For as long as I could remember back, during most of my pre-teen years, my dreams were an exercise in lurking terror followed by wild flight and occasional escape.

It was an almost nightly rerun and there were many variations on the theme as to who or what might be doing the chasing, but the story always followed the same linear plot line.

It began with an unknown fear masking itself in the dark, although I could sense its presence. Then as it revealed a partially shadowed self I would try to nonchalantly walk away from it, hoping against hope that I might walk into a lighted area or that the impending doom might get bored this time around and move on to other children’s bad dreams.

But it rarely gave in and as it came closer I would eventually have to run and then the chase was on. I ran fast enough to barely keep a short distance but there was always a juncture where I knew something more would be needed to escape because each time a sudden, black abyss would appear randomly in front of me anywhere during the chase, as if it were placed there magically by my pursuer. This had played out so many times that even in my dreams I could anticipate the eventual abyss.

Now if you’re a psychologist, or play one on TV, you’re probably on the phone to Freud right now, sizing up the scared little boy on the run, so I’m going to give you a second to make a few notes and then continue with the story…

Are we good to go? Alright, so anyway…

Early on I would reach this ‘juncture’ and have to make a decision whether to stand and fight or simply jump into the abyss and hope for the best. Sometimes I fought and sometimes I jumped based upon the imminent threat facing me. If it was something I thought I had a fair chance against I’d risk confrontation. Either way was sheer terror so there was no good choice.

Until I learned to leave the ground.

This same terrible nightmare went on for years with that damn abyss outmaneuvering me and confrontation inevitable but eventually I generated enough inertia from out and out fright to lift myself into the air.

At first I was only able to get a few feet off the ground but after awhile I realized that I had control over this gift if I would simply work with it. So I practiced nightly, knowing the dream pursuit would happen again and again and I’d be scared into perfecting my apparently innate, but heretofore unknown, ability to fly.

The feeling of being able to enable and finally control my flight was a complete rush, similar to the fright of the chase but without the anxiety, suddenly replaced by exhilaration as soon as I took to the air because I knew I was safe. But it was even more than that because I became physically connected to the act of flying, like the most amazingly real flight simulator imaginable. I could feel every move and every surge and lift in a way that I just knew was real…that is, of course, if this dream state were actually possible.

I even became skilled at hovering, often at heights of 60 to 100 feet off the ground. My night stalker was rarely able to take to the skies and continue the pursuit and even if he did, I had developed a skill level that was second to none in the land of dream terror. Bullets? Oh, I could outfox those with a little zig or zag and eventually outdistance them.

There was still one problem.

Even though I could outrun my assailant and go airborne, the dreams kept coming night after night and that initial stabbing fear would jump out of nowhere to torment me once again; just another night of bad dream mojo I was going to have to avoid.

At some point I decided, regardless of my fabulous ability to go aloft, this was going to go on forever and I might as well get used to it until something ended it once and for all, and I thank him to this day.

Davy Crockett, ‘King of the Wild Frontier’, inhabited by the acting likes of Fess Parker, coonskin cap and all, defender of good men everywhere, afraid of no one, accompanied by his pal Jim Bowie (rustically played by Buddy Ebsen), promoted and displayed by Walt Disney. It was one of my favorite shows and Parker’s portrayal of Crockett always made me feel comforted and protected. I even had a Davy Crockett foot stool that I lugged around from room to room depending on the occasion. I sang the song, I had my own coonskin cap, I never missed a show and, fortunately, I had no idea that things were going to take a bad turn at the Alamo. All I knew was this guy had great adventures and could make friends with anybody, be they human or critter.

One night I didn’t have the chase/abyss dream as usual. It was replaced by some brain cinema featuring Davy Crockett and me (I’m assuming that Buddy Ebsen was out auditioning for West Side Story or something). Davy and I had adventures and he taught me how to take care of myself and how to ‘wrassel a bar’ (that’s ‘wrestle a bear’ for the uninitiated). I felt like Davy had my back and in many ways he did…because I never had that chase/abyss dream again.

Never.

Dreams would come and go but that constant darkness was gone forever and a light replaced it. If I got myself into a pickle, I had the savvy to get out of it. Hell, I even did a few dream episodes with Bat Masterson (if you’re too young to know the name, just Google it). Davy Crockett had broken the cycle and I was free at last.

There have been a lot of days gone by where I could have used a little more Davy Crockett in my life and goodness knows that Peter Pan, flying around thing would have come in handy but, for a frightened 8 year-old, I got what I needed, when I needed it, and from unlikely sources.

