Driving Ms. Daisy

I did a lot of hitchhiking in college, thanks to Jack Kerouac convincing me that being On the Road was a romantic adventure.  Kerouac ended up a drunk and hanging out in Gunther's Tap Room,  Northport, Long Island, not far from where I grew up.  I never got around to buying him a beer.

 

A college buddy and I made it to Big Sur one year.  After a summer in California with the Navy near LA, we hitchhiked up Route 1 and got stuck in Santa Barbara where scores of other hitchhikers were trying to score a ride.  We drew ourselves a phony sign with [destination] Boston on it and a guy in a VW van stopped for us right away.  You guys going to Boston.  No, we're from Boston.  We're headed for Big Sur.  The guy replied, sorry, we're going to San Francisco.  We'll drop you off in Salinas.  Ok, thanks.  [Where's Salinas].

Salinas is forty miles from Big Sur, a little north of Monterey.  It's surrounded by miles and miles of vegetable fields.  It was dark and late when we got there so we found a motel to sleep for the night.  We were on the road, but not on the road enough to sleep with the lettuce or real hobos and migrant farm workers.  One of us even had a credit card.

In the morning, my friend, who could strike up a conversation with a refrigerator, comes back to the motel room and announces he has found someone from Holy Cross College, like us, and he's taking us to Big Sur.  Luck of the Irish!

In fact the man has a nephew who went to Holy Cross.  He works for the Diocese of Monterey and has friends who are camping at Big Sur for the weekend.  The Diocese had a Big Sur chapel and since his friends work for the diocese, too, they're using it for a campground.  You can stay with them.  They'll be delighted.


Our host had a lovely family.  They pitched us a tent and we stayed with them on the chapel grounds.  Big Sur was beautiful.  Big trees, big cliffs, big ocean.   Not a hippie girl a la Kerouac and Neal  Cassady in sight.  But we ate well and at the end of the weekend our hosts took us home to Monterey, fed us again, washed our clothes, took us to the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium and then put us on the bus for San Francisco and our ultimate destination in the Canadian west.

*    *    *    *    *

Most of the time, though, I travelled alone on shorter trips.   One night on a trip from Holy Cross back home to Long Island, I got picked up by the head basketball coach, Jack Donohue, a minor celebrity who'd coached Lou Alcindor (aka Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in high school.    He said he could take me as far as New Haven, where he was spending the night with a friend's family.  Then he launched into a fatherly diatribe about what a bad idea it was to be hitchhiking, especially at night.  I allowed that I was unafraid.  I was experiencing an adventure.  He was blunt: "You don't have to shoot yourself in the head with a .45 pistol to discover it's a bad idea."

He dropped me off on the New England Thruway outside New Haven.   I waited a while for a ride and then three black guys pulled over.   I hesitated, but then thought:  I'm not going to let them think I won't ride with them.  All the trouble is between the old people.  "What a Wonderful World."



We weren't back on the road two minutes when the guy next to me in the backseat says:  "I am Dr. Death and I am going to operate on you."   This was pretty disturbing, but I pegged them for some college guys on the way to NYC from Brown or Yale.  Dr. Death would not let up,  though.  Open up your bag.  Give me your money.  Says I, If I had any money would I be hitchhiking.   In fact I had some money, but if I gave it to Dr. Death, I wouldn't have train fare out of New York City, where hitchhiking was impossible.   Dr. Death is thinking he's having fun with a soft white suburban kid.  I'm thinking if the car gets off the thruway or if he shows a knife I'm going to break his neck before the guys in the front seat can do anything.  I wasn't as tough as I thought I was, but I'd been in street fights before and survived being on the wrong end of knife before.  I was determined to go down fighting.   After about 20 minutes of this, the driver, who's wearing a Joe College tweed jacket, tells Dr. Death to stop bothering me.   There's nothing but silence for the rest of the ride.  They drop me off at the Throgs Neck Bridge and drive off into the darkness without saying a word.

The Cops and the Cannibal

My son's friends (black, white, red and brown) tell him the police are bad, corrupt and pick on people. He says, huh? When have you guys ever been picked on by the police or even stopped by them. Answer: er, like never, dude, but, but, but. The closest they came was one night when they were walking to Best Buy. A cop asks them where they are going. They say to Best Buy. He's, ok, you'll be fine. We're chasing an armed robber. Stay out of the neighborhood over on your right.

