BOXER SANITATION

Introduction

I have always, secretly, believed that I could write (at one time, I thought I could fly by flapping my arms); the seed for this idea nourished by both my parents who heaped praise on my letters sent from the pea fields. But this fantasy began before that, in the seventh grade when I wrote my own dust jacket blurbs for an art class drawing. It continued in high school when a paper I wrote, The Symbolism and Mysticism of William Blake was given a B because the teacher thought I copied directly from my resource material. I hadn’t. Now after two years of plunking keys and reading a variety of novels and self-help books, I’m not so sure. I have less doubt about what will happen when I flap my arms, but about writing, I am chastened. I have, however, a fresh appreciation for those who can write. Call it the Picket Fence Syndrome.

Twenty-five years ago, my friend Dan told me that as soon as I finished my first carpentry project, a picket fence, all my questions regarding proper construction would disappear. Not because I would benefit from my mistakes, or simply his expertise, but because from then on, everywhere I went, I would see picket fences. And I did, even in my dreams. I can’t say all my questions about writing have been answered, or that I even know what good writing is, but two things have become clear to me.

First, I understand plagiarism. I see phrases and want to possess them as a child his first two wheeler. I consider copying whole paragraphs, then changing a word or two to work them into my own stories. “...the night cascading through the tall pines until it’s in the house.” “ I closed my eyes and saw myself in waves of lucidity, a vanisher in a long process of vanishing...” How about, “As a child I kept a stone in my pocket, thumb and forefinger in collusion with wind and water... . “ What would be the harm: Nervously I reached into my pocket and felt only coins, reminded as a child, calmed by finding a stone; thumb and forefinger in collusion with wind and water... . Who would know? Only those who had read Stephen Dunn, and of those, only the ones who remember.

Secondly, I want to write and write well. I want to craft words into paragraphs, into stories, into books. I want to put those words together as I did my son’s room with clean, colorful, vibrant lines, open spaces that inform and shape creative imagery. I want people to covet my words as Matthew’s friends covet his room.

I would start on this same one room scale, a short story or what Anne Lamott would call a short assignment. She urges the beginning writer to temper their expectations and attempt a project of manageable size. That defines my speech, how could it not my writing. Like heartbeats, I sense I have only so many so I use them sparingly.

“The first useful concept is the idea of short assignment. Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of-oh, say-say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier, It’s hard to get your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up. Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.”

My first two stories, Putting In and Paddling Out (Puddin’ & Paddlin’) were short and began just as our camping trips. Not with the splash of a canoe, or a stone skipped on the surface of the clear lake, but with my feet securely on shore and my hand tentatively touching the cold water. They were written before the dams formed, when words would somersault from my mind to my fingertips and all I had to do was provide a soft landing. My original intent was to begin a chronicle of our trips, with hopes that the other four guys would follow, thereby creating a written history for all of us to enjoy. Adam, Mr. Prolific, accepted the challenge and was soon throwing buckets of text at me. His words flow like a fast moving stream, mine continue to flop like salmon in an unfamiliar river.

My third story, Christmas Trees, began my chisel and brush approach to my past, surely helping me understand how past events relate to the present, and inevitably the beginning of my morality plays. Clemency was a natural segue, revealing more history, and for the first time, exploring family matters. That story was difficult to write and without Diane’s patience and skilled editorial help, I never would have finished. I puzzled over that story, determined to finish it, exasperated that neither the thoughts nor the words would appear.

The second helpful point Lamott makes is what she calls the shitty first draft. Don’t sit and bite your nails, put your words to paper then edit, and when you are sick of editing, edit some more. She claims that no one sits down and writes fully formed literate, passages. Well, almost no one: “Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think she has a rich inner life or that god likes her or can stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”

I don’t hate people but I’m not sure I can say that about most of the work I have done. My jobs have sustained me financially, meagerly, but sufficiently. But no massage for my soul. That’s what I anticipate writing would do. Make me less nervous, focus my ever wandering mind, calm my soul, water my garden, wax my truck and maybe even cure all my mental illnesses.


