What I Did on My Summer Vacation
1968, A Space Odyssey
On Wednesday evening July 10, 1968, after dinner, three weeks into my post 9th grade summer vacation from Island Trees Junior High School in Levittown, New York, my mother and father took all three of us brothers to the Mid Island Plaza Twin Cinema in Hicksville to see a popular new movie, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odyssey.” As I sat in the theater listening to the canned music, waiting for the curtains to part I wondered why they took us here. In the past few years it would have been very unusual for either of them to spend time with us. It was even more unusual for both of them to spend time with us. And even more unusual was for them to go out with us, on a weeknight yet.
I remember the giant screen in the theater projecting a commercial space ship with the familiar blue PanAm logo floating in the cold still blackness to Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz,” My mother’s favorite waltz. She played it over and over on a scratchy record while I was still a baby. Its three-count was woven throughout my young life though it belonged to her, not me.
The film’s pert female flight attendants, called “stewardesses” then, in their London mod uniforms caring for their charges while wearing gravity boots aroused something in my 15 year old soul. 2001 would be just like 1968 except prettier, calmer and much less angry. We would float peacefully, unbound from this violent ugly planet. I calculated that I would be 48 then, an old man.
The second half morphed into a frightening, out-of-control psychedelic disintegration of what we think we know. It became completely opaque and unpredictable, at least to a 15 year old boy who spent his entire life in Levittown. The astronauts remained expressionless and emotionless throughout while coping with a vindictive rebellious computer and frightening unexplainable events. I made a mental note to be more like those astronauts, cold, unfettered by the unexplainable around me.
[Disassociation]
We’re Putting You All on Plane to Michigan Tomorrow, Now Go To Bed
On the short drive home from the theater down Jerusalem Avenue I couldn’t stop thinking about one particular scene, the emotionless astronaut on a space walk cut off from his life support by a self-preserving computer named HAL. That image of the astronaut floating helplessly away from the ship into a cold blackness, alone and dying, stayed with me my entire life.
My mother drove us back. My father was afraid to drive at night. She pulled up into the driveway. As we exited the car to bolt for the TV she said she had to tell us something. She said we have to go to bed because we have to get up very early tomorrow. She said “You are going on a flight to Lansing, Michigan tomorrow.” So go to bed.
“Huh?” I didn’t quite understand. “By ourselves?” I asked. “The three of us?” “Yes” she said and repeated that we had to get up early with no other explanation. “So go to bed.” Between the opaque movie about dying in cold empty outer space and the thoughts of Lansing, Michigan, whatever that was, I couldn’t sleep at all that night.
That Flight
At 4:30 the next morning, July 11, my mother flipped on the lights and woke us up in her screechy, loud, full-overhead-lights-foot-stomping sort of way and piled us into the 63 Mercury to drive three dazed and terribly tired boys to LaGuardia Airport. It took only 45 minutes at that time of the morning. The boys were me, 15, Keith, 13, and Drew, 9. She didn’t talk much while she drove in the early morning dark. She wasn’t smiling but she wasn’t mad. At LaGuardia she parked in the cold newly built concrete garage, walked us in, made sure we boarded and left, still with no explanation. She was expressionless.
The stewardesses led Keith and me to a back windowless row where they sat. They lead the youngest, Drew, to a row further up front and to the right. I couldn’t see him over the seat tops but there was always at least two stewardesses cooing over him at any given moment.
I had never flown before so the air pressure really gave me a headache and the back of the plane bouncing a nauseous stomach. This and a lack-of-sleep regularly interrupted with ephemeral dreams of dying in cold dark space gave me a general wish to end my short life.
I couldn’t see outside the plane from where we were sitting but after what seemed like couple of hours the pilot said something, chimes rang, people put out their cigarettes and the stewardesses sat down next to us and buckled their seat belts. The plane descended, popping my ears, and landed with the engines roaring. As it taxied people fussed with their bags all around us bumping into each other as I watched a white light bounce off the wings and play onto the cabin’s ceiling. The engines wound down and stopped. After some time of complete stillness they opened the front door admitting some intense light in and letting the waiting people out, all lined up like we do at school.
