The Inability to See Distances

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I was in third grade. Initially, my teacher, Mrs. Reins, was out recovering from cataract surgery, and we had a substitute. This was back in the day when cataract surgery was a life-threatening operation, before implantable lenses. After surgery you looked like Mr. Magoo, with eyeglass lenses so thick you could fry ants on the sidewalk with the magnified solar energy. Mrs. Reins was no exception. When she arrived in December, she was a target for mockery. A frightening sight, her eyes were magnified to the size of tetherballs. And unfortunately, she was still pretty blind. You could make wild faces at her, and she never knew. Her handicap also enabled Howard Frankland, Steve Smith and me to stay busy drawing Batman pictures while she assumed we were practicing our newly-learned cursive techniques. Today, of course, if you need cataract surgery, all you have to do is pull up to the speaker at the cataract drive-through.

“Do you want 20/20 vision with that?” comes the voice from over the speaker. “It’s only seventy-five cents more.”

You then answer, “Yes, and I’d like mine with cheese.”

“The doctor will see you now. Please pull up to the first window.”

For ignoring my blind teacher and failing to do my class work, my karmic justice arose four years later when puberty hit. I flunked the in-school eye test and was sent home with a note to my mother, directing her to take me to the eye doctor.

The optometrist confirmed the myopia, and I was given a prescription for eyeglasses. At that time, the choice of frames for boys was virtually unlimited, provided you wanted only black or brown horn rims. I chose the black plastic frames, because I knew that my ability to look like pubescent Woody Allen, along with my sparkling orthodontia and clunky orthopedic shoes, would make me the most popular boy at Wilson Junior High School.

Picking up the glasses at the optometrist’s office, I remember looking through the storefront window across the street to the clock on the bank and being able to tell the time.

Wasn’t technology wonderful?

But my vision continued to deteriorate. When I was fifteen, I begged my mother to let me have the now-available wire-rimmed frames. Up until then we just replaced the lenses in my shabby looking Woodys.

By then the braces had come off, and I flat-out refused to wear the orthopedic wingtips anymore, knowing full well that this would cost me my popularity for the rest of my youth.

The frames were awkward and heavy. My lenses were glass, and thick glass at that, and they drilled dents in my nose and behind my ears. When I took off my glasses, there were big red spots on the bridge of my nose and blisters on my ears. They couldn’t be adjusted enough to make them comfortable.

When I was a junior in high school, I don’t know how, but I convinced my mother to pay $200 for a pair of hard contact lenses for me; the cornea-scratching, painful, masochistic kind. Had to have them.

For two weeks I ran around school with my head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, because that was the only way I could see. I looked like some kind of William F. Buckley trainee. I never thought they might be ill-fitting. I just thought that was the price I had to pay for fashion. They made my eyes itch horrendously, and I would rub them, and the lenses would slide up into my brain. Then I’d have to raise my hand and tell my teacher I needed someone to guide me to the bathroom so I could look in a mirror and fish out my lenses, which were lodged up somewhere in my dura mater. I had insisted that getting rid of my thick spectacles would make me appear less ridiculous, and clearly that was happening. I had evolved from Woody Allen to José Feliciano by way of William F. Buckley.

I got refitted, and the new hard lenses weren’t so bad, but every other time I blinked, one would fly out, and then I went back to glasses for a week until a new lens was ground for me.

The next year I switched to soft lenses and had a little celebratory party in the bathroom to flush my old hard lenses down the commode.

In my life, I wore soft lenses, gas-permeable lenses, extended wear contacts that damaged my eyes, and disposable lenses. With every new contact lens breakthrough, I stood up to the plate to try them.

In my 30’s I got sick of buying the paraphernalia required for contact lenses: cleaning solution, boilers, conditioning solution, saline solution, forceps, artificial tears, re-wetting drops, and endless cash to buy all that crap. Not to mention the affirmation cassettes that told you that nothing was wrong with plucking rubbery disks off your eyes with unsanitized digits. It was too much trouble. I went back to glasses.

My vision still declined, but just as technology changed with contact lenses, so they did with eyeglasses. They were now able to condense the thickness of my Mrs.-Reins-tetherball specs to a thinner polymer. There were glasses that were almost frameless, making them very lightweight and comfortable to wear.

Still, when I entered the production floor of the beer factory where I worked, I had to wear safety glasses, and the employer didn’t pay for condensed lenses, and the required frames were solid and heavy. The lenses were 5/8" thick, so thick that they prevented the side temples from closing. Legally blind is 20/200. I was 20/200 light years.

I closely followed vision technology. I remember seeing a show about a procedure called radial keratotomy, where your cornea is sliced like a pizza to improve your nearsightedness. The procedure was discovered by accident by a Russian doctor after picking shattered eyeglass lenses out of a young boy’s eye.

Yeah, baby, come at me with an X-Acto knife, smile and say, “Pizza! Pizza!” I’m ready for that.

I only knew one person who got the radial-K surgery, and he ended up having to get new lenses implanted from a cadaver. He had stitches hanging out of his eyeballs, and if that doesn’t make you wince, you are not human.

Then along came LASIK. And after Tiger Woods had LASIK, I went to the same doctor who did Tiger’s eyes. I was making enough money then that it seemed reasonable that for perfect vision, I would have to pay four thousand dollars. As a bonus, before the procedure, they gave me Valium, which to me is worth at least half of that.

I thought the procedure would be grosser. My worst fear of seeing someone come at my eyes with a knife was unsubstantiated. They just had these little gizmos that pried my eyes open so I wouldn’t blink. It went dark, and I heard a little buzzing and felt a disgusting little splash on my face (eye soup?) I sat up, looked across the room at the clock and could tell the time.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

That was ten years ago. Three years ago I got a prescription from an optometrist and am again wearing glasses. My myopia has returned. And I need a magnifying glass or readers to look up a number in the phone book.

My dear third grade teacher, Pauline Reins, I’m sorry I ever mocked you. If you were alive today, I’d treat you to a ride through the cataract drive-through. And then we’d go split a pizza.





billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Allene's Voice

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It is January of 1964, a few days after my seventh birthday. It is my first birthday without my father, who died 4 months earlier. I have been sick a lot since then, and my mother has an interview today and can’t stay home to take care of me.