The story that follows, is unlike my last three. It does not use camping as a springboard to my past, and more importantly, it will not wind its way to a moral. I haven’t written it yet but it may just end with a train ride back to Indiana.


Prologue

Wayne's intestinal cancer was in remission, and he had regained his linebacker’s physique, when we built Dan and Linda’s tool shed twelve years ago. Wayne and a friend dug the six footings, all below the frost line at four feet and in the cursed, rocky soil of New England. I drove up one day to see Wayne lying on the grass, next to a pile of dirt, rocks and unfinished holes, his back commanding him not to move. Anxious to finish on time, I was not sympathetic.
“Looks like you’re almost done.”
Wayne looked away and mumbled, “Yeah, well, but I can’t finish, not right now.”
At that time I had no idea what it meant to have a back problem, how it’s not just your back like it’s just your left hand.
“I thought we’d get the holes done today, maybe even the concrete poured.”
Still avoiding eye contact, Wayne responded, “I know.”
“I’ve got another job to do, or I’d stay and help.”
I kept wondering why his friend was sitting next to Wayne. Sympathy pains? What has always made me a poor supervisor is my inability to ask that question, not through clinched teeth.
Today I still see him lying there in his sleeveless red shirt, full reddish brown beard, and apologetic smile, but now I want to say, “It’s okay, I’m not in a hurry.”

As mysteriously as it arrived, his back pain subsided and two days later we attacked the framing and soon this small, one story building was finished, not because we worked quickly together, our styles always clashed, but because we made few errors. Wayne’s linear approach was designed to minimize mistakes, mine more inclined to maximize them. Where Wayne would cut a single stud and make sure it fit, I’d cut a dozen and if there was an error, I’d then devise a work-around.
“Cut the header forty inches, the jack studs at eighty, and the kings at ninety-two. Make sure the top of the window lines up with the top of the door, and ... “
Wayne who never got angry, and seldom showed his own impatience stopped me, “Let me finish the header first.”
He didn’t mean let me, he meant shut up until the first task on this short list was nailed in place.
Once I cut the studs a bit long for a basement I was remodeling, but had assembled the wall before I caught my error. I placed the top of the wall, underneath the floor joists where it belonged and moved the bottom of the wall into place. Except it didn’t fit. It angled out, not much, but I had the weight of the house above me and a concrete floor below slowing my progress. With a beat block (a short section of 2x4 that would protect the footer or bottom section of wall) I began swinging away with a sledgehammer. The wall moved in great thundering, house shaking inches, until finally it was in place. Wayne would have finished at about the same moment, but without lifting the house.

We set Dan’s shed on concrete piers, used pressure treated and oversized lumber near grade, hung the original front door recently discarded from the main house, and after the last shingle was nailed down, we painted the shed yellow to match their home on Sunnyside Lane. There were no high fives in those days, and truthfully not much standing back and appreciating jobs finished on time, but this one made us both smile.

Last week, as I was repainting the door, I had what might be called a religious experience and yes it was about death, not about Wayne’s whose cancer came back two years later but about my own. I had just finished painting the house, and this door was all that was left. The backside of the house and where I now stood was bathed in sunlight and by sitting in the doorway, I was able to straddle the shadows. I thought of removing the hinge pins, laying the door flat in the cool comfort of the shed, but I didn’t.

With six inset panels, the flat surfaces of this door once scraped of peeling paint, could be rolled quite easily. That left the only brush work for the fluted trim that framed the panels. The corners always collected excess paint that would then trail down the face of the panel. As I followed my brush catching those rivulets, like tears with the back of my hand, I began thinking of the years I have left, and of the friends I have lost.

I thought that I’d elaborate on that experience, starting with Wayne’s final project , a second story deck he built attached to his own house. Crippled by the return of his cancer, unable to kneel and not wanting to use the nail gun I loaned him because of marks left on the decking boards, he set up a movable platform so he could stand, head and shoulders squeezed through the floor joists and nail each board by hand. We all construct our inner world in ways that ignore reality, but Wayne was the Lawrence Taylor in this endeavor. He contiuned to work, not because he needed the money, he surely did, but because he was not going to die. Not even when he weighed a hundred pounds, living on morphine.

