Sex

NOTE: This is another chapter in my autobiography, No Secrets.

In “State Trooper,” Bruce Springsteen sings, “The only thing I’ve got’s been bothering me my whole life.” I think I know what he means.

I’m not sure how my insecurity about my sexuality developed. It may have been when I would bathe in a tub in the living room when we lived on my grandfather’s farm (we had no bathroom). Perhaps during one of those baths my cousin or someone else made a disparaging remark about the size of my penis (it is very small). Perhaps my bed-wetting made me self-conscious (I even wet the bed once when I was in the seventh grade during one of my cousins’ visits).

Perhaps my anxiety was aggravated by the fact that as a child when I had a full bladder I’d often have trouble urinating and my mother would stand next to me trying to assure me, which only made matters worse. At times my difficulty may have been caused by an erection. Regardless, when I did piss, it would be a bit painful at first. And I did have a low threshold for pain. Throughout my childhood, I’d often faint when I hit my elbow or knee (probably because the muscles around my neck would tighten to minimize the feeling in the hypothalamus, which would cut off blood to the brain.)

Decades later while taking a Gestalt Practice workshop with Chris Price at the Esalen Institute, Mother’s effort to help me pee emerged from my subconscious. One day Chris suggested that right before going to sleep we ask our dreams, “What is love?” and then write down our dream when we wake up. My dream was vivid. I walked down a stairway with my mother into a basement and as I urinated, Mother stood next to me and watched. My definition of love!

When I reported this dream to Chris, her spontaneous reaction was, “Once again,” suggesting that she often heard clients dredge up similar instances of parental misconduct. What Mother did wasn’t classic sex abuse, but it feels very close to it. I believe it helped instill deep-seated discomfort about my genitalia that would take decades to purge.

Mother would also accompany me to public restrooms and embarrass me by standing guard outside. I believe she even did it once when I was in the 10th grade, for I recall such an incident at the drive-in theater and Daddy didn’t work there until I entered high school. She was probably worried about gay men, but this over-protectiveness probably engendered more angst about my sexuality.

When I was in the second grade a friend came over to my house with his boxing gloves and wanted us to strip down to our underwear so we could more properly box. The thought scared me and I refused.

During this period, I heard a joke I’ll never forget. Two young children, a boy and a girl, lived in a two-story house. They slid down the stairway banister. At the bottom, they rammed into a knob and fell on the floor. They got up and pulled down their pants to inspect the damage. “It sure has swollen up,” she said. He replied, “Good Lord, it knocked it clean off.” That joke was the sum total of my sex education.

In the sixth grade, I had to go to gym class and take showers with other boys. While I was naked in the locker room, other boys would make fun of my penis. Some would call it “peanut.” Almost every day one or more boys would harass me. The more they saw that I was disturbed, the more they did it.

And I had no one to talk to. If I had had a good relationship with my father, we probably could have talked about how he suffered the same insults, for he also had a relatively small penis. But we didn’t communicate about anything, much less sex. So I dreaded gym class.

These taunts so traumatized me that as an adult I sometimes thought that I didn’t want to have a son because he might inherit the same trait and suffer as I did. Rationally, I knew I could have nurtured him so it wouldn’t be an issue. Nevertheless, that irrational feeling occasionally crossed my mind.

It wasn’t until Masters and Johnson released Human Sexual Response in the late 60s that I learned that my penis was more than adequate for genital intercourse (as proved to be the case!). But knowing it intellectually is one thing. Dealing with it emotionally took time.

Once the morning after a one-night stand a Brazilian woman saw my penis, giggled, and made a comment. (Maybe Brazilian women are more transparent.) But she didn’t complain the night before!

Puberty was late arriving, which exacerbated my disquiet. Guys would talk and some would jack off in the shower competing to see who could ejaculate the farthest. It all mystified me. Then one day while showering, I got an erection and had an orgasm. It was marvelous. “So this is what they’ve been talking about,” I said to myself.

I proceeded to masturbate frequently, staining my underwear. Mother noticed and made a comment about “wet dreams” or some euphemism. I ignored her. She’d come to my bedside at night, spying on me. After I bought a Playboy, one night I heard her approaching and hid the magazine. She pulled back the covers, was scandalized, confiscated the magazine, and said something about me being a “bad boy.” Feeling guilt about masturbating was a problem for many years.

In high school, I’d sometimes go on long road trips with the debate team. I competed in the extemporaneous speech contests. Though I always finished last, I kept going. Once on the way back, in a crowded car, a girl sat in my lap. I was clearly uncomfortable and others joked about it, but I didn’t really understand their jokes.

In college, sometimes I’d masturbate multiple times a day, telling myself that the more I did it, the less I’d feel guilty. It took years, but it worked.

Once, after two or three reconnaissance missions, I went to the Tenderloin red-light district and followed a hooker to a hotel room. She gave me a blowjob, I came quickly, and she jumped up apparently angry and ran to the sink. I did not enjoy the experience.

When I finally had real sex years later with Judy in Greenwich Village and we began to engage in oral sex, I was clearly uncomfortable. She asked me why and I told her about that incident with the hooker. She assured me to forget it and I did.

As I mentioned in the “College” chapter, I was obsessed with sex. One reason I went alone to concerts in San Francisco is that I’d get up close to the stage where it was crowded and could have physical contact with women, which would arouse me. I was always careful not to impose myself. I would get close enough so the woman would make contact with me and if she stayed away thereafter, I accepted it. But they often clearly enjoyed it. (Now concerts are a different experience, for the younger women who go to concerts avoid contact with me because I’m an old man.)

One night at the Winterland concert hall, I was in constant contact with a woman to my right and a woman behind me, who was being embraced by a man. The man commented, “If it’s too hot in the kitchen, get out.” That seemed to be the dominant culture at those concerts. I assume it still is.

Shortly after the disastrous 1970 Altamont concert, the Rolling Stones wanted to compensate by playing several shows at the Winterland, a small venue for them. My friends and I camped out all night for tickets. During the show, so many people were crammed together I got behind a woman and spent almost the whole show with my groin pressed against her hips, with other people pressed against me on all sides. That was a unique experience. But then again, the Rolling Stones are unique.

At my first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival I followed two women toward the stage for the Professor Longhair show and when we couldn’t get any closer, we would “dance” with stroking their butt as we moved. They once switched positions and we continued as before.

Twice at concerts I reached orgasm merely by dancing by myself, not touching anyone, just watching. I once came while riding a bus, just staring at a woman who was staring at me. Riding the Greyhound back and forth between Dallas and Berkeley involved a constant effort to sit next to a woman who wanted to have physical contact (the vibrations of the bus were very conducive to sexual arousal). Taking public transit in San Francisco was a similar sexual adventure, especially when the bus was packed and I had to stand up. Once I reached orgasm undulating on my stomach at the beach staring at a woman who was staring at me. I was a sex maniac.

In 1969, I was hired to serve as Intern Minister at Glide Church in San Francisco. I had two jobs. I helped run the psychedelic light show that we projected on the wall behind the ministers during Sunday morning celebrations. And I helped to operate the audio-visual equipment during workshops held by the National Sex and Drug Forum, a Glide project. Otherwise I was free to do whatever I wanted.

The workshops were for various kinds of helping professionals. During the sessions that focused on sex, we projected slides of erotic art as well as pornographic movies and erotic films that the Institute itself produced. We held these workshops in the Church basement in a carpeted room filled with those large pillows that were popular with hippies. The participants would lie on the pillows while bombarded with images that depicted all sorts of sex. The concept was to “desensitize” the participants to forms of sexuality about which they might initially feel judgmental.

Even for San Francisco in 1969, it was a controversial approach. One night the local Methodist Bishop got down on his hands and knees looking for semen on the carpet because he had been told that orgies happened there. He found none.

Working there for 15 months was an informative and liberating experience. I certainly overcame my ignorance concerning homosexuality!

Around 1970 I went camping in Mexico with a married woman who lived in San Diego. She was active in the New Adult Community, which was a sister community to our Alternative Futures Community in San Francisco. We settled on the Ensenada peninsula, a gorgeous setting, with many pelicans diving for fish. I took some LSD and we exchanged massages and were physical with one another, but she didn’t want to have sex. I was frustrated and stayed awake most of the night processing my feelings.

When the sun came up the next morning, I started reading Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, which I had brought with me. It blew my mind. The book documents how we have been acculturated to relate to sex as a power struggle. Men objectify women and proceed to try to “conquer” them. The “missionary position” with the man on top and in control symbolizes this domination. Once the conquest has been achieved, men often drop the woman and move on to the next seduction. And women often collaborate, being passively seductive. Domination or submission is the name of the game.

Seduction, conquest, and domination had never been my game. Especially after reading I and Thou, mutuality inspired me. But Sexual Politics helped me understand how I too had been acculturated with some elements of those dynamics. Reading that book attuned me to those tendencies, which makes it easier to avoid allowing them to determine my behavior.

For those insights, I was deeply indebted to Kate Millet. Years later, when a friend tapped me on the shoulder at a small gathering and told me, “I’d like to introduce you to Kate Millet,” before turning to greet her, I almost screamed, “Kate Millet!” It was a warm encounter.

Some time after working at Glide, I got a job working as an orderly at the Laguna Honda convalescent hospital in the orthopedics ward. One of my patients was a retired Navy commander who had rheumatoid arthritis that required him to lie at all times on a large piece of sheepskin. We often had long conversations. Once he told me that he and his wife of many decades never had genital intercourse and never felt that they were missing anything. They had a glorious sex life and a great marriage.

That story often comes to mind. It certainly stands in sharp contrast to the conquering missionary position exposed by Kate Millet! And it makes me wonder why our society is so obsessed with penis size, for genital intercourse is not essential for great sex.

For twenty years I had a good bit of sex, sometimes one-night stands, sometimes short-term relationships, and a few longer-term involvements. On two occasions, with relationships that were particularly passionate and satisfying for both parties, we stopped seeing each other twice only to get back together for a third go.

