In 2003, in the immediate aftermath of America's 'Shock and Awe' bombing campaign in Baghdad, Kristina and I made our way from Jordan into Baghdad and delivered the only gift we had: we carried my oud and we sang Iraqi love songs on the streets of the burning, smoky city... We passed my oud around... Lots of Iraqis took turns playing a song or two...
How did we come to be there... We have to back into the past and find out...
Quit School - Hitchhike to Florida
I had quit school months ago and was inviting whatever kids I met on the streets to parties at my new apartment. Bottles of bourbon and rum and cases of beer were always on the tables. I did make an attempt to begin classes at another high school but my interest flagged and I soon gave up on it. I moved out of Steve’s house into a room in Minna Elman’s house. She was a friend of my mother’s who was an artist and who lived on Gaslight Square, a newly-constructed neighborhood of art galleries resurrected from the destruction wrought by a nasty visit by an unfriendly summer tornado. There was a gay painter named Sam who also lived in the house. I was nervous around gay people but Minna assured me that Sam wouldn't try anything sexual. He was a gentle and friendly artist.
Eventually my mother rented an apartment and I moved out of Minna’s house into that apartment. My mother was seldom actually there as she was still a part-time resident in two mental hospitals: one in St Louis and one up in New England. She was juggling a mild alcohol problem, electro-shock therapy and the sudden pressing need to find a new husband. When she was home we became drinking buddies.
My father, back in Missouri briefly from France, announced that he would come by the next morning and personally deliver me back to school but I was on a bus by 4:00 AM headed across the river to Illinois.
I had a gun, a switchblade knife and a twenty-dollar bill in my pockets and by dawn I had my thumb out on a south-bound highway. I declined ‘friendly’ overtures from a truck driver who ‘just wanted to feel me up,’ insisting that I be dropped off at the next intersection. I rode on down into Alabama with two younger truckers who described the delights they had found with the newest ladies in a roadside trucker’s whore house while I waited in the cab.
Arriving in Sarasota, Florida, where it felt warm enough to sleep out on the beach, I began looking for a job until I was picked up after a few days by the local police. They kept me in a jail cell until I finally gave them a phone number. My father talked to them on the phone and assured them that I was a good kid and he suggested to them that I should not just be left with nothing to do in jail. Soon the cops began carrying me around in their squad cars to offer me a little entertainment.
My mother rode down on a train and she and I headed back to Missouri together. We made a deal. I would find a job and stay there in the apartment as long as no one made any further efforts to make me go back to school.
I soon found a job washing test tubes in a laboratory at the Washington University Medical School. I was offered an initial salary of $100/month and was soon raised to $250/month.
I got very little sleep. I worked by day at the Medical School, eventually becoming skilled at performing various lab technician procedures. My hands were young and steady. I was good with microscopes and could weigh single cells on quartz-hair balances.
I kept that job for two years, until I was sixteen years old and had decided that I actually did want to go back to school. I upgraded my 1949 Ford to a 1953 Mercury and set about turning it into a hot street machine. I had been learning how to fix cars since age twelve. I carried a fifth of bourbon in my glove compartment and seldom got home before 4:00 AM. Occasionally exhaustion would overwhelm me and I would take a night off from my explorations.
Turn Off the TV
I bought something new which I had never had in my own house before: a TV. I tried watching it for a few weeks but noticed that it wasn't offering me anything comparable to real-life adventures. I also began to feel weirdly disconnected from myself and after having the disquieting experience one evening of being suddenly afraid of my own reflection in the mirror, I grasped the knob on the TV and turned it off forever. I noticed that my feelings of isolation and dis-orientation simultaneously vanished. I was back on the streets full time again.
I learned to function at high speed with my belly full of bourbon or rum. We raced our hot rods through rural Missouri until 4 o’clock in the morning passing through tight turns at high speeds. But being proud of rolling your car, as many of my friends seemed to feel, was not one of my goals. I learned to use my conscious intention to burn through the various states of drunkenness so as to never make a mistake. Driving through tiny back roads at close to a hundred miles an hour became a training ground for maintaining high focus and concentration: either burn through the alcohol with an unwavering alertness or end up, like my friend, Bill Cortis, paralyzed in a hospital bed for life.
I kept discovering that I felt a warmer connection with my music-loving African-American friends. It seemed that the backwoods Missouri white folks were more likely to be the ones with seriously aggressive mean streaks.
I Don’t Really Like To Fight, But...
I didn't like to fight, but our nights were filled with suspense. If ‘Tiny’ was in the other car, watch out. Knowing when we were outnumbered we had to make choices: fight and lose but preserve our honor or find a way to flee. We struggled and held our ground. We really just wanted to find the next party and dance.
Loner personalities like Monte Byers and Frank Mullins would invite friendship when sober and then turn mean with alcohol. Armed with a nasty tool called a ‘frog gig,’ Frank Mullins attacked me in a remote abandoned farmhouse one night. I was agile enough to stay out of the weapon’s reach. A few days later, Frank Mullins treated me again as ‘friend.’ Monte Byers kept his hair bleached. This was 1958 or so, well before the California surfer look became popular. His goal was to drink a case of beer every night. I learned to recognize the look in his eyes as he would gradually turn from friendly comedian to aggressive and mean. But there were others who were meaner.
My very good friend, Bill Sneed, with whom I had spent many nights covered with grease as we learned to mechanic our Fords and practice our fighting techniques, ended up under the pummeling blows from a rival group of aggressive drunk kids led by a nasty guy who had been threatening us for months. There were about five of them and only two of us. Hopelessly outnumbered, we were at their mercy. The unspoken code of ethics implied that if we fought them hard enough we would qualify to become one of them. Bill Sneed’s efforts eventually earned our freedom. I remained a future target because I had been less willing to fight. The real ages of some of these kids were hard to guess. Their eyes and faces were hardened into meanness even from childhood. They looked older than they actually were.
My friend Bill Sneed joined the Marines as soon as he turned sixteen. I went with him to the airport and watched him disappear, along with many other young recruits, onto a military plane. One of the others had a bottle of liquor which would alternately drain and refill from the contents of his stomach as he guzzled away his last few minutes of freedom.
The laws in Missouri back in the late 1950’s were loose. We drank in the bars, we carried our bottles of liquor in our glove compartments and the cops who occasionally pulled us over told us to party in the woods and stay off the highways for a couple of hours. Sometimes they lamented that they couldn't take away our drivers licenses because we didn't have any. The cops were just more of us street kids but with badges. We were easy on each other.