I am a veteran croup kid. When I cough, it sounds like the bark of a bull seal. I also have a temperature. As a special treat, Mom calls Allene to see if she can come watch me.

Having Allene there guarantees that I’ll have an exceptional day, despite my being sick. Before Daddy died, she would come to the house to clean and make us a nice fried chicken dinner. Now, without our man-of-the-house income, we can only afford to have Allene on rare occasions.

In Tampa, it is a common site every day at 8 am to see throngs of black women walking down the street in front of our house. They arrive on the bus that brings them from the other side of this segregated city. They dress colorfully, and some carry umbrellas to keep the sun off of them. After their walk, they arrive at the residences of white ladies, where they change into their crisp white maid dresses and scrub floors and toilets, wash windows, vacuum, dust, and sanitize their kitchens after making the evening meal. For all this hard work, they get paid only a few dollars a day, less than minimum wage. In the late afternoon, they don their bus dresses again and walk back to the bus stop, laughing and trading stories about their day.

Today when Allene arrives, as always, she pretends not to know who I am. “Where’s Billy? All I see is a big boy.” Then after taking a closer look at me, she says, “Well lookie there. You’re growing so big!” I give her a hug. She smells like line-dried laundry and vanilla.

Allene changes from her traveling clothes to her white dress in the back bathroom and puts her colorful dress in the clove-scented broom closet in the back hall.

After my mother leaves, Allene comes to my room and asks me what I want. It’s always the same: a Coke. Allene makes a Coke like no one else. She wraps ice cubes in a dish towel and goes out on the back step and pounds it with an empty glass Coke bottle until the ice is coarsely crushed. She transfers the ice into a plastic tumbler and then pours the Coke over it . She wraps a paper towel around the base and serves it to me in bed and asks if I want a story.

“I want to play school,” I say.

“Your Mama said you need to rest. But maybe later we can play if you’re up to it,” she offers.
She pulls out The Tall Book of Nursery Tales. The book has been opened and closed hundreds of times by Allene and my parents. Many pages are dog-eared. The spine is split, and some pages are loose.

My favorite story is always "The Three Bears." She sits beside me in the bed, holding the book with one hand in front of me so I can see the pictures. The other arm is behind my neck with her callused hand resting on my shoulder. She reads with such joyful expression and uses different voices for all three bears and for Goldilocks. I laugh with her, and she reads me another one, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which puts me to sleep as her voice intentionally softens.
She wakes me up in a couple of hours to give me a Sucrets lozenge and a tablet of penicillin and asks me what I want for lunch.

“Peanut butter and jelly,” I say.

“What kind of jelly?” she asks.

“Ummmm, apple.”

“What else?”

“A banana popsicle.”

“You want to watch some television?” she asks. “If you take your blanket and pillow out into the den, you can stay warm on the couch.”

I am happy to do so. There is a long sectional sofa that I bundle up on. We have two televisions, but they are both in the den. One is an old DuMont console that stands like Atlas, holding on its shoulders the Sylvania black and white portable that used to be my grandmother’s. They are set up this way because the DuMont only has sound, and the Sylvania, on top, only has picture. Sometimes we like to watch NBC while listening to CBS. When my dad was alive, he would watch Chet Huntley, and then when it switched over to David Brinkley, he would let me switch the sound to the other channel, which was Woody Woodpecker. I loved watching Woody’s voice come out of David Brinkley’s mouth. When Chet came on again, I had to switch the sound TV back to his voice.

Today I decide to watch The Price is Right, and in a few minutes, Allene brings me my sandwich, cut in four even squares, just the way I like it, and some apple slices and thin strips of carrot. And of course, another crushed-ice Coke. For a while she watches the show with me as people win new ranges and other things we can’t afford, like new color televisions.

“Aren’t you going to eat something?” I ask her.

“I think I’ll get something later,” she says, but she never does. She doesn’t eat our food. Allene always brings a piece of fruit or some crackers from home, even though we have told her many times to help herself to anything in the house.

After lunch, I fall back asleep to the sound of someone winning an Amana refrigerator-freezer. When I wake up, I’m back in my bed. Allene has carried me there because it’s closer to the kitchen, where she can keep an eye on me. I stretch and yawn and call her name.

“Awake now?” she asks, arriving at my bedside with half of a popsicle.

“Yes, can we play school now?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, “after you finish your popsicle.” The cold bar is soothing on the back of my swollen throat, and I finish it slowly, savoring its sticky coldness as it trickles past my tonsils.

We go into the kitchen, where we arrange two dinette chairs to face each other, and we sit.
Sometimes Allene is the teacher, and sometimes she is the student. This time, as the teacher, she holds up a pad of lined paper that we pretend is a chalkboard. She draws a picture of a cat on it.

“Can anyone in class tell me what this is?” she asks, panning the room of imaginary students. I raise my hand, but she calls on Jennifer. She cups her hand to her ear. “What? What, Jennifer? Speak up Jennifer. A horse? No, this is not a horse. Go sit in the corner.” We both laugh.
She sees me with my arm up. “Billy, can you tell me what this is?”

“A cat,” I say.

“Yes, that’s right, it’s a cat. Now can you spell cat?”

“C-A-T,” I recite.

Below the drawing of the cat, she writes, D-O-G

“No,” I correct, “it’s C-A-T.”

“That is C-A-T,” she insists.

“No it’s not. It’s dog, D-O-G.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure.”

“Why don’t you write it for the class, then?” she suggests.

She gives me the crayon and the pad of paper. I cross out D-O-G and write in C-A-T.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re so smart. You get an A-plus.”

This game goes on for an hour. We switch, and I get to be the teacher, and she intentionally answers my questions wrong. Two plus two equals five, she insists, and we both break up with laughter. I love to hear her laugh. It is a hoarse, wheezing chortle that grows into big belly laughs.

Not too long after that, Mom comes home, frustrated and in a bad mood. But the smell of Allene’s fried chicken is somehow soothing, sitting steaming on its paper towel-covered plate.
Allene has also prepared her scrumptious milk gravy. Later Mom will make rice to put under the gravy and also a box of frozen vegetables. Mom thanks her and offers to drive her home.