Some special individual moments stand out. The woman who sharply bit my penis during orgasm. “So that’s why they say, ‘Bite me,’” I said to myself. The woman who rammed her finger into my anus during orgasm. “So that’s why gay men like anal sex,” I said to myself. The woman who had such control of her muscles she could massage my penis with her vagina. Having sex on the beach with a woman I picked up hitchhiking. Making love with my one true love in the grass at Strawberry Fields on the Mendocino Coast. Being seduced by the girl friend of my hash dealer in an Amsterdam houseboat when he left to go get the hash that I would smuggle into San Francisco. Making love on the kitchen floor with the school teacher who worked in the tree-house-populated enclave, Canyon. The Mexican woman whose husband scared me when he unexpectedly came into the apartment at 6am. My sister’s friend who seduced me by pretending to be taking a nap on my bed half-naked when I arrived home in the afternoon. The short-skirted woman at Esalen who walked up to me and said, “I’m attracted to you.” The women who at different times joined me on the dance floor when I was dancing alone. The women who walked away from me as the energy began flowing and stared out a window, inviting me to massage their back. The woman at Alternative Futures who wanted to shower first.

One encounter particularly amuses me, for it shocked the dormitory at the Pacific School of Religion where I lived while a student there. My roommate was out of town and loaned me his convertible sports car. Tooling around town, I noticed a woman in a car behind me. I turned left and right and she followed me. So we drove to the school’s parking lot and went up to my room. Dorm residents never had overnight guests and she was very loud, so I was informed the next day that my behavior was inappropriate.

Once, however, I was intimidated. Walking through Golden Gate Park, I found a very well tanned woman in a bikini lying on her stomach with the top off. I lit up some weed, which caught her attention when the wind carried it in her direction. We proceeded to play the typical voyeur-exhibitionist eye-contact game, but after an hour or two, I left. The next day, I returned to the same spot and she was there again, reading the Sunday paper. I asked her if I could join her and she said yes. We got stoned, lay in the sun for a couple of hours, and were clearly both aroused. Our sighs were almost orgasmic. When she left, I walked with her to her car and she gave me her name and number. But I never called her and don’t know why. I still often fantasize about her.

All in all, though, I had lots of great sex with lots of women who had lots of great sex with lots of men. Though the first time or two with a woman, I sometimes would come too quickly, once we got to know each other, that was less of an issue. I became very confident in my sexual abilities and my anxiety about the size of my penis largely disappeared.

Talking openly about the issue helped. Once, during a weekend Urban Plunge that dealt in part with sex education conducted by the Alternative Futures in the Ministry project, I stood up, took off my clothes, and walked around talking about my history of discomfort with my penis and how I had overcome it, thanks in large part to Masters and Johnson. Story of that incident circulated back to the Pacific School of Religion, a co-sponsor of the project.

Influenced by Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals, the hippies who preached “free love,” and the feminists who challenged the notions of patriarchy and monogamy, I persisted with my commitment to open relationships. Having been a virgin until I was twenty-three, I was making up for lost time

The movie Kinsey addressed “free love” with some sophistication, pointing out that we were too casual about it, too indifferent concerning how others were reacting to our infidelity. Perhaps I still would have been non-monogamous, but I regret not listening more and discussing the feelings that were involved.

Once in the early 70s, I had just taken a half-tab of LSD when I learned that some acquaintances were having an orgy and the most famous anti-war activist in the country was going to be there. None of my friends wanted to go, but I jumped at the opportunity. The host was Betty Dodson, a famous feminist promoter of masturbation.

When I walked into the large rectangular room where the orgy was being held, I met a male friend, who was standing up, naked, talking with a tall woman, who was also naked. We chatted for a while and I said, “Well, I guess I should take off my clothes.” After I deposited my garments, I met another friend, a woman, with whom I had spent the night once. We started kissing and a male friend of hers joined us and he and I started kissing. His beard was rough but otherwise it was somewhat pleasant.

Then I noticed the first woman lying on the floor next to me receiving oral sex, nearing a loud orgasm. I reached over and touched her. She took my hand and I moved away from my threesome and became involved with her. I stayed with her all night, while other men came and went. We talked some. Her boyfriend was in Brazil and he approved.

After multiple orgasms over the course of several hours, the anti-war superstar, who had been on the other side of the room all night, came over, said something to her, and she joined him. After an hour or so, she returned to me and gave me great head. Being pretty much spent, it took a while, but eventually I reached a great orgasm while others watched.

All in all, it was a memorable night. I went to two more orgies at the same location, but never had sex with anyone. Weeks later I saw my partner from the first orgy on the bus. We chatted a bit and within hearing distance of others, she told me, “I only do one-on-one now.”

I wasn’t all that promiscuous, for I was always very involved in my community work. But I was ready to fuck at the drop of a hat.

After that orgy, I only had one other homosexual experience, with a friend in a threesome that did not involve intercourse between the man and me. It was ok, but not compelling. Though I was once sexually aroused in my taxi while giving a gay man a long ride, and I do sometimes find men somewhat sexually attractive, do believe that we are all “polymorphously perverse,” I feel no inclination to act on it.

In the mid-1980s, while living in the Tenderloin and working with our newspaper, The Tenderloin Times, I explored the notorious Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theater that is located in the Tenderloin. I had been there once before, with my one true love, Michelle Dayley. We went to see the innovative porn film, Behind the Green Door, and enjoyed it. (Later she did some nude sketches of me that were placed on exhibit at the Erotic Art Museum, a project of the National Sex and Drug Forum.)

On this visit, I learned that the theater was now offering several shows featuring naked women: an old-fashioned peep show, movies, a “shower show” with women making out, a dark room with men holding flashlights while naked women moved around provocatively, and a traditional strip show. Most of these shows also featured the lap dance. In exchange for a tip, the dancers would sit in the patron’s lap, and if they were so inclined (which usually meant a larger tip), bring him to orgasm by stroking his groin with their hips.

I soon discovered that if I gave the dancer a back rub, they would often stay for 10 or 15 minutes for only one one-dollar tip. Since I’m a very tactile person and give a good massage, I became a frequent visitor, usually stoned on marijuana. At the time, with my beard and long hair, people would sometimes come up to me and ask me if I was Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead. Some of these dancers may have had the same suspicion, for on occasion they’d be exceptionally affectionate. Or maybe they just loved my back rubs!

Whether due to guilt, shame, or some combination of the two, I’ve never told anyone about these expeditions, except for one letter to an old friend with whom I had re-established a connection. We were exchanging letters and for some reason, I felt the need to tell him about my O’Farrell Theater encounters. I wanted someone to know. Maybe I needed to confess. Regardless, I told him.

He never responded. Our correspondence came to an end. I’ve never heard from him since, despite some attempts on my part to contact him. I suspected he did not want me to be anywhere near his children!

Since then, I’ve only briefly mentioned to one friend that I used to go there, but I never told him any details and he never asked. Until now, no one else has known about my adventures at the O’Farrell Theater or some of the other stories I report here.

I shared this chapter with no one before posting it, so for all I know, more friends will disown me like that correspondent did. And any credibility that I have for my community work may be destroyed. Those fears may be the result of deep-seated guilt instilled by my mother. But they are real, nevertheless.

In the late 80s, I suffered a traumatic breakup of a relationship with a woman I cared about deeply, became depressed, gained a lot of weight, moved to a cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and began to go through “male menopause” (a decline in my sex drive) without really realizing it. Also, the advent of AIDS led to a reduction in sexual activity among my peers.

Liberated from raging hormones, I got out of the sex habit and for more than 20 years now, I’ve been very inactive sexually. I did meet a woman several years ago and had some great sex with her (per her request we never engaged in sexual intercourse). But that relationship was short-lived.

Now, with the aid of marijuana and erotica, I “use it so I won’t lose it” by masturbating once a week and satisfy my hunger for physical contact by receiving frequent massages.

I’d welcome another long-lasting sexual relationship, especially with a woman who appreciates the many forms of sexual activity other than genital intercourse and accepts my body as it is. I would even be willing to commit to a monogamous relationship. But most of all I seek emotional intimacy. Good sex would be icing on the cake.

If I had been more mature as a youth and had settled down with a wife, been more self-disciplined, and less obsessed with sex, I could have achieved more with my life. I may even have become that professor of political theory.

But it is what it is. For every gain there is a loss and for every loss there is a gain. I struggled through it, have some good memories, am ready to enjoy life without being addicted to sex, and perhaps be more productive. Confessing my sins here may help. Only time will tell.

College

My arrival in Berkeley in September ‘62 will forever be etched in my memory. Looking across the beautiful San Francisco Bay at Mount Tamalpais, getting off the Greyhound at San Pablo and University avenues, taking a local bus to Shattuck Avenue, and walking down to Virginia Street were memorable.

Most unforgettable, however, was walking up Virginia looking for the house where I had rented a room. Compared to Dallas, it was like navigating through a tropical jungle on a path that curved left and right with bushes, flowers and enormous trees everywhere. Walking past my address and having to double back twice caused concern. Then I found it, a duplex set back from the street, halfway hidden. How strange! Not like the straight, well-ordered housing in Dallas.

My landlady, Mrs. Brogden, welcomed me. She was renting two bedrooms where her children had slept before they went off to college. My room had two single beds and my roommate was a bit strange. He believed pro wrestling was authentic and loved to watch it. But my other roommate played the jazz trumpet, which intrigued me, and the house was only three blocks from campus. I was satisfied.

But I quickly encountered a problem. Mrs. Brogden’s son was still there and he wanted me to go out with him on a double date that night. I declined. He said his girl friend couldn’t go unless her girl friend also had a date, which puzzled me. I insisted I wanted to stay home. He became almost hysterical. I still refused, retreated to my room, and got settled. My top priority was to go hang out with the beats in North Beach.

My expedition across the Bay the next morning was incredibly exciting. North Beach felt like home. I wandered around and soon ended up in Mike’s Pool Hall, which had ten or more pool tables like in the movie “The Hustler.” No Minnesota Fats though.

After a while, still having a cheese sandwich that my mother had prepared for the trip, I walked up to the bar and asked for a glass of milk. The bartender said, “I don’t have any milk but I can sell you a glass of wine.” I started to tell him I was only eighteen, but caught myself, accepted his offer, and said to myself, “Welcome to San Francisco!”

The University was enormous, with. 35,000 students, but the campus, especially Strawberry Creek, was beautiful. After learning I couldn’t enter the introductory course for my Physics major because I hadn’t studied calculus in high school, I failed the “writing sample test” by a narrow margin and had to take a special non-credit course to boost my skills. The instructor loved crisp, short, clear sentences. His favorite model was Hiroshima by John Hersey. Failing that test was a blow to my ego, but it improved my writing. But equally important were the long, heartfelt letters to Mother that I frequently wrote.

