Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The Red, White and Blue





The Red, White and Blue





Another anniversary went by last week. An important one. Did you notice? Did you remember?


If not, how could you possibly forget?


The television stations were filled with the awful images most of the day Thursday. Some of the channels rebroadcast the actual pictures and accounts in real time, just as if it were happening right then. Minute by minute.


It was blood chilling.


The retrospectives started with short announcements of a possible accident that had occurred in lower Manhattan. The accounts were fragmentary, disjointed, confused. We didn't know what was happening. No one did early on. Then the pictures started coming in and the towers were shown, one of them with a black, smoking collision hole in its side, burning.


Of course it was an accident,” most of us thought. A terrible, awful accident. A jet that had to have been very, very lost, very confused. Of course that was the problem.


Of course.


But the nagging thought that was trying its damnedest to surface in our minds was, “What if it wasn't an accident? What if it was something far worse?” We watched, the images on our television screens burning into our retinas, into our brains. Then, suddenly, like a sucker punch to the gut, we knew it wasn't an accident. When the unbelievable images of the second jet impacting the other tower, a lot of our national innocence was lost. In that split second of impact we all became, collectively, the walking wounded. We sat in front of our televisions and numbly watched the attacks play out. We saw the fireball at the Pentagon and then we heard the stories of the airliner that had smashed into a field in Pennsylvania, the one that was ostensibly targeting the White House or the Capitol building. The one, we later found out, with the heroes on board. We watched the horrifying pictures of the people dying in the towers – the ones leaping to their deaths and the ones burning alive.


We watched a war start.


Then, unbelievably, the towers fell and the monstrous roiling cloud of pulverized stone, steel, paper, wood and flesh came boiling down the canyons of lower Manhattan like a ravenous beast, devouring all that sat in front of it.


The survivors who came stumbling out of that swirling cloud looked like ghosts, their bodies covered with the white ash, their stumbling, wooden gait reminiscent of an army of the undead stumbling out of a black and white zombie movie.


On this anniversary, on this Patriot's Day, I watched our television. Not as much as I did on that terrible day not so long ago, but enough to reignite the memories. Seven years ago I could barely leave the area of the TV, even to eat, even to go to the bathroom. On this day I could carry on with my daily tasks. I could pursue normal activities. But I kept being drawn to the television accounts none the less. I was dragged into the pictures of the smoking towers, of the brave police and firemen rushing to the horror. Drawn like a moth to a flame. And the tears that came on that bleak day in the past were again present in my older eyes. My wife again looked wounded as she stared at the screen.


And I remembered, as most Americans can, where I was on that day:


I was out of work. I had been “downsized” from a job I'd held for over 19 years and had been out of work for about two months. I'd been actively searching for a new job during those 8 weeks of unemployment, traveling here and there, talking to people, visiting employment agencies. On this particular Tuesday morning I was on my way to an interview in Independence, Ohio - an eastern suburb of Cleveland. I was going to register with an new employment agency up there who, I hoped, would help me on my quest to acquire a new job. My wife was traveling along with me on that day to keep me company as she happened to be on vacation that week.


It was just another day.


We were listening to the Howard Stern Show on the radio while traveling up I-77 northbound when he suddenly started talking about an airliner crashing into the World Trade Center. He was carrying on about it and sounded concerned. But this was Howard Stern! I was sure what I was hearing was a “bit”, one of his notorious in-bad-taste jokes. Another example of Howard's twisted sense of humor. But the “bit” went on and on and, as he kept jabbering, I was starting to wonder, “Could this possibly be real?” I flipped the radio to another station and they were talking about the same thing. I tried another station. Same. Another. Same.


I felt a queasiness in the pit of my stomach. Something really weird was going on.


We arrived at the employment agency and I went inside to talk to one of the agents. I had a hard time finding anyone as most of the staff was gathered around a television set in a rear office. From where I was standing in the lobby I could see on the TV screen the burning tower I had just heard about on the radio. Finally one of the counselors came out, greeted me and we proceeded with an abbreviated interview. She got my resume and some quick statistics about me, but we mostly talked about what was happening in New York. Our eyes kept being drawn back to the television in the adjoining office. We finished our conversation quickly and she promised to contact me if any jobs were forthcoming. She returned to the group around the television and I rapidly returned to the car and my wife, who'd been listening to the radio while I was in the building.


