“…you have been designated Godfather of the… of the National Newspaper of Peru (“The Voice of the People… is the Voice of God”)… in merit to your fine virtues and profession of service that you have shown throughout your exemplary life that everybody appreciates, admires, and exalts.
Director, Apolinario Mayta Inga & Manager Rivera Flores, October 7, 2009
Donkeyland Minnesota
STORIES OF EVERYDAY LIFE
OF A NEIGHBORHOOD
Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D. (Vol: IV)
Andean Scholar, and Three Times Poet Laureate
Parts in English and Spanish
Donkeyland (Minnesota)
Stories of Everyday life of a Neighborhood
Copyright © 2010 by Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D.
Any and all translations in Spanish by Rosa Peñaloza de Siluk
Front Cover by art work, by the Author
Index
To the parts of the Novel
Contents: † cross indicates –In English and Spanish
Theme Poem
I See the Boys
((Of Donkeyland) (1960s))
▼
Introduction
No Laughing Matter
(Donkeyland, a Side Street Saga—1950s and ‘60s!)
Narrated by Chick Evens
▼
The Bizarre Years
Grandpa’s Tobacco Jar
Christmas Bet
Arms, Fists, and Poetry
Mother and Paper Dolls
The Mud hole
The Quadruple Knockout!
Brother: One of the Boys
The Candy Counter
ACE (or, the Big Bopper)
Everybody Knows
The Fifteen-hundred Pound Horse!
Integrity & Treachery in Four Pieces
A Classical Winter in Minnesota
John L
The Fighter
Ideas of a Young Man, and Girls in Two Pieces
White Castle Hamburgers
Interlude
Something Unexpected!
The Drunkards
The Last Stage
Follow the Course!
The Vacuum Cleaner Department
Indian’s Mound
The Garage and the Hooligans
The Boy who almost became a Tramp
The Boy Called Doubt
In Two Pieces
Grandpa’s Sunday Roasts
Last Time in Donkeyland
What’s the Matter with Donkeyland?
Commentary by an Old Donkeyland Poet
▼▼
Epilogue
In Two Pieces
Sounds out of Donkeyland
(And)
The Hours
▼
The Parts of the story in Spanish †
(See back of book)
Grandpa’s Tobacco Jar
The Candy Counter
Theme Poem
I See the Boys
((Of Donkeyland) (1960s))
I see the boys of Cayuga Street; it’s summer (it is in the early sixties). They are sitting on the steps of the neighbourhood grocery store, in the evening it will be the church steps, down on Jackson and Sycamore (with the heat, and the summer winds).
They are talking about the neighbourhood girls chewing on green apples from old man Brandt's backyard—next to the empty lot.
These boys of the neighbourhood—called Donkeyland by the police—are curds in their recklessness? Sweet and sour, like honey on fire: the jacks of folly, with fingers like bees.
Here in the summer's heat, they sneak under bridges, catch pigeons, scale the beams with no doubt; even in the dark they feed their nerves. After twilight, after leaving the church steps they will go down to the train tracks, open up a boxcar empty it out—jump over the cemetery fence, and get wasted with the cases of beer they’ve stole—no doubt.
I see the boys of Cayuga Street, it is still summer they divide the night and day with mental images of what they’re going to do: they got on dark shades; and as sunlight paints in the moon, they are building bonfires in the empty lot (over by Indian's Hill) to party soon.
By the looks of things some will die young, others in the war in Vietnam; still there are a few others who may die old, and perhaps alone...
There, in the night all the houses and everyone in them are sleeping, but the boys in the neighbourhood turnaround (some have chains of keys hidden behindtheir coats: Mike, and Gary and a few others will borrow cars to ride throughout the neighbourhood tonight, putting on a show).
All the boys, are with their gals, holding onto their bottles of beer, and wine and whiskey: smoking, joking: a fight or two most likely with come about: Big Ace is making loud noises like singing that damn old Black Bird song, dancing hoodwink like—David laughing, I'm somewhere around; it's a hell of a crowd.
4-22-2008 (#2359) Dedicated to the Donkeyland Gang of the 1960s
Donkeyland Minnesota
Introduction
No Laughing Matter
(Donkeyland, a Side Street Saga—1950s and ‘60s!)
Narrated by Chick Evens
They were rather a grubby and unruly bunch (The Donkeyland Gang, so the police called them, us), and they were sometimes pretty rebellious, but just the same, like any other large neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1950s, and early ‘60s, they had their self-importance. They pert near all stuck together. Just suppose you had a few too many drinks in the neighborhood, on a weekend night, and you felt a little argumentative, or confrontational and not reluctant to a fight yourself, and you happened to meet someone, a stranger, down around the turnaround where the guys hung-out, and he got smart with you, and you gave him a little lip back, “Come on lets duke it out!”
And the stranger got ready to punch you out—
He better not do that. The devil only knows how many of the neighborhood guys you’d have on your hands. It would be like Custer’s last stand. They’d come forward like lightening, appearing out of nowhere, out of the allies, and houses and behind trees, and garages, as it were.
Now you take anyone of them guys. You could trust those fellows (well, most of them). None of them would stick a knife into you anyhow. That’s what they’d not do.
And just think of it, most of the girls from that neighborhood would marry into that bunch. I suppose that’s no way to put it. But that’s how it was. There were a few fellows, crazy like bananas, and there were a few smart-alecks of the neighborhood, young men who should have known better, encouraging the crazy one’s to do crazy things. I don’t remember any philosophic ones, but Roger would make wise-cracks about people…and Doug was one of the smart-alecks, and Jerry (we called him Ace) and Dan (just Crazy Dan) were two of the crazy’s. And Gunner was Mike, my brother, who liked to windup the engines in his hotrods lay rubber on the street—as they referred to it back then, and mouse was really Gary, the mechanic, and Chick Evens, the poet (that’s me), to name a few, and there were a lot of cousins among the Lindsey’s.
On the weekends, especially on Friday nights, and sometimes all day on Saturday, thru Sunday afternoons, there’d be a party out there at Jerry and Betty Hino’s house. There’d be beer, plenty of that, and wine and sometimes there’d be some whiskey, even sometimes friends of the bunch in the neighborhood would show up, drop a name, and join in on the festivities, folks who really were not of the neighborhood. And some of us drank so hard, and in time died of the sickness. But Betty was always friendly and willing to share her hot meals to those who would stick around and drink for several hours. Between the two, Jerry and Betty, I think they had fourteen-kids (from previous marriages).
And there were among us, all kinds of rough people too.
There were several girls unmarried, Nancy and Carol, and Jennie, and her sister Jacky, and Katharine and her twin sister (whom Chick Evens dated both Jackie and Katharine for a season), and Jennie married, one of the Lindsey boys and there were two Nancy’s—no, three, one married a Lindsey, another David. And there was Shelly, who dated Roger; her father was the caretaker from Oakland Cemetery, near Cayuga Street.
But the parties never ended, nor the drinking, and sometimes dancing and singing and just general hell raising and maybe a fight or two. And when you turned sixteen or seventeen, when you looked older than you were, and found an ID, that said you were twenty-one, “What the hell?” most of us said, it’s my neighborhood, and off to the two corner bars that were on two corners one across from the other, by Jackson and Sycamore Streets. And there’d you’d start your bar drinking careers in a professional manner—thinking as we thought back then—a man’s king in his own neighborhood, ain’t he?
Chick, one of the two Evens’ boys (that’s me again), played his guitar with Bill K., and Sonny M., singing Elvis and Rick Nelson songs, were sullen and seldom looking for a fight when they’d go drinking, and they were much like that at home. They’d rather be drinking and singing songs, like Johnny Cash’s, “Ring of Fire,” or Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel” or Rick Nelson’s “Traveling Man,” than breaking into boxcars for several cases of beer, or selling stolen copper back to the junkyards, from where they originally took it, although, Chick Evens was not innocent of those crimes completely.
And during those now far-off years, many of the boys ended up at Red Wing’s incarceration center for breaking the law— a sort of boystown, and some of boys ended up in prison and jail. These were the hard-boiled young men stilling cars and using them for racing in the neighborhood, among other things; which was no laughing matter.
And pretty near everyone smoked cigarettes—and in later years, pot, and there wasn’t any boy in the neighborhood who could out drink Ace, or out fight Larry. There was even a few that didn’t drink like Pat, who did much weightlifting, but those fellows you could count on one hand. And we’d say, “He’s fine, don’t bother him about drinking, he’s got to keep up those muscles,” and we all understood, Pat, who even got Chick Evens into weightlifting, and Pat’s sister, as pretty as a doll, never hung around with the bunch, I suppose she didn’t like everyone howling drunk.
I wasn’t much of a neighborhood guy, but you could live in it, if you were by a hair's breadth, friends with the neighbored itself. They lived. They married and had children. Now of course they are pretty old. Ace, perhaps seventy or more, he bought us boozes all the time (being underage); he was the oldest of the group. I’d like to know how their doing now, for they’re nearly all gone I hear. Some died, in the Vietnam War, alcoholism or/drugs, heart attacks, cancer, took some, and some were carried off to a state instruction; also accidents took a few like Sid and Kathy. Perhaps there were thirty of us, a few more a few less.
It was just a little strip of land, called Donkeyland, a mere street called Cayuga was the epicenter, which is now empty, a parking lot, and empty spaces, I suppose somewhere in that near vicinity, a new neighborhood has taken its place, so I heard, with no code of honor. There will always be at least one such place; before us, there was the Mississippi Rats (a decade earlier), so I heard, and I knew one of those guys, they’d now be in their eighties I suppose, but it was nothing like what you’re going to read as you turn these pages in this book called “Donkeyland…” as soon as this introduction is over.
We all played softball in that empty lot next to my grandfather’s house, and we got silly drunk and cross-eyed, in that empty lot, and turnaround (which was next to one another), and some of us, habitually silent, and some of us, had odd habits.
The neighborhood had no plan in life just innumerable funny angles, and eventually we all went to work, settled down. It’s like this: many of us simply crept out from under the bushes and did what we had to do. We were quite a bunch of men and women (or boys and girls), and for the most part as I look back, it was no laughing matter, none of us took a disliking for the other, just some of us like me, walked quietly away when the time came, and some were left behind.
For eight years I’ve tried to figure out a way how to tell this story, and to be quite frank, this is the best way I could figure out on how to do it, that being a novel in its own right, but a episodic novel in structure, loosely connecting one story into the next, or one story mingled within the lot. But the story comes out the same, as each story has its own theme, interconnecting to the overall theme and plot. It is a story—plain and simple, about a neighborhood of the 1960s, in the breadbasket of the United States (in particular, Minnesota).
The Parts to the Novel
The Bizarre Years
((Part one) (concerning the old Painter,
Anton Evens, and the Grand Children) (1958))
The Painter, a short old man clean shaven, had some difficulty in getting to sleep. The windows alongside of his house in which he lived were low and he could look out them at his lilac bushes when he awoke in the mornings, or paced the living room floor in the afternoons. Several workmen came to fix the house he had just purchased on Cayuga Street (1958), a carpenter, electrician, plasterer, and a furnace man, and Earnest Manning, his neighbor, and daughter’s boyfriend, was around sporadically to assist.
Quite a lot of commotion was made about the affair in getting the house ready to live in, for the old man, his daughter and two grandchildren (Mike and Chick Evens). The old man, Anton (and sometimes referred to as Tony), had been a soldier in the Great War, came into the country in 1916, from Russia, raised a family, wife died at thirty-three years old, in 1933; he was now sixty-three years old. The painter had cigars lying about and he smoked a pipe likewise, and at times chewed his snuff.
For a time the two men—Anton and Earnest, talked of painting the house inside and then outside, and then they talked of other things. The old man got on the subject of the war. Ernest in fact had led him to that trying and unstable issue. His son, Wally, had once been a prisoner in Germany—a POW, as they called them back then, during World War Two. And he also had a son who had died in the last days of that war, Frank, in Italy, in 1945: died due to an explosion, and when that part of the story came up he had wet eyes.
Earnest, liked the old painter had a wide face, and when he smiled he wrinkled up his eyelids and forehead, and that wide face moved up and down. The sad old man with the pipe in his mouth was perhaps seriously comical at times. The plan he had for the house was mostly done his own way, the teenage grandkids, had their bedroom in the attic, and his and his daughter’s on the first level.
In his bed the painter often rolled about this way and that way, but more than often laying quite still most nights. For years he had been weighed down with notions concerning his affair with a younger woman (although he was a widower and she was not married). He was lonely, hard at times to get along with, and had three children by the young woman, his heart fluttered for her.
The idea had never occurred to him, his grandson would find this affair out, it never even came into his mind, and he would die unexpectedly and unknowingly, that his one grandson knew, and the grandson, always knew when he got into bed he thought of that person, he even found photos of her, naked photos hidden in the side of his sofa chair. It did not distress the boy. The outcome in fact was quite a unique thing and he knew it would not be easily explained by his grandfather if indeed confronted, but it really was not his business and therefore left it be, but told his mother. Perhaps it made him more energetic, thought the boy, younger at heart, for he had met the woman, and the kids, invited into her kitchen one afternoon, when he was fifteen-years old. There he sat perfectly still as he listened and learned more about his grandfather than anyone would have ever guessed, who might have thought, this old man, his body was too old and not of much use anymore, yet something inside him was altogether young. He was like a teenager, only that the thing inside of him was not really a teenager but an old lonely man. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was that he needed a woman, young, and lovely and slim, and he was to her, what he wanted to be, her knight. It sounds bizarre, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old man as he lay in that bed each night, lonely, and sometimes a little tipsy, his heart fluttering over her. The thing to get at is what the old man did for her, the young thing within his heart, he bought her that house she lived in, paid her bills, and supported them kids, and nobody knew, nobody but the grandson.
The old painter, like most of the folks around the world, had got, during his long life, a great many ideas in his head. He was at one time quite handsome and had been married twice, and other woman had been attracted to him. And then, of course, he divorced his first wife, who drank too much, and his second wife a good woman who could be called a good woman, and no one challenge it, was a church going wife, a believer in the Lord, the King of Kings, Jesus Christ, she died early on in life, died of an illness.
He had owned a restaurant, and had gotten to know people, a lot of people, in peculiarly this young woman—who I must bring up again— intimately, and perhaps in a different secret way that was different from the way in which you and I get to know people. At least that is what the old man must have thought and the thought pleased him to keep her a secret from his six daughters and one son. Why quarrel with them concerning his money, upon his death bed, whenever that day occurred? And he knew that would have been the case (and in truth and reality that is exactly how it was).
In the bed the old man had a dream that was not necessarily a dream, perhaps more likened to a vision. As he grew somewhat sleepy, for several weeks, often still conscious, shapes began to appear before his eyes, demonic shapes. He imagined, and told his grandson, they were near indescribable, other folks he told—and there were only a few of them—said such things within himself were simply nightmares, unreal, something old folks get (especially now at eighty-three years old), but they were digging a long tunnel into his basement from afar-off distance (implying: from the empty lot to the garage right to his house into the basement), the old man said, in a procession, and these shapes were waiting for him. And he added, “True or not, I see them.”
You see the interest in all this lies in the shapes that went before the eyes of the old painter. They were all demonic. Most all of children of the painter had now become concerned about his health, and where he hid his money, some even threatened him.
The picture was a little grotesque and seemingly turning out horrible, the young grandson confronted, told the relatives, to back off, not to threaten the old man, or they’d have to deal with him. The old man didn’t know this but his mother did. Some were even amusing to the now twenty-seven year old karate expert, and Vietnam Veteran (it now was 1974), and he didn’t want anyone to hurt the old man, not even the shapes. When he talked, he asked the boy on a few occasions to scramble him some eggs, and the grandson would make them for him. He felt perhaps the old man with all his unpleasant dreams, was not eating right, and had perhaps indigestion.
In the latter days, before he died, for hours that procession of grotesque shapes passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although his heart was throbbing, his hands quivering, he crept out of bed and went to the bathroom, it was late afternoon. Someone within the group of the shapes and shadows had made a deep notion on his mind and he wanted to avoid it, perhaps wake himself up more.
Sitting on the edge of his bed the old painter thought for an hour. In the end he knew his time was short “The shapes have busted through the wall in the basement” he told his grandson, Chick. It was never mentioned other than this one time, but he had heard him say it that once and it made a permanent impression on his mind. The old man had one central thought during those last days that is very bizarre and it always remained with his grandson. By remembering it he had been able to understand many people and things that he was never able to understand before. The reflection involved is a simple statement of which would be something like this:
That in the beginning when we were young, and the world was young to our minds, and we had many thoughts and very little pretense, but no such thing as illegitimacy. And part of this truth was that Man made the reality himself around him, and each reality was a fuse that lead into a great many more, in not vague at times thoughts. All about his world were these new forming facts—what were implied facts, and they were all beautiful if not some strange in the beginning, during formal reasoning, and beyond when our minds are still impressionable.
Now that he was an old man he had listed—mentally listed those facts, and truths, and realities, as if in some kind of unwritten book he kept in his secret chamber in his mind—threw pretense away, he had kept it for so long, he even questioned what was real and what was not. I will not try to tell you of all of this, There was a truth of God for him, but only in nature, now this new truth, fact, reality, obsession, haunted him: the truth of these demonic shapes and shadows, if they were who they were, then beyond nature, there must be the opposite, a real God, it is the opposite, like wealth and poverty, black and white, truth and lies, thrift and wastefulness. Perhaps if there was a message here, and if it was for him, this was the message, the last message he’d ever get from God himself. Thus, he opened the door for him to see his demons before they dragged him away: who’s to say?
And then the relatives, the sisters and his son came along. Each as they appeared snatched up whatever they could, that also was a fact, a truth, a reality, a dozen times over during those last days of his on earth.
It was the fact, the reality of it all that made the shapes so real, like people to the old man. He had no quick or elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his view that the moment the demonic figures dug through the last morsel of dirt—hence, able to stretch their hands out to grab him, they’d take him into the tunnel, and seal it back up, once and for all, this was his reality, his truth to all concerned, to himself, called it what you will—perhaps theory or whatever—he could not live his life any other way, he became a slave to the shapes before the shapes embraced his very soul and spirit and mind.
It is not hard for one now to see, for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his adult life thinking one way, was now filled with doubts, would start to page through masses of new possibilities concerning other thoughts on what was and what was not reality within his world, his mind. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a shape. He didn’t, I suppose ever think this a reality, for the same reason that he never took the time to examine his mind’s overall chamber of hidden content, what his Christian wife had told him time after time after time—that Christ was real, a fact, just like now—as the shapes were to him a fact, the shapes and shadows were as real as those cowboy movies he loved to watch on television, and both were truths he had learned were truths, when he was ten-years old, but new facts took over his mind thereafter. If anything was going to save the old man, it was to throw pretense to the side, to go back to when he was very young, put back inside him that part he threw out, save the old man could.
Concerning the other characters in this story, I only mentioned them in passing because they, like the old man, are what are called very common folk, and they become, like the old man, the nearest thing to what is desirable and lovable to all the shapes and shadows—the demon—God’s creation.
Grandpa’s Tobacco Jar
((Part Two: summer of, 1958) (concerning: Chick Evens, Grandpa, and Donny Manning))
(The Old Russian Bear, 1891-1974)
He sat down in his sofa-chair—behind the tall reading lamp, that extended an inch or so over the back of the chair, taking one of his wooden pipes laying in the standup ashtray next to his chair, and struck two matches together—Chick (his grandson) sitting on the couch observing him from the corner of his eye (they—Chick and his family—had just moved into the house on Cayuga Street, that very spring, just eleven-years old, to be twelve that very fall, shoe shinning up on Rice Street and the East Side, with Donny Manning) while watching a western on television, he had previously filled the pipe with tobacco from his tobacco jar he kept on his bedroom dresser, and once lit he dropped the matches into the ashtray, for once not missing it, and having it land on the floor: mumbling and cussing all the time under his mouthful of air, like who-knows-what, only he knew exactly what he was saying, the Old Russian Bear, as Chick called him, figured he simply did it out of habit, or perhaps talking to his demons.
“Dont ya go-a turin’ da channel ven I gone, ya her-me!” he said to Chick as he stood up, walked through the bedroom to the bathroom, never once looking at Chick longer than a millisecond, it wasn’t a question, although it might have sounded like one, it was a statement, and perhaps in a light form, a statement-question, yet rhetorical, not necessarily meant to be answered verbally, only acknowledged with a look, or nod of the head, silently if possible. Once old grandpa (not quite five-foot tall) disappeared into the shadows of the bathroom—the bathroom door shut with a bang as usual, Chick quickly got up and hightailed it to the kitchen—after hearing that bang—knowing the direct route to the icebox, and knowing exactly where the pears and apples and oranges were (and the time factor involved) and out they come one by one into his side pockets of his robe, and next, he rushed back like a deer to where he was sitting, picking up his old apple, as if to disguise his race against time, then a second later, grandpa appeared, he was mumbling and cussing again, and Chick looked up from his position on the long couch, a flat affect on his eleven-year-old face as if he had never left the settee, his heart hardly pounding, grandpa brushing off the ashes from the sofa chair—they were all about, where he sat, his eyes caught Chick eating an apple, unknowingly, the next three apples he had put in his robe pockets, would appear one by one— (in due time) but for now, it appeared to grandpa as if he was eating the same one—just very slowly; it was simple, he didn’t’ want his grandpa to discover the principle of his deception at its most fundamental obscurities, lest he be made fun of for eating them, and his mother and his older brother Mike—whom all lived together as if in an extended family, out of house and home, because the Old Russian Bear took a disliking for that chopping and chewing noise and seeing and monitoring (which he didn’t have to do, but seemingly by compulsion forced himself to do) eating, apple after apple, after apple, and you can add that pear and orange in there if you’d like, it annoyed him, and made him mumble and cuss more. Grandpa took another look, Chick now blinking as if he had something caught in his eye, he had eaten the apple core and all, as he had learned to do—part of that ongoing, long deception, and had a new apple in his hands, this time grandpa took a double take on this happening a little longer than a millisecond, said, “Humm…mmm…” as if he was trying to figure out the charade, then back to those new formed cuss words, half in English and half in Russian, so no one could ever figure out completely what he was saying, he had his own black book of cuss words it would have seemed, somewhat even coded.
Was Chick a sneak? Yes, oh yes, sneaky he was—likened to a spider to a fly (but sneaky because it was called for, out of demand for the right to eat his fruit and watch television at the same time that his grandpa was watching it), and he’d tell you so right to your face, upfront, if you’d had asked him, he’d even had told you himself, “Boy am I sneaky, but I got to be…” and had you been there, you might have even caught him mumbling something to that effect, as his old grandpa sat bolt upright in that sofa chair, watching ‘Da Long Ranger,’ or ‘Hop-along Cassidy,’ (or dat cowboy vith da white hair) as he’d referred to the two of the many westerns he’d watch nightly—peacefully watch; and nothing nowhere, and nobody anywhere in the world could anguish or disturb him because he was in his tomb of silence, for the evening, and forevermore loving it, and god forbid, should someone even thing of disconcerting him at this sacred moment.