Another wakeup call was discovering that, unlike in Dallas, I was a mediocre chess player. I found games on campus and had no chance. Mostly out of curiosity, next spring I went to a baseball workout, thinking I might try out. But I soon realized that was pointless. Having done amateur theater in Dallas the previous summer, I tried out for a Maxim Gorky play. But my Texas accent didn’t quite fit the role of a Russian!

Clearly, I was now in a whole new league. It was humbling.


Less than two months after I arrived in Berkeley, the Cuban Missile Crisis hit. Like most Americans, I was terrified and followed events closely. One night I stayed up late writing an unassigned essay for my Political Science class arguing that if the United States could have missiles in Turkey, I didn’t see why the Soviet Union couldn’t have them in Cuba. My teaching assistant liked what I wrote. Bertrand Russell’s campaign to “ban the bomb” had influenced my thinking.

Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, I’d been a strong supporter of President Kennedy. My grandfather had been excited by his campaign for Vice-President in 1956, which probably affected me. During the 1960 Presidential campaign, I found Arthur Schlesinger’s Kennedy or Nixon persuasive. And the Cal campus was still buzzing with excitement from a recent appearance by Kennedy at the Greek Theater.

But I disapproved of Kennedy risking a nuclear war for reasons I found unpersuasive. My faith in liberalism was shaken. It was only years later that I discovered that Kennedy averted war in large part by secretly promising to withdraw those missiles from Turkey that had struck me as so hypocritical.

The crisis quickened my interest in politics and I switched my major to political science. I wanted to become a professor of political theory.


Fortunately, I had made arrangements to eat my meals at Ridge House, a small student co-op between my residence and campus that was built by William Randolph Hearst as a summer home for one of his progeny. That setting provided a comforting sense of community, with about 40 male students who lived there and another 40 like myself who boarded. The presence of students from throughout the world was stimulating. The “richness and diversity” touted in the University catalogue proved true.

I immediately gravitated to Dave Robbins and Lyle Downing, two graduate students who had animated conversations about philosophical, political, and cultural issues. Mostly I listened. But when I voiced my agnostic doubts about the literal interpretation of the Bible that I had learned from my fundamentalist upbringing, Dave and Lyle weren’t shocked like people back in Dallas had been. Rather, they took it in stride and introduced me to modern existentialist theologians who re-interpreted those myths into contemporary language.

I’d usually sit with them at the dinner table where we’d continue the conversations. Once when the chair of the Education Committee came by to recruit tutors for underclassmen, he assumed I was a senior and asked me to be a tutor!

I quickly switched from chess to bridge. We’d play all night for money, drinking tea and coffee, take a break to eat breakfast, and continue.

An art history graduate student and I would solve the taxing Double-Crostic puzzle in the Saturday Review. He had esoteric knowledge and I had a logical mind. We complemented each other well.

My pickiness about food vanished. I ate what was served or I starved.

We’d have beer busts and “Dinner Date Dance” theme parties that served hard liquor. Walking home across the campus of the Pacific School of Religion, I’d urinate on the sidewalk out of contempt for their “solemn assemblies.” Once I woke up to discover that in the middle of the night, I’d neatly thrown up onto a clipboard lying on the floor, missing the carpet completely.

On the way to campus, there was a pizza parlor (in a dark beer garden set off the street that seemed like a sinful opium den to me), a donut shop, and an ice cream store. Combined with the alcohol, my thin frame began to expand.

Around the corner, across from campus, there was a coffee house that served all kinds of intriguing teas that were totally foreign to me. I ordered jasmine.

One night I went to hear the Vince Guaraldi jazz trio. I came back to Ridge House and said I’d liked the concert. Mike Romeo, a hipster from North Beach, said, “Yea, it was bitchin’.” Never having heard that expression before, I replied, “No, I liked it.” Mike explained that “bitchin’” was a positive term. He also loved to say, “Whatever’s right,” an expression of cultural relativism that challenged me.

Hearing Jewish jokes was new to me too. My cultural environment in Dallas was so homogenous I never heard them there.

My freshman Speech class instructor always utilized the Socratic Dialog. He’d pose probing questions to the students in the style of Socrates. I loved it, both listening and engaging. One day we went outside and sat on the benches in the Eucalyptus Grove to discuss the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter in The Brothers Karamasov. At one point, the instructor summarized the main character’s argument that God does not exist because if he did, he would not allow so much suffering. The instructor asked if anyone agreed with that argument. There was a long silence, after which I raised my hand. I felt like a minority of one on the hot seat. The instructor challenged my position, but I held my own and was proud that I had had the courage to raise my hand.

At the start of my sophomore year, I applied for a by-invitation-only inter-disciplinary American Studies course. Two of the instructors were professors of political theory, John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, who later mentored Cornel West at Princeton. The course included three 15-person seminars, which involved extensive dialog with the professors. I went to the interview and was surprised and pleased when I was accepted.

The course proved to be traumatic. During the discussions, I was absolutely unable to utter a single word. The other students were much more well read than I was and they were quick with their comments. I was totally intimidated and insecure.

I compensated by working extra hard on my research papers and ended up getting a good grade. The main impact of the class, however, came from being assigned to read The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel by Albert Camus, two books that have had a lasting impact on me.

Before my junior year began , at the last minute Mrs. Brogden asked me to move out due to my involvement in the civil rights movement. My new room was far from campus. My father had reduced his financial support so I had to work more and took a job working in a cigar store on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft where I had to stand up for long hours all cooped up in a claustrophobic three-by-three foot space.

I remained immersed in the civil rights movement, participating in a sit-in at an Oakland welfare office opposing forced workfare. Before the semester started, the University released their order prohibiting on-campus recruitment for off-campus political activity. It was clear the shit was going to hit the fan.

My political activity had caused my grades to plummet. It was becoming clear that my goal of becoming a college professor was unrealistic. My sense of identity was adrift. Down deep, I felt like I was in a no-win double bind. So one day I impulsively called Mother and asked if I could return home.

She said yes and one of those two seminary students who had led that post-graduation study group recommended that I apply for a job as an orderly at the county psychiatric ward. I did, and although employees were required to be 21 and I was only 20, they hired me.

The next semester I enrolled at Southern Methodist University. My clearest memory consists of sitting at the back of the classroom for the 8am Art History Class and looking forward over the heads of hair sticking up high in the air that the young women had managed to put together in the early morning. It was amazing. They must have awakened at six just to work on their hair. I never saw anything like that in Berkeley, even when Mrs. Brogden brought me to a painful event at the sorority where she was an adviser.

My best course was Contemporary Theology. We studied the process theology of Charles Hartshorne and read Martin Buber’s I and Thou, which has inspired me my whole life.

I also went to Austin for a weekend workshop led by a campus minister who had been to a workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The participants exchanged foot massages, which blew my mind, and did sensory awareness exercises, a Western form of meditation. It opened me up to the world of humanistic psychology.

After working at the mental hospital for several months, I spoke with the head of the unit, Dr. Bob Beavers, and his psychologist about my interest in a mental health career. They recommended that I focus on a Ph.D. in psychology rather than an M.D. So the next fall I returned to Cal and decided to pursue a Field Major in Social Sciences.

The psychology department there, however, was focused on quantitative research, which bored me. The only interesting course I took in that department was one on the psychology of religious experience, which was addressed in a sympathetic light.

I recall an inspiring sociology course taught by Ernest Becker. He once asked, “Have you ever really been touched?”

And I remember another professor of political theory, Norman Jacobsen, whom I really liked. We brought him to Ridge House for a seminar and he told us that rather than teach he’d really like to open a restaurant and develop it as a community center.

Mostly though, my college years are a blur, hidden behind a fog of sexual obsession, drug experimentation, rock-and-roll concerts, and political demonstrations.

When I returned to Cal, I moved into Ridge House, which I loved. Particularly comforting was the downstairs music room that we equipped with state-of-the-art speakers. I’d lie there on a couch in the dark for hours listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other soulful music.

I coached our softball team and was elected to most of the important leadership positions at the co-op, including President and House Manager. A Board of Directors oversaw all the co-ops, but each one was self-managed. Dinners were delivered from a central kitchen, we prepared our breakfast and lunch,  and we were responsible for maintenance and enforcing house rules. It was a valuable experience that led to a life-long interest in cooperatives.

My most brilliant act of leadership at Ridge House was the design and execution of a prank against the residents of our new neighbor, Ridge Project. During my year away, the co-op Board had built a new large, co-ed building right next to ours, with a connecting door. We resented the invasion. So I suggested that we store up hundreds of water balloons, lock all our doors, set off their fire alarm that would bring the residents into their courtyard for a supposed fire drill, and bomb them from above with our water balloons. The plan went off without a hitch. When they took cover under the connecting passageway, one of our members spontaneously pulled out our fire hose and thoroughly soaked them. They tried to retaliate, but our locked doors blocked them. After a while, they accepted the beauty of the prank and let it go.

Ridge Project did bring Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, to speak there one night. Their living room was jammed. He came across as a very kind, gentle, intelligent person. A warm evening.

And I enjoyed sitting in their large living room getting aroused sexually by women who would get aroused by exposing their thighs and making eye contact. In fact, that was a favorite activity of mine all around campus. Short skirts were in fashion. High school girls in Dallas didn’t wear them, but they sure did at Cal. I’d sit in chairs and couches at the Student Union and the reading room in the Main Library and play games with exhibitionist girls who clearly were into it. I also played footsie in the library.

I never dated much though. One friend, a redhead from Arkansas, and I would study together at the library at the Pacific School of Religion. And somehow I met a Mills College student my senior year and had some platonic dates with her.

But the closest I came to real sex was during a sleepover retreat organized by the Quakers' campus ministry during my freshman year. One clear memory is of a heated informal discussion about corporeal punishment. About half of those who were engaged opposed the practice, which was a novel idea for me that I favored. Then at night, we slept in a row on a deck in sleeping bags and two or three couples noisily engaged in sexual intercourse. I found it hard to believe.

I had a few good friends. On holidays, Jerry Zellhoeffer would invite a few of us down to his family’s house in the Carmel Highlands, where we’d get stoned and listen to Donovan and other records in front of a fire. John Lowry and I engaged in passionate intellectual discussions. Tom Solinger and I would argue about how well Bob Dylan played the harmonica.

