Little Shit

If I dood it, I get a whuppin’.
I dood it!

Red Skelton

1952 – 1961

I was a little shit and no doubt about it.

I have no personal memory of the earliest story.  Only of Mil throwing it in my face when she would accuse me of being “just like your father.”

Phil Fields was my best friend since we were babies and his aunt and uncle rented half of the 22d Street house from Dwain.  Mildred and Alma, Phil’s mother, remained friends until my teenage years when Mildred decided that Alma no longer wanted to be friends with her.

Phil and I were placed in the same morning kindergarten class at Creston Hills Elementary School.  As the story goes, we spent too much time playing and giggling together and not enough time paying attention to the teacher.  The teacher decided to separate us, and transferred me to the afternoon class.

According to Mildred, I threw a tantrum worthy of Dwain, threatening the teacher that I would “take a knife and cut you up in little pieces!”

Well, we all have our bad days.

But I can’t vouch for the total accuracy of the story.

All I remember from kindergarten is a slight difficulty in learning to distinguish blue from purple and a refusal to skip.

You’d think I couldn’t tell black from white (and actually, I wouldn’t learn that until the “block busting” days in our neighborhood two years later) the way they went on over the colors.  Nowadays, I am able to distinguish among robin’s-egg blue, Navy blue, royal blue, indigo blue, “Blue-blue-my-world-is”  blue, “Blue Velvet,” “Blue Moon” and “Deep Purple.”  But as far as I’m concerned, they’re still all shades of blue and you just have to memorize the names.

My stepdaughter, the fashion queen, who claims you can’t wear this shade of off-white with that shade of off white, because they don’t match would violently disagree with me, but really.  Is it worth having parent-teacher conferences over?  I’m a future member of Mensa, for Chrissake, I thought, and you’re treating me like an idiot.

I think that must have been when I discovered the Great Kids’ Secret.  Idiocy can be a very useful thing.

Kids aren’t allowed to say “I don’t want to,” or “that’s fucking silly and I’m not doing it.”  The Great Kids’ Secret, therefore, is “Gee, I’m trying my best, but I just can’t do it.”  Or, “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand.”  Or, “I really am trying, but I guess I’m just too clumsy or too stupid to get it.”   Adults always buy “I’m too stupid” or “I don’t understand” from a kid.  They may not like it, but they believe it.

The Great Kids’ Secret saw me through skipping, which I found to be an incredibly juvenile waste of time when we should be learning to read or having stories read to us.

“Of course I know how to skip, dummy,” I thought.  “I can skip you under the table.  I was skipping in the womb.  But I was much younger then.

“Besides, skipping is for babies or girls and I ain’t gonna do it.”

“Mrs. Dimick, Stevie can’t seem to learn to skip.  All of the other children can skip around in a circle, but he just can’t seem to make his feet go the right way.  Have you considered having him tested?”

Now there was a teacher with a finely honed understanding of children.

Dr. Spock wouldn’t be invented for a couple of years yet.  I still don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

*

Two years later, Negroes began moving into the Creston Hills neighborhood.  One family, then three, then five, as housing prices plummeted because white folks couldn’t get out fast enough.  It all happened in the space of one summer and before we knew it, white people were a minority on 22d Street.  Dwain refused to move, but did have to admit that if “they” actually were planning to go to school at Creston Hills, measures must be taken.

I was enrolled in the third grade (and Rick started in kindergarten) at the next nearest school, north of 23d Street, in a neighborhood that hadn’t yet been “ruined.”  The third-grade teacher spent as much time teaching us to sing “Oklahoma” and promoting her side job, selling World Book Encyclopedias, as she did teaching reading, spelling and arithmetic.

When we relocated to Midwest City the following summer, Mildred discovered that fourth-graders were expected to know their multiplication tables and how to do short division.  I knew neither.

Maybe that summer wasn’t as idyllic as I remember.  Evenings, after supper and before television, were like summer school.  Rick got to play and I got to drone “two times two is four.  Two times three is six.  Two times four…”

*

I left Midwest City in 1973 and didn’t return until my 25th high-school reunion in 1990.  Surprisingly, my classmates – even the ones I would have bet wouldn’t remember me at all – seemed genuinely happy to see me.  Then I ran into Sharon.