“I’ll take the bus. You don’t want Billy out in the cold car, now.”

Mom thanks her again.

She changes clothes, and I always cry when she leaves. She gets down on one knee and hugs me and promises she will be back soon. I watch her through the jalousie windows as she joins some of her friends on their walk to the bus stop.



My sister and I grow up and learn to cook. We are made to vacuum and dust, wash windows and strip wax off the kitchen floor. We rarely see Allene now. She is old and doesn’t work much anymore, but now and then she comes over to make us chicken and visit with us.

As I enter adolescence and become politically and socially aware, I chastise my mother for taking advantage of Allene and tell her she should send her a thousand dollars. Times are a little better now for us, and we have a cleaning woman, Helen, who comes in once a month. Mom pays her $7.50 for a day’s work, and she never even sees Helen. She just leaves her the money in an envelope with the instructions written on the outside.

It is 1969, and I am 12. When my grandfather takes us out to dinner, it is always to the cafeteria. At the end of the food line there are a half dozen black men dressed in starched white uniforms. They work for tips only. Three men carry our trays for us, and my grandfather gives one of the men a dime. It drives me absolutely out of my mind.

When my grandfather dies, more than anything else, I feel relieved that I no longer have to be a witness to his selfishness. But now, when Mom takes us to the cafeteria, she puts only a quarter on one of the men’s trays. She doesn’t even put it in his hand. She places it on the empty tray the man offers, just as my grandfather had.

The next time she offers to take us there, I refuse to go. My mother and I bicker about it. I insist the cafeteria is violating labor laws, getting something for nothing and is taking advantage of minorities. My mother insists the men are just carrying trays, for God’s sake. What do they expect for that? She asks, “Would you feel the same way if they were white men?”

“Absolutely. The cafeteria is getting free labor no matter what color they are,” I insist.

“Well then why do they do that job if they feel like they’re being taken advantage of?” she asks.

“Maybe they just need the money.”

“Well they should be glad they have a job. It took me months after your father died to find employment.”

It’s no use arguing with her, and I stand firm in my convictions. “Fine,” she says, “your sister and I will go, and you can stay home and fend for yourself.”

So I do stay home. I eat a peanut butter sandwich. With apple jelly. Cut in four squares, just the way I like it, and some apple and carrot slices.



Now it’s 1983. I am working in Saudi Arabia, and the mail, which is addressed to me at work, is the highlight of my day. I recognize my mother’s handwriting on the envelope and return to my office to read it.

My Dear Bill,
I have the unfortunate task of having to tell you we lost our dear Allene last night. Her house caught fire and she was trapped inside…

I weep hard, like a child, and my tears smear the ballpoint ink on the letter. After I was old enough to do so, I never visited Allene, even though I loved her and thought of her often. I was a teenager and was too busy misbehaving with my friends to pick up the phone and call her. I feel just dreadful; my guilt is immeasurable, and I’m consumed with sorrow. I can no longer picture Allene as the sweet, generous woman from my childhood. I can only picture her with a look of terror on her face as her rickety old clapboard house, in flames, engulfs her.

Today a copy of The Tall Book of Nursery Tales arrives in the mail. It is a sentimental find from eBay. When it arrives in the mail, I am happy to see that it is as beat up as our old copy had been. I leaf through it and admire the colorful illustrations. I sit down and read "The Three Bears." The words come back to me, but I don’t hear my mother’s voice or even my dad’s voice.

It’s Allene’s voice I hear.


billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Dognapping

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I applaud the states and localities that have enacted legislation and passed laws limiting or banning the chaining of dogs. I never understood why one would adopt a dog, only to neglect it and tie it up in the back yard year round, day and night, in good weather and bad. Tethered dogs can choke, bleed, or drown from this act of animal cruelty. Bottom line is, if you can’t put your dog in your house, don’t get one, or move to a place where you can.

Other Bill and I once had to take the law into our own hands about this. In rural Virginia, we lived next door to a duplex that housed renters. It was my gathering from the real estate agent who sold us our house that you’re not supposed to say “renters,” especially when you are outside and the renters might hear you. Instead, you merely whisper the word, as one would utter a racial slur under one’s breath. Pete would always speak to us in audible volume, unless the sentence included the “R” word, which was muffled, often with a hand in front of his mouth.

We lived in our big brick house for several years, during which next door renters would move in and out of the units, often changing tenants several times a year.

I never met the landlord, but did speak to him on the phone once. He was an idiot. Wait, let me change that: He was an idiot! There was a beautiful, huge, 100-year-old walnut tree in the duplex’s back yard, and there was a rumor circulating that he was going to cut it down. This tree shaded our tin-roofed sunroom and in summertime, prevented it from becoming a steaming pit of hell. I talked to him on the phone about it. He said he was cutting it down because he was tired of walnuts clogging his gutters. Even though I offered to clean his gutters for him, he turned me down, and in no time, two guys with enormous chain saws came out and dropped the big, gorgeous tree to the ground in just minutes. They left it there for months to rot, until it was finally cut up in pieces and hauled off. It would have made some great flooring or furniture, but instead became firewood.

Apparently he did not allow his renters to have dogs in the house, and since there was no fencing in the back yard, any tenant who brought in a dog usually tied it up, usually but not always, under the formerly-standing walnut tree, which was close to the house, not at the bottom of the lot, where the dog could be easily fogotten about.

There was a rental family that built this ramshackle lean-to for their small mutt to seek shelter under during storms. Made of sticks, scrap lumber and rotting, unpainted plywood, this rat hole was not even big enough for the dog to turn around in. In addition, the dog was tethered to a ridiculously short chain that only allowed it in and out of the hovel.

I had often heard the dog shrieking and had seen the little white trash rental children pick the dog up by the neck and poke it with sticks.

I called the local SPCA and found out that chaining a dog was legal, as long as the chain was three times the length of the dog. How generous. A 20-inch dog could be tied with a chain the length of a shoelace.