But I decided a better topic, one that surely propelled me to the day I would be sitting on that threshold, painting that door, would be my summer job in Boxer Sanitation. You have to admit, if you had a choice between reading another religious epiphany peppered with stories like the one above, or an identity crisis of a boy caught between unsympathetic parents and the Green Giant, you’d choose that boy.

Okay, it’s a tossup, but I’m chasing the boy.

CHAPTER I

I was seventeen, I was leaving Indiana, and traveling two thousand miles to work for the Green Giant in the pea fields of Dayton, Washington. My job description, checked on the flat white card that resembled an overdue library notice, was Boxer Sanitation. I didn’t know what that meant, maybe not even the guy who had checked the box knew, but it didn’t matter.

I was overjoyed, I thought happier than anyone else in my house. At the time I was completely unaware of my mother’s complicity in this trip. Like ignoring the fingers typing this story, I was so head strong I failed to recognize the prime mover. My senior year was in a word –explosive, and I wanted to go far away, as soon as possible. I accomplished both when I scheduled my departure for the week before graduation ceremonies. My stoic mother never showed the strain my behavior surely had on the rest of the family, not to mention her, but it was she who first suggested this job.

“I have a friend whose son worked at a cannery in Washington, maybe you’d like to try it?” my mother offered as I was ignoring yet another day’s homework. I can still hear the tone, a studied ambivalence that made the prospect even more enticing. “How do I apply, how do I even contact a company in another state?” I asked. Her reply, “I’ll look into it, it may not be so difficult.”

When I was packing my dark gray -nearly black- suitcase, and I had already included my wingtips and my dark blue -nearly black- suit, I’m surprised she didn’t suggest adding my furniture. Perhaps my bed. A woman of remarkable endurance and restraint, her anger was always concealed under many layers of humor and perhaps a good measure of Catholic guilt. Even without my bed, when I finished packing, I could barely lift my block of cement called a suitcase. This was my first trip away from home alone, and I didn’t want to forget anything. Years later I would learn to err on the weightless side. My trip to Jamaica with Diane, I had to repeatedly wear the same faded green t-shirt that I assumed encouraged the locals in their tireless pursuit to sell me drugs. Now that suitcases have wheels, I pack, stomp and close.

My parents drove me to the bus station in town, where I would travel to Chicago to board the Great Northern. Built in the thirties, famous for its Art Deco facade, it seemed a sterile portal to faraway cities. Sterile until I walked inside where abruptly, voices and footfall in equal measure, were reflected off the hard blue and white walls. Accompanying those sounds was the fragrance of daily life. Long before odors arrived with warning labels, the smells this building harbored were paintings of their own. Exhaust from idling buses, cigarette smoke that permeated the walls, urine that lurked just behind the men’s room door, and of course, only a breath away –the slightly sweet smell of stale beer.

I should also mention that I was afraid of this place. Not palpable fear, not even identifiable fear, but the kind of fear that, as a boy, you learn to bury, because there seems to be no other way to cope. Not just behind that door with the urine smell, but fidgeting in line about to buy my ticket, or sitting on the bench waiting for my bus to be announced, this was my first exposure to men looking for boys. I learned early, not to make eye contact, to ignore advances, to just, “go about my business.”

“Buses are always late.” He was tall and thin, dressed a bit better than most people, smelling of too much cologne.
“I don’t mind, I’m not in a hurry.” Thinking maybe I shouldn’t have said that. It’s important to always be constrained by time, places to go. Unavailable.
The conversations always started that way, then they meander for a while and then.
“I live in Toledo, I own a shop. It’s called Little Pleasures.”
The door opens, I can close my eyes and think this guy is just like any other guy I talk to, or follow the hackles on my neck and move away.

But I never really understood what was happening or why. That would have required thought, and there are many areas, confusing, gray ones, where , for a boy learning about the world, the doors were best left shut. The house we moved into in my sophomore year, for instance, was available only because the couple who built it were slammed into by a drunk driver. Orphaned, their grade school age daughters, Janie and Suzi, lived next door with their grandparents. The lake behind our house, was created and named in memory of their father. At sixteen and already living in an elaborate fantasy world carefully constructed around the present, the concept of dead parents never entered.

