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Soundings From the Second Tier

July 26, 2004

In the Merry Old Land of Oz

"Ha - ha - ha, Ho - ho - ho - And a couple of tra - la - las That's how we laugh the day away, in the merry old land of Oz!"

Dear Rosalie, There I was on a Sunday afternoon enjoying the sun and moving steadily along in the far left lane of I-65 down to Gary from Merrillville. Relaxed, I was content with listening to the drone of the cars tires gripping the highway wondering how many inches of rubber actually met the road at sixty-five miles per hour. Up ahead and filling the windshield of my immediate vision, a series of huge green highway signs flashed exit information as I ticked past them. Before long I was past the last exit and the highway narrowed to boulevard proportions at the Ind. 12 & 20 traffic light. I had, willy-nilly, decided to forego the 80/90 toll way for a brief run down memory lane, Gary, Indiana. For reasons still unknown, the past two summers have been very mild in comparison to the normal wilting heat and humidity entailed by summer in greater Chicagoland. A good many people I talk to think its a boon and somehow natural in the great cycle of meteorological phenomena. I have my doubts, suspicious that we have in some way disrupted the barometric balance of our atmosphere. Its simply too good to be true - and then again, maybe smog control is working. Speaking of patterns, Nathaniel Ruff is your husband isnt he? How stressful has it been representing George Pabey in his quest to become mayor of East Chicago? While someone of your husbands intellectual caliber is capable of taking on a long-time

P age |2 incumbent, dont be surprised at any outcome against an entrenched political machine such as that of Mayor Bob Pastrick. You know, don't you, that Pabey is a cookie-pusher from Horace Mann, Class of 69? At least it should have been but I think he finally matriculated in 1970. He wasn't known for being the brightest bulb. But maybe blue-collar resentment is precisely whats needed in taking on the likes of Pastrick and his gang. Like the fantasies and dreams of local pugilists boxing each weekend at the Hammond Civic Center, hoping to be noticed, written about, and finally discovered, hes probably leading with that hard stubborn will of his and barely feels the artful combination of jabs and round-house rights to his psyche. Regardless, hes come a long way from his days as a patrol boy conducting students and pedestrians across Garfield Street at the alley cross-walk just behind the east building, a quarter-block south of Fifth Avenue. Not surprisingly, rumors have surfaced that back then he was close with members of a local street gang. I cant recall if he ever was a bona fide gang member, and I can't remember him there when en masse it invaded our neighborhood. Fortunately, reason prevailed. Still, it was ruefully ironic decades later in the late 1990s, to read that prior to Pastrick appointing him East Chicagos Chief of Police, Pabey headed the citys gang unit. Perfectly imperfect, I thought. Capital! But despite the active journalistic access I enjoyed back then, I let the rumor die without a pursuit or mention of it. I figured if the local suits could do it for Jack Crawford, earlier in the decade, to ensure his appointment as Director of the Indiana Lottery, then let him without sin cast the first stone. I wasn't. A lot of things happened back then that on balance with the adult world, didn't amount to a hill of beans. Besides, like others, Pabey had since abandoned the dark side. So I left the sleeping dogs of our developmental trials & tribulations buried in past. Though what tipped the scale and for me cinched it that he remained virtually the same was the sheer alacrity with which he quit the police force to become head of security for Indiana Harbors dockside gaming boat. Newly minted & licensed in July 1998 as the Showboat Mardi Gras Partnership, Pabey was actually given an ownership interest. Not a big

