A Long Strange Road

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

Buddha

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein

Chapter 1

Growing Up

The toddler crawls through his parents’ bedroom between the brass foot of their bed and the chest of drawers against the wall. He pulls open a drawer. He finds a pair of his mother’s panties. He wipes the panties on his face and feels warm comfort. He cries because he is home alone. He crawls forward toward the open window facing out on the overhanging black tar roof. He lifts himself up to the windowsill. He stares out and sees the treetops of Tompkins Square Park in Brooklyn. On the black tar roof is the skeleton of a skate caught by his father at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn where his father often fishes until sunrise. When his father gets home, his mother angrily complains about his staying out all night. She continues her yelling with insults. Once, his father almost throws his mother out the kitchen window to a three-story drop.

The toddler climbs over the windowsill and drops down on his hands and knees to the warm black tar surface. He reaches the edge of the roof facing the street. He sees a horse tied to a wooden wagon with a high wooden fence keeping the half-empty bed of rags from flying off the wagon. The wagon driver sits on the wagon’s bench, shakes a cowbell, and yells Rags! The horse drops poops under the carriage.

He stares ahead to see the fence and park benches of Tompkins Square Park. His mother sits on a bench beside another woman. They are having an animated conversation, their hands swinging left, right, and out. He feels relief at seeing his mother. He crawls back into the bedroom and falls asleep on the floor.

He lives on the corner of Tompkins and Greene in the Old Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The residents there are mostly Eastern European. His mother’s parents are Austrian-Jewish immigrants. His father’s parents came to the United States from Sweden. His parents were both born in 1907. His mother is a native of Brooklyn. His father was born in Geneva, Illinois, not that far from Chicago. It is 1948. He is now five-years-old.

Before marriage, his parents lived among the Bohemians in a small Greenwich Village flat. The Bohemians were usually writers and artists who were members of an alternative culture that existed before the Beatniks and the hippies. Before marriage, his mother separated herself from her Orthodox Jewish upbringing. She became his father’s model. His father’s income was his Army disability pension. His father insisted he was a fine artist and did not want to be known as a commercial artist.

His father studied art at the Art Students League in Manhattan on the GI Bill. His father took the subway there every day to his art classes. One day, he takes him along. He tells him to stand outside the glass front door. He glances through the door. He sees a nude woman standing on a pedestal facing art students sitting in front of easels. Seeing the naked woman sends a shivering shudder through his body.

The New York subways cost a nickel. There is no fear of crime. The subway trains are free of violence and graffiti. The station platforms are uncluttered and clean.

They sometimes ride the subway to the Staten Island Ferry which also costs a nickel. To him, the ferryboat is a big ship and the ride is exciting. He watches from the bow as the waves sweep the sides of the ferryboat. He brings his eyes up and is excited seeing the New York skyline. The Statue of Liberty comes into view. Staten Island comes into view straight ahead. The ferryboat has a wide ramp that loads cars and their passengers parked on a wide platform going from the front to the back of the ferry. Wide benches fill the inside cabin where the other passengers sit. The New York scenery is tremendous and amazing to him.

His family lives in a three-story building. The front of their building holds a dry cleaner store. The door to the stairway leading to the two landings is on the dry cleaner’s right. There is no elevator.

On the second-story landing is a Jewish Synagogue. Through the open door on his right, he sees the Rabbi standing behind a podium in front of the open scrolls of the Torah propped on a stand beside him. The Rabbi wears a long blue and white shawl, draping down below his hips, and hanging around his shoulders. The Yarmulke on his head bobs forward and back to the rhythm of prayers leading those sitting on benches in front of him with their heads and shoulders bobbing back and forth and their fingers tracing from right to left the Hebrew words of their prayer books.

Their apartment is on the third and top landing. On the inside is one large living-room space. French doors separate his parent’s bedroom from the living room. Through the glass of the bedroom French doors, he sees the family doctor examining his father’s erect penis. This is a heavy and thrilling sight that captures his attention for just a few seconds before he turns away.

There is no furniture in the living room. There is only a steamer trunk on the floor with a lock on its front hinge. The wooden floor is bare and without rugs or other coverings.