The Junior High School I attended in Cincinnati, had already taught me to protect myself. To see, but not always to look. Even though I lived in suburbia, it was not a neighborhood without violence. I remember my friend from grade school, Mark Bowles and another buddy making the mistake of peering through the girl’s locker room window. Maybe that wasn’t the mistake, surely being caught was. Angel’s boyfriend and his friends, needing to make some kind of statement, left Mark’s blood in the school hallway. We were drawn to his blood, and rumor spread daily where to look. Friends of Mark’s we surely wanted it to stop but we just kept going to school. It didn’t until his mother threatened to call the police.

I guess that was the first association, sex with violence. At thirteen, my hormones overwhelmed me, and though I was warned repeatedly, I couldn’t stop staring at classmates developing bodies passing me in the long corridors. Into that same hallway, at odd times, one could reliably stumble onto a bloody sanitary napkin, only to be removed, eventually, by a teacher. There were also frequent fights outside of the school grounds, near the tennis courts, where some slight or another would be settled. And there was the dog. More precisely, the puppy.

I had been to this bus station three months earlier, after Steven Labaw, my coconspirator, dropped me off so I could escape to Nashville. Again, I’m not sure what my mother thought when we showed up at noon on a school day. I was running away to Nashville Tennessee but I first had to pick up my savings, all seventy dollars. I guess I decided to do this in Mrs. Buechler’s Latin class, why else would I have left home that morning without my money? I assume my choice of cities was just as impulsive, after all, I had money to go farther. Steven was my closest friend in high school, he was about my size, had an awful stutter that made speech class a hazing, a younger sister, a friendly but violent father and a mother who was going to die of cancer. His teeth were badly decayed, and he would frequently cover his mouth when he laughed, and when he stuttered, he would take a breath, whistle, start again and pretend it had happened for the first time.

When Steven talked of his family it was usually about his father, a heavy set man with thinning hair and a need to shave twice a day. I remember Ray’s self-effacing smile, Steven would recall the times of retribution and while we didn’t dwell on those episodes, I never forgot them. Because he had a car, we ate many lunches not in the school cafeteria, but in town at Muhlbauer, a restaurant that boasted home-style cooking. Meals were buffet style and vegetables were boiled, steak pan fried, and both would beg for salt and pepper. Dessert might be a slice of chocolate cream pie. This was not gourmet food, it was just food. Think of the sun setting without a display of colors. Job done and done well enough.

Returning one day to school in Steven’s Chevy, a fast car that begged to be drag raced, we paired with a similar car at a stoplight. Engines revved, the light changed and we squealed right past an idling police car. Steven knowing the wrath of his father, thought he could lose the cop, but after a few two wheeled corners, he gave up. We shared a lot in those days, even the same girl, but I sure didn’t want to share any of this. In the bright sunlight, despite Steven’s most apologetic tone, the cop with sunglasses wrote the ticket for his next beating.

Our friend Eileen was slim, had long, brown hair that couldn’t be washed often enough to keep it from looking oily, controlling parents, whom I never met, and an older, half sister. We rode the school bus together, and her stop was the one after mine so we always sat together. If we weren’t talking about the girl we always passed, posing in her window, holding her breath so her breasts would stick out, I was expounding on some book I had just read.

“Do you know chimney sweeps got cancer of the scrotum?”
“Huh,” she replied
This was for a paper I was writing on carcenogenic hydrocarbons, a title I liked, a subject I little understood. “Sure, in the eighteen hundreds, in England, they used small boys to clean chimneys. They would actually crawl into the sooty chimney and years later would get cancer of their scrotums.” I had to ask a teacher what a scrotum was.
”Means we shouldn’t eat burnt toast.’
“Oh” she smiled, “I thought you were talking about birds.”
I diverged a bit , to Inuits who seldom get cancer.
“They overheat their igloos, then they can walk out almost naked, pee and walk back inside.” The idea astounded me, many mornings I remember my sister shivering, waiting for the school bus. If only we had been living in a hot igloo. I don’t know why this embarrassed her, maybe because I was using my loud voice, the same one my mother would have to suddenly acquire consumption to drown out as she waited for me to finish my Saturday confession.
“I hit my sister and I stole a dollar and twenty-five cents from my mother’s ... .” Cough, cough, cough. “ pocketbook and five comic books from...” determined unconsciously to confess to more than just Father O’Connor.
Eileen also shushed me when I asked about her underwear.