A Christmas Bet
((Part Three; a Short Story about Christmas; Concerning Mike and Chick Evens) (1958))
Narrated by Chick Evens
We could hear the television on in the living room, grandpa was watching it. My brother Mike and I looked at all the presents scattered under the tree, where mother had wrapped them in Christmas colored paper, with our names on them, we were in the kitchen finishing up our supper—pork steak, and pork n beans, the gifts were in the next room over.
“That one’s yours,” I said to Mike pointing my finger at a small rounded present—the size of a shoe—somewhat soft looking with a near silent laugh. (I had read the label.)
“Sho now,” Mike said. “Grandpa will hear us laughing, he’s watching a western.” Then Mike stared at the small package.
“I know what’s in it,” he said. “I could tell you if I wanted to.”
(Chick looked at Mike’s present, and the many other presents around the tree.)
“I suppose I can wait to find out on Christmas day,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what’s in it for a quarter,” Mike told me.
I looked at his present again. “I haven’t a quarter,” I stated.
“But you’ll have one Christmas morning when grandpa gives you five-dollars, like he does to all the family members on Christmas day,” Mike remarked. “Matter-of-fact,” Mike added, “you’ll know what’s in it by opening up your presents that look like my present—because mom is giving us the same. She does every year,” Mike told me. “If you don’t believe me go and ask mom!”
Then Mike grabbed me by the forearm. “Before you go into the living room to watch T.V., do you want to bet?”
“I’m not sure, can I feel it?” I asked—meaning the package. Then I stood up from the chair, washed my hands in the kitchen sink and looked through the doorway at all the presents all scattered out under the tree—many the same size as the one my brother wanted to bet with me on, and to be frank, he never did answer me the question I gave to him.
I could almost smell Christmas around the corner, to-morrow morning to be exact. Thus, it would be just tonight I could make this bet. In the morning with our red and white robs on, the ones mother had made for us a year before, Mike and I would sit next to one another, alongside of the tree, opening up one present after the other—unless we could talk mother into letting us open them up this Christmas Eve—which would be in a few hours.
“Well,” Mike insisted, “do you or don’t you want to bet?” Then there was a hesitation, hollowness in the air, “Chick!” he bellowed—but in a sedate manner, to get my attention, “Do you or don’t you?”
“If I guess what is in it, will you pay me a quarter?” I asked.
“Go watch T.V.,” he said somewhat frazzled.
I was only eleven-years old, Mike two years older than I, but I knew Mike was cleaver, I guessed he knew more than what he was saying, it was as if he had the edge. Yet I didn’t know what was in it, and my best guess was that he did.
“Don’t tell ma,” Mike told me.
“Why?” I asked.
“She’ll say I’m taking advantage of you, that’s why!” And just then, just at that very moment, mother had come out of her bedroom, which was a few feet away from the kitchen, not sure how much she heard but she said, “Hah?” as if it was a statement and a question all in one, as if she knew more than what she lead us think she knew. (Then there was an explanation that followed, not sure who said what.)
“You’re too old to be betting with your brother,” she said to Mike, after she found out that the game was a betting one.
Now Mother, Mike and I were all looking at that one present that looked so much like so many other presents under the tree—meaning, there were perhaps ten in total, that were of the same nature, in size, roundness and litheness. Grandpa was still watching his cowboy movie, mumbling something, smoking his pipe as if we didn’t exist, as if we were the silly cluster. He liked his quiet moments, his cowboy shows, and any kind of disturbance, as we were causing, even as light as it was, was for the most part, an imposition.
Anyhow, Mike asked ma if she would bet with him, that he could guess what was in the small packages.
“No,” she said, “we don’t bet here but I don’t think you really know anyhow.”
Now there was nothing at stake, except Mike’s pride, or call it, reliability, and that maybe was payment enough because he said what he thought was in those packages that all looked alike. And he chuckled when he said it, and he said, with a manner of confidence, “All right, okay, it is socks, all those small same size packages are socks, because every year, ever since I can remember you’ve been giving us socks in the same size packages. Matter-of-fact, in my dresser drawers, in two of them, all that is in them are socks, perhaps fifty-pairs, from years past.” And he wasn’t kidding.
“Well,” said mother, “now you know Chick, would that have been worth losing a quarter over (because that could pay for one ticket at the movie theater).” And we all laughed quietly, and lightly. Then I asked, “Can we open the presents up at 6:00 p.m., (less than two hours away)…?” waiting for her response, I added “since we all know what is in half the packages anyhow!” And that brought on a bigger laugh, and a shake of my mother’s head, to the right and left and she said, “Maybe!”
“Your maybes are always no’s,” I commented.
“Well, all right,” she said, and then gave us a big smile, and added “but be quite about it, don’t disturb grandpa, he likes his cowboy movies.”
Arms, Fists, and Poetry
((Part Four: concerning Lorimar Williams
and Reno and Chick Evens) (1962))
Within the half decayed garage’s porch in the backyard of a large framed house that stood on an embankment with two other houses (on Cayuga Street), near an empty lot, in the neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota called ‘Donkeyland,’ by the local police, stood Chick Evens and Lorimar Williams, it was Lorimar’s house—I mean, his father and mother’s house— Evens was visiting (as they often hung out together, and only a few houses apart), he was fourteen-years old, and Lorimar fifteen, and up the side dirt pathway in back of the three houses—that at one time was used by buckboards and buggies drawn by horse back in the ’20—a fat short teenager by the nickname of Reno (Steve Lungburg) paced nervously up and down the asphalt driveway that circled Rice School (an elementary school, one Evens had stole a record player out of, had climbed the drain pipes and loosened up a window and he and Lorimar snuck in) Reno was waiting for Evens, restlessly and again the boys of the neighborhood were provoking a fight to be.
Across the empty lot a long open field that had been uncut, and was full of weeds and bushes and some garbage, the public street to its side the neighborhood kids, youths and maidens, laughing and shouting boisterously, and rowdily, were walking up that same pathway to see the fight that was going to take place between Chick and Reno, it was the near evenings, or late afternoon’s main event.
The boy Reno, fourteen-years old, one hundred and ninety pounds, dressed in blue jeans, and a plaid shirt, leaped forward, attempted to grab and drag Chick to the ground, whom was a weight lifter and strong as an ox, at a little less than one hundred and forty pounds, but perhaps an inch or two taller; after this somewhat unsuccessful attempt, one of the maidens—Jackie the same age as both Evens and Reno—fourteen, screamed and protested sharply (on behalf of Chick). The arms of the boy now on his back on the black asphalt pushed up his mass of muscle that soon would float that mass of fat across his body, turning the tables, and making Reno face the hot, hot summer sun, over the long hot driveway, next to the school.
Next that same slender girlish voice screamed, "Oh, hit him, hit him Chick!” and she combed her hair back with her fingers to get it out of her face, it was falling into her eyes: her nervous little hands fiddled on as though about to arrange a mass of entangled curls.
Chick Evens, prior to this, who had been forever uncertain of his life and stand in the neighborhood, was no longer under pressure by this peculiar gang, he had not thought of himself as in anyway part of his life being part of this neighborhood where he had lived now for five-years, but now it was, like it or not.
Amongst all the kids (twelve to twenty or more) of Donkeyland but one had come close to him, Allen Pitman, his mother owned the grocery store (a tall thin boy, of the same age, fourteen). With Chick Evens, and Lorimar Williams, Allen had formed something like a friendship. Lorimar’s father was a top Chief at the St. Paul Hotel, he had helped Chick and Lorimar get jobs for the summer, out in St. Louis Park, a friend of his father who had now become a full fledged chief himself. In years to come, Lorimar would follow his father’s footsteps, and become top chief, of a well known railroad, and be even honored by the President of the United States. As Allen would as an adult become an Air Marshall.
Chick, Allen and Lorimar, sometimes in the evenings drank beer down in that decaying porch attached to the garage, and they’d walk out along the streets linking to Cayuga Street, and within the empty lot getting intoxicated with beer and wine.
Now as the old man, Anton, Chick’s grandfather walked and paced his living room floor, looking out those side windows, up and down Cayuga Street, alongside his garage, that was alongside the empty lot, his hands moving nervously about, he was sure his grandson would become nothing but a bum, if not a drunkard, he shook his shoulder hoping he wasn’t right, maybe the Army would draft him before that happened, he deliberated, put aside the neighborhood, and give the boy a break in his life.
Well, besides all these tidbits of informal information, one night, Lorimar and Chick Evens come together and spent the evening sleeping of all places in a carrot field. Let me explain this further: they had an idea to go for a night out and sleep in the fairgrounds, and get drunk and in the morning, go on back home. But at 2:00 a.m., the police spotted them all snuggled up like snails in the corner side of a building, told them to beat it. And now they had really no place to go, and walking home—down Snelling Avenue and then down Larpenteur, in those days, the University of Minnesota was doing some farming, in consequence, they found a field to rest in, a carrot field, drank the rest of their wine and passed out in the field like two hobos. It was easy I suppose, there was no tall weeds or climbing rail fences nothing like that, just sleeping in the dirt with the carrots, alongside the road leading back into the center of the city. For a moment he stood—as a result of their predicament—rubbing his hands together and folding his fingers between each hand, and cracking his knuckles as he did this, looking up and down the road, to see if any police were about, and perhaps wishing they were back inside that dilapidated porch, at least it had a porch couch in there, although the pillows one sat on was plastic, it would do for an evening.
In the presence of Lorimar Williams, Chick Evens, who for five-years had been the neighborhood mystery (and of course you know now, he no longer was), lost something of his timidity, and his obscure personality, inundated in an endless road of uncertainties now within the neighborhood, who came forth to look at the world within his neighborhood’s eyes: now, with his young friends at his side, he ventured in the light of day and into the dark of night, into cars and garages, and strolling Cayuga Street or tramping up and down on the rickety old streets connecting, back into that old garage porch, and at times in the empty lot where Indian’s Hill was, in its background, with its forest like wooded area, also by his grandfather’s garage, these were his drinking and smoking and fighting areas, and he did them well, excitedly.
The voice of Jackie Saint John, his somewhat girlfriend, had been low and they saw each other off and on—but nothing steadily, as he now saw other girls he was attracted to, like Nancy Pit, and Kathleen Bird, a twin, who went to the same High School, Washington High, off Rice Street, a mile or two away, and younger sister to Ace, also known as the Big Bopper. But to him they were all wriggle fish, fish that returned to its home brook, or would get lost in the lake if you blinked your eyes, or swam away down the Mississippi River if the pickings were better (not all that far away): especially, if you weren’t around daily to watch them, pay them attention: everlasting attention, it was how he felt, lived.
Perhaps striving to put into words his feelings, and not able to, he now put into drinking, his mind had accumulated long silences and indifference.
Chick Evens talked much with his hands; his strong expressive fingers, evermore active, evermore striving to conceal whatever was bothering him, if not expressing themselves visibly, then inside his pockets or behind his back they’d go, forever, like machinery out of motion, similar to his friend Jeff Lindsey, who liked his drinking as much as he did, a few years younger than Chick—whom at this time was nearer nineteen (as an adult, Jeff would sober up, like Evens, but it would take a decade or two).
The story of Chick Evens younger life is a story of arms and feet, and hand moments, and drinking, and fights and girls. God was there, but like his grandfather, I think was pushed back someplace within those vaults within his mind. And all this other restless activity was pushed upfront, as if it had some real meaning, value; he was perhaps to the demons of his grandfather, their new imprisoned bird: and alcohol and drugs, and such a lifestyle, assuredly helps things along. Although at night, he still was that same obscure poet, who wrote twenty-two poems by the age of nineteen, had a few published in his school newspaper (i.e., “Beyond Man,” and “Typing”; and in years to come would get them published in a local Minneapolis newspaper and beyond those years, in books), his neighborhood never knew of this, and in years yet to come, would be poet laureate three times over.
Those hands were expressing at what his mind couldn’t, those alarmed feelings. He wanted to keep them hidden, those feelings hidden, away and looked for quiet in a noisy world.
When Chick Evens made a fist and beat with them upon the face of those who wished to build their reputation starting with him, the action made him more comfortable in the sense it was a high, relief, he didn’t have to express now, it was all out of him, done for him: God save, he save and he did. By and by, what alcohol did, fighting did better—and so he started to learn Karate and sparring (or in the dojo fighting; this again got his hidden, if not frozen anger out). If the desire to talk came to him, so be it—that also could be used for a high. Walking was used for thinking, all the others for hiding. It was how it was, how it formed, was still somewhat of a mystery, hard to say.
The story of Chick Evens’ arms and fists and drinking is worth a book in itself. Understandingly if it was brought forward it would bring into play many strange, and eerie, if not obscure qualities in the young man—if not defects or unwanted and undesirable behaviors, in which he’d have to get rid of in his older adult life if indeed he wanted to mingle with the cream of the crop: the scholars, and clergy, politicians and so forth of the world, but he was not much different, any more that is, than perhaps those other young boys and girls and growing young men in that neighborhood at that point in time, in his life—they were similar, like to like. It is a job for a poet to sort such things out, perhaps that is why Chick Evens became a poet, although the poet was already born in him, it had not risen to adulthood, maturity, refinery or for that matter, gained the love and wisdom it needed to transform words into love and wisdom: he had not yet, pulled the roots out of: philosophy and theology, and psychology, and eschatology, and all the other …ology’s available, and although the breeding had somewhat engendered in him: it was still sharp pointed, if not downright barbarian at times (he would need the tears of the world not the anger of his Donkeyland neighborhood and its roughness—although, that in itself—his or this, inadequacy, was his stepping stone to epistemology: his gaining knowledge, to find out how we come to know what we know, how it is acquired, to future knowledge: and living among the many, the poor and the rich, in far-off castles, and barracks, and in dugouts, and in war’s lonely abodes.
In Donkeyland it was first his muscles, and then his feet, and then his arms and then his fists, although all attracted attention, merely because of their activity—his poetry was still being written on the sideline. With them—his neighborhood gang—Chick Evens had went in life as high as he could. These new activities became his distinguishing features, the source of his fame. Also it made him an intangible individual. Donkeyland was proud of him, in spirit anyhow; he had won the race with a trot.
As for Lorimar Williams, he had many times wanted to ask about being a chief with his father, like his father, to his father, but never did, I mean, never face to face did. At times he formed an almost overwhelming curiosity on how to make this and that—in the food preparation area—and showing Evens his father’s newspaper clippings he kept in the garage, his father never guessing he had such a desire to be like him, to emulate him in his life’s profession. But as time went on, He felt that there had to be a reason for this strange activity of wanting to learn, that inclination to keep hidden recipes he was making, and he gave his father that growing respect a father wants, that a son keeps hidden inside of him, from blurting out the question—“Do you think I can be like you?” in time the two were walking and talking in the same fields: in the same language as they say (a figure of speech), and then Joe Williams retired, but even after his retirement from the St. Paul, Hotel, he worked occasionally. And his father told him: “If you want to be like others in this neighborhood, fine, you’re already here. If not, get out of it, and learn my trade well—you are anyhow,” and he set him up as an assistant to a chief—an old friend who had a young friend already in a chief’s position—as a result, his future was carved.
Mother and Paper Dolls
((Part Five: concerning Elsie Evens
and Earnest Manning) (1920-2003))
She was a young white (Russian, Polish) girl, and had a little ski jump for a nose and her hands were strong. Long before the time during which I knew her (having not been born yet), she was a meatpacker working at SWIFTS’ slaughterhouse, in South Saint Paul, across the Mississippi River, from the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, and drove to work in a green 1950-Chevrolet, owned by her longtime boyfriend, Earnest Manning, and they’d often go on long rides on the weekends through the streets of St. Paul, up by to or towards the North Shore, and thereabouts. She never married him. Later on in life, after her father Anton had passed on, and his monies left for distribution, she had purchased the large house they (Anton, Elsie and the two grandkids, Elsie’s kids) had lived in, by giving up her portion of the inheritance.
As a young girl she was quiet, hard working, had lived with her several sisters and brothers (two) at St. Joseph’s orphanage after her mother had died in 1933 of double-pneumonia. Her hair was darker brown than light, and to many people she seemed very stern, and strong and at times outspoken. Everyone in the neighborhood wondered why she never married Earnest, who also worked as a painter like her father, and he worked out where Elsie worked, at SWIFTS Meats.
Her hands and knuckles were extraordinarily large and had a rough and scaly surface, reddish with harsh looking scabs, due to allergies she assumed and the doctor assumed and called Eczema: a term for different types of skin inflammation (dermatitis). And it brought on a constant itchiness, forming the redness rawness that went deep near the bones; at times her hands looked dry as a desert well, irrupted by soaps and detergents, cleaning products, lotions and creams. Once on a hot day in July, in 1987, she prayed she said, and thereafter—now a new born Christian—forever more, she forgot all about having Eczema, it had disappeared never to return: as would be the case to her forty-years of smoking cigarettes one after the other: acquiring emphysema.
Donkeyland had forgotten—or perhaps never took into account—the older folks of the neighborhood, but they never bothered them either, there was an unspoken code, one you never talked about, you just lived it, knew it existed, and it implied you never talked back to one of the parents of the gang members of which perhaps there were thirty or more, or stole from them, or hurt them in anyway, it was near to the unpardonable sin: the seeds of something very awful. And as I say this I must point out two occasions, and only two that I ever heard of: Reno one morning stole some tools from Mouse, and it became so unbearable for him to live in the neighborhood, he voluntarily brought them back, but a scarlet mark was pinned on him forever (that was back when Reno was starting to take drugs, alas, in time he’d be sent to prison for that very reason, and that is where he’d die). The second case, was when Lorimar Williams’ brother, Bryan, tried to pull the air conditioner out of Anton Evens’ house, Elsie spotted him as she came home from work. Because of his mental deficiency, the police was not brought into the case, and it was hushed up—somewhat in the neighborhood. In any case, he was the clown of Donkeyland; I guess we all have them. He’d run after a car in the winter, any ole car, grab onto its back bumper, and take a skiing ride up Cayuga Street free, and when the car would stop, and the driver reprimand Bryan, Bryan would stand like a statue listening, and the man or woman, or whomever, giving reprimand, would start back up the road, Bryan would again grab that bumper. The boys just let him grab it when they drove about, giving him a whirl of a trip.
He never really had a girlfriend, and when he did find one, got her pregnant, she left him, and he went into his father’s garage one day, started his father’s car up, locked the doors, laid under the car’s frame and went to sleep forever. Two weeks before that, he asked Jesus into his heart, Chick Evens prayed that day with him.
For many years Elsie acquired a few friends, some from her childhood school years, others from work, but mostly it was family—she was quite selective in this area. Sometimes around Christmas, in a playful or talkative mood, she’d tell about how she got her paper dolls for Christmas—back when? It was all her father could afford, and mother. But she’d talk briefly on it; not wanting to blather on old sentiments, like her Russian father, the laughter was short lived.
The story of Elsie Evens and her forty-year courtship with Earnest Manning—(tall he was, with a thin mustache, and hair combed back) of which she became his unspoken companion, is a very curious story. It is at best awkward, and at the same time delicious, in a way, like the twisted apple tree that grows everywhichway, but produces nice sweet apples. Thus, in the orchards of Donkeyland, she was the only one perhaps so independent. Had it not been for Mr. Manning though, finding a house in his neighborhood for sale, for Tony—Chick Evens’ grandfather, to relocate, because the state had ordered the old man off his own property, to build a complex of houses for the poor, the whole household would not have moved from Arch Street over two miles to Cayuga Street. It was that simple. Somehow it all seemed senseless, in that the State of Minnesota, or better put, the City of St. Paul, took from the poor to give back to other poor folk—there’s no Robin Hood here.
The death of her father had set a train of new ideas, and thoughts for Elsie she was now more independent than ever before, perhaps not to the liking of Earnest. Her children now grown up, she found a new passion. She talked to her passion and allowed no one to interfere, she became a born again Christian, and there was a strained eager quality in her voice to set things right with Him, between her relationship with Earnest in particular. She told him, as plain as it could be told, and as blunt as any reserved woman could tell it, in a Christian like manner that is, that if she had to pick between Jesus Christ and him, it was Jesus Christ (no contest), that either he was to marry her, or break the relationship off. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, as I make it sound. And in his eyes, he looked devastated, he was ten-years her senior, and growing old quickly, drinking picked up after that, and he died in 1990, perhaps three years after that statement, proclamation, perhaps of a broken heart, and a swelled liver. He just could not marry her, plus, his children of which he had three were set on not letting the money escape their presence: as so often the story ends.
In any case, the two had become different, no longer were they much alike, each other in their own world you might say, and not much room for God and Darwinism. Earnest did say one prayer one day over the phone with Chick Evens, and forgot he had said it a week later, he had asked Christ into his life, and let’s hope he meant it.
The Mud hole
((Part Six) (Concerning, Roger, Shelly, Doug, Mike, Chick and Ace, 1960))
He was the son of a hard working German, Roger Landsmen (like Evens’ grandfather, old man Landsmen had changed his name some, to match to the English language, and to go with him, it seemed to be common back in those far-off days). East, by southeast, in the neighborhood, was a bridge in the process of being built, the city was building it over the main street, called Mississippi Street, which was at the Far East end of Cayuga Street. Below this area, and down near where the railroad tracks were, above were the bridge was to be, was a mud hole, large as a small swimming pool you might say. Chick Evens was thirteen at the time, Roger sixteen, going with Shelly, who was fifteen, the cemetery caretaker’s daughter, the prettiest girl in town, or the neighborhood anyhow. Tall, long blond hair, and nice blue eyes, and a healthy looking body to boot.
This was the boys’ new recreational area. Roger was young and wild, and Shelly was kind of new in the neighborhood, quiet, reserved, smiling all the time, inclined to be silent, not that she was shy though. And this one late afternoon, Gunner, and Evens and Mouse, and Doug and Ace, Jackie, and Roger with Shelly were down there swimming, Roger swimming and playing with Shelly, tossing her about, and kissing her and so forth.
Nothing ever turned out much that summer at the swimming hole, except getting drunk, and Roger showing off to his new girlfriend, but this day he must have had odd, if not delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain, and he wouldn’t come out of the mud hole and we all didn’t know why. Doug hugged Shelly some to get him jealous, to have him come out, but he just wouldn’t and we all drank our beer as Big Bopper sang his song of “Twenty-four black birds baked in pie, and when the pie was ready…so on and so forth,” dancing and clapping his hands, and making those odd faces with no teeth, and dribbling saliva from the mouth like a dog, thus, no other worldly developments took place, then we all looked at Roger, he was walking out of the mud hole with his under shorts on, and it was as if he had a big stick stuck in them, and he couldn’t make people understand he had no control over it, and Shelly was struck dumb for the moment, as if she was thrown against an iron wall.
I suppose it was one of those many things that kept things turning in Donkeyland; and so us young folks gathered and smoked our cigarettes and talked among one another wondering when he’d get settled down some, and it took a while.
