Tape 1, Side A
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
You told me about living in St. Louis, but you say here [in the biographical sketch] that you were born in Kansas City [Missouri]: How long did you live in Kansas City, and do you remember anything about Kansas City?
No, I don’t really remember anything specifically. I remember things from stories that I heard later, but I don’t remember anything like that. Later on I went back to visit someone that I remembered as being referred to as my grandmother. And I don’t really remember anything about her, but it was Kansas City, that’s for sure; and I have this vague memory that she pointed out places where I had lived. So I believe everybody when they said that, and it’s on my birth certificate that I was born in Kansas City, Missouri.
Documents don’t lie.*
No.
So how old were you when the family moved to St. Louis [Missouri], or was that the next move?
No, there was something in between there. There was several years in between there. I’ll just run out the narrative . . .
. . . Okay . . .
. . . as best as I remember it.
Take it away.
My earliest memory is actually when I was a kid in New Mexico. Yeah, we lived in Deming, New Mexico, right by the desert; and I actually have highchair memories, and there’s a piece of cake. That’s all I remember. It’s like a birthday party probably, something like that’s what I imagine. And I’ve held onto that memory for a long time.
What’s the memory? It’s an image?
I can look down and see the little highchair table with like a piece of cake on it. And that’s about it. It kind of fades. You know, sort of in the distance there are merry-makers, maybe, and there’s noise.
That’s New Mexico?
That’s New Mexico, and I can remember New Mexico because I ran away from home when I was really just two or three or something like that; and I ran out into the desert; and I have a clear memory of that, you know, toddling out into the desert. It was a small town, very close to the desert; didn’t have a lot of development at that time, and you know, it was just sand and brush as far as you could see. And, you know, I was snatched up; I didn’t get very far. Snatched up real quick! But I remember that too. Yeah. You know, it was preschool. That’s when my memories of other people in my family start coming into focus: my younger sister [Patricia] had been born by then, so I sort of have some memories of her.
How much younger is your sister than you are?
I guess she’s three or four years--or five years--three to five years younger than me; I’m not sure exactly. Yeah, she must be forty-seven or forty-eight, and I’m fifty-two--I’m fifty-one or fifty-two [laughter], so I don’t know.
What accounts for the moving around? What was your father [Clifford Patrick Conkin] doing?
He was in the Navy. Good question. He was in the Navy; that’s why we had to move around so much, but then between that and--I mean he was in the Navy intermittently. I don’t know the whole story there either. It was just on and off.
Oh really? Not a career change?
He was, but he kept gettin’ out and gettin’ back in. I think--my guess is--trying to make it on the outside. But he had lots of different jobs, and I’m hearing other ones too, now that I’m getting in contact with people who were adults then who are still alive now who knew him.
So you’re still learning about jobs that he did?
Yeah, like I just learned recently that he was the deputy sheriff of Deming, New Mexico, this town; he was in the police force for a while.
Do you have any idea what the population of Deming is?
No, I don’t.
What’s it near?
It’s near El Paso I think . . .
So it’s near Las Cruces and all that?
[With an accent] . . . near Tixas! I don’t know where that is. I know it’s fairly near El Paso because . . .
. . . Have you heard of Anthony?
No.
Okay. I know the area. So it’s high desert.
I think so, yeah. We went to El Paso every now and then because there were relatives there. And some of them still live there, my cousins and so on. And so, yeah, that’s who I heard this from, my cousin Sylvia that I just learned existed, and then, you know, another one of those deals where I started having memories about them. I never even thought about them.
When did you start having memories?
When I heard that I had a cousin Sylvia [laughs].
So just the name brought her back?
Yeah. Sylvia, yeah; then I remember, Yeah! We went to El Paso from time to time, and we’d stay there with my mother’s * sister and their family; and yeah, Sylvia. I remember that. I have a vague recollection of that. There was somebody in the picture named Sylvia. But still it’s all just--most of my memories are focused on me. I have an older half-brother, Bob, who lived with the family from time to time when he was a kid, you know, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and he’s five or six years older than me, or maybe older. And he was apparently around all the time. I have very little memory of him.
Your father had been married before?