“Sharon!  Steve Dimick.  What was the name of that play we were in in high school?  You were the princess and I was the prince and we both got our servants to stand in for us.  Remember?”

“Steve Dimick.  Steve Dimick.  Oh, God.  You made my life a living hell in fifth grade.  Sitting behind me and punching me in the back all the time.  I actually hated going to school because of you.”

“Oh, shit, Sharon.  You don’t know how sorry I am.  I could give you the long story, but the short version is, there was no excuse for what I was.  I was awful and you just happened to be the nearest target.  But I’ve learned a lot since then and I really, really hope you’ll accept my apology.”

“I don’t know.  Maybe,” she said reluctantly.  “So…ah, what do you do now?”

“I’m an attorney.”

“I should have known it!  So am I, and I knew you’d beat me to it.”

“No, no.  I didn’t go to law school until years after college.  I’m sure you got there first.”

“What year did you get out of law school?”

“Uh, 1979?” I ventured.

“OK, you still win.  I had to wait until I was finished having kids and they were settled into school.”

The only curious thing to me about this exchange was that it didn’t happen with more regularity that weekend.  I had been a little shit and no doubt about it.

*

Being appointed “man of the house” made me cocky.  Being extremely shy meant that I couldn’t really deal with other people unless I could hide behind a mask.  It didn’t matter much which mask it was at the moment: the mask of the obnoxious adolescent, or of the rebellious teenager, the mask of the know-it-all student, the mask of the highschool student giving a speech.  I had a closet full of them.

I could deal with the world just so long as it wasn’t me dealing with the world.

In fifth grade, I sat behind Sharon all year.  Seats were assigned and that was that.  In the Midwest, things are the way they are.  You can complain about other people and you can complain about the government, because government is always bad.  Matters, however, such as the weather or seating charts, are ordained, and there is no sense in complaining or trying to change them, even if you were the one who had done the ordaining.
So it never occurred to the teacher to change my desk to the front row, so I would sit behind nobody.

*

The Dutch twins, Adri (“Archie”) and Tao (“Ted”) joined our class mid-year, after the curious incident of the girl breaking her neck in gymnastics class at another elementary school.  They hadn’t been in the United States a year yet, their English was barely functional and they were incapable of conforming to the norms of the Midwest City School District – they simply didn’t understand.

The Oklahoma solution was that the teachers or administrators should beat them into submission with wooden paddles and, by high school, these mischievous Katzenjammer kids had become surly, sullen and delinquent.  Like my half-brother, Dwain Lee, they were also poor mutts who never had a chance.

*

Pigtails were out and inkwells had been traded in at least twenty years before in favor of pencils.  So we didn’t get our knuckles rapped for blotting our copy books and young girls’ long hair was certainly safer.  Not that the girls themselves were, if they sat in front of me.

Just for something to do, or maybe because I liked her, or, more likely, to get attention, I would punch Sharon in the back with a pointed knuckle.  Not hard, but certainly enough to be annoying.  Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty times a day.  When she finally worked up enough nerve to complain to the teacher, we were ordered to switch places for a week, and she was invited to punch me as many times as she wished.  At the end of the week, we resumed our former seats.

A week.  I mean.  Get real, teacher.  The girl is suffering, here, and a week’s turnabout is the best you can come up with?

My reaction was a bit different from what teacher was expecting.  I counted every punch, marked in a notebook in groups of five: four “IIIIs” and a “/.”  The next week it was payback time, and she got two punches for every one I had received.

I was a little shit, and no doubt about it.

*

The fifth grade was when I learned to smoke stolen cigarettes, sitting on the railroad trestle a hundred feet from the ground, and for some reason decided to see how far I could push my new-found manliness.  As an “A” student (although we didn’t yet receive “A’s,” “B’s” or C’s,” but only Excellent, Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory), I had been awarded the coveted position of a Junior Policeman.

The Junior Police wore a canvas version of a Sam Browne belt with “Jr. Police” lettered on the diagonal portion.  They served as crossing guards at stop signs and intersections near the school, saving the district I-don’t-know-how-much money through not having to pay mommies or retirees to serve this function.