But mostly I was a loner. I went by myself to live theater in San Francisco, seeing wonderful plays like Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. More often I’d go hear all of the famous Sixties San Francisco rock bands at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium. I’d hang out on Haight Street and make fun of the people in the Grey Line tour buses that would come by and ogle at the hippies out the window. I went to the ecstatic Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which concluded with Allen Ginsberg chanting Om as the sun went down. And I participated in student strikes at San Francisco State and Cal as well as anti-war demonstrations.

So my grades suffered and I took a number of incompletes, which (fortunately) forced me to do another semester during the summer of 1967. During the spring semester, I got wind of an experimental program, a Residence College, that would be held that summer at a nearby student co-op, Cloyne Court. The basic idea is that there would be no required reading and no tests. About 100 students would design their own learning program and meet with instructors one-on-one and in small seminars. And everyone would automatically get 12 units credit, enough for me to graduate. I jumped at the opportunity.

At the outset, someone nominated me to be one of the Coordinators for the program. Two other students and I were elected as Co-coordinators.

Many students wasted their freedom. But I studied Coming of Age in America by Edgar Friedenberg, a sociologist, The Politics of Experience by Ronald Laing, a psychiatrist, and The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, a theologian. At the end of the semester I wrote a paper on those three books and their similarities. Not a heavy workload, but a meaningful one. And informally at the co-op and elsewhere, I learned a great deal.

The most dramatic moment of the summer happened during a forum on civil rights. The panel included the charismatic, eloquent Ron Dellums, then a city council member and later a famous U.S. Congressperson. The event was compelling and then from the audience, sitting at the back, a young Black man spoke with great fury about police brutality in Oakland and the need to resist. He made a powerful impression. It was Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who would eventually play a major role in my life.

The most exciting moment, however, came toward the end of the semester. Judy Wheeler, a New York-based research assistant for Charles Silberman, author of Crisis in Black and White, came to study our experiment. My fellow co-coordinators had resigned so it was left to me to welcome her and organize a discussion group. To facilitate the conversation, she bought a case of large jugs of Almaden wine. For us that was a step up. We were used to rot gut Red Mountain.

She was very attractive, charming, and 32 years old. After a fun conversation, I walked her across campus to her hotel. When we arrived, she warmly invited me to visit and stay in her Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. As soon as the semester was over, I hitchhiked my way east. As I exited the Holland Tunnel, I was standing up on the bed in a Volkswagen bus with a sunroof window yelling at the top of my lungs.

During the day, Judy would go to work and I wrote my first published essay, “An Evaluation of the Residence College,” for the UC Berkeley student newspaper. I worked hard on it and still like it. My perspective on life and education is still much the same.

At night, we’d explore the Village. Judy would treat me to some nice meals and famous places and tell me stories about New York, like hanging out with Miles Davis. And then we’d go to her apartment and fuck our brains out for two weeks. Being ten years older than me and well experienced, she provided a great introduction to the glories of sex.

Wades Journal - December 13, 2012

CONTENTS
Wades Journal - December 13, 2012
Readers’ Comments


Wades Journal - December 13, 2012

Robin Rainbow Gate has produced a 10-minute video, “Wade’s Tepoztlan,” that captures my normal routine here in the mountains of Mexico. It includes a tour of my bungalow and favorite spots in town. To view it, click here.

My bungalow is a simple abode. The kitchen is in the bathroom with a hotplate, toaster oven, and rice cooker next to the sink. Some day I may expand by building a living room and kitchen. But that’s all I could afford without driving taxi more, which would have cut into my other efforts. And I don’t know how much time I’ll be spending here. So this works well for now.

For one thing, I want to travel for at least one month each year, generally to places I’ve never been. This February my destination is Brazil. I’ll be there for Carnival in Bahia, where the celebration is more participatory than in Rio, where it’s more of a spectacle to observe. In the future, Belize, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, the islands off the east coast of Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, and Vietnam are on my list. And I can finance it while listening to Giants’ baseball! Not bad.

Unless, of course, I get swept up in a revolution or some true love. But neither option seems very likely at this point. Maybe I’m too picky in my old age.

I’d like to help change the world in a direct, dramatic, and obvious fashion. But the movements of opposition I see seem to unnecessarily reproduce the dominant culture, which undermines their effectiveness and discourages my involvement.

So I’ll continue to plants seeds as best I can, keep my eyes open, and contribute my fair share to those options that are available. Maybe some compelling energy will emerge at the January 19 Social Transformation Using the Three-Fold Path workshop.

What stands in the way? Fear, I figure, as I discussed in "Facing Fear." Our ego gets scared, seizes control, and shuts down our heart. If we face reality and follow it to its logical conclusion, our whole world might be turned upside down. So we live in illusions, refusing to be honest. I do this as much as anyone.

Except in employment situations where job security is important, I suspect most fears are irrational and counter-productive. Rilke said our fears are like dragons protecting our most precious treasures. Rumi said we use our thorns to protect our roses. But if we keep our treasures cooped up protected by our dragons and our thorns, we can’t enjoy others enjoying them.

Fortunately, it seems younger people are much more open and transparent. Maybe they’ll grow a new culture.

So I hole up here in the mountains alone on a working retreat, trying to develop new, more productive habits. Here I don’t have to drive taxi. There are fewer distractions. There are fewer temptations (like exquisite but fattening restaurants). The sun shines every day. At night I can step outside and stare at the stars. When I socialize it’s with a different set of individuals, which is interesting. But otherwise life here is much like in San Francisco.

This week, for example, I’m experimenting with not going online until I’ve completed those tasks that I can do without being online. I’m making my meals a meditative experience rather than reading the screen while eating. And I have a list of tasks with times budgeted for each, use a timer to keep track of time, and check off the tasks as I complete them. That way I don’t have to waste time deciding what to work on next or keeping an eye on the clock. I can just concentrate on what I’m doing.

Following is this week’s check list: Morning Pages – 15 minutes; Exercise, incl. shower – 1 hr; Memoir – 1 hr.; Read a book – 1 hr.; Wade’s Weekly (including working on photos and video) – 1 hr; Workshop – 1 hr; Reform Wall Street (research, incl. Twitter, and writing) – 2 hr; Getting organized – 1 hr; Email – 1 hr; Facebook (incl. outreach) – 1 hr; Evening ritual- 15 minutes. That’s 10.5 hours total. Plus eating, cleaning, and sleeping makes for a full day. On weekends I do errands and take a day of rest.

Last week was a bit ragged. My routine was disrupted. It took me three efforts to get my laundry back. My DSL connection has been off and on, so I have to pay more to use my smart phone as a slower portable wi-fi hotspot. Repeated efforts to get set up to pay my electricity and phone online have been unsuccessful, but we are making progress. Getting my water pump fixed was disruptive, but hopefully it works correctly now. A dinner guest cut into my routine last week. And Monday night, curious about how good the Houston Texans are with what was an 11-1 record, I did email while watching Monday Night Football. (It seems Houston is not so good after all.)

This week is going better. I may have an even more productive second month before I return to San Francisco in early January.

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READERS’ RESPONSES

Re: Question #1  - Do progressive activists need to improve how they relate to others? If so, how?

…To summarise my main points:
a. Be clear about your own intentions.
b. Be clear in your expression.
c. Be careful of the other's needs.

Thanks for reading!

Yahya

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From Facebook and Email:

Become more instructive and less accusatory.

2. I think both progressives and arch right conservatives have to improve their empathetic listening skills, be more open and less mired in their own beliefs.

3. what...stop talking?

4. Yes. The righteous indignation tends to turn people away. The ego, the judgement. a progressive activist (or any activist, I suppose) needs to not invest so much in immediate results, immediate rallying - but, be patient and be in it for the long term. Activism is a long and slow process without many immediate rewards, at times. Pretty soon after the rallying cry it can turn into "You're not doing it the way I want you to do it and I started this thing..." kind of stuff. Factions and splits form and - soon after - abandonment of the process. Patience is a virtue in leaders, and many social activists don't have a lot of patience to spare. In my experience of giving up on working with progressive activists...

5. suggest Stephen R. Covey's book the Third Altenative, and no you don't stop talking , but you listen to everyone's ideas before inflicting your's on others.

6. I remember when people started describing themselves as progressive I myself did a fellowship for the Center for Progressive Leadership which is now non existent. At that time I would describe progressive as trying to make progress in our society from the two party system as well as the box that people live in the political system in this country. That they cannot think outside the two party box and they themselves can't provide a solution to move this country forward and make progress.

7. frame the debate and go on the offensive rather than react to right wing obfuscation.

8. Yes, of course. We need to listen more, insult less, and focus on positive visions that resonate and provide hope in addition to endlessly critiquing the many negatives. Progressive activists need to tell more stories, get ourselves and others to laugh more, celebrate more victories, build broader coalitions, stop cannibalizing our own as much, and never quit. We have truth, morality, and history on our side, but nothing is inevitable or automatic; we have to go out and help make it happen.

9. Yes! Be Fair, Firm and Calm.

10. Progressives should move beyond their ideology and towards a view that values diverse perspectives as a source of collective wisdom when handled well - and to advocate a social-political agenda that practices and institutionalizes productive conversations among such diverse perspectives (especially in jury-like minipublic councils that embody the diversity of the community concerned) to generate wise public policy that benefits the whole community or system over the long haul. I suspect that such a we-the-people-in-creative-conversation approach would result in far more legitimacy and far more public policies that reflect current progressive values than continuing to invest activist energy in left-wing partisanship.

++++++++++

Re: Question #2 - How do progressive activists need to change how they FEEL – that is, in terms of our tendencies, how would you like to alter your inner experience?

As you're reading Camus, here's my answer to Q2: "The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a [person's] heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." --- Camus

Dan Brook

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"Yes, of course. We need to listen more, insult less" - insult not at all!

Leonard Roy Frank

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Re: Escape 

Wonderful and descriptive.......Thanks

Sherri Maurin

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write on, Wade...I'm back in town, you in Mexico?

Camila Aguilar

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Wade, great!. I enjoyed reading it and thinking back to high school, you did an excellent job of getting the reader (me) into the story. I have one possible typo and 1 possible clarification.... Look forward to the next chapter.

Freddi Fredrickson

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Even though I didn't have the time to read your first chapter, I read it and enjoyed it. Good luck with the memoir. Arlene (Also a U.C. grad on a scholarship after attending 2 yrs. at S.F. City College. Graduated from U.C. in 1960 before the "hurricane called The Sixties".)

Arlene Reed

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Looks like your time in Mexico is good for your writing. Wishing you the best.

Vicki wolf

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Good luck on your memoir Wade. They are always important.