When everyone else was gone we and the stewardesses exited from another door in the tail descending down steep aluminum stairs with the stewardesses walking sort of sideways in their high heels. We followed behind them across the tarmac under a blinding sun towards a squat glassy tinted-windowed terminal building.
Jack and the Hermaphrodites
Once inside I couldn’t see right away from the glare. Shadows seemed to be walking to and fro, that blinding sun that even penetrating the heavily tinted windows.
When I had regained my indoor eyes I saw up ahead a 30ish, tall, slightly stooped, dark haired, very thin man with a receding chin and big horn-rimmed glasses on his equally thin face waving at us. He began to walk over from the baggage claim. We had just carry-ons for our summer long stay. As he approached he said plainly “You must be them.” He was with a puffy sort of man with a thick head of puffy reddish blond hair. The thin man said “My name was Jack and this is Clayton.” I turned around to look for the stewardesses but they were gone.
[Why are we here? With these people?]
We followed Jack and Clayton out into the heat to his car which was parked only two rows outside the Lansing terminal like we were at a Stop-and-Shop. I liked cars and knew every make and model. The car was a gold 68 two-door Plymouth Fury hardtop with a black vinyl roof.
Jack and his friend didn’t really say where we were going but when he opened the door of the Plymouth and pulled back the seat we obediently got in. All three of us boys sat in the back by age order by some coincidence with oldest, me, behind the driver and youngest Drew behind the passenger. Drew’s feet barely cleared the edge of the seat. The interior was black and hot and there was no air conditioning which added heat exhaustion and car sickness to my flight-nausea, headache and sleep deprivation.
Jack backed out of the parking spot and turned out of the airport onto the straightest flattest highway pointing through the most featureless landscape I had ever seen. Everything about the Midwest seemed to be about what isn’t there. I remember thinking “Who eats all this corn?”
That’s when it got weird.
Jack turned around from the drivers seat and said “Fucking sucking. That’s all you kids say is fucking sucking.” We looked at each other. I thought “We don’t say that. Nobody says that.” but I didn’t want to counter an adult because you know how they get. Jack went on about that for quite a while.
I couldn’t hear everything because all the windows in the car were open at highway speed but I did hear the word “cock” several times. I certainly understood what “cock” was. It was a word used to mean penis by elderly men. Sometimes an angry kid would say “suck my cock” to another one and we would laugh at him. Not for the fellatio request but for the use of the word “cock.”
I also heard the word “hermaphrodite” a couple of times from Jack during our trip. We were still decades away from Google so I just had to go with that one.
Jack had a heavy midwestern accent with its over pronounced “Rs” invading every syllable so everything he said sounded like a record played too slow. The added spice of the words “cock” and “hermaphrodite” made this one-way conversation ever more surreal. The fiction of “A Space Odyssey” was completely forgotten less than 12 hours later.
Jack’s House
Living all my life in a Levitt house that was 25 by 36 feet with five people and multiple pets had not prepared me for the size of Jack’s house. By today’s McMansion standards it wasn’t that big but to me it sprawled, on a lake yet, with speedboats and water skis. He said we could drive the boats and learn to water-ski. He said Chris, who was a Michigan state water-skiing champion would show us. That the state of Michigan with all its corn and flat endless prairie has water ski championships just boggled my mind. How much does a water ski champion make anyway?
Jack led us to our beds to deposit our bags with each bed in a different room. My room was cramped and cluttered with several other unmade beds.
Jack’s house was the largest in a group of modern houses that surrounded this shallow lake that was maybe a mile across. He even floated a water-ski jump in the lake that Chris used to practice. He was state champion you know.
Naked Kids
After dark someone told us to go across the property to the cabin and pointed the way. My brothers and I walked across the uneven ground to the cabin and knocked on the plank door. Someone let us in. It was dark and inside only lit by candles.
As my eyes adjusted to the candlelight I saw that there were about a half dozen people in semi-circle all sitting on old makeshift furniture. As my eyes further adjusted I noticed that everyone was naked. I first noticed a red headed girl directly across sitting on Chris’s lap with her legs slightly spread toward me.