I always wanted to say, “Thanks Davy”, for getting me out of a tough jam. I owe you one.

What a weird, weird thing that junior high ’shop class’ thing was, and what was the point really? Of all of the nonsense that I created in shop class, none of it could have held a spec of worthiness compared to ‘home ec’ (home economics). You have to cook to eat or sew to keep your clothes in one piece but nobody needs a coffee pot wall-hanging made out of a coat hanger…nobody. But ‘home ec’ was for girls and ’shop’ was for boys and I’d say the girls came out ahead on that sexual pigeon hole.

So I created that coffee pot wall hanging masterpiece pretty much the way I did everything in shop class; half-ass and half-awake. I had cut all the necessary pieces of the coat hanger and after bending them in the proper direction I would finally solder the joints, apply the paint, and then some overly grateful mother would be displaying the thing on the kitchen wall and, inexplicably, be proud of it!

But there was a hitch in this particular project because while preparing one of the coat hanger pieces I had a little mishap.

I had one of the long parts, about 7 inches, pointing straight up, inserted and tightened in the vice, and was about to bend the thing by bludgeoning it with a ball-peen hammer. At the same time I was goofing around with the kid next to me who was working on the same project.

While I was talking to him and not paying attention to detail, I took a wild swipe at the top of the hanger and, taking my eye off the target, hit the back of my hand, driving it down onto the sharp metal like a hunk of chicken on a Shish Kabob.

My hand is now impaled and I’ve literally become part of the project. I’m staring at it, in shock that I did such a thing, and I frantically start loosening the vice to get the hanger out since it has my hand attached to it.

All the guys around me are sort of creeped out and I am too except I’m noticing there’s no pain associated with this accident and it calms me down. It looks bizarre and feels strange but that’s about it, so I start towards the shop teacher’s office to get some help, but when I get closer I see a line around the outside of the glass-enclosed office where kids are waiting to have their projects evaluated.

So, I got in line.

I know, you’re saying to yourself right now, ‘cut the line you dope’, this is an emergency! But my orderly sensibilities were telling me to ‘wait your turn and then he will tend to your situation’. I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense but that’s what I did, that is until I acknowledged to myself that this was a really long line and I’d be waiting for a while. Finally I tapped on the glass and nonchalantly held up my hand with the hanger piece stuck in it.

His eyes got wide as 3/4 inch washers and he jumped out of his chair and came running out to get me. We immediately headed for the principal’s office where my mother was phoned to come and pick up her overly creative son and get to the doctor.

However, on the walk to the office, that calm caused by the lack of pain gave me an unusual freedom to do some physical schtick on the way there. So, as we’d pass open classroom doors or other students in the hallway, I’d be holding up my new hand accessory and pointing at it with some goofy look plastered all over my face; a move solely designed to freak other kids out.

Eventually my mother made it up to the school and took me right to our family doctor who looked at it very matter of factly, like dumb kids were running in and out of his office all day long with pieces of metal stuck in them. Who knows? Maybe they were. The first thing he did was submerge my hand in the examining room sink with some Epsom salts. I must admit, his placid affect kept me somewhat at ease because my imagination was beginning to get concerned with what it was going to feel like coming out. Maybe we could just leave it there and I could live out the rest of my days with a totally unique appendage.

I soaked in the sink for about 10 minutes and then the doctor came back in, examined the traveling shop class project then, before I even knew what happened, he wrapped a towel quickly around his hand, slammed the bottom of the hanger to push it through and, just as quickly, grabbed the other end, pulling it out of my wounded palm.

I was stunned. I didn’t even have a chance to get tensed up and weirded out because it was all over in the blink of an eye and I remember thinking; ‘holy shit, what just happened?…this guy’s good…real good’.

I required the usual tetanus shot and got to spend the rest of the day at home watching cartoons and wondering how I could milk this for multiple days off, but I was screwed. The weapon of mitt destruction was gone and all I had left were a couple of puncture wounds and those weren’t enough to delay my schooling.

The next day I returned with some notoriety but not the acclaim I’d hoped for and I had to go back to being just another shop class schlep, but at least I got a good solid out-of-the-ordinary day of physically entertainment.

Considering the current cultural climate of piercing amongst teenagers and young adults, I was way ahead of my time. I was ‘old school’ baby! Nothing but a vice, a coat hanger, a ball-peen hammer, some bad aim and ‘bingo’, there’s your fashion statement.

