The Haircut and the CIA

After supper, Father, my little brother Howie, and I march over to Uncle Larry’s for our haircuts. Uncle Larry bought a pair of electric clippers about a year ago and has been giving us all haircuts ever since. Well, not exactly giving—he charges us each a dollar.

    Uncle Larry and his family live just down the highway on the other side. The orchards behind his two-story farmhouse run all the way to the Puerto Rican migrant-labor camp that houses the workers who come in the summer to pick crops on the farms here about.

    I am the first in the chair on the concrete slab behind the back kitchen door. Uncle Larry starts in on me. He is unusually talkative this night. “Just about finished my bomb shelter, Henry.”

    “I can see,” I say, but I really can’t tell this hole in the backyard is going to be a bomb shelter. It is about eight feet deep and ten feet across. Uncle Larry wants me to share his vision of an elaborate shelter able to sustain lives for up to three months.

    “We had an air-raid drill in school today,” I proclaim. I know he will be interested in that.

    “That’s good for when the Russians drop the big one on us,” says Uncle Larry.

    “Drop and cover against an interior wall—that’s what Mrs. Warner made us do,” I say, trying to sound like the official government brochure we read. “Oh, yeah. All the major cities have a ring of Nike bases around them. So the chances of  the Reds’ missiles ever getting through is pretty slight.”

    “Well now there’s the rub, Henry. The commies are wily, and they can count. They know that they only need to get a few missiles through our defenses to take out Washington, New York, maybe Los Angeles and Chicago, just for starters. They’ll throw hundreds at us, maybe thousands, figuring we can’t knock them all down. And that’s why I have this bomb shelter.”

    Uncle Larry must have noticed the surprised look on my face each time he calls this hole his bomb shelter. “Well, I know there’s some finishing work to be done,” he says.

    Just then a dark car out on the highway slows down. “See that car, Henry?” Uncle Larry says in a hushed tone.

    “Yup, they’re curious about your open-air barber shop. You might have some new customers, Uncle Larry,” I kid him.

    “Curious like hell,” says Uncle Larry. His voice becomes gravelly and his demeanor turns dark. “Those two are CIA looking for me. Or maybe FBI.”

    I can’t see two people in the car. I can’t see anybody because Uncle Larry’s house sits too far down a lane to tell how many people are in the car. It drives off.

    “Oh yea, CIA, I think.” Uncle Larry goes on. “They’re still pissed about Korea. It wasn’t my fault. They know that.”

Later at home I ask Father. “What did Uncle Larry do in Korea during the war there?”

    Father says. “He never went to Korea. He was in the Coast Guard right here in New Jersey. What did he tell you?”

    “When I was getting my haircut, a dark car drove by slowly. He said CIA agents were inside looking for him. It had to do with something he did in Korea.”

    “Oh boy, he’s talking that way again. The last time he got this way he started digging his bomb shelter. Just don’t pay any attention. He’s confused.”

    Later in the summer I heard Father tell Mama that Larry would have shock treatments in the hospital where he has been sent. It sounds like the electric chair. I hope it doesn’t kill him.

a river of silence

grows wider every night—

cold sliver of moon

Walt Fields

He manhandles the polishing machine at the back of my father’s little lamp factory. A felt disk as wide as a hubcap whines at tremendous rpm. A human should not get anywhere near it. But Walt does, as his strong hands and hairy arms guide brass lamps, candlesticks and the like against the disk. A glossy finish is coaxed out of the surface of the metal.                                                                                        

    Walt regularly glances at his image in the greasy paned window. He shakes loose his shaggy locks of dark hair like Elvis. He doesn’t see the three-day beard, dangling Camel cigarette, or wragged plaid shirt missing two buttons. He sees the king of rock-n-roll on the Ed Sullivan Show. He wiles away the polishing hours belting the hits, “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” “Jail-house Rock,” and the list goes on. His fellow workers yell, “Knock off that bellowing,” but for the most part they tolerate his show, maybe even enjoy it.              

    And Walt loves the chippies. Saturday night he calls and tells Father—the closest he’ll come to having a real father—that the band at Lakeview Inn is  having him sit in with his guitar. By the time Father gets there, Walt is nowhere to be found. Monday morning he claims one of the groupie girls got real cozy and took him out to the band truck.       

    At 19 he’s four years older but still badgers me to set him up with girls that I go to school with. He describes his sexual escapades, some may even be real. I am intimidated and pretend to understand. Years ago he stops going to school, somehow avoids the Vietnam War. And dies a decade or two later from lung cancer.

dark forboding— 

pitty of the 

workshop milieu

My Sister Ellie

—a poem by George Parks, Grade 5, 1957

Little Mongol idiot*

Locks herself in the bathroom again.

Mother, “no business having babies in her forties,”

Says our neighbor;

Unhinges the door.