A few months later in the neighborhood over on the right, a guy killed his wife and dog and then cut off her head and his own arm.  Then ate part of her.  The cops have a tough job. Thank god for them.  They're the only thing standing between us and the cannibals in the neighborhood.

The Dragon and the Little Gal

Two Sundays ago, after many years off,  I took my teenage son downtown to Andre House where the Catholics feed the homeless.



I ended up working on the serving line, plunking pieces of watermelon on plates, dessert to accompany the main course of rice and beans.   There was no chili this Sunday.   Not enough volunteers to cut up the ingredients,  according to crew chief Lorenzo.

An argument broke out just before the food line shut down.   A large disturbed black man was shouting at a tiny white girl, one of the devout college students who volunteer to spend a year at Andre House.   He had violated one of the house rules and she was telling him to get back in line.  The shouting became very threatening as the large man towered over the little girl.   She stood her ground and didn't waver.   The black lady who like me is helping serve whispers in my ear:  "I'm really scared."  I'm thinking I'm way too old for this and if I say or do anything I'll probably set off a fight.  Wait.  Maybe he'll forget why he's mad or just run out of steam.   Eventually he does and leaves.   The black lady volunteer asks the tiny white girl if she was afraid.   The tiny white girl says... "A little.  Sometimes they punch the male volunteers, but they won't hit a girl."

The majority of the homeless are mentally ill... inherited, bad luck, or induced by addiction, neglect or abuse.   Fifty years ago they'd be locked up in a hospital.   In our benevolence, we've turned them out onto the streets where the cops now have to play psychiatric social worker, a job they are not intended or prepared to do, constantly. 

The crime isn't that some knuckleheads beat up a homeless guy in Boston.  It's that a "benevolent" society has turned the mentally ill out into the streets.

How Did You Spend Your Summer

.

One of the Holy Cross NROTC requirements was to spend a summer aboard a ship.  Think eight week internship.  I opted for a small minesweeper based in Long Beach, California, the MSO (minesweeper ocean) Guide.   California was where it was happening.  

Aboard the MSO Guide not much was happening, as I discovered when I got there.  Active duty US ships aren't really prepared to train aspiring Navy officers.  The Guide like many of the Long Beach ships was taking a rest between deployments to Vietnam where she patrolled coastal waters looking for Viet Cong sneaking around by sea. 

Between visits to Vietnam, the Guide never ventured far from port at Long Beach.  It was a little minesweeper, just 700 tons and 170 feet long.  Big destroyers like the USS John Paul Jones weighed in at 4600 tons, were 400 feet long, packed guided missiles and 5-inch artillery that could lob explosive shells at targets 12 miles away.   During the Battle for the Dong Ha Bridge, a 70-lb round from the Jones disintegrated an NVA tank during a firefight at about 1000 yards.  The Guide had a tiny 40mm gun, which wasn't a defense against much of anything in the era of jets, guided missiles and tanks.  It's steering didn't even operate like a big destroyer's.  It had special propellers that could change their angle for better maneuverability.  Guide  was half the size of the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides", the famous 200-year-old three-masted sailing ship that my parents took me to visit in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston when I was a little boy.  Consider that the 200-year-old sailing ship outgunned the Guide by a factor of 50 to 1.



The ignominy of it all.   Our first day trip out onto the calm waters on a sunny California day just south of Long Beach and I got seasick.  I couldn't even find privacy and refuge from the shame of it.  I raced inside to the Guide's closest head (restroom) and let loose into the toilet only to discover at the last moment that one of my supervising officers was sitting on it.  Unlucky and messy for him.  ignominy for me. 

Sunny California didn't turn out to be a refuge from the grim reality of the military in a time of war.   I was looking forward to a weekend at the beach one Friday afternoon when all shore leave got cancelled.   The Guide and all remaining hands were to sail immediately for San Diego and help search for a helicopter that had crashed at sea during a training exercise.   Hopefully, the minesweeper's sonar would be able locate the sunken helicopter, and divers would be able to recover the bodies of its crew.

