Names of Luck

The 1950s were dominated by a then young Cold War and a consumerist fugue borne by the nihilism of the nuclear arms race.  We were poor as mice, but that did not prevent us from living the American Consumer Dream vicariously.  My mother allowed me to keep field mice as pets and it never occurred to me either that it was an eccentric calling or that it was ironic when we were chronically hungry for months on end to be giving food to mice that we could ourselves be eating.  We lived on a potato farm six miles from a military installation and 60 miles from Manhattan and so we were sure to be within the blast of any Russian attack.  Our house was on a 40 acre lot where we could see the landlord’s house on a slight rise too far away to be easily noticed by them; they were Polish which was in some adult logic supposed to mean they were not as good as normal white people; but they owned such large acreage that it disappeared over the treeless horizon and they were our landlords, and that refuted some measure of disparaging logic in a child’s mind. 

The land­lord’s homestead was semi private behind leafy shade trees and flowering rhododendron shrubs 12 feet high, reaching up above the window sills.  And that helps explain why – in plain view of the sole traffic artery connecting Montauk with Manhattan -- we could with relative impunity steal the landlord’s potatoes out of the dry, dusty berms a quarter mile long, the color of milk chocolate pudding.  Our house was a few meters from the sandy shoulder of County Highway 25 which until the notorious Long Island Expressway was the fastest route for potato trucks, refrigerated trucks from duck farms, the fish houses and wharfs on the Forks, and day trippers from NYC.  On the other side of 25 was a stand of trees about a mile deep, and in the middle of that grove was a sink where the water table came up to the surface; it was penetrated by a jumble of pipes carrying irrigation out to various pump houses on the lots.  One day I ventured alone out to the little squared-off pond and was morbidly en­tranced by the vision of thousands of dead frogs, bloated and floating on the black water and scattered all around the perimeter like confetti lying on their backs, feet sticking out away from the bloated bodies.  It was the pesticides and fertilizer, I learned later without ever having told anyone that I trespassed on a sacred battle ground and had had a revelatory vision of death.

I was exposed to modern art and the French language before beginning first grade because my best and only friend was a daughter of one of Peggy Guggenheim’s protégés, a man among the first wave of American Modern Art.  Her father was a contemporary of Jackson Pollack, Lee Kraznick and Willem De Kooning down the road a bit, when we still lived in East Hampton; these now famed painters plus scores of others were all a bit mad, all discovering a school of art that not much of anybody liked.  America had not yet acquired the French appetite for abstraction and non-representation.  A taxi driver who out of affection often drove an inebriated Jackson Pollack home from the roadhouse in the woods would take the random small sketches and paintings offered up in exchange for the fare he couldn’t pay; and they ended up in the trash with such judgments as, “my children could make a better picture.”  A limousine driver would get a familiar call once or twice a year from Willem de Kooning’s valet in the small hours of night saying, “Pat, it’s time again for a trip to Connecticut”; to a de-tox clinic. 

My friend’s mother had married her father who was in the Service during the war and was in France at the end of it and brought home a war bride.  When I came to their house, filled with art and objets, early mornings for eggs and buttered toasted with strawberry jam, my friend and her younger sister, and their mother would talk briskly, mellifluously, mostly in English for my sake, and sometimes slipping away into northern French dialect.   When we dared risk it, my friend and I sneaked around the 300 year old barn with two stories capped by an amazingly towering hay loft with another great barn door and hay-boom three stories above the ground – we sneaked peeks at the enormous canvasses of her father or if lucky watch him undetected throwing paint at framed canvas the size of walls.

My mother’s family had been out in the Hamptons and on the closely huddled islands of three states, for about 300 years (though “the Hamptons” is a word they seldom ever used we preferred to use East End or South Fork to name the place, which was a playground for international elites and a word from the fabled and/or suspect metropolis, implying class distinctions); we were on Shelter Island, where my mother was born; Greenport, where my grand­mother and I were born; and on Block Island where there are a number of grave markers framed by neat green summer lawns and a vertiginous backdrop so steep and deep blue it can make you gasp and take a step back, and you think you have faltered and had to catch your balance.  On this little table-top island of bluffs, lagoons, ponds, and a text book example of a sturdy, enclosed, deep water port, there are about ten generations of my family names.

Whaling had come to a halt more or less 1915, about 35 years before I was born, but I remember hearing about the cruelty and carnage of whaling, the intelligence, kindness and heroism of whales, dolphins and porpoises.  Whenever I saw scrimshaw depictions of whales in ports on Long Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it was not consumerist envy that held my gaze but the melancholy knowledge of what happens to whales in the industry that figures so much in my family culture.  In my childhood, while they were unwinding due to over-depletion and pollution, Cod and Lobster were still commercially viable with other lucrative fisheries in Whitefish, Bass, Bluefish and bayside shellfisheries.  Almost all the men in Sag Harbor, Springs, Three Mile Harbor, Amagansett and Montauk fished, some with surf-riding dories and beach-anchored haul sein nets that can hold a ton of enraged, fighting fish dragged back to shore by teams of men pulling from the beach in an existen­tial tug of war; some fished with rakes in flat bottomed wooden scallop boats or with shovels on the beach chasing cryptic signs of clams moving two feet under the wet sand at the moving tideline, and many fished far out on the dark stormy seas where Norwegian dragons lived underneath the watery veil.  Most women were adept at cleaning and dressing the meat for market:  fishwives.  Both women and men made fishnets by hand strung across back yards on racks competing for space with nets that need to be spread out between catches so they dry and avoid mold and rot; and both compete for space with inboard motorboats on trailers, long-keel boats on sawhorses, and others upside down resting on cinder blocks…and with laundry strung in between.