(Roger, more known for his womanizing than his drinking, died at the ripe—but not too ripe—old age of sixty-five years old, sitting in his sofa chair, said to have had a heart-attack, he lived his life the way he died, with his overworked heart.)
The Quadruple Knockout!
((Part Seven) (Donkeyland; and the Cayuga Street Gang; 1960))
Told By Chick Evens
I really couldn’t say for sure, but what I remember was we all stopped playing baseball in the empty lot, and walked over to the new kid standing somewhat in the way of the players; he had moved in by Ernest Manning’s house, his first name was Buddy, can’t remember his last name. He had a white tea shirt on that day (a muscleman shirt they call it), looked pressed and real clean. We were all dirty from playing baseball, all but him that is, and he looked too clean for us, so we tried to ignore him, but he wouldn’t let us. It was the summer of 1960, I was thirteen years old, almost fourteen, in three months that is. And Buddy was all of fifteen and half a-foot taller than I, but I was weight lifting, and had fourteen inch biceps—plus. It was a hot and dusty day there in the empty lot, and somehow we all were called into Buddy’s little interruption, he wanted to tell us something, and he did:
“Anytime, anyone of you guys want to fight me, I’m ready,” and he said it loud and he said it clear and he said it with a smirk on his face, and he looked ready, but he wasn’t ready, at one moment he even looked as if he was going to walk away at the same time, everyone talking among themselves over who got to fight him, and here is this guy standing there, as if he was Bruce Lee, or just got through watching his program, or perhaps cowboy movie, where the man step out and wants to fight the toughest guy in town—to let everyone know, not to fool around with him, you know what I mean, to imply his the dude (but he was the duck).
All of us boys were saying amongst ourselves, almost as if in a football huddle talking who was going to tackle that guy:
Voices in all directions saying: …me, me, I’ll fight him. No, let me fight him; me…ee…let me have him…. Echoes from all directions
Jack, my close friend at the time, wanted to fight him bad, he was always hyper, and he was real comfortable with the idea at first, but he didn’t do anything, he just talked. The train of guys (or so it seemed), were all standing in that empty lot around him now, I among them, Indian’s Hill to the side of us, Cayuga Street in back of us, and him in the front of us, everyone gambling for the right to punch him out, or try.
Jack said, “Let me take him on,” then started cussing as he usually did, but he didn’t throw a punch, as he listened to the other boys argue with their hands gripping into a fist modes; the lucky guy would be me, and I was heated up, and I was ready to go, to do it.
Doug, and Roger, were there, Larry (the tough guy of the neighborhood) was not, he most likely—had he been there—most likely would not have hesitated, and the guy would have been hamburger, he would have thrown the first punch, and the fight might have been over before the guys stopped arguing over him. And so the dispute was with us. And the more the confrontation went on, the more I wanted him, as if he was the prized bull and I the matador, and he stood there like a bull, wanting anyone to charge, to come to forward, not waste his time. So I figured—it should me be.
Now there was a circle around him as I said before, and he stood quietly, stone-still, as everyone wagered for the right to fight him, and everybody wanting the right to fight him, but nobody fighting him, and I looked, just stared at him, saying to my mind’s eye, what am I waiting for. I had been weight lifting, had several fights before, but was no tough guy, not like Larry Lund, anyhow, but was getting a reputation—somewhat.
“Can’t I have him,” I said, and everyone looked at me, I mean everyone, and they looked at one another, and Buddy looked at me, and he shook his head okay, as if it was okay for me to fight him, and when he took one step forward before he even put up his fists, just that one step, I grabbed him and threw him on the ground like a runaway chicken who knows his head is coming off with an ax soon; and I never stopped punching his face-in until someone grabbed me off of him (I think it was Jack): lest I make him hamburger.
I suppose I was waiting to show the boys what I was made out of; this was a chance, they’ll tell me later how I was—I figured. But I had lost control somehow, a light went off inside my head, I didn’t like that, it was dull youth telling me to fight I presume, and I had won the fight, light on or off it didn’t matter to me, yet in years to come this would be repeated somewhat in other fights, to win was the main thing, and once you started, took that leap forward, you didn’t stop until your opponent was down and out. But was it unfair? I mean I jumped the gun; didn’t give him a chance. I didn’t look at the Golden Glove Rules, and I think Buddy did, none of us neighborhood guys did, I just punched, grabbed, and I didn’t squander any time in the process. He was perhaps a better puncher than I and he expected me to punch his way, so he could march onto victory, and I knew my fight would have to be by strength, surprise, push and force, and then a relentless number of punches, perhaps four, or double even that, but as most fights are, it is that first solid punch often, and if he was a puncher, I’d never got a second chance, to do what he expected to do, before my first punch was thrown, and I knew that, and down he flew like a raging bull to the ground.
Brother:
One of the Boys
((Part Eight) (concerning Mike Evens, summer of, 1961))
Mike Evens, the son of Elsie Evens, was tall and plump and his face was smooth, mannerisms were quiet, but shrewd. Although he was but sixteen the obscure neighborhood had put a fire into his veins.
Elsie (the boy’s mother) thought of the neighborhood and the boys who lived there within, around them, looking at her son, feeling defeated at times because of their influence on him, if not down right done for because of his changing behavior in the house, as he entered into his teens—in particular, seeing him turning out to be more like all the other boys day by day, consequently feeling—God forbid.
For Mike, in which he had just begun life so hopefully was now a mere ghost of what a household should be, in that a son should spend some quality time in it, so his mother would have said had someone asked her, and so she felt, because she had mentioned it to Chick Evens in passing, more than once. As he’d come back at all hours of the night into the house, through the streets of Donkeyland drunk he’d somehow find his way, he sometimes stopped and turned quickly about as though fearing the police, the common tick self inflicted, for those in the neighborhood—in those days, the boys, spirit of Donkeyland, this was the night he ran away, well kind of, left the house to live among his friends in the neighborhood, and now that he had made that forward, and foremost step, at times you could see him aimlessly walking the streets of Donkeyland (it wasn’t like he took off to go to Detroit or Chicago or California), “Damn such a life, damn it!” he sputtered pointlessly after a few weeks to his brother, coming home taking can goods to eat, his brother Chick thinking how unprofitable running away is, and forever pledging to his mother to not run away, not that he had to but it all was so ungraceful, disorderly, his brother was looking more like a ragged carpet than a healthy strong brother.
Between Elsie and her one son Mike (the older of the two sons by two years) there was a deep unexpressed bond of incomprehension, based on an adolescent genetic fiber that had long ago died within Elsie. In the son’s presence she was timid and trying to understand, and remained reserved, but sometimes while he hurried about the neighborhood intent upon his roustabout life, she went into her room and closed the door not knowing what else to do, frustrate. If she knew how to pray she most likely would have, but in those early days, she had not come to the cross, was likened to her boyfriend, Earnest Manning, and like Mike, all three agnostics, if not atheists.
In the boyish figure she could see something half forgotten that had once been a part of herself, now being re-created, perhaps mismanaged, although he had paper route, and was a hard worker, and would be so all his life, she sucked in her pride, perhaps said to herself “I will somehow and in someway, keep defeat from you, even if I have to die trying.”
Here were two deep souls with determination that shook the foundations of the household. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists, next time she saw her son, “Okay,” she said, “what is it that you want.”
“I will come back,” he declared, “if I can stay out to one o’clock (in the morning), like all the other boys!” His curfew was now 10:30 p.m., as was his brother’s.
“No,” said Elsie, “people work in this house, and they feed you and cloth you, and to demand it the way you are doing is unfair, but I will go along with twelve midnight, not a second beyond. And if that is not good enough, well then, I’ll call the police and you can deal with them from here on.”
He had won a victory, and he knew it. And Chick overhearing this, figured he’d take anything that fell his way. He didn’t get the midnight curfew, but he did get 11:00 p.m., and at sixteen, he’d get the midnight curfew, it was the same curfew the police had for teenagers, without parents, roaming the streets at night.
Pausing hesitantly, Elsie stared about the boy. She knew she had to let go of the reins, she had tried to be mother and father, the boys not having one, but successful she was only at being a mother, no woman can really take a father’s place, even though they may think otherwise, but there was Earnest and Grandpa Anton, for male role models—and they were descent hardworking folk, just not God fearing, and old Grandpa Evens swore pert near to every English sentence he spoke, although mixed with his Russian, it was hard to distinguish exactly what four-letter word he was trying to say, but had someone took note, he could have written up a little black book of his bilingual creative new language.
The commotion within the household between Elsie and Mike, now ceased, in a way, it was on the surface a proper thing without meaning.
After that she did not worry along those lines anymore, but tried to forget the contest between son and mother, it seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, wonderful and not so wonderful in its intensity. In the beginning, when her son would come in to eat, or on the weekends, they sat in the kitchen or other rooms in silence, making perhaps each other feel, ill at ease, being both tongue-tied. And then as usual, the darkness come on, and the boys went to their attic bedroom, and you could hear the evening train coming in, leavening over across the street by the steel factory. In the street just below their window, which separated the boys’ beds, you could hear feet tramped up and down, and familiar voices, and cars racing back and forth on Cayuga Street. And then Mike would fumble through his pockets to see if he had the hundred or so car keys he kept, and sneak out the window, jump off the back kitchen porch, and go find his friend Gary Lindsey, whom was called Mouse, and they’d go find a car, and go for a joyride. And Chick could hear their voices laughing, and then a few hours later, laying perfectly still in bed, limp, Mike would come back the same way he left, but now sick with alcohol, making his way back to bed as if trekking the Rocky Mountains, drooping over this and that, hitting his long ape like arms against everything. And mother would on occasion say:
“I think you both had better get to sleep up there,” her bedroom was at the bottom of the steps.
Mike Evens, in time would turnout to be the more ambitious son. He had always thought of himself as a successful man, truck driver likened to many of the neighborhood boys, in particular, Mouse and David Myers both good ole boys, and for the most part, everything he had done, seemed to turn out successfully. Elsie wanted her son to succeed, and in her eyes, and his eyes he did, but she did not hold the same hope for her other son, to the contrary for Chick Evens. It even came to the point, in years ahead, when Chick was in his late teens, eighteen and nineteen, his brother would come with his truck, have work for him, tell him, “I tell you what, Chick, you’ve got to wake up, not sleep you mornings away, come help me with loading and unloading the truck, you can make some money” he said sharply.
And if the hangovers were bad, he’d fall back to sleep, if not so bad, he’d go to work—a kind of laissez-faire situation (in this case meaning: free of restrictions). And often times half the day, He’d go along for hours not hearing when he was spoken to just acting, going through basic motions, “What ails you?” His brother would ask. Although his work was fine, he was numb from the booze. And Chick laughed good-naturedly, “Well, I guess I’ll sober up by the time I’m done here,” he’d said. And so it was in those days.
But like his brother, Chick had that family definite determination, where mind and soul and body and spirit are not easily defeated. He was the son you know of the hard-hearted woman of Donkeyland, so they called Elsie at SWIFT Meets, where she worked, in the slice bacon department, for twenty-two years. And that took determination also, the result of long years of quiet and rather shrewd thinking, having to be both parents to both boys. “Now,” she told herself, “now I can rest.” The boys were now old enough to stand on their own.
The Candy Counter
((Part Nine) (Concerning: Bill Kapuano and Chick Evens; First Job, at the Show House, 1962))
Told by Chick Evens
To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be standing behind the candy and popcorn counter at all, but during the summer before I was sixteen-years old, I had sought for employment downtown, and met Mr. Henry Blackhead with my friend Bill Kapuano, Blackhead being the manager of the World Theater at the time, and I was offered a job there, and had taken it right up to the end of summer of that year.
Mother was delighted and my brother Mike, not sure what he was doing, but he had some kind of income, he was going to be eighteen, come October, of that year—1962.
To be honest, I couldn’t find another job; there just wasn’t any other work to be got. A strong fellow of fifteen couldn’t just hang around the house all summer long and I had got too big to mow people’s lawns and sell newspapers, and shoeshine, which I had done in the past. I used to lay awake nights thinking of getting this black 1950 Ford, thinking up ways to buy it, without any criminal activity involved, and in my old neighborhood (called: Donkeyland) there was a lot of that stuff going on around me.
Mr. Henry Blackhead and I got along fine. He was a short middle aged fellow, perhaps thirty-nine, give or take a year or two, with a lazy extensive soft looking body, in a black suite and tie, kind of big eyes for his head and body, a little droopy stomach, I doubted he’d be much in a fight. But he was a fair man to work for. We even stood behind the ticket stand a few times that stood in the middle of the air-conditioned corridor, and talked about trivialities for the most part.
I suppose you could say, Mr. Blackhead, taught me how to work as an employee, my first boss. How to sell candy, give out change, smile at the customers, clean the showroom area, a lot of valuable things for any young man to know who never had worked a regular job.
Gee whiz, when I think on it now, it was fun. You got a free seat in all the show houses in downtown St. Paul. And a fair price for candy and soft drinks and popcorn at your place of work too. The job, once the show started left you a lot of time to hang around and listen to the popcorn machine, or talk to the manager, or to one of the other two employees, the ticket taker, and so forth; everyone chewing the fat, a lot of chitchat going on.
There was a lot of discipline involved I suppose, stuff you could use all the rest of your life, if you had some sense and overlooked what you heard and saw, and felt.
And then at the end of the summer, I bought that black 1950-Ford, with my friend Bill, he came down to the show house to fetch me, and Henry was short of help, and I was supposed to get off at 4:00 p.m., and Mr. Blackhead looked over worried perhaps it better said, overcooked, etc., etc., if you know what I mean (he was short of help, and he felt a shade helpless).
“Gee whiz, Gosh almighty,” he said to me, when I was about to leave with Bill, “you can’t leave, I need you now, until closing, a double shift,” so and so didn’t show up.
I guess I knew he was going to come to me with that story. But Bill said the guy was waiting for me to buy the car, and he was going out of town, and I knew Mr. Blackhead was in no mood for any kind of story like I had, he’d simply be dissatisfied with anything I’d have to say, and I started to walk out, said “I got an appointment.”
First of all I went down and talked to Bill, and he and I walked about like two dudes or hoods, as it might have been referred to back then, in those days, Bill having a black leather jacket on at the time, and I told him I had only $40-dollars, and the car was $60-dollars, and then he borrowed me ten-dollars, and that would just have to do for the car, and it would be enough, Bill pointing out a few things wrong with the car, to its owner, so the man decided to lower the price some.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked my boss. I looked up at him by the little door he went in and out of, his office; the very one he often just stood around and watched everything happening within the theater. I didn’t care for how he said what he said.
“I’m going, and you can stick your job up…!” and I gave him some sign language” that said what I couldn’t say. I guess he knew where I got my formal education.
“Let’s get going,” said Bill to me, and that was that (although I did come back a week alter to pick up my earnings.
(First Job, at the Show House, 1962)
ACE
(or, The Big Bopper)
((Part Ten) (concerning Ace or the Big Bopper, and the boys, summer of, 1958-68)
Jerry Bird was a large man of pert-near, six foot six inches tall, with a drooping mouth, no teeth, broad shoulders, weighted perhaps two-hundred and twenty pounds—depending on what year we are talking about. He always wore wrinkled cloths, well not always, but often—so he’d appear in dirty waistcoats, hidden in his pockets sticking out were cheap cigars when he moved about they showed—known as stogies (more like: cheroots, since they do not taper and are less expensive, or cheaper than stogies; nowadays everyone calls a cigar a stogie it seems). His false teeth were seldom around when he needed them, he’d forget them, have Roger Landsmen drive him home, pick them up, so he could eat, although his gums were as hard as nails: he had irregular eyes also, something strange about his eyes. The lids of the eyes twitched, more often than not, perhaps too often; it would close, tightly down and snap back up as if mechanical; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were sunken headlights, window shades.
Ace, had a liking for the boys, I mean, hanging around with the boys, he was ten years Chick Evens’ senior. Actually, he was everyone’s in the neighborhood senior. It began when Chick had become one of the boys, and started his drinking, I can’t put an exact date on it, but it was around 1960, when Chick started his light drinking, and Ace, Big Bopper, was buying booze for the boys, and getting drunk with them: at which time, Jerry was more an acquaintance with most of the self ruled gang, but it was simply a matter of time, in the making, before he’d be one of them. He was, for the most part, short witted, that is to say, slow minded, or slightly backward. A good ole boy though. Often, up at Rice School, when the boys were drinking, behind it, he’d dance and sing “Twenty-four black birds…baked in a pie (and so on and so forth)…” and he’d dramatize it, and it was a hoot.
In the late afternoons, Roger Landsmen, or Doug Swords, would drive Ace to the liquor store on Rice Street; Cayuga Street was off of Jackson, a main street in St. Paul, across from the Oakland Cemetery. And Rice Street was parallel, but on the other side of the cemetery. Roger, lived across the street from Evens, and his brother Ronny was the same age as Evens, Roger being three years older than his brother. In any case, the owner of the liquor store got to know Ace pretty well in those days, and when the booze was gone the boys went to the two corner bars off Jackson and Sycamore (Brams and the Mount Airy), saloons some of the boys would spend their whole lives in. And when the place closed up at 1:00 p.m., Ace would slip in at the backdoor of the saloon and buy a number of six-packs for the boys, of course with their money, Ace seldom had money, but he had the assets to buy it, and so he was always welcome to come along and drink it, and he surely did drink his share of drinking.
Ace, and a few of the other boys, began drinking wine and at times combinations of drinks, such as: sloe gin and soda water, and so forth. They even got to breaking into trains down by the steel company, in back of Roger’s father’s apartment, breaking the Federal seals, off the cars, and taking a weekend supply of beer, finding a hole to drink it in, and that was the weekend.
Jerry Bird liked women, like everyone else in the neighborhood (if there was anyone to the contrary, no one knew about it), but seldom found a lasting relationship, he was not the most handsome guy in town, and had reached the age of thirty. He imagined one of the neighborhood girls to have fallen in love with him, in which she didn’t, but it renewed the youth in him. Mary Aldrich most sensualist, she enjoyed talking to men, and was not all that honorable with keeping a relationship, and for a season for hours at a time, she’d lingered about at parties and at those two local bars, playing up to Dan Wright, and—you got it, Big Bopper.
The saloon keeper was a short, broad-shouldered Italian with peculiarities, and would slip you a Mickey in your drink (LSD or something of that nature) if you got too mouthy, or he simple and plainly didn’t like you. That flaming kind of sense of humor got him shot one evening, when he opened up the backdoor to sell a six-pack of beer.
In any case, Mary was playing one against the other, she liked men fighting over her, and as I said, sensualist she was, but plain looking. As they (Mary, Ace, Dan and David Rye) stood outside an apartment having a party with several other guys and girls, arguing and fighting over Mary—David trying to calm the situation down—rubbing his hands together from the cool fall air. Dan grew more and more excited: it was as though his mind had been dipped in blood that had dried and washed out, he wanted more, and it was called revenge for being pushed aside by David Rye (a huge sort of a man, but with a little more reason capabilities than Ace), and Mary for telling him to go his own way, and it was Ace he was mad at. Dan was a small plumb sort of guy—perhaps as round as he was tall (not well liked and not at all handsome), often called “Crazy Dan,” and thus Crazy Dan, went home, and pulled out of his father’s closet, a shot gun, ran back to the party, and aimed it at Ace.
As David Rye stood by looking at the red faced Dan Wright, as Dan tried to talk to his woman Mary Aldrich, who really was not his woman, she wasn’t anybody’s woman, and she sat looking out the apartment window, frightened. And the shotgun went off, but it wasn’t Ace who got shot, it was David Rye.
The police appeared immediately after the death of David, and Dan who had disappeared, was captured by the Highway Patrolman, four hours later, hitchhiking, or trying to catch a ride to Wisconsin, across the Minnesota boarder, as if it was Mexico and he was Pancho Villa. His lawyer somehow convinced the jury, and judge, the intent to kill wasn’t there, he was so convincing, so much so, that Dan got only four-years in prison. It seemed to the neighborhood boys, if you had your eyes open, you got life in prison for killing, and if you closed them you got a much lighter sentence. There of course is reason for that: a blackout, an accident of the trigger-finger. The reason does not justify the act, but in fact, it matters in the long run—amusing, eh?
(Last time Evens had seen Danny, was in the 1990s, working at one of the city’s parks under an assumed name. He had called his name out and he’d not answer and then approached him, and confronted him, “It’s it Danny, right?” and he admitted was then, and that he was afraid to use his old last name in fear he’d not get a job, his reputation proceeded him.))
Everybody Knows
(Part Eleven)(Concerning Chick Evens, Lorimar Williams and
Howe the Police Officer, 1963))
LOOKING cautiously about, Lorimar Williams arose from sitting on a case of bottled beer, in the back of Rice School, about a block away from his house, up on Garnet Street, by the Pitman Store (it was owned by an old Jew that often went to Israel, and had retired a few years back, and sold the store—probably went back there to live for good, he talked about it enough; the first time the old Jew mentioned he was going to Israel, and said to Evens he went every year, Evens had thought how amazing to be able to travel like that, it was as if Israel was on another planet to him…), and he and Chick Evens had went hurriedly out from behind some bushes as the police spotlight shinned on them. The night was warm without a single cloud in the sky, and the stars were everywhere, and although it was not yet late in the night, perhaps 10:00 o’clock, the police were checking out the neighborhood, Howe, the cop was driving the squad car, and he had a helper (in years to come, he’d get a presidential accommodation for his long enduring work he had done in the most troubled neighborhood in St. Paul, called Donkeyland, where a hundred cars a week were stolen, and driven up and down Cayuga Street and all the crisscrossing streets there about).
Evens was sixteen-years old, and Lorimar, a year older, and they were half snapped, Lorimar made it down the embankment, and his house was right there, he hid in the old porch attached to his garage. The police car drove all the way down the alleyway to the back of the school, and Chick ran like a team of wild horses towards the Pitman store, in the darkness he stumbled by a black sedan in an empty lot that was alongside of the store, and rolled under the car, to hide from the police. A dog jumped from under the car, and when the police shinned his flashlight in that direction, seeing the dog run away into the night, Howe thought: from what?
Ace had bought the case of beer for the boys, and took his share, six bottles, and went to another party—elsewhere. The young man was nervous under the car. All evening he and Lorimar had gone about their drinking, he was in a kind of daze. Now Howe was out of the car, and his flashlight going everywhichway.
In the darkness Lorimar waited for Chick, walked along the edge of his property, looking up he could see Rice School, he looked about carefully and cautiously. He had left the screen-in door open to the patio-porch, in case he had to make a quick run to hide from the police, but they seldom drove up that big driveway onto their property, and surely they’d never tumble down the hundred foot embankment—from the school back parking lot to his home property below, or backyard.
Howe leaned downward, said earnestly: “I know you’re under there, are you coming out, or do I have to drag you out?”