No, my mother had been married before. Yeah; my father, he gets out of the Navy after World War II--served on a ship--and gets married very shortly thereafter, as I understand it, to this woman who had just escaped from a bad marriage herself. And she had three sons from that marriage. Three sons, yeah. They’re Scotts: Joe Scott, Gene Scott and Bob Scott; and Bob Scott is the one who later on changed his name legally to Conkin, ‘cause most of the time, as I say, he was there, he was basically raised as part of our family, my mother’s second family. But, again, that’s just a shadowy figure as far as I know, but he was there all the time!
So the three kids [from his mother’s previous marriage] were in the household when you were growing up?
No, only Bob. The other two kids I didn’t really even know about until much later, much later in the picture.
They were older?
Yeah, Gene is like sixty-five or sixty-six now, and Joe would be older than that--he’s the one who committed suicide in the late fifties. Didn’t know anything about that, only later.*
Did your family talk about that?
No. Didn’t know anything about that. Didn’t know anything about Gene--I’ll flash forward: Gene was a prisoner of war in Korea, the Korean conflict. And the first time I knew about him, or knew that such a person even existed, that I remember, you know, we were watching TV during the Korean War, at the very end of the Korean War--it lasted two years--and everybody was interested in this Gene. Names would flash on the screen, from time to time they’d make reports on who was going to be released by the North Koreans who had been captured, and they were always looking for his name, and actually it turns out later that it was two years after the war ended that he was released, so he was kept another two years; and basically he enlisted in the Marines when he was like sixteen, he lied about his age; he was trained up--basic training--sent right over there, and like the way I always heard it was like within the first week that he was over there, he was out on patrol and bending over a stream to get some water, and he gets up and there’s a gun in the back of his head, and for four years he’s in Chinese North Korean prison camps. That’s how he spent the Korean War.
Did they hold many people after the war was over?
I don’t know. I never looked into it. I think they did. I think there was a long strung-out negotiations. And again I should say, you know, as preface to this whole exercise, none of this stuff could be actually factually true [laughs], in detail. These are just things I’ve had in my head and I never questioned one way or the other, you know, never really thought about that much.
So there could be a certain amount of family mythology, or just simply inaccurate . . .
No, I think it’s just me, you know, just not remembering correctly, or, you know, you fix on a certain interpretation and if you don’t discuss it with anybody or you’re not curious about it, that’s what you--and I’m not, and I never have [been] [laughs]. Even now, like I say, when I’m getting in touch with all these people that I haven’t seen for very long, twenty, thirty, forty years, I’m still not that curious about it [laughs and then shifts into a funny folksy voice]; ‘cause I’m a superficial kind of a person, you know. So, I don’t know the real story there, I mean of course I know he was captured, but I don’t know he was really held for two years later; it just seemed like that. It seems like--I believe the Korean war was over in 1952, and I don’t believe he came home till 1954. Now some of that could have been--he could have been in hospital, ‘cause he had tuberculosis when he got out, and they may have kept him in hospital for a long time. But then suddenly he was there, this eighteen or nineteen, twenty year old guy, and he was part of the picture too then.
Did the family blend very well there?
As far as I know there wasn’t--yeah, as far as I know; and I think one indication of that is the fact that Bob, my older half-brother, changed his name. I always heard the story was in some way he did it in recognition that he felt more like my father’s son than the other feller’s son or anybody’s son.
Did you ever meet the father--your mother’s first husband?
No. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t remember exactly what happened to him. He just ran away, you know; that’s the story I hear. He just ran out on ‘em.
So he wasn’t very highly regarded?
No. He was a drunk and a bad character, I think.
So back to New Mexico. I think we got there because my father was just looking for ways to get on, and I remember he had lots of different jobs. He had like a bread truck or some kind of delivery truck--maybe it was candy. [Shifts to funny voice] Uuum, candy! But the one I remember was he was like a shoe salesman, like a door-to-door shoe salesman.
Door-to-door?
I think so, yeah, or, you know, he would go out to stores, ‘cause he had a case; and this is what I really dug because he had all these samples in there, samples of different kinds leather, samples of different kinds of insoles, and my favorite was the half-shoes, you know, shoes that were cut right down the middle longitudinally so you could see the fine workmanship and all the different layers of soles. So I remember that. He might have sold insurance at some point.
You had an interest in the way the shoes were put together?