In my first and second grade, each winter saw the loss of classmates’ fathers, brothers and uncles in storms at sea.  My own grandfather was washed over the rails of a 200’ trawler in a storm.  A quick acting mate secured him with a long-handled gaffing hook that cleaved the flesh and hooked his cervical tendons and muscles – before the chest high waders filled with water above black water 100 stories deep – the mate pulled him up to the rails on the next rolling swell.  The wave itself lifted him up and, with the guidance of the gaff, put him on the deck again with the skill and strength of a stevedore. 

The gaff left a scar in his shoulder that became a sort of family religious stigmata.  The hard bulbs of tissue became mysterious objects filled with religious symbolism in a secular, atheist, immigrant, hard drinking, hard playing Irish-German-Swedish family.  I knew he was a tortoise jigger around Shelter Island Sound who gutted ancient, defense­less, and mute sea turtles the size of the dining room table for soup, and on account of this distressing act of cruelty, I had to keep a child’s wary, cynical eye on him because clearly there was a hidden dark side behind his warm, winsome ever present smile. 

On occasion he took me on weekend mornings to the golf courses where we prowled the woods on the perimeters hunting for stray lost golf balls to resell to an old fisherman in Sag Harbor who cleaned and sorted them to sell back to the pro shops.  I asked why we don’t sell direct to the pro shops and he said, “we leave that t’others,” meaning someone else had that niche market already and he would not usurp it.  Grandfather was a renowned house painter and could handle tricky wallpapers made of antique lace or carved leather that few others within 100 miles would attempt; he would be called in occasionally to attend pavilion catered tables at the ancient, Elizabethan Maidstone Club an exclusive aristocratic mansion with a famed golf course that did not admit Jews or Africans.  It was situated on Georgica Pond, which was really a swan-bedecked black water lagoon full of tortoises, nestled in an enclosure of dunes; it was a brackish mix of sweet water from springs that only traded tides after high storms raised 20 foot waves temporarily breaking the narrow strip of sand between the pond and the sea.  He always brought home exotic foods from extravagant functions and told stories of decadent hoi palloi, e.g., a film star in a scintillating two-piece bathing suit in a chaise lounge at the pool ate one bite of food and then put out her cigarette in the center of a medallion of filet mignon.  He could negotiate collegial informal deals with the owners of the ‘cottages’ (a colloquial term for the summer mansions and estates on the ocean bluffs of Lily Pond Lane) the likes of William and Elizabeth Ford (Grandson and CEO,) Juan Trippe (Pan Am) and Charles Revson (Revlon) on the strength of a handshake.  He’d been to school two years as a child before going into the workforce, and was reserved about developing relationships, casual or business, with the profes­sional class of lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, realtors, gallery owners, etc., and other than weddings or funerals, had no use for a necktie or stepped inside a church.  With workers, merchants, farmers, larrikins, people of color, immigrants, scoff-laws, and agnostic skeptics he was effusive, jovial, gregarious and enter­taining.  There was a lot of drinking all around the several circles of friends – weekend poker house parties, bingo carpools filled to the brim with choralers of then current pop music hits, fishermen and fishwives, select neighbors that survived the gossip gristmill -- but my grandmother did not permit him to drink more than once a year and both my grandmother and mother throughout their lives were not quite, but almost tee-totalers.

On other mornings, during the growing seasons on the farms, we went to the boats at Montauk and bought one or two 100 pound wooden crates of fish and put them in the trunk of the family car.  Then it was a 45 minute drive to the migrant labor camps at the potato and duck farms in Southhampton, Quoque, Aquebogue, Cutchogue, Riverhead and Mattatuck.  The Laborers were almost entirely African Americans from southern states with a patois I thought was not English, and a smattering of Caribbeans from the Spanish-speaking Greater Antilles.  My grandfather weighed fish from a scale hung from the propped up open trunk of the car, usually Porgies and Whitefish, cheap fish at 10¢ a pound, and wrap­ped by two’s or three’s in newspaper or carried home in a dishpan big enough to hold a dozen or more fish weighing two, three pounds each.  My job was to go ahead of the slow moving Ford Fairlane and sing a song, “Fish man, Fish man, run and get your fishpan.”  That had been my mother’s job when she was my age (7-12 years old.)  Big buxom women squeezed my cheeks, absolutely swooned over my blue eyes, hugged me between mounds of flesh while the men teased me and nodded approvingly to my grandfather, Joe Gilfoyle; we called him Gilly.

I was proud of my grandfather, even at a young age understanding the meaning of wealth in a town like East Hampton, where the aristocratic old families played and took their leisure, where masters dressed down in some sort of version of Casual Fridays, apparently deriving pleasure from looking like an em­ploy­ee, and drove modest station wagons by day, and by night were patrons and hosts to their entour­ages of bon vivants, artists and writers, designers and models, politicians, diplomats, world leaders and society mavens from the newspapers and magazines of world capital cities, plus an army of homosexual beauticians, party planners and interior designers.  In her later years my mother was a pantry maid for the Fords, collecting an annual salary for the six weeks of the year they were present and she attended to them, and she extolled the virtues of authentic old family money:  They are unpretentious.   They really care about individuals.

I was proud my grandfather was a Democrat, a worker, proud that my grandmother didn't dither in the frivolous folly of theism (despite the fact that, ironically, I did), and proud that she, and my mother as well, were assertive, so-called mascu­line women, with independent ideas that they did not shrink from defending.  But as much as I took strong personal identity from them, there was a fly in the oint­ment.  In the migrant labor camps, my grand­father was a celebrated longtime friend of the workers, and a charmer with the ladies who said on more than a few occasions, “Oh, but he looks just like JFK”. 