Chick Evens wiggled out from under the car, jumped to his feet, the light came onto his face. “Oh,” said Howe, “you’re one of the Evens boys, right?” He had known everybody in the neighborhood, and Chick’s brother was of course better known, and Howe was just trying to connect the dots, and making sure they were in line.
“Yes,” said Chick, “I’m the younger one.”
There had been no immediate decision. He had just jumped to his feet, and the other officer, younger officer hurried up to Howe’s side, not sure what to do, but eager to do whatever had to be done, so it appeared:
“We’re going to take you home, to make sure you get home we’re going to give you a lift, I know you’re not one of the trouble makers, and we’re going to be through street after street tonight, so it is best you stay home, avoid us because if I pick you up again tonight, I’m taking you in, now get in the car and shut up.”
He crossed and re-crossed the roads going down to Cayuga Street, even though it was but down a block, and to the right a half a block. When he passed a number of street lamps he slowed down, he saw other faces, familiar faces, Ace was walking home, drunk, and a few of the older boys, the Tashney’s and the Hinos all of age to drink. He did not dare think his mind was too blank, too drowsy, and sleepy. “Why not bring the kid down to the station, and put him in jail for a night, teach him a lesson?” questioned the other younger officer in the car to Howe.
“Everybody knows these neighborhood kids drink like fish, we’d be taking them in every night—if that’s the case, and I’m looking for the troublemakers.” He said, and left it at that, and the young officer left it at that.
“Thanks for the ride home, Howe,” Chick said as he stumbled out of the squad car and up the fourteen steps to his doorway. He was learning life gave him some small breaks, and in years to come, they had seemed to be bigger than what he thought originally.
The Fifteen-hundred Pound Horse!
(Part Twelve)(Concerning: Don Manning, Andy and Chick Evens, September of 1962)
Minnesota State Fair, a Hoot!
It was mid afternoon at the Minnesota State Fair, it was late summer and three of the boys from Donkeyland: Donny Manning a tall thin bean like boy, with long arms and long legs, (Earnest Manning’s boy, the same age as Chick Evens, fourteen, nearer to fifteen), and Andy, a small boy, light on his feet, and that looked under fed, and hobo like, also the same age as the other two, had bought their tickets to the State Fair, went and seen the fat lady, and two kids stuck together ((Siamese twins) (at the so called freak shows—respectfully)), and poked around the midway area. The day had been clear of clouds, and it was drenching hot to the point it was sticky, dusty and sweat rolled off them like Niagara Falls, under the passing sun, setting their skin ablaze, they all wanted to cool off.
As they walked about crowds filled the stands, the games, the hotdog huts, and candy frost carts, corn on the cob on a stick, and then they went to the corral, where the horses were, and cows and nine-hundred pound pigs were parading around, some laying around, all trying to get their blue ribbons, and right behind them was the University of Minnesota farmyards, lustily filled with madly looking beasts.
“Want to do some horseback riding?” Don says to both Andy and Chick.
“How’s that possible?” asks Chick. Noticing thoughts seemingly kept coming into the head of Donny. He stomped impatiently, “Well what is it?” He said, looked sharply about, then into his eyes.
“Well, I know what he’s thinking,” muttered Andy, “he wants to ride the horses in the University corral, as we did it last year.” And then Donny spoke up, “There’s a hole in the fence, used to be anyhow, between the fairgrounds and the university, was there last year at least, let’s see if it’s still there—if so, then we can go riding.”
They pushed and squeezed their way through the masses of people at the fair, all anxious and alive for a new adventure. After they had gotten to the fence, crawled under it, and into the corral, there was the biggest horse Chick had ever seen—the size of two large horses, with white tubes in its side, and upper thighs. The horse looked old and a little tired, set apart from the other two who were spunky and half-tragic figures. This was Evens’ horse for sure, but he was a mountain of a horse, if only he could put a rope around his neck for a harness, and climb that big, huge, wide beast, perhaps fifteen-hundred pounds.
To Evens’ mind, his new sense of calamity, adventure, and excitement of riding this horse-beast, set him apart from his comrades (for the moment anyways); he had to be first on the horse. It was a feeling that took possession of him, and he grabbed a barrow and jumped on it as Don throw a rope he found (somewhere) around its neck, and with the help of jumping off the barrow and Don and Andy pushing on his feet and butt, he rolled onto the wide back of the horse.
There is a time in the life of most every boy, when he first takes into consideration, it was better left alone, perhaps that is the moment when he crosses over from the fact he is no longer indispensable, the horse jerked up and kicked back, and Evens rolled off him like a sack of potatoes and landed on his butt bone and it near cracked. And now Don and Andy weren’t sure if they were up to it. But Evens stubborn temperament forced him to say: “It’s still my turn; this beast is not going to beat the shit out of me!” He said this loud and clear, and with a voice calling the horse some awful names. But when he approached the horse, he whispered to him, as an imaginative boy might, “Let’s be friends, sorry about the name calling,” and patted him on his snoot. And perhaps the old horse understood, because he cooperated this time, as Evens mounted the horse, and rode him around the corral, and all those harsh thoughts disappeared into nothingness, looking from atop the horse he could see the countless figures—like colorful dotes—at the end of the fairgrounds, also some of the larger rides in the midway, and then he looked at the old horse, and a sadness of some boyish sophistication came to him, perhaps it was both of their afternoons, his last ride that the old horse would ever give, and the first ride that made the boy think, more of the horse than of his pleasure—consequently, self-interest was pushed aside for a momentary glance at the horse, and his needs. There is a time and place for each person to step aside and look beyond them, perhaps sparse, if not scarce, to the majority of the world, especially the younger world, but until one does, he or she remains congested in a confined bubble.
He knew somehow, that the horse knew (or thought he knew), that he must live and die, in uncertainty, a thing the horse was destined to do soon. Perhaps even before the sun went down that day: who’s to say; the near fifteen years the lad had lived already, was but a moment of his life expectancy: breathing the air and taking up space among all the other billions of people on earth, and maybe the horse somehow knew this—too.
Then a man came out of the barn, broke the train of thought, “All right you kids, get on out of here, these horses are sick!”
With all his heart he didn’t want to leave, but he had too, he really didn’t belong there, and he felt sad that he might have caused the horse some stress and damage: he touches the horse on his mane; he prefers at that moment to be a horse, that is because he believes that this horse will be gentle with him, has been gentle with him, he’s old and wise, that he will understand him, or try to, and perhaps that is what he wants most of all.
Integrity & Treachery
((Part Thirteen) (concerning the old folks, and Soldiering,
Larry, Richard, Tom, Mary: 1959-1970))
In Four Pieces
The Old Folks
Donkeyland had its old timers as well, they were always around, you just never seen much of them: Mrs. and Mr. Stanley, the old man had retired in 1959 from the Railroad, died in 1964, lived next door to the Evens, and to the opposite side, by the Williams, they’d sit on their front porch in the front part of the house or puttering about in the backyard garden by their garage, the old man had bought a new 1959, Rambler, his pride and joy, and if he wasn’t on the front porch, or in the garden, or thereabouts, he’d be washing or waxing that Rambler, he did it more days than he drove it. They were good ole folks, busybodies, the boys in the neighborhood called them, but in reality they just minded their own business, and watched everybody else’s.
On Agate Street, a few streets over from Cayuga, Aunt Mary Clemens lived, of the old people, a sister to Anton Evens’ deceased wife (Ella), she was in her late ‘70s. They were—for the most part, an uninteresting, soft voiced lot. Then there was Anton, who always looked old to his grandson Chick Evens, he was in 1965, seventy-four years old, a silent—if not grumbling—old man with thin white to brown hair who befriended the only Blackman in the neighborhood, and because of him, the boys didn’t cause the Blackman any trouble. But the Evens boys were questioned by the local gang members, voices saying “Why’s your grandpa catering to niggers?” But it was left at that.
Then Chick’s grandpa, that year, 1965, after the state surveyed the empty lot, finding out his garage was halfway on state property, he had to move it to the backyard, funny the old rickety, lopsided board outer-covering didn’t fall to pieces in the transfer, over a loose framework on an old brick foundation, and a dirt floor. It was I would guess, a small horse stable, from the ‘20s.
It was—at one time— the empty lot and all, next to the Evens’ garage, that a number of houses that now remained around it, were but a larger cluster of houses joined together in a rather random comportment twenty-years prior. Now, inside, the empty lot, the one Ernest Manning had cleaned out, and cut the grass, with his own lawnmower, and picked up rock after rock, the boys now had made a baseball diamond out of it, and it was no longer just a drinking hole. Earnest was also becoming one of the old folks. He was in 1965, fifty-nine years old. Planning early retirement, he was a painter from the slaughterhouse out in South Saint Paul. And Joe Williams, and Roger Landsmen’s father, were all planning their retirements too.
So Donkeyland, as the police nicknamed Cayuga Street, and all those streets that seemed to connect to Cayuga—invisible or not, and that empty lot, and the turnaround that was next to Evens’ house, was a place full of surprises. At one moment all was quiet, then doors began to open and cars roared, and that is how Mike Evens got his nickname: Gunner, he would gun his car, and rip up and down Cayuga Street with his black 1940-Ford as if it was right out of the Marlon Brando movie: “The Wild One” with its big engine, and all one saw was a streak, and you could heard the pilling of rubber being burnt off his tires—even if you were watching television in one of those houses on Cayuga Street—as was the case for Gary, nicknamed: Mouse. The neighborhood grease monkey (or backyard mechanic, and clock man, he had old clocks he worked on likewise). And the old folks, would stare out their windows, and Smiley, out his window, he was not one of the old folks, rather a new—younger lad—in his early to mid thirties, who had bought a house kitty-corner from the Evens, a big bulk of a man, with a nice family, with children, who never smiled, and one day, all the neighborhood kids were gunning their cars, and making noise, and the police came, and the police left, and the police came, and there just was no end to the game of the cat chasing the mouse: you know what I mean, when the police came, all was quiet and dandy. And Doug Swords, a rowdy, and well build fellow, looked like the wrestler Crusher, back in the ‘60s, strong as a bull, was boastingly, clattering with several of the boys, in front of Smiley’s house, about four years Evens’ senior, not paying any attention to the noise he was making, matter-of-fact, annoyed that Smiley had called the police. And then Smiley came out, and we looked at this big bulk of a man.
Down the few stairs he came, a murmur from his soft voice arose, and our eyes appeared to be listening more than our ears, to his dozen or so obscure words, and he walked up to Doug, who was standing on the corner edge of the sidewalk, an inch from the street, “I’ve already mentioned this to you,” he told Doug, who at that moment looked a bit dull-witted, “what do I need to do to make you understand, there’s a limit to my patience!” And he pulled out a revolver, it looked like a 38 Special, and he aimed it at Doug, pert-near shoved it in his mouth, “Next time, I may pull the trigger,” he said, and turnabout, and walked away.
The War Years: and Soldiers
By this time the Vietnam War had started, it wasn’t long before everyone in the neighborhood was talking about this unknown country, some place in Asia, no threat to America, but it was loosely said: if we don’t stop communism here, then where? The Korean War had been over for ten-years or so and World War Two, for some twenty-years. And in due time many of the boys in the neighborhood would go to war, or off to some other place for soldiering. First was Evens’ friend, Joe Parker, a new kid on the block, he was eighteen, got killed that year in the jungles of Vietnam, he was the only one that Evens knew who wasn’t drafted, he wanted to go to war. Then there was Bill Kapuano, he survived the war, but when he came back found out his wife was seeing his brother, that didn’t stand very well, but they didn’t divorce; Terry his older brother, looked much like Bill, and so there was an immediate attraction there. And in 1985, Bill was killed by an electric current, while working at that steel plant, near the railroad tracks, in back of Roger Landsmen and his younger brother Ronnie’s house (Ron, for short, he and Evens hung out for several months or so, back in 1965, driving his 1960 black Chevy Impala, up and own White Bear Ave, and Cayuga Street, looking for girls, as if they were on Route 66). And Jack Tashney went off to war (another friend Evens hung out with, and they’d also drive about, in his 88 Oldsmobile, the white knight, showing off, and trying to pick up girls), and Jack came back mentally messed up forcedly had sex with two of the neighborhood girls, causing some commotion, and almost landed himself in prison. In Nam, he ran over a cluster of Vietnamese village folk, who allegedly on the road, were trying to escape the Vietcong, and ended up, maimed, dead or wishing they were. Evens went to Vietnam in 1971, and came back a better man than when he left, used the GI Bill (for education purposes at several universities) until there were no funds left in it for him. Pat Grains (the strongman of the neighborhood, the one who inspired Chick to start weight lifting, the one who lost his girlfriend to Doug Swords, when he went into the Air Force, she couldn’t wait, and got pregnant), never saw any war action: and Larry Lindsey the tough guy of the neighborhood, was serving his time in the National Guard. The others—more or less—got married before 1965, and hence, were allowed to avoid the draft, as for Gunner, and Mouse, and Reno, and all the other boys. And as for Ace, he had flat feet, and I would guess, would have gotten deferred if not from that, from mental incompetence. And Lorimar had flat feet, and Bryan was in the same category as Ace was, mentally.
Indian’s Hill
When Earnest Manning had cleared away all that thick foliage and bush, and rubbish from the empty lot, and the boys started playing softball in it, and there of course was no ownership of the place, much of the harder part of the work of clearing had been done, but the boys clung to old traditions and helped the old man out, Earnest, and after a few weekends, widened the lot, clearing even more, and picking up even more rocks (burning the trash and burying it in a hole, with the rocks), and now behind them was a big hole where a house used to be, another small lot and Indian’s Hill, so it was called. Many of the streets and areas in that local had Indian names, Minnesota is famous for the Chippewa Indians that had once lived in the area, and called this place home— a few hundred years back.
In the fall those trees on Indian’s Hill, were a drab color of a colorful rainbow, most beautiful, and through most of the winter the hill was used for sliding, back in the late fifties and early sixties by the neighborhood boys but now, now in 1963-’65, they were no longer kids, it was used as an escape route for the boys, when the cops chased them, or it was used for drinking parties. It became for a while there, the Sleepy Hollow, of Donkeyland.
Several young men were drinking on Indian’s Hill this one evening (Ace doing his little dance singing “Twenty-four black birds baked in a pie…” he had forgotten his teeth again and you could see his gums, and his eyes popping out and a few of the boys were saying, “Come on Ace, come on, put more into it,” and Ace jumped up and own and just like he was crazy and everyone laughed and had to hold their stomachs, and then he’d stop, and ask for a drink, and god forbid if you gave him a bottle of wine, it would be gone in three gulps), Evens sitting down in the lot below listening to all this, with Ricky Grains by his side, Pat’s younger brother, and two years younger than Chick—the best chess player of the gang; Chick half snapped on a case of beer, the other guys drinking hard eating heavily, a bonfire going, a track of greasy food, a few girls: Jackie, Jennie, Nancy, and Mike’s future wife Carol Landsmen, a relative to Roger and Ronny, and a few others were there, and a few of the boys were passed out this night, slept like tired beasts on a bed of grass and leaves and straw like weeds. Into their lives came a little excitement, and it would end up being not the mild night they had planned, two squad cars came down Cayuga Street, stopped at the empty lot, jumped out, with clubs in hand, and brutal and outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal—and wanted blood.
It was Saturday night, Evens was fifteen, and the cops ran right by him, up into Indian’s Hill, and there was a squad car full of cops behind, on the other side of Indian’s Hill, there they all stood, the boys were all dressed in overalls flecked with dirt and grass stains: their hands as they stretched them out to fight—making fists, the heat of the bonfire crackled with red sparks. It was difficult for them to talk and so they for the most part kept silent, and Larry cold-cocked one of the police officers, he dropped back like falling timber, and then another one, Larry was fast like Clay, the boxer, and his punches stunning. And they grabbed him as the others got away, and pulled him into the squad car, and brought him down to the police station; beat the crap out of him on the elevator.
When they had brought him down, they had also brought Evens down, he was drunker than a skunk, and he had just kept sitting on that case of beer, as if it was the Lost Treasure of the Incas. And then when the day came for his mother and him to face a juvenile judge, he told him (the judge), face to face, “I want to go to Red Wing, that boystown, or reformatory, where you got my brother,” and that was when the boy saw his mother cry for the first time in his life, the hard hearted woman from SWIFTS Meat, out in South St. Paul, where she had earned that reputation, melted like butter in front of her boy and the judge, she just couldn’t hold it back any longer.
Consequently, the boy was sent to a juvenile pre trial waiting correctional facility, called Woodview, and that would be for two weeks, and it would have an influence on the boy, never to return again. When the judge visited him, he asked, “Now you have a very light taste of jail, what do you think of it?”
Chick Evens could no longer keep suppressed his dismay, he was breaking up inside of him, he hated being locked up (he now even had sympathy for the zoo animals, encaged). A kind of crude and animal-like poetic justice—he felt, oh he deserved it. Intensity took possession of him, and if not released, it would be a long and bitter struggle for Evens. When all turned out well he emerged from his incarceration, placed in the custody of his mother once again, and went back to High School, as though nothing had happened.
Fire Alarms, Girls and Victims
Then the neighborhood had been well for several months, things died down suddenly, and it must have seemed to the police the boys altogether were discouraged in causing trouble, even though there was still a raid of stolen cars in every parking lot in St. Paul, racing up and down the side streets of the neighborhood. Chick was seventeen, going out with a girl called Barb Ergot, fifteen, from Johnson High School, who everyone at Johnson High School seemed to know, and she was originally a blind date, one Sid Molar had fixed up for him, Sid was going out with Eva, a East European girl, who had now been in America ten-years, of the same stock, both short, both with bronze skin, both very attractive, and both knowing it.
At this time, the new pranks were to tie up a few of the boys, onto the fire alarm boxes—in the neighborhood—that were fastened onto the towering electric poles and pull the red lever inside the box and wait for the fire engines to come, and run like hell. They did that so much one summer, they took the red box out of the neighborhood—once and for all, never to return. The victims to this sport, was Allen Pitman, and Richard Zackary. Richard would become infamous in just a few years—thereafter, like Tom Fauna, would be, both would end up in prison, for raping girls within their homes, Peeping Toms of the neighborhood and other neighborhoods, and Richard’s old man, his pa, he talked of selling the house, moving out of town it got so bad, he had to put a second mortgage on the house, and then when things look good for his son, he was caught again doing what he was under suspicion for doing the first time, and thus, whatever kind of suspicion was considered by the jury, now became fact beyond a doubt. He would tie the woman’s hands to the bed, and rape her. Sometimes all day, other times all night, when he knew the husbands were out working, truck driving cross country; when they neglected their homes; when the husbands got so drunk and forgot to come home.
A Classical Winter in
Minnesota
(Part Fourteen)(Concerning: Chick Evens, Ralph, Mary and Peggy, 1962)
Saint Paul, Minnesota winter Carnaval Days!
Young Chick Evens got out of bed in the wee hours of the morning, it was mid winter, and the trees in Minnesota, and in his neighborhood and downtown St. Paul, were covered with new snow; all along the residence streets in St. Paul When the wind started blowing, the light snow off the top of the old hard snow would be blown off to a new location, whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a carpet under everyone’s feet. All the winters were pert near the same, although this one would be different. The St. Paul, Winter Carnaval was going on, the torchlight parade had taken place, and they had built the world’s biggest Ice Castles in lots and in different locations throughout the city, in years past. It was to his knowledge the largest festival in the nation, and oldest, and coldest, and he often went to the center of the city for those cold but thrilling toboggan rides down Cedar to 10th Street, from the State Capitol.
In all respects, it was a classical winter, and Evens was fifteen-years old, just got his driving permit, not his license, and he was with Ralph Eldritch, and Mary Aldrich, and a girl named Peggy, Evens had not known, she was with Ralph. And they had been drinking, and they were on their way to Gray Cloud Island, to visit Ralph’s sister, drunk as skunks, reeking with booze. Since early on that evening both Ralph and Evens was drinking.
Light had climbed high into the sky, stars still shone as they drove mile after mile outside the city, beyond the last visible house, on a lonely road, the Mississippi River to the side of them, some great stretches of open fields, fields owned by farmers, old corn stalks showing above the snow, it was a cold, cold winter, and a dark evening, and the little light the moon gave was just a crack in the sky.
Evens had been in the center—seemingly so, of a great open place, on this winter’s night, and the curves were sharp, and slippery, and everything covered with snow and only that moon with the crack of light and those dim stars—I’ve already mentioned, along with foggy headlights to guide him, and a bleak wind blew on the car—you could hear it as it slapped the side of the windows, and it vibrated, and blended in with the loud music, but outside, had you stopped, it was silent, nobody around, “Hey, you sure you can drive this tank, these roads are thin, and sharp—slippery, I’ve been here before, they can get treacherous…” said Ralph.
Chick came around a shape corner just then, and straight ahead was an incline (a slant to the curve), an embankment of some thirty-feet forward and beyond, and he slammed on the brakes to make the curve he had been going too fast (not the thing to do) and the car jerked and slid, and they were all carried like a kite into the wooded embankment, trashing through the bushes and trees like a huge elephant, until they slammed onto the icy Mississippi River. The river was hard and likened to a platform, everyone knocked out, and the car that stood taller than Evens, or as tall, or near as tall, was pert near, three feet shorter.
Evens now woke up and found himself half in and half out of the car, and the ice cracking. Now he stopped to look about, “Bad luck!” he said, and pulled Ralph, out of the car first, and then the two girls…and nobody was damaged that bad, thank God, only a few concussions, and a nightly checkup cleared the girls of their dilemma, as Ralph and Evens walked the few miles left to his sisters house, and the girls had found a ride to the hospital: although the phone call Evens got from the girls mother the following day was a bit unpleasant.
John L
((Part Fifteen) (concerning John L and Chick Evens 1964-1967))
John L, a story of a boy, teenager, young man from the neighborhood with such amazing contradictions, throughout those Donkeyland years related to Larry Lindsey, the tough guy of the neighborhood, played a lengthily part in Chick Evens’ life back in the early to late ‘60s. So, if Evens were writing this narrative, it would be described as thus. The girlfriends he had up to the one he’d marry, Karen, were loose and wild, fickle like him: full-blooded, but not thoroughbreds. It seemed at times John didn’t belong to the neighborhood, he didn’t live there-–never did—but he was always there. Like a stray dog, a boy with long hair, crazy eyes, and a jaw that was more pointed than square. So here was a boy who made you laugh, and had a warmhearted life with drinking, and drug taking and snuffing out life for a thrill, knowing him, was worth living for.
The first time, Chick Evens really got to know John was at the turnaround, the boys wanted a show, and provoke John L to fight Chick Evens, and Evens ran into the dark of the empty lot, knowing, there was no way to win (a lesson well learned at nine years old that you don’t fight a friend’s friend, or relative, and expect them to standby and watch get bet beat up, they get involved), in this case, with his cousins all about him, especially Larry. Once alone in that empty lot with the tall grass and the moon over head, he stopped, turned about, and John stopped abruptly—too, now both face to face, near shoulder to shoulder, no defense around John, just him, and his opponent and a half-amigo to be. And they fought, and the fight was short lived, Evens throw him on his back as if he was a sack of potatoes, and was ready to clobber him with his fists, when John pleaded for him to halt, stop. And he did. And when they walked back together to the turnaround, he said (and he said it with earnestly, out of goodwill) “You best say I won, or they’ll kick the shit out of you, especially my cousins.” And so it was. That was back in 1964.