I sort of knew Chris from Levittown. He was the son of my mother’s Ethical Culture Society friend, Joanne Jones. They came over for Christmas a couple of times. Chris explained that Jack Smith, the “fucking sucking” guy, is his uncle, his mother’s brother. My mother and his mother set up our stay here in Michigan.
Everyone else introduced themselves to us. To my right was two skinny hippies named Dan and Beth squeezed together into an old Lazy-Boy. They were more into each other than anything else going on.
I backed up slowly to sit down on something but that area was cluttered with junk. I found an old portable record player to sit on. I could feel it giving way under my butt but I didn’t care. Chris introduced naked girl in his lap with the slightly spread legs as Cathy. He also indicated that Cathy has red hair on her pussy. I assume that was so I could pick her out in a crowd.
After introductions my brothers and I walked back to the main house where I couldn’t find my assigned room for a while. It reminded me of the first day of junior high when I couldn’t find my home room. I finally found it.
I sat on the unmade bed and wrote in my diary that night as my mother made us do every night so she could read them when we weren’t there. It was the last time I wrote because my mother was a thousand miles away. I wrote that we flew to Michigan and then closed it.
I laid myself down on the unmade bed and fell asleep immediately.
Jack, Featuring His Penis
When I woke the next morning Jack was next to me with his penis touching me. AOWWW! EWWW! GROSS! I jumped out of the horrible bed and bolted for the bathroom not touching anything. I turned on the hot shower. I got in. EWWW! GOD, that still turns my stomach.
The next morning, over a hearty breakfast of Fruit Loops, Jack mentioned that the naked hippies were a little disappointed as they expected more of a reaction from us as to their nakedness. They wanted to shock the boys from New York City.
As to his mysterious appearance in my unmade bed Jack seemed amused. He explained to me, with my two brothers in attendance, that a man is like a telephone pole. Tipping too much towards women is just as bad as tipping too much towards men.
I may have been only 15 and as-of-yet inexperienced in the ways of sex but, in my mind, I called bullshit. Out loud I said nothing because I didn’t want to be turned out on the street as my mother always said I should be. Especially because this place has no streets. Just infinite straight blacktop with nothing but corn on either side. I was left with three questions: “Who exactly is this chinless prick? What does he want?” and “Who eats all this corn?”
The Indoor Pool
The house had an indoor swimming pool in which Jack had a rule that no one was allowed wear clothes. Jack would often be in the pool walking around in it with Cathy, of the red pussy, in his arms. That’s it. Just walking around.
We three didn’t want to go in the pool naked but finally they all convinced us we should. Cathy challenged me to float holding my self in a ball as if diving a cannon ball. I did. When we climbed out of the pool Chris came over and said the Cathy wanted to fuck me. Cathy was an older woman of 18 and her aggressiveness made me nervous. He said “You don’t have to worry. She got a real tight pussy.” I looked at the cots by the pool and said no.
Jack’s parents stopped by now and then. I don’t really remember their looks well. The house was so big with people coming and going that I never noticed when they arrived or left. His father had one arm and would mow the lawn on a riding tractor. The mother would come in and straighten up. They were sullen just at the point of open anger. I didn’t approach them or even speak to them. Jack did not seem very bothered by their anger.
I Settled on an Internal Compromise
I did settle on a temporary life compromise in light of my current circumstances in the corn fields. Television in 1968 depicted the world as a dystopian horror of assassinations, thousands of local boys dead in Vietnam, riots, demonstrations, hippies and hate hate hate and more hate everywhere. I myself was on an involuntary trajectory to die in the Vietnamese jungles in three years. School was a constant frogger of which hall and staircase to use to avoid a beating. Back in Levittown, 1968 also contained my mother which, in my young mind, paled all that; she wished that I was never here in the first place. Jack, in all his flaccid child molesting evilness, was workable as long as I could keep my distance from him. Also the hippies seemed harmless. Besides there were speedboats and water skis.
