’t stop or slow in the slightest, just crossing at normal pace. Had I been struck down by a car I would have been the happiest man dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to step deliberately into the path of that one car which might have killed me (the driver looking the other way). I was very disgusted with myself then.

But the band played on. There was not a smile on the street in the afternoon and only on those idiots you would expect at night. People, tho continued. I got a haircut, and Cathy came to work.

[Sixth page]

The thing I wanted most was either to die or to go off somewhere alone, and I was allowed to do neither. Business as usual, the world turns on, the band played on, however you prefer to say it. Not even Mr. Kennedy’s death stops it. The president dies and idiot kids ride the avenue, a person comes in and buys athlete’s foot ointment and a boy gets a haircut and a girl comes to work. The whole of the ship of state is violently wrenched. I’m sick of writing. I want to forget this day and I never will. Maybe I can find a book for a while. I doubt it.

[End of the pages.]

And then there was the long shadow of John F. Kennedy. I’ve never known anything like it. Not before, and certainly not since.

Hero-worship is one thing. It wasn’t that. By age 13, I had already had heroes, not only fictional heroes but real ones, like Abraham Lincoln. What is a hero, anyway, but maybe someone you place your ideals on, someone you fall in love with, confusing a flesh-and-blood person with an idealized image in your mind.

I don’t think this was that. Once I was fully fixed on John F. Kennedy, my attention never wavered. I admired Bobby and, gradually, others of the family as I read about them. I came to love Bob after 1963, because he had loved Jack, and because he so obviously suffered the way I did. But nobody ever took front and center the way Jack did. Kennedys were glamorous, but only Jack was Jack.

It must have been hard on my father, to know he was being compared with JFK. Fathers find it hard enough to hold the respect of their adolescent children. Try competing with someone rich, handsome, talented and famous, and an idealized version, at that. But it wasn’t exactly hero-worship. Really it was that Jack and I were parts of one thing. It is the only explanation that will make sense of my early life. When he was killed, I was shattered.

What did he and I have in common? A quick sense of humor, voracious reading, an intense continuing interest in history, a childhood plagued by illness. Catholicism. That was all. Everything else – all the essentials – couldn’t have been more different. Not only the externals such as the worlds he inhabited as he grew, but elements of character such as my flaming temper. (If Jack had such a temper, I never heard of it, and I’m sure we would have read of it as we read of his father’s.) Didn’t matter. I absolutely identified with him.

The physical life I lived was a pale shadow of the events I read about. History and current events were the world my mind lived in, and I assumed that it was only a matter of time before they were where I would live my life. I took it for granted that I was destined to do great things on the world stage. I suppose it was like kids feeling the difference between themselves and their family, and imagining themselves as changelings. And then –

Why is it that my world was shaped and shattered before I was 18 years old by a man I would never meet? I ask, and the answer that I get is: Relate my experience as I experienced it, and let the meaning emerge.

.2.

In the Fall of 1963, I was in my Senior year at Vineland High School, having transferred from Sacred Heart High at the end of my Junior year. I had asked my parents to let me transfer, and I probably would have done it two years earlier, if it had occurred to me that it was in my power to change anything. Grade school had been okay, but I had experienced Catholic high school as jail. It was many a decade before I began to understand my own part in my failure to fit into a closed system.

But in the Fall of 1963, there I was in a vastly larger school, happily lost in the crowd. I still didn’t fit in, but none of the boys around me cared enough to make it an issue. The pecking order had been established years before I arrived, and I was scarcely affected by it. I didn’t have any real friends, but I had a few joking acquaintances, and the contrast was startling and enjoyable. I had three months of this happiness. September, October, November.

On the Friday before the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was sitting in Miss Ostrander’s social studies class, in the back of the room, near the right-hand corner. It was the next-to-last class period, with only a study hall to follow. Miss Ostrander had been called to the door, and I was joking with a couple of guys (In three months, I had already become known for telling jokes). When she returned to the room, she told us, soberly, that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

I felt the blood drain from my face. Months later, Miss Ostrander talked to us about the reactions she had observed that day and said that some of us were scared. I knew she meant me, for I had seen her see me. But I wasn’t scared. My world had been shattered between one moment and the next. It was as unnatural as if the sun had risen in the west. In a way, I had been killed, and that 17-year-old had no way to process any of it.

I don’t remember the rest of that class period. I do remember sitting in study hall next period and finding that the only way to deal with that awful pressure was to write, write, write. I remember Leo Darmstadter looking over at me, quizzically, as I filled the pages furiously. I kept those page, and they will form the next entry.