And then there was the time in the turnabout, John was getting a beating, that is in short, beat up, badly from a stranger in the neighborhood, he had tried—unimaginatively—to beat this guy up, who was drunk and had fell to sleep in the backseat of a car, and it turned on him, the stranger was on top of John, hitting him like he was a rag doll, and he yelled for Chick, and Chick Evens came to the rescue, he grabbed the boy by the back of his hair, pulled it back—neck stretched out like a chicken, and Evens hit him solid a few times in the face: the stranger was built well but Evens was built like a gorilla, and he had no choice but to released John to protect his face lest he be mash potatoes before it was all over, and now Evens was on top of the stranger, took the fellow off John and beat the shit out of him. And when the boy pleaded he had enough, Evens as usual, stopped the massacre.
And then there was the time in the local neighborhood bar (Brams), when John was feeling his oats, and was with the motorcycle gang, “Hell’s Outcast,” and he threw a chair at Evens in a booth, whom was with three other folks: Jennie (Larry Lindsey’s future wife), Karen (John’s future wife), and Larry himself, along with Chick, who hit the chair in the air as it descending overhead onto the booth with his elbow, and it boomeranged back towards John, and you could see on John’s face disappointment. And then the police came, and Evens had to save the day once again, by pushing John into the cab and down onto the floor, “You guys see John L?” the police officer said.
“I think he went out the back door of the bar,” Evens said, when in essence, he went out the front, and right into the taxi. And then a summer or two later, they—John L, and Chick Evens—up and went one morning to Long Beach, California, and that’s another story.
The Fighter
((Part Sixteen) (Concerning, Larry Lindsey and Chick Evens, 1966-67))
It had been a deep cold winter, and the streets of Donkeyland were frozen over with ice, Chick Evens was renting out the upper apartment on Granite Street from Larry Lindsey and his wife Jennie. The duplex was right across from the steel company, which behind that was the railroad, and Larry was working for the railroad at that time. And that morning, the wind sprang up and blew snow everywhichway, on Granite, and Acker and Sycamore and Jackson and Cayuga, and Sims streets. Covered smooth, fairly smooth all the places coverable and what wasn’t frozen with snow was frozen with mud. Evens had his space heater going full blast, and drunk as a skunk in those days, he slept with the window open and the gas stove on, and that perturbed Larry, “I’ll give you the gas bill next time if you don’t turn that damn thing down,” he said; and of course he turned down the gas.
Evens kicked his feet dry coming in the door to walk upstairs to his apartment, met Larry at the bottom of the steps going out, young Chick Evens, who had nothing to do, was glad to have bump into Larry without Jennie with him (whom of course was a close friend likewise, but guys will be guys, and she wasn’t one of those): Larry, who was on a two week vacation—I think it was a forced vacation for many of the railroad workers in those days, they had to take it during the winter season when things were slow, or not at all. In any case, Larry’s evening was open, and his day was open and his morning was open, and he left to get drunk with Evens, telling his wife he’d be back after awhile, and bring some hamburgers back with him when he did come back. Fine, but here he built some trouble, a fire under Jennie’s feet—figuratively speaking, because she’d be waiting for those hamburgers. And Larry wouldn’t return for three days. He had talked to his wife with great earnestness, and really meant to come back sooner than later, but during the drinking, and the parties—and Evens’ black girl’s enchantments, and Evens showing his black girlfriend off in Nigger Town, as they called it back then (Rondo), and going to after-hours joints every night, and sleeping wherever available, there wasn’t anytime to go back home.
To Evens it was all the same, he was single, and had nothing to do, was glad because he did not feel like working that winter anyhow, and collected unemployment, paid Larry a hundred-dollars a month rent and slept the night and half the day away. But Jennie was searching high and low for her husband.
Here started a friendship that would become stronger. When Larry had moved from Granite, to Acker, Evens one summer, after returning from a trip from Omaha with Jerry Hino, rented out Larry’s attic, gave him $700-dollars to buy insurance for his car, then Larry torched the car to collect $2500-dollars insurance. A nice profitable sum for a days work; it wasn’t all that unusual for such happenings, it was as it was, do it to the other guy (in this case company—because they always stick it to you anyhow) thus, do it first before he thinks about doing it to you, something like grabbing the cheese off the table before the mouse get to it, something on that order.
On another occasion, an older person was looking for Evens—back around 1960, and happened to run into Evens and Larry and a few of the other gang members, down in the side lot next to Roger’s house, and when he said, “I want Evens,” Larry ran after him to kick the shit out of him. Larry was kind of the protector, the bodyguard for the neighborhood, and got that respect in return.
It was only once I had ever seen Larry beat in a fight, and he was drunk as any drunk could be, and in a little confined area of a basement, and several huge football players came in looking for him, because he had beat the crap out of a loud mouth, who evidently was part of the football team. And Larry couldn’t get the room to fight, and John L tried to fight, but was pushed into the brick wall, and down he went like a wet rag from a snapped clothesline. Once Larry got out into the backyard, fresh air hit him, he got back into his fighting stance, but the guy didn’t want to fight anymore, and thus ran and jumped into a car, Larry picked up a two by four longer than he was tall, over six feet, or thereabouts, and crashed it into the window of the car as it spun out of that alleyway—amongst the snow and ice, slipping and sliding as Larry pounded the car—kicking it with his feet.
Larry was no prize fighter, but he had it in him. And incidentally, when he did return home, after those three days missing, he brought a bag of hamburgers, and that is when the real fight started.
Ideas of a Young Man,
And Girls
(Part Seventeen)(Concerning: Chick Evens, Nancy Pit, and Girls, 1964)
In Two Pieces
Chick Evens lived with his mother and Grandfather to the age of eighteen, the Grandfather being of Russian stock, with a peculiar pallid complexion. The house in which they lived stood on an embankment with huge trees beyond where the garage was, in Donkeyland. And Ernest Manning had a daughter Jill, and Jill had a friend by the name of Nancy Pit. And it was the summer of 1964, and they met that summer; Nancy was one year older than Chick, and her parents were from Hibbing, Minnesota, she was of Irish stock, as was Evens, Irish, Polish and Russian that is.
At this point in time, Evens’ life was like a tiny if not modest volcano that lies silent, but could abruptly shoot out fire. No, he wasn’t quite like that—he was more like loose cannon, rolling around freely on a ship in a storm, subject to outbursts, one who walks among his fellow men with that strange and uncanny state of affairs on his face, eyes staring and mind seemingly in a tugging mode.
He was similar to that, built with smooth and rolling muscles, only that this new visitation that descended upon him: Nancy Pit was a mental and not a physical thing to him yet, and she seemed to quiet his insides. He was beset by ideas they could be in love—as the long hot summer rolled on, the idea of love, not sure if it was really his idea, but it could come to near uncontrollable states. Words rolled and tumbled from his mind, but never came out of his mouth. A strange grin came upon his face when they lay together over upon Indian’s Mound, in the high grass on an Indian blanket, the edges of her lips seemed to paralyze his face, she actually glistened in the moon’s light. She wanted to make love, but Evens feared he’d get her pregnant, and end up having to marry her. And although that wasn’t a bad idea, at his age there’d be no escape. The excited girl breathed into his face, peered into his eyes, milled upon his chest with a shaking body, pretty much demanding and compelling attention, and she got all of that, but not consummated love, in its complete form, and I would guess, her hormones were going wild, kicking wild.
In those days the neighborhood was full of girls and Evens was doing his share of dating once Nancy Pit had gone back to her hometown. She would within a few years, marry and have children, and Evens would never see her again. It would be, eighteen months, and he’d meet Barb Ergot, and they’d date for a summer season, and she’d join the neighborhood gang, and they’d marry for fifteen months, and that would be the end of that marriage. It would seem, looking back, those who married from the neighborhood, their marriages lasted the longest—among the neighborhood boys; on the other hand, those who married outside of the neighborhood, their marriages vanished in a much shorter time. Perhaps there is something to that.
The Girls
David Myers, would marry one of the neighborhood girls (and it would last to the end of his days, a forty-year marriage), by the name of Nancy, and Roger would marry a girl from outside the neighborhood and bring her inside of it (that didn’t last). And Jill Manning would marry someone outside of the neighborhood, and good for her, she was getting a bad reputation in Donkeyland. Oh she didn’t do anything any of the guys wasn’t doing, but she was doing it, and started doing it at a young age. And there was Pizza Face, and everyone was screwing her, so it seemed, and she was laughing at everyone, and she was as ugly as the top of a pizza. Evens had never seen her, and had asked, “Why is everyone screwing her, and calling her such an ugly name?” and Roger and Doug took Chick Evens to the corner of Cayuga Street, waited for her to ride by, and when this young girl rode by on her bicycle, one of the two said to Evens, “Well, what do you think?” and Evens replied, “I understand now…” he replied, but he couldn’t understand why they were screwing her, if that is what they thought of her. But in time, and through maturity, he’d learn, even an ugly duckling, as long as she was female, had something someone wanted; and the only other prerequisite was patience.
Vicky Schultz, also got that same kind of reputation like Jill, but somehow got out of Dodge, before she was scorned to death. Evens used to go over to her house, back in 1958 thru 1960, she was a few years older, and wasn’t a bad looking girl, and they both took a liking for one another. As did Kathleen Bird, Big Bopper’s sister, during the High School years at Washington High. She was a nice looking girl, and had spunk, and a nice shape, she might have been an inch taller than him, if not the same size as Evens, but kisses was all that arose from that relationship, and a long term friendship.
And Larry married Jennie St. John, and Mouse married Jackie St. John, and Sam, Larry’s younger brother—thin as a bean, mellow, married another Nancy, who lived on Cayuga Street, across from their home. And Sid, who had been dating Eva, had stopped and was dating some woman outside of the neighborhood named Jody, a short Italian looking girl, with big hug breasts, too huge for that little body of hers, and during their separation, he went out one evening with two other guys to Hudson Wisconsin, driving back from to St. Paul, all three drunk as skunks, got themselves killed.
White Castle Hamburgers
A strange Story
((Part Eighteen) (1965, the dating Game, at Lubor Road, concerning Barb, Sid, Eva, and Chick Evens))
…he rode through the city with his friend Sid in his 1955-dodge his parents had bought for him, through the crowded city he drove, to have Chick Evens meet a blind date he had fixed up for him. It was Friday night, and the moon appeared to be rising and falling, they both had a few drinks, both were seventeen-years old. Sid drove outside of the city where there were open fields and hidden roads, with his part time girlfriend Eva up front, and Evens with his blind date, Barbara in the backseat, with her bronze Italian skin, and dark thick hair.
“Well,” said Evens, to Barb “do you like what you see or not?” she, Barbara turned a little pale in the face, surprised he was so forthright. Against the side of the car were thick and high trees, they could not be seen from the distant highway they had rode out to a drinking spot the boys from Cayuga Street (Donkeyland) often used for drinking—Lubor Road, out in the country, in the thick of woods, down a dirt road, near some farm land.
“Yes,” she said, “I like what I see!” He moved her over to the corner of the car, “Will you be uncomfortable here?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she remarked.
“Sid seems not to be wasting anytime up front there,” said Chick, he was making out with Eva. Chick put his hand on Barb’s shoulder.
“You can start kissing me if you want,” said Barb, nearly two-years younger than him.
He shook his head, “Sure!”
“What did Chick say Barb?” asked Eva.
“That you and Sid started making out already!”
“Isn’t he observant!” said Eva.
“How do you like it out here?” asked Sid to Chick, opening up a can of beer.
Chick looked out the side of the car window, somewhat blocked by a tree. “Well, I don’t mind it I guess,” said Chick, then Sid replied—“…except it’s a long ride back if we both get too drunk.”
The woods were dark; the road had left the highway about a mile behind them, the radiator was hot and boiling, Sid had to turn the car off, it was fall and a chill was in the air as well as in the car now. Eva looked annoyingly and suspiciously at the sounds the radiator was making, the engine silent now, “I hope we can make it back safely,” she said.
“Certainly,” Sid said.
Eva wore a short skirt and a loose blouse and a light leather jacket. She leaned forward against Sid, pushed her breasts against him, and smiled. She smiled seemingly on both sides of her face, because it was clear to Chick as she turned the good side toward him. She had a charm and a good side of her face that always smiled, even when she wasn’t trying to smile. Her nose was small, and it looked very cold and firm he thought, taking good notice in her.
“You like me, don’t you Chick?” she asked.
“He adores you, and so do I,” said Sid, “now let him and Barb make- out (and she stroked her hair).”
“Tell Chick, Barb we have to go; I think Sid’s a misogynist, he took a bite out of my ear!”
“That’s an accidental love kiss…” Sid told her.
“Will you shut your mouth and take me home?” she asked. Sid went silent.
“Chick, will you get us out of here?” she was mad.
“Will you stop quarreling; let’s go Sid and take them both to their homes, so we can get drunk on our own, in peace and quiet.”
Two Weeks Later
Eva called Chick up asked to go out with him and they are now looking about for a place to eat…Chick stops at a White Castle Hamburger Café…
“I’m not Italian, my family and I we’re from Bucharest,” said Eva to Chick as they stopped at an outdoor hamburger place, called ‘White Castle.’
“I’m glad I’m with you and not with Sid!” remarked Eva.
“I don’t know why you say that?” said Chick.
“He’s dull…and irritating!” the young woman said.
“You talking about Sid as dull, he was trying to be with you, what did you expect from him?”
“Lovely place, couldn’t you find me a better place to eat?” Chick had ordered several White Castle hamburgers (you know those little things that take three bites and they’re gone).
“Oh, no. You eat them, I don’t want them.” Said Eva, as the hamburgers were brought to the car, and Chick pulled out a few for her.
“Ah,” said Chick, to the young girl, “here take at least one, I paid for them, I can’t eat them all!”
“No…you don’t understand,” said Eva.
“You want to pay the bill?” said Chick.
“Oh no, but listen, I want to go home,” she said.
“Every time you don’t get your way you want to go home,” said Chick.
“You can amuse yourself by yourself, I said take me home!”
“Just eat a hamburger or two, and in a little while I’ll take you home,” said Chick.
“Listen,” said Eva, “don’t bother to ask me again. I tell you these hamburgers are awful.”
Chick took a hamburger out of the bag, handed it to Eva, “Eat it!” he demanded (he loved those little critters).
“No!” she repeated, rejecting the offer with distain.
“Well,” he said, as he waited with the hamburger in the open palm of his hand for her to take, which she would not take, “Jerk,” she called him.
It started to rain, a few cars drove by them watching them quarrel.
“SMASH!—Smack!” the open hamburger in the palm of Chick’s hand somehow jumped by impulse out of his hand right smack into her face.
“Well, see,” said Chick, “you did eat it…after all!”
“Oh, yes, you son…of…a…b…! She started to say, holding back the last part of the word—foursome ward (expression).
Finally they both could see eye to eye.
“It’s gone now, I’ll take you home.” The hamburger was all over her face, on her dress and partly on the floor.
“Oh you’ve been gone a long time,” she said in a hateful voice. “I’d walk home but it’s raining,” she added.
She wiped the remaining parts of the hamburger off her face and skirt, and blouse, and then Chick took her home. The following day, he called Barb up for another date, hoping it would end up better than with Eva.
Interlude
Life to Evens was chaos: recklessness, especially in his middle to later teens, bitter and sweet, with bits and pieces of ugliness, comic, torches of trouble, incompleteness in the romance area, solitude in the writing area and he also found it in the drinking area, twisting hunger to know, and not knowing what he wanted to know. On the other hand, life was curiously breathtaking to him, yes, even with all its disorder, especially the unexpected, which sometimes turned out to be miraculous events and took on shapes he never would have guessed. Always struggling to adjust himself to it, and discovering his spirit on the way, his mind bound for his own innermost secrets, but with fraternal feelings towards the neighborhood, and looking beyond it. Donkeyland was his tiny world (unknowing it was tiny) before the dreamer found out the secrets he wished to learn; which in time would give birth to all that he would become.
Perhaps the resemblance of this work, these stories herein, little living things that flow from the fact that as a whole, represents who he became, these small elements of those teenage years of his, might show, boys who come with a wish to arrive at great accomplishments, must travel the road of disparity—the road less traveled: simultaneously, with whom he wishes to become, and whom he is. Causing the old boundaries to diminish on the long road ahead: perhaps the end fact, we need more emphasis, but this book is about his neighborhood, naturalism, and Evens himself.
▼
Something Unexpected!
((Part Nineteen) (Concerning RG, 1967))
From their embankment seats, sat RG, Doug, Roger, Ace, Chick Evens, and they were having a contest who could drink the fastest, and they had a case of beer and two bottles of Thunderbird Wine. The embankment was rough, the railroad below them, and Larry Lindsey’s house to the left of them, and Acker Street, just over the embankment, there they sat, in the dirt and foliage out of sight of the police, everyone had their heels kicked into the dirt, and the bottles of beer were being passed about like can fruit, then looking about Doug says to RG (the youngest of the group, and looking at a large hole in his pants, RG staring absentmindedly into the wooded area and along the railroad tracks below the boys) “Well, well, what can we get you to do tonight!” (More of a statement, than a question.)
Exclaimed RG, “Shut up,” then he jumping to his feet, and went into the high weeds and bushes, to take a leak. Then cheeringly and sheepishly, RG sat back down, and watched Ace having a contest with Roger, drinking the Thunderbird. And Roger drank a quarter of a bottle down, and Ace drank the whole damn thing, without a breath—and now he was singing his Blackbird song— gad forbid!
Now RG was looking at Doug, half snapped, a flush crept upon his face, his hands began to twitch. Evens couldn’t imagine what Doug was implying, and why RG was so frightful.
The distraught young boy, perhaps seventeen at the time, sat in the middle of all of them, Doug with a glare, RG not knowing, and not showing any special emotions, but just his presence now made him feel uncomfortable. “I don’t want rumors going all over the neighborhood,” said RG, “and Chick will not understand, so just leave it be.”
Sullenly the young teen stood up, tramped up the embankment, stood alongside of the road, with his hands stuffed into his pants pockets, seemingly a little upset.
“What’s up?” Evens asked Doug, noticing at the same time there was now mud that was formed on his heels of his shoes, and some clung to Doug’s shoes, and Ace’s.
“We all got drunk the other night, and RG did something raw,” and Evens really didn’t want to know anymore, it was making him miserable body to mind. And Doug really had said enough. And if it was a joke or if he had done anything of that nature, it was perhaps when he was stoned out of his mind, drunk as a skunk, and Doug or the boys got perverted in some way or manner, which normally they didn’t, I mean they had did some stupid things but nothing too raw, plus, RG, he was getting married soon, had gotten a girl a year younger than him pregnant, a pretty petit girl with blond hair, was looking at renting a small house on Sycamore Street, one an old couple had, and was moving to a Long Term Care Facility.
For a few hours more, everyone drank and got drunker, then when it got darker, then everyone arising, started creeping cautiously up the embankment to find another hole (local) to drink in: surrounded now by houses and street lamps, and RG simply said to Evens, “Nothing happened worth talking about, not really, you do stupid things when you’re drunk…please leave it be…” and Evens did—let it be, never asking the boys what he did or had done, and had he asked, they would have told him most likely; thereafter, he and Evens walked down the street at arms length, he was a good chess player.
The Drunkards
((Part Twenty) (concerning: Don and Mercy, 1965-1967))
Donkeyland had its drunks, I mean, chronic drunks, during these days of unpainted houses and over used roads in the neighborhood, Don Gulf, and Mercy Patterson, were the two biggest drunks (in just a short time there would be more to add to this ever-growing list, but in 1961, thru 1967, they were the most notorious).
Don spent his time drinking mostly in the bars or at his mother’s house on Acker Street, and Mercy, on his porch steps on Sycamore Street, all part of Donkeyland’s interconnecting maze. It would seem had you looked at them they spent their time talking and thinking of God or the devil or on the philosophies of life, but they were really in a stupor, a daze, half cocked, in a cage they couldn’t fine the door out of. They even proclaimed themselves to be alcoholics, and was so absorbed in destroying themselves, if not the God given idea of life itself, manifesting themselves into little abnormal children, making noises as they waved to Evens and all the other boys of the neighborhood, and especially Evens as he rode by in his 1959 Black Plymouth, in 1965. Only a parent could see what wasn’t always there, especially when they were children, for it appeared they were born with a bottle of whiskey, or wine bottle or some sort of alcohol bottle in their mouths.
It did occur—believe it or not—to Chick Evens, as he’d pass these two drunks, they’d never be successful in life; the one they were living was dull and seemingly endless passing hours and hours and hours, into seasons and years, that led into more drinking, harder then ever drinking, as each hour, and each day, and each year passed. If they succeeded in doing something it was not in giving a name to a rich and healthy life, or living such. And as I said, Evens saw this, but what he didn’t see, was that he was in the makings himself of becoming what they had already become— of being a chronic drunk. Perhaps he was too close to the forest to make a comparison.
One evening, when Evens and Don were at the corner bar, Brams, was its name then, Don had been in a long process of debauch—no stranger to it, and he came reeling along the pool table, pushing a few chairs to the side to get closer to the pool table to get closer to Evens, in a child like manner, mumbling some words, slurring them—his body shook, and when he tried to address Evens, standing behind the table, his voice trembled. It was misty and dim lit in the bar, as bars are normally, except for over the pool table, and now he was a short distance to Evens, and it would have seemed—and it was as it appeared— that he was holding in a prolonged blast, and like a whistle of a train, he barked—yelled, babbled it out, and made accusations concerning Evens, saying: “You’ve been screwing my wife!”
Evens became silent and seemed overcome by such a statement, even saddened, he liked Don, “I assure you, Don” said Evens in a soft voice, “it wasn’t me.”
Then in a hoarsely voice, sharp and even earnest, he said “Then who else?” And he started to chase Evens around the pool table, and Evens repeated, “Who said it was me?” Don was married to JoAnn St. John, the eldest of the St. John girls. Evens was going to stop and throw a side kick into his chest, but thought first: on such an evening like this, when he was so drunk and full of anger, and in a child’s behavior state, see if you can reason with him if not, then do what you have to do. Although Evens could fight, he never provoked, and if possible walked away from potential fights.
Don’s shoulders shook violently, he tried to smoke his cigarette, with trembling fingers, as he tried to catch Evens, ever so moving around that pool table.
“John L, said it was you?” said Don.
“Did you ask your wife who it was?” asked Evens.
“No,” said Don.
