CHAPTER 1
A lice infestation swept through southern Maine in the winter of 1958 and each school district mandated crew cuts for all the boys without explaining why girls were exempt from this edict. Every Sunday night my father sheared his sons’ scalps to the bone with electric clippers and once we passed my mother’s inspection for ‘cooties, my older brother and I ran into the living room to watch DAVY CROCKETT on TV.
Millions of adolescent boys idolized the frontiersman, although our devotion was dedicated to Fess Parker’s Disney character rather than the Tennessee Senator martyred at the Alamo. We wore coonskin caps and sang the theme song on the school bus to Underwood Primary School. No one, not even our parents, could tell the boys in the school apart from each other, since we had the same clothes with the same haircut and shared the same dream of ‘killin’ a bar’.
We were the sons of Davy Crockett.
On the 4th of July 1958 my parents loaded our Ford station wagon for a drive to the seashore. My father had installed aluminum bars across the rear windows to prevent his children from falling out of the car and my grandmother Edith joked that we were the youngest reform school residents in the State of Maine. My mother didn’t think her comment was so funny. Four kids were a handful and she had another one on the way.
Old Orchard Beach that weekend was crowded with Canadian tourists, families from Portland, and local residents. The water was cold, the sand clean, and the sun hot. By late afternoon my two younger sisters’ skins radiated a dangerous pink and our parents called it a day for the beach.
My brother and I rushed to the bathhouse, because Old Orchard had more to offer than an ocean. Dressed in identical jeans and Davy Crockett shirts. We ran out of the bathhouse to our father, who lifted his hands.
“Calm down.”
“Yes, sir.” We respected his commands, especially when they were in our best interest.
“You ready for fun?” He looked over his shoulder to the amusement park.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s have a little fun.”
Silvery stars sparkled over the darkening green of the Atlantic beyond Old Orchard’s pier. My father took us on the Mighty Mouse coaster ride and we screamed on the turns. My older brother got lost in Noah’s Ark funhouse and I cut my knee on the giant slide. The carousel was the only ride my mother considered safe for my sisters. At the arcade I tried to knock over milk bottles with three baseballs. My throws barely wobbled the targets. Teenage boys won Kewpie dolls for pony-tailed girlfriends, who rewarded their prowess with kisses from candy-colored lips.
“What you looking at?” my brother asked holding a bag of popcorn.
“Nothing.” I cringed inside my Davy Crockett shirt, for ‘bein’ born on a mountaintop in Tennessee’ had ceased to be as important as knowing the words to the Platters YAKKETY-YAK.
“Yeah, nothing.” My brother also wanted to be older.
“Who’s hungry?” My father gave my mother a stuffed dog. His strength was matched by his aim.
“We are.” My brother and I walked away from the White Way.
“We have a half-hour.” The fireworks were scheduled for thirty minutes after sunset and our family queued before the take-out counter of Gordon’s restaurant. Our mouths watered in anticipation of golden fried clams, French fries, and cold Cokes.
A roaring thunder stopped my father’s order in mid-sentence. Ten motorcycles were rumbling down East Grand Street and screeched to a halt before the restaurant. Not one bike was driven by a policeman. Their riders sported dirty leather jackets and oil-smeared jeans. Sideburns skated down their cheeks and they strode along the sidewalk, as if they had inherited the world from the meek.
“Who are they?” I asked, as my parents spirited us into the family station wagon.
“Trouble,” my mother answered with no uncertainty and a uniformed policeman ran from the Whiteway shouting, “You boys better be moving along.”
“We ain’t breakin’ no laws,” the twenty year-old with a Mohawk replied without any threat. “All we want is ice cream.”
“Then go down to Saco and get some.” The cop wasn’t taking any lip from a boy half his age. Saco was a factory town. The workers didn’t like rebels of any kind. “You’ll get a good welcome there.”
“Ain’t this a free country?” He defiantly stood his ground.
“Not for your type.” Another policeman arrived, his billyclub tapping an open hand.
A crowd watched from a safe distance.
“Our type?” The biker with the Mohawk examined our station wagon. “Guess Old Orchard is for the squares. Let’s go, boys.”