Other Bill and I weighed our options. We could speak with the screaming, boozing mother about it and offer to buy the dog a longer chain. We could catch the kids on camera abusing the dog and show the mother and/or the police, but because she was a mean, alcoholic redneck, and we were city-born homos, we knew that this would not garner pleasant neighborly relations. Since she was on welfare and was home all day, we thought that having our house burned to the ground wouldn’t be out of the question. We had never introduced ourselves to her; although we did hear her yelling at her children a lot.

So our only other option was to steal the dog.

Other Bill had a friend who was always rescuing dogs and finding homes for them. She picked up the stray and wounded, or sometimes selected some from the shelter. Nancy repaired them and showed them love and either kept them herself, or farmed them out to friends and dog lovers. Bill called her and asked if she wanted to be a co-conspirator. Without giving it a second thought, Nancy said, “absolutely.”

Late one Saturday night, Other Bill and I got dressed up in all black, including gloves and balaclavas. We loved playing Mission Impossible. I had played the theme song in junior high band, and if someone had handed me a flute, I could have really set the stage.

We had literally mapped out our plan. We would keep the dog quiet with pieces of a leftover hamburger. He would hold the dog by the collar, while I would bend out the clasp on the chain so that it looked like the dog just pulled herself out of it. We were nervous and shaking as we crept down the back yard. We were probably the only residents of the town who didn’t have at least one gun, and people could be nutty on the weekends. I made a mental note to look into body armor in case this was to ever happen again.

The dog, a small beagle-mix mutt, was totally cooperative. She jumped on us and wagged her tail and whimpered a little, and then started chewing up the hamburger. I uncrimped the latch while Other Bill held the dog by the collar. When the chain was free, Bill scooped up the dog, and we ran back up into the warm house.

The dog was a little flipped out, but our dog, Murphy, helped to calm her down. But she was coated in mud and her own shit and had an intolerable stench to her. Plus, she was covered in ticks, some the size of small grapes. We removed the ticks, gave her a nice warm bath with the Shower Massage by Water Pik, dried her off, cut out the mats in her fur, fed her and gave her water, and in no time she fell asleep on our good boxer’s bed. Murphy slept in bed with us that night.

When dawn arrived, I got up, stretched and looked out from our second story bedroom window.
“Oh, my God!” I gasped. Other Bill immediately sprang out of bed, because there is just no way to wake him quietly, especially when you are exclaiming.

“What? What happened? What is it?” he asked, panicking, surmising that the FBI, Canine Theft Division, might be lining up troops in our yard.

“Look at the tracks!” I told him. Indeed, in the darkness of the night, we had left clear footprints in the dew-covered grass from our back door all the way to the back of the lot next door. We jumped in our clothes and shoes and ran outside and started stomping around and running in circles, making other tracks in the dewy grass, so when the FBI came, it wouldn’t be so obvious. Whew, that was close.

Nancy, the dog rescuer, was to meet us halfway between her home in Maryland and our house in Virginia. We stuffed the clean, fluffy dog into my car via the garage, remotely opened the garage door and fled the scene. A little over an hour later, we met Nancy in a Denny’s parking lot, made the drop, and then sped away in opposite directions.

No renters ever posted any “lost dog” signs in the neighborhood. Law enforcement did not come pounding on our door. We were willing to suffer the consequences if they had, and we could always get the dog back, as she lived with Nancy for a couple weeks before she found a good family for her.

And not long after that, to the new owner’s surprise, our stolen dog gave birth to a litter of puppies.

As far as I know, none of the new puppies went to live with renters.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Race of '72

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When I was a little runt I used to go with my mother to the polls every Election Day. They had voting booths with curtains back then, which reminded me of the dressing room at JC Penney, where there were 3 mirrors placed at different angles. I liked looking at the reflection of the reflection of the reflection and wishing that I could just step through all those shrinking mirrors and become really small. I’d imagine all the things I could do if I were fly-sized, until my mother would shout from the other side of the curtain, “Why is it taking you so damned long to put on a pair of pants?”

In the dressing room on Election Day, my mother actually let me press the levers for the candidates and issues she selected. It was a great way to educate me and instill in me the need to always carry an additional outfit on the first Tuesday in November. And when we exited, there was always a polling volunteer handing out “I Changed My Pants” stickers. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

The '68 presidential election was the last time I went into the voting booth with Mom. The polling volunteers decided, at age eleven, I was too old to see my mother in her underwear anymore and told her not to bring me back.

That was unfortunate, because if I had been able to get in there with her during the '72 election, I would have quickly pressed the McGovern lever and checked her out. She voted for Nixon three times in her life, despite Checkers, Vietnam, and the swelling tide of Watergate. By then my adolescent revolutionary period was in full swing. I had spent the summer with my liberal-agenda Aunt Kay in Denver and stayed up all night watching the Democratic convention on the black and white TV. We both listened carefully to George McGovern's "Come Home America" acceptance speech, which, as far as I'm concerned, is still unsurpassed in the goosebump meter rating. We had a neighbor whose fiancée was missing in action then, and I thought if the Vietnam War were to continue, it wouldn't be long until I could be sloshing through the swamps of the Mekong Delta.

So beginning early in 1972, right before I had to make that terrifying transition from junior to senior high school, I started doing telephone canvassing at McGovern headquarters in Hyde Park in Tampa. After school I would ride my bicycle there, come in, tear off a computer list of Democrats to call to ask three questions:

1.) What do you think of the Democratic candidate this year?
2.) Could you please tell me if you intend to vote for the Democratic candidate this year?
3.) Do you need a ride to the polls in November?

The third question was only asked if question 2 was yes, which was almost never.
Looking back, I see that it’s a pretty good look at how desperate the Democrats were. They didn’t want us to say “McGovern,” because they were hoping, I guess, that rubber-stamp voting Democrats might not know he was the candidate, and would tow the party line. Also, they were relying on 15-year-olds to gather their statistical information.

Apparently, someone had already called all the Democrats in town and said, "Hey, if you hear some kid whose voice is changing call you from McGovern HQ, tell him you wouldn't vote for George McGovern if he were running for dog catcher."

I got that answer a lot. Given the paranoid environment and the dirty tricks campaigns going on, I wondered if all of our outgoing calls were being funneled to one person who fed us back the dog catcher line. It wasn't funny after the first 50 times, so despite the rules, I would go outside the three questions and take issue with the turncoat Democrat on the other end of the phone.