P age |3 one, but large enough that a short time later, he, along with Indiana state representative John Aguilera, were suddenly in line to make a sweet little killing when Harrahs bought it. Harrahs invested some $30 million in the place and after four years of struggle finally surged to the top of the revenue heap last year against all four of NW Indianas dockside gaming houses. Today, Harrah's also owns Hammonds Horseshoe Casino in a transaction that was finalized only two months ago, when the former Vegas pioneer of gambling Jack Binion abruptly opted to cash out. Rumor now has it, though, that Harrahs may have to jettison controlling interest in one of the boats for running afoul of gaming regulations. Stay tuned, because its the East Chicago boat at risk. Since climbing to the top last year, its been unable to stay there, and of late steadily losing money. Meanwhile, anybody the least bit familiar with Pabeys administrative expertise is instantly struck at its shortcomings. Put delicately, Pabey is insufficiently funded as they say in DSM VI parlance. When it comes to managing the competing and conflicting interests constituting the lifeblood of a municipal corporation I, for one, seriously question whether hes able to artfully process the information load, let alone manage a second-class city the size of EC. Leaving aside the issue of adequate skill-sets in parsing acutely distressed budgets, your husband could perhaps caution his client to be more careful about his wishes. Though to be fair (as in you never know), because it is well-established that God loves to invert the prevailing order of things, I concede it is possible the last could very well become first. But I digress. Since tracking news reports detailing the events leading to the closure of Gary Mann, which was due they say, to the Gary school corporations financial problems, my yearning for that one last look at the site seemed to have churned up the desire to run the Ind. 12 & 20 gauntlet from the east to far west-side of town and give the old gal one last look. Though I refer to the vestiges of Manns former glory in the feminine gender, psychologically, indeed perhaps even in spirit, despite being considerably aged, the architectural majesty of Horace Mann remains decidedly masculine. I'm probably biased on

P age |4 this because of the decades of authority it epitomized in the likes of personages such as Coach Don Elser, Coach Cactus Jack Hobbes, or James Cougias before he became a guidance counselor and stopped wearing the black beret and driving the Austin Healey; and later, teachers like David Dickson, economics guru Wild Bill Stern, grumpy old Stephen Vician and Miss Betty Spychalski, our senior class counselor, who was a very, very cool lady. Ms. Betty, it turns out, was quite the party animal in her day (and beyond even her prime) or so I was later informed by some Korean War generation adults I drank with in local pubs. No matter, it was common knowledge that Spychalskis charm, grace and candor helped many, like me, marooned here in the backwaters of Northwest Indiana, institutionally balance the 60s counter-cultural revolution and its impact on us. And probably the very last of this line of old-school stalwarts and disciplinarians was principal George Grigsby, a tough but eminently fair man - to name but a few. One thing was a constant at Mann, even for radically conflicted teenagers: You were always imbued with the way things ought to be done. That was the school's spirit. That anyway is the legacy I associate with my now, nearly eclipsed, memories of high school. This highly pragmatic ethic of fairness was a sense of integrity, something both inspired and hammered into us by likes of Bob Zurcher, the legacy of the Dimitri brothers or guys like Jack Nurse. This ethic was even peer group-enforced during alley fist-fights in back of the Pantry. No kicking, biting, clawing or gouging was permitted, or the fighters second, and others present immediately intervened. Like many who lived in reasonable proximity to the school, I suspect my consciousness of life, self, and the world began with the image of Manns then towering three-story main building. I vividly recall in 1962, at the ripe old age of ten, rocking back and forth on the swings of John H. Vohrs playground late one summer afternoon, when suddenly a horde of varsity football players invaded the semi-grass field separating the two schools. The sheer number kicked up a huge cloud of dust in their wake. Unfortunately, despite attending kindergarten at Mann, I have no experiential memory of the idyllic pond,

P age |5 filled-in a year or so earlier before Vohr opened in 1958, which now constituted the junior varsity football practice field. What I do recall is back then (circa 1962/63) my mother worked part-time cleaning houses and on Fridays she mopped, dusted and saw to the lawn care of Ms. L.C. Christophers home, located at the corner of Sixth Avenue & Roosevelt Street, kittycornered from the Finley house. I was told the chain-smoking Mrs. Christopher was a middle-aged woman, who, at the untimely death of her husband assumed the responsibilities of running Garys LC Christopher Glass Company. During the late summer, once the lawn cutting crew, consisting of my little brother and me had finished the front and back yards, wed walk over to the Dust Bowl to watch the big guys football practice and scrimmages. One late afternoon in early August, my little brother and I were rocking back and forth on Vohr playground swings overlooking an empty practice field when suddenly a horde football players in white practice jerseys invaded. To this day I can still see the flaming redhaired E.J. Fleming, flanked by Dennis McQuillen, Art Ramirez and Ray Wolf at the head of the entourage pouring into the field. On the fight card was a scheduled bout between two underclassmen, Scott Alderson and Dan Aragon, then freshman football players. The two were being escorted into a makeshift circle of upperclassmen. As they discarded their wristwatches, both were afforded one last chance to opt out of fighting. Both refused. Soon they were stalking each other for a minute, like pugilists, in a concentric pattern, before violently attacking. I was riveted by the spectacle; so completely enthralled at the one-on-one aggression that I failed to notice my mother, who had come from Ms. Christophers to collect us for the walk home. Come. This is not for you, she curtly ordered. With each of us gripped firmly in her hands, she sternly led us away. As we walked I strained in cranking my head back to trace the echo of continuing whacks and slaps in an effort to reconstruct the action. A few of the players noted her presence and from the looks they shot us it