I got caught smoking on duty and was drummed out of the corps.

“Why?” asked Mr. Huffman, the principal.

“I dunno,” I said, and I didn’t and I don’t.

I first went to summer camp between fifth and sixth grades.  The camp was run by the Church of Christ – not our family’s church, but a fun experience nonetheless, except for all of the Jesus stuff and singing the books of the Bible like Muslim students memorizing passages of the Quran.  After my third summer, I was invited not to return. Something about a cursing match with a camp counselor.  I told Mildred that after three years, it wasn’t fun anymore, and I didn’t want to go back.

“Funny,” she said.  “Alma says that all of the other kids thought this was the best year ever.”

*

I rather liked the learning, but hated the schooling:  Mrs. McCauley, luckily not my teacher, who, just before the class bell rang, required her students to line up by blowing a whistle and shouting “My People!”  The edict that came down in mid-fifth grade that recess would thereafter be a time for group play.  Everyone would play tetherball or jump rope or some other organized activity.  Two friends sitting on the sidelines and just talking would not be allowed.

I didn’t do organized activities.

In college, I finally read T.S. White’s “The Once and Future King.”  The totalitarian ant society, in which “everything not forbidden is compulsory” reminded me certainly of the stifling bureaucracy of the University of Oklahoma as imposed by the Oklahoma Legislature, but more immediately of Glenwood Elementary School.

*

I was never disruptive in the classroom (well, except for the fistfight in highschool geometry class), but neither was I all that cooperative, and I suspect my contempt for the entire process showed.

There didn’t seem to be much homework in grade school; certainly not what my step-daughter faced forty years later.  Most assignments were done in class, leaving me with plenty of spare time.  But I caused no commotion.  Rather than throwing spitballs or sitting calmly with my eyes glazed over, I did what I did best.  I read.  Voraciously.  A volume from the small bookshelf that served as the classroom library would last me only a day or two, while all but the two smartest girls were still working on their assignments.

The girls, much more adept than I in the ways of getting along, pretended to be diligently working, while actually passing notes in the alphabet they had invented, based on the Phoenician.  I, meanwhile, got in trouble for not attending to business.

“Steve, why are you reading a book again?  What about the assignment?”

“It’s finished, ma’am.  It’s right here.”

“I can’t read this.  I think you should do it over.”

“But…”

“Just go back to your desk and do it over.  Neatly.”

*

WHO in HELL was she to be telling me that right answers weren’t good enough unless they were also neat?  Sometimes she would make me do the assignment over four or five times until I was almost in tears, each version becoming more illegible than the previous one as I grew angrier and more frustrated.

*

Reading aloud was just as bad.  As the class took turns reading a page or so, I would be several chapters ahead, or reading another book entirely.  When it came my turn, I had no idea where I was supposed to start.  Punishment – and it was punishment indeed – usually meant I was skipped over and not allowed to read aloud.

“Mrs. Dimick, Steve seems to have a real problem paying attention in class.  Have you thought about having him tested?”

*

Mildred could have said, “I certainly share your concern, but how are his grades this term?  That good?  Well, then I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

But she didn’t.  She may have chafed under the imagined lack of adulation by her friends, but she always bowed to authority.

**

At thirteen, I was racing quarterhorses, which I did for about two years, until the day I was unable to force the horse to make a sharp turn.  The horse jumped the railing. sending me flying.  Racing saddles are not made for jumping.  Wholly inept at sports but fairly agile nonetheless, I landed on my feet, breaking my left ankle, spraining my right and marking the end of my racing career.

I sold my saddle and, as a consolation, Mil sprung for the second item on my wish list (the first was to be a jockey): a Cushman motor scooter.  It wasn’t long, though, before we were standing in front of the judge in night traffic court.

It started with Phil and me cruising around tossing fireworks in our wake.  Who should pull us over but Grady, the one officer on the Midwest City Police Force who was held in joking contempt not only by the town’s teenagers, but even by most of their parents.  Grady moonlighted, in full uniform, at the Skytrain movie theater on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons to keep the rowdy kids in line and eject those who caused too much disturbance.