"Well, sir, if you were a more educated Democrat, you would know that dog catcher is not an elected position." Or: "Ma’am, McGovern cannot run for dog catcher. Spiro Agnew has a life-long appointment to that job."

I would even try to trick them and get them to abstain by offering them rides to the polls after the polls were already closed. "Well, I'm sorry you won’t be supporting the candidate this year, but we want to make sure that everyone gets out and votes this year. Will you be needing a ride to the polls? We could pick you up at 7:30 PM."

Click. Slam. Ding.

It was Phone Canvassing Roulette. You would never know who you were going to talk to or predict the temperament of the party whose number you dialed. I learned new obscenities in the summer from men who defiled me when I interrupted their viewing of the World Series. It was a shocking exploration in human behavior.

My friend and schoolmate Mary Lou made the worst call. The lady who answered told Mary Lou told her she'd gotten her out of her deathbed because she thought it was her daughter calling. Mary Lou was inconsolable. We sensitive Democrats, especially those of us who weren't yet old enough to change clothes in the voting booth, had yet to develop thick hides. I tried to convince her it was probably just a joke. After all, who uses the word "deathbed" anymore, except possibly romance writers? It didn’t work. Mary Lou went home early that night.

The whole volunteer experience was made worthwhile when I called a woman who said she had listened to McGovern's speech on TV, and there was nothing in the world that could keep her from voting for him in November. "I'm 74 years old and blind, but I'd like to come do some work for the Senator. I could stuff envelopes or answer the phone." I put her on hold and went and got the volunteer coordinator to talk to her. I never followed through on what happened, or if she ended up joining the campaign.

It was enough to know that she was just willing to.

I worked tirelessly night after night there, and as the weather cooled, so did McGovern’s chances of winning. Maybe it was the fact that Thomas Eagleton, his first running mate, dropped out when it was learned he had hospitalized, it was reported, for “exhaustion.” Or maybe it was because McGovern was just too liberal for the time. Either way, he never stood a chance. Still, mainly because I was young and naïve, I maintained a glimmer of hope. I thought that maybe the numbers were wrong or that people would come to their senses on Tuesday.

The tiny, run-down, rented building on South Boulevard was packed full of local politicians and business leaders on election night. The media were shining lights and popping flashes every time you turned around. Everyone there was at least a generation older than Mary Lou and me, and the crowd was loud and somehow not sad. The champagne flowed, the local Democrats schmoozed. People even laughed, but Mary Lou and I were brokenhearted and silent. It was my first volunteer job, and I had done everything I possibly could and failed. It was a tough lesson. I called my mom to come pick us up. Even though her candidate won by a landslide, and McGovern only carried Massachusetts and DC, she didn't rub it in.

But I did.

Two years later I was flying back from my summer pilgrimage to Aunt Kay's in Denver. It was August 8, 1974. I got off the plane in Tampa and stepped on the escalator. I saw my mother at the top, and I held up my copy of the Denver Post with the splash headline: "Nixon to Resign!"

I stepped off the escalator and gave her a hug. "Told you so," I said.



billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

People Eating Tasty Animals

Whoever is in charge of publicity at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a public relations dreamboat. PETA will do anything to get publicity, especially if it’s free, and they are geniuses at getting it.

Their latest publicity stunt involves weighing in against President Obama for killing a fly during a television interview. A PETA spokesperson, one Michael McGraw (certainly no relation to Quick Draw) said: “One thing this has done is raise awareness, that even the smallest of animals, a chicken, fish, cockroach, or yes, even a fly deserves protection.” To set Barack straight, they sent the president a no-kill fly trap.

Wait, back up a second. Did he say “cockroach?”

I have a question for One Michael McGraw, and it goes like this:

“Mike, have you ever had a cockroach, a really big, Florida-sized palmetto bug-style cockroach, fly into your mouth?”

I have, and I’d like to meet you one day and stick a live one in your mouth, and see how you handle it.

I was nine years old. In 1966, there were no such things as plastic garbage bags. We used paper grocery bags to line our trash can, and we didn’t have a garbage disposal, so all of our meal wet-nasties went into the open bag. When it got full, I, having been the sole male in the house for three years, had the responsibility of taking it out to the can.

This was not a task I took kindly to. The garbage cans, made of galvanized steel, initially sat outside our garage. There were always lizards around, and I hated lizards. They scared me and grossed me out when they stuck out that bright orange goiter-thing at me. And I had been bitten by more than one. Not to mention the fact that they loved garbage, and when they saw me coming, they would herd around me as if I were some kind of reptilian Pied Piper, or like feeding time at the O.K. Cold Blooded Corral. They would jump all over me.

The outside location of the cans became problematic. The Farriors, one of the wealthiest families in Tampa, bred beagles like rats, and just let them roam free around the neighborhood, knocking over people’s trash cans, spewing nastiness all over the property. Since I was the one who had to pick up their stinking mess, I successfully lobbied to have the trash cans moved inside to the locked garage.

And that’s when cockroaches became an issue.

Whenever it was time for me to take out the garbage, I turned on the garage light from inside the house at least five minutes before I took out the stinking yutz. Lights make cockroaches hide.
Unfortunately, it didn’t make the cockroaches already housed in the metal trash cans hide. Whenever you opened the lid, there was cockroach mayhem. They would flutter around as if the giant, animated can of Raid had entered their perimeter. Some would flee south into the bottom of the can, some would crawl out, and, because they were Florida palmetto bugs and they could, some would fly out.

One night the can was particularly gamy, and I did as I always did before I opened the lid, which was to bang on the outside of the can to let them know Mr. Raid was about to make an entrance. I could hear them scatter, so I took the lid off, dropped in the soggy paper bag, and then noticed, right next to my face, underneath the lid that I was holding, the mother of all insects, the size of a grown man’s thumb, dark brown and shiny, with flickering antennae and six hairy-looking legs.

I froze and screamed, and the instant I started screaming, the bug took flight and landed right in my wide open, screaming orifice. As quickly as I could, I spat it out, stomped on it, and ran inside to find anything that would rinse away this memory forever: mouthwash, bleach, sulfuric acid, electroshock therapy. Needless to say, nothing worked.