Speedboats and Water Skis
So speedboat and water-ski I did. Chris, who was state champion you know, taught me how to water-ski. I floated in the water, life belt on, two hands on the wood handle attached to the rope attached to the motor boat, ski’s pointing up and waited. Chris would fire up the outboard, the bow would rise and I would panic point the skis down and get dragged face down in the water. Chris would circle around, I’d pick up the rope, he’d accelerate slowly and the skis pulled my body up out of the water into the air. I was now treading water. Water could kill you but I was treading it. Fuck you water.
Clayton and his Airplane
Turns out Jack’s bushy headed friend Clayton was an amateur pilot. And he had an airplane.
One morning Jack says we are going to fly in Clayton’s plane. Remembering my first flight a couple of weeks ago I said “No, I don’t want to go.” They said, “Oh, come on, it’s way different than a commercial jet. Way different. It will be fun.”
So they drove us to the airport which was a shed and grass strip cut into the cornfield. They had us three boys climb into the back of the smallest plane I had every seen. The door felt like it was made of tin. It was. Clayton and Jack climbed in the front.
This moment is frozen in my memory.
Fifteen year old me is crammed into the back seat of a tiny tinny airplane with my two younger brothers on a Michigan cornfield on a hot summer day of July 1968. In front is Jack with his homosexual bushy-headed lover, Clayton, at the controls. The engine is idling loudly. My palms are so wet that the left one kept slipping off the arm rest.
Clayton accelerated the engine until it ran so violently loud you couldn’t hear anything else. He released the brakes and the plane lurched forward and accelerated, bouncing violently until he pulled back on the stick and the bouncing abruptly ceased. My back and butt were pressed against the seat and up front through the window all I could see is the faded blue summer sky. Keith next to me wore a frozen smile and Drew, 9, wore an innocent look of fear, eyes wide, mouth open his pudgy cheeks flush.
I often think looking back “Tyler, you pussy, it was just an airplane ride. That’s all.” But you need to understand how, at this point, I had lost all faith that any adult was going to look out for my well being and yet here I was with a pedofile, his lover and my two brothers several thousand feet in the air.
The engine was so loud, the plane so crowded and unstable that I needed more air. I needed more room. So as you would in a car I pushed opened the little vent window next to me. Air roared in like a tornado, shaking the plane as my heart seemed to stop while I struggled to pull the window back closed. I could hear Jack yelling at me through the maelstrom. I pulled hard against the wind and finally heard the latch click with Jack yelling “NEVERRRR DO THAT AGAIN.”
I wore a little secret smile for the rest of the trip.
Electric Fence Chargers and Geodesic Domes
Jack owned a one story factory that made electric fence chargers for farmers. He made quite a bit of money selling them and novelty items from the back of magazines like Popular Science. In fact he made enough money to create an artificial lake and a housing development that surrounded it. One benefit of owning a lake is that no one will say anything amiss about the man that holds their mortgage
They took me to the factory once. Several of the kids on the property worked there. I remember the chargers were painted bright red. They explained to me that the electrified fences kept the cows in. I worried about electrocuted cows but they just laughed at me. One thing that amused me was that they were trying to build a geodesic dome a la Buckminster Fuller. I watched them struggle with the cinder blocks for a while. It’s as if these people were trying to stuff as many sixties cliches into this one summer as they could.
The Normal People
Kids from from the “regular” people who lived around the lake would come by. They were open and friendly. Said I should move to Owosso which is maybe 10 miles away. Coming from hostile working class world I was suspicious and kept distance from them. Wasn’t sure what they were up to.
The Hippies and Hanger-oners
Over the months hippies and runaways wandered in and out. Living in the trailers.
Dan, the peaceful hippie who lived with Beth, electrified his entire silver Airstream trailer when he and Beth were in it. I found out once when I knocked on their door and got a hair-standing zap.
There was another Dan who came and went. He dressed kind of straight and kept his hair combed to the side. I never saw him without his acoustic guitar. He worshipped California guitar bands like the Ventures. He kept his California guitar band record collection at the house though he didn’t live there.
The Interracial Dater
One evening while we were all seated at the kitchen table an alumnus of the house came to visit. He was blonde good looking and wore Chinos and a button-down. He introduced himself. He said his name was Richard and don’t call him Dick.