P age |6 appeared they half-expected my mother to say something. This wasnt altogether out of character for an adult in those last years of our mass-cultural innocence. At Thirtysomething back then, my mother was certainly robust enough to at least command sufficient respect, and perhaps momentarily stop the fight, should she so choose, and have her criticism heard. I dont think I idealize this prospect, as the dark clouds of nihilism had yet to eclipse the still gleaming norms of American middle-class integrity. Beyond the horizon, though, a new constellation, indeed a new spiritual dispensation was fast approaching, one that would soon expose everyone to an all-too-ready-risk of being derided or contemptuously beaten down and drowned out if attempting to invoke the established order. Anyway...

Traffic was light on Fourth Avenue when I finally hung a left on Roosevelt Street and found myself stopped at the mouth to Fifth Avenue waiting for traffic to clear. On my left stood the former Temple Bethel and I reflexively winced at recalling the Class of 70 had been denied a 'Temple celebration. The indignity of it so infuriated some of us that we promptly decided to throw our own. So a band of 70's seniors consisting of myself, Rudy Southern, Richard Santos, Wayne Alderson, Arthur Jimenez, Dennis Harrington and Tim Keough went to Merrillville and rented the Saxon Lodge, whose president agreed to rent it to us on the condition we produced two adults who would officially agree to chaperon our 'Senior Party. Believe it or not but we managed to enlist Mrs. Barbara Loy and Santoss uncle - and thus were we in business. I dont remember too much of the party. I do retain a vividly odd image of Alex Vagelatos and Marie Del Busto plopping down $5 each for admission. At the time, Arthur shot a raised eye-brow over to me at the door, as I took the cash, and stamped them. We later speculated that they too wanted to let their hair down. I cant recall if you attended, Rosalie. All of us thought the world of you and Im certain you would have been invited and likely as not admitted free. So it went. (I still remember sitting behind you in Mrs. Valentis eight-grade social studies class and bugging you for pencils or a

P age |7 pen just to marvel at your ample breasts. Yes dear, at that time they were a topic of conversation among the fellas.)

I finally got across the Fifth Avenue hump and couldnt help but troll Roosevelt Street down to Sixth Avenue, silently reconnoitering my memory-bank while moving like a submarine prowling an enemy harbor. The houses ticked by in slow-motion. Amid the faded incandescence they once seemed to possess I could still make out the quality of form embedded in their design. I noted the home of Warren Roth, with whom I used to sometimes play with on Fridays after class, while my mother completed her cleaning chores. (FYI - Ill bet you didnt know that our mothers worked together in the Goldblatts deli in the early 60s? I mentioned your maiden name while telling her about your assistance in procuring that library book for me and she immediately remembered you mother. She had beautiful skin. Very attractive woman, she said. Small world.) At Sixth Avenue I turned and paused momentarily in the middle of the street to have a peek at the old Christopher place, and in the corner of my eye I thought I spotted the old Young and Poogach homes just across the street. But don't quote me on that. A minute later past McKinley, I was stopped at Cleveland Street. On my left stood Joe Morriss old abode and immediately in front of me the entrance to the HM teachers parking lot. A queer sense of alienated objectivity came over me as I hit the entrance mouth and ultimately filled a parking spot. I felt like a ghost. On the right were the tennis courts which always reminded me of David Lucky Lakin, a pleasant and sincere chap. Once Dave starting hanging around with us during senior year, Rudy and Arthur enforced an implied understanding to watch Luckys back to ensure no harm came to him if things ever got too crazy. I think Lakin came to us by way of Blake Green, who despite his teenage alcoholism, was as fine a guy as you could meet. Lakin and Blake helped civilized us - or gave us the veneer of being civilized, as Rudy once quipped. Not that we were bad, we were just too damned ignorantly radicalized; instinctively opposed by the times to prevailing norms and