But when we were away in the company of white people, his attitude was different.  It changed from folksy solidarity to parochial condescension, and while driving to the town dump, for exam­ple, through the segregated settlement on the town periphery, miles from town, he might utter, “See that boy,” pointing with his chin to a man my father’s age walking on the sandy shoulder of the road, “he’s a good one.”  And that should have been enough, but it wasn’t.  “That’s one you could trust with your wallet left unattended to.”  Or, “he’s a hard worker,” implying with inflection an exception to the rule.  Or, “you can tell he really listened to the teacher in school by the way he talks to you, ready to firmly shake your hand and look you in the eye.”  It was a non-sequitur as well as a didactic, stentorian voice adults use to complement children and pets.  And after a pause, he uttered wistfully, “but not too much like he’s bigger or better than you.  It’s always something with colored people, either too much or too little.”  And I would think to myself, silently, “you cannot make a simple statement without qualification one way or another.”  I don’t know what actual words I used to compile that thought, but I realized as a child that white people behave differently in the pres­ence of Black people, and the existence of that differ­ence was uncomfortable.  It would take a few more years to see that at least one reason for segregation was a comforting, soothing distance from conscience. 

This memory of his casual comment causing such a distressing stirring in me was weeks, months, seasons and years, brewing to understanding.  I wanted to say, “but, that’s not a boy.”  I held my tongue because I was already a reticent child; people often said I was a great listener.  It was really because I’d seen domestic violence and drunken fishermen careening into oblivion and threatening to pull down the house around them.  My grandfather was not like that, but now he’d gone and said some­thing com­pletely incongruous and dissonant.  We were both very aware that my father was not white and yet this grown up man with shocking red hair could casually tell his grandson something not with animus or anger, but something that was essentially unkind to the man walking on the road, unkind to my father and to me, and so the confusion started with my understanding of my grandfather as authentic­ally kind, and yet, demonstrably, unkind, only gradually figuring out what segregation means in a part of the country that went to war for slavery, freed slaves and is supposedly free and living happily ever after. 

It took a lot for a little kid to figure this out, but I had a lot of help from my father.  In Riverhead, New York, my father had a few favored places to drink after work and they were all segregated Black juke joints and road­houses.  One of his favored watering holes was the Blue Bird which I saw as recently as 12 years ago, in 2007, and so it may still be standing 60 years later; it was in a woody gap between River­head and Flanders on County Road 25, sandwiched between a milk bottling plant and a thin ribbon of trees partially shielding it from view with its antique animated neon sign of a bluebird spreading its wings and taking flight.  One, two three.  Flap, flap, flap.  One, two three, rising a little higher with each blink of the blue neon.  My father was a bully and a scrappy bar room brawler; he prided himself on taking on cops and went to the county jail in Riverhead for six months when I was eight for knocking out a cop re­sponding to a bar room fight; after my father’s death, one of his brothers bragged to me about how the two of them once ambushed and beat up two cops just for sport.  But after an afternoon at the Blue Bird, buying drinks for each other, gambling, bragging and sharing long yarns, when he was at home in his cups, he would speak of his bar room buddies in vulgar, mocking, sarcastic racist terms.  This was a rhythmic repetition of my grandfather’s racial duality.  Where the one was belligerent and physical, the other was condescending and liberal.

When I was ten, our family of six moved hastily from the idylls to the raw, post-industrial and racially tumultuous City of Boston in the last weeks of 1960.   My father spent $50 on a two-door Studebaker coupe – which was a week’s pay for him.  Six people, two dogs and everything we brought with us fit into that little car.  It made the 225 mile trip to and died on arrival.  It was a rocky landing at my grand­moth­er’s; she decided after two weeks that her house was already overflowing with grandchildren whose dysfunc­tional parents were absent or incapable; she raised six grandchildren when their parents were unwilling or unable to, and two who were born out of wedlock.  One boy she raised was the ille­gi­timate child of her best friend who was forced to put the boy up for adoption, and this brings the count of children who grew up in my grandmother’s house up to 17.  The only silver lining was my cousin, Harry, half Chinese, quarter Algonquian and quarter English.  Of the many cousins, he was closest to me in age; when we visited my grandparents, we had to share a bed and found a hundred ways of break­ing rules, staying up quite late and carefree after the old folks had crossed the river of deep sleep, each snoring loudly from their respective bedrooms.  We watched TV under tents of blankets to buffer the blue light of the black and white console, making fun of late night movies, especially our favorites the hilariously dubbed 1950s Japanese monster genre, noting inconsistency and inauthenticity, and making fun of authority, e.g., the ‘Father’ smiles when his daughter walks on screen and asks him a question.  He pulls his glasses off, gazes into the distance, taps the stems of the spectacles at his chin and says, “Let me see.”  It could have been a commercial because I seem to remember seeing it multiple times and each time, we would roll on the floor laughing with our whole bodies.  One of us would say, “Let me see.”  The other would say, “Oh wait!  Take your glasses off first.”  Laughter.  “So you can see.”  More laughter.   

We were wry and dry as gin for a couple of third, fourth and fifth graders; cautious and cryptic.  After that I stopped visiting my grandpar­ents, or rather my mother did which forced the issue for the rest of us.  The last I heard, my cousin finished high school and went to a high school prom at the function hall of a white ethnic social club.  Because there was a public front bar, one of our uncles was there with his date and commented my cousin’s date was possibly underage.  My cousin took offense and commented that our uncle’s date was quite definitely not even half his age.  They had a fistfight on the dancefloor, which cleared a circle of appreciation and encouragement:  it was no match with one lithe, agile ado­lescent boy and a puffy old man who had been a professional heavy weight boxer 30 years earlier.

My cousin’s  father’s identity was unknown, and his mother, after leaving him with our grandmother, married a Seventh Day Adventist deacon and moved from Boston to Anchorage, in a bid to buy some respect­ability.  Her husband demanded she disavow my cousin and not speak, visit or write to him, and in this at least, she was never untrue to him.  She was tall and stately, imperiously dismissive – and well-heeled in contrast to the likes of us; she made my blood boil.  I met her twice when she visited Boston from Alaska with her husband and four sons; true to form, during the brief visits before their daily re­treat to their hotel, my cousin was banished to other parts of the house or outdoors altogether and that was a rhythmic repetition of history because my grandmother, an Algonquian acquired by a white family in her infancy, was the domestic menial of the household and while she cooked meals, she did not sit with the family while they ate.  I have no recollection how long my aunt’s visits lasted but do remember sitting with my cousin in the detached garage, each of us pouting profoundly in silence.  And each day of her first visit, Cousin Harry and I pouted defiantly until we saw them go away to the hotel, releasing us to run like hell as far away as a sprint can get a 45 pound seven year old, laughing suddenly.