Probably years from now when I’m languishing in some nursing home somewhere, I can stop an orderly, who’s managed to insert a car axle through his head, and say, “You wanna talk piercing? Did I ever tell you about the time I was in shop class…?”

It didn’t take a detective to see that there were aspects of my childhood that struggled for lack of a paternal influence and with my biological father (father #1) hiding out in parts unknown, avoiding his children like the plague, and my adoptive dad (father #2) just plain ineffectual, my mother decided to pull a card from beneath the deck and took me down to the Big Brothers of America office.

I have to say I didn’t see this coming. I was in Junior High School by this time and somewhat resigned to being ignored for the remainder of my youth. I thought she felt the same way and we’d both call it a loss and go on with her single parenting but she also realized there were large gaps in my development that she couldn’t fill.

I wasn’t all that excited about this but, then again, I had nothing to compare it to since I was an only child so, what the hell, let’s at least hear what they have to say and so we met with the representative. My situation was discussed, likes and dislikes, and finally my consent was given and a Big Brother was chosen for me. We left the office with an appointment made for our first meeting at my house.

Beaver had Wally (Leave it to Beaver), Ricky had David (Ozzie and Harriet), Chip had Robbie (My Three Sons), so maybe I should have a big brother to show me the ropes and make manhood a little easier to grow into…at least that was the theory and since it looked good on TV, then…

Todd showed up on the designated evening and met me and I can’t say that I was all that connected to this, because I wasn’t, but he seemed like a very nice guy and I decided to give it a fair shake, for both our sakes. Here was someone, who had no part in my history to date, willing to step into my life and give something to it, and that was awkward for me, a kid who was already awkward in most social situations because I didn’t have a decent frame of reference who wasn’t my mother. I didn’t know how to relate to this.

But I’m sure that he felt equally awkward in his role and, though I sensed his sincerity in wanting to do this, I also felt the trickiness of the situation that he had signed up for. This whole Big Brother/Big Sister thing is, no doubt, a wonderful concept and something that has lead many lost kids out of isolation and into a life of being cared for but it is, nevertheless, an unnatural setup despite its nobility.

Where are the folks who originally signed up for this duty? I’ve got a middle reliever coming in from the bullpen because the starters couldn’t go the distance and, I’m thinking, am I so impossible to be around that a father couldn’t care for me? And now here’s this stranger who I don’t even know, trying to insert himself into my life and I’m confused. I was confused then and, writing this many, many years later, I’m still confused. Who found it so incredibly difficult to be my father that they either doused themselves in alcohol or ran far away so as not to be found?

I was that much trouble, eh?

I did what I knew to do with that confusion. I stuffed it deep down in the little reservoir I kept for such shit and I soldiered on like everything was fine and steered the boat myself even when I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no father to reference when things got ‘male perspective’ crazy. All I had were my own instincts and those, frankly, weren’t always reliable because I didn’t have a lot of life experience to rely on.

If you’re reading this and you have a son or daughter who you marginalize or neglect for any of a hundred no-good reasons, just remember that you’re setting them adrift to sort it all out in ways that aren’t necessarily reliable or healthy. I am someone who believes that everything works from the top down, from corporations to fast food joints to parenting. You do what is necessary to make the business strong, the customer happy and the child strong and self-reliant. Anything short of that is just one big fuck-up.

But my hats-off to Todd because he put in the effort and really tried to relate to me even when I was relatively disengaged and mostly quiet. I had learned to relate to myself and that made it hard to relate to Todd the way that Big Brothers would have envisioned.

I didn’t know how to do Norman Rockwell.

Todd became a friend and I have many good memories of our time together. I was very much into cars during my early teens, as was he, and so we went to the drag races and the auto shows and I remember those times very fondly. He taught me to drive a stick shift in his prized 1965 canary yellow Pontiac GTO and endured, with patience, as I popped the clutch over and over to the dismay of both of us. He was a good companion and he was very earnest in his attention to me and for that I will always be grateful but after a period of time, as I got older, we drifted apart and saw each other rarely until I left the state altogether and lost contact.

Still, Todd did, in a short time, what my fathers were unable or unwilling to do and that’s to give me attention that wasn’t warped by their own nonsense. We spent time together that was really about me and, for that relatively short period of time, Big Brothers of America worked. Todd wasn’t perfect but he didn’t need to be.