P age |8 authority. By contrast, Lakin & Green were more reasonable and exemplified an inherently different perspective on things, an mode of conformity seemingly more rational and accepting. Moments later, to my surprise, I got out of the car and walked over past the Vohr tennis courts near the door of the old multi-purpose room. Naturally, I was struck by the true scale of the site constituting the place. My vision roamed along the classroom windows east, taking in the small back campus grass all the way to the cafeteria/multipurpose building, then north up around the small hill over the gravel playground and back to the tennis court path. I found that I moved over into the small handball space between the tennis court's back fence and the Vohr gym building's outer wall. The last time I had stood here was in Summer 69. At the time, Rudy, myself, Wayne, Carlos Chavez (a.k.a. Mud, due to the mess he made each morning in the practice field dirt while vomiting the previous evenings beer) and Santos were participants in a series of July afternoon football work-outs with Bob Zurcher and Al Renslow. On Zurchers orders I had been running laps around the field. Somehow I noticed that the west end multipurpose room door to Vohr was ajar and I wanted a drink of water. So I trotted over on the tennis court pathway linking the practice field to Vohr. To my surprise none other than our old elementary school PhysEd Coach Robert (Bob) Denslaw was seated along the wall in sweats and busy filling out his teaching planner for the upcoming school year. My god, I recall thinking, I gotta talk to him. It had been six years since I saw him last, and six years since he swatted me for not tucking in my shirt and chewing gum. Hey coach! I warmly greeted him, remember me? Oh sure, sure I do. You're Big Tall Jimmy who was gonna play basketball. Sure I remember ya. I remember all my students. Ahhh no, Coach, I mused. But nice try. It made me chuckle. It was still very good to see him. A touchstone. Looking back, I think the small joy at visiting with the now middle-aged Phys Ed instructor compensated for a growing sense of angst I had been exposed to since mid-way through my junior year.

P age |9 Because of a last-day-of-school prank my sophomore year, Principle Grigsby had suspended me for the following half year, sternly advising me that if I wanted to return to Mann and graduate on time, I had to attend night-school. Convinced then that Grigsby was patently absurd in issuing such a directive, I dismissed it believing he didnt possess the authority to enforce it, as the punishment did not fit the offense. I was wrong. Letters during the summer from the Gary School system about my status and a brief meeting with Big George, in early August, resulted in a consensus with my parents - my parents! that getting away from the crowd I was running with was the best thing for me...in addition to the disciplinary measure needing to be meted out. Evening school at Lew Wallace, as it was politely called, was pleasant and easy to the point of tedious boredom. But it was then that I began reading, delving into the literature of social-realism, a diet clearly beyond the scope of normal high school English curricula. It would prove to be the opening salvo of critical resistance to the cult of efficiency framing the norms of public school education in America, an educational shift hinted at by none other than our Unitarian namesake Mann, but made operative with the advent of Frederick Taylor's rules of scientific management. Six months ago, during my sophomore year, a group of us had passed around Willard Motleys, Knock on Any Door, a book that struck a deep, hidden nerve in me. I would later ask Dave Dickson if he had heard of it, and after commenting on it, he further referred me to the works of J.T. Farrells, Studs Lonigan trilogy. With the Lonigan series read, I recall returning to Dickson hungry for more of the same. He recommended Hemingways short stories and then F. Scott Fitzgeralds, Gatsby. With Gatsby, I had hit an existential (for me) mother-load and had unwittingly embarked on a twenty-year journey into the metaphysics of philosophy. My first existential encounter occurred one November evening beneath a solitary street lamp that lit a small playground at northern end of my neighborhood located at Second & Pierce Street. I was hanging around bouncing a basketball, hoping some of the fellas would soon come out for a little one-on-one. I remember looking up at the wind