My father had five brothers and two sisters who survived childhood, all half Algonquian M’q Maq.  Four of them immigrated with my grandparents to Boston from Nova Scotia and the rest including my father, were born in Boston, in the small enclave of Alston, a white, working class post industrial sector.  This place my grandparents called Freedom.  My father’s nickname in the Army during the Korean War was Cherokee and he bore a resemblance to Elvis Presley who is famously mestizo.  Dad looked Indian with stout body morphology, a rugged unblem­ished complexion that no season could harm and lustrous, thick straight black hair that stuck out in his peren­nial ‘crew cut.’  He mostly got his looks from his mother – who looked to me Asian like a Mongol, Siberian or Kazakh – as I got much of my looks from him.  My mother met her mother-in-law four months after her wedding.  She didn't confer first, but in her bold, smiling, winsome way asked her new mother-in-law, “What kind of an Indian are you?”  Years of research have been incon­clusive, but definitely have not ruled out a theory I have held since adoles­cence, much of it from an uncle who drove truck between Florida and Newfoundland – he met people in Halifax who knew my grandmother when she was a child living in a white home until she married my grandfather: 

My grand­mother was a Stolen Child from the Canadian First Nation when Indians were randomly and in various ways taken for adoption, placed in boarding schools and put to work with the grand over-arch­ing justification of assimilation and salvation.  A variation of Manifest Destiny.  She grew up in a bour­geois home of Baptist Scottish settlers as their domestic.  She has no official birthplace or date of birth.  In various civic documents (Canadian and US census, marriage, immigration, etc.) she has two dates of birth, 1899 and 1902.  She has no birth certificate, instead a Registration of Birth that was filed by her parents of record when she was already five years old.  My grandmother and uncles and aunts insist they are English and Scottish, with a vengeance.  They are without exception outspoken, aggres­sive white supremists. 

My grandmother tongue lashed my mother and said, “Can ye not hear my voice Lass?  I’m Scottish.  I’m from New Scotland.”  She was beside herself in a pique of anger and took my father aside into the next room and chided him as well, “Now ye’ve gone and married a woman who thinks she’s better than you.”  From that time forward, my father stopped allowing anyone to call him Cherokee. 

After the two weeks of living at my grandmother’s house, we lived for a month in the spacious two story home of an uncle, where two other uncles also lived, with my uncle’s wife who had three grown children from a previous marriage.  It was tight.  My uncle’s wife stole $300 from my mother’s purse at a time when $20 would buy a week’s groceries for a family of six.  In a femme fatale melodramatic moment she stood halfway up the staircase leading from the foyer and said, “Yes, I took it.  What are you going to do about it?” The Amer­ican Craftsman two story home was at the end of a dead end street at the edge of a small rail yard of a long warehouse; in other directions one would have found the sumpy, estuarial clay beds under a couple feet of swamp hidden behind a maze of reeds where we built a flotilla of rafts from salvaged lumber – pulled from the river – and in another direction the hulking, derelict brick railway locomotive round­house, aban­doned since the end of the age of steam engines; it was big as a cathedral or a hangar for commercial jumbo aircraft, and was full of adventure!  

After the arrival of spring, my parents drove us to a north shore beach town and while we ate fried clams, onion rings and milk shakes (extremely rare delectables!!), they told us they had reached the end of their ropes and had started talking with social workers about letting us go to foster homes.  The beach road­house was meant to be our Last Supper.  I was the only one old enough to understand and respond.  I remember with clarity, it’s when I stopped sleeping at night.

As it turns out, my father got a mafia loan so we could get an apartment and furnish it, my mother started working days to supplement my father’s erratic on again, off again contributions to the house­hold finances.  She worked in the clean, white-collar office of a shoe factory (but she had no patience for frivolous women), and then on a conveyor belt wearing a hair net in a candy factory (but was repulsed by routinely pulling dead mice off the belt), then waitressing at a lunch counter and then finally she found her niche waitressing nights because tips from the dinner and theater crowd were better.  My father drove taxi at night, and you can do the math.  Two adults working at night plus three children in the care of an 11 year old equals my insomnia, para­noia, isolation and hypervigilance against the intervention of Child Protection Services. 

When we finally found our first home in Boston, it was a three story tri-plex on a lot at the edge of a swamp, across the street from crumbling abandoned industrial ruins and a quarter mile from the near­est residence.  It was faced by a boarded up and abandoned breakfast and lunch joint that had once served the workers but was now as derelict as the ruins across the street; it was squeezed into the narrow space between the pavement of the sidewalk and the tri-plex, coming to within a few inches of the building so there was not enough room for even a child to squeeze in between.  There was a family of 14 people living in squalor on the ground floor, and the top floor was never occupied.  The whole area was razed to build the interchange and toll booth plazas.

Moving in, we had to replace several window panes of the second story railroad flat, and the hot water heater was a kerosene tank in the kitchen next to the stove which was a gigantic wood burning stove with gas burner conversions.  The stove still had intact a small side wood box and two heavy cast-iron burner plates so that one could still build a little wood fire and use it as a warmer or to cook.  As the eldest child, it fell to me to carry a two and a half gallon jug from the kerosene tank in the damp, earthen floor basement on wooden stairs that sagged and heaved with the weight of each footstep.   Going down through the interior stair case, at the bottom step you could look through the space where a wooden door had tumbled and was hanging akimbo by one of its hinges and through the rubble of the collapsed timber of what was the back porch in the evening twilight, you could see houses through the rushes and reeds of the swamp as their lights came on.  There were large Norwegian river rats and I imagined them watching me, biding their time.  The apartment smelled of kerosene carbon ash.  There were copper pipes overhead that branched down to the kitchen sink or through holes crudely punched in the wall to the bathroom.