The drive home seemed to take forever. Our eyes were on the road but our ears were on the radio, listening intently to one radio station and then another, listening to our lives being changed in many fundamental ways. Not long after leaving the employment office my wife pointed to an eastbound jet liner that was flying over the interstate we were traveling on. It was pretty low and she said to me that she thought she'd just seen the same jet going westbound just minutes before and it had turned around. Later on in the day we realized that what we had seen was United Flight 93 which was on its way to a fiery crash in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It gave us both shudders when we realized we had been, in a small way, naked-eyeball observers of a piece of the national tragedy that was unfolding, that we were that close to the evil that had taken over that sunny day in September.


So on this day in 2008, a day so bright and reminiscent of the day seven years ago, I watched the television retrospectives and revisited some of my own memories. I stepped out my front door and walked to the sidewalk. I looked up and down the street. I counted three American flags flying.


Mine was one of them. Mine flies all the time.


Where were the other flags? This was Patriot's Day, this was the anniversary of our national nightmare. It was nine-eleven, dammit. Where were the flags?


Where was the red, white and blue?


Back in 2001 and not long after the attack, the streets were full of American flags. The nation was a sea of red, white and blue. Rare was the house and rare was the business that didn't proudly display our flag. For a period of time we were all Americans Рno political parties, no divisions, no dissension. All brothers facing the yet-to-be-named common enemy. Hell, even France's "Le Monde newspaper summed up the corresponding international mood of sympathy on that day's headline: "We Are All Americans" (Nous sommes tous Am̩ricains).


But that was then and this was now.


Now there was no smoke of agony staining the crystal blue skies over New York. Now there was no fiery, smoking hole in the side of the Pentagon and the debris and heat-scorched earth of the Pennsylvania field has been returned to normal.


Perhaps I shouldn't be so critical. Maybe it shouldn't bother me that very few people had taken the trouble to display their flags. Maybe I should have just ignored the ache in my belly when I saw the empty street - my street - with no flapping banners of red, white and blue.


But it did hurt. It did bother me.


I just hope it doesn't take another tragedy to draw my brothers together again, to set their faces in the direction of honor and patriotism and solidarity. To reject partisanship and divisiveness and regionalism and every other thing that draws us apart. To not be Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, African-Americans or any other word-hyphen-American.


To just be American.


To just fly the flag.


And to remember, at least for this day, what we all have lost.






Tuesday, September 2, 2008

The Seven Lads



The Seven Lads


It was amazing how tumultuous the years 1963 and 1964 were. In '63 you had a new pope. The big civil rights “March on Washington” occurred and Dr. Martin Luther King started becoming a household name. Our president, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and his killer was subsequently killed on national TV soon afterwards. The Beatles were taking the U.K. by storm. Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique and Kurt Vonnegut wrote “Cat's Cradle”. And to cap off the year, the wonder drug Valium was introduced to an increasingly neurotic world.


'64 wasn't much more restful. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Vietnam War was off and running. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Krushchev, the buffoonish premier was ousted and replaced by a more sinister Alexey Kosygin. China gave the world a shudder as it shot off it's first A-Bomb. Three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Bob Dylan was increasingly popular and the psychedelic music craze was beginning to really heat up with groups like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. The Beatles first appearance in the U.S. occurred on the Ed Sullivan Show, “Dr. Strangelove” appeared on our movie screens and the Surgeon General told us what we already knew – cigarette smoking causes cancer.


I was in high school during those years, learning algebra, learning geometry, learning chemistry and beginning to learn that the world was neither bad nor good, evil nor saintly.


It was mostly just indifferent.


Those years encompassed the end of my sophomore year through the beginning of my senior year. There may not be another period in a person's life where more is going on than that time period. For me and most of my classmates it finished the chapters of our childhood and began the narrative of our adult years. What we would write on those fresh chapters of our lives was a mystery to us at the time, but we'd all hesitantly gathered up our pencils and pens and had tentatively started laying down the first few words.


You going to the dance?” my friend Chuck said to me one mid-week Spring day in the high school hallway between classes.