*

The Skytrain was a combination community day-care center and teen hangout for the under-sixteen crowd.  Parents parked their pre-teens there for four hours on Saturday afternoons and allowed their young teenagers to hang out there on Friday nights.  There being no shopping mall in town yet, the Skytrain was the only place in town for young kids to meet.  Hormonal teens went to meet their friends, cut up and make out.  Pre-teens went to meet their friends, cut up and maybe watch a movie.

Management was Mrs. Coxey, whom we all felt bore a striking physical and attitudinal resemblance to Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West.  Mean as sin, we thought, since she would have us ejected for the slightest little offense, such as smoking, spitting, climbing on the seats or talking too loud.

Still, at the end of the double feature, kids would line up at the ticket booth where management allowed each of them in turn to use the theater’s telephone to call their parents to pick them up, and Mrs. Coxey never received a word of thanks.

Had I, at my age now, been manager of the theater then, I would probably have carried a bullhorn in one hand and a cattle prod in the other.

*

The theater was a training ground for future anarchists, terrorists and engineers.  We vied to see who could come up with the best disturbance while maintaining innocence.  I am proud to say that I invented two of the best.  Maybe I should have been an engineer.

One of my group raised pigeons and three of us each smuggled a pigeon into the theater under our jackets.  At the signal, we each carefully placed our pigeon on the floor, where they proceeded to walk underneath the seats for several rows until seeing a clear spot from which they could take flight.  Girls screamed as the pigeons brushed by their ankles.  Once aloft, the birds first flew toward the light of the movie screen, then catching sight of the narrow beam of the projector, flew toward it, then back to the screen and then back to the projector.

It was beautiful.

*

From my familiarity with stolen cigarettes, I realized they made the perfect delayed fuse for fireworks.  And somebody in our crowd always had access to illegal cherry bombs and M-80’s.  It was such a simple matter to stroll into the bathroom, light one end of a cigarette, insert the cherry bomb fuse into the other end, place the contraption behind the toilet and return to my seat and the movie.

The sound of a cherry bomb exploding in an enclosed stall in a small, tiled bathroom in the middle of a Doris Day movie was as welcome and fulfilling to us as the smell of napalm in the morning would be to Army brass not so many years later.

Officer Grady was livid.  And helpless.

*

Everyone called Grady “Barney,” after the Don Knotts character on the Andy Griffith television show.  Wits that we were, we never failed to ask him, on our way into the theater, “Hey, Barney!  Did Andy give you your bullet today?”

“You damn kids sit down and shut up or you’re out of here,” he would bark, impressing nobody.

I speculate today that Grady probably had nine kids at home, a wife too ill to work and no choice but to suffer helplessly at the best moonlighting job he could get.  Unless, of course, he really was the fool that we all thought him, but that would be too easy.

*

After the motor scooter fireworks prank for which I did get busted, Grady made us follow him to the police station where our firecrackers were confiscated, we were lectured, cited and turned loose.

“Have fun with my firecrackers,” I said with a cheery wave as we prepared to ride away.

Damn poor judgment for a kid as smart as I thought I was.

Hauled back into the station, I was given two more citations and we were forced to call our parents to come retrieve their little darlings.  The Watch Commander at the police station apologized to Mildred for the inconvenience, but explained that it was for my own good.

He wondered if she had considered having me tested.

In night court, I was still feeling that only one of the three citations was fair and the other two were punishment for being a smart-ass, which was not against the law.  Mildred kept elbowing me and whispering for me to shut up.  The woman whose friends never showed her proper respect always showed proper respect toward her superiors.

Phil, a pampered only child who always had his eye out for a con, who later made something of a hobby out of sneaking his mother’s car out for unlicensed joy rides with his friends, and who would shortly be nailed as the kid who had been helping himself to his church’s collection plate for several months – but who was smart enough not to smart off – was the apple of his mother’s eye.  She refused to let him ride on my motor scooter again.

*

It can’t have been the Skytrain pranks, or breaking into the drive-in theater during the off season when it was closed, or shooting up the water tank with a .22 – I didn’t get caught for any of those.  It might have been for walking through the State Fairgrounds parking lot randomly breaking off radio antennas (for which I was caught.)  Or just general surliness and my smart mouth.  I don’t remember the precipitating factor, but Mildred finally heeded the advice teachers had been giving her for years and decided to have me “tested.”  Convinced that I was a “troubled child,” and well on my way to a life of crime, she sent me to a child psychologist.

