MY WILD CHILDI should have known something strange had arrived, for at birth, the scales tipped at ten pounds, nine ounces. The three or four extra pounds all bundled up in energy, confusion, passion and bizarre behavior. He not only marched to a different drumbeat, he marched to the entire tympanic section of the John Phillips Sousa Band.
When he was four, with two older brothers and a sister just newly born, he was asked: “Do you think we’ll have any more girls?” He nodded toward her crib and said “sure we will,–soon as she starts layin’ eggs!”
A neighbor said to me when he was six “I didn’t know he wore glasses.” I replied that he didn’t, but she informed me that he was seen at our local library reading a book (upside down,) wearing glasses. As it turned out, he had ‘borrowed’ a pair of my sunglasses, poked the lenses out, trying to look studious.
Suspecting he was different, we made an appointment with a neurologist who diagnosed our son with ADD and prescribed Ritalin. He became lethargic–a zombie–to the extent that we hardly recognized him. After a few months, we stopped giving him the drug; rather loving and embracing him for who he was.
Although he was brought up in a Catholic household and went to parochial schools, when he was thirteen, he decided to become a Hasidic Jew after reading a Chaim Potok novel. In the middle of summer he paraded around the neighborhood in one of his father’s long woolen overcoats; attempted growing long sideburn; only succeeding in an unkempt mane of dirty hair.
This lasted for that one summer. He then discovered the guitar. Found out it was much more enjoyable strumming at the young adult Sunday Mass than walking around in a scratchy overcoat.
We sent him to Europe when he was fourteen to gain a little culture and hopefully ingest a little German for his coming high-school German class. It didn’t help and he received a ‘D’ in German.
It was around this time that he would notably be absent from our dinner table, and we would discover that he had ‘hitched’ somewhere. We always knew he’d return–just weren’t sure when.
Only years later would we be privy to his journeys: demonstrating in New York to protest nuclear power; traveling to D.C. to march against Apartheid in South Africa, US involvement in covert wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. He attended a few Abby Hoffman’s Yippie Party Annual Smoke-Out’s in DC to protest against the criminalization of pot, and one time thumbed to an ‘occupation’ on the Iroquois Nation land in upstate New York, and another in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
In the summer of 1977, when he was eighteen, he stayed at Kent State’s Tent City, and one day I came home to find Jewish/Muslim/ Black/Asian women and their interracial babies showering in our bathrooms and fixing sandwiches from food borrowed from my fridge to take back to Tent City. He transported them to and from in his dilapidated twenty-year old, green former mail truck.
College was a nightmare and his first semester brought us grades of an ‘F’, an ‘incomplete’ and a ‘dropped the course.’ Tough love was applied.
Forgetting about higher education, he applied and was hired for a job at Weaver Industries and Workshop, as a group leader for mentally challenged adults. There were ten in his class. Their job was to count and package rubber bands. In order to make sure they were able to meet their quota, after his class was bused back to their facility, he would stay and count the rubber bands to make sure they were accurately boxed.
A friend once told me that he saw my son treating his class to lunch in an Italian restaurant. As he is quite tall, he has always walked with a slight stoop. The friend said he was leading the way (stooped as he walked), followed by the entire class of ten walking hunched over, mimicking him, but not deliberately. I was told it was a pretty funny sight!
One time, when I visited his class, a man with Down’s whispered to my son. Later I asked him what the man had said. He laughed and told me “Your mom has a nice ass.’”
After three years, he decided to give college another go–which he would be responsible for financially, tough love as it was. He applied and gained admission to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1981. This is probably the most liberal college in America, and it marches to a different drumbeat as well.
Surprisingly, many well-known Americans have graduated from there: Founded by Horace Mann in 1852, Antioch has produced two Nobel Prize winners, and scores of notables in the fields of government, science, entertainment, business, education, as well as writers and poets. Coretta Scott King graduated in 1951, while her husband, Martin Luther King gave the commencement speech in 1965.
My son traveled to the Rose Bud Indian reservation in South Dakota where he worked with the Lakota’s for part of his freshman year.
It was at Antioch that he began drinking, and whether alcoholism was the ‘drug de jour’ or he inherited some of his grandfather’s genes, I will never know; however, he eventually joined AA on campus. It worked, and he gave up drinking, deciding that weed was less addictive and much more enjoyable.
We attended his graduation four years later, watching the graduating class march down the outdoor aisles to ‘Pomp and Circumstance’–the music provided by the entire student body playing their kazoos; the wooded arena reeking with the redolent odor of ganja.
Then it was on to California, where he put his degree to work. His major was in Visual Art and Art History, and he worked as a fine art lithographer apprentice and spent several years working for R C Gorman, Luis Jimenez, and Masami Teraoka.
One of his roommates was a German girl living in the U.S hoping for a Green Card. She was distraught as her time here was about to expire. My son took pity and married her! That solved her green card issue; however, as the marriage was in name only, my husband informed our son that he would be struck from the will until the time came that we witnessed a signed divorce decree. Eventually, that was accomplished, but not without coercion.
In the late eighties, he decided to become a Zen Buddhist and trained a good deal of the time at the Zen Center, where he spent long hours on hard wooden benches in abject silence; then cultivating their gardens in return for food and lodging.
After working in various curatorial capacities in museums and the San Francisco airport, he decided to become a teacher and went back to school, receiving a Master’s degree with his thesis, written and oral, on Global Child Labor, which he earned by collaborating with a group of indigenous teachers in post-war Guatemala City.
They all had family slaughtered in the 25-year Civil War sponsored by the United Fruit and Banana Co. Most of them had been on government enemy execution lists for being part of the resistance. A program had been set up in peace time where they educated child laborers from families who had spent generations on the streets, in shanty towns, working in the largest open air market in Guatemala City, and the worst place of all, the unsanitary municipal dump–a smoldering mountain of waste, foraged daily by the people. He interviewed children and parents in the market, the dump, and the classrooms.
Today, at fifty-four, he is a highly respected and tenured sixth-grade math and science teacher. Two summers ago, I sent him to Oregon where he obtained a certificate in bicycle maintenance. Beside the time spent teaching, he builds and repairs bikes, and parks bicycles at all the home baseball games.
His life has become my journey toward truth, reality, acceptance and love. Other than his head, hands and feet, every part of his body is tattooed. The tattoos are inspired by Shinto protective iconography, combined with Lafcadio Hern’s 18th century cycle of ghost stories known as “The Kwaidan.”
Regretfully, not one of them says ‘Mother’!
Jan Chapman
December, 2012
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