Then said Evens “You ought to know better, it most likely was John then.” ((And the following day, when John would be confronted by Evens on this matter, John would admit, by telling him, in so many words: “Yes, it was me, I told Don it was you, because I didn’t want to face him, sorry ole chap.”)(Well, sometimes honesty comes out too late, but it comes out usually one way or the other, and too often sideways…))
And he leaped towards Evens; Evens figured he was just not listening, and he glanced at the bar folk, and they were pert-near laughing, not sure if it was because of Don’s actions, or Evens’ running, then Evens said softly, and at this point halted and stood in a karate stance, “I’ve made up my mind, I can’t talk to you, so I’m going to have to kick the shit out of you, sometimes its the only way men learn to listen,” and he put up his fists, ready to throw a blow and a kick, and Don stopped as if pride was washed away like old dirt on a car, it didn’t mean anything anymore, or maybe not, maybe he honestly, and truly, rose above his anger, his hard stance, instead of fighting, he now dropped his hands, and his knees stopped shaking, and raised his head, above his drunken lips, and he no longer was strong and courageous, he was hurt.
I don’t know exactly how he was feeling, I suppose no one can put a finger on another person’s emotions in such a time, unless he has walked in his shoes, but he was—Don, touched and tired and wanted to be comforted, I don’t think he wanted revenge, he was just a child swept so bitterly into a stone wall. Most everyone in the neighborhood, wives, and girlfriends, so forth and on, to include husbands, all cheated on their spouses, and boyfriends and girlfriends at one time or another. I imagine I could pick out just about anyone from that neighborhood who would fill that bill. But I don’t want history to say I was a Truman Capote, who told tales on all his friends—although all the tales he told were true, as mine are to a most high extent. And so beyond this, I shall leave the untold tales untold, unless I outlive everyone. But back to Don, so with childish abandonment, he gave himself over to new grief, shaking his head trying to look everyone in the bar in the eyes; he wasn’t’ a coward, just a drunkard who had lost not only the respect of his wife, and perhaps of those in the bar, but for himself.
As for Mercy, believe it or not, he stopped drinking for a spell, taking into his arms, caressing it like a lost love, sobriety. I don’t know if he went back to it—for sure, but I did see him many a days on that porch sober, waving his hands at me.
Don, he died a few years after that happening, and perhaps best for him, I heard his liver was darker than the abyss the demons come out of, and his body was bloated, swollen from head to toe, and he died in his early forties—as often times drunkards do.
It would be the same case for Betty Hino, who had married Jerry Hino, and whom Evens drank many a winter night with, even traveled with Jerry to Milwaukee and Omaha, Nebraska with, back in 1967. In his case, he’d sober up in the ‘80s and died under a car, while working on its transmission—it collapsed on his chest. Betty died some years after that, the same way Don did, unfortunately.
The Last Stage (Part Twenty-one) (concerning the boys on the Church steps, 1963-1967))
The Church steps at Jackson and Sycamore, within what was called Donkeyland, three blocks away from Cayuga Street, is where Chick Evens and the boys hung out during many an evenings. It was a huge stone structure, on a limestone set foundation, with solid cement steps, perhaps fifteen steps to its backdoor, that led into the back of the church, funny, but the front was really in the back. And the church itself was a huge red brick building, with a steeple covered with black tiles, ones you’d use for a house. Across the street was the Jew’s Store (belonging to an old couple, both being Jews), so it was called; hence, these two old fat Jews that owned it, they looked older than Moses, the boys would warm up within its doorway, during the winter months, used it for when they’d have to wait to catch a bus to school—if the old lady didn’t chase you out that is: heading onto Como Jr. High School, out near Como Park, now the Kapaun’s had bought it.
The Church seemed to overshadow it from across the street. Up a block were the two local bars, where the guys from Donkeyland, were weaned from the cradle to the crypt.
Cars coming north and south, to downtown, and away from town, passed this way, and you couldn’t avoid seeing the gang of ten or twenty, or even more kids gawking at the drivers, meeting one another, thinking, planning, as Gunner, and Mouse and a few of the other boys, rode by in their stolen Dodges, and Chevy Impalas, Ford Thunderbirds, and so on, and so forth. The Chattering band, told their rude jokes, and cried their wolf calls at lone women driving by, Jackie St. John, now was Doug’s girl, and she was often there, as was Sam’s and his future wife, Nancy, and Jennie with Larry, and Mike with Carol, it was the summer of 1965, and Chick was with Barb. There they all sat—Ace doing his dance of the twenty-four blackbirds—now having a bigger audience—no one, and I mean no one at all, regretting a thing, half drunk, boisterously laughing at nothing, meaningless shouting, and endless streams of four-lettered words. In a way, these were not the dark days for the cops of Donkeyland, they knew where the boys were, and that was good news. And unless someone made a complaint, they just rode by, some with shaded glasses on, as if not to be recognized in future times, some even waving their hands and Howe, usually stopped and would say a word or two.
It seemed as if Doug was dating everyone in the neighborhood at one time or another during this period, Larry had stuck with Jennie St. John, and John St. John had come to age, and joined the boys on the church steps, he was the youngest of the gang. And Mike, after a number of years of marriage, would find Jessie St. John, as his mate for a fling, giving up his marriage for a toss in the hay; Jessie had earned that reputation, the same one Jill Manning had earned—was earning, and Vicky Schultz was earning, and Pizza Face had earned. But for Mike, that was still years in the making.
In the relationship between the boys and the steps, there was a quality that even seemed to—almost seemed to—produce a healthy respect for the public, they didn’t want to lose their new found meeting place, the turnaround by Evens’ house was dark and dead and lost whatever quality it had, now this was alive, it was like they were on stage, unhealthy for the environment perhaps and the tax payers, but steadily they looked into the eyes of the roaming public, drowning their puzzled look into their eyes. But in a matter of two years, with a combination of leaving whiskey and wine and beer bottles on the steps, and singing as loud as one could to the latest tunes by Roger Miller—such as “King of the Road,” or Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” or Elvis’ “It’s Now or Never,” and Rick Nelson’s “Traveling Man,” and giving the finger to the passing by of cars, and a few police raids, shooing the kids back into their empty lot area, the church itself took the steps out, and made the back, which was the front, the back, and the front became the front without steps, and that was that for the new, and now old meeting place.
Sometimes we become our own worse enemies, we work against ourselves.
But the boys were growing up now, and they preferred houses to steps anyhow, and Chick Evens got to know Jerry Hino, and started his drinking over there with his wife Betty, and Ace who would show up now and then, and Doug now and then (Betty would make a kettle of stew, or chili, or some kind of dinner for her kids, and if we were there playing cards, which we usually were, she’d feed us, and Ace, he could eat a cow whole if you cut it up for him: and now Roger was working for the Horseshoe Bar on Rice Street so he didn’t have time for the boys—like he used to, and Doug was getting into new adventures, and many of the boys were going into the Army, and things were changing: in 1966 to 1968, matter-of-fact, the whole world of those days of no regrets, and few tears, and endless navigating those crooked streets, were ending fast.
Follow the Course!
((Part Twenty-two) (Concerning Chick Evens and Barb Ergot and marriage, 1964-1967))
It is true, unsaid or not, and remains true, each person, each individual has to follow his own course in life, what is right for him, may not be right for another person, success is in the eyes of the beholder, as is relevance to the path he takes. In other words, live up to your values, if you have any, because when you violate them, things get turned upside down often, you see life just doesn’t operate by a uniform code, or rules. That being said, Chick Evens was facing responsibilities of getting married at the young age of seventeen, to be married at the age of eighteen, to a girl eighteen-months younger than him, she was pregnant. He didn’t get tricked by the devil, nor by God, nor fooled by anyone; he just got lustful, and made a fool of himself and got a girl to have his baby (her name would be Darla). Oh he asked for advice on what to do, but who can really give it after the fact? No one!
Now that the circumstances have been described, here’s how the story goes: Dan Wright (Crazy Dan), who lived off Jackson Street, at the far end of Donkeyland, was having a party one night: Doug, Ace, Roger, Mary, Sam, Nancy, and just about the whole gang was there, drinking and all. And in an anticlimactic way, Barb tells Evens—standing by the boiler room, “I’m pregnant, I’m real sure I’m pregnant, I haven’t had my period in two months!” (And to be fair, he knew it was his, even though she had a raw reputation.)
The mood in the beginning is a tinge stoic, with both of them, especially Evens; he’s in his own world; perhaps afraid to come out of it, lest he hear that a second time, and it dawns on him, its reality. He just kind of walks off on his own, he feels like the decision to marry or not marry has been taken out of his hands; he has to get married now it is the right thing to do, what else can he do. In a month or two they will talk about an abortion, but neither one can fully accept that, lucky for Darla. They know nothing about the intricacies of marriage, how can they, who would have taught them? Can he settle down and raise a kid? This is foremost on his mind. If he says yes, he knows it’s a lie, if he says no he’s violating his values, so he feels, but more than he feels he thinks. Plus, Barb is a flirt, too well known to too many people; she’s by far no virgin.
Barb is a non serious woman, and has little sharp-features to her, and a sharp tongue, no hair on it as they say; she says what she thinks, out loud, the two move into a house on York Street, out of the neighborhood, beside the factory called: Whirlpool, where he works, in the vacuum cleaner department. His instincts—which are always right on—told him he should not have gotten married, but of course we know he has now.
And so these two, Barb and Chick, didn’t seem to have all that much in common in the beginning other than sex, and now there is even less of that uncommonness, there’s a lot of silence between them. Chick the more sensitive and always minding his own business, Barb to the contrary; matter-of-fact, she now had started looking elsewhere for a boyfriend, and found one. How she fond one was everyone’s guess back then—in the beginning, but word of mouth said (and it proved to be correct), her half brother Mike, brought him over one night, and evidently, she distracted his mood, affected his feelings, and that was that: life changed for everyone involved.
One evening, Evens had come home late—he had never cheated on his wife, not once, and discovered to his dismay a shadow running out of his backdoor, down the back steps and off into the dark. That would be the man she would marry for twenty-years (in the long run, he’d get what he’d deserved, how true it is, what goes around comes around it is just a matter of time, and what you take, will be taken from you), living out by Forest Lake, and buying clock after clock and winding them up, making sure they were steadfast on the wall, and one day she’d get tired of him and do the same thing, leave him for a redheaded chap, twenty-years her junior, the same hair, the same completion her previous husband had, except, much uglier.
Chick Evens was thinking after all this, maybe he should be listening more to his intuition, his instincts, than following his foolish values. He said that to himself in a low voice, because right or wrong—as though understanding his thoughts—right or wrong, he had to live with himself, and perhaps the better choice in the future would be to: harness him up, and drive himself like a horse on a straighter path.
Evens couldn’t answer his own questions; he shook his hands of the whole deal, drove his white Plymouth Valiant straight away to the old neighborhood, he knew there was only one thing to do, to say, but for his life, he didn’t know how to say it, but what he did was out of old habits, he got drunk at the corner bar for a very long time, until he went to San Francisco, in the summer of 1968.
But if there is to be a climatic point in this story, let it be: he harnessed that horse; it just took him a bit longer than the average guy.
“Follow the Course,” dedicated to Darla Siluk
The Vacuum Cleaner Department
((Part Twenty-three) (concerning Chick Evens working at Whirlpool, 1966))
Narrated by Chick Evens
They had brought in a ‘minute-man’ into the Vacuum Cleaner Department of the factory, third floor (off Arcade Street, St. Paul, Minnesota, in the summer of 1966).
They are the efficiency experts—as most everyone knows. His job is to come into our area of work with his time-watch on, set it accordingly, ready to click it at any given moment. And then simply stand about—timing you.
Let me explain: if you can staple together with the standup (ten-foot tall) staple machine—more boxes in less time, all the better (boxes for vacuum cleaner that is)— His question is, or will be to himself: “Is Mr. Chick Evens doing all he can do?”
Consequently, a portion of Mr. Evens’ pay is based on piece-work.
Well, he stands by the staple machine clicks that watch to go, counts “one second, two seconds, three seconds—one box, two boxes…” times me. He says “Just be natural!” (He doesn’t mean that, he simply says that.)
Then when I stop to go to the toilet, he questions if it should have taken me three minutes or seven minutes? (Which it took me all of seven minutes to do what was natural. And had I had to do—a number one and number two, all in one setting, he might have had to reset his watch.) In any case, He also questions if I really should have stopped for five-minutes to help my fellow worker (perhaps thinking, it’s someone else’s job, which perhaps it is.) He says nonetheless (placing it in a different category) “You don’t get paid for gossip, you could have stapled twenty-boxes in the time you stopped to chitchat... (two minutes had elapsed).” I don’t tell him what I’m thinking, god forbids.
He now sees your face is annoyed with him, and says, “There are plenty of people out of work, god knows, so don’t get smart with me fellow!”
Indian’s Mound
(Part Twenty-four)(Concerning: Sandy, Mike L, Chick Evens; 1961, to April of 1967)
Prologue
There is to the author no other way to write this story without this prologue, or preliminary part, so please be patient and understanding as we slowly enter into this awkward story…
Indian’s Mounds—which is told in more of a loose talk or reporting style of narration, is a story of power over another person: in essence, control. Although a rape takes place, and excessive force is delivered, the author wants to show in this sketch, two characters and two personalities and how a conflict is created over this issue by not only those directly involved but those around them. And to two different people Mike L, and Chick Evens, it has different meanings, as power or control has.
If we examine Chick Evens past, we see he has used excessive force before, once with taking the bat Richard Zackary had found when they were both in their younger teens, Evens fourteen and Richard fifteen, Evens hitting Richard to win the bat, and in the process putting him in the hospital. Second, there was a fight with a new boy on the block, who moved in kitty-corner to Mr. Earnest Manning’s house, he kept punching him in the face, as if he lost control, and he looked more like hamburger than whom he really was after that fight was finished. And so forth and so on. Thus, he has on a number of occasions, lost it, even when he was twelve and a Boy Scout: he hit a lad in the stomach so hard he pert near knocked him out. Point made, he perhaps did on this occasion as well, use excessive force. But that neither justifies the other person’s action of rape or attempted rape, that doesn’t disappear all together you see, and the reader will have to judge for him or herself if the means justifies the end.
The Story
Perhaps the actual beginning of this story takes place in 1961, at the YMCA: I need to show one of many incidents of Evens himself sharing in this excessive force theory, the one man seems to push upon man. To let the reader know, Evens knew how it felt to have received by others excessive force, because he, himself, has at times had to endure that questionable excessive force; in other words, he’s been at the other end of the spectrum.
A young man who had just gotten out of prison, had spotted Evens weight lifting at the YMCA in downtown St. Paul one late afternoon, and saw him in the hallway sitting down, eating an apple thereafter, and the young fellow named Borne, a cousin to a fellow he’d meet in the future (in the winter of 1966, meeting Jerry Born, who had just come out of the Navy) well, this fellow had thought Evens looked like a past associate, and gave him two kicks in the eyes, Evens jumped up trying to fight the guy, but couldn’t see him—his hands feeling for the culprit, his eyes puffed up. Folks having seen what happened called the police. This character, was registered at the YMCA, and quickly apologized to Evens, and wanted to give him money to shut him up, and all sorts of things: even trusting him with his embarrassing past, saying: “If the police come, and I’m accused of assault, I go back to prison, have some mercy please…!” To make a long story sort, things were straighten out.
Now in January of 1967, Evens had met this young girl named Sandy Smith, she was no virgin, and he was nineteen at the time, and she seventeen, and very slim, tall and lovely; and for the most part, a flirt, but no slut or whore.
Now it is April, of 1967—I do realize we are flying in time but I want to get to the rape—and she has just graduated from High School, and was invited to a party with a bunch of neighborhood guys, and other guys from outside of the neighborhood, and has asked Evens to keep her company (a sort of bodyguard): for the most part, they are no longer lovers, but friends. He really doesn’t want to go, he knows there’s going to be trouble, he feels it or senses it, the mixture of people are not to his liking, but as she pleads he agrees to her wishes.
Now at Indian’s Mound, which is located several blocks down Mississippi Street, from Cayuga Street, which is called the heart of Donkeyland, Sandy, Evens and Mike L (a cousin to John L, and a distant relative to Larry Lindsey) and ten or so more fellows and girls are by a bonfire drinking. Mike L has taken special interest in Sandy. They become like wooden stumps, over in a corner, talking, kissing, knee to knee, type of kissing. Everyone can squarely see across the fire, both of them clearly. They become the children, the objects of wonder for them all, as they drink the wine and booze and beer—and get lopsided drunk.
Evens hadn’t looked for a while at them, and when he did they had vanished. He had been hearing whimpering and cries in the not so far-off foliage of the wooded area of the mound; Evens walked closer to hear either the talking or whimpering or cry—he couldn’t distinguish exactly what category to place them in: as he spoke to his mind, “What is it…!” Perhaps he knew it was Sandy and Mike L, and Mike hadn’t been lucky enough yet to score—Evens wasn’t jealous, but he just wanted to know why she was crying—if indeed she was crying, and then he heard her keep saying (rapidly): “Help, help, help, he’s raping me!”
It would not have been anything had Mike L, simply got up and walked away, it might not have had to turnout the way it did. Why couldn’t he be warm and tender to her: as Evens now was looking down at Mike L, and Sandy?
Mike was cold, “What do you want,” he said: it was a rhetorical question of course.
“You can’t think you can rape her, let her up!” demanded Evens, “if you don’t there’s going to be an accident, you!” he reiterated several times. Somehow, Mike L was convinced Evens—because of his constant telling and not doing—his threats meant very little, and he was not going to do a thing about anything; and Mike, told Evens in four letter words: “Beat it.” (The actual words: ‘Fu...k off!”) And continued with his rape, and trying to rip her panties off, and slapping her in the face and pushing his legs wide (he was not gentle).
They were both—Mike L, and Evens—drunk, and Sandy, slightly, but something made them both in an odd way, stubborn and resistant. One feeling he could take power over this girl, and Evens feeling he could by any means take control over this situation: the ends justifying the means. This resistance Mike was showing awakened a strong and determined authority in Evens, his mind near blank, and not even realizing he had a beer bottle in his hand he pulled the hair of Mike L back and back went his neck, and hit him with the bottle three times, knocking him backwards, and off Sandy.
The fact had drawn everyone to the site, particularly close to Evens, and Sandy and Sandy whispered with a suggestion they get out of there—quickly.
Sandy’s whole family, under the circumstances—felt this was a natural course of action, and took it serious. Still Mike L and his family of course felt different, it was excessive force they said, and took the rape less seriously. Still, I suppose the neighborhood was caught in-between, confused. Perhaps what was not recognized was Mike L, did what he did because he was as he was. Having that kind of cold blooded controlling heart, a heart likely at any given moment to stop another’s breathing, for his pleasure, and Evens non stopping beating, until the opponent could no longer be hurtful.
Well, the parents of Mike L had threatened to take Evens to court; he had been hospitalized, and lost his sight in one eye for a very long while—and at best it never did heal correctly, it was damaged. And Sandy’s parents, threatened to take Mike to court for attempted rape: consequently, it was a standoff, and nobody took anybody to court.
In years to come, Mike L, would confront Evens saying, “You know you didn’t really need to used that much force, you could have simply beat me up, you’re tougher than me anyhow—you knew that at the time.”
And Evens replied, “Yes, you’re probably right I could have, and you could have stopped raping Sandy, when I asked you to, over a half dozen times and saved us all this embarrassment (that was in 1985).”
Sandy, she ended up going out with Jerry Born for a spell, he bought a bar, and then she went onto stripping in nightclubs in the Twin City area, and in around 1986, Evens would see her at one of those nightclubs, not recognizing her, but she did him, and she came and hugged him, she had never forgot what he had did for her. Then in 2005, Evens stopped over at Born’s Bar on Rice Street, and asked how he was, and if he ever saw Sandy. And he said, “She comes in now and then.” And that was all that was to that.
The Garage and the Hooligans
(Part Twenty-five)(Concerning a rape feast, Sword, Sid, Evens and the
boys, summer, 1968, prior to going to San Francisco)
Chick Evens had come back from Seattle, Washington, in the spring of 1968, he and his friend Jeff Bird (Bopper’s younger brother) had gone there on an adventure, hoping to meet his Navy friend and live there with him for a spell (but once his friend saw that he had two kids and a wife, not just a guy friend, he walked away before he had any regrets, smart guy, perhaps smarter at the time than Evens), and Evens return back to Minnesota, early on, while Jeff a year or two later. The reason being, Jeff ended up taking his wife, and she ended up taking her two kids along on the trip that was suppose to have been, just those two guys, and he didn’t feel like helping the family raising those brats—as he referred to them, and Jeff’s wife was giving him a lot of demands, if not odd impressions—and was robbing the cookie jar, if you know what I mean. So he returned early, got out of Dodge like they say, while the getting was good. And now he was back in the neighborhood, where the houses were all clustered about in no general design.
What a life Jeff had to live, thought Evens, and what a strong willed woman he married. She had not been part of the neighborhood, although Jeff was to a certain degree. But this is really is not all that important to this story—matter of fact, it’s just the beginning of another (I should add at this juncture, Evens had gotten married in July of 1965, and separated in December of 1966, he was in his own eyes a free man, and his ex wife, was now serious about that guy she had been seeing while they both were living together).
First off, Evens had to find a place to live, again he got a hold of Larry Lindsey, he had saved a little money, but most was swept away when he gave Larry five months rent for his garage, through the spring months to July, at which point between traveling to Seattle and getting settled down for the spring and summer months (virtually living in the garage, sleeping on a couch) he was for the most part worn-out (as for the months beyond August and the following year, we don’t have to worry about, he took off to California, San Francisco).
But these were the trying months, he started working for Malibu Iron, over on the eastside of town, and his hands got scared and twisted and out of shape for that foundry work was numbing. When he took hold of those weights and shifted them from mold to mold, at the end of the day his hands looked like raw meat, and his veins — like, creeping vines, hang from a tree, or sharp bark, sticking out of a tree. But it opened the way for a savings account for his planned trip to San Francisco, to see the famous karate champion named Gosei Yamaguchi—a sixth degree Black Belt, whom would befriend him, and teach him his style of karate Goju-Kai, and in the months to follow, he’d meet the legendary “Cat,” of Karate, Gogen Yamaguchi, attend an international tournament, and spend the afternoon with Gosei and Gogen.
The young lad started to have his old friends over now, as he got the chance, Big Bopper, Ralph Elbridge, Sword (from “Hells Outcast,” a motorcycle gang), they all started hanging around the garage, and several other boys to boot.
It was one evening, Ralph came back with two girls, lovely young High School girls, and they met Evens, and were attracted to him, and each one wanted him, excited they could scarcely speak. Ralph took one into the garage, and he made love to her, and the other went into the car with Chick, two sixteen year olds: and Sid came trudging along, wanted some of the action. The gal with Ralph said if Evens would go with her, she’d first lay with Sid. And so it was. And the toothless old Ace, wanted some action, and then came Sword, and he took one of the girls into the garage, snatched her up like a rag doll, perverted, he had gotten so angry at her, he broke the fish tank, and water fell all over both of them, and she screamed, and nervously, all had to pull him out of the garage.