Playful on the bus, she was nevertheless governed by a rigid schedule her father imposed, one from which she never varied. She would tell me when she had to go home and that was that. Someone else might have played with the margins, but for her that was unthinkable, and she conveyed it so well, not just by words but through her dark brown eyes. I never pushed her, surely I wanted to.

Before classes we would sit in the school cafeteria awaiting the first bell and one memorable morning as I was reaching for my papers, she trapped my hand against the table with her left breast. I flushed but didn’t move, not even when I felt her probing bare foot. This was the beginning of many sexual encounters, most not much more surreptitious. Many of our explorations were on the bus ride home, other times in the school hallway; only horny teenagers could think their activities would go unnoticed in so public a place. I was not at all offended when Steven described even more intimate adventures with Eileen. After all, she was engaged to a boy neither one of us knew.

Once she bicycled to the far side of the field behind my house, and waited for me to appear. We held hands as we searched for a soft place to lie down. After tamping the grass with out feet, we lay touching, just an elbow props view from my kitchen window. She laughed later at the sounds I made, like the uninhibited cooing of a baby. That sweet moment unfolded in a spontaneous way, and ended abruptly - it was time for her to go home. The next week we carefully planned to be together in that field, and I eagerly waited at the edge of our pond, gigging frogs, blanket at my feet. Unknown to me, she was riding past, a prisoner in her father’s car.

Eileen married shortly after graduation, divorced then married again but continued, with the consent of her husband Tim, to have many partners. The last time I saw her, we met in the restaurant of the Hotel Vendome. We talked about our families, the years gone by, the future and her slim chances of survival from her recent bout with lung cancer. She said fifteen percent. As we were leaving she suggested we see if the hotel rooms were those with mints on the pillows.

Two years later I got a tearful late night call.
“Is this Michael Miller?”
“It is” I answered.
“My name is Tim, I found your name in my mom’s address book. Eileen Osha...ah, you knew her as Kuhn.”
I took a deep breath, I knew what was coming next, I knew before he told
me his mom’s name. I didn’t want to hear anymore, I didn’t know how to untangle my feelings: what I felt for his mother, what I was feeling for him, her son. We had never talked before, never met, I was talking to a stranger, sort of.
“My mom died two nights ago,” he began to cry, softly, like he wasn’t supposed to, as a man. As a son sure, but not as a man.
“I’m sorry. Losing your mother..that has to be hard.” I wanted to give him room, to let him know it was okay to call a stranger and cry. But I kept thinking about how many other men he might have called. Did he know about his mom’s arrangement with his father? Did he approve? Of course not. I was afraid he thought I was just another one of her lovers. He needed support and I gave it to him as best I could, a young man I had never met, looking for help to mourn the loss of his mother. I wanted to tell him about the Eileen I knew; I wanted to tell him I had never slept with her.

Before we left the Vendome, Eileen told me that Steven,Mr Ever Helpful in my escape from home, was already dead. Sadly he was a victim of his own kindness, in return for stopping to help what he thought was a stranded motorist, he was given a bullet in the brain. If you knew Steven, you’d understand the man who named his daughter, Amber.

Steven was thirty-five and Eileen forty-five when they died. As a teenager living in this small town on the Ohio River the significance of death was sitting somewhere upstream on a barge. My concerns weren’t about mortality, they were much more immediate: how to get along with my parents, what was I going to do now that high school was over, and what seat to choose on this bus.