The Guide's sonar was high tech and secret.   There was actually a hole in the bottom of the ship (actually an internal well) that the an/sqq-14 sonar was lowered through.  The sonar rendered a television view of the bottom of the ocean.   When we arrived near where they thought the helicopter had crashed, we lowered the sonar and searched and searched ... and found nothing.  Then the sonar died.  We hauled it up to fix the thing.   This was where my most useful talent came in handy.  Not something I learned at Holy Cross.  The previous summer on an Oregon ranch, I had learned to use wrenches to take things apart.    To the surprise of everyone, especially the ship's captain, I rolled up my sleaves and started helping the chief petty officer take the cover off the sonar internals.  We couldn't fix the sonar, so we bolted the thing back together and went home.  That was the most interesting thing I did all summer, but not really useful.   They never did find the bodies of the helicopter crew. 

I discovered too late that the Navy base at Long Beach wasn't much closer to the beach and California girls than an Oregon ranch.


 

Marcy Tierney

Marcy Tierney

Ma's friend Marcy

was the first Irish Catholic

hired to teach
in a small New Hampshire town

Jobs were hard to come by

during the Depression,
but so were good teachers
in small New Hampshire towns.

The principal told her:

"You're by far the best candidate
but these people don't know many Catholics,
particularly the Irish kind.
If hired you must be the best Catholic
that you possibly can be."

Marcy got a dispensation from her confessor,

a Jesuit most likely,
to join the Protestant Grange
and learn their secret signs.

She slept upstairs with a hot brick

to warm her feet in the winter
in a small New Hampshire town.

Bruce and Grandma C

"Goodwin Procter is an equal opportunity employer. We hire, train, and promote without regard to race, color, gender, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, military or veteran status or other legally protected status."

Grandma C grew up in the world of novenas, daily mass and regular graveside prayers for the dead.  Devotion not much different from that of her roots in Portugal and Italy, though she grew up in Boston and attended Girls' Latin School in Roxbury.  For her conservative parents high school with young WASP and African-American women was preferable to proximity to young men of any race or creed.

Grandma C was also devoted to work and became a crackerjack legal secretary at a wealthy Boston law firm.  Her sons and daughters attended Harvard, Yale and Boston College.  Born a generation later, Grandma might have been a lawyer at the firm instead of a secretary.  That didn't matter to her.  She was content with her faith and rituals, taking care of her children and family, and preparing for the festival of Christmas.  Puritan New England defined itself through work and material success.  Latin New England expressed itself with food and art.  Christmas in the Chicarello household was a two-day feast, including hand made ravioli, lobsters, spaghetti with lobster sauce and cannoli.  The artist was exhausted by the end of the feast, but what a show.

Her sons might have called him unpleasant names, but Bruce was Grandma's work buddy.  This didn't soften the blow when Bruce arrived one morning dressed as Caitlyn.  Grandma passed out when she learned this was a permanent arrangement and that she was going to have to share the ladies room with Caitlyn.  The law firm advised Grandma that they would provide her with professional counselling to help deal with her problems concerning Caitlyn and the ladies room.  They never made the logic quite clear on why Grandma, and not Caitlyn, was the one who had to deal with the problem of sharing a rest room with anatomically correct men.





 

Tugboat Annie and the Condom Factory

There really was a Tugboat Annie and more than one.  Ours was a friend of my father's Long Beach neighbor, Alice Murtha.  Annie was a big, rough cigar smoking woman who was a tugboat captain in New York harbor. 

One afternoon, while visiting Alice, my young father let out that he was looking for a job.  The mistake was doing this in the presence of Annie.  Maybe he wanted to work on Annie's tugboat.  Ever helpful Annie said she knew a man who'd give young Jim a job.  She gave him a name, an address, the Acme Rubber Co., and a note of introduction.

Innocently, young Jim showed up at Acme for a job interview.  The owner was very polite and said he'd love to hire my father... I can tell you're a very nice young man ... but are you really sure you want to work here?   This is what we make.  The owner pulled a condom out of his desk drawer.  Not long removed from Regis Catholic High School and being an alter boy, my father turned red with embarrassment.  He couldn't speak.  The man said, I understand, son.   Annie was having some cruel fun with you.  I'm sorry.