Robert Kourik

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I read it and liked it, Wade - partly cuz I'm a former Dallasite and UC Berkeley grad as well....Good luck with it!

Don McClaren

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Great writing Wade. Couldn't stop reading once I started. Best of luck getting the book published.

John Testa

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Wow... I learned things about you that I never knew before. You really captured the feel of Dallas -- and of our mother. I, too, escaped as soon as possible - to live with you in SF!

Mary Hudson

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Nice memoir, Wade. I enjoy hearing people's life stories.

Annodear

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Two suggestions: Make the columns a third of its present width.

If you haven't already, read David Brooks' column about Lincoln and the Krugman column about the right on the 23rd.

Hope all's well.

Mike Larsen

++++++++++

Re: Mother

Wade, thank you for writing and emailing your memoirs.  I love hearing people's stories, and so much of what you've written has resonated with me.  We've had similar experiences, in different contexts, and it's a bit like looking in a mirror.

I, too, held my mother's hand as she passed away (and, two years earlier, my dad's).  It's a profound experience.

Again, thanks, and I'm looking forward to reading your next installment.

Susan

++++++++++

Re: Daddy 

Sheila Koren:
Very interesting and compelling, Wade. Thanks for sharing it.

Sara Colm:
This chapter answered some questions from earlier sections,

Richard Cohen:
Thanks. Didn't want to read it but glad I did. Puts a story behind the man driving the Vespa.

Daddy (No Secrets)

NOTE: Following is another chapter in what may become a full autobiography titled No Secrets.

My father was like a monster in the closet that periodically emerges to administer punishment. In his case, with a belt on the butt. After I got to be seven or so, Mother would complain about something that I did and he’d tear into me. Once or twice a year. Enough to keep me on my toes. Even when all was normal, the enforcer was lurking.

When I was in high school, I brought home from the library Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell. Mother perused it and found a section that advocates “free love,” or “open marriage.” She was scandalized and showed Daddy a paragraph when he came home for dinner. He reacted, “You can’t check out any more books.” Mother replied, “Well, let’s let him check out one book at a time.” He agreed.

So I brought home a book by Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General, Thurman Arnold, a famed trustbuster. The title, The Folklore of Capitalism, was all they needed to see. They freaked out and forbid me to read it. But after mother woke up in the early morning and discovered me reading it in the living room, they backed off.

Daddy would whip Sally, my older sister, too, though less frequently. Nevertheless, he once went after her with such fury Mother feared he would seriously injure her.

With ulcers eating up his stomach, he was always ready to explode. His father was a sharecropper and when he was young he worked the farm too. Almost his whole life, he worked hard, real hard.

The only thing I remember about him from our seven years in Arkansas was the Jewel Tea truck he drove while distributing and selling sundries. He was a non-entity. Gan-Gan, my mother’s father, was my de facto father.

I don’t know why my parents moved to Gan-Gan’s farm after Sally was born in Dallas. Daddy once told me he was drinking heavily during that period. My sisters recall being told that the family departed Dallas because Daddy injured himself delivering large blocks of ice, which was his job, and couldn’t work.

But around the time I was born and they moved to Arkansas, Daddy decided he would divorce Mother as soon as I left home. He decided to wait because he didn’t want people to say about him what they said about his father: that he left his kids when they were young. (Then Mary’s unplanned birth delayed his departure another ten years of love-less marriage.)

So I find it curious that the move to the farm and his decision to divorce happened about the same time. He was handsome, charming, and, as I learned later quite a flirt. So he may have had an affair or did something else to make Mother jealous.

Prior to his funeral, I asked his younger brother why Daddy and Mother left Dallas. My uncle stood up and walked away without saying anything. (Later, at the funeral, when I sat down next to him, he moved to another seat, disabusing me of my notion that we were close.)

Daddy’s first wife died suddenly. I think he was still heart-broken by that. And maybe he was worn down by having to be “the man of the house” after his father left home. The Great Depression and World War Two traumatized many of his generation, leaving them numb. Being the only man at home and having a bad back, he didn’t join the armed services, but the war must have affected him too.

Needless to say, I never observed much warmth between my parents. They were hardly role models for a happy marriage. No wonder neither my sisters nor I had children.

After Mary finally graduated from high school, while he was living and working in Houston, Daddy told Mother about the divorce by mailing her the papers. He was not very good at handling or communicating his feelings. Even going to a hospital was a traumatic event for him, so he hardly ever did it.

Daddy’s father lived in Corpus Christi. We’d visit there from time to time. When he was sixty or so, he married a woman who was thirty or forty younger than he was and severely disturbed emotionally. They had a child, who had a hard time herself.

During those visits, Daddy, his father, George, Sr., and his siblings would mostly drink and play 42 and Moon, two games played with dominoes. They were very serious about it and played for money, a penny a point.

Daddy was serious about everything. The main lesson he taught me was, “A job’s not worth doing unless it’s worth doing right.”

We’d go over to his mother’s house in Dallas for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Usually there was lots of tension in the air. The females would prepare the food and the males would go in the living room and watch football or play 42. I did enjoy one cousin in particular who was closer to my age and my uncles, who were quire lively.

My father’s older sister married several times and had several children. The last I heard, the children were all still at odds with each other. His younger sister married twice and had a troubled second marriage. My father’s two younger brothers were married a number of times, never had children, had many health issues, and died at fairly young ages. His mother was rather strict. She harshly criticized Mother for spoiling me. I didn’t like her very much.

After I had settled in San Francisco, one of my cousins moved to the Bay Area. I visited them once or twice, but he and his family never accepted my invitation to come see me in San Francisco. Once my father and I visited them on the peninsula. At one point, out of the blue, my cousin started talking about the shape of my lips (they are thin). It felt very creepy to me.

All in all, not a healthy extended family.

But the saving grace was that my father managed theatres and I got to see lots of movies and eat popcorn free of charge. (Now, I must have popcorn when I see a movie.)

At first, I mostly loved cowboy movies with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. Then in 1952 when I was eight the first realistic Western, High Noon, was released and it captivated me. I saw it fourteen times. With its story of the loner standing up for what’s right against the whole town and even his new bride, I think it may have helped shape my character for the rest of my life. I’ve often been a minority of one.

Daddy worked afternoons and nights seven days a week, so I’d only see him during dinnertime. The family would eat while watching the evening news on television. We didn’t talk much when he was there.

Daddy and I basically only discussed sports. He certainly never told me anything about sex. When he did want to talk to me, which may have happened only three times in my life, it would be a long rambling monologue.

When I was twenty, I was very involved in the Northaven Methodist Church young adult group, including two major theatrical productions. One of my best friends, Frank Murray, was an older man who sold beauty supplies. He was gay but I had no idea. He’d give me a ride home and I’d sit in his car in front of my house continuing our philosophical conversations. And for a church play I was asked to play the role of a gay man, the title role, in Edward’s Albee’s “An American Dream.”

Mother was worried and told Daddy to warn me about homosexuality. One day while driving in his car, he gave me a fifteen-minute lecture that mystified me. I knew next to nothing about heterosexuality, much less homosexuality. I hadn’t even realized that the American Dream was gay! So I just listened and said something like, “Ok.”

But he did buy me a Vespa motor scooter for my paper route and, without complaining, he did pay for the windows I’d break when I’d zoom down the street, throw a bundled paper toward the porch, and hit a window.

During my high school years, he switched to the South Loop Drive-in Theater and hired me to work in the kitchen, where I’d cook hundreds of hamburgers a night. At home, he never cursed. But at work, he’d cuss up a storm. It was like Jekyll and Hyde, a hidden side of him that stunned me.

Unlike most drive-in theaters that were known for adolescent sexual activity, Daddy was proud of South Loop’s reputation as a “family theater.” A child’s playground in front of the screen was very popular. Daddy would go for tours on the back rows snooping on patrons with a flashlight. When he found some objectionable sexual behavior, he’d force them to leave. Years later I deduced that those tours probably gave him a sexual thrill.

Then he horrified my mother and surely disturbed many of his regular customers by showing And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot, the French sexpot known for being photographed nude on the beach. The film is rather tame by today’s standards, but back in Dallas at that time it bordered on pornography.

Once as we were leaving the house, a film with Sophia Loren was on television and he made some disturbing comment about the size of her breasts.

He was surely a man with a dark side. Just how dark I was yet to learn.

He disapproved of my involvement in the civil rights movement and reduced his financial support because of it, though his income was increasing. But he still let me use his car to drive around Dallas in 1964 to gather canned goods for Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

After I graduated from high school Associated Popcorn Distributors, Inc. hired him to be Vice-President-in-Charge-of-Sales selling concession supplies to the Astrodome in Houston and theaters throughout the Southwest. He was a great salesman, the business boomed, and he began to earn big bucks. His crowning achievement was being invited to join the Dallas Athletic Club, an exclusive country club where he played golf. He bought several pieces of land throughout Texas, including the place in the Hill Country where he retired.

But when his best friend at the company died, the remaining partners fired him, much to their later chagrin, for the company’s business collapsed without my father massaging his contacts.

Daddy then made a serious mistake. He invested in a jewelry company and when the Texas oil economy tanked, he eventually had to declare bankruptcy and salvage what he could. Gradually he was forced to sell most of his properties and squeak by on Social Security. A sad downfall.

His new wife, Wilma, was about twenty years younger and was a loving, compassionate woman who took good care of him in his later years when he was very ill. She was good for him and he became noticeably happier.

Still he never gave my sisters or me praise for our accomplishments. On occasion, I’d try to explain my life commitment, but I don’t think he ever understood. Once I told him, “I think you should tell Mary you are proud of her.” I don’t think he ever did.

One day I told Wilma, “You know Daddy has never visited me in San Francisco. I’d really appreciate it if you got him out there.” A few years later, she did, and we had fun touring around. Wilma kept saying, “Well, anything goes in San Francisco.” She was a serious evangelical Christian, but had a tolerant streak.

One of her siblings who had several children got into serious trouble of some sort, which led to Wilma and Daddy adopting two of the children, who were in grade school at the time. Whenever I’d visit, I’d notice that Daddy would treat the children like slaves, ordering them around to do this or that. That treatment bothered me, in part because it reminded me of how he had treated me. But I never really challenged him about it.

During those years, the thaw between us melted. One turning point was when he was still married to Mother and heard two sermons about racism and the civil rights movement. Those sermons were an epiphany for him. He told me about it and said he had been wrong in the past. He didn’t express explicit appreciation for my involvement in the movement, but it was implicit, which was comforting.