It is still one of the top ten worst memories of my childhood, possibly even number 2. I realize that in the scheme of possible childhood traumas, this is petty, even insignificant, compared to, say, contracting leukemia or polio. Nevertheless, it’s something you never forget.

So Mr. One Michael McGraw, I invite you to be a guest at my home here in South Florida. I’m sure that if I let my exterminator skip a spraying, I could find a nice juicy one for you. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get a female with a nice, fat egg case popping out of her abdomen.

Now you just sit back and relax while I let this adorable, defenseless little animal roam around the depths of your outspoken, publicity-snaring mouth. I want to watch you as you calmly grasp it with cotton-padded tongs, place it in a luxurious, dark shoebox full of rotting refuse and then go out find a nice adoptive family for it.

Typing with My Vagina

Unless your career goal was to clip the beaks off of baby chicks, slaughter poultry or work on a manufacturing production line, the Shenandoah Valley was not an easy place to find work in the 80’s.

At that time, I had managed to get myself in a Green Acres-type situation. The man I was pretending to love insisted we abandon our practical city lives in DC and move to this dumpy weekend place we had bought outside the tiny town of Shenandoah, Virginia (see photo, above). You are my wife. Goodbye city life!

I lived on unemployment for several months while working on rehabilitating the house. When it became clear the money was going to be gone before the house was completed, I went job hunting. For a man who had very few real-world skills other than word processing, I was in a bind to find work.

That part of Virginia is a hotbed of Republican, fundamentalist Christianity. It was not the place to be a shy homosexual with a history of administrative jobs with big companies. Nevertheless, I managed to snag an interview at James Madison University. The man who interviewed me had no intention of hiring me after he learned I didn’t attend church. How, you might ask, did he know that? Why, he asked me, of course. “What church do you go to there down in Shenandoer?”

I quickly figured I had three choices: I could lie, but I didn’t even know the name of a church; I could politely say my religious beliefs were private, or I could tell the truth, which was that I didn’t go to church. Translated, to him that meant: Satan worshiper.

The correct answer was: the Shenandoah Valley Pentecostal-Baptist Zealot Independent Church on Shifflett Hollow Road (motto: Repent or we’ll kidnap you, tie you to a herculon recliner and force you to eat pork rinds and watch episodes of Hee-Haw.)

I answered with the truth--no churc--and that was the end of that. No church, no job.

Money was running out, and I was getting desperate. Even though I only had one marketable skill, I could type like a sumbitch, as they used to say in the Valley. I had been a phototypesetter for many grueling, boring years, and I could hit 114 accurate words per minute on a good day. Surely someone would hire me.

The last place anyone seeking full-time employment goes to is a temp agency. The pay stinks. You’re always given the shit work to do. The stuck-up permanent employees assume that you’re inept and better than you because they have benefits. Signing on with a temp agency is the last, desperate act of the unemployed. And temp agencies thrive on people with low self-esteem. Perfect for me at that time in my life.

So I called Manpower in the nearest city with a stoplight to ask for information. They told me to mail in a resume, and they’d get back to me.

This was 1985, before everyone had computers and administrative work was, at least in the Valley, a woman’s job. I was so sure that, because of my gender, I wouldn’t get an interview for an office job, I sent them a resume that didn’t have my first name on it; only my initial. I also highlighted my typing speed. I realize now that this would have made for a great sitcom episode.

To my surprise, I got a callback. The first thing they requested was my first name, and I told them it was Billy. (People always think I’m a girl on the phone; I hate my voice.) I never go by Billy. But I hedged my bets by using the ambiguous nickname, hoping that they’d think I was Billie and not Billy. They never asked what sex I was, and they asked me to come in.

So I showed up early to my appointment, and it was immediately clear that I made the receptionist nervous, possibly because there had never been a Y chromosome in that room before. She was actually shaking when she was giving me the typing test.

After I produced over 90 words per minute for her, she pressed the intercom button on her phone and said, “Billy Wiley is here.”

She gestured toward the door, and I went in. I was nicely dressed in a blazer, shirt and tie, but back office lady looked at me as if I was an oozing, festering, pus-filled carbuncle.

“You’re a man!” she shrieked.

I blushed and said, “Yes.”

“Well I can’t send you out on any assignments,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“Well,” she snapped, “because our clients would just die!”

Even as a person with low self-esteem, I started to get mad. I ground my teeth.

“Why would they die?” I asked her.

“Because you’re a man!” she said, instructing the receptionist, with a sweeping hand gesture, to get me out of there.

I had sunk to a new low. If I couldn’t even get a job at a temp agency, I was unemployable. I went home and moped. Whenever I felt especially blue, I would call my mentor, my Aunt Kay in Denver. She could always cheer me up. She’s the one who once told me, “I’m so old and deaf I can’t even hear myself fart anymore.” She was 77 when I told her about my event at Manpower that day. She was as disgusted as I was. “Did you tell her you don’t need a vagina to type?” she asked.

I laughed. Of course she was right. And when you stop to think about it, wouldn’t it actually be easier to type with a penis?

A few weeks later, a copy shop advertised for a phototypesetter. I hadn’t set type in years, but I was willing to do anything, even the ultra-mundane. I ended up being hired at $5 an hour, a salary approximately two-thirds less than my job in DC. And I was grateful to get it, especially since I was a man and the owner didn’t just die.

It was a tiny shop you could barely turn around in. Like most Valley people, the owner was very religious and insisted on having prayer circles every so often to start the workday off right. He also had missing fingers, cut off during wood shop in high school, and was fond of putting his remaining fingers on some of the female employees who didn’t like it a bit. He also insisted on giving them hugs. He had a violent temper that he would display for his little children, who, along with his wife, stopped by often just to hang out and get in the way. There was always spanking and squealing and yelling whenever they were around. I worked there for several months and hated it.

Because I lived at the poverty level, I supplemented my income by breeding substandard golden retrievers and publishing gay pornographic fiction. One Monday morning my dog went into labor, and I called the office manager (a woman who let herself get touched for money), and I asked her if I could come in late, because I had to assist in the whelping of a litter of puppies. She said, “no problem,” and I guided my dog into the whelping pen and watched the birth of seven hamster-sized puppies. At least one of the pups would have died had I not been there.