The Witch Child of Kansas City

Social media is the curse of the 21st century.  You're instantly introduced to all sorts of people you don't want to hear from.   As a rule I decline all attempts to "Friend" me on Facebook.  Not only have I never met most of these people, but too many of them are inclined to share their predictable and unwelcome political views.  I already get hate mail from AWAR (the Arizona White Aryan Resistance) for my opinions published in the Arizona Republic.  With enemies like that who needs "friends."

I reluctantly began accepting some requests for friendship after my sweet cousin Siobhan suggested I join Facebook to share family pictures.  Ok, I like pictures of cute babies, weddings, flowers and puppy dogs. 

I joined up and before long I had a legion of long-lost cousins inviting me to share with them.  Who wants to be rude to long-lost cousins, their wives, families, puppy dogs and cute babies. 

Silly me.  Before long the barrage of political messages started.  The university affiliated were the worst.  Who knew I belonged to a family of outraged progressives.  I made the mistake of responding to some of the messages, which earned me all sorts of pleasantries from the nasty friends of my long-lost cousins and the cousins' foul-mouthed, rude children.   I have my own children to deal with.  Who needs to hear from someone else's snippy kids.  At least mine aren't foul-mouthed.

I have a lot less friends now and hopefully more pictures of puppy dogs.

The Spanish Prisoner: You Dirty Diseased Whore

For years my wife made me miserable and guilty whenever I left a waitress a generous tip.  Not just for years.  For my entire married life.  Have you no sympathy for the working class, the Hoi Poloi, Dear, says I.  None whatsoever.  Not one iota, came back the retort.   She stalked our restaurant bills like an angry tigress  after I filled in the tip and signed my name.  NOBODY TIPS THE NURSES!

Okay, I got it, Dear.

She knew the mass in Latin better than any alter boy, and was pissed off that she couldn't be one.  She was the smartest, hardest working girl in every class.  When her brother got an assignment to write an essay for the City of Boston Columbus Day contest, she wrote it for him and won the contest.  He got the credit and sat next to Senator Kennedy at the awards lunch.  She got to watch.

Since idle hands are the devil's workshop, in her spare time between being the smartest student and reciting the mass in Latin every Sunday, she went to work at 16 as a candy striper in the nursing home a few blocks from her house.  From one thankless task to another.

In the early 70s the Veterans Administration started farming out the old demented veterans.   A bunch of them went to my wife's nursing home.  The sweet devout candy striper who wrote uplifting Columbus Day essays was about have her education take a new path.

The demented veterans were pretty much completely out of control.  The candy stripers were prey.  A nursing home staffed with 16-year-old candy stripers was the Serengeti.  Hungry hyenas versus baby gazelles.   The nursing home's young gazelles learned fast to stay out of the grab and grope of the hyenas.  But being out of reach wasn't protection against being hit by a bed pan and its contents when the hyenas were in a foul mood.  Or being called a "dirty diseased whore" for some obscure reason possibly having to do with magazines or cigarettes.

The ordeal of the Serengeti ended after a year for the candy stripers when the veterans were moved to a facility better able to handle or ignore them.  A new group was moved in from a mental hospital.

My wife had never met her father's mother, who had been severely disturbed for many years.   The grandmother was a very bright woman who had came to America from the north of Spain, married and had two children.  Her disease became severely dysfunctional when my wife's father was a little boy.  She began to see insects everywhere and stuffed rags into the spaces around the doors to seal the bugs out of her son's bedroom at night.  By the time my wife met her, the grandmother had been locked away in an institution for over thirty years.  She recognized her granddaughter right away, though, was quite lucid most of the time, and very talkative.  What do you talk about with your granddaughter when you've done nothing for thirty years except look at the walls and try to brush off invisible bugs.  The two of them managed to find some common ground, maybe they even prayed together in Latin or Spanish.    I'll have to ask my wife about that some time.

Privilege: A Man's World

The Deloitte Houston office had over 200 professionals thirty years ago.   Prosperous from the oil boom, its offices were richly appointed.  The partners' offices had Louis XVI furniture.  The main lobby floor was covered with a large antique Persian rug, a little frayed at one remote corner, but that was okay.  It was an antique. 

