May 13, 2003

• Still in Kansas, Toto…
  1953-’54

  My
  cousin Red and his wife Blondie (the whole town of Halstead called them
  that, but to their mothers they were still Eldon and Charlene) have a
  red-haired daughter, Elizabeth, four years younger than I. 
  In this pic from Christmas ’53, she was 5 and I was 9.  I received
  the Chinese checkers set for Christmas.

    Several people played a few games with me, but nobody would
  continue to play with me for more than a half dozen or so games,
  because nobody could win.  When I complained to Mama, she said I
  should let other people win sometimes, but she didn’t explain how to do
  that.  The instructions on the box said how to play, but not how
  to let others win.  I was accused of cheating, because I
  didn’t know how to cheat.  I had a lot of fun with the game
  anyway, sitting by myself in the back booth at the drugstore, making
  those orderly arrangements that are diagnostic of obsessive-compulsive
  disorder.

  

  Elizabeth had been born in that town while her parents ran
  the sundries store.  She was a cutie and the town’s sweetheart,
  growing up on Main Street.  Because Liz wouldn’t let anyone call
  her Granny anything but Granny, my aunt Alice was Granny to the town of
  Halstead and soon became Granny to me, too.  It was a lot simpler
  than arguing with Elizabeth.  My mother already called her Mom,
  anyway.

  Another gift for me that Christmas had been a little black plastic
  Brownie camera.  Mama put strict limits on the amount of film,
  flashbulbs and photo processing I could have, and I shot pics right up
  to my limit all the time.  Most of my childhood photography, all
  the negatives and the best of the prints, got away in ’69 when I went
  to jail and our house was stripped by our friends.  The shots I’ll
  be posting here are some that Mama and Granny kept and then returned to
  me in ’79.

  I have mentioned the magazines, comics, paperback books and jukebox
  in the store.  We kept a paper cup beside the cash register, full
  of nickels painted red with nail polish.  When the man came around
  to empty the coin box in the jukebox, we got our red nickels
  back.  I just had to make the cup of red nickels last between his
  visits.  Once a week, a news service in Wichita delivered a bundle
  of magazines, comics and paperbacks.  I would break the twine and
  put the new stock out on the white-painted wooden magazine stand and in
  the wire racks.  Then I would start reading.

  My favorite magazines were Life, Look, Photoplay and Modern Screen,
  but I read everything including Argosy and Esquire, even Mama’s
  magazines:  True Story and True Romance.  She also read a lot
  of the bodice rippers with the sexy covers from the paperback rack, and
  I liked them, too.   I read all the comics, too:  the boys’
  books like Superman and Plastic Man; the non-funny funny books Classics
  Illustrated; Archie, Nancy & Sluggo, various Disney
  funnies–whatever there was to read, I read. 

  Among the paperbacks I read around that time, the most memorable was Asimov’s I Robot. 
  For a few days, I got lost in that world of the future.  I already
  knew how to handle books, so selling them after I read them was no
  problem.  Mama made sure I washed my hands whenever I came in from
  outdoors or finished the sweeping and dusting.

  My compulsive Virgoan orderliness and my photographic memory got me
  into a lot of work.  I was the one who got to unpack new stock and
  put it on the shelves, and who counted everything for the year-end
  inventory.  During the school year, Mama hired a series of high
  school girls, one at a time, to help out in the store on evenings and
  weekends.  When I was out of school, I worked there.  I got
  paid an allowance of 25 cents a day for it.  Even when I wasn’t
  working, if I was there doing my homework in a booth or reading or
  watching TV in our little balcony room, and someone couldn’t find
  something, they’d call me.  I knew what we had and where to find
  it.

  The balcony over the back of the store had a partition across its
  front that went almost but not quite all the way to the ceiling. 
  When we took over the store from Red, the balcony held his
  desk, a filing cabinet and boxes of some of the bulkier but
  light-weight stock such as paper cups.  I rearranged the other
  stock in the back room that opened onto the alley behind the store,
  made some room, and moved the boxes down from the balcony. 
  Mama bought a pair of bunk beds for the balcony and we moved in there.

  I remember finding several cases of very old castile shampoo in the
  back room.  Red had stuck it back there because the stuff didn’t
  sell.  I got it out, and made a big pyramidal display of it in the
  middle of the store next to the greeting card racks, and it started
  selling.  I think I helped it along by going back again and again
  to shake up the bottles and turn the unattractive separated contents to
  a satiny creamy consistency.

  I remember getting my introduction to taxes, tariffs and
  international trade around that time.  We sold Coty cosmetics,
  imported from France.  A shipment came in from a wholesaler, and
  it contained both imported and domestic items, on some of which Mama
  had to pay excise tax or luxury tax.  When she asked me to
  calculate a retail price that would cover cost, taxes and a 33 1/3%
  profit, I asked her what an excise tax was.  She didn’t know, so I
  went to the library to find out.  That was the start of something
  big.

  The hospital and clinic had earned Halstead a Carnegie
  Library.  Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic foundation
  has contributed about as much as any other force or
  factor, to my education.  I don’t recall the librarian’s
  name, but I remember exactly how she looked and smelled, with her curly
  blond hair and the floaty flowered silk dresses she wore, her open-toed
  sandals, and the sweet Muguet des Bois perfume she
  wore.  She sparked in me an ambition to be a librarian, which
  I’ve fulfilled a few times in different ways, starting in junior high
  school and continuing in prison.  The only thing of much value
  still left in our old place across the highway here is my
  library.  I wish I had room in this place for all my
  books.