But when Mother invited her spiritualist friends over for me to give a report on LSD, he fell asleep in his recliner.

Later, when Mary was in high school, he softened even more. I couldn’t believe how much he loved their poodle, Choo-Choo. He’d sit with that dog in his lap for the longest time.

Once he visited me for about a week and stayed with me in my apartment. I enjoyed his visit, especially our road trip north to Bend, Oregon, spending the night next to a beautiful lake. In the city, like a young child, he’d be thrilled by the sound of fire, police, and ambulance sirens. Once walking down the street, a hooker passed in front of us, he stuck up his cane horizontal to the ground, and made a suggestive comment. I ignored him.

In early 1987, his youngest sister told me, “Wade, you should go see your father. He really needs you.” She said it in a way that indicated that was all she wanted to say, so I didn’t ask why. But I felt that I was hitting my head against the wall with my work in San Francisco and I had never “wandered.” So I saved up some money, bought myself a BMW motorcycle, sold or gave away most of my possessions, and hit the road not knowing for sure where I’d go. But Daddy was on my mind.

First I found Gary Snyder’s mailbox in the Sierra foothills and left him a copy of a Ralph Waldo Emerson biography with a note asking him to suggest to his good friend, Robert Redford, that he use the book to make a film about Emerson. I thought good footage could be made from Emerson’s support for the abolitionist John Brown, and the fact that when one of John Brown’s men escaped from the Harper’s Ferry incident and went to Emerson’s home for help, Emerson gave him a horse and buggy that he used to go to Canada.

When I arrived at his “ranch,” as he called it, outside Harper, Texas, I learned that he was in trouble with the authorities for sexual abuse of one of the children he and Wilma had adopted, a girl about 12 years old. After dinner, Wilma went to bed and left us alone to talk. He told me that he’d been accused of fondling the girl and had agreed to go to a certain number of therapy sessions in exchange for charges being dropped. But the authorities were threatening to file charges against him anyway.

Though he never totally admitted the crime, he left no doubt in my mind that he was guilty. But he was 75 years old and I did not want him to go to prison. So the next day I consulted with my friend from high school, Mike Doughty, who was a social worker. He recommended that I talk with Daddy’s supervisor, partly because Daddy’s primary caseworker was on vacation, and urge him to honor their agreement. I did andthe supervisor assured me that charges would be dropped. Later, they were.

I continued on my journey with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Some time later, I learned that my father had engaged in similar behavior with my older sister when she was about the same age. When Mother found out, she was outraged. No wonder she wanted to divorce him!

Shortly thereafter, in my own mind, I basically disowned the Hudson family.

Since neither of my uncles had had children, I was the last male on that branch of the family tree (there was some distant Hudson male who may have kept his branch alive, but we weren’t in touch with him). Once I asked Uncle George if Daddy was concerned about the family name dying with me. George said he was.

But I didn’t care. I felt George Sr.’s branch of the tree was deeply poisoned. I did not particularly want to keep it alive. Still I loved my father and would visit occasionally, often with other family members. Once his older sister, Jenny, asked me to give her a foot massage. She was a social worker. She probably understood me better than any of them.

Daddy and I talked pretty much only talked about sports and politics. He was basically a right-wing populist. He hated “the Rockefellers” as much as I did. The last long conversation we had before he died was when Ralph Nader was running for President in 2000. He asked me who I liked. I told him I hoped Nader would get 5% of the vote to qualify the Green Party for federal funding during the next election. He said he agreed with me. I was thrilled and relieved. That was more than we had ever agreed on anything about politics and he was 88 years old.

He died a long slow death consumed by Parkinson’s disease. Over the years, he got more and more stiff. The last time I visited him, he was frozen solid. Lying with his back to me, he said, “Son, do you ever cry?” I said, “Yes, I do from time to time.” He replied, “Well, so do I.”

After a while, he said, “I feel I was not a very good father.” I answered, “You did the best you could.” I could have also told him that I appreciated his repeated support for my independence and had picked up from him his moral concerns, his interest in politics, and his dedication to hard work.

Not many people came to his funeral in Dallas. After Wilma warned me not to say too much, I said a few words and so did Sally and a few other people. Then we scattered his ashes at a golf course in honor of the passion of his life.

When I headed back to California, I swore that I’d never set foot in Texas again.

Mother (No Secrets to Conceal)

NOTE: The following is the second chapter in a memoir that I may write whose working title is No Secrets to Conceal.

When I was four or five, one day my parents, older sister, and I got into our Nash Rambler to go to town. We rarely left our small farm on the outskirts of Little Rock, so this excursion was special. I was excited.

At one intersection, we had to wait for an African-American woman to cross before we could turn. I yelled out the window, “Get out of the way, nigger.” My mother turned to me and forcefully told me, “Don’t ever let me hear you say that word again.”

There weren’t many anti-racist whites in Arkansas in the 1940s. So far as I know my mother was the only one in our family. But as do many hillbillies who get away from civilization so they can do their own thing, she had the courage of her convictions and was determined to shape me accordingly. Nothing she ever said had such a long lasting impact on me.

That incident illustrates her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. She was a very moral person, and she was very moralistic and judgmental.

My sisters and I had nicknames for all our close relatives. Our father was Daddy. Mother’s father was Gan-Gan. Our grandmother was Ma-Ma. But our mother was Mother. Period. She was soft and tender, and also strict.

She was very loving and expressed it physically. She’d often scratch my back, for instance, which I loved. But my warmest memory is sitting cuddled next to her on the porch swing watching the lightning bugs or listening to her read a story with my sister, Sally, on the other side.

She’d often say, “How much do you love me?” and I’d reply, “A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” And then we would hug.

But as I got older, she’d ask, “Do you love me?” and if I didn’t reply, “Yes, I love you,” she’d pressure me to say it, leaving me forever conflicted about uttering that phrase.

Her father, Heywood Presley Marsh, had wanted a boy, so when Mother, his first child, was born, he named her Willie, short for the William they were going to name their son. Fortunately, they called her by her middle name, Corrine.

When their second and last child was also a girl, Gan-Gan had to wait for me to be born to have a son. He spent more time with me than my own father did.

My grandmother, Sallie, was very quiet. I hardly remember her at all. Mother told me more than once that she had “Indian blood” (and that the family had roots in the President Andrew Jackson family). Given that some photographs of Ma-Ma indicate Native American features, I have often wondered if her heritage contributed to the fact that we never had any contact with the families of either grandparent, who lived just north of Little Rock. I thought maybe prejudice led to an estrangement.

When we were adults, my younger sister, Mary, my father, and I took a road trip from Dallas to Arkansas to explore our Arkansas roots.  We looked up Marshes in the phone book, visited some, and showed them photographs. They identified some of the people in the photos, all of whom were strangers to us. We learned that so many Marshes lived nearby on top of a large hill that the area was known as Marsh Mountain. The town now has a Marsh Mountain Road. But we knew none of the other Marshes.

In recent years, a DNA test concluded that I have no Native American ancestry. Nevertheless, if the rest of the family and the neighbors believed that Ma-Ma had Indian blood, they still could have discriminated against them because of it. Regardless, so far as I know, my mother lost all contact with her family other than her parents and her sister, who did occasionally visit us with her husband and two children.

More likely, however, the separation from her family may have been due to the fact that my mother did not consider them morally worthy and wanted to protect me from them – like she protected me from the rest of the world. I had no friends when we lived on the farm other than my older sister. Later on, she wouldn’t let me join the Boy Scouts. Or maybe Mother just wanted me all to herself.

After Gan-Gan, who groomed me to be a professional baseball player, died, she repeatedly told me, “Wade, you’re going to be a great man some day.” She had her dreams of her own.

Years after Mother died, I asked my father why she rarely went to church. He immediately said, “She never met a preacher she didn’t consider a hypocrite.” Daddy also once referred to as a “saint,” which was probably more than stereotypic Southern chivalry.

More than anything else, she beat into my head, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The small farm we lived on belonged to her father. Mother bought it for him as a retirement gift with the money she earned working as a secretary before she got married at the age of twenty-five. He grew lots of corn and other vegetables and raised rabbits, which he sold at market. Once I counted 114. But my favorites were the strawberries and the homemade ice cream that we made after picking them.

As a young adult, I returned to the area and visited the neighbors across the road. I arrived at dinnertime and they invited me to partake in their meal, which included six or seven excellent dishes. They told me they always thought Gan-Gan was “half crazy” the way he worked so hard in the field, which was very rocky and not very fertile.

Their impression did not surprise me. He was very hyper. Watching a boxing match on TV, for example, he’d sit on the edge of his seat throwing punches into the air empathizing with his favorite boxer.

Shortly before the stroke that killed him, he stood up and yelled at my junior high school principle and who had loudly criticized me, “Don’t you tell my grandson how to play baseball!”

On the surface, growing up on the farm was idyllic. Riding the workhorse, making sand castles in the driveway with my sister after a rain, playing with the rabbits, catching lightning bugs and putting them in a jar, sitting on the swing with my mother, listening to the Grand Ole Opry, The Lone Ranger, and other shows on the radio.

But like a David Lynch movie, below the surface, there was trouble, like the danger that lurked in the nearby woods that Mother forbid me to visit.

I would often walk in my sleep and once I stepped on a scorpion. Another time, after a storm, my family found me walking in the snow in the front yard. And my sinuses were chronically congested. After a number of trips to the doctor that involved having a tube stuck down my nostril to painfully suck out the mucous, we finally had an operation to “clear my sinuses.”

But worst of all, in retrospect, was the isolation and the fact that I had no friends of my own age with whom to interact other than my sister who was 16 months older. My social skills surely suffered as a result.

Then when I was four or so, my mother went back to work! Separation anxiety to the max. Nightmares involving the death of my father. And driving to the highway to eagerly, desperately await her return on the Greyhound bus.

To whatever degree life on the farm was idyllic, the bubble burst when I had to go to first grade, Landmark School, which included all twelve grades. Those big, angry boys who were fighting all the time scared me to death.

Having no bathroom, the boys had to stand around a hole to urinate. One day, another student pushed me. While gathering my balance, I peed on the boy standing next to me, who got angry and caused a scene. I was taken to the office of the principal, who did not believe me when I told him what happened and called my mother to tell on me.