Chapter II

My favorite bus seat, usually taken, is directly behind the front door where my view of the road is unobstructed. This was the seat I would always grab, years later, on my late night trips home from Indiana University. Without my window seat, buses, unlike trains that invite you to look out, were always about what was inside. Squeezed by crying babies, that smell of beer, cigarette smoke and sweat, the air was never fresh, and never cool enough, just as the faces of my traveling companions, were never far enough from mine. I rarely, if ever, slept. I seldom even entertained the thought. When I did, sleep came in short bleary bursts, interrupted by sporadic small town stops, with visits to luncheonettes for what could only be described as awful food.

This bus trip was only four hundred miles but it wore on like an abscessed tooth. Finally, I arrived at the Chicago train station but long before the Great Northern was scheduled to depart, and I was just beginning to feel that bobbing sensation. I wasn’t quite over my head but I felt like I was being pulled into deep water. It was not my original plan, but I stopped when I passed the indent where a wall of mirrors reflected the black and white of barber’s chairs.

Growing up, my father cut my hair and I was always comforted by the touch of his large hands, and the intimacy of our conversations. He was a renaissance man, a lifetime employee of one company, a mathematical whiz, who could fix, shape, create, just about anything. He built the unheated garage next to his family ‘s house, the same one he and one of his three sisters slept in. His desire to avoid incompetence fueled his mastery of the world. No matter what needed to be done: appliance repair, car maintenance, house painting, tree pruning, concrete pouring for our new driveway, he could do it. Mr fix-it created a safe world that enabled me to think I could and would do the same. Those hands always smelled of Edgeworth pipe tobacco, often of gasoline, oil, and burnt motor coils. He never wore a wedding ring - there were many traditions like birthdays, that weren’t recognized as important - and his long fingers were thick like a boxers, as he was in college.

On my own now, I sat down in one of the six empty chairs looking for those hands.
This was just the beginning of the hippie long hair days and most barbers, left to their own entrenched beliefs, and in spite of my direction, reflexively cut hair even shorter than was appropriate for the time. My head was no exception and I could only stare at my reflection as brown clumps fell from my lap to the floor. Like a fresh recruit I felt even further stripped of my identity. I don’t remember what we talked about. This would happen once more in college, at another vulnerable time, but never again.

The train ride took me further away, and I kept fighting my awkward feelings of loneliness. The one friend I managed to meet on the train. soon met a girl his age and often when I walked back to visit, he was locked in a smoochy embrace. My antipathy towards my parents was receding faster than our approach to the town embraced by the Blue Mountains.

With the freedom to roam, I moved about that train, from the bubble cars, to the dining car, and back to my empty seat. I looked out at the passing cities, farmlands, and mountain ranges, not yet thinking this was a mistake. My father told me about a tiny town in Oregon that he too worked in for a summer and I was determined to see as much as I could from the train window. Moments before we passed through, I fell asleep, but it was dark anyway. When I arrived in Dayton, with my gray suitcase and its bulging latches, I was feeling lost and lonely. Lugging this damn suitcase made me feel like a little boy pulling an overloaded wagon. From the train station, I walked through town past the court house that, like the train depot, overshadowed the nondescript stores that lined main street. Beyond all the stores and up a slight rise I approached the entrance to the Green Giant Corporation. This was going to be my second home away from home for the next five weeks.

Two years before, I spent the summer with my uncle Willoughby O’Connell in Nevada Missouri, working on his new auto parts store. I lugged cinderblocks for the foundation and assembled metal shelving units for auto parts, and when I wasn’t working I was exploring in his new open bed, banana yellow, Chevrolet pickup truck. If I wasn’t driving out on the highway to buy firecrackers, I was testing my nerve by driving as fast as I could. Why he had such a truck with such an engine, I don’t remember. Why he let me drive it, the summer before I got my driver’s license, I can only speculate. Maybe for the same reason he took me skeet shooting, served me nothing but premium cuts of beef, and sent me to the barber’s to have my acne treated. A lost art no doubt but a skillful blend of hot towels, some kind of sulfur concoction and a liberal amount of squeezing at least made me think I looked better.