I participated willingly – if not always honestly – finding the process fascinating, if a bit of a joke at the same time.  Torn between really wanting to know more about me and the feeling that the whole process was a sham, I gave honest answers half of the time and (what passed in my mind for) witty answers the rest of the time.

There were standard multi-phasic tests, essays, word associations (“black: purple;” “up: giddy;” “stop: no;” “new: do;” “old: McDonald”), and the Rorschach test.

I had always wanted to do a Rorschach ink-blot test.  When I could think of a smart-ass description of a particular blot, I gave it.  When I couldn’t, I was honest.

One pattern left me with trouble expressing myself.  “It’s a person carrying a shopping basket.”

“Can you tell me anything about the person?”

“It’s female?”

“And how do you know it’s female?”

“By the…uh…the bustline?”

In mid-America in mid-century, we didn’t speak of sexual matters or body parts except in Victorian euphemisms.  My first mother-in-law probably never uttered the word “breast” in her life, although hers were something to be proud of.  Her oldest daughter, my first wife, after spending two decades and more in California, might occasionally say “breast,” but felt much more comfortable with “bosoms.”  This was very late 20th Century, and she informed me testily that she would never refer to them as “boobs.”

And so I was tested.  Once a week, week after week.  Both of us waited for the results, for different reasons.  When they arrived, we were both disappointed: Mildred because of the bottom line, me because of the lack of details.  If there was a written assessment, I never saw it.

“He says you’re normal,” Mildred said, with more than a hint of disappointment.  “Abnormal” would have meant that it was out of her control – the diagnosis for which she hoped – while “normal” implied that she either shared in whatever problems existed or was overreacting.  “He says you’re a teenager.”

Well, damn.  And after all the trouble I had gone to.

*

In elementary school, tired of being one of the two or three smartest kids in my class – especially since there seemed to be no percentage in it for me – I tried my best to get a “U” (Unsatisfactory) in some subject.  Any subject.  It was a personal goal I set for myself.  But worthless kid that I was, I couldn’t even do that successfully.  The best I could manage was an S minus in music.  Jeez!  I couldn’t even fail P.E., and Mr. Faudree knew I never paid attention and never joined in unless forced to.

And now, in junior high school, I couldn’t even be a successful juvenile delinquent.  I couldn’t even be a “troubled child.”  If that shrink is still practicing, he should have his license pulled.

**

There was little socio-economic class overlap in Midwest City elementary schools, there being one such school for each square mile of town.  Class status in the junior high schools, however, was broader, with John Jarman (10-term congressman) Junior High School having students from middle-lower to upper-middle class and Mike Monroney (three-term senator) Junior High School teaching students from lower-middle to upper-upper class.  (All rankings have been unilaterally adjusted to Midwest City standards by the author.  On an absolute scale Midwest City’s highest class would have been upper-middle.  And damned few of those.)

Jarman had a two-year trade course in auto mechanics.  Monroney didn’t.

I attended Jarman for the first two years and then, because Mildred and Bob had moved across town, transferred to Monroney for the ninth grade.  Jarman, the Monroney vice-principal explained to me, had “a lot of problems, because they have to take the foster children and the Air Force kids and the farm kids.  That’s why they have so many hoodlums.”

Many of those “hoodlums” were my friends, and I sought them out, at both junior high schools.  They were also angry and surly, with giant chips on their shoulders, looking for a place to fit and, not finding it, making a place of their own.

At the same time, I was a part of another group: the “A” students, with whom I spent most of my classroom time.
I didn’t fit well with either group.

The hoods were a little too ready to fight and a little too proud of receiving “C’s” and “D’s.”  They talked a lot about cars, about clutches and carburetors and engines and tires and other things wholly foreign to me.  They also liked to lie and brag.

“Man, I know this ol’ boy has a 427 Chevy engine that’s been bored and stroked ‘til it’s a mean mother and he’d let me have it for only about three-fifty.”

“Shit, that’s nothin’.  My uncle’s rebuilding a GTO for me.  It’s gonna have 450 horses, four-on-the-floor, dual carbs, a racing cam and racing mags.  I’m gonna get it for my sixteenth birthday.”