  When the librarian had gotten to know me and I had nearly exhausted
  her collection downstairs, one day while she was in the store having a
  Coke, she asked Mama if she could have permission to let me browse the
  stacks, the loft above the library where the “restricted” books were
  kept.  Mama said it was okay with her. 

  At the head of a steep stairway was a glass fronted bookcase filled
  with leatherbound books with gold edges on the pages and gold titles
  stamped on the spines:  Decameron by Bocaccio; Ovid; Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis; Darwin’s Origin of Species; Audobon’s Birds of America and
  about sixteen feet of shelf space packed with a similar variety of
  books.  I read all those listed above and a dozen or so other
  less memorable titles from that case, and a lot of the other, less
  costly books on the open shelves up there.

  During the first summer in Halstead, I met a few kids whose parents
  had businesses in those few blocks of downtown, and one boy, Leroy Coy,
  whose father hung out either in the pool hall or the beer joint in
  the next block north from ours on Main Street.  Leroy’s hands,
  face and clothes were always dirty, and he reminded me of Mugsy of the
  Bowery Boys (who had been my first movie star crush).  Leroy was
  tough and quick and he noticed things.  He would act out hilarious
  parodies of the twittery old maids who gathered for cherry phosphates
  in our front booth every Saturday, and the bachelor wheat farmers
  who showed up for cokes or shakes at the counter and to check out Mama,
  the new single woman in town.

  That fall, I got an earache.  Mama took me to Elizabeth’s
  pediatrician, Dr. Stouffer.  He prescribed a new drug:  an
  antibiotic, aureomycin.  As I got worse, Mama called the doctor
  and he told her to double the dose.  I got worse still, with a
  rash, higher fever and seizures.  The next time she called,
  Dr. Stouffer was out and the on-call doctor, whom I eventually came to
  call Dr. Bob, listened to the symptoms, figured out that I was
  having a reaction to the drug, and discontinued it.

  I survived, but I was very weak, shaky and incoordinated, and my ear
  infection had gathered so much pus behind my eardrum that the eardrum
  burst.  My muscles were stiff and sore.  I had a hard time
  holding my head up because my neck was weak and sore.  I ached all
  over and they told me it was growing pains.  “Growing pains” are
  now recognized as early signs of ME/CFIDS.

  That winter, I had mumps again, for the third time.  The
  doctors at the world-famous Hertzler Clinic there wouldn’t believe that
  I’d had mumps more than once, and I’ve encountered that same
  incredulity from other doctors all my life.  I don’t argue. 
  I’ve never known whether it was idiots in the first place misdiagnosing
  me, or idiots later on not recognizing my immunological
  anomalies.  Who knows?  All I know is that from my
  perspective the diseases have been the same every time I’ve had
  them.  Something changed when I was about twenty.  My
  allergies changed, I got asthma, and stopped getting the “childhood”
  diseases.

  At some point that winter in Halstead, a doctor looked down my
  throat and said that after they got the fever down a bit I would
  need to have my tonsils out.  When I got better and went into the
  clinic for the surgery, they looked down my throat and said I didn’t
  have my tonsils any more.  They said they had “rotted away”. 
  Yaay!  I’ve also been told that THAT doesn’t happen either. 
  Who knows?

  Greeting cards were a big portion of Mama’s business in the
  store.  Halstead’s only real industry at the time, besides the
  wheat farms surrounding the town and the grain elevator and farm
  equipment store, were the Halstead Hospital and Hertzler Clinic. 
  We had customers from all over the country and even a few from other
  countries, looking for get well cards, sympathy cards, and such. 
  The couple who were Mama’s wholesale card suppliers took a liking to me
  and offered me the pick of the litter when their cocker spaniel had
  pups. 

  When the puppies were old enough to leave their mother, Mama and I
  went to their warehouse in Wichita to pick out my puppy.  Mama
  insisted that I get a male… no money for spaying and no room in her
  heart or house for puppies.  The puppy I picked out (none of whose
  puppy-pictures have survived) had curly black fur and ears so long they
  dragged on the floor.  He blended into the shadows in our balcony
  room.  I’d watch him go across the floor toward the little office
  alcove at the back, and then next time I’d see him he’d be coming out
  from under my bed, dragging dust bunnies on the ends of his ears. 
  It was spooky.  I named him Spooky.

  Mama spent a little money and joined a Lonely Hearts Club out of the
  back of one of her romance magazines.  She got the first mailing,
  a four-page catalog of singles ads.  She started writing letters
  to the men she found there.  One of them came to visit, and then
  another.  Neither of them looked much like the photos from the
  ads, and one of them had an atrocious toupee.  Mama laughed it off
  and joined two more Lonely Hearts Clubs.

  We had a Saturday morning routine that spread to six days a week
  after school was out the next summer–we were closed on Sunday, like
  every store on our block of Main Street except the cafes.  We
  would come down from the balcony-loft in back, unlock the front door
  and bring in the bundle of newspapers, two quarts of raw milk with
  cream floating at the top, and any other deliveries waiting by the
  door.  Then Mama would start setting things up for the day while I
  headed up to the bakery for half a dozen donuts, with a stop at
  Millie’s Cafe on the way back, for a pint of coffee.

  There on the stools at the counter, we’d share that breakfast. 
  She would pour half of the coffee into a heavy mug to cool, and I would
  add a scoop of vanilla ice cream to what was left in the white
  cardboard carton.  We’d split the half dozen donuts between us and
  drink our coffee, often finishing up between waiting on early
  customers.  I can still smell the coffee with that overtone of
  bleached cardboard.  The gooey mouth feel of a fresh glazed donut
  has brought up those memories many times.  Oh, yum…  I gotta think about something else for a while, and go find something HEALTHY to eat.

  • 6:05 pm
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