The atmosphere in America during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was extraordinary to say the least. With the immediate threat of annihilation in the forefront of everyone’s mind, the collective consciousness of the public moved through their lives with the insane thought that if things didn’t go right in Cuba we’d have to figure out ways of surviving a nuclear holocaust in our own country.

Much like the psychological craziness that has dogged us since 911 and the extreme reactions to it, in ‘62, and even prior to that, people were all suddenly finding the idea of building bomb shelters as somehow reasonable in the face of nightmarish odds. If we just build something under the ground in the backyard, stock it with hordes of can goods and stay there until the smoke clears we’ll survive.

At least that’s what folks were considering because they couldn’t come up with another answer to complete devastation so ‘hey, I guess we have to build a bomb shelter’. Now most families that I knew didn’t do that because it was expensive (especially the concrete ones that resembled swimming pools with a lid) and besides, this was the Midwest and it was far more likely that they were going to drop a nuke in Washington D.C. or New York City before they’d ever start aiming at Michigan so we mostly decided to take our chances.

To reinforce our need to do something we were practicing ‘duck and cover’ tactics at school, hoping that crouching under our desks would help us to dodge the nuke strike and then we’d all crawl out safely after the bombing and go ‘wow, that was a close one.’ Adding to our mutual paranoia was the fact that on every radio and television the government had stepped up Civil Defense practice warnings. You know the ones: ominous high pitched tone for a minute or so followed by “If this had been an actual alert you would have…”

Would have what? Been blown to smithereens? It seemed like every time you turned around that damn Civil Defense alert was going off and it was making people a little jumpy like what if the guy doesn’t give the little practice disclaimer at the end this time? Then what? It’s go time?

I didn’t really have a sense of my mother’s concern throughout this thing but my guess is that she stayed relatively calm so as not to freak me out but I remember watching the TV as President Kennedy showed the aircraft reconnaissance pictures of the missile launch pads in Cuba and thinking ‘well, that’s way down in Cuba’ and I had some blind faith that President Kennedy would take care of it. In other words, I just didn’t get the gravity of the situation and how close we were to having our asses blown off. I should have been more frightened but for some reason I figured it just wouldn’t happen and it didn’t and President Kennedy did take care of it but I had sort of distanced myself from the reality of it all.

But one day brought it closer to home for me and that was the day I went to the Miracle Mile shopping center with my baby sitter and her son. We all knew the concept of the bomb shelter but none of us felt any real connection to one. That particular day a bomb shelter manufacturer had set up a makeshift showroom near the parking lot and there were all these low-cost shelters made of corrugated steel, lined up in rows like new cars.

This was my first exposure to the commercial use of fear-mongering for profit and after all the tension that was being disseminated people were seriously looking at these small, vulnerable little shells as a practicality. To me, they didn’t appear capable of stopping a good rain storm but those retailers wouldn’t have been out there if they didn’t think they could make a sale. People were frightened and that caused them to do things out of character like dig a big hole in the backyard, buy a corrugated steel coffin with a periscope and no place to take a shit. Stock it with a couple of blankets, several cans of soup and, by God, we’ll outlast ‘em.

Those shelters may not have been practical but their commonplace existence made me feel less secure in my indifference to the Soviet buildup. For an 11 year-old the reasoning is if they’re selling these at the local shopping center then just how close is this thing to happening? Am I safe in my own bedroom?

Now my memory of that day is an historical curiosity to be filed away with all the other oddities of my memory but what I took away from that time is how fear pulls us away from logic and how it can be used to control our lives. The Y2K doomsday scenario brought that all back once again as profiteers sold jugs of water, crank radios and guns to normally reasonable people who were afraid that computers would massively fail and along with it civilization.

Didn’t happen but nobody gave back the scads of cash they made from the scare.

And even if Kennedy had stumbled and Khruschev would have delivered on his bombast to “bury you” I doubt that the corrugated tin can at the Miracle Mile shopping center would have done much good.

Between 1960 and 1977 my mother was in the dating pool and, as the only child, I usually had no complaints. She managed to keep her son at the top level of importance and then everything fell in line after that. There was only one glaring misstep and, to this day, I can’t figure out where her judgment failed her.

Tom was a large, pot bellied fella with a crew cut and a career in drywall who came into my life like a low-rent Santa Claus, always showing up with a variety of used gifts for me. He would give me things like transistor radios, rifles, bikes, archery gear and on and on. These were things that we could never afford to buy and though they were used I was appreciative nonetheless. I even had a homemade go-cart to kill myself on in the back yard and that kicked me into another status level among my pals on the block.