As we gradually grew from my mother’s daytime jobs into a completely nighttime working routine with no adults present from late afternoon until early hours of morning, there were daytime weekend diver­sions to keep two, and later three, of the children away from the house in the daytime to let the parents sleep, such as several municipal swimming pools accessible by public transportation, plus the public spaces at Church (whatever you say, don’t say anything,) Paul Revere’s House, the USS Constitution, the Bunker Hill Monument, the Arboretum and the meandering linear paths of the Fens, several Museums, Faneuil Hall and the working port waterfront; there were always plenty of things to do outside the house which did not come too close to familiarity with curious, meddling neighbors.   As years rolled by, slowly as they do for children, I could do these daytime activities with all three siblings without raising too much curiosity.  We were adept at tolerating old women’s doting adoration without encouraging it.

After a year of public school in a homogenous Irish-German enclave in Boston, I crammed and caught up with the Boston curricula, which was a grade ahead of the square, four room public school in Riverhead.  In Bos­ton Public, there were grinding constant reminders from certain Irish protestant and Irish cath­o­lic chil­dren – children of people who had gone to ele­mentary school with my father and knew his moth­er – that my grandma is a holy-rolling squaw that speaks in charismatic Baptist tongues.  She looked the part – brown and round, short of stature with jet-black, long lustrous braids rolled up high on her head – but rather than hysteri­cal, she was more of the fiery rhetorical Glasgow Calvinist who would have been a deacon, chaplain or pastor if not a woman, or an Indian.  She pounded the bible, read annotations, expounded and declaimed and put growling and resentful grownups on their knees while she led interminable, excruciating prayer.

In addition to driving taxi, my father was a high functioning alcoholic, with a stable of readily corruptible lawyers and doctors to manage the lawsuits that followed his frequent auto accidents; his mantra was “I never take a drink before 10 pm, but he routinely worked and drove for another four or five hours past 10.  He was no effete cocktail drinker.  His pints, in flat glass bottles, slid smoothly into the back pocket of his pants and were normally found in the glove compartment.  He kept weapons under the driver’s seat.  He was a gambler who defied risk and in­termittently was in trouble with bad looking men in suits who came to the series of apartments we lived in to look for him or his brothers (sometimes my mother and I knew they were Mafia, sometimes we knew they were Detectives, and sometimes we weren’t sure which.)  On one such occasion, while one mafioso reached out smiling to pat me on the head (I instinc­tively took a step backward) while the other, with a smile, threatened my mother.  They were annoyed with the lack of information, and the threat was, “Keep an eye on your children when they go out to play.  It would be tragic if one of them were run over in a hit and run accident.”  She quipped back, “I grew up tracking deer and shooting duck and geese.  If I can shoot a moving target at 100 yards, I sure as Hell can hit a target with a 12 gauge shotgun as big and fat as you at the distance you and I are right now.”  They nodded, and smiled sardonically to each other before turning and walking away without saying goodbye.  It was a charade, like ceremonial shots fired over the bows.  But it was also potentially deadly if you faltered or tripped or showed fear or confusion.  Like the Three Stooges, but with guns and knives; there was a sub-genre of street fighting that was in the vernacular revolving around knives and razors: 

I remember once my mother coming in the apartment from a bus ride up the Avenue and remarking to her she looked pale and pensive.  She had witnessed a hate crime:  a car with teen age boys and men slowed as it passed the bus kiosk and a youth leaned out the window and whipped a leather belt across the face of a man standing at the curb.  The end of the belt had a single edge razor affixed to it and it laid open a clean but deep gash across the man’s face.  My mother asked him, “Somebody just drives by and randomly picks you out of the crowd for no reason and with no provocation?” and she held him up while they walked slowly to a bench nearby.  “No,” he said, “They pick me because I’m a Jew.”  He spit out the word making it sound like “Chew” with wet sibilance.  My mother said for days, “The poor man, probably come from Poland or Russia…all that way to end up in this cesspit.  Dignity, respect, civility…without them we are nothing, we might as well be naked animals eating each other for dinner.”

Ironically, given his lack of education and an impulsive ‘wet brain,’ Dad was also a numbers runner, some­times carrying money for the organi­zation, sometimes relay­ing financial information (without commit­ting anything to writing) and some­times fencing stolen goods, doing strong arm persuasion at political rallies, ‘contract’ enforcement work, greeting and meeting visiting dignitaries at public places such as at the dog or horse races, card rooms, the bar & grille circuits, titty bars and social clubs, and so on.  The thing all of this had in common was cash. 

There was always a cascade of dollars – emptying the pockets of my mother’s aprons each night, sprayed across the kitchen table, at say midnight or one or two am, would culminate in towers of stacked coins and the paper money from her tips.  She and I would prioritize the needs of the household and reconcile it to the stacks of coins and dollar bills.  If I was asleep in the morning (I began cat napping a couple hours at a time through the night and then face difficulty waking when it’s time,) my mother would leave money and a note for shopping or an errand.  If I left the house even for a few moments, I had to prepare the kids and take them with me.  They could neither be left alone, nor could we engage with neighbors who could lead Child Protective Services to the door a-knocking.

I was a bookworm and self-contained, not prone to impulse or attention disorder.  A series of less than effective ear surgeries caused me to be a student of lip reading for two years and that gave me a life-long habit of gazing upon the face I’m speaking to or listening to, and that, most people agree, is a sign of confidence, respect and authenticity.   In school, I was a natural student, introspective, idealistic, curious and self-motivating.  Federal mandated school desegregation of the Boston School District was turning up the heat and the pressure was breaking down the norms of civil society. 