Sixty-four crayolas litter the floor—

On the bathroom wall 

Blue sky and green grass

With a swath of white between.

“That where we live,”

Says the little Peter Pan.

She will never grow up.

She-will-never-grow-up.

“A space between the earth and sky for us to live.”

—a thought ill-formed and unspoken by Eleanor Parks, Thursday, March 21, 1957.

*(the offensive and derogatory term often used in  the 50s to describe children and adults with Down syndrome)

The Cock Fights

Mama says, “Hector is different than we are – he’s Puerto Rican. They’re dark and dirty and carry knives.”      “Hector doesn’t carry a knife,” I say to her. “Besides he’s only half Puerto Rican.”      Hector Murphy lives near the migrant-labor camp. He is a year older, skinny with lots of pimples, and barely passed Mr. Grady’s sixth grade. I see him smoking cigarettes along the school’s back fence at lunchtime. I think I might try cigarettes when I get to sixth grade. After school lets out for the summer, I hang out with him around the picking fields once in a while, where he speaks Spanish with some of the younger pickers.      One Saturday Hector and I camp out in his backyard, but later sneak off for the migrant camp, a cluster of low, whitewashed blockhouses where the laborers live during the picking season. Just outside the glow of a campfire, we hunker down and peer through the tall grass. The camp swells to over a hundred men. We know most of them by daylight, but at night it is “no gringos allowed” – that means me and half of Hector. indigo shadows the coolness of the woods       By eleven an almost-full moon rises to reveal shadowy figures at the edge of the compound unloading crates of chickens from the backs of several trucks – mangy cocks with tufts of feathers missing and many scars where their bare skin is showing. The moonlight reflects in silvery streaks from the broken razor blades strapped to the cocks’ ankles. A tight circle of men crowd in for the gore and betting.      Cash, gold chains, crucifixes, and the like are laid down. Betting runs heavy for a red-topped bird twice the size of its opponent and a lot meaner. The owners face off with their birds and let them have at it. The heftier bird barely hits the ground before it leaps back up twirling in mid-air with its spurs extended. One spur slashes across the smaller bird’s eyes and the other cuts its throat. The match is over in a matter of seconds.      The next bouts are better matched. Round after round, birds flail at each other with their razor-clad ankles. Feathers and blood fly. One gush splatters our two faces back in the shadows. A young migrant, Jesus, glances our way, his eyes following the spray. He squints once but then looks away.     Midmorning on Monday, Hector and I wander over to the fields. The migrants are taking a break. “Hola!” Hector calls to Jesus. “Que tal?”      The space between Jesus’ dark brows narrow. “I saw you,” he says in a barely audible tone but in English, so that I can understand. The pickers scramble back to work, Hector and I are left to trudge home.      After Labor Day, school starts back up – I sit in Mr. Grady’s class, and Hector moves up to the junior- high wing of our school building. He starts seeing girls and riding in older guys’ cars. We lose our passion for the picking fields and never meet there again. gathering clouds footprints in the sand  to the future to the past

Babe

1957—At his lathe, Babe guides the tool over the surface of the spinning brass disc. The tool—a solid steel rod a foot long and an inch thick with a baseball bat-sized handle. The brass fluidly conforms to the shape of a wooden mold. Trading for a second tool, he trims excess from the rim of the brass. Ribbons of metal fireworks fly. Babe opens the lathe, releases the font-shaped sculpture—the base for an oil lamp.

     Craftsman, artist, metal spinner, gentle hulk like the blue ox. His demeanor and rural tongue belie the dangerous work. Split second of inattentiveness and the spinning buzzsaw can fly off the lathe and open a man’s arm from wrist to elbow. In over four decades, Babe had one mishap—took 38 stitches to close it up. 

the workshop window’s

greasy glass grid—

shards of summer sun

The Death of Two Negroes

That year of sorrow, 1968, saw Dr. King brutally struck down. As today, the country erupted with racial turmoil and the thought "Black Lives Matter" was pushed into yet another era. 

                           turtle crossing--

                    blows back every time 

                        the big truck roars past 

    In Vietnam the Tet offensive, proportionately taking more Black lives than white, left us reeling. I was stationed at an air force base in southern Georgia, in a community where we asked Black boys to die in the rice paddies of Vietnam but not go to school with us or use the same bathrooms, restaurants, and hotels. The week following Dr. King’s assassination, I was assigned yet another military burial detail for a soldier sent back. This one in a poor Black neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida. Nineteen-year-old body, full military regalia, pallbearers, honor guard, and bugler. 
     During “Taps,” it was my job to fold the flag that draped the coffin into a tight triangle and present it to the mother. Handing it to her, I delivered the little speech that ended with “a symbol of a grateful nation.” She looked at me with tears and disdain and said in her soft voice, “Sergeant, this is not a grateful nation. Thank you anyway.”

A grandson lingers— 

Snowflakes light on the long black wall, 

                             melt and run down