All through the evening the garage rattled along, and there was a line of men standing there, waiting their turns to have intercourse with the two girls, and Evens couldn’t get it under control, it was taken out of his hands, he could not believe the folks that ended up at the garage, coming out of nowhere, a train of them. And Sid and Evens stood confused, Ralph had taken off.
Evens did not get along at all with this. Yet he was one to get along with anyone, anywhere: and it was paralyzing to feel helpless.
In Donkeyland, new girls were hard to find. These two girls who wanted to have fun, and just see this kid called Chick Evens, who insisted on being with him, even asked what they should do, in those trying moments, were now sitting at the police station at a table talking with their parents and lawyers and the police, furnishing several names, among them Ralph and Sword, and Sid. Sid’s parents had taken a quick trip to California and their son with them, so they’d not be questioned. And Ralph, he went to prison, and Sword was on the run. As the old saying goes: if you can to the crime, make sure you can do the time: the girls explained to the parents, police and judge, Evens was the one who tried to save the day, although in part that might have been true, but in reality, it wasn’t good enough: in that it didn’t save the day.
The Boy who Almost
Became a Tramp
((Part Twenty-six: Chick Evens Speaks) (1966-1968))
It seemed to my mother for a time, I had become a tramp (or near a tramp, almost homeless), working only now and then, when I had no money (now out of High School, and separated from Barb, it was December of 1966), but spending all the time I had loafing around who know where, (I had quite my job at Whirlpool, making vacuum cleaners and was collecting unemployment checks)—buying junk cars, and taking little trips, even taking a little ride on a freight train, trying to grab as much adventure as I could, as cheap as I could. I didn’t do any stealing though, not what you would call stealing—I had still a few pretty good sets of cloths, and a few pairs of shoes, but I was in a constant frenzy, I did realize, after numerous day jobs, that success was not on my menu: and figured I’d ride out them unemployment checks. (Let me clarify: I stole once in my life, a record, at a record shop, and got caught, and the manager let me off easy, saying: “It catches up with you, so it is best you stop before you get fond of the idea of taking something for nothing.” And that was that.)
The most delightful experience of that time of my life was when I was doing my karate at the Arcade Street dojo. It seemed to me I was on a race-track, but it was nonetheless a high spot, in that part of my life, and would be one of those things that extended beyond this time period, it would lead me to San Francisco, and the Army would have me train some of the troops in self-defense, although they also had me stop teaching when I hurt a few of them, not intentionally but it was hard at times to teach without striking flesh.
As I said, I was now unmarried and had not been successful in or at anything, but I was at karate. What I mean is, I was free to do what I wanted to do, and I guess this had become more a part of my life than I had expected, but so often when we lose one thing we grab onto another, and I guess I was doing that after the separation which would turnout to be a divorce, I was not yet nineteen.
There was something I liked about power, and control and knowing where and when to strike and kick, and about the people around you, we were somewhat the same, united, as soldiers, all on the same race-track, but of course, I was the undependable part of the lot. But I liked that kind of fighting, and the pain was okay, it took the stress out of me. And once learned I didn’t have to bend my knees to many folks, only to the Lord in church—and in those days I didn’t go too often, but thank God, he didn’t abandon me. What I mean is, I had the attitude at that point in time, go-to-the-devil, if you don’t like what I was doing, and pass me the beer. And if that wasn’t good enough ‘knock ‘em off,’ wherever they stood.
I liked the whole blamed lot of guys and girls in the dojo pretty much. And I liked getting drunk afterwards, and one night, boy did I get drunk.
I was living on York Street at that time, and only went to the neighborhood, now and then, mostly at night at the two corner bars off Jackson and Sycamore Streets. Things were changing in the neighborhood, and changing fast especially right around 1967 and 1968. In any case, after the workout this one evening, Loretta, a new karate gal at the dojo, and two guy friends of mine, one being Jim (whom I’d live with in another half year or so, in San Francisco and study karate under one of the great maters of Gojo Kai) and the second karate man, with the other woman Loretta’s girlfriend, we all went out drinking.
It happed that it was a Friday, and no one had to go to work, and I wasn’t working anyhow. Let us suppose it was a Monday, it would never have happened.
I somehow managed to sit beside Loretta, and the other fellows by her girlfriend all trying to see which one would end up with her. And we started out drinking in the basement of the dojo, and then in the backseat of Loretta’s car (her and I, side to side, lip to lip), and now we were at her house, all five of us. Jim pulling on his thin like Charlie Chan mustache. But he wasn’t really sad he was not making time with the other girl, he was married and had two kids, and his wife was a foot taller than him, and perhaps pulling that mustache was telling him—get drunk, but keep your hands on the bottles, not the girl.
“You two boys,” said Loretta, in a stern voice, “want to keep Sissy company…Chick and I are stepping out for a moment.” And she led me into the bedroom. She was prettier than plain, but really not all that pretty, borderline pretty. And she was not heavy or thin, but healthy looking with dark eyes and black hair. And I followed her, and I was so drunk, I must have walked lopsided.
And Charlie, the other karate man, tall and ugly, but build well, and well mannered, said “I’ll be setting here, go ahead, I’ll keep an eye on the house for you,” and he looked at Sissy, and smiled.
So we started off on our journey into the quiet and reserved bedroom, and I felt as if I was falling off a tree, my head spinning, I had drank too much. Seldom in those days did I get sick, professional drunks never do, but I guess I was not yet chronic, because I was, and Loretta was likened to a camel in heat?
To tell the truth, I suppose I didn’t mind making love to her, it just didn’t feel like the right time, and she got near naked in front of me, and jumped on the bed, and I was hardly bare at all, she was quick, and she said “Well!” and I said (standing there solemnly beside the bed) “I don’t feel well!” And she said, “Don’t say much, just get in bed,” and I looked at her, and she looked at me, and my head felt as if it was back at some race-track racing with the horses, and I got onto the bed, cloths and all, just my shoes off, and then we were going to make hay, but I threw up (vomited) all I had in my stomach on her…all over her…and on her nice clean white sheets…the quiet sound of the bedroom was no more, “Oh, hell!” she screamed.
Anyway, I don’t think she ever wanted to see me again, but she did go back to the dojo, but we never dated after that, the experience was like Post Traumatic Stress for her I do believe.
Grandpa’s Sunday Roasts
((Part Twenty-seven) (Concerning Grandpa’s recipes, 1958-1968))
Old Grandpa Evens had everyone come over for Sunday dinner, although it was more like Sunday lunch. And on Saturdays, he’d take his grandson, Chick down to the market, and over to the butcher’s shop, and he’d look for a good piece of beef, perhaps a rump roast, and or round roast, his plans were simple, to cook it slowly on a low heat which prevented any gristle form getting too though, this of course was not used on prim cuts, it would have made the meat too mushy like.
When I watched him cook all those years, it looked so simple, and it was for the most part, just patience. He liked bones and fat on every piece of meat, more flavors he’d say. For his pork roast he’d pre heat the oven keep it low, perhaps 350 F, no top covering the meat for an hour or two, then he’d check the meet every half hour, put the cover on so it wouldn’t burn or dry the meat out. Let the meat sit for a few minutes then bring the whole thing in a try and put it on the table for everyone to pick and choose. Perhaps the pork roast was three to four pounds. With ribs on the side, and potatoes, and tomatoes, and he’d have an inch of water in it, served as juice from the meat, and fat and bones, and he’d have carrots in and around it, and just a few slices of garlic, no more, everything natural. And you could smell it throughout the house, in the summers even in the backyard, when the main door was open and the screen door was used.
He’d pick his pork and beef out at the butcher’s shop, and if it was chicken, he’d go to the market, make sure the chicken was fresh, wanting the death of the chicken not to be over six hours old. He’d cook the meat three to four hours at a low heat, and just the last hour he’d turn the oven up, as if to brown the top more (or whatever), and if it was well enough, and it sizzled, in an inch of water, he’d turn it back down, until he felt it done, then wait a few minutes for it to settle.
He liked beef ribs (and often put tomato sauce in the pan when he cook it, and cabbage, potatoes, onions, mixed vegetable around the roast and ribs); and pork ribs and/or sausage around a pork roast. And if you didn’t eat a good portion on those Sunday afternoons he’d not be happy. Nothing was fancy, just a lot of love and tender care and waking up early to do the cooking on Sunday, and of course the Saturday shopping. And then he’d call everyone up, to make sure the dozen or so family members would be there on time, and they were, for a decade or two. He liked hard bread, darkened on the top—crisp like, he always said: a meal isn’t a meal unless you got bread. Funny, I find myself saying that nowadays also.
When he made pork ribs and sourkrought that was the best of the lot. He’d cook a large portion of those ribs in a large kettle of water for about three or four hours, during that process he’d fry onions, and then throw his rinsed sourkrought in with the onions (taking the bitterness, out of it), cook for a half hour or so, and then throw all that into that kettle of boiling water and ribs, the juice was great, the ribs fell off the bones pert near, and you had your simple but delicious afternoon dinner.
After the meal, the guys went down in the basement for a drink or two, or three, or four, of 140-proof Vodka, and the women sat and drank coffee, cup after cup after cup, in the kitchen, and gossiped, and gossiped, until they got tired, and then did the dishes, and the kids played in the backyard crazy like, and it all came about through an old man, who could out swear the devil. He had some kind of a satisfaction in making all that food, cooking for hours and hours, nothing cheap either; and never asking for a dime, feeding ten to fifteen people each and every Sunday, for a decade or two. Chick Evens and his Grandfather didn’t get along splendid together—he was more a Mike person (Chick’s brother), but by Chicks observation, the old man never knew, taught the boy something, and it wasn’t how to rub down a horse, it was how to cook those hefty meals, and he would in years to come. And if you’d ask him today, he’d say: “Gee whiz, it was all fun—pretty much anyhow…!”
I guess it’s all those little, and simple things in life that make life worth living, that comes to mind most often, the few and in-between main events, well they are short lived at best, and although remembered, they seem to hold less importance—in the overall scheme of things.
Last Time in Donkeyland
((Part twenty-eight: concerning: Judy, Bill Jr., and Chick Evens) (1998))
Chick Evens walked eastward on Sycamore Street, thorough the south end of his old neighborhood, Donkeyland, through the deep penetrating shadowy evening with a book in his hands, one he wrote, “The Last Winter and Autumn,” on the neighborhood when he had lived in it thirty-five-years ago, his left hand in his pocket. He had convinced himself to a lot of trouble to make his one last trip through the neighborhood; it was a long, enduring, and tiresome walk, all the way from his home on Albemarle Street, about two-miles away, in the heat of summer, and he’d walk back again.
The day before, Evens now fifty-years old, had heard from his brother, the neighborhood had changed since he last been down there, and he had been gone a long, long time. He had already thought about returning someday to see everyone, but when he stopped at the two corner bars, there was no one he knew in what used to be called Brams. He had just left one that corner where the bar stood, the other one was close-up, the door locked, and wooden boards crisscrossed it. It was for sale.
Four or five people were sitting under a large umbrella, in Judy Kapuano’s yard he noticed, looking at Evens as he put his hand on the fence, in front of Judy’s house, they had been observing Evens ever since he was across the street by Oakland Cemetery, walking across Jackson Street, while still on Sycamore—first seen fifteen minutes before walking on the sidewalk slowly looking, and now he was in fact within reach. The three people under the umbrella stopped whatever they were doing.
Judy had her oldest child; now forty-year old sitting by her side drinking beer, in addition to her friend, a relative of Jerry Hino’s all drinking beer and wine under the umbrella, under the dark enclosing twilight. And Evens was careful not to startled them, he had changed and Judy might not remember him—right off hand, and Bill Jr. was fifteen years old, last he saw him, and Bill Sr. was killed by an accident at the steel plant, down by Cayuga Street, twenty-years prior.
To-day, Evens had just come by to give Judy a book he wrote, some of the poetry in the book concerned the neighborhood, nothing of real importance to the neighborhood as a whole, but her husband was in it. And now he opened up the gate to the fence, had ventured closer to the group, and Judy was looking deeper than ever to place the familiar face, and carrying that book in his right hand.
Bill Jr.’s wife was home across the street, and Judy’s daughter was with Bill’s wife, and a relative to Jerry Hino was there—heavy like Jerry was (he was killed ten years prior of a accident), and a tinge short, he looked to be in his mid twenties, and Judy’s daughter was looking out the window at the stranger who had opened the gate, she was a few years younger than her brother. Last time he saw her, she wasn’t even ten-years old then.
Judy watched Evens closely while he stood now a few feet away from everyone around the table, she was old looking, older than he was looking, wrinkles and stress all over her face, but she smiled as soon as she could pinpoint the face, “Chick! It’s really you!” she said. And Bill looked strange as Evens who stood as if in the middle of them. He had set the book on the table; he took in a deep breath, a bit rigid, gasped,
“You’re the first familiar faces I’ve seen around here!” he muttered.
Evens had a good reason to come to the neighborhood, otherwise he never would have, he was leaving for good, to live in South America, he was ill. The next move was left entirely up to Evens. No one in the front yard had said a word, just Judy’s acceptance of elation to see her husband’s old and good friend. Bill Jr., wanted to speak, but he didn’t, not yet anyways, he just stared.
Judy’s daughter came rushing over, stood by the side for her mother, and said “Who’s this?”
“If I had known you were coming,” said Judy, “this is my daughter, Sissy, you remember her don’t you? (she looked at Sissy, saying) this is Chick, he held you when you were just six or seven.”
“Oh yes, we have his poetry book in the house “The Other Door…”, I remember something about him, I know him and dad hung out together.”
Judy opened up another beer, handed it to Evens, “Sit down and tell us what you’ve been doing all these years?” Wiping the top of the can of beer with a clean rag, “Now,” said Sissy, “are you anything like my father and Sunny used to tell me…?”
“By gosh, I think you’re mother will have to tell that tale.”
The Boy Called Doubt
(Part Twenty-nine)(Concerning a story of a story in Donkeyland)
In Two Pieces
There is a story I know, but not quite well, I have no real theme for it, the story from my neighborhood is near forgotten, and it’s been now forty-nine years since I’ve recalled it back into my mind, and the first time for print. The story concerns one boy, in a house on Cayuga Street. If I could have remembered the story I would have told it long ago of course. I think the story came back to me a few times, fragmented, in whispers. I would pace in the house, mentally thinking—over and over about this story as a youth. Tongue-tied to say it out loud and when I grew up, it occasionally rattled in my head, against my teeth—but never had it ever returned to me in full blossom. There were two boys in this house on Cayuga Street—no, three. Two were twins, the other the brother to the twins was the older brother. And one of the twins, never quite knew why he was, or who he was. The second twin was not consumed with doubt, and never had a hard time sleeping. So perhaps at this point of the story, I should call the twins, the Doubting One, and the Undoubting One (until I can figure out a better name for them). The doubting one was always waiting for the undoubting one to take charge, rubbing his fingers together, cracking his knuckles, just waiting—waiting, endlessly waiting.
In the attic bedroom, the brother, older brother of the twins, was more like a foundation for them (or at least for the Doubting One), I mean whatever darkness the doubting twin had (since the undoubting twin was silent), the brother, was always a half lighted window for him.
This is the premise of the story, and all that I am, or ever will be is part of this story, if not all or half. I will always ferment in this, knowing that the other twin did at sometime come up and out and above all the elements of the first twin, as he was waiting that day.
I remember the boys, the undoubting one, and silent, forever silent I thought he’d remain, as if lost out at sea, and trying to get back and save his brother-twin. And when the three brothers got together, there was no sound, of the undoubting twin. Then one day, the undoubting twin became like a man with a torch, his eyes became contrivable, he ran out of what you might call a cage, or jumped out of his box, or call it, his skin. His mother, and his older brother, and even his brother-twin, the doubting Thomas, they were infected—graciously so, by the appearance of the twin, I mean, he was always there, but wasn’t really—he kept pulling himself out of the picture. How quiet the neighborhood was when he left, never to fully return: when both twins left that is, and there the doubting twin was waiting, and they now both went together, kind of silently.
This is what I remember of the story—how everyone in the neighborhood waited for the twins to come back, but they never did. Oh, they both craved to write about their exploits in the neighborhood, and perhaps that is the story here; or a good part of the beginning of the story. The doubting twin wanted to create, or recreate himself, with his other twin, you know, become one; and to be quite frank, when they came in sight of each other now, they were one. Their hearts never parted again—only to remember those days when the doubting one, and the shy one, kept their distance. Now they both smiled at each other.
There was a few times, one wanted to rebuke the other, but when the doubting one saw in his brother’s eyes, that he was the imperial one, how could he. And there was a time when the doubting one ran and whined and did all those things one shouldn’t do, and although the undoubting one tried to follow him in his ways, he simply couldn’t endure it, and to be truthful, got tired of it, and at times never wanted to wake again.
Exactly how the story goes, and how it ends, I don’t know that part of the story, it seems to slip my mind, perhaps the partial death of one, gave more life to the other. Beyond a doubt, both were waiting for that to happen. It always has puzzled me. I have thought many times on this story, and I still cannot understand it. And most of the time, it really doesn’t occur to me, if indeed I could understand all of it, I could tell you and the world at large the full story. I would no longer have to think about it.
To get to the point, I am not sure why I was even given this story, why am I the one to have to tell it? Because if I had all the details, and knew the end, as well as the beginning I’d have a great story to tell you, but as of now, I have no way to tell it—completely.
But Why
I slept well last night, but I think my mind wrestled with this other part of the story, still not the whole part, but nonetheless, another part. So I got up early this morning to let you know about it, before I forgot it. And I say this believe me, with the instinct of an honest and God-fearing Minnesotan. One who found his way across this vast globe, this race-track and the hardships of life; only by this perhaps can one know for sure, beyond a doubt, if you are right, when you are right or wrong. The boy, the one we call Doubt, or I call Doubt, and his twin whom really should be called Doubtless, are one, raised in that same neighborhood called Donkeyland. He was always doing little favors and writing things, down, like poetry and so forth, learning all he could, not sure why, but it made a lot of peoples’ mouths water to try and figure this out.
Well, I must tell you about what happened, what he did, and let you in on what exactly I’m talking about. I will not tell you the troubles he had all the way to adulthood, but now he is there, and he is in Germany, and he’s not there as a tourist, he’s not buying souvenirs, or postcards, or even taking pictures. He’s walking down a hallway, looks to be in a large building, folks with their bags and cloths all laying about, some with Army fatigues on, uniforms, children, everyone waiting, just waiting for housing, a place to live. Most are squarer with kids—so the picture looks. I don’t know why this occurred to me last night, perhaps it is a side theme, or the theme, or part of the plot to the story, and you’ll have to figure that out for yourselves, I’m just telling it, as I see it.
Doubt, which now should be called by his twin’s name, Doubtless, has really never been faithless. He is a nice man, and generous, and he knows they are all waiting for housing, a place to live, hundreds of folks. He’s actually gotten pretty old now and he walks slowly among the many, the folks really pay him little to no attention, I don’t expect he cares, he never says anything to them, not yet anyways. He’s thinking, and stops by a lady, she has children, and there are other folks around her, “Give me five dollars,” he says, “and I’ll find you housing.” And she looks at him mysteriously, and he says “That’s all right,” and starts to walk away, and she quickly pulls out a five-dollar bill, hands it to him. And he takes it, and stares at her as if he knows something she doesn’t know—yet. And that’s what I’m writing this second part of the story about.
She’s puzzled. He’s okay with her decision to give him the five-dollars, but there’s evidently something he sees in her, or saw in her, and he smiles at her, and she must had said something like this in her mind: I don’t see what he can do for me, not really…and grabs the five-dollars back out of his hands. He was so sorry she did that, he almost wanted to cry, looking at the children and all. Then he goes to the other side of the walkway, and asks another female with children, and she bluntly says “No!” As if to say: you’re not going to play one on me.
Well, he didn’t get smug about it, and he didn’t die over her action, he figured as much, but was hoping he could help. Then he made up his mind he’d try one more time, and he came upon a few men, soldiers with there families, all laying down waiting, this one particular soldier, leaning against a wall, we can call him, Wally, for short. But Doubtless, although he looked at him, it was quick, and now he was looking at some other fellows, as if to say, but he didn’t say it out loud: no sense to ask him. But when again he looked he must have said: trust your instinct; it’s always right on the mark. And he turned back to this fellow, Wally, as we’ve now agreed his name is. “How long have you folks been waiting here?” Doubtless asks.
“Let me see,” said Wally, and he leaned over to ask another family, evidently he had not been there too long, not half as long as the others anyhow. And before Wally could say anything, Doubtless asks him, “I can find you a place to live, will you give me five-dollars?”
Without a second thought, the man pulls out five-dollars and hands it to Doubtless. And so the deal is made, sealed you might say. It brings a lump up into Doubtless’ throat.
“How do you know I’ll not simply take your five-dollars and be gone?” said Doubtless.
Chidingly, or not, Wally says, “It’s in my blood, I can tell a winner.”
“How?” says Doubtless, “My tongue, it always has a certain taste to it (he forgot to mention fate and faith, but Doubtless knew he had that also, he had to have it, and that Wally knew, because it all has to do with training: you see, a thoroughbred knows another thoroughbred, or as the saying goes: only a poet can critique a poet).
What had happened was that Wally got his apartment that afternoon, and that made Wally and his family very happy, and Doubtless saw this happiness of Wally and his family, and that made Doubtless happy — (and if you are asking why it made him happy, it is because happiness is byproduct, and the five dollars has very little to do with anything).
▼▼
What’s the Matter with Donkeyland?
Commentary by an Old Donkeyland Poet
“What’s the matter with Donkeyland—why not Donkeyland?” So Chick Evens had asked himself time after time after time while he was growing up. Couldn’t it be that the entire world outside of Donkeyland was just more and more of Donkeyland? (If so, he had to fine out.) It would turnout in later years, his ability to move and feel and live within the world abroad, any place in the world, to live in larger places, that Donkeyland, having lived in such a neighborhood left him a more vivid figure in the minds of others.
Chick Evens dreamed of coming back to Donkeyland someday as much as he dreamed of leaving it someday, he had left for twelve-years during one period, thus, returning and taking up his old life in Minnesota for the following twenty-five years, to rejoin that small circle, compared to the larger one he had ventured out into (only to move out again and move to Peru). He’d admit he felt cramped in Donkeyland. The young man, who had left, came back understanding of others better than when he had left.
It may be that there is greener pastures every man should seek, venture out to, in other places, bigger places, they have more listeners, voices, more so than in his hometown, and his home town to be honest wasn’t all the gracious to him anyhow, and he knew most folks nowadays, lived under this plastic pretence of bigness is the avenue to all fame and fortune, and the new world is surely full of that false pretense: people trying to move the masses, getting big heads because they can, learning all the psychological trickiness in such approaches—everything for an applause, no values needed, and those you say you have, no need to test them under fire, parading about with this false power and importance—Donkeyland didn’t have any of that.