At Christmas in addition to a special bonus, every staff member was given a new personal leather briefcase embossed in gold leaf with his or her initials.  Deloitte took great pleasure in reminding all that they were the Auditors' Auditor.  The office's premier clients were the Hughes Tool Company and the U.S. subsidiary of ARAMCO, the Arabian American Oil Company.   Deloitte hired only the very top accounting graduates.  In Houston they mostly came from Rice, the University of Texas and Texas A&M.  They worked endless hours and after their first year on the job the ones who couldn't keep up, about half, were gone.

His or her initials.  Deloitte, along with the rest of the accounting profession, was transforming itself.  It was no longer a man's world.  There were plenty of smart female accounting graduates and about half of the junior accountants and many of the managers were women.  Still the young women complained that it was a man's world:  "As long as Gene Harris is head of Audit, there will never be a woman partner."  I had to bite my tongue.  For some reason I had insider information above my pay grade and knew who the two women were who were slated for promotion to partner that year.  One, Caroline V was Gene Harris's protégé.   Caroline was a gorgeous blonde who could get away with wearing a business suit and, for Texas, short hair.   The other, Sally M, was all Texas with long black big hair and wore big, light colored, flowery dresses.  Gorgeous, too.  Ladybird Johnson with softer edges.

Today, Cathy Engelbert is CEO of Deloitte LLP, the largest professional services firm in the US with over 70,000 professionals.  She is married and has two children.

Martin X was the only black professional in the Deloitte offices thirty years ago.  There were no Mexicans.  The closest the office came on that score was one of my colleagues in the consulting group having a Mexican-American wife.  Hiring him was considered very enlightened.   The head of consulting was from Cornell, not Texas. 

Martin had one and only one assignment.  He was the manager for the audit of the Aramco Services Company.   It was a nice assignment, but it was also pretty much the only client he could be given back in the day in Texas.  The Arabs who owned the oil company were more accepting of a black professional than most Texans.  This was a nice opening for Deloitte Houston.  They could be enlightened, hire Martin, and give him a nice assignment.  Nobody, but nobody in Houston was going to do or say anything about it, since nobody, but nobody wanted to risk upsetting the Arabs, who considered themselves the leaders of a diverse Muslim world.

I've often wondered what Martin thought about this.  Practically overnight Deloitte had addressed its gender diversity issues, while he remained the Lone Ranger.  He soldiered on pleasantly.  He had a beautiful wife and the pay was great.   He probably ended up teaching at an MBA program for a couple of thou a year. 

Today, Deloitte doesn't look much different from Houston in the 1980s.  While minority youth languish unemployed in America's inner cities, Deloitte takes the lead in outsourcing America's technology jobs to India.

The Dragon Meets the Tongans

My son's Phoenix high school sits close to the demilitarized zone where the affluent rub shoulders (but mostly try not to) with the middle class and the children of migrants from Latin America, Africa and other far away lands.   My son sometimes gets caught up in this and remonstrates about his dislike for the aloof demeanor of the "rich" kids.  I try to explain to him that rich is a matter of perspective and very few, if any, of his schoolmates' families are in the category of playing poker with Andy Carnegie and JP Morgan rich like his great-great grandfather was.

Senior year fun at my son's high school includes assemblies where seniors perform all sorts of silliness for the merriment of the entire student body.   Understand that among the students from far away lands are the Tongans.   Tongans are immense and very hearty Pacific Islanders.  Think of them as Irishmen on steroids, who love a senior year prank as much as anyone.   They're the stalwart linemen of the high school football team and played basketball with my son.

A senior my son knows from baseball was featured at one of the assemblies.  He was asked what kind of animal he'd like to be.  Response:  a TONGAN.  This brought down the house, but got him suspended from school for a day.  Didn't matter that his Tongan friends had put him up to it.

The enlightened among the white affluent students were appalled by the racist outburst.   My son was appalled by the white students who were offended.  "They don't have any Tongan friends.  They don't even talk to them.  If they did, they'd know it was the Tongans' idea in the first place."

Then my son went with the story about how his friend from Sudan showed him a video titled "How to get Africans to go back to Africa."  It showed a boat full of watermelon and fried chicken.   When my son chuckled, one of the white enlightened who was looking on denounced him as a racist.  His response: "Hey, it's the guy from Sudan who you aren't even friends with who's showing the video."

A high school life lesson on hypocrisy.