I was crying when I went back to Miss White’s classroom. When the girl sitting next to me, whom I liked, asked me what happened, I was too embarrassed to tell her. But even worse was that once home, I learned that Mother didn’t believe me either. A bond of trust between us was forever broken.

The next year we moved into town for the first semester of my second grade and began a series of more or less annual moves until high school that left me without any close childhood friends. Mother was unhappy and hoped that moving would help.

I don’t remember much about that semester in Little Rock or any of my grade school years. One clear memory is getting angry at a friend of my sister and hitting her on the head with my baseball bat. Or at least that’s the way I remembered it for decades until Sally told me she didn’t remember the incident at all. So it was probably more like a light tap. But it scared me and got me into big trouble with Mother.

Then we moved to Dallas, where Daddy had grown up and Sally had been born. We lived on the edge of a Black ghetto where Daddy managed a movie theatre and I became best friends with a Black boy slightly older than me. Mother probably nurtured that friendship.

Less than two years later, my younger sister, Mary, was born. The story was that it was an accidental pregnancy. But I have my doubts. I suspect Mother wanted another child to fill the vacuum in her life.

When I was in high school, Mother encouraged me to get in touch with my friend from the South Dallas ghetto after not having seen him for eight years to say goodbye before he went away to college in Colorado. I declined.

Mother knew about his college plans because she hired his grandmother to help around the house. Mother wasn’t employed and Ma-Ma lived with us, but still she needed help. Maybe it was because she was so depressed. Or maybe she was already feeling the effects of the emphysema and bronchial asthma that would eventually kill her at the age of 55.

She was often emotionally agitated, which was probably aggravated by the fact that her doctors treated her lung ailments with cortisone – a drug that can cause “unusual behavior or thoughts, severe depression, anxiety, and mood changes.”

Once I entered the bathroom not knowing she had just finished a shower. She was naked and screamed to high heaven.

Our relationship was very symbiotic. She was too much for me to handle. I needed my independence.

Once I bought a diary that had a small lock and key, but she managed to open and read it, which infuriated me. Still we were close.

We studied flyer saucers together, which prompted me to give that speech in high school on why I believed in flyer saucers. One night that year we thought we saw one through the back window. We ran into the back yard to get closer, only to discover that the UFO was a red light on a telephone poll.

When she told me that we were related to Andrew Jackson, I assumed she was living in a fantasy world. I felt the same way about her beliefs in extra-sensory perception and other psychic phenomena.

She was a lousy cook. Lots of fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, pot roasts that would last for days, grilled cheese sandwiches, canned tomato soup.

She insisted that I eat every thing on my plate at dinner time. When I refused, she made me sit at the table until I finished. Some times I never relented. Once I threw the food in the garbage while she was watching television. She caught me and gave me hell. Another time I managed to flush it down the toilet.

While watching television at night, she and the others would talk incessantly. I’d complain, “Why are we watching if you don’t want to watch?” but they kept on talking.

But at least I got to see some shows that planted seeds of rebellion in the 1950s mainstream culture, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Naked City.

Mother definitely smothered me with her love. By the time I was an adolescent, it was like I was breathing for air. One afternoon, she got very excited about a beautiful sunset, but I had to keep my distance. Unable to share the experience, I remained indifferent.

When “Picnic,” the somewhat racy movie with William Holden, was released and my father showed it at his theatre, she wouldn’t let me see it. Like so much in her world, that film was too sinful.

Still I loved her and appreciated much about her, including some of our conversations, like discussing how much she hated “Texas men” after seeing the movie, “Giant.” And her taking me to listen to Father Tollifer!

When I was in high school, she told me that she wanted to divorce my father and I panicked. I told her not to do it. I probably sensed that she would’ve had a very difficult time making it as a single mother.

During my first few years in college, I often wrote her long letters telling her about my life in Berkeley, leaving out my obsession with sex. When I fell in love with Bob Dylan, she listened to his records and was blown away when on “The Les Crane Show” he performed “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” She didn’t care for his references to drugs and sex, however.

She pretty much supported my involvement in the civil rights movement, though she felt Dr. King and his associates should be more patient.

She did let me take a job as a paperboy in junior high school, which gave me a glimpse of liberation. She persuaded Daddy to buy me a Volkswagen bus in 1967 when that was the rage with the hippies. She loved “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

One day home alone with her in the kitchen, I was lying on the couch listening to Frank Sinatra and feeling affectionate toward her, and I briefly got an erection, which freaked me out.

After I started taking LSD, she invited her fellow spiritualists over to the house for me to report on my experiences and lead a discussion.

Throughout her later years, our relationship remained strained, leaving me feeling somewhat angry toward her. I don’t recall specific arguments, just an overall feeling of being pressured to be what she wanted me to be.

But when I visited her in Will Rogers Hospital in upstate New York where she was being treated for her tobacco-induced lung disease, she seemed really happy for the first time. She loved the mountains and had taken up painting again, which she loved as an adolescent. I think she was quite good. My sister framed some of her work and I have a watercolor of hers in my “altar” at my desk.

When I went back to my student co-op to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my liberation from Dallas at a fundraising event, I read through the old binders that had members’ profiles. I read over other’s comments in response to standard questions, which tended toward efforts at humor. Then I looked at one of my own pages, saw my own attempts to be funny which I read out loud to others standing around, and suddenly read, ”My mother castrated me.” Shocked, I stopped reading and quickly put the book down.

So with all her positive qualities and the many gifts she passed on to me, Mother was also half-crazy like her father and she seriously stunted my emotional development. As discussed by Karl Jung and R.D. Laing, I eventually went completely mad and regressed to an infant-like state in order to grow up again. Finally, when I turned 60, I felt that I had finally grown up.

I can’t help but wonder what our relationship would have been like if those doctors had not pumped her full of cortisone.

We remained close to the end and she never stopped telling me I would be a great man (which I consider to have been a mixed blessing). I did finally read Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain that she had recommended, liked it, and read several of his books, while thinking about her.

When she took her last breath, I held her hand and felt that a circle had been completed.

Escape

NOTE: The following is the first chapter in what may be a forthcoming memoir titled No Secrets to Conceal

I escaped Dallas by the skin of my teeth on a Greyhound bus to Berkeley in early September 1962. My mother wanted me to stay in Texas to go to college. But I was dead set on going to the University of California. To get her approval, I had to make her an offer she could not refuse.

My determination to go to Cal was prompted by a special course on anti-Communism that the Dallas school district required every junior to take during the 1960-61 school year. The only textbook was J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit. The whole exercise struck me as absurd. I considered the Soviet Union a brutal dictatorship, but the anti-Communist hysteria of the time felt misguided and repressive.

Being smothered by my mother’s love, totally alienated from the Dallas orthodoxy, and bored by my lousy high school, South Oak Cliff, I had already rebelled, timidly. This anti-Communist nonsense reinforced my rebellion, which had begun during my last semester in junior high.

One day in the lunch cafeteria I overheard another student eloquently advocate atheism, a concept that was totally new to me. Intrigued, I asked a friend about this troublemaker. He told me they were neighbors, his name was George Littell, and he was a good guy. My friend introduced me and George and I became best friends.

I taught him how to play chess and he took me to the Dallas Public Library for my first visit, which totally blew my mind. My mother had the Modern Library Great Books collection at home, but I rarely read any. Being set free to find my own books out of thousands was another story!

George showed me the philosophy/politics/sociology section, where I quickly discovered Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician and philosopher who wrote in a popular style that a high school student could understand. Why I Am Not a Christian and In Praise of Idleness were two of my favorites. Being awkward and shy with girls, I devoured his books, played lots of chess, and started a high school chess club, my first organizing project.

H.L. Mencken, the notorious, sarcastic columnist for the Baltimore Sun, was George’s favorite. I too read lots of Mencken, who railed against the stupidity of the “booboisie,” the ignorant middle class, and would occasionally be racy, like when he intrigued me by saying he preferred overweight women who had some meat on points “north, south, west, and east.” Mencken led me to other iconoclasts like Ambrose Bierce, Tom Paine, and Ralph Ingersoll.

The only essay I was ever assigned to write in high school – yes, the only one (it was a terrible school) – I wrote on Voltaire, the libertarian French satirist. But my favorite writers were Russell and Mencken,

When I first read Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater during my sophomore year, I thought it was excellent Then I read “The Case for Socialism,” an essay by Russell, who was an early vehement critic of the Russian Revolution but favored democratic socialism of the sort that became established in Great Britain and Scandinavia. So when I re-read Goldwater’s book, I realized that when he talked about “freedom,” he was talking primarily about unfettered freedom for Big Business and I disagreed with his notion that private business should be able to do whatever they want (regardless of the consequences).

My teachers were not impressed with my freethinking. None of them ever encouraged me, with three subtle exceptions. One, a beautiful young woman quietly let me know she was reading Anna Kareinna and suggested it was somewhat scandalous. The chemistry teacher would play chess with me in his lab when I skipped mandatory pep rallies (I’m still amazed he did that, probably jeopardizing his job.) And the civics teacher was not shocked when a fellow student told the whole class that I sat down during the Pledge to Allegiance at the city auditorium when Ronald Reagan appeared on his General Electric-sponsored speaking tour that catapulted him into his political career. (I did not reject the Pledge, but rather how it was being used.)

The civics teacher may have been sympathetic to nonconformists because he was gay. He took some of us male students to Austin for the State basketball playoffs and he and some of the others carried on behind closed doors in ways that puzzled me.

Dallas was dominated by the John Birch Society, the precursor to the Tea Party that was also funded by the infamous Koch family. The whole city was filled with John Birch Society billboards and tons of cars sported their bumper stickers. (When Bob Dylan was invited to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, the top show on television, and sang “Talking the John Birch Society Blues” during rehearsal, Sullivan ruled he couldn’t sing it and Dylan walked out.)

One month before the Kennedy assassination, former Democratic Presidential candidate and then United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson appeared in Dallas and was jeered, jostled, hit by a sign, and spat on, prompting him to warn President Kennedy not to go to Dallas. (After the assassination, the local establishment became very concerned about the city’s image and most of those bumper stickers quickly vanished.)

The same oppressive atmosphere permeated my high school. I hated it and my teachers knew it, much to their displeasure.

The only thing I knew about the beats came from watching The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis on TV, listening to the comedian Dave Gardner, and reading Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy.” But I identified with them and wore my bathroom slippers, Native American-style moccasins, to school.