Kids in school and on school busses were attacking each other with seriously grown-up weapons, parents were attacking each other at school, and the Klan, South Boston Irish Mafia and North End Italian Mafia were boldly coming out of seclusion and cruising for trouble.  The Boston Police Depart­ment was a gang of racists resisting desegregation, fiercely opposed to civil rights.  Tender, young men of the National Guard were called in to quell tensions.  The upshot was depriving schools of sober teachers, school supplies, quality and range of services, timeliness and political stability. 

I was already a regular church goer when my parents decided to send me to a private religious school, that is to say I was a church goer and I always took my brother and one – and eventually both – sisters with me.  Neither of my parents went with me to church, with one singular exception:  one parent braved the disap­proval she expected to receive from the church people and went to the church when I was baptized in a pool under the pulpit.  She raced away as soon as possible pulling me by the hand to the bus stop and muttering angrily, “I’m hanging for a cigarette.”    My zealous grandfather had recently told me my mum was going to hell for her sins, to which I replied, “Me too.  Wherever she goes, I am too.”  It was the beginning of doubt at age 12 in the reasonableness of god.  I saw my mother who had been a choral soloist in the East Hampton Methodist Church as trapped by ‘adulthood’ and I yearned for her to be happy.  She was as winsome and gay as she was melancholy and defeated in fits and turns.

Going to a pri­vate school was one more gift, of many, to reward my complicit acquies­cence in making it possible for both parents to work night shifts; if neighbors complained, if the kids wandered out of the house unattended, if the dogs or the semi-annual litters of pups were noisy or left wandering in the neighborhood, or anything like it, unwanted attention is possible.  Among other gifts, I had a significant coin collection with a steady bountiful supply of coins, a genuine, bona fide an­tique secretary desk, a professional typewriter, skis and all the gear and attire, and always pocket money for busses, trolleys and subway, for buying daily lunches at delis, and museums, and used book­stores during the hours between end of school and when I had to be home at the hour my mother left for work.  Actually a little earlier than that because I often bought her an extra 30 minutes by ironing her outfit with spray starch in a can.  They were monstrous contraptions with detachable collars and cuffs, cufflinks, big wide bow tie that was five feet long and eight inches wide, white apron with lace edging, a linen tiara and pleats in the skirt.  We would talk about school, friends and life while she did her hair and put on makeup, smoking at the pace of about 60 cigarettes in a day.  She was never far away from an ashtray.

I was occasionally mistaken by (usually male) college students for one of their own.  Between the hybrid sounds of an East End Long Island accent (Kent and Dorset), a Boston accent (East Anglia) and my Nova Scotia grandparents’ vestigial brogue (Scotland) and subtle mutations from childhood hearing loss, I often found myself seated on a bus, trolley or train next to a grown up twenty something who wanted to know collegially which country I’m from, what school I’m at, what my major is, and so on. 

My father’s family thought it a wondrous thing – given my mother’s resistance to the melancholy visionary religion obsessed with martyrdom – and a miracle of God – given the sudden appearance of a pair of teach­ers from out of nowhere who wanted to start a school in the quaint neighborhood at the edge of the Fenway – that I started going to the Seventh Day Adventist day school in a single room with two white missionary teachers, a husband and wife from Wisconsin.  When my father’s family learned I was the only white kid in the school, it caught them off guard – they had not antici­pated that.  In ages ranging from early childhood to eighth grade, there were five Filipinos, three African Americans, two Black immigrants one each from Grenada and Cape Verdes, and an Armenian from Turkey whose family had fled Soviet Armenia before he was born in Istanbul – he had immigrated the year we met when we were both ten.  And there was me with gold and copper flecked brown hair and blue eyes.  The Black kids lived in the Black towns, Roxbury, Dor­chester and Mattapan, the Filipinos in Central Square, Cambridge and the Armenian lived in a town house on the block behind the church which housed the schoolroom.  Sometimes I went to Central Square and hung out in the kitchen with the mother of my classmates.  Sometimes I went to the Black towns and met the families, but mostly I stayed an hour or so at Sadiq’s apartment and listened to his violin practice:  Chopin, Bach and Brahms.  He was really good at English, and could speak easily about abstractions, nuance and emotions; his father was an architect and mother an art teacher in Istanbul and in Boston, his older brother a pianist.  Their English was professional, but it wasn’t their mother tongue or the language they spoke at home, and so Sadiq and I spent most of our time together silently, comfortable with speaking to each other but not glibly or inanely, pared down to the bookish lives of two children. 

It was at this period that I came to realize that the Seventh Day Adventists, as pious as they come, were also complicit in racism because one day in Roxbury I was wandering aimlessly exploring (always search­ing for used book stores) like a visitor to another country (few whites in Boston ventured into the Black Towns; it was a tribal taboo) and I saw the Black church like a vision where the proverbial clouds part and enlight­en­ment glistens.  I knew the name of the church but hadn’t known where it was or that it was segregated.  It hit hard and I remember seeing myself in memory and in remembrances of memor­ies, standing and seeing it through tears welling up threatening to spill over.  With all the visits to friends in the ghetto, and knowing my Black friends did not come to our church in the quaint Fens, I had not been curious enough to recognize that even our church is segregated.  I just had not thought about it and I felt shame for being slow to realize.

One of my uncles owned a colossal apartment building of some 120 units, which had once been stately, but now after white-flight, it was derelict and serially mismanaged, currently by my uncle whose only aim was to pull money out of it while neglecting to put any back.  I was there with him one day helping clean a vacated apartment and my father and brother and sisters were present.  The youngest was too young to do work but my father and uncle celebrated her as an apprentice and nicknamed her, “Painty.”  The two men kept up a bantering rift about Blacks and the way they live.  One of these com­ments has stayed in my memory, burned in by the mortifying embarrassment of being associated with them.  “If you go down to the truck, Painty, and get me a spackle knife, I’ll give you my switchblade knife because in this neighbor­hood you don’t play without a weapon to protect yourself.”  My sister was beaming and glow­ing with the attention she was receiving.  My father and uncle were self-satisfied and high on vitriol. 