The “A” students had parents who took them to plays and museums.  Their parents actually welcomed other students to their houses to study or work on extracurricular activities.  Most of them actually liked their parents.  During summers in high school, while I worked to save money for college,  they went to band camp or math camp or debate camp at out-of-state universities.  Most of them knew where they wanted to go to college, and it usually wasn’t the one that was cheapest.

If the “hoods” seemed too unhappy, the A’s seemed too happy.  Even through my senior year in high school, I never completely solved this internal problem and never felt that I fit in, even when I found a place where I did.

One thing I did not do was blame the group because I didn’t fit in.  That would have been too Mildred.

Dwain

I built the Rock of Ages, it was in the Year of One
And that’s about the biggest thing that man has ever done.

The Bragging Song, Traditional

1947 – 1972

There was another man in my early life, a man much more intelligent than even he knew (certainly preferable to the converse), who had little formal education, but never ceased exploring and educating himself and asking questions and challenging authority and occasionally taking the time to try to teach me to do the same thing.

His name was also Dwain Lee Dimick, Sr., and he was also my father.

I remember surprisingly little of life before I was nine.  Mildred was always surprised at how little I remembered.  I suppose I either blocked most of it out or, off in my own fantasy world, wasn’t paying any attention in the first place.  I remember selected scenes like movie clips I occasionally play.  On balance there are probably more pleasant memories than unpleasant.

*

While Mildred didn’t always have money for groceries, or even a dime to give to Dwain Lee for school lunch, Dwain always had money for toys.  We had the first television in the neighborhood, the set itself almost as big (in my memory) as today’s giant-screen TVs, but with a round screen not more than eight or ten inches in diameter.  From the time it arrived, Sunday evenings belonged to Dwain’s friends and Milton Berle.

But televisions were temperamental, tubes were fragile and wiring could overheat and short out.  As TVs became more common, so did the need for television repairmen, who were few, overworked and evidently fairly expensive.  Dwain ordered a home-study course courtesy of the G.I. Bill and taught himself electronics.  The oversized garage on 22d Street was transformed from auto repair to television and radio repair, not on any large scale, but for friends, neighbors and friends of friends.

I assume he did it to earn extra (non-reportable) money on the side.  I would be surprised if he earned much more money than it took to purchase the testing equipment and supplies before becoming bored and moving on to something else, but to me, that’s not the point.  He could do it; he did it, and he did it by himself.

Dwain and toy

I think he moved back to cars for a while after the television phase, converting the fuel system to make the family Chevrolet run on butane rather than gasoline.  Maybe butane was cheaper, but all I remember it accomplishing was diminishing the trunk space by about 75 percent to make room for the butane tank.  Oh, well.  We never went anywhere but Guthrie or Stillwater, anyway, and the frosty butane tank was handy for keeping the groceries cold.

(We always drove Chevrolets.  In the quiet, prosperous post-war years, when there really was a car in every garage – except those garages filled with dismantled radios and televisions – there were several makes of automobiles (all American makes, of course), but only two types of ordinary guys: the ordinary guy who drove a Chevrolet (“Chivolay” it was and “Chivolay” it remained even in national advertising  until at least the 1980s, showing the brand’s strong identification with the heartland: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chivolay”) – and the ordinary guy who drove a Ford.

(The Chevy folks thought the Ford folks were simply a little slow.  Buy a Ford and a Chevrolet on the same day for the same price, and two years later the used Ford would be worth half as much as the used Chevy.  “And then dayum!  That fool went out and bought hisself another Ford!”

(The Ford folks didn’t care.  They had a love affair. And, hell, you didn’t trade in your Ford every two or three years, anyway.  You could keep that ol’ car a-runnin’ with balin’ wire, electrical tape and bubble gum long after that dern Chevy had gone to the junkyard.)

Then it was motorcycles, including a huge Indian.  At five, I didn’t understand the allure of the Indian.  I was probably fifty-five before I read a feature article about the Indian being revived and what a cult bike it had always been.  But it certainly impressed the neighbors and my uncles.