I don’t know, I guess I just thought it was--I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know that that’s what things--A, that you could manufacture a half-shoe like that: Where’d they get them half shoes? And, you know, just the inside look, you know; I liked that ‘cause it’s a curiosity, like a shrunken head in a jar or somethin’ like that, and plus the fact that my father was doing it. He had this. He had this. He could carry it around with him all the time. He could look at it any time he wanted. [Suddenly remembering] Oh! He was a match salesman! He had this, uh--I remember now, yeah; it’s all coming back!--matchbooks. He had lots of different kinds of--he was trying to sell matchbooks. He had a whole case of matchbooks, you know, and they all had these great pictures on them, and they were all different sizes: There was one that was huge. It had these great big matches in it, big as your thumb. Took two hands to get the match cover off, you know, two little-kid hands.
And so you got to look through his samples of whatever he happened to be selling?
Yeah. I don’t know if I--maybe I wasn’t supposed to, but yeah. Those were like little treats, all those little matches, those were just little gems, like little play pretties.
So it sounds like it was, at least in your way of looking at it as a kid, that it was a kind of positive thing that he was doing a bunch of different jobs, so there was always a lot to look at and . . .
You know, to the extent that I thought about it, yeah. I don’t know that I--I don’t have any way of knowing whether I knew that he worked or what work was about or any of that stuff, ‘cause, you know, I was like three or four, maybe a little older. It’s another one of those things where I just put it into place later. Oh yeah, so that’s what he did, and he must have done all these things. . . . Because that trend kept on going as I began to understand more and more about life and look at what the other kids’ daddies were doing, you know? And there’s always TV, you know. Ozzie: he just stays around the house all day.
He doesn’t have shoes sawn in half.
Right. And Ward, on Leave It to Beaver, he goes out. Ozzie: what kind of job does he have? I don’t know. But Ward goes out and comes back, and he’s worried about the Beav. But Ozzie, he just stays around all day, you know, tryin’ ta look for his pipe or whatever, get a basketball, find a basketball or something. So I don’t know.
Did you sit in front of the TV as much as we did when I was a kid?
I’m sure, I’m sure I did ‘cause I remember all that stuff. I remember the first TV we had, and you know, Howdy Doody and all that stuff, and Winky Dink.
What year would that have been? Any idea?
Ah, no.
So you were born in 1946?
Forty-six, yeah. The New Mexico period doesn’t seem to me like it was that long. Then later on we went to, we moved to, we found ourselves in Kansas, in Olathe, Kansas*. And then my father was back in the Navy. We actually lived in like a housing project that they had there. And that didn’t last too long, seemed like he was out--see, again I may have the sequence mixed up, because we were living then in another area outside of the Navy base, and seemed like then the family was managing a motel. In fact, that’s true, ‘cause we lived in this long string of side by side--yeah, it was like a classic motel, when they first started up, a post-war motel. And when my brother Gene came out of the Korean war he got to stay in one of these units; so I remember him down there, you know, shining his shoes and listening to jazz music--yeah, bebop, you know, some crazy bebop stuff, stuff I never heard before.
I was gonna ask you about that, about music in general, because I know that you like music now. Do you remember the first music you noticed when you were a kid?
You know that’s funny, Chris, I think that’s it.
Before rock-and-roll?
[emphatically] Yeah! There was music on TV, and jingles, and Your Hit Parade, Davy Crocket, I mean that was--[sings] Davy, Davy Crocket--but that was just, you know, I didn’t know anything about that you could go buy records and hear all this stuff, but it was on TV, and it was on the radio. But he [Gene] had, he had records. He had all this stuff from--he had 45s; and he had a little portable record player; and he had crazy stuff, like Charlie Parker stuff and Dizzy Gillespie stuff, and this was, you know--nobody was listening to this--you didn’t hear anything like this on the radio, and big band stuff, and . . .
. . . And you were back in Kansas?
This was in Kansas, when he got out of the Korean war; so this was fifty-four, this is like, I’m six or seven, something like that.
Kansas City was actually a kind of center for bebop and everything. Did that have anything to do with it, or was it all through records that music came into the picture?
I don’t know. I don’t know how he originally got into that stuff, possibly from his time in the war, because as I learned later, when he was in Korea, held a prisoner of war, he was seventeen years old, they had managed to grow a huge marijuana patch right by the compound, and he has all this memorabilia from all his buddies, some of whom he still meets now I’m learning, you know, they have get-togethers and that sort of thing. He has something, some kind of photograph of all of them where they’re all talking about--they sign it they say something underneath their signatures about weed, you know: Weed forever . . . ; so they were all stoned for a lot of that time during the Korean war. And he has other wonderful stories about that. So he might have got himself hip.