Of course he was referring to the first of the weekly student dances the high school was putting on in the parking lot behind the high school. They staged those outdoor dances in the latter part of the school year after the weather had started turning nice and before the school year ended. Just a student DJ, a sound system borrowed from the AV department, lots of records, some speakers and a teacher or two to keep an eye on things. They usually ran from around 6 pm to maybe 11 or 12 o'clock on Friday nights, depending on turnout and how many kids stayed late.


I wonder if they have anything like that nowadays in school. Probably not. There's more than likely a Federal law or an EPA regulation or some kind of official nonsense that disallows this kind of activity. What a shame for the kids. If they do have dances they're probably chaperoned by six vetted couples and two armed security guards.


I'm glad I had a chance to grow up during the time when I did.


I reminded my friend who'd asked me if I were going to the dance that I didn't know how to dance. He smiled and said that that could be remedied. I was dubious but decided to see what he had in mind. He was much more advanced in the boy-girl thing than I was.


We met that evening at one of our girl classmates homes where, with lots of pushing and jerking and tugging, I began to learn the rudiments of what passed for dancing in those days. Nothing fancy, just get out there and stomp and wiggle a bit. Sorta. And try not to mash the girl's toes too much. That was fast dancing. Slow dancing was lots more fun and lots more terrifying. It wasn't as hard as learning all the strange fast dances – the monkey, the swim, the twist, the mashed potato, the Watusi and sixteen other weird kind of dances. When you slow danced you just held the girl really, really close and kinda shuffled around the dance floor. I was a very, very late bloomer and the idea of actually holding a girl close and dancing with her was intimidating, unnerving, sweat-inducing and generally terrifying. I found out much later in life that it was generally the same for the girl. I always thought that girls, being the ethereal creatures they were, were good at this stuff automatically. They were born knowing it, being good at it.


What a doofus I was.


Anyhow, the dance came and went and we had fun. Then there were more dances, high-school sponsored, YMCA-sponsored and the occasional radio-station sponsored ones, some in our hometown, some in other venues.


But I didn't want to tell you about dances, at least not directly. What I really wanted to tell you about was a group of guys I hung around with and some crazy stuff we did.


First off, you need to know there were seven of us.


Most of us were from lower middle-class families. One came from a rich family, but he was the exception to the rule. We used to hang around together after school, go to dances pretty much together, hang around at each other's houses and generally just spend time together.


One night the group of us was attending one of the indoor school-sponsored dances in the basketball gym (the weather had turned cold) and I noticed the clothes that one of us was wearing. I didn't know it at the time, but his choice of wardrobe that night was the genesis of the formal “gang” we would shortly become. I wish I could remember which one of us was the style setter, but that fact totally escapes me now. Anyhow, this is how he was dressed: (It may seem odd to someone now, but it was close to the tops in guy fashion of the day.) He had on black pants that were snug on the leg, a white, long-sleeved shirt with blue pinstripes, black boots with horseshoe cleats, a thin black tie with a white pearl tie-tack and a black trench coat.


The look was to die for! We all checked him out and started making plans on how we were going to pay for our new black trench coats. Luckily, most of us had part-time jobs and had some money coming in. In a few weeks we all had been able to purchase our coats, get a pair of black pants narrowed down to an acceptable thinness and to get horse shoe cleats nailed to the heels of our boots.


The next dance we went to was at the YMCA. We arrived at the dance as a group. We were even asked a few times that evening, as we were standing outside of the Y smoking our cigarettes, if we were the band! It was an incredible feeling.


We had an identity!


Now we needed a name. Once again I don't remember the particulars on who actually coined the name “The Lads”, but it seemed to click and we started calling ourselves by that title.


You also have to understand that none of us were particularly “good” boys. We were mostly middle-of-the-road students or a bit below, no jocks, most worked at after-school jobs and liked to raise a little hell from time to time. We weren't the lowest class of kids in the school, the ones heading directly to jail and worse in upcoming years, but we knew the kids in that group and were friends with a lot of them. We might have even emulated their style, their walk or their language occasionally. But we weren't hard-core. One or two of the Lads were on probation for petty crimes, but on the whole, most of us were clean.


Marijuana hadn't arrived quite yet in our town during those years. I guess it was around but it really hadn't gained in popularity with the kids in our high school like it would just a few years down the road. Our drug of choice was beer. The cheaper the better and a few of us were known to down prodigious amounts of the brew when we put our minds to it.