When I walked in to work about 11, the office manager glared at me with a frightened look on her face, while Mr. Fingerless came at me, grabbed me by the arm and took me outside.

One of his clients was a numbers runner who every week brought in his pick cards that he distributed to illegal gamblers. The backup typesetter had not been in that day, so there was no one to do that work except Mr. Fingerless. This was basically just typing a few dozen words, printing it out, and giving it to the graphic artist to cut, paste up, and photocopy. To be fair, it was probably more taxing for him and took him a while to do it, due to his missing digits.

He read me the riot act. Words like inconsiderate, selfish, evil, un-Christian, as well as stupid asshole came flying out of his mouth. He told me he was writing me up, and it was going to go on my Permanent Record. Of a company that employed a whopping seven people. How would I ever work again?

I was humiliated. That night I went home and was too unnerved to have fun with the seven new mutts. And for the first time in my life, I let my pride overrule my need to eat. I went in to work the next day and, without any employment prospects, gave him two weeks’ notice. That would give me enough time to typeset a nice resume and embezzle reams and reams of good 100% cotton stock. He was stunned and apologetic and asked me to reconsider.

During the handholding prayer vigil on that Friday (or in his case, half-a-handholding), the boss asked Jesus to guide me to change my resignation decision and stay with his copy shop family.

A week later on my final day, I had failed to hear from Jesus, probably because I didn’t attend church, which had gotten me into trouble before. In an attempt to make me feel worse, Mr. Missing Digits told me that he had given raises to the six other employees that day, and if I had stayed, I would have received one, too. Perhaps Jesus had guided him to be so retaliatory. When five o’clock rolled around, the owner had been missing (like his fingers) for a couple of hours, but I tracked him down, hiding in the dark room, behind a locked door. I banged on the door, and he didn’t answer. I banged again, calling his name. He finally came to the door. I told him I wanted to thank him for the job and that I had no hard feelings and wished him well, even though that was a lie. He wouldn’t even look at me through his tinted glasses.

I got my next job, which lasted only weeks, because I was sleeping with the boss. When he was fired for abusing his expense account, so was I.

A high-paying Fortune 500 company had come to the Valley, and I had spit-shined my resume, which was fraught with hazy recollections and falsified timelines It completely omitted the previous job, and the copy shop job, because you never know when that Permanent Record might raise its ugly, puppy head. But there were tens of thousands of applications for only a couple of hundred jobs, so I considered that a sailed ship.

Once again I was nearly destitute and certainly desperate. I thought if I went over the mountain to the big city of Charlottesville, I would have better luck finding employment. Since I was still a bottom-feeder, I started at the bottom. Driving to another temp agency and pumping myself up along the way, I decided I was going to follow Aunt Kay’s advice if they pulled that “you’re a man!” crap again, because I really didn’t have anything to lose. Driving over the mountain, I rehearsed the line using different attitudes. (Pardon me, but I don’t think you need to have female sex organs to type. You need fingers, not a vagina to type. If you needed a vagina to type, the keyboard would be a lot bigger and curved, like a saddle. I didn’t type those hundred words a minute with a vagina, you know.)

Miraculously, this temp agency loved the fact that I was a speedy typist, even if I was a man, and they hired me on the spot. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get the chance to say “vagina” in that office, but I quickly got over it. They sent me back to the Valley to work at the new Fortune 500 company that previously would not hire me directly, and I became, I am loathe to say, a Kelly Girl. But I was not just any Kelly Girl; I twice achieved the rank of Kelly Girl of the Month (possibly the only Kelly Girl without a vagina to do that). That honor came with a ten dollar bonus and a crappy certificate. I wish I still had them.

The pay was still lousy, but the people where I worked were nice. One morning when my boss found out that my golden was having another litter, and I had left the expectant mother alone to fend for herself, she sent me home to assist. Not much later, I got a permanent position there, and overnight my salary tripled.

With my first paycheck, I gave my dog a great gift. I took her to the vet and had her spayed. She didn’t need a vagina to do her job anymore, either.

Adventures in Wigland

.

Once upon a time in the sixties, my mother, a brunette, without any warning, came home from work wearing a platinum blond wig. It was so white, it hurt to look at it for a long period of time. It was short and youthful, with a slight That Girl-ish flip at the ends. It looked like the haircut of a modern-day child beauty pageant contestant. That should make it clear.

My sister and I were full of questions. Why on earth would she want that? How much did she pay for it? Where was she going to wear it? Why didn’t she just dye her hair?

These questions were all answered with maximum vagueness. She bought it for her boss’ boss, a man she dated whenever he was in town from Miami. “It’s kind of a joke for him,” she said, without further explanation. It cost “around fifty dollars,” which was a gasp-producing amount. My mother never spent money frivolously. With regularity she paid the bills, bought groceries, cigarettes and bourbon and little else. We were shocked. It was real human hair, and that came at a price far higher than its lower quality synthetic, Dynel sister wigs.

And she was going to wear it to work the next day. We assumed the boss’ boss would be there for the joke, whatever it was.

As for the hair dye question, we already knew the answer to that: Only sluts dyed their hair.

Maybe she didn’t look ridiculous in it if you had never seen her brown-haired self before, but it sure looked goofy to us. And the prep work to get it to look believable was insane. She packed her own hair down against her head with a thin nylon stocking cap, and that had to be adjusted and readjusted so that you didn’t see tell-tale stocking remnants under the wig. She had it professionally washed and styled frequently, and she was always futzing with it, picking at it, combing it, trying to pave over any part that looked wiggish. And I can’t imagine how unbelievably uncomfortable it must have been under there in the humid Florida heat of summer. Nevertheless, she was determined.

She had even bought a wig stand for it. Let’s be clear on this. A wig is like a pet. It’s soft and fuzzy, but doesn’t come without needs. You wouldn’t buy a bird without a cage. We were a little put off by the extravagance of this major investment. We couldn’t get genuine Red Ball Jets sneakers when the generic JC Penney sneakers would accomplish the same foot-covering task. Fortunately, she had economized and bought the plain white Styrofoam Head wig stand, and not the more expensive one that looked like a mannequin head with an aloof expression and slutty makeup. Bitter and resentful in my Penney Ball Jets, one day while Mom was at work, I took the Styrofoam head and drew on it large crossed eyes with giant lashes and oversized lips, colored in with real lipstick. You know: slutty. She was not amused. It became a little creepy having this psychotic-looking blond head in the house, staring down at us from her tall white dresser.