We think we invented marijuana in the sixties [laughing].
Well, he’s the one who first turned me on, you know, later on.
Is this jumping ahead, or were you starting to smoke . . . ?
. . . Yeah, that’s jumpin’ ahead. [facetiously] No, I was eight years old. Gimme some of that fine stuff. No, I didn’t know anything about that then. But he was pretty cool. He had a convertible; he had a girlfriend, you know, he was tooling around the countryside. Every now and then I’d get to go along with him for a ride. And then he went to study journalism at Columbia University.
So there we were in New Mexico, and now then we’re in Olathe, Kansas, where there’s a big Navy base, and my father’s in and out of the Navy, and he’s also--during this time he’s also doing other things: he’s involved in the VFW, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and they do things for the underprivileged, you know, they put on . . .
. . . Was that a job?
No, no, it was volunteer stuff. I remember he had kind of a little hat, a little hat you can wear with your--or maybe he had a whole uniform too, with medals and little insignia and that sort of stuff on it; and he would wear that when he would go out and deliver boxes of food with the other VFW guys, and I could tag along, to ‘the less fortunate’ out there in the sticks.
So did you tag along?
Yeah! That was--I remember some of that stuff. So he was doing that, plus he had all these other jobs, and then there was the motel thing. And that’s the first thing where I really remember my brother Bob. And apparently, again, he was there all along. I just don’t remember it. I remember my younger sister and my younger brother Dennis--my younger sister Patricia--my younger brother Dennis, when they came along. I remember them, but I don’t remember Bob that much now. Maybe he ran away from time to time [laughs].
And is Bob also from your mother’s first marriage.
Yes. He’s not as old as Gene, older than me. But I remember one night a car drove up to check into the motel and it turned out that the people in the car were deaf and mute, and they couldn’t get it across what they wanted, exactly what they wanted; and my brother Bob stepped up and dealt with them in sign language. Somehow he [laughs]--so, you know, it’s just a shot of a memory. I don’t know. For whatever that’s worth. That’s how I remember him. Sometimes I have memories of him at the breakfast table, but it’s very strange.
It sounds like you were constantly being surprised by what these people came up with.
Well, yeah, I was. But you know I just wasn’t paying attention, like I should have been, to life and things around me, ‘cause that’s the way I was.
I wonder what effect moving so much had on you.
That’s an interesting one. I don’t know.
‘Cause maybe there’s some relationship. It seems to me that maybe if you’re moving a lot that you feel like: Well, I’ll just keep my eyes open and maybe tomorrow we’ll be someplace else. You know what I mean?
You know, you probably have something there, because later on, when we all were put into a home, it really affected my younger brother and sister much more than it affected me. I didn’t wanna go, of course, but I got used to it real quick.
You just kind of rolled with it ‘cause that’s what was happening?
Yeah. I just kind of accepted--I was able to--and that’s carried along with me--I was able to jettison the past very easily. It just starts now. It always seemed to be that way. And sort of, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I realized that that’s the way it was, and that’s the way the world was. My whole experience at that point crystallized, and that’s why I’m emotionally fourteen, right now. I never changed since then. I realized how it was and I had it all figured out then, and . . . [pauses]
So you mean the feeling that ‘this is just how it is’ had to do with the institution, or what do you mean exactly? Like wherever you find yourself, there you are.
[laughs] There you are. That’s right. Wherever you go, there you are. Wherever they put ya . . . --again, I didn’t have any problem really with being drafted, you know, being legally and physically and forcibly taken from one life and put into another life. It was all fine with me, and also by then I was sort of--I’ll tell ya a story about this too later--I sort of got into, or sort of became aware of Zen Buddhism. And . . .
. . . Pretty young, I mean around that time?
No. This is like later, when I’m fourteen or fifteen or something like that and I’m sent away to live with my older brother. And that figured into it too, so by the time I had to go into the army I just thought it was fine. I knew I wasn’t going to kill anybody, but it was like: Oh, let’s see what these people can show me. I didn’t have any objection to it at all really, ‘cause it was just another thing, you know; by then I still wasn’t able to--I didn’t think that it was interesting to try to control events. It wasn’t interesting at all. I wasn’t exactly passive; I didn’t care that much, ‘cause it was all kind of funny and wonderful [laughing]. But I just didn’t take anything that personally, ‘cause I didn’t have a strong, rock-solid sense of myself as a person.