He had at his side a “Negro” woman. (“African-American” was still decades in the future). He introduced her too but I can’t recall her name. He said he and her now lived in Lansing which was considered a big dangerous city to locals.
I had never met anyone Black in my entire 15 years in Levittown. This was kind of an interesting shock. They both sat with us at the kitchen table as Richard filled the people in as to what he was up to.
He was kind of a one-line joker. “That’s a fig tree of your imagination.” was one of his regular lines. He joked line after line about race. “Prick her with a pin and see what color she bleeds.” was one.
It didn’t sound hostile just nervous. He seemed very nervous. He had reason to be as an interracial couple riding in car together could get you arrested by the police or severely injured by the locals. Cathy, the red..uh..headed girl, mentioned she saw a black woman and a white man in the same car together a couple of weeks before. That’s it. Just having seen it was enough to produce pause and disbelief.
I had a regular dream after of me floating above the windshield of a mid-sixties Chevy Impala with the white man and the black woman in the front seat and me needing to protect them. My vivid dream even had the Impala as sea-foam green.
His girlfriend sat to his right across from me smiling. I felt uncomfortable for her. Why, I asked myself, is it so dangerous? I watched her smile at his stupid jokes. She had on a short yellow jacket over a short deep-purple dress. A memory perfectly frozen from a summer night in the cornfields in 1968.
Two Lesbians and My Little Brother on a White Horse
Karen was one of two girls, about 18 or so, who lived in small cottage set back into a wooded place a short distance from the big house. They had a large white horse on which they rode bareback around the property together. It was quite a site to see them emerge from the woods together on this big white horse.
They said my youngest brother, Drew, was cute as a button and took him on their horse too. They had him sleep over that night in a sleeping bag. I kept asking what’s wrong with me. How come I don’t get to ride on a white horse with two girls. I thought Karen was a beautiful older woman not quite grasping the bigger picture.
They seemed at peace.
The Chicken Episode or “Cocky Gonna’ Get You.”
I slipped away from molester Jack and his faithful penis at every opportunity. When he did approach I seemed to have somehow understood how weak he really was and no longer showed much fear. For possibly these reasons I was no longer his prime directive. Jack had identified little brother, Drew, as his new molestee of choice.
For reasons unexplained Jack told us that we could no longer sleep in the big house and that all three of us had to share one of the silver trailers scattered about the property. We had spent all of our lives sharing a single 10 by 10 bedroom in a Levitt house so no biggie.
They raised chickens in front of this particular trailer. I don’t know why. A hippy thing? So a dozen chickens pecked, walked and clucked around the front steps to this trailer. I don’t believe any of us had seen a chicken outside of its natural habitat, plastic wrapping.
So here we were on a hot July afternoon in 1968 on the outskirts of greater Owosso, Michigan crouching with 12 chickens outside of a silver Airstream trailer. Nothing to do, no TV to watch and nothing to read. When, wouldn’t you know it, here comes Jack walking up from the big house, naked and holding his dick.
As he was walking up he spotted my little brother, Drew, staring at his flaccid penis. He looked at 9 year-old Drew and said “Cocky gonna get you” in a sing-song way. Drew freaked and ran up the trailer’s aluminum steps and pulled open the little door. He ducked in trying to shut the door behind him. Jack walked slowly towards the trailer saying “Cocky gonna get you” several more times. He climbed up the steps and pulled at the door. Drew was holding it from the inside but Jack got the better of him and pulled the door open hard. Drew ducked and ran down the same steps and into the middle of this parched piece of emptiness with chickens clucking all about. Jack entered the trailer and shut the door. We waited to to see what he would do next.
All three of us boys intently watched the trailer door from outside for quite a spell but nothing happened. It was quiet. Too quiet. Chickens were still clucking and not much else. We waited more but there was still nothing for quite some time. Not a peep.
So Keith volunteered to sneak up and quietly open the trailer door to peep inside and see what was what. He opened the door of the trailer and then gently shut it stage whispering “He’s sleeping!” So we formulated a plan.