Even at age six I knew that squares were uncool and my Davy Crockett shirt crawled on my skin.
The bikers remounted their chrome motorcycles and revved their engines. Our car vibrated with each twist of the gas. The Mohawk biker pointed at our station wagon’s aluminum bars and said with a gap-toothed smile, “Don’t worry, kid, you’ll escape that jail wagon soon enough.”
His friends and he sped away in a swirling nebula of high-octane exhaust. My father had taken off the locks of the doors, so I couldn’t chase them like a boy desperate to join the circus. My love for Davy Crockett was dead.
“We’re going home,” my mother told my father.
“What about the fireworks?” They were the weekend’s highlight.
“We’re going. No telling who else is hanging around Old Orchard.”
There was no arguing with my mother in this mood and we ate fried clams in the car.
They were delicious, but I kept looking over my shoulder for the single headlights of the motorcycles. All I saw were cars. Saco was in the opposite direction from Portland.
My mother noticed my vigil and the next morning burnt our blue jeans. The fire saved my brother and sisters, but the blaze was too late for me.
I attached baseball cards to my bike’s rear wheel. Their flapping over the spokes imitated a motorcycle. My best friend, Cheney, did the same. We were the Seagulls. I asked my father to give me a Mohawk. The buzz-cut was the only style available in our house. My mother sent me to the priest. Three-dozen Hail Marys failed to cure my obsession.
I nearly broke my arm biking down the bluff overlooking Portland Harbor. Both knees were scrapped skinless by a failed attempt to leap over a garbage can and the back of my head was scarred by an uncoordinated wheelie. My mother threatened to take away my bike. My father said it was simply a phase, for any native of the Pine Tree State knew there were two seasons in Maine. One of good biking and winter.
Perfect attendance at 1st grade at Underwood Primary School shortened my riding time, as the storms of late October covered the streets of Falmouth Foresides with a thick snow. My bike was retired to the garage and the tattered baseball cards were freed from the wheels. I only kept one of them. It was Pete Runnel.
In the spring my father announced his promotion to a better job in Boston. My mother was happy, because she would be living near her family. I was sad to leave the coast of Maine. My mother promised I would get over it. As usual she was mostly right.
Our home was a pink split-level ranch house in the Blue Hills. The next-door neighbors were Italians. Mrs. Manzi cooked lasagna once a week. My father took my brother, Chuckie Manzi and me to Fenway Park. Pete Runnel hit a home run. We ate three dogs each. My mother drove us to Nantasket Beach for a weekly swim with cousins. Life in the suburbs seemed perfect in the summer of 1960.
In the fall we attended a Catholic School. People thought my brother and I were twins in our identical uniforms. My mother said we were Irish twins, thirteen months apart. Even the nuns laughed at her joke. They taught us that Jesus was our hero, but there were too many choices for heroes in the 1960s.
The town’s teenagers drove souped-up cars. The football captain got all the girls. John Glenn circled the Earth in a rocket. JFK said we were going to the moon. He died young like Buddy Holly. We cried for a weekend and that winter the British Invasion spawned a new army of heroes one after the other.
We became Mods. Our wardrobes mimicked the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Not everyone was a Mod. Greasers didn’t like us. They dressed like bikers in jeans and t-shirts with hair slicked back with Brillcream. I fought three of them at Wollaston Beach. A local teenager rescued me from a beating. Donnie Lianetti was the best of the best, but he disappeared after a near-fatal dive into the Quincy Quarries.
Anti-heroes like Captain America from EASY RIDER replaced local heroes in the late-60s. They lived fast and died young. Thousands of boys obeyed that line in Vietnam. Millions more refused to join the body count. I went to college to avoid the Draft. My hair fell over my shoulders.
Before my junior year at Boston College I hitchhiked to Pomona outside LA to visit a friend. Wayne belonged to the Nomads. His small biker gang criticized the Hell’s Angels for killing people at the Stones concert. They lent me a Harley tricycle and stole it back the next day.
“Sorry,” Wayne said straddling the Harley. “No member has ever finished high school.”
“I understand.” Maybe my father was right. The biker thing was just a phase.
No comments:
Post a Comment