I was like most children in that the world was an out there place till I was put in the Kindergarden. First off Kindergarden was an uncomfortable place. My first delivery there could not have been better directed for the rain was coming down in a thick torrent with thunder and lightening.
The nicest thing I had was my mountain goat colored nap rug. There you go kid! Sleep on the floor. Have a cookie!
Where I was a kid what we did for fu, or to pass the time was just throw rocks at each other, or push each other off a cliff that was conveniently there at the end of the street. A balsa wood airplane launched from up there went far out into the block, where if your friends got it, there was another flight, and if you enemies got it, it was laughingly crushed.
First Grade was a hell of noise and theft and if there was anything taught or learned it was stay out of the path of a wandering Nun, or they would step on you and then hit you with a ruler for being in the way.
When I arrived with two younger sisters and a brother in Elon College the attacks continued and intensified. One kid knelt behind, and the other pushed from the front. The whole time I lived in Elon College North Carolina someone was always sneaking up from behind looking to hit me in the balls. They did that.
It was because I was a Yankee, having been born in White Plains New York.
My father taught Speech and English and had been a combat soldier across France and Germany in the last year of the war in Europe.
He drank a lot, yelled at my mother, hit her during one big fight we all listened to, and was gay. Or anyway he had a boyfriend. Bob was his main guy. They must have met at some bar. Bob worked at some place like General Electric, making typewriters or something. Who knows what happened to the poor guy for they were together for as long as I remember in North Carolina till my Dad, sick an divorced moved to Florida and died.
Dad had another boyfriend named Pete by then. War service was a big thing and they had fought in the same theater.
For long Dad had stopped drinking. He became more and more gay as time had gone on. He was an intelligent man, and good looking, but I don’t know what or when he was much happy.
I can pick out a safe booth in a bar and drink alone to music and watch people. I want to go back to Manhattan and sit at the bar in Grand Central and drink and look down on the scurry.
I studied and performed as a stand-up comic to improve my humor, though really who knows what keeps you feeling humorous?
There are some songs by The Band that capture the jist of things. “Life is a carnival, two bits a shot.” Stage Fright, the song about Stage fright is a good one. Performing live on stage will make you throw up beforewards, and talk and drink too much afterwards. The qualifier is whether you are an extrovert of an introvert or not.
But the other thing is that I myself never felt very safe. A psychologist recently told me it seemed like i might have caught combat fatigue from my father.
You know the common man who was invested in the United States and fought for it in World War II got a lot in return for that work if he survived.
If he survived he was put up in barracks, bought books and sent to whatever college he had good enough grades to get into.
There was peace until the Korean War.