Tom became a large part of my mother’s life and consequently a part of mine and a number of his lifestyle choices became integrated into ours including his penchant for poodles, old Cadillacs and skiing trips. Much of this we adopted and, for a long stretch of time, Tom’s life was more or less steering ours, especially in the recreational department.

He liked to hunt and so off we went on a hunting trip in the sticks around Gaylord, MI which is where as much as I liked to hunt down and eradicate tin cans I was hopelessly unable to shoot a deer. I picked off those pesky cans though with a Winchester 32 Special and they never bothered us again.

He liked to ski and we’d hit Boyne Mountain or other nearby Northern Michigan slopes in the winter and with his omnipresent wine flask strapped around his shoulder we’d trek off down the slope and since this didn’t involve shooting things and since I was somewhat of a daredevil, totally into maniacal runs down the steepest most dangerous slopes in the area, I was happy to be on board. Actually, ’slope’ would be a misnomer since what we usually recognize as a slope would, in my case, be more of a ledge that one might fall off of.

But there was always something just beneath the surface of Tom that made me wary of him. He was not a person I ever felt comfortable with and, in fact, usually kept my distance from and although I wasn’t sure what the source of this apprehension was, emotionally it wasn’t worth the risk of wanting to get close.

Kids have unusually capable radar when it comes to sizing up the character of a person. There may be hits and misses here and there due to their upbringing but children, in general, are not as misled by the superficial and let their spongy-selves pick up on the potentially devious.

One event in particular turned me off once and for all and what I got was a glimpse into somebody I didn’t feel safe being around. When I got into my teens the hormones started wreaking havoc with my complexion which happens to plenty of kids and so I had to deal with the onslaught of acne and blackheads. I was doing what I could to handle the problem (heavy on the Stridex pads) but it was a losing battle that I’d just have to deal with until it abated in due course.

Apparently, my mother and Tom had discussed this problem and concluded that I wasn’t doing enough and so approached me together suggesting that I let them get rid of some of the blackheads on my face. But the verbal negotiation broke down quickly as I said ‘no’ to their plan and then it became an ambush. Tom was big and much stronger than I and he forced me to the living room floor and pinned my arms with his knees and then began to go to work on my face. I yelled and struggled but it was a relentless embarrassment that seemed to go on forever and I didn’t have the strength to fight my way out of it.

To be clear here, this was not a friendly suggestion from a parent, it was a humiliating assault by someone who was not my father and whom I generally considered untrustworthy so to have all of his weight driving me into the carpet against my will was a confirmation that what we had here was a card-carrying, certifiable asshole that I should take every measure to avoid in the future. To make matters worse my mother, unfortunately, bought into this plan of action and so I was totally vulnerable.

After he had carried out whatever they thought needed doing they passed it off humorously but I was seething over what they were unable to see was abuse. I wanted to kill that bastard and the only thing I could think to do with my anger at the time was to go down in the basement, slap a piece of paper into the typewriter and, like Jack Nicholson’s obsession in The Shining, write over and over “I hate Tom, I hate Tom, I hate Tom…” until I ran out of paper.

Tom had proven that my earlier gut feeling was accurate and it was further substantiated by the time my mother finally came to her senses and gave this jerk the boot. He left alright but he left with a number of gifts he had given me and a number of things that never belonged to him in the first place and it was then that I figured out the pattern: make an inroad to relationships by giving away the property you’ve taken from others and if that doesn’t work out simply take those things back and lavish them on the next patsy. It was downright sociopathic.

The Tom episode didn’t end all that badly though.

On his way out the door he expressed interest in my first car, a black 1958 Chevy Impala with red and white interior which I’d gotten from my grandfather for $50. It was time to move on from my beloved Chevy and so I sold it to numbnuts for a small profit. He probably would have stolen it but it was too large not to be noticed right away.

Anyhow, I’d had the rear wheels off in the garage for some reason and my mother told me to put them back on and Tom would pick up the car later that day. I slapped the lug nuts on and went off to hang with my friends. Later on that evening my mother told me that Tom called and furiously relayed the following:

He was driving the Chevy home when he noticed a wheel had come flying past him on the passenger’s side and rolled into a ditch up ahead but he had no idea where it had come from. When he stopped to check on the wheel it turned out that it belonged on his newly purchased Chevy and he’d been dancing down the highway on 3 wheels. Pissed as hell, and with the lug nuts long gone, he had to call a tow truck to get the car the rest of the way home.