About this time, my mother who raised collies for show, stud and sale, had given this uncle a rare black collie.  The dog was the result of selective breeding, and had white feet, a white collar and a white star on its forehead:  an absolute perfecta of color and markings, with a long pedigree of American Kennel Club champions – literally a document about 30 inches long.  My uncle put the juvenile dog in the basement of that dreary institutional building, locked in for about six weeks for the purpose of keeping thieves from ripping out exposed copper pipes in the basement for junk yard resale.  Collies are herding dogs with excitable temperaments.  In nature with big spaces to run off their exuberance they are in their element – they are fiercely protective and will stay with the battle to the mortal end; and they are gentle in the home and can be trusted in any situation with small children.  But confinement can sour their nature.  With only quarterpane windows at ground level, the dog went crazy because Black children taunted the incarcerated white man’s dog, making daily games of stirring up the dog to race in a circle around the basement and end the run with a flying leap up to the window for a fleeting glimpse of each other, eye to eye.  My mother was livid, took the dog back and it came to live again in our apartment, but it was a psychologically changed animal. 

I took him out one day at twilight for a walk on a leash along the traffic artery near a bridge out of Cambridge where Alston bleeds into the swampy backwater of the Charles River estuary.  A black man came briskly walking down the sidewalk (in Alston where blacks, while not forbidden, are rarely seen) and the dog flew into a furious frenzy.  I was unable to keep hold of its leash.  I had to beat the dog hard with a thick tree limb before getting the leash securely into my hands again.  The bitten man, with tears streaming across his grave, enduring and stoic visage, walked backward while I did the same tugging on the leash like changing the course of a ship on the end of a perilously thin line.  I was shocked by the sur­reality of it, while the dark man seemed to be adept and familiar with the déjà vu quality of the assault.  In that moment I hated my father, uncle, the dog and myself.  My mother had the dog put to sleep that same day and I was relieved because I knew she was reluctant to destroy such a rare miracle of breeding and patience.  Before it was weaned and ready to release to my uncle, she had become attached to that dog affectionately and had named it.  Toby.

In her liberal views she decried racism, but in this moment, all her animated anger was about losing a rare dog, not simply because it was more valuable than sable and blue collies, but because she had worked for several years with pedigrees and kennel owners in dog clubs and stud services and this was her first litter of black pups.  It was her achievement -- and it was a litter of only two puppies, where 6-10 was the norm.  She defied the odds by breeding marketable dogs in low rent apartments, and was confounded by my uncle, a slum lord apart­ment own­er.  She was attached because this was a spirited puppy with a winsome personality; I was disappointed, again.  To think that even she, who was my best friend and confident – my best supporter and the one who encouraged me to be eccentric and to be bold in imagination – because she did not think very much about the harm done to a man or about the existential nightmare of race and terror.  She was incapable of talking about race except in the mildest, most optimistic terms.  But she once revealed her inner thoughts when she said, “I support the civil rights of Blacks, but if they try to get the best of me, I will have my revenge.”  She presumed a static force that was a common opinion of whites and implied Blacks are usurpers and opportun­istic parasites, angry victims who have been wronged and seek revenge.  It was a non-sequitur.  Not real.  And I did not challenge her because I still needed her for survival and I feared toppling the house of cards that we lived in.  I knew I was giving her a pass and it felt like disloyalty to my friends.  I had to internalize and suppress that toxic awareness.

Before long she had forgiven and forgotten about the incident and proclaimed from time to time her affection for the uncle.  But it happened five years later that we came to be living in one of the houses of that uncle, in a white section of the city.  In the fall my uncle had a dispute with the gas utility that he could not reconcile and so one evening he and my father used crowbars to pull the gas meter out of the basement and threw it in the Charles River (to hide the evidence of tampering.)  For all of that winter, we lived in a six room apartment with six people in our family plus my mother’s sister, her husband and infant and two dogs, with one heat source from the stove which was jerry-rigged and attached to the gas meter of the apartment on the first floor.  We lived with blankets nailed to the doorframes through­out the apartment to still the air flow and each evening pulled mattresses onto the kitchen floor, where one by one, the children and the waitresses, the cabby and the parking lot attendant of various shifts came in to crawl into a transient space and fall into temporary, light slumber.  We didn't see anything of that uncle all that winter long.

The next year the missionary teachers left the school and the church could not find replacements.   I started commuting in fifth grade to a Seventh Day Adventist school in the suburbs, about an hour each way on a com­muter coach beyond the city’s public transportation.  Sadiq came with me to that school for two years but then his family moved to another suburb where he went to the local public school.  I was very unhappy in this school affiliated with the Stoneham Seventh Day Adventist Sanitarium three miles away, a teaching hospital for doctors and nurses.  All the 80+ students with two exceptions were bourgeois children of doctors and nurses, teachers, clerics and mission­aries from places like Shanghai, Rhodesia, Switzerland, and they were all white, except Sadiq; the other exception was a working class Polish boy (you could tell class by what people wear,) Ondrej, who lived with his grandmother and, I noted with approval, he did not socialize easily and did not chat and confide, like me.  He came to my de­fense one day when I was being bullied.  I told him afterward how much I appre­ci­ated his help.  He was willing to be friends in struggle and in solidarity but not in idle chatter.  He was a morose, handsome giant who shunned the indignity of popularity.  I presumed he had secrets like I did.

It seemed natural for me to guess something similar to my family’s disconnection, disunity and dysfunction about Ondrej, and right or wrong, at the time, this idea further endeared him in my affection.  Outside of Glenn and Sadiq I didn't establish any ties during four years at that school. 