Such men he knew, generals and mayors, and senators and presidents, he had traveled the world over, and so forth, but he grew out of a neighborhood—nonetheless—out of a house on an embankment, with a large shady tree overlapping his grandpa’s garage, never coming out of touch with his common old friends (or common folk in other places), and that made him of course the man he became: because he said one day, “What’s the matter with someone coming out of Donkeyland and being all he can be?” He declared that day, to be his day of being an individual—not typecast from Donkeyland.
A boy grows up, goes away, and comes back. Some folks have died, others moved out, some in the Army, some in prison, some grown up, some become just born. Life has been going on in Donkeyland, although many things have changed—for a very long time—but there was only one period that Donkeyland became Donkeyland, and that was during his period. With all this there is a narrow fascination, panorama to his life concerning Donkeyland (and the others who have lived I also).
Perhaps—only a zealous traveler, roamer, adventurous person as himself, can realize how lucky he really is, to have been part of a small, close knitted neighborhood, where friends are friends from the cradle to the grave. He always hungered to get back, until it almost disappeared, unrecognizable now, but still there was an intimacy the few times he did ventured back down into Donkeyland—under all sorts of circumstances, and now aging.
On the other hand, and there is another side to this, and I am not knocking those who have never left Donkeyland (or those how have left Donkeyland only to visit the same friends that came out of Donkeyland in their now new locations), matter-of-fact, Chick Evens’ brother Mike, he is a man who has his roots in the place where he was born—for the most part. Perhaps this gives him a certain kind of strength that is not only good to see, but to have. He has less to explain to others than Chick. But Chick of course, he couldn’t be like that.
By and large, small neighborhoods—only a few of them are close to one another, like Donkeyland was (in the good ole days), in good fortune or bad. It’s kind of funny as Evens now looks back: now at sixty-two years old, he’s still familiar with walks he had taken, roads he drove down, cars he’s driven, familiar faces so often seen on those connecting streets of Donkeyland—pop up now and then. Places he and the gang visited, led up into hills and mounds, and spots to drink, the cemetery, the trains and steel mill. He even remembers the shapes of the hills, and the city neighborhood block, and the bunch of tall weeds in the empty lot—hence, I am confirmed, totally: Donkeyland will never die.
Epilogue
Sounds out of Donkeyland
(Narrated by the Author)
In two pieces
I have now, somewhere within these stories of Donkeyland mentioned that the house I lived in when I was growing up (I mean, Check Evens) stands on a slight embankment, along with two other houses, the Stanley’s and the Williams. And Roger Landsmen’s house is across the street, and down some, on the same side of the street of my grandfather’s house, was the Manning’s, and so forth, and that there was an empty lot by Anton Evens’ house, and what the boys called that space in-between the empty lot and the garage, the turnaround—that also being state property—
Back then, by in the late fifties, and early sixties, to the mid-sixties, Day or night, there was a flood of sounds coming in through the attic window of my bedroom, had been ever since we had moved into that house: the stream of sounds eventually: mentally and quietly whispered to me.
Countless nights I lay in that attic bedroom, by the window, Cayuga Street beneath me, the railroad yard and the steel mill in back of Roger’s house, across the street, and they had their specific sounds that flooded my cerebellum—; my window faced all of that—and the whitewater of sounds coming down that tributary was like a race horse coming around a bend on a racetrack: all open and coming in through my window, and the other sounds were of: cars, running over hot asphalt roads in the summer; rocks flying in fall; the sound of rainstorms—its thunder and lightening; and cars slipping and sliding in the winter snows. They were all telling me how life was going on outside, on those dark haunting nights and early mornings.
The sounds changed from hour to hour, but you learned to discriminate between them, and at times they become oddly momentous, more important for sleeping with them than without them. When you don’t hear them: the footsteps, the car horns and the sidewalk gossip, and so forth, sounds of old friends, voices of girls you’ve dated, cared for, it’s hard to fall to sleep, or back to sleep. Some feet sounds are haunting, and curious, broken rhythms from familiar ones. Some feet have long slow strides, others quick, and there are a hundred other sounds, I called them life sounds, and above these life voices, and unfamiliar sounds, footsteps and all, above these, as a boy I could create an imaginative world, that put me into the dream mode, and put me quickly to sleep. Perhaps that’s why I write so much: I have a lot to say.
My brother Mike, had a long slow stride, I could tell if it was him coming or going, and let us say, I could also tell, who he might be mingling with in the turnaround, by the sound of the car motors.
These sounds, made my night alive, my summers to create imaginative stories—such as this one you are reading now, and I could collect them, and put them in parts, and start dreaming part two of the original dream the next night, thus from night to night, the soap opera went on until the dream finished, or got to the end of the dream stream; something like this book—in the making.
I do believe the stories of Donkeyland, are good stories, and should be reread, and then given to a friend, so he/or she can read them, and reread them. It cost a great deal of time to write them, often as you know, the price one pays in time and effort to produce something of this nature, does not pay one back, it takes a little soul, spirit, health out of a person: perhaps never retrievable. Yes, I know: don’t do it then. But it seems in that bed, back near fifty years ago now, I made an outline and sent it to my brain, and my brain said, “It’s splendid, now you just go ahead and do it whenever you can—when its time to…” and so I did (am doing), and there’s a time for everything under the sun, one for living, one for writing—you can’t give a hundred percent, if you are doing both at the same time, and that is the answer to that question, this is the time.
The Hours
There is little life in that neighborhood now, the houses are all torn down, and the steel factory is gone, and the empty lot is a parking lot, and the trains have halted, and the two grocery stores, once owned by two Jews and then bought by two non Jews they also are gone, made into apartments. And Rice School now has four houses or more in its place. Yet the darkness of those years still stirs and reverberate in a few of my tireless nights as I’ve now gotten into my sixties— Strange years they were, in what was called Donkeyland, Minnesota. The ground under my feet seems to crack when I think back on those days—perhaps its me cracking with age—and my hands when I move them, I feel like a decaying trunk of a tree, left on the wayside, they are stiff and sore: its now been forty-nine years that have passed, since I roamed those streets. In a few more most of us who lived this time, in Donkeyland, will have passed on, our hours will be up on earth, as surely as the branches of those shimmering green trees have long since fallen—once and for all— Actually, they were pulled out by their roots, like we all were, slowly. And that dusty old empty lot, that surrounded us overshadowing our ever move, encircling our daily lives through our growing years. The only thing left is that old dirt road, more like a path in back of Rice School, that leads down to that once empty lot, that once Indian’s Hill, that once turnaround, and Cayuga Street to its side, that is the only thing left, and after I’m gone, perhaps will be the only thing remaining still, to have said: I was once: and to prove these stories did happen.
End to the English Version
Notes on the Book: All the stories within this book not here mentioned specifically, were written between 17 and 25 of January, 2010, while in Lima, Peru (Numbers between: 567 to 590). One story dedicated as indicated: “Follow the Course,” dedicated to Darla Siluk. The Poem: “I See the Boys,” written4--22-2008 (#2359) dedicated to the Donkeyland Gang of the 1960s. Other stories added to this book: “The Quadruple Knockout!” written In Lima, Peru, July, 2006; Revised and reedited June 5, 2009 (in Huancayo, Peru). “Grandpa’s Tobacco Jar…” written during lunch at the ‘Mia Mamma’ café in Huancayo, Peru 7-23-2009, No: 442; “The Candy Counter,” written in Huancayo, Peru, 8-7-2009, No 451. “White Castle Hamburgers (a strange story” was written-2-2009, No: 511. “A Christmas Bet” written August, 27, 2009, in Huancayo, Peru, No: 457. The Introduction, “No Laughing Matter,” Written in Huancayo, Peru, 11-28-2009; No: 526. “The Vacuum Cleaner Department,” was written 12-5-2009, in Huancayo, Peru, No: 540. (The numbers indicate the short stories, or sketches the author has previously written; as he also does to indicate the number to his poems.) “Last Time in Donkeyland,” Written 1-26-2010, No: 592 (Lima, Peru)
There are twenty-nine stories, or parts to the main novel, an introduction, theme poem, commentary at the end of the book, and epilogue.
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The Spanish Version
El Tarro de Tabaco de mi Abuelo
(1958)
Mi abuelo estaba sentado en su sillón—detrás de la alta lámpara de lectura que se extendía dos centímetros o más sobre el respaldar de la silla—tomando una de sus pipas de madera del cenicero con pedestal cerca de su silla, y juntando dos fósforos; Chick (su nieto) sentado en el sofá lo observaba por el rabillo de sus ojos, mientras miraban una película del oeste en la televisión, él previamente había llenado la pipa con tabaco de su tarro de tabaco que él guardaba en una cómoda en su dormitorio, y una vez prendida él tiró los fósforos en el cenicero, por única vez no fallando al hacerlo; murmurando y diciendo palabrotas todo el tiempo bajo su aliento, quién sabe qué, sólo él sabía qué estaba diciendo, el Viejo Oso Ruso, como Chick lo llamaba y se imaginaba que simplemente lo hacía por costumbre, o talvez hablando con sus demonios.
“No vayas a cambiar de canal cuando me vaya, ¿me oíste?” él le dijo a Chick mientras se paraba y caminaba a través del dormitorio hacia el baño, nunca mirando a Chick más de medio segundo, no era una pregunta, aunque ésta hubiera sonado como que lo era, era una afirmación, y talvez en una forma ligera, una pregunta-afirmación, aunque retórica, no necesariamente significaba ser respondida verbalmente, sólo reconocerla con una mirada o movimiento de cabeza. Una vez que el viejo abuelo (no exactamente 1.55 m. de estatura) desapareció entre las sombras de la puerta del baño—ahora abierta por un periodo, pero pronto a ser cerrada—Chick rápidamente se levantó y se dirigió hacia la cocina sabiendo la ruta directa hacia la nevera, y sabiendo exactamente dónde estaban las peras, manzanas y naranjas, y afuera ellos salieron y fueron uno por uno dentro de sus bolsillos de su bata, y luego, él corrió de vuelta como un venado a donde él estaba sentado, agarrando su manzana anterior, como si para disfrazar su carrera contra el tiempo, luego un segundo más tarde, el abuelito apareció, él estaba murmurando y diciendo palabrotas de nuevo; Chick lo miró desde donde estaba en el sofá largo, con una expresión plana en su cara de diez años de edad como si no se hubiera movido, su corazón apenas latiendo. El abuelito, cepillando las cenizas de su asiento de su sillón, miró a Chick comiendo la manzana, sin saber que las tres siguientes manzanas que él había puesto en su bolsillo aparecerían poco a poco— (en el debido tiempo) —para él era como si Chick estuviera comiendo la misma manzana, lentamente. Esto era simple, él no quería que su abuelito descubriera el principio de su ardid en su más fundamental oscuridad, por temor a ser burla de querer comerse a él, a su madre y a su hermano Miguel—quienes todos vivían juntos como en un clan familiar, fuera de casa y hogar—y el Viejo Oso Ruso había tomado un disgusto a ese sonido al comer y ver y monitorear (que no tenía que hacerlo, pero aparentemente por una fuerza compulsiva se vio forzado a hacerlo) el comer, manzana tras manzana, y puedes agregar esa pera y naranja allí, esto lo molestaba, y hacía que él murmurara y renegara más. El abuelito miró otra vez, Chick ahora pestañeaba como si tuviera algo en sus ojos, él se había comido la manzana con corazón y todo, como él había aprendido a hacerlo—parte de los tres años de astucia, desde los diez a los trece—y ahora tenía una nueva manzana en sus manos, esta vez el abuelito miró un segundo y medio, dijo: “Humm…mmm..” como si él estuviera tratando de entender la farsa, luego volvió a murmurar esas nuevas palabrotas, la mitad en inglés y la otra en ruso, parecerían de alguna forma codificadas.
¿Era Chick astuto? Si, ah si, él era astuto—similar como una araña a una mosca (pero astuto porque era necesario, por demanda por el derecho a comer su fruta y mirar televisión al mismo tiempo que su abuelito estaba haciéndolo), y él te lo diría directamente en tu cara, de frente, si tú se lo preguntabas, él mismo incluso te diría, “Cielos, soy un astuto, pero tengo que serlo…” y si tú estuvieras allí, talvez lo hubieras encontrado murmurando algo al respecto, mientras su viejo abuelo se sentaba erguido en ese sillón, mirando “El Llanero Solitario”, o “Saltar junto con Cassidy” (o a ese vaquero con el cabello blanco) como él se referiría a las dos de las muchas películas del oeste que él miraba—pacíficamente miraba; aunque, nada en ningún lugar, y nadie en ninguna parte del mundo nunca más podría angustiar o molestarlo, y consecuentemente él hacía una pausa a esa automática forma de decir palabrotas; por temor que ellos quisieran ese libro negro de palabrotas para sacarlas y hacer sonar el eco como tambores golpeando y no sabiendo exactamente qué significaban pero sabiendo que eran palabrotas de alguna naturaleza, ya que él estaba en su tumba de silencio, por la noche, y acariciando éste para siempre, y Dios no lo quiera si lo perturbabas en ese sagrado momento.
Nro. 442. Escrito el 23 de Julio del 2009 (Escrito durante un almuerzo en el Restaurante-Café “La Mia Mamma” en El Tambo, Huancayo, Perú)
El Mostrador de Caramelos
(Primer Trabajo, en el Cinema, 1962)
Para decirte la verdad, me sentía un poco tonto de tener que estar parado detrás del mostrador de caramelos y cancha blanca, pero durante el verano antes de cumplir dieciséis años de edad, busqué un empleo en el centro de la ciudad y, con mi amigo Bill Capuano, conocí al Sr. Henry Blackhead, quien era el administrador del Teatro Mundo, quien me ofreció un trabajo allí, y yo lo había tomado hasta el final del verano de ese año.
Mi mamá estaba encantada y mi hermano Miguel, no estoy seguro qué estaba haciendo él, pero él tenía cierta clase de ingreso, él iba a cumplir dieciocho años de edad, el próximo Octubre de ese año—1962.
Para ser honesto, no pude encontrar otro trabajo, no había otro trabajo para obtener. Un muchacho fuerte de quince años de edad ya no podía permanecer en la casa todo el verano largo y había crecido tanto como para cortar el gras de los vecinos o vender periódico, o lustrar zapatos, los que los había hecho en el pasado. Solía mantenerme despierto en la noche pensando en adquirir ese carro Ford negro de 1950, pensando en comprarlo, sin tener alguna actividad criminal involucrada, ya que en mi antiguo barrio (llamado La Tierra de los Burros) había mucho de esas actividades alrededor mío.
El señor Henry Blackhead y yo nos llevábamos bien. Él era de mediana edad, bajo, talvez de unos treinta y nueve años de edad, más o menos, con un cuerpo largo que parecía perezoso y suave, vestía terno negro y corbata, sus ojos como que eran muy grandes para su cabeza y cuerpo, un poco gordo en el estómago, dudaba que hubiera estado mucho en peleas. Pero era un hombre justo como para quien trabajar. Incluso estuvimos parados detrás del mostrador de boletos, que estaba en el pasillo ventilado, unas cuantas veces, y hablamos generalmente de trivialidades.
Supongo que podrías decir que el señor Blackhead me enseñó a trabajar como un empleado, era mi primer jefe: cómo vender caramelos, dar cambio, sonreír a los clientes, limpiar la sala de exposición, un montos de cosas valiosas para cualquier hombre joven que recién empezaba a tener un trabajo regular.
Cuando pienso en ello, era divertido. Tú tenías una entrada gratis en todos los cinemas en el centro de San Pablo. Y en tu trabajo, podías tener caramelos, gaseosas y cancha blanca a un precio justo. Cuando la función empezaba, tu trabajo te dejaba bastante tiempo libre, como para escuchar a la máquina de cancha blanca, o para hablar con el administrador, o a uno de los otros dos empleados, o con el que recogía los boletos, etc. todos conversando, un montón de charla se llevaba a cabo.
Había bastante disciplina involucrada, supongo, cosas que podrías usar el resto de tu vida, si tú tenías algo de sentido y pasabas por alto lo que oías y veías, y sentías.
Y al final del verano, compraría ese carro Ford negro de 1950, con mi amigo Bill, él había venido a mi trabajo para recogerme y Henry estaba corto de ayuda y se suponía que yo tenía que salir a las cuatro de la tarde y el señor Blackhead lucía preocupado, o mejor dicho, asado, etc. etc. si tú sabes lo que quiero decir (él necesitaba ayuda y sentía una sombra de impotencia).
“¡Caramba!”, me dijo, cuando estaba por salir con Bill, “tú no puedes irte, tú sabes que te necesito hasta que cerremos, doble turno”, ya que otros no habían venido a trabajar.
Creo que sabía que iba a venir con esa historia, pero Bill me había dicho que el hombre estaba esperando para comprar el carro y que él estaba yéndose de viaje, y yo sabía que el señor Blackhead no estaba de humor para historias de esa clase, él no estaría satisfecho con nada que pudiera decir, y empecé a caminar afuera, dije: “Tengo una cita”.
Primero que nada fui hacia Bill y hablé con él, y ambos salimos como dos tíos, como se hubieran referido allá en esos días, Bill vestía una casaca negra de cuero, yo le había dicho que sólo tenía cuarenta dólares y el carro costaba sesenta, y él me prestó diez dólares y eso sería suficiente para comprar el carro, Bill señaló algunas fallas del carro a su dueño, por lo que él decidió rebajarnos el precio.
“¿A dónde piensas que estás yendo?” me preguntó mi jefe. Lo miré por la pequeña puerta por la que él entraba y salía de su oficina; la misma en la que él se paraba para mirar todo lo que pasaba dentro del teatro. No me importó lo que él dijo y cómo lo dijo.
“Me estoy yendo, y puedes quedarte con tu trabajo porque no me importa” le dije. Supongo que él sabía dónde había adquirido mi anterior educación.
“Continuemos yendo” me dijo Bill, y eso fue todo.
# 451, 7 de Agosto 2009 “The Candy Counter”
Books by the Author
Books Out of Print
The Other Door (Poems- Volume I, 1981)
Willie the Humpback Whale (poetic tale)
(1982; 1983, 2008, four printings (forth in Spanish & English)
The Tale of Freddy the Foolish Frog (1982)
The Tale of Teddy and His Magical Plant (1983)
The Tale of the Little Rose’s Smile (1983)
The Tale of Alex’s Mysterious Pot (1984)
Two Modern Short Stories of Immigrant life [1984]
The Safe Child/the Unsafe Child [1985] (for teachers, of Minnesota Schools)
Presently In Print
The Last Trumpet and the Woodbridge Demon (2002) Visions
Angelic Renegades & Raphaim Giants (2002) Visions
Tales of the Tiamat [trilogy]
Tiamat, Mother of Demon I (2002)
Gwyllion, Daughter of the Tiamat II (2002)
Revenge of the Tiamat III (2002)
Unusual Books (no category)
Every day’s Adventure (2002) Pot Luck
Islam, In Search of Satan’s Rib (2002) Opinion
The Addiction Books of D.L. Siluk:
A Path to Sobriety I (2002)
A Path to Relapse Prevention II (2003)
Aftercare: Chemical Dependency Recovery III (2004)
Autobiographical
A Romance in Augsburg I “2003)
Romancing San Francisco II (2003)
Where the Birds Don’t Sing III (2003)
Stay Down, Old Abram IV (2004)
Chasing the Sun [Travels of D.L Siluk] (2002)
Romance and/or Tragedy:
The Rape of Angelina of Glastonbury 1199 AD (2002) Novelette
Perhaps it’s Love (Minnesota to Seattle) 2004 Novel
Cold Kindness (Dieburg, Germany) 2005 Novelette
The Suspense short stories, Novels and Novelettes:
Death on Demand [Seven Suspenseful Short Stories] 2003 Vol: I
Dracula’s Ghost [And other Peculiar stories] 2003 Vol: II
The Jumping Serpents of Bosnia (suspenseful short stories) 2008 Vol: III
The Mumbler [psychological] 2003 (Novel)
After Eve [a prehistoric adventure] (2004) Novel
Mantic ore: Day of the Beast ((2002) (Novelette)) supernatural
The Poetry of D.L. Siluk
General Poetry
The Other Door (Poems- Volume I, 1981)
Willie the Humpback Whale (poetic tale)
(1982; 1983, 2008, four printings (the forth in Spanish & English)
Sirens [Poems-Volume II, 2003]
The Macabre Poems [Poems-Volume III, 2004]
Minnesota Poetry
Last Autumn and Winter [Minnesota poems, 2006]
Peruvian Poetry
Spell of the Andes [2005]
Peruvian Poems [2005]
Poetic Images Out of Peru [And other poems, 2006]
The Magic of the Avelinos (Poems on the Mantaro Valley, book One; 2006)
The Road to Unishcoto (Poems on the Mantaro Valley, Book Two, 2007)
The Poetry of Stone Forest (Cerro de Pasco, 2007)
The Windmills (Poetry of Juan Parra del Riego) 2009
The Natural Writings of D.L. Siluk
(To include the Shannon O’Day in four Volumes Trilogy) In English and Spanish
Cornfield Laughter (and the unpublished collected stories…) 2009 (Vol. 1)
Men with Torrent Women (Two Short Novelettes and Sixteen Short stories) 2009 (Vol.II)
A Leaf and a Rose (a comprehensive library of new writings…) 2009, (Vol. III)
Donkeyland, Minnesota (Stories of Everyday life of a Neighborhood) (Vol .VI)) 2010
A Midwinter Soldier (... and other selected unpublished stories…) 2011 Vol.V
Back of Book
There is no single antagonist in these natural writings, “Donkeyland, Minnesota…” Events and circumstances sometimes seem to pile up, bringing about doom into certain lives. Each of the twenty-eight stories has its own theme taking place for the most part, between 1958 thru 1968.
Mr. Siluk grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, his neighborhood serves as the model for this mostly nonfiction novel. The reportedly characters carry the same qualities of many of the real life people from that neighborhood.
The book (Volume four) is a collection of related
short stories, which could be loosely defined as a
novel: mostly centered on Chick Evens, or those who share his life. The overall plot explores the everyday lives of a cluster of these teenagers in this small-neighborhood called Donkeyland by the police. The author conveys the half-conscious thoughts, raw emotions of the inhabitants; the gang’s inability to express hopes, fears, the future—while living in an inarticulate world of their own.
“What Stories are remembered? Is it not those which people’s very souls are bared, in which there heart-beats are almost heard, in which life is not described but revealed?”
—Sherwood Anderson
Such is this book, to be read and reread…
Back picture-painting, is of the author, May, 1963 (at fifteen-years old), St. Paul, Minnesota (while living in Donkeyland). This is the author’s 44th book; he lives with his wife Rosa in Minnesota and Peru. Presently the author is working on Volume Five to his natural writings, called “A Midwinter Soldier.”