Gee, I thought I’d tightened those.

I began running track in junior high school because, number one, I was an athlete with energy to blow off but, number two, it was the kind of singular endeavor that I could approach all on my own without the immediate concern of teamwork. I loved sports like basketball and hockey but my natural inclination was to find an outlet that channeled my lone self and success and failure would rest solely on me. Yes, the track team mattered in terms of overall points and beating whoever the other school was we were competing against but each challenge, with the exception of relays, was dependent on only one person’s ability.

I was long and lean, almost the prototypical long distance runner body but for some weird reason I saw myself as a sprinter and worked to get stronger and faster, eventually succeeding in my senior year in high school as a viable member of the team. The difference in how I achieved that success was to, ironically, begin running long distances almost a year before my final track season.

My theory was that I’d be able to match what speed I had with the untiring mindset of a long distance runner. At the end of sprints I’d be speeding up rather than slowing down and in the end it worked. But the result of my hard work wasn’t the best part of it because, as it turned out, the process became a nocturnal ritual.

I began to run in the dead of night.

In fact, all throughout the summer preceding my senior year I ran almost every evening but only after it was pitch black with nothing but the streetlights at intersections to guide me through my lightly trafficked neighborhood. Most of our streets at that time were dirt and gravel but to keep the dust in check they would send out trucks that laid down a coating or two of oil and after the road had been traveled enough times the oil mixed with the dirt and would harden into a deep, blacktop facsimile of actual asphalt. That made the road beneath my feet almost as black as the night and I loved running on it.

The neighborhood kids on their bikes liked to follow me around but it was best when they’d head back to their homes and so I began running later and later at night as they peeled away to their families.

There was something ethereal about running through the darkness and as my body settled into its mechanical gate and the endorphins filled my system, I was enveloped by this comfort that made everything work effortlessly, floating through the night, lost in space, unable to even calculate or care about distance or stress.

I have no firsthand knowledge of drug addiction but I imagine that I was having the natural equivalent of that high without the downside of expense and bodily destruction. On the contrary, I was getting stronger by the day and totally addicted to this training regimen.

Throughout the summer of 1968 I ran pretty much every night with little exception other than bad weather or girls and sometimes even that wouldn’t stop me. The fascinating thing about distance running, and I imagine that any distance runner will tell you this, is that after awhile it becomes an automatic function, like hitting ‘cruise control’ on your steering column, you hit the button and then it’s all down to making sure you stay on course.

That’s exactly how it felt to run into the night and the accompanying euphoria that made me want to do it endlessly. In this time and space I could shed the confines of physical exhaustion, temporarily free from the mundane.

In the hold of the darkness there was nothing of importance but the sound of my own breathing and the feint light at the end of the street.

Yes, this was my greatest scheme ever and it’s a shame that it happened so early in life because I don’t think I was sophisticated enough to realize just how brilliant it was.

It was 1959 and I was an imaginative 3rd grader with time on his hands (what 3rd grader doesn’t have time to spare?). I was in Miss Mazza’s class and had one of those hormone-absent crushes that kids sometimes get on their younger teachers. I’m only telling you this because I think, by extension, it might explain some of my subsequent actions.

I had gone to the Huron Theater in my neighborhood to see Gone With The Wind (originally released in 1939) and had come away awfully impressed with the skill and style of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and how he set himself apart from so many of Scarlett O’Hara’s other suitors. In the end he got the gal even though he lived to regret his own doggedness and eventually had to utter the immortal words, “Frankly Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.”

But that was irrelevant. What I really took away from that movie, as an 8 year old, was the kissing skills of Butler. Rhett Butler knew how to dramatically kiss a lady and while I wasn’t all that enthralled with the idea myself I could see and somehow understand what he was shooting for. It was style and charisma and at least my 8 year old self could understand the artistry involved with that.

Somehow I came to the conclusion that this idea was transferable to my elementary school playground and there was opportunity to display my newly acquired acumen in the area of the dramatic kiss. Why couldn’t I be just as effective as Rhett Butler? At that time, I wasn’t all that popular but I had enough inherent cuteness to impress someone my own age if I needed to so I put my plan in motion.