Guns: collecting, buying, selling, trading.  Fishing: different rods, different reels, different lures, the best places to go for black bass, the best times of day to fish.  Taught himself (and later me) to use a fly rod, a talent which looks deceptively simple, and was damned good at it.

The most fun was when he decided to turn our tiny basement into a full-sized basement.  It had a concrete-block wall on three sides, and bare dirt on the fourth, and the original portion of the basement was only about a third the size of the footprint of the house.  In came section after section of conveyor belt and a large portable engine to pull the contraption.  Unfortunately, the basement only had a couple of narrow windows to the outside and a standard-sized door to the inside of the house, so there was no getting a backhoe down there.  Had there been, Dwain would have bought one.

Shovel and pick and sweat loaded yards and yards of dirt up the conveyor belt and into the back yard, where it had to be shoveled again into the pickup to be hauled off to a landfill.  Naturally, it wasn’t long before he became bored with this project and moved on to another.

But with something of the child left in him, he took a ten-foot section of conveyor belt (without the belt – just the rollers), attached one end to a welded ladder about four feet tall and invented the world’s greatest slide.  We would take a piece of cardboard or plywood, place it on the rollers at the top, sit down and head for the ground faster than any playground slide ever.

As Dwain had been with his new television, I was the hero of the neighborhood kids with my new slide.  In time, I learned to stand on a piece of plywood, balancing myself all the way to the bottom, much like surfing.

*

And music.  On a whim, he traded some old boy at work a pistol for a violin, and only afterward realized he would have to teach himself to play.  He did.

Guitars, a steel guitar and a mandolin all passed through the house and as soon as he learned each one, he would trade it off for a different instrument.

Hat, tinted glasses, pencil-thin mustache

In the second grade, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons.  Dwain was delighted.  It was an excuse to buy a piano.  Never mind that you could rent one for five dollars a month.   While the piano teacher, Mrs. Short, who was about three feet tall and at least 100 years old, was still struggling to teach me about “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “All Cows Eat Grass,” Dwain skipped the reading part altogether and started playing Fats Waller by ear.

In his 40’s he was living in a two-room house on about an acre of ground in the poorest part of Midwest City, some two miles from our house.  I saw him a few times a year, usually by riding my bicycle to his house.  He decided to buy a saddle horse.  And then another one.  And then another one.  Each one, of course, had to have its own set of tack and who knows where this money came from, since he was constantly complaining about the $50 per month he had to pay in child support for each of his sons.

Then came the library of books on breaking horses, training horses, jumping horses, cutting horses, gaited horses, shoeing horses, horse anatomy, horse diseases, veterinary treatment for horses.

(On one of the few occasions he was in a generous enough mood to let me take one of the horses out, I rode over to visit an adult friend who had two pre-teen daughters.  The horse was a retired cutting horse who, although a bit sway-backed and a bit arthritic, could still do a 180-degree turn on a dime at the touch of the reins on her neck, and could leave an unsuspecting rider still going in a straight line, sans horse.

(A few weeks later, I was back at my friend’s house and his oldest daughter asked me, “Steve, is that horse really 21?”  I didn’t know where this conversation was going, so I answered carefully, “No, I don’t think she’s quite that old.”  “Well, Daddy said she’s old enough to vote.”)

I didn’t get to ride all that much, but I learned by watching and listening.  Boy, did Dwain like to talk.  He taught me how to saddle a horse, the proper way to tie a cinch, the uses of different kinds of bits and different kinds of shoes, how to approach a horse, what not to do around a horse, how to clean their feet, how to cool them off and groom them after riding, what do to if the horse had the heaves or the colic, what a “cribber” was, how to tell a horse from a mare by looking at their head, instead of underneath.

**

After I was maybe 12 or so, Rick and I had no more set visitation schedule.  We didn’t want to see him all that often.  So we were allowed to go when we wanted.  I would visit regularly for a while, he would turn ugly for no apparent reason, and I wouldn’t go back again for weeks or months.

During my visits, he seldom had any real time to give me; he was always working on one project or another.  But if he was in a good mood, he would allow me to tag along and would explain why he was doing each step: why the fence post had to be set this way, why he put old rugs down over the fresh concrete and wet them down while it cured, why you planted the new tomato plants so deep and why you didn’t do it that way with flowers.