He made a magnanimous gesture that was unfamiliar to me; unselfishness. So, if I walked away with anything from our relationship, it was that and I’ll never forget it. Thanks, Todd.

P.S. 12/11/08

It wasn’t until I had written this story about half way through that I realized what an impact Todd had made on my childhood and I’m sure I did not or could not articulate that when I was a kid. Subsequently, I’m making it a priority to find him (I’ve narrowed it down) and let him know what I think I revealed to myself in the process of crafting this piece. This oversight of gratitude probably occurs often in Big Brother relationships (we were children afterall) but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge what I gained through this program and, specifically, Todd’s addition to my life.

No, not that Pipeline, the mammoth coastal waves located in Hawaii, because that would involve a near-death experience with a surfboard and water rolling over head. Mmmm, not so much on that one.

The Pipeline I’m referring to was born in the very un-surfer-like Detroit area and was the name that teenagers gave to an anomaly in the local phone system that allowed faint, random crosstalk after the dial tone ceased. This was the mid-sixties, before the advent of the phone company’s recorded message urging you to hang up the phone, followed by the endless, ear splitting aural reminder that you can hear two rooms away.

How it was discovered is the stuff of teenage legend and nobody knows for sure, but the end result was a ‘chat line’ in its most primitive form, sort of a Facebook without the graphics, text, audio (well good audio anyway), video or anything else resembling technological progress.

How it worked, at least the way we did it, was that you picked up the phone, hit the two top ‘hang up’ buttons until the dial tone ceased and then listened carefully for what might be distant voices, although some kids dialed non-working numbers to achieve the same thing. Because they were nothing more than analog bleed-through sounds from virtually anywhere, like when you get wires crossed and can hear another person’s conversation, you had to yell in return and hope the person you had heard could hear you. If the process was successful, you exchanged phone numbers and then called one another directly and had a more civil conversation.

That was the usual protocol although you had to do a lot of yelling to determine if you wanted to call this person back. The premise was fairly simple in that if you were a boy, you were trying to talk to girls and visa versa. During the Pipeline’s heyday, My friends Hank and Sammy and I spent tons of our vast idle time screaming into the phone trying to get girl’s numbers.

The end result was always awkward because you were establishing connections with kids you didn’t know, who lived in different parts of the city from you, and were no more than voices so you couldn’t size up the physical possibilities. Hmmm, sounds a bit like the Internet doesn’t it?

But, at least from the young boy perspective, it was a titillating experience with just the very slim possibility that you might meet a really cool girl and…the imagination took over from there. It was a fantasy that kids were projecting upon one another; plus, the incredible newness of this phone trick and our hormones made it a teenage pursuit of the highest order.

All three of us had different approaches to the risk involved in talking to a girl you didn’t know. Sammy was the most brazen because he had the cool thing going which gave him a certain confidence with girls, so we tended to give him the lead in making return phone calls after we’d screamed back and forth for 5 or 10 minutes.

“HEYYYYY, WOULD YOU LIKE TO TALK TO MY FRIEND?…HELLO???…YA, MY FRIEND WANTS TO TALK TO YOU…HELLO???…WHAT’S YOUR NUMBER?…I SAID, WHAT’S YOUR NUMBER?…HELLO???”

So Sammy would call the girl back and we’d be hanging on his every word and kibitzing like crazy (“Ask her what school she goes to.”), hoping against hope that the girl had girlfriends that might meet us at some location and we’d, in theory, hit it off and boom you’d have a girlfriend and…well, that imagination thing again.

Hank laid back the furthest because he had absolutely no confidence in this area and I was somewhere in between no confidence and fearless stupidity so I was game whatever the scenario. Though it was only cool Sammy that took it all the way and actually set up a meeting with one of the girls. As he relayed it in scant detail, the meeting was uneventful and he never called her again although I’ll bet it was a pretty exciting lead-up.

My guess is, with certain exceptions, nothing much ever came from the Pipeline other than some minor socializing the way that teenagers do and I imagine that the Internet social sites amount to about the same thing. A little blather here and there, some false bravado, some innocuous flirting and, bingo, there’s some more teenage time accounted for. Before the Pipeline there was cruising the mall and before that was the soda shop so, other than some major technological perks, nothing has really changed all that much.

But I’ll tell you one thing about the Pipeline. At the time, it was the most amazing social phenomena and something we never mentioned to our parents and that made it exotic, and exotic in the hands of teenagers is pure enchantment, however dopey it may be.