I challenged rules that seemed arbitrary, like having to leave the cafeteria during lunch hour and not being able to cross an invisible line when we went outside. And I would sit down rather than stand up to sing the Fight Song during mandatory pep rallies (when I went) – even though I sat on the second-to-last last row, the coaches stood right behind me, and I played on the school’s baseball team.

But I never pushed it to the point of being overtly punished. I had been “teacher’s pet” prior to high school, was very repressed emotionally, and was basically a coward. The only fight I had ever gotten into was when a student spectator ran onto the field during a soccer game and took the ball from me when I was about to score a goal. I tried to mutilate him and got taken to the principal’s office, where my hands were slapped severely with a flat board.

My sophomore year in Speech class I gave two speeches. The first was on “Why I Believe in Flying Saucers” (my mother’s influence). The second, inspired by a C. Wright Mills book that I gave before the United States drove Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union after the revolution, was on “Why I Like Fidel Castro.” Word surely circulated among the teachers.

On the first day of English Literature class, the teacher told us to read the introduction to our textbook and write at least three-fourths of a page about what we would like to have done if we had lived in Medieval England. I read it, quickly wrote the required minimum declaring there was absolutely nothing I could imagine liking about Medieval England, and put down my pin, probably with a smirk on my face. The teacher said, “Are you already finished, Mr. Hudson?” I said, “Yes.” She replied, “Well, I can see what kind of grade you’re going to get.”

Later that year, when I spelled “there” “their,” or vice versa, she gave me a poor grade and when I complained with tears in my eyes, she said, “Well, in college if you do that, they will fail you.” I did in fact get my worse grade ever in her class.

I believe it was a C, for I probably did get a few Bs. Mostly however I got As without hardly ever studying. Normally I’d do my homework at my desk while waiting for the tardy bell to ring and the teacher to take roll. The anti-Communism course instructor, who also coached the basketball team and taught history, clearly hated it when I scored 100 on his tests.

Math was particularly easy. On the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), I answered every question correctly and scored in the top 1%. But my high school never assigned me to any honors courses, not even math, probably because they did not like my demeanor. Perhaps my parents or I could have requested that I be placed in an honors class. But I knew nothing about it.

So when I went to Cal planning to major in Physics, I was surprised to learn that I could not take the normal introductory Physics course because I had not studied calculus in high school. (At the time, I was disappointed, but on reflection, it may have been a stroke of good luck.)

Fortunately a clique of close friends helped me cope. In addition to George, who scored 800 on both of his College Boards and went to Harvard on a full scholarship, there was Terry Prince, who also scored two 800s and went to MIT, Roland Cunningham, who went to Texas Tech and ended up in the Seattle area, probably working for Boeing, and Mike Doughty, who became a top-level social welfare administrator and college instructor. We would stay up late smoking pipes and cigars, playing poker, and discussing life and philosophy (though we never drank and knew nothing about drugs). As Bob Dylan sang, “I wish, I wish, I wish in vain/That we could sit simply in that room again”

South Oak Cliff High School had another small group of quiet rebels who raced sports cars in a local shopping mall parking lot and listened to jazz. I became friends with one, Gary Bishop, now an accomplished photographer who after graduating finished second among Texas amateur racecar drivers and once drove at Daytona. I’d go over to his house and help him with his homework. Gary would also sit down during the Fight Song at pep rallies. But he had to sit close to the stage and one day the principal noticed and admonished him in front of the entire student body.

Gary lived on the “other side of the tracks,” in what was probably only a middle-class house, but seemed like a mansion to me. I lived in a tiny house, the first house my parents ever owned, without my own bedroom, with seven people, including my two sisters and my mother’s parents. (The neighborhood is now an African-American ghetto with a house church in almost every block and my high school is now almost all Black and Brown.) And he had a family who seemed to like each other. I enjoyed going there.

Gary turned me on to jazz and Joan Baez. At home we only listened to Frankie Lane, Johnny Cash, Johnny Mathis and such. Jazz and folk were a whole new world and I loved it.

Throughout high school, I only had two dates. On one, we went to hear the Modern Jazz Quartet on the campus of Southern Methodist University. I felt like a grown up and cherished the concert.  At the end, knowing nothing about the encore tradition, as everyone was clapping I asked her if we should leave. She said yes. Later I heard the quartet played a number of great encores and was disappointed. I blamed her.

At night, I would often go for long walks alone and sit in the swings at the nearby elementary school playground. After I had begun that habit, I read in a text book a Ray Bradbury science-fiction short story that was set in the future and featured a man who would walk alone at night while looking at the windows of homes that glared with the light of televisions inside where people were passively transfixed. Then an automated, driver-less police car drove up, interrogated him, and arrested him for improper conduct. (Is that the future for the Google car?) Like the character in the story, I felt scandalous, a freak.

The only other item in that book I liked was “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot. Sounded like Dallas to me!

George once suggested that we run away from home. I was tempted, but decided against it. He did it anyway, but on the first night, he called his mother from the edge of town and asked her to come get him.

Some time later, he was selected Dallas Optimist Club Boy of the Month and went down hill from there, as he glimpsed a future of “success.” He joined the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps), which struck me as strange. After graduation, we corresponded some (he told me I should become an op-ed columnist). Then one night at Roland’s house during Christmas break, we had a heated disagreement about the Vietnam War (he approved) and we never communicated again. (The last I heard, he worked for Mobil Oil and had his sights set on becoming CEO of one of the nation’s ten largest corporations. For all I know, he succeeded. He was “smarter” than I was, but I did beat him once in a citywide “numbers’ sense” contest after secretly prepping for it).

When it came time to apply to college, we had to go to the school counselor to get her recommendation. Terry said that when he went in, she asked him, “Is it true that George is an atheist?” Terry lied through his teeth and said no.

When I went in to see the counselor, I wanted to go to Rice University in Houston to study physics. She started to check the highest recommendation box but then noticed that the faculty had not selected me for the National Junior Honor Society. She asked why, I told her I didn’t know, and she left the office. After several minutes, she came back and checked the second highest recommendation. I assume she found out that I had some “character” issues. Rice rejected my application. (Thank God.)

This rejection prompted me to think back on that anti-Communism course, during which the instructor played a documentary, “Operation Abolition,” produced by the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The film included footage of a hearing the committee held in the Supervisors’ Chambers at San Francisco City Hall in 1960. So many protestors showed up to challenge the committee’s witch hunt the crowd overflowed onto the steps of City Hall and the police swept them away with fire hoses. The film’s narrator blamed the incident on agitators from the University of California at Berkeley.

Recalling that scene, I decided UC Berkeley was just the place for me and went to the downtown library to review the school’s catalog. The Introduction began, “Renowned for its richness and diversity, the San Francisco Bay Area….” That seemed like heaven to me!

After determining that my grades and College Board scores automatically qualified me for admission, my mind was made up. Tuition was free and I could work to make ends meet. The only task left was to persuade my mother.

For many weeks we went back and forth. Even the basketball coach/history teacher/anti-Communism instructor, who lived across the alley right behind us, told her, “Let him go. Let him get it out of his system.” Still she refused. She wanted me to stay close to home.

But I had an ace-in-the-hole: Father Tollifer. He was head priest at an upper class Episcopal Church in North Dallas. Once one reaches that level in the Episcopal Church, one is totally independent, like being tenured faculty at a University. So he was able to get away with being a totally eccentric spiritualist, including membership in the secretive Rosicrucian Society.

My mother and her small circle of friends, all of whom were women 40-50 years old, revered him. They were totally into the metaphysical world, read Edgar Cayce religiously, would go to séances and such, and one of them took LSD before I ever heard of it.

I liked Father Tollifer too. Mother would take me to his Tuesday night lectures on topics like “The Soul,” “The Mind,” and “The Spirit.” I didn’t agree with all of it, but it was far more interesting than anything I heard in school. And challenging. He was clearly an intelligent, thoughtful, nice person.

One night he casually mentioned that he thought prostitution should be legalized. I passed that on to my clique at school and two of them were discussing it in Honors English at the end of the school day when some cheerleaders overheard them and became very agitated. The teacher asked them to quiet down and stay after class to discuss it. I got wind of the controversy and joined in the heated discussion, taking Father Tollifer’s side. So the good priest spiced up my life and I appreciated it.

Knowing how much my mother adored him, I told her, “Look, I’ll go talk to Father Tollifer and if he says I should stay in Texas, I’ll stay in Texas. But if he says I should go to California, I’ll go to California. Ok?” As I expected she accepted the gamble.

When I explained the situation to Father Tollifer, he immediately said, “Go to California.” I replied, “But I don’t want to hurt my mother,” to which he responded, “Son, it’s a question of your own integrity.” We talked some more, I thanked him, and as I left, he asked me to go to the Rosicrucian library in San Jose. I told him I would. (I never did.)

After reporting our conversation, my mother backed off. Freedom was on the horizon.

(Later, while watching an interview with Frank Bardacke in the documentary “Berkeley in the Sixties,” I learned that many other students were inspired to go to Cal because of the film, “Operation Abolition.”)

I didn’t go to the high school graduation ceremony, or the prom. The sooner I had nothing to do with South Oak Cliff High School, the better. (Though the trauma did stick with me and for years I often thought about going back there to teach in order to show them how it should be done.)

That summer, in addition to going to some coffee houses to listen to folk music and going to the Unitarian Church to check them out, I participated in a marvelous study group conducted by two students at Perkins School of Theology. Our class valedictorian went to the same church as the seminarians, who suggested the study group. She invited our little clique to participate.

We read stuff like Plato, Freud, Marx, and most memorably, “Coney Island of the Mind” by the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I had never encountered any of that kind of material in high school. So it was a stimulating summer and after the last gathering, the hosts served us mint juleps, the first alcohol I ever drank. A fitting sendoff to college!

That adventure with alcohol prompted some of us to get some six-packs and find a dark field to drink. Unfortunately, however, some small round prickly balls got stuck on the bottom of my pants legs, so I got into big trouble when I got home and Mother noticed. I didn’t care though. I was about to be free.

The Greyhound bus ride to Berkeley was incredibly exciting. I had never been out of the state of Texas since we moved there from Arkansas, and had never been out of Arkansas before that, for our family never took vacations. And on the bus, a young Latin American female student attracted a number of boys, including myself. She spoke openly about sex in a way that was very titillating. I was on my way to a new world!

Little did I know that I was about to encounter a hurricane called “the Sixties” that would sweep me up and change me forever, for better or worse.