We peeked in one more time to verify that Jack was still sleeping and indeed he was, sitting upright on the couch still holding his dick, or “cocky” as he affectionately called it.
Drew snuck in first with a handful of chicken feed and sprinkled it all over Jacks crotch, Keith followed and then I followed and also did the same. So with a well-seeded cocky we gently shut the trailer door behind us.
Back outside we then grabbed a chicken each (they are very soft), snuck back in, and placed the chickens on the couch next to sleeping Jack. We, just as quietly, snuck back out and waited. We had completed our mission without detection. Thumbs up. A-OK.
After what seemed an afternoon we heard “OWWWW!” … pause … “OWWWWW!” “GORD DARMMIT!” Jack then burst out of the trailer yelling “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!”
But it was. It was very funny.
Two days later Jack told us our parents were coming.
Parents Come and Then Go
Toward the end of July 1968 my parents drove 800 miles to Michigan to come get us. I don’t remember much about their presence at all. I do remember us in the kitchen when the hem came undone on my khaki pants. Karen, lesbian number one, said “Take them off and I’ll fix them. I hesitated. She said “Oh come on, take them off and I’ll fix them” so I did. I stood there in my tighty whities while Karen went to work with needle and thread breaking the thread with her teeth. It felt very uncomfortable standing there in my underwear in front of my mother. Karen was taking care of me with my mother sitting right there.
My mother looked uncomfortable and was more or less silent the rest of the time she was there.
The next day in the same kitchen Jack and my parents told me that my parents were taking my two brothers back to Levittown. They asked if I wanted to go too. It seemed a strange question that my entire family was going to drive back the 800 miles to Levittown and considered 15 year old me just an option.
It felt empty. I got the message and told them “No, I’ll stay.” So they left.
Owosso to NYC
So I spent August of 1968 learning to slalom water-ski, driving the speedboat and just hanging around the big house. I was pretty much left alone and spent almost all my time by myself which suited me fine.
Toward the end of the month they told me that they were going to drive to New York. Jack seemed a little irritated. I guess I disappointed him somehow.
So they packed up the Plymouth and Jack, some blonde guy, Jack’s handsome nephew Chris Jones (who was Michigan State water-skiing champ you know) and I took off for NYC.
When we got to the Pennsylvania mountains the guys said they had never seen an automobile tunnel before. When we entered the tunnel they stuck their heads out the window and yelled “yah yah yah yah.” It scared me a bit. They said they trying to get an echo. I remained scared.
They told me that they wanted to see NYC before we headed out to the Island, especially Rockefeller Center for some reason, so after we passed through the Lincoln Tunnel (more “yah yah yah yah yah”) I said park in a garage and we’ll walk or take the train.
We parked on the far West Side and proceeded to walk down 42nd Street to Eighth Avenue. I thought they’d like all the hookers and porn shops but they didn’t even notice. Jack, stooped, receding chin, horn rims, walked up front in a slow plodding gate like an old horse. The two boys walked behind him, blonde, tan, wearing tank tops, surfer shorts and flip-flops with me keeping third with as much distance as I could.
Their slow plodding pace was annoying pedestrians so I said let’s take the subway. At Eighth Avenue we descended the steps, bought tokens, went through the turnstile and waited for a Queens bound E train. In the dark dank subway of the 1960s the two surfer boys virtually glowed in the dark. We got in the first car and Jack asked me what stop. I did not know. As I was looking at the map he got up, walked to the motorman’s cabin and knocked. The motorman opened the door (a technical violation) and Jack asked in his thickest, most R laden, slow talking, plodding, heavy-weighted, midwestern accent “Does this train go to Rockefeller Center?” The motorman nodded and slammed the door shut. Jack came back to us and said “All you got to do is ask.” I pointed to the map and said that we use those.
Levittown
All six lanes of the Long Island Expressway were packed with automobiles this late August rush-hour afternoon. A thick smog of automobile exhaust and building incinerator soot hung in the overheated air. Light heat-rippled over the abandoned World’s Fair grounds up ahead with its Jetsons towers and silvery steel globe shimmering though the haze. I was finally home. Jack, slouched in the drivers seat and seemed miserable.
