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’.