Of course none of us were old enough to drink. And, of course, that didn't stop us in the slightest. There were plenty of carryouts around that were more than willing to sell beer to us. I guess enforcement of the prevailing liquor laws weren't as stringent as they are now, since getting the beer was never a problem. We did have to be careful, though, when buying the stuff, to make sure we got the correct sort. At that time there were two kinds of beer available. The normal, high-power stuff that was around 7% alcohol which you had to be 21 to drink, and the weak, watered down, nasty 3.2% stuff that the 18-year-olds could legally imbibe. We always got the high-powered stuff. Hell, we weren't old enough for either of them so why not?


Some memories of the Lads:


A number of us walking down the hallways of our high school with the horseshoe cleats on our shoes clanking, clicking and echoing in the hallways, scarring up the floors, making the janitors furious. Or walking down a sidewalk at night with them on and seeing the bright sparks fly as the steel in the cleat met the concrete.


Spending the night in one of the guy's big garage/barn behind his folk's house and drinking beer until we couldn't stand up. Literally dozens of bottles apiece.


Stopping in an alley on a crisp fall night and waiting while our oldest-looking member went into a liquor store to buy a case of cheap “Old Dutch” beer – our favorite. It was taking a long time and we were starting to worry, but soon he came back to the car with the case under his arm. The reason why he was late? The man behind the counter was trying to sell him some wine to go with the beer!


A number of us standing in the woods behind one of our fellow-member's house, waiting for him to arrive. He'd promised us some hard cider and we were patiently waiting for it. He finally arrived with the gallon jug. We passed it around, drinking the strangely-flavored cider. When the gallon was gone he informed us that the cider wasn't really hard, so he had added some vinegar to it instead!


Having parties at the rich kid's house when his dad was out of town (his mother was deceased), drinking some beer and his dad's powerful bourbon, smoking cigarettes and goofing around. How our dates would come to the house and we'd all listen to the rock 'n roll records cranked up real loud, dance a bit and maybe make out with the girls if they were willing.


Stopping on a snowy lane out in the country near some railroad tracks one winter night on our way to a radio-station sponsored dance. We opened up the trunk and everyone grabbed a long neck beer and starting drinking it – ourselves and our dates. Then another. And another. We were heading for a dance and wanted to get a little drunk before going. The mission was soon accomplished and we headed off to the dance.


Riding in our rich member's maid's Corvair. (Don't ask.) There were six of us, 3 of the Lads and our 3 dates. The two of us in the rear seat had our dates sitting on our laps. We were heading to a small town about ten miles from where we lived. The route there was a narrow, 2-lane, winding road that had many hills and blind areas. At one spot there was a bridge that was a bit narrow. It was night, we were sober (for the moment), we were heading for the bridge and a semi was heading toward us. The Corvair and the semi passed on the bridge at the same time. When we asked our driver (the rich kid) how he was able to pass the semi on the bridge, as we were sure there wasn't enough room, he answered, “I dunno – I closed my eyes!”


Perhaps the one thing I remember the best was a small thing. I had gone to the boy's room in the high school and had stood at one of the urinals. Written in magic marker on the wall in front of my eyes were the words: THE LADS SUCK.


We had arrived!


Of course we were stupid. That goes without saying. A lot of time being young and being stupid are synonymous. How we all escaped being killed or seriously maimed during our time in the “gang” will continue to be a mystery to me. Maybe we were being saved for something later in life? Maybe those chapters in our books are still to be written.


Of the seven Lads, I'm still great friends with one, on nodding acquaintance with two more, another one's living in Arizona running a convenience store, one went to prison for murder and dropped off the radar of my life, and the other two I don't have a clue about. Most of us spent time in the military, some saw combat and a few learned what the inside of a jail cell looked like.


The Lads were a chapter of my life of which I'm not particularly proud but do recognize as a milestone in my development. I would be horrified to know my son had done half the things I did in those days as I'm sure my parents would have been horrified in my case.


The memories of my friends in the Lads have faded some with the passing of time, but those that are left are some of the sweetest of all.


I guess, when you boil everything down, it's called growing up. You do things – some bad, some good - you grow, you learn. And on the way you become a man.


And that's what makes it all worthwhile.