When it was time to go to high school, the Seventh Day Adventist academy on the hospital campus at the Sani­tarium was too expensive and after a distressing experience at the principal’s office at a Boston public school, attempt­ing to enroll, my mother hit on the extreme, bizarre idea to enroll me at a Catholic high school.  It was on a campus with a cathedral, a convent and the Monseigneur’s residence on three acres behind a medieval Gothic wall; the ritual robes, veils and wimples and almost S&M code of con­duct was as mysterious and foreboding as the martial and uniform behavior of the Cuban boys who were from rich families who had fled the revo­lution during the previous six years.  Their posture was always erect, their hair uniformly trim and tight, eyes forward, and silent unless spoken to.  The Irish girls, in contrast, were sassy and rebellious, out­spoken and provocative.  By this time I was agnostic, but not even close yet to atheist.  I admired my German grandmoth­er’s atheism, but I was not convinced she was right, just certain that she had intellectual courage and didn't fear disaffection and isolation from the community.  Whereas the Seventh Day Adventist’s are puritanical and demure, Catholics are wizards and magicians. 

The Papal Church in Boston was a gatekeeper for homebuyers, small business owners, Housing and Urban Development conspiracies of bankers and realtors, police and local government – it demonstrably did not approve the Civil Rights movement.  The Church had a voice that reached right into peoples’ homes and marri­age -- and choice of marriage partner, too!  In the press, it was suspiciously impugned to be engaged in Mafia activity, and of course we in our family would have known more about that, unoffici­ally.  With its bloody sleeves rolled up, the Church was cheek and jowl deep inside the notoriously cor­rupt taxi medallion market, construction trades and unions, competing on par with the Italian and Irish mafias.  The Papal Church is the arche­typal Beast of the Latter Days (according to Seventh Day Advent­ists).  They are imperial, militarized and even the children are weaponized as evidenced by the ubiqui­tous Drum and Bugle Corps and the rumored armories in the basements of churches.  The Book of Revelations tells us that in the latter days, we will all suffer the fate of an Orwellian future:  authoritarian surveillance and, for those noncon­formists who do not succumb to the Papal Estate, this will lead to expulsion and extermination.  The Seventh Day Adventist’s of the 1960s, in New England in any event, were a cult of martyrs with feverish dreams of tor­ture, imprisonment and ritual public execution of the meek Soldiers of Christ.  Other­worldly rewards are to be heaped upon martyrs who give their lives in service of the lord, such as to set them apart and make them readily known in heaven from lesser humans who were merely ‘good enough’ to get into heaven and to further elevate them above the stations of diverse multitudes of type, genus and purpose of angels of heaven.  This was magic of a different order from the Papists.

I was there with the nuns for a year and, again, did not make lasting or even temporary friends, except in a limited way with one of the nuns, a young woman called Sister Glenn Anthony, who took a special sympathetic interest in my atrocious algebra.

I finished the last three years of high school in the suburbs.  My mother was a steady earner and a steady climber allowing us to live a little bit better with each passing year.   This particular sub­urban public high school at that time promoted itself as one of the top ten in the country.  High school was bizarre:  I made a spectacle of myself for two months until I was allowed to take an elective in lieu of Phys. Ed. (and all that disturbing hypermasculine nudity.)  In the 1960s, high schools didn't have elec­tives, but they found a way to get one for me.  I did something similar until I was able to take a study hall in the library instead of chemistry where the teacher was sadistic and didn’t entertain ques­tions willing­ly.  After a couple months at the library, the chemistry teacher pushed to have me ex­pelled because I was MIA – but that backfired on him because for the first week he had asked for notes from the librarian to prove where I was, and she not only asked for notes from him in return but made the extra effort to keep and retrieve them.  So he painted himself into a corner and was exposed as a liar. 

Several humanities teach­ers came forward to speak on my behalf – I finished three years of ROTC during MLK’s resistance to the war in Vietnam and his call for draft evaders.  I was marching in uniform in the town square, with rifles, every Monday afternoon during the Tet Offensive and the Battle for Hue.  As Nixon expanded the war to bomb Cambodia, and while other kids brought their parents’ Deutsche Gramophone and Angel Records LP’s, I used my assigned ‘teaching day’ in Music Ap­preciation to play Buffy St. Marie’s Little Wheel Spin and Spin and her Native American anthem My Country ‘tis of Thee.   I used the school’s mimeograph machine to make copies of the Mohawk mani­festo asserting sovereignty, land rights and Broken Treaty in an armed standoff then happening in upstate NY. 

But I was lost.  I wanted to go to the Navy to go to college, but already beginning to hang out with hippies 15 miles away in Boston (a world apart from suburbia) and to adopt anti-authoritarian atti­tudes that would have made me incompatible with military life.  Instead I finished high school, went back to East Hampton for a year living with Gilly and Evangeline, my grandparents, and then I drove back to Boston in an imported, vintage little red convertible from Britain and came out, sexually, culturally and politically. 

I spent the next six years living in communes in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Oregon and Seattle and up and down the coast with hippies, artists, homosexuals, drag queens, sex workers, Ph.D.’s, teachers, civil rights activists, political organizers, designers, anti-war activists, feminists and wiccans, pagans and naturalists.  In context, it was a much better choice than college.  In 1976, six years after graduating from high school, I went to college for the first time and began working in the SF financial district, but for seven years from 19 until 26, I found hundreds of eccentric, bohemian, rebellious ac­tivists who had consistent, sensible views of race, gender and sex, class, empire and war.  They adopted me, I embraced them, and we acted upon society and made change.  When I found them, there had never been anything like them before in my life – theatrical and political, spiritual and artistic, brave and stentorian, kind and selfless, awfully dramatic and unbearably light – which is to say that some things are so beautiful it hurts.  I hardly knew jargon and vernacular of organized resistance, literary criti­cism or political analysis, but that was secondary.  I was already radicalized by formative childhood years.

Polo Costello, Salt Lake City, UT, 1 March 2019