I don’t recall arriving home at all. There was certainly was no welcome. But I do remember feeling a rush of cold air under me from my parents. Disappointment I’d say.
But the local kids on the bleachers in the baseball field behind my house made up for it by demanding “Where the fuck were you?”
We all weren’t friends in the traditional sense. We hung out. There’s a difference. Pete Kramer, Dennis Conyers, Michael Meany and Willie Farella sat on the green painted wood planks of the bleachers in the early evening, drank Colt 45s, smoked Marlboros and insulted each other in one continuous stream. Something familiar and stable at last.
Chris, the Michigan state water-ski champion, also chose to hang out with us in the bleachers a couple of times. They kept asking him to say things in that funny accent.
The surfer boys and Jack stayed at Jack’s sister’s house a few blocks away also in Levittown.
Joanne Jones and her Experiment on Young Boys
Jack’s sister, Joanne Jones, was a “divorcee” as they used to say. She was a psychologist who initiated this whole Michigan carnival. She befriended my mother during a regular Sunday meeting of the Ethical Culture Society in Garden City, sort of an upper-middle-class church for atheists. My mother went there to meet “better people.”
From mid 1967 until the time we were packed off to Michigan in July 1968 Joanne came to our house more and more frequently until she showed up almost every other day. She listened, as she was trained, to my mother’s “concern” for our well-being and “worry” for our futures what with the street rats of lower class Levittown and all. Joanne read right through my mother’s a full fledged narcissism and heard her strong desire to rid herself of her children. My mother, encouraged, loudly broadcast her desire to make them go away, the nine-year-old, the thirteen-year-old but especially her fifteen-year-old who‘s too smart for his own good and an academic failure to boot.
By giving this raging narcissist some free therapy Joanne had found three live subjects to work out her theory that homosexuality is as innate in each person as heterosexuality. That we are born preferring either sex and are culturally conditioned to prefer the opposite sex, Jack’s “telephone pole” analogy. Jack the fiddler, of course, just wanted to score some fresh meat. I believe they were both desperately trying to justify Jack’s homosexuality and his little problem with children.
So in a time honored tradition of science the good doctor reached into the lower classes to find some suitable live subjects for her experiments, us three boys.
Robin Avener’s Week Long Orgasm
Neal Avener, my brother’s friend, stopped by the bleachers too. He was eleven years old but walked, talked, made jokes, and played the piano like an elderly Jewish man. His grandfather was in vaudeville. Neal’s pretty older sister, Robin, drove him there in her dark green Chevelle and out of curiosity came out back to the bleachers too. The Aveners lived in Levittown but moved up to middle-class Bellmore. Robin always looked down on us street urchins. Nobody cared about that really, but she did.
Dark haired pretty Robin Avener caught one site of blond muscular Chris, the Michigan state water-ski champion, and decided that she wasn’t better than us after all. She figured she’d hang around a bit.
Next day she and Chris were magically a thing. Together. To Robin this was love, she had found her soulmate, the Michigan State water-skiing champion. She came to see us every day but now in a slightly disheveled state. She was sullen and moody. In love. She was probably the 25th or 26th girl Chris had fucked in his young life.
So while she and Chris looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged solemn vows of some kind we went to the sump to hang out, smoke Marlboros, drink Colt 45s and insult each other. Sumps were acre wide holes in the ground scattered around flat Levittown to catch storm water. They were fenced off with no trespassing signs so a perfect place for us to hang out unmolested.
I told them how Jack liked to play with little boys. They just shrugged and said “whatever.” And that’s how I spent my summer vacation.
Epilog
Robin, who resumed looking down upon us, remained moist quite some time after Chris promised to write and left. Three years later in 1971 Jack jumped off the top of a ten story building in Houston, lingered a month and then died.
In 2021 I contacted a reporter for the local newspaper, the Argus-Press, about Jack’s house of pleasure and see what they might have in their morgue about such a prominent citizen but he said they have nothing and after all it was a long time ago.