You say you weren’t going to kill anybody. Was that kind of a set feeling, like your limits or something? Well here I am. I’m in the military. They’re not going to be able to get me to do this, but whatever else is okay.
Yeah. Let’s play your little game and see where it goes. That’s what--I guess that’s what it was. It was also the path of least restraint. I didn’t want to go to Canada, or I didn’t want to shoot my toe off or anything like that; and I wanted to sort of disappear from my life at that point anyway, from my other--so I just thought it was cool! I didn’t tell anybody. [Remembering] Oh no, I didn’t tell anybody that I got my draft notice.
Really?
Yeah. I just thought it would be cool just to completely drop out of sight. And that’s what happened.
Really?
Yeah, yeah. Nobody exactly knew what happened. I mean I had a job, and I gave them a couple weeks notice, but I didn’t tell anybody that I was leaving my job or I didn’t tell anybody that I was going anywhere [laughing]. They just turned around one day and I wasn’t there anymore. I heard from people later on that they just thought it was very . . .
. . . Where did Michael go?
Yeah. They just thought it was--they just didn’t know, and that’s . . .
. . . That’s what you wanted, actually.
Yeah. I thought that would be an interesting thing to happen.
So . . .
. . . But back to--where were we? back in ah . . .
. . . Well, you mentioned the institution.
[Gravely] Yeah.
When did that happen?
So there we are in Olathe and we’re managing a motel. That was nice. That was nice country around there--not developed at all. There were farms and I could wander around, and I was going to school, and then--oh that’s, I guess, fifty-four, fifty-five; and then I became aware that my mother was very sick all the time. She was always going into the hospital, and it turned out that she had breast cancer or some kind of cancer. I didn’t know what kind of cancer then. But just to telescope that whole . . .
. . . Nobody told you?
Oh, I just didn’t know.
[End Tape 1, Side A]
You told me about living in St. Louis, but you say here [in the biographical sketch] that you were born in Kansas City [Missouri]: How long did you live in Kansas City, and do you remember anything about Kansas City?
No, I don’t really remember anything specifically. I remember things from stories that I heard later, but I don’t remember anything like that. Later on I went back to visit someone that I remembered as being referred to as my grandmother. And I don’t really remember anything about her, but it was Kansas City, that’s for sure; and I have this vague memory that she pointed out places where I had lived. So I believe everybody when they said that, and it’s on my birth certificate that I was born in Kansas City, Missouri.
Documents don’t lie.*
No.
So how old were you when the family moved to St. Louis [Missouri], or was that the next move?
No, there was something in between there. There was several years in between there. I’ll just run out the narrative . . .
. . . Okay . . .
. . . as best as I remember it.
Take it away.
My earliest memory is actually when I was a kid in New Mexico. Yeah, we lived in Deming, New Mexico, right by the desert; and I actually have highchair memories, and there’s a piece of cake. That’s all I remember. It’s like a birthday party probably, something like that’s what I imagine. And I’ve held onto that memory for a long time.
What’s the memory? It’s an image?
I can look down and see the little highchair table with like a piece of cake on it. And that’s about it. It kind of fades. You know, sort of in the distance there are merry-makers, maybe, and there’s noise.
That’s New Mexico?
That’s New Mexico, and I can remember New Mexico because I ran away from home when I was really just two or three or something like that; and I ran out into the desert; and I have a clear memory of that, you know, toddling out into the desert. It was a small town, very close to the desert; didn’t have a lot of development at that time, and you know, it was just sand and brush as far as you could see. And, you know, I was snatched up; I didn’t get very far. Snatched up real quick! But I remember that too. Yeah. You know, it was preschool. That’s when my memories of other people in my family start coming into focus: my younger sister [Patricia] had been born by then, so I sort of have some memories of her.
How much younger is your sister than you are?
I guess she’s three or four years--or five years--three to five years younger than me; I’m not sure exactly. Yeah, she must be forty-seven or forty-eight, and I’m fifty-two--I’m fifty-one or fifty-two [laughter], so I don’t know.
What accounts for the moving around? What was your father [Clifford Patrick Conkin] doing?
