In Loyalty to Their Kind

Until my oldest brother Mike moved out of our half of a double-block home, we had three bedrooms for four kids. Briefly, I squeezed in a bed with Mike because bunking with my other brother Ned would have been the same as pouring salt on a slug. And you can probably guess who would have been what or what would have been who in that scenario.

Mike had books on his shelf: The Pentagon Papers and RIGHT ON! A Documentary on Student Protest. I hadn’t read those, but I did manage Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. I didn’t grasp its theological implications, and yet some nights I couldn't help but think I'd landed on another planet.

Silver metallic stars and a cardboard white pig with black spots dangled on bakery string from Mike’s ceiling. At night, he’d read me the poems of A.E. Housman:

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair

And left my necktie God knows where,

And carried half way home, or near,

Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:

Then the world seemed none so bad,

And I myself a sterling lad;

And down in lovely muck I've lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Then I saw the morning sky:

Heigho, the tale was all a lie;

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew.

I guess Mike painted his bedroom walls by himself because other than the shade of our Catholic priest’s sash during the Lenten season, deep purple and my mother clashed. How she let him get away with that paint color is anybody’s guess.

One night he got home later than usual after I’d drifted off to sleep. His now understandable hunger had him taking a grape jelly sandwich to bed. I don’t think he managed a bite of it because the next morning the smears of Welch’s on my body matched the paint on the walls.

Mike made his way far west in 1973. I remember the Viet Nam draft day not long before. You know, the one where your parents and sister and fiancé sit in the living room and don’t do cartwheels when your number gets called. The one where you hope Phil Berrigan crashes the party instead of someone like Phil Simms.

Mike got lucky. That’s one way to look at it. Had he been born a few hours later, he would have made a trip far east. And that’s not exactly the kind of trip that interested any long-haired dude in the early 70s.

I remember palpable uneasiness among my family in our TV room: a silent foreboding days before the Selective Service yanked capsules from big revolving clear plastic drums. Like the Powerball drawing absent the American Dream. The capsules contained strips of paper on which were printed the birthdates of a fresh new batch of nineteen-year-old kids. If your special day got pulled among the first hundred or so, you were headed out.

I remember seeing guys come back from that place. A place where John Fogerty said the devil was on the loose. These young kids looked like they’d watched while their dog got flayed on their front porch.

At age nine, I didn’t know about the heinousness. I had no idea what the nation’s “leaders” didn’t want anyone to know. I knew little about politics and economics, but I knew the commandments pretty well. And things didn't feel right.

My opinions indeed formed from the way this war made me feel. I’d feel it on the six o’clock news. I’d feel it in the expressionless gaze of a guy from around town. He wore a dark green uniform with gold medals and multi-colored ribbons earned in the pseudo-Olympics hosted in Southeast Asia. I’d also feel it through the music of Eric Burdon and the Animals. If by itself the song Sky Pilot wasn’t enough to stir a young kid’s emotions, then I don’t know what was. 

One morning my dad and I dropped Mike off on the side of the highway. I watched my brother point his thumb in the general direction of Haight-Ashbury. He tossed a sack on the cinders between the white line on the freeway and the witch grass beyond the berm. My dad lowered his head and raised it, straightening his jaw and driving away after a goodbye that seemed awfully quick.

I stared through the rear window as the growing distance rendered my tall, lanky, dark-haired brother to the size of one of those little plastic green toy Army guys with a peace sign on its helmet. Understanding California was a ways away that may as well have been Beijing in my mind, I felt like someone pulled my mattress from beneath me in mid-slumber. My bony nine-year-old body was in some respect left to lie on wood slats and squeaky coil springs. Mike had protected me. He bought me records before he left. I listened to those albums each night thereafter in shards of sadness before sleep, now that I had a turntable and a dispirited bedroom all to myself. 

My brother’s departure became more tolerable after his friend Austin showed up at our door one day not long after. Like all hippies versus their parents in that era, it seemed Austin and his mom disagreed about life’s trajectory, and my parents agreed to put him up for a while. I’d wait for him to come home at night and at low volume we’d listen to The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, just like I did with Mike.

A peaceful and gently brooding soul, Austin would find his own way to San Francisco after a couple months spent in Mike’s old purple psychedelic slice of our Broad Street home. He’d meet a wife and find contentedness and say farewell to all things secular on a Northern California stretch of road in 1977. Time hasn’t clouded my memory of him, and I find it impossible to recall those days without mentioning how much I enjoyed having Austin around. 

The distance made his death difficult to grasp. At a family party not long after Austin passed, our friend, playwright and newspaperman Mike Cotter, consoled me in the living room. But in the middle of trying to make sense of Austin’s death, I took a potshot at one of Mike’s columns in the Sunday paper. I found it trite. He was better than that. I also fancied an argument like everyone else was having in the kitchen. He got mad and questioned me on some basic grammar usage. He had me. I was about to attempt a bullshit answer when Jimmy “Fru” Frushon, an artist and musician, walked into the room. My eyes looked like those proverbial holes in the snow. 

“What’s wrong, Tommy?” Fru said. “You been smokin’ weed? C’mon, man. C’mon, ya gotta share. Let’s go out back.”

“No, man. I’m just sad. I’m just thinking about Austin. I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know where he is. Do you believe in God, Fru?” 

“Of course I believe in God, Tommy. If I didn’t believe in God, I’d be out shooting people.” 

Whenever I have certain doubts, I recall that night. I lean on that statement.

Mike Cotter staged a play called Sweeny at the Gate in 1973—performed at The Great Gatsby Theater in Scranton. Fru helped compose the music. Mike said maybe I could land a small part as the script called for a young kid in a cameo role. I think they used Cotter’s little brother for the part. Maybe I missed my big break.

Fru would begin a play called Earth Prisoner in which your social security number was your convict number. Mike Cotter and Jimmy Frushon are no longer confined by the Earth. I miss them both.

I’m glad I grew up around people like these. People who felt and thought and rebelled and committed it all to some form of art. There’d been poetry, plays, music, and these philosophical discussions that sailed way over my head. The arguments had the tenor and vehemence of dialogue in one of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg pot-houses. Because, well…there were some pots floating around— in a manner of speaking.  

I took away what I could from those discussions. But I learned not to get involved. I wasn’t versed in what they were versed in, and they would put me squarely in my place if I raised any nonsense. Usually when I opened my mouth, I got a dismissive wave of the hand and a “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” They were right. I didn’t. But hanging around those guys gave me a foundation to think and not just aspire to grunt, deceive and look for fistfights. Or shoot people.