I didn’t live in his house, but that of my grandparents, maybe a mile away.My grandmother, a devout Christian Scientist, was battling some form of dementia for which she was periodically hospitalized, until finally the return home was removed. Her husband, my grandfather Leroy, was at that time staying at her side. I had the house to myself and remember most vividly the oily taste of softened water with more than a hint of sulfur, worse even than the well water at home. Think of a tablespoon of crushed rock for every glass. I was also fond of my naps. Southern Missouri heat was a thing to behold, and I loved it. I felt swaddled, even nourished by it. I took naps during the day drifting off on the couch, fan blowing the hot air in my face. I would wake in a peaceful haze, peaceful, until my Aunt Mary-Jane rooted me out, to participate in some kind of social activity. I was shy, and wanted to be alone with my job and my uncle.

She was a social being, and tried to fill my every available moment. I was young, I was shy, and I wanted to be left alone to do my work, which I enjoyed, I loved to sweat, the taste of salt water dripping from my forehead, and eat rare roast beef with cold Tabs. On my way back from his hunting cabin, Willoughby turned to me and said, “You know, as you get older, you will find yourself doing many things you don’t want to do. As an adult, you’ll have no choice, it’s just the way it is. But you know what? While you’re here with me, that won’t happen.” Swaddled not just by the heat but by my uncle’s words.

Uncle Bill and Mary Jane belonged to the local country club and I arrived one day without my swimming trunks. Bill, about three times my size, let me use a pair of his. Slowed me down a bit. We raced once, except he had a foolproof plan. He asked me show him how fast I could swim, lap after lap. Then, quickly, he slid into the water and asked if I would like to race. Even breathless, and with his yellow swimming trunks billowing like the space shuttle’s re entry chute, I almost won. However, it was years later that I’d realize how he had manipulated that race. Of all the people I wish I could have back for a night or two, he would be first. He died long before I realized how much I loved him.

One night, during a pot luck dinner in the center of town for a politician my uncle was supporting, I drove that yellow truck along a meandering road, far from this madding crowd. I might have been searching for a secluded place to set off some of the M-80’s I bought with my not so hard earned money. I turned around, slid off the road and got stuck with the rear end of the truck nearly off the ground. A farmer, passing by, stopped but couldn’t pull me out. Instead he took me back to town where, with tears in my eyes (after all, I should have been attending this rally) I told Willoughby what I had done. He simply smiled, motioned to a friend, and away the friend and I went to retrieve the truck. This was paradise.

Chapter lll

The canning factory was not. First built as the Blue Mountain Cannery, then used in 1945 to house German POW’s and finally bought by the Green Giant Corporation to harvest and produce peas and later asparagus. The layout was very simple, a military style complex of white buildings, two parallel rows, front doors facing, that gave shelter to metal framed bunk beds. At the end of one row stood the building that housed the showers and bathrooms. The toilets lined one wall and I was embarrassed to see no walls separating them. Just stark white porcelain bowls, one after the other. The showers were similar, open stall affairs with multiple shower heads. I was accustomed to the shower stalls, but the toilets meant a certain shedding of inhibitions. For me, that was the most graphic example of how I would have to adapt, but then this was a labor camp. I remember once, spilling my bottle of tetracycline that I used to treat my acne, onto the bathroom floor, and to my amazement, a man with strikingly sad eyes helped me pick them up. He didn’t speak English, or he wasn’t interested in talking because when I thanked him, he just looked at me, with a smile independent of those eyes.

Offset from these barracks and nearby was the operations office, where the supervisors would hear our complaints but mostly issue orders. Of course my mother did say it was a migrant labor camp and even today it is referred to as a labor camp, but as a fuzzy cheeked teenager, that had little meaning as I dreamed of my trip west.

Standing at the top of the asphalt tarmac that swept down to the employment office and beyond to those white, narrow single story houses, I took a deep breath and headed to work. When I was directed towards my building and walked past groups of workers, I was now in the ocean struggling to find that sandbar on which to stand. They were all older than me, unshaven, dressed in clothes that may have never been washed, and talking in the now familiar cadence of the not so recently sober. As I walked by a brief fight ensued, and I was sure my wide-eyed reaction displayed for all to see, just how vulnerable I felt.