He was in the Navy. Good question. He was in the Navy; that’s why we had to move around so much, but then between that and--I mean he was in the Navy intermittently. I don’t know the whole story there either. It was just on and off.
Oh really? Not a career change?
He was, but he kept gettin’ out and gettin’ back in. I think--my guess is--trying to make it on the outside. But he had lots of different jobs, and I’m hearing other ones too, now that I’m getting in contact with people who were adults then who are still alive now who knew him.
So you’re still learning about jobs that he did?
Yeah, like I just learned recently that he was the deputy sheriff of Deming, New Mexico, this town; he was in the police force for a while.
Do you have any idea what the population of Deming is?
No, I don’t.
What’s it near?
It’s near El Paso I think . . .
So it’s near Las Cruces and all that?
[With an accent] . . . near Tixas! I don’t know where that is. I know it’s fairly near El Paso because . . .
. . . Have you heard of Anthony?
No.
Okay. I know the area. So it’s high desert.
I think so, yeah. We went to El Paso every now and then because there were relatives there. And some of them still live there, my cousins and so on. And so, yeah, that’s who I heard this from, my cousin Sylvia that I just learned existed, and then, you know, another one of those deals where I started having memories about them. I never even thought about them.
When did you start having memories?
When I heard that I had a cousin Sylvia [laughs].
So just the name brought her back?
Yeah. Sylvia, yeah; then I remember, Yeah! We went to El Paso from time to time, and we’d stay there with my mother’s * sister and their family; and yeah, Sylvia. I remember that. I have a vague recollection of that. There was somebody in the picture named Sylvia. But still it’s all just--most of my memories are focused on me. I have an older half-brother, Bob, who lived with the family from time to time when he was a kid, you know, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and he’s five or six years older than me, or maybe older. And he was apparently around all the time. I have very little memory of him.
Your father had been married before?
No, my mother had been married before. Yeah; my father, he gets out of the Navy after World War II--served on a ship--and gets married very shortly thereafter, as I understand it, to this woman who had just escaped from a bad marriage herself. And she had three sons from that marriage. Three sons, yeah. They’re Scotts: Joe Scott, Gene Scott and Bob Scott; and Bob Scott is the one who later on changed his name legally to Conkin, ‘cause most of the time, as I say, he was there, he was basically raised as part of our family, my mother’s second family. But, again, that’s just a shadowy figure as far as I know, but he was there all the time!
So the three kids [from his mother’s previous marriage] were in the household when you were growing up?
No, only Bob. The other two kids I didn’t really even know about until much later, much later in the picture.
They were older?
Yeah, Gene is like sixty-five or sixty-six now, and Joe would be older than that--he’s the one who committed suicide in the late fifties. Didn’t know anything about that, only later.*
Did your family talk about that?
No. Didn’t know anything about that. Didn’t know anything about Gene--I’ll flash forward: Gene was a prisoner of war in Korea, the Korean conflict. And the first time I knew about him, or knew that such a person even existed, that I remember, you know, we were watching TV during the Korean War, at the very end of the Korean War--it lasted two years--and everybody was interested in this Gene. Names would flash on the screen, from time to time they’d make reports on who was going to be released by the North Koreans who had been captured, and they were always looking for his name, and actually it turns out later that it was two years after the war ended that he was released, so he was kept another two years; and basically he enlisted in the Marines when he was like sixteen, he lied about his age; he was trained up--basic training--sent right over there, and like the way I always heard it was like within the first week that he was over there, he was out on patrol and bending over a stream to get some water, and he gets up and there’s a gun in the back of his head, and for four years he’s in Chinese North Korean prison camps. That’s how he spent the Korean War.
Did they hold many people after the war was over?
I don’t know. I never looked into it. I think they did. I think there was a long strung-out negotiations. And again I should say, you know, as preface to this whole exercise, none of this stuff could be actually factually true [laughs], in detail. These are just things I’ve had in my head and I never questioned one way or the other, you know, never really thought about that much.
So there could be a certain amount of family mythology, or just simply inaccurate . . .