The kitchen is in the back through the living room. It is a narrow space with an icebox and a gas stove on the left, closets on the right, and a sink with two basins facing a bare three-by-five feet window. The window faces an apartment window of the building next door. His mother daily yells, trading insults, mixed with some gossip, through the window to a Polish woman in the apartment across the way.

His mother’s name is Pauline, but he always calls her Mama. Richard is his father's name. He calls him Rich, following Mama’s lead. He does not call him father, daddy, dad, papa, or pop; words kids commonly call their fathers. Rich is five-feet, nine-inches tall. Mama is just under five-feet tall. Rich is tall and straight. Mama is short and round. Rich dresses in a long overcoat with a wide-brimmed hat in the winter. Mama wears a scarf and a hat adorned with a decorative pin. Rich usually has a quiet nature. However, he feels Rich’s presence through the swinging of his belt across his ass whenever Mama tells him he did something bad.

Rich had a favorite saying he used to encourage him to eat his vegetables: They’re good for your gizzard! He tells bedtime stories without needing a book. He tells the story of the Lilliputians, the very small folk who encounter a full-sized human, and the way the Lilliputians reacted to living with the giant. While listening to Rich tell the story, he often sees a glass of green lime soda floating in the dark over his bed, always just out of his reach. He is always thirsty for a glass of green lime soda.

He lives in Brooklyn until 1950 when he, his younger brother Mike, his sister Barbara, and baby Carol move to Miami on a Greyhound bus. Rich thinks Miami will be a better place to be a fine artist.

At each bus station in the former Southern States, he sees restrooms with signs over the doors, labeled either Colored or White, and there is always a Colored and a White water fountain. He thinks these signs are strange and unnecessary.

At each rest stop, he and Mike search under the bottom of every soda machine for lost nickels and always find enough nickels, even dimes and quarters, for buying Cokes and Pepsis.

They find a single-family house for rent in South Miami. On the first night, they are startled seeing a tall flaming white cross on the front lawn. The flames flare out wide and illuminate the white wooden sides of the house. How did they know there are Jews and Yankees living in the house?

They quickly leave South Miami. They move into a three-room section of a single-story building in a poor Miami neighborhood. Coconut palm trees grow in a field nearby, leaving coconuts on the ground. He uses a screwdriver and hammer from Rich’s toolkit for punching holes in the coconuts and drinking the sweet juice. He cracks the coconuts with the hammer and screwdriver and brings home the white meat. There are mango trees growing in the field leaving mangoes on the ground free for the taking.

He plays hopscotch by drawing a grid with chalk on the sidewalk beside the house. At the local grammar school, he plays dodgeball and kickball.

In the summer of 1950, a bowling ball tossed on the downtown Miami sidewalk would hit nothing.

For the next five years, he travels on Greyhound and Trailways buses from city to city, usually moving whenever Mama does not get along with the neighbors. He visits the Alamo and Canal in San Antonio.

He lives in New Orleans for a few months. Mama stands in front of the Jackson Square statue with Rich’s paintings propped against the white steel fence. His New Orleans flat is one room on the second floor overlooking the French Quarter. He and Mike sleep outside on the hard iron balcony in the rain and cold.

He travels north again as far as Providence, Rhode Island. He lives in a walk-up apartment with a front stoop facing the passing cars. He and Mike like to identify the makes of cars. Hurricane Carol comes and provides interesting sights of fallen trees and flooded streets.

He returns to New York and stays in a homeless shelter. The first night there, Mama and Rich have a loud and passionate argument. Rich walks out of the shelter. Mama tells him to chase Rich. He catches up and walks beside Rich. He begs for him to return to the shelter until Rich gives up and comes back.

At some point between childhood and adolescence, he suffers both Chicken Pox and Measles with accompanying red rash, pimples, and fever. He sees hallucinations of goldfish floating in his water glass. The only treatment available for either disease is splashing on Calamine Lotion to stop the itching while he waits for the fever to break, for the red rash to disappear, and for the hallucinations to end. There is no money for doctors.

He gets used to feeling that anywhere he moves is temporary. Between New York and Chicago, he lives in Philadelphia for a while. The interesting thing about Philadelphia is the Sunday visits to Father Divine’s house for a free Sunday dinner. Father Divine is a black man whose followers believe he is their Holy Father. Father Divine is married to a white woman, who is