I kept walking to the last building in the short row. There I chose an empty bed, at the far end , and dropped my suitcase. Brand new and with a pungent vinyl smell that will always bring me back to this job, I laid it flat and unzipped it to look inside. This was a funny suitcase without latches, only a zipper that ran the perimeter of the flat, front face. What I had packed hadn’t moved . On top, folded carefully was my suit. Jacket and pants and a narrow dress belt with a bright brass buckle. Underneath, two pairs of shoes, and equally well folded, what seemed to be just about everything I owned. Why hadn’t I just strapped my dresser to my back? There must have been underpants for every day of the summer, and a near equal number of T-shirts. No sweaters, one or two long sleeves shirts- this was summer and where I was coming from, the heat was merciless. Stuffed against the side were paperback books, mostly by J.D. Salinger. Aerosol deodorant, razor. shaving cream in a large can, and a shoe horn. Taking stock of all these valuables, I hurried back to town to buy a chain and lock. When I walked into the hardware store and explained what I needed, the owner after staring for a moment at my head, asked, “Are you working at the cannery?” When I returned, I tucked my suitcase away as safely as I wished I could tuck myself.

The arrangement of these barracks grouped the white middle class boys together while the migrant laborers were housed in the other seven buildings. The daily schedule was just as foreign as my surroundings. The loudspeakers would wake us at 3:45 AM, we would dress, stumble to the mess hall, fill our plates with breakfast that always included beans ( I laughed when my mother told me there would be beans for every meal) , and at the same time, collect makings for lunch. Lunch never varied. Into our dull, black lunch boxes we would place our white bread, lunch meat sandwiches, more beans if we wanted them and our thermos bottles full of Koolaid. After breakfast we would then wait around until we were alerted to the days events. Either the weather invited the harvest and our work, or we were told that once again, there was no work. If we worked, we would all pile into the back of open trucks, the same ones that carried the peas vines, ride over dry dusty roads with out t-shirts pulled over our face and off to the harvest fields before the first glimmer of daybreak.
Even with ripe peas I wouldn’t have been able to work when I first arrived, I was still just a few days from my eighteenth birthday. The closest draft office was in Walla Walla so I had to wait, then hitch hike to register for the draft . I had never hitch hiked before and I was surprised at how quickly I got to the draft office and then back.

That delay was insignificant as the spring had been dry and the peas were not ready to be harvested. We got up for two consecutive weeks, each day, filling our lunch boxes with those bologna sandwiches only to be told there was no work. I knew we had a room and board charge, so instead of having fun hanging out at the local swimming pool, reading Poul Anderson paperbacks stolen from the drugstore, I counted how far in debt I was getting. I never asked a supervisor about this debt, and what would happen if someone just got fed up and left. Would they have to pay that money back? Probably not. At the time, when I wasn’t worrying, I was writing plaintive letters home on the backs of pea can labels. These letters were unintentionally designed to scream, “See what you did to me? How could you have sent me off to this horrible place.” Each letter would begin with a tale of woe, maybe a drunken fight, an inconsequential trip to the hospital when I was backed into by a tractor, how long the works days were, all spilled from the mind of very homesick boy. I even felt guilty after mailing them, but I shouldn’t have. All I ever heard in return was what a good writer I was. Three years later when I hitch hiked twice around the country, I was told to send stories of my wanderings to the New York Times as James Kunen had when writing The Strawberry Statement. Kunen’s writing has been described as “extremely funny and very serious.” I wonder if the funny part was what my parents were referring to. I had no idea how life would change once those pods ripened.

My mother knew what the inside of those barracks looked like, she knew what a migrant labor camp was, just as my father did. The both knew much, but in worldly matters, my mother seemed to know everything. That was always a matter of contention, if she knew everything she was never truly amazed at my discoveries, but I mention this to illustrate that constant tension that existed between us. I’m not sure how much either one of us listened to the other. I was trying so hard to assert my identity that I seldom followed her advice. She could say, that roller coaster will make you vomit on your friend and those unlucky enough to be behind you, but I would have to find out for myself. “Hey mom , guess what happened at the fair today?” She could have told me that drunken rages frequently end in knife fights, but I would have had to see for myself. And I did. I still don’t know how she acquired this library of knowledge, but I was thankful that not once did she say, I told you so.