A couple of days after seeing Rhett Butler work his magic and realizing that my puppy love for Miss Mazza would go unrequited I suggested to a few of the girls in my class that I had seen this movie and would gladly demonstrate my new skill set upon them if they were so inclined. I framed all of this in the heart-wrenching backdrop of the Civil War to give it some historical authenticity.

To my surprise, two of the girls, Shelley and Chris were convinced or perhaps intrigued at what I was suggesting and stepped right up to the plate and we met behind the ball diamond backstop for a hands-on demo. So, here I’ve got two of the cutest girls in my class willing and able and I’m in the process of grandly bending them backwards and planting a big one right on the kisser. First Shelley, then Chris and then there was a small line of the curious building behind them.

This was success beyond my imagination. Apparently there were plenty of girls who wanted to know, up close, what amazing historical experience I might be offering and all you had to do was wade through a small line to get to me. I was like a Ford production line, turning out grandiose kisses left and right until…

Mrs. Cromartie.

I never had Mrs. Cromartie as a teacher but she had the reputation as a sour puss and just happened to be on playground duty that day and came to investigate the backstop crowd and when she saw the wanton kissing machine that was me, grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled me across the gravelly playground and into the principal’s office.

Even though I knew I’d been apprehended I really didn’t have a sense of shame about the kissing carnival I’d created outside. I wasn’t out there clobbering some poor schlep over the head with a pencil box or filling some kid’s pants with gravel so I didn’t get where the infraction was and, in fact, the Principal couldn’t seem to explain what my transgression was either. My mother and baby sitter were called and I was to be sent home.

While my mother worked during the day I stayed with a nearby family (for about 5 years total) and then at the end of the work day my mother would pick me up from the sitter’s house. When my sitter, Myrtle, arrived to make sure I got back home, she surprisingly gave the powers that be some of her holy hell for arresting me on what she felt were trumped-up charges. “Why is he being punished for kissing girls on the playground? And what about the girls, they were kissing back and did you punish them?!” She basically dressed them down and for that time anyway I felt like Myrtle had my back.

Besides, I’d seen such a thing as a kissing booth where the clientèle puckered up for a quarter and nobody thought anything of that and here I was doing the service for gratis, almost a charity of sorts. It was not only fun (at an age when boys simply did not kiss girls!) but instructional as well and isn’t that the foundation of education whether in the classroom or not? Rhett Butler was planting them on belles all over town and the Confederate Army didn’t haul him off to Andersonville for it.

No, looking back I was onto something there and it’s unfortunate I never got a chance to fine-tune the idea because I might have become the Ray Croc of the dramatic kissers. ‘Over 40 Million Kissed And Still Cranking Them Out!’ and in 20 years, after I had franchised the operation I would have retired to a life of ease and satisfaction knowing that I had done a service to the country. Eventually, I would be summoned by Jimmy Carter to the White House for a Medal of Honor ceremony celebrating my achievements in the area of kissing; turning amateurs into pros through repetition at 50 cents a pop.

And many years later, I would lie on my death bed and just before succumbing to whatever was ailing me I would quietly mouth the words “Miss Mazza”. My arm would go limp and a snow globe would roll from my fingertips onto the floor while my wife, fighting through the tears, would wonder aloud, “Who the hell is Miss Mazza?”

I was seemingly born with a naiveté reserved for someone with far less brain power than myself but that did not prevent me from being unable to understand why something would be less than advertised or someone would be deceptive if they were a friend.

Now I’m a card carrying, rant-toting, discriminating thinker with a lean towards the curmudgeon, but when I was a kid I very much wanted to point to the glass half full and in many cases wasn’t even aware there was an empty half.

My mother told me about a year ago that my childhood friend, Sammy, had consistently been drinking the liquor from the bottles behind our rec room bar (a place we often hung out to listen to records) and replaced the guzzled booze with water. Incredulously I listened to this story finding it hard to believe that I (a) didn’t even have an inkling that he was doing that and (b) felt silly that I could have been there and not figured it out and then (c) felt pissed that the jerk had done this, apparently, every time I left the room.

But he was a friend and why would he even consider doing something like that when I, a resident of the bar, wouldn’t consider doing that? You see the logic I was applying here?