Then, in his 50’s, it was airplanes.

“I should have known,” Gerri, his fourth wife said drily, “that if he got one airplane he would eventually have two.”  He started with a two-seater (no idea what kind – that’s outside my area of expertise, and I wasn’t keeping notes in those days) and then added a four-seater.

Ground school, flight school, instrument flying, the mnemonic “May I Go Flying Today, Peter Rabbit, Sir?”  I heard it all.  Look at this: take this strip of paper and blow over the top.  See?  It’s the wind on top of the wing and the low-pressure area underneath the wing that gives the lift.  He was so eager to explain and to share.  I was so eager to fly.  I had always wanted to fly, but was having trouble enough paying for college, let alone a minimum of 40 hours of flying lessons, pre-solo, at 50 bucks a pop.  I ate it up.

However, like the horses, who always had an excuse for not being saddled up, the airplanes always seemed to have an excuse for not being flown – at least when I was around.  Gas was expensive.  100-hour maintenance was coming up.  He didn’t have time.  “You don’t come out here to see me?  You only come for me to take you flying?”

But still.  Credit him for doing it at all.

I went up with him two or three times in the two-seater, so he could show off his new skills.  Once, or maybe twice, in the four-seater.  Airplane fuel was expensive.  Today, I would pull out my wallet in mock disgust and say, “For Crissake, don’t be so goddamned cheap!  Here’s a hundred bucks for gas.  Let’s go flying.”  Then, all I could do was think Why don’t you sell the goddamned thing if you can’t afford to fly it?

**

In the late 1960s (Dwain’s 50’s) he also became a nutcase.

Perhaps that’s not wholly accurate.  Nutcase?  OK.  Age?  Maybe it started almost 20 years earlier.

When we lived on 22d Street, the neighbors behind us were Gertrude and George, sister and brother-in-law of Dwain’s fourth wife many years later.  George was a deputy sheriff for Oklahoma County who earned extra money on weekends by driving prisoners from the Oklahoma County Jail to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester.  Good money, too.  The rules were that there had to be two deputies for each transport, for safety.  The transport was private automobile: George’s.  So two deputies sat up front and three handcuffed prisoners sat in back.

On many weekends, no sworn deputies were interested in the overtime, and George could deputize any respectable citizen to accompany him.  That’s where Dwain came in.  Pretty good money for pretty easy work.

But on one ill-fated trip, another car cut in front of the prisoner transport on the two-lane road, and George’s car swerved, went off an embankment and overturned.  With no seat-belts, some of the passengers were trapped in the car and some were ejected.

Dwain was stuck in the car until a stranger, dressed all in black, carefully pulled him out (he had several broken ribs), carried him to the slope of the embankment, gently took off his jacket, folded it for a pillow and made Dwain comfortable.  The stranger then left, without waiting to be thanked.

None of the other four passengers – neither George nor the three prisoners – saw any of this.  To a man, they swore there was no stranger.  It never happened.

The experience bothered Dwain so much that he went to church with Mildred for…oh, three or four weeks.  To this day, he swears by the stranger in black.

*

Years later, he began reading, and then collecting, all the printed works by and about Edgar Cayce, the mystic psychic who read minds, diagnosed and cured illnesses from thousands of miles away, connected daily with the Godhead, explained Atlantis and who could cure anything from heartburn, hangnails and halitosis to fits, farts and freckles.

Dwain had treatises explaining that the Earth was hollow, shaped like a donut, and that a superior species, the descendants of Atlantis, lived in the interior.  The “proof” was in Admiral Byrd’s journals of flying over the North Pole.  UFO’s in New Mexico?  He had the proof.  Where he got this stuff, I don’t know, but he had piles of self-published pamphlets on every mystical, mysterious or paranormal phenomenon imaginable.  No doubt he could have dug through the piles and come up with articles explaining the disappearance of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa.

It’s a shame he never came to California to learn about the Lemurians, from the lost Pacific continent of Lemur, who live inside Mt. Shasta and who are occasionally seen by those brave enough to try to climb it.  I actually know one.  (One such brave soul, that is; I didn’t meet the Lemurian – he did.)