P a g e | 10 whistling through newly barren trees and the snap of residual foliage flapping along the uppermost banks of the Calumet River. I then felt a power surge. It was as if something had burst the ceiling door to my skull and the horizon of my mind dissolved into an incredibly expanded consciousness of time, specifically, historical time. The immediacy of it was radical and extremely focused and I could concretely and sensuously process how I would someday age and ultimately die. Equally, that life would go on in my absence as though I had never inhabited the earth. I was more in shock than afraid. The tightening grip of fear and anxiety would come a few short years later and deposit an abiding sense of being cursed, that for decades left me on the ontological defensive, a sense and feeling that simply defies rationalization. So what are ya doing these days? Are you in college? Denslaw asked. Senior year at Mann, coach, I chirped. He looked up at me through those trademark black thick-rimmed glasses sported by Buddy Holly (or was is Clark Kent?) and later became fashionable in the Elvis Costello look. I couldnt believe he still wore them. Aside from some graying at the temples, only his paunch betrayed his otherwise still athletic physique and body-language. Damn, I could still feel him jerking down on my ear lobe or pinching a tuft of my hair. Tuck that shirt in, son.

I dont know how long I stood there, alone, my fingers locked in the cyclone-wired mesh of the tennis court fence. Looking eastward to the immediate horizon, about 75 yards or so ahead of me lay Manns south campus, the flag pole, the main building's crest and its third-floor windows. The phenomenon of feeling radically out of place swept over me and I soon sensed the grip of an uncanny if not weird clarity. What made it strange was the depth of sheer specificity. Unlike the vision of seer-prophets penetrating time, it was my sense of empirical space that had been radically enlarged. I was in a material NOW that displaced the historical status of the observer - me! This was this! I just stood there. I wondered if this was the same vantage point Scrooge and the ghost of Xmas past would have occupied. My

P a g e | 11 mind wasnt so much processing the psychic status of the object(s), as much as it was itself being mediated. It felt as though my mind was being turned inside-out and my sense of being was being devoured. Propping up the deteriorated majesty of Horace Mann with my memory was reminiscent of filling-in the anthropology requisite to fully appreciating stuffed artifacts in a museum of natural history. But once again I was forced to resist the thrust of latent guilt stabbing the psyche of my adolescent defiance. Had it been an unconscious defense mechanism attempting to protect or prolong my innocence or nihilistic rampage into a prolonged madness beyond teenage wasteland? Had I carelessly violated a prime ontological norm of being-in-the-world? What was it Mailer once hypothesized about the human condition: "If we are born into life as some living line of intent from an eternity which may have tortured us or nurtured us in death, then we may be obliged to go back to death with more courage and art than we left it - or face the dim end of going back with less."

Unfortunately, it seemed the validity of these issues represented the net yield of my reason for being and the sum of its existential rationalization. In terms of my personal history, the last thing I clearly recall is being plugged into Richard Bach's Livingston Seagull metaphors. I was nineteen. But instead of improving the profundity of my metaphysical outlook, in the belief that authentic quality outweighed and out-performed quantity, all I seemed to have gained despite the considerable time was greater efficiency in rational thought and idealization. Before long, I had evolved into the hard exploitative consciousness of an Ebenezer, a Scrooge, one now stalking the past, unable to reconcile that its unresolved issues are probably moot and void in terms of relevance among the living. Analyzed in Jungian terms, and depending on how events broke, it also seemed plausible that I taken up the task of postmodern knight on a quest for a grail or, equally,

P a g e | 12 that the flaws in my psychological development might ultimately render me Beat, someone atavistically willing to settle for a timeless mental state of mystical clarity. Ohmmmmm. It wasnt that whomever I had been or whatever it was that had once occupied my body in that past space and time, no longer existed; it was something more, a harsh dread that my defiance was haunted - or hunted - by the potential I risked during my frolic and detour on Tobacco Road. I sensed that the summer meeting with Denslaw was the last time I had a right to realistically claim the potentials contained in those issues. Even more cruel, was the uneasy irony at having to distinguish whether the school or my Self had become the relic. Still, absent that extra-curricular high school reading, I may never have discovered philosophy, and in it the progressive analytic that provided me the sorely needed language and terms by which I could continually re-articulate and adjust the issues confronting my being. Nostalgia, I repeatedly muttered to myself as I headed back to the car, its just nostalgia.

/ GSToya