When I was in the 4th grade I got in a huge argument with this kid, Eugene, about the existence of Santa Claus. He and I sparred back and forth, I defending the jolly St. Nick that I was positive was coming to my house and he threatening to punch me out if I kept believing such nonsense. But I wasn’t content to rest on my theory of Santa; I had to take it to another level and repeated what my dad (father #2) had told me. In all earnest my dad explained that my German Sheppard, Pal, could talk to Santa when he showed up at the house and tell him whether I was good or not. That was about the time that the entire classroom turned on me. Any allies I might have had were lost with that final revelation.

But why? My dad told me that and it seemed to be reasonable at the time and why would he lie about something that important? Santa was capable of magical deeds, a magical deed might include the ability to communicate with animals and who knew me better than Pal? It all made sense. I still think you got that one wrong Eugene. Look at the reindeer, man! Look at the reindeer!

Our backyard buttressed up against the rear of a motel and when I was 13 a new family had taken over as live-in management and their daughter Sandy, my same age, started hanging with us in the neighborhood. This was a couple of months after I had broken my leg in a skiing accident and I was in a full leg cast, right up to my hip.

Sandy started to focus on me and one afternoon got me alone in my rec room (yes, that den of iniquity again!) and had me pinned on the couch, lying on top of me, applying what little she had learned of life to the art of seduction in an effort to have a pants off dance off. But beyond the kissing, I had not clue 1 as what to do next. It all felt great and I figured there was something after the kissing but I just didn’t quite know how the next move was supposed to go. Plus, I’ve got a frigging leg cast that has me anchored to the sofa like a shipwreck and all her squirming around did little to make things clearer.

Finally, Sandy just got tired of the endless petting with no payoff and left in disappointment but, I thought at the time, over what? I’m 13 and I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground so how am I supposed to figure out the gymnastics associated with the particular result she was shooting for? I’m 13! Did I miss a meeting that explained all of this in detail? It was enough that Sandy had ignored my mother’s earlier edict forbidding her from coming over when she wasn’t there but apparently there was little to worry about because the unenlightened one would rather watch TV anyway. As a foot note, Sandy was impregnated soon afterward by someone older who had already read the manual so my ignorance actually came in handy that time.

When I was in my junior year of high school and on the track team, because of rain we moved our practice into the halls and stairways of the school. We could run in there and do small drills and so we gathered, sitting on the floor, while the coach conducted a little pre-workout meeting. Every once in a while, as he spoke, our star hurdler would start laughing and I could see the coach was getting progressively peeved and began to dress the guy down and finally pulled him out of practice and sent him home. Someone leaned over and told me he was drunk and, for the life of me, I couldn’t process the knowledge.

You mean he’s at track practice but he’s drunk? That doesn’t make any sense because it’s track practice and besides he’s underage. You see, I was applying my own ethical/logical viewpoint to the situation, almost denying that track practice and being drunk could coexist which, in this case, they surely did. But why would you want to do that, I kept thinking?

Get this…through all of my entire 4 years of college, and keep in mind this is the late ’60’s – early ’70’s, I never smoked a joint. Consider; I’m a working musician, I’m all the way across the state from my mother, I’ve got hair down over my shoulders, I’m wearing bell bottoms and a tie-dye shirt and I NEVER smoked a joint. If I were in a social situation where someone might haul out their weed and a circle was formed, I would get the joint and pass it on to the next giddy person in the circle.

Now wouldn’t my interest be piqued at some point? Might I just try a teensy bit of the ganja? This is college experimental time, right? NO, and the answer was simple as a sunrise to me: the whole stoner scene felt really cliquish and I had a thing about cliques, born of my distaste for them in high school, and I wasn’t going to budge on the issue even if I could get higher than a kite and sleep in till noon.

O.K., that last example wasn’t just naiveté, it was probably just plain dumb. Whatever, I was working on a principle and I was just stubborn enough to see it through to the end.

I have lived with certain steadfast opinions about reality that are rigid to the point of absurdity. However, let me point out that those younger years of oblivion shouldn’t be devalued since they formed the foundation for the raging lunatic I am now.

Without that foundation I would have (a) downed all the whisky in my father’s bar and eventually died of alcoholism in 1965, (b) carried the certainty of Santa Claus to such an extreme I ended up with a postal job consisting of nothing other than answering children’s letters to the North Pole, (c) done the deed with Sandy and become the youngest daddy on my block, (d) spent the rest of my track career drunk on my ass eventually wandering across the infield and killed by an errant shot-put to the head or (e) become the stoner’s stoner, living in a trailer, still wearing the same, now faded, tie-dye shirt I made in 1971 and addressing everyone as ‘dude’.