Wigs were a big thing back in the 60’s, and women took their spare hair very seriously. Falls were kept in special round boxes. Switches were popular for making you look like you had more and better hair than you actually did. And dyed-to-match wiglets, from pin-in ringlets to beehive add-ons were popular with the well-to-do yacht clubbing stole-wearers.

The wig remained in our house for a few years, worn more and more infrequently, and finally ignored. It was last seen on my head during Halloween when I was sixteen. I dressed as a prostitute and paraded around the neighborhood late at night, demanding candy. “My God!” one woman explained, “What are you out for tonight, son?” That kind of threw me for a loop, and I immediately pulled out my breast-stuffing socks and ceased my trick-or-treating career forever. (And I still had to tell people, four years later, that I was gay. Were they just acting surprised?)

I was a very naïve child. My mother was morally strict with us, especially with my sister, so I never thought anything about her “dating” Mr. Butler, a married man who lived in Miami and was in town once a month or so for a night or two. The whole time they were going out, Mom insisted that it was all very innocent and genuine, strictly business, and that he didn’t know anyone else in town, so he took her to dinner to pass the time, plain and simple. I was good with that.

And I was shocked to learn years later from my sister that Mom and Mr. Butler were doing it. He always stayed at the Manger Motor Inn, a luxury hotel in downtown Tampa on the Hillsborough River. They later changed the name to the Manger Hotel to class it up a bit. We got to see the inside of his room once. I remember everything being very yellow, including the built-in rotary wall phone in the bathroom. (God, I wanted that!) I never imagined that the opulent Manger had been a house of lemon-yellow sin.

Whenever he was in town, Mr. Butler would come to the house, have a cocktail and chat with us while Mom got ready for her night out with him. He was a nice man, sweet and sensitive, and very engaging with my sister and me. He would always take Mom to Bern’s Steak House, the swankiest, most expensive restaurant in the city. My sister and I had never been there, and we loved hearing stories about it and gnawing on the leftover morsels that sometimes came home in a doggy bag.

Mr. Butler was the only man-friend of my mom’s we had to call “Mr.” That was probably because in the office, she had to as well. I liked him. And Mom brought home some scary men, including a falling-down alcoholic who would pick me up by my head and a boozer who tried to explain condoms to me while standing in front of me wearing only grimy pajama bottoms while his member dangled out the fly, unbeknownst to him. (He was the one she ended up marrying.) While my mother was recovering from surgery, Mr. Butler babysat us and took us across the bridge to eat at Wolfie’s deli in St. Petersburg. He knew I was a dyed-in-the wool Peanuts fanatic, and would from time to time bring me Peanuts-related stuff, like the Charlie Brown trash can he gave me. He took an interest, which was more than any other of Mom’s gentlemen callers did. To those guys, children were usually a liability; a roadblock that prohibited remarriage. Mr. Butler seemed to actually return our affection, and I secretly wished that he would get divorced and come to Tampa, marry my mother, and move in with us. I never asked, but I suspected the females in my family were hoping for that, too.

But it just wasn’t in the cards. I realize now that Mom finally grasped that things were not going to change, and the relationship was not going to advance. The last time he came to the house, Mom met him in the driveway and talked to him while he remained in his rental car. I knew something serious was going down as I watched from the living room window, peeking out from behind the new curtains (which were, curiously enough, yellow). When the car started, I quickly moved to another part of the house, and Mom came in the house and wept loudly. I came back into the living room, and she was on the floor, crying into the feather cushion of the camelback sofa. She looked up at me and said, “Do you understand why I’m crying?”

I said, “Because you’re not going to see Mr. Butler anymore?”

She said yes, and continued to weep.

Still naïve about the intensity of their relationship, I thought what she was really crying for was the fact that there would be no more chateaubriand from Bern’s, no more heels-and-stole wearing dress-up dates, and she would miss that. I never surmised that he was the good one she had to let go. The lost prize.



There was one time when I was in my early twenties when my mother and I actually had an adult-to-adult talk. She had come up from Florida to visit me in my apartment in the DC suburbs. It was very confessional for both of us. I admitted to her that I sometimes enjoyed smoking marijuana. She told me about the time when her husband (Mr. Penis-Poker-Outer) had given her an ultimatum: She could be with him, or she could have her son, the homosexual, but not both. Never giving it a second thought, she hopped in her car and left. He later backed down. And she also told me about her love for Tom Butler, how much she wanted him to back out of his loveless marriage and be with her. It was very touching, and I felt badly for her. Of all the men mom dated, Mr. Butler was most like my father. He was bright and intellectual, thoughtful and kind to children; soft-spoken with a delightful sense of humor. And she ended up settling for Mr. Pee-Poke, an illiterate truck driver alcoholic who accused her of raising her son to be a faggot. She sat quietly for a moment after that. Trying to brighten up the mood, I said, “So what was with the wig?”

A grin came to her face. “Tom really had a thing for blond women,” she said.

That was the first time I heard her refer to him by his first name only. “I see,” I said, although I wasn’t sure that I did.

“No, you don’t see,” Mom said. “He was impotent. I bought the wig hoping it would turn him on and enable him to be functional.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

“Not really,” she shrugged.



Some things are better left unsaid. I think I liked it better when I was young and naïve and didn’t realize my mother was teaching chastity to us while having an affair with a married man who couldn’t get it up. Whenever I think of this, I get an image in my head. Mom and Mr. Butler are in the bright yellow Manger Motor Inn with the bathroom telephone. She’s lying on the king sized Posturpedic’s banana-colored sheets, and as Mr. Butler bumbles unsuccessfully on top of her, her head moves down on the pillow, forcing that sweat-making, platinum blond baby-doll wig to inch slowly down over her forehead until she can’t see. Whenever this vision comes to me, I try to block it out with an image of my Charlie Brown trash can.

“Good Grief,” he says.