No, I think it’s just me, you know, just not remembering correctly, or, you know, you fix on a certain interpretation and if you don’t discuss it with anybody or you’re not curious about it, that’s what you--and I’m not, and I never have [been] [laughs]. Even now, like I say, when I’m getting in touch with all these people that I haven’t seen for very long, twenty, thirty, forty years, I’m still not that curious about it [laughs and then shifts into a funny folksy voice]; ‘cause I’m a superficial kind of a person, you know. So, I don’t know the real story there, I mean of course I know he was captured, but I don’t know he was really held for two years later; it just seemed like that. It seems like--I believe the Korean war was over in 1952, and I don’t believe he came home till 1954. Now some of that could have been--he could have been in hospital, ‘cause he had tuberculosis when he got out, and they may have kept him in hospital for a long time. But then suddenly he was there, this eighteen or nineteen, twenty year old guy, and he was part of the picture too then.
Did the family blend very well there?
As far as I know there wasn’t--yeah, as far as I know; and I think one indication of that is the fact that Bob, my older half-brother, changed his name. I always heard the story was in some way he did it in recognition that he felt more like my father’s son than the other feller’s son or anybody’s son.
Did you ever meet the father--your mother’s first husband?
No. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t remember exactly what happened to him. He just ran away, you know; that’s the story I hear. He just ran out on ‘em.
So he wasn’t very highly regarded?
No. He was a drunk and a bad character, I think.
So back to New Mexico. I think we got there because my father was just looking for ways to get on, and I remember he had lots of different jobs. He had like a bread truck or some kind of delivery truck--maybe it was candy. [Shifts to funny voice] Uuum, candy! But the one I remember was he was like a shoe salesman, like a door-to-door shoe salesman.
Door-to-door?
I think so, yeah, or, you know, he would go out to stores, ‘cause he had a case; and this is what I really dug because he had all these samples in there, samples of different kinds leather, samples of different kinds of insoles, and my favorite was the half-shoes, you know, shoes that were cut right down the middle longitudinally so you could see the fine workmanship and all the different layers of soles. So I remember that. He might have sold insurance at some point.
You had an interest in the way the shoes were put together?
I don’t know, I guess I just thought it was--I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know that that’s what things--A, that you could manufacture a half-shoe like that: Where’d they get them half shoes? And, you know, just the inside look, you know; I liked that ‘cause it’s a curiosity, like a shrunken head in a jar or somethin’ like that, and plus the fact that my father was doing it. He had this. He had this. He could carry it around with him all the time. He could look at it any time he wanted. [Suddenly remembering] Oh! He was a match salesman! He had this, uh--I remember now, yeah; it’s all coming back!--matchbooks. He had lots of different kinds of--he was trying to sell matchbooks. He had a whole case of matchbooks, you know, and they all had these great pictures on them, and they were all different sizes: There was one that was huge. It had these great big matches in it, big as your thumb. Took two hands to get the match cover off, you know, two little-kid hands.
And so you got to look through his samples of whatever he happened to be selling?
Yeah. I don’t know if I--maybe I wasn’t supposed to, but yeah. Those were like little treats, all those little matches, those were just little gems, like little play pretties.
So it sounds like it was, at least in your way of looking at it as a kid, that it was a kind of positive thing that he was doing a bunch of different jobs, so there was always a lot to look at and . . .
You know, to the extent that I thought about it, yeah. I don’t know that I--I don’t have any way of knowing whether I knew that he worked or what work was about or any of that stuff, ‘cause, you know, I was like three or four, maybe a little older. It’s another one of those things where I just put it into place later. Oh yeah, so that’s what he did, and he must have done all these things. . . . Because that trend kept on going as I began to understand more and more about life and look at what the other kids’ daddies were doing, you know? And there’s always TV, you know. Ozzie: he just stays around the house all day.
He doesn’t have shoes sawn in half.
Right. And Ward, on Leave It to Beaver, he goes out. Ozzie: what kind of job does he have? I don’t know. But Ward goes out and comes back, and he’s worried about the Beav. But Ozzie, he just stays around all day, you know, tryin’ ta look for his pipe or whatever, get a basketball, find a basketball or something. So I don’t know.
Did you sit in front of the TV as much as we did when I was a kid?
I’m sure, I’m sure I did ‘cause I remember all that stuff. I remember the first TV we had, and you know, Howdy Doody and all that stuff, and Winky Dink.
What year would that have been? Any idea?
Ah, no.
So you were born in 1946?
Forty-six, yeah. The New Mexico period doesn’t seem to me like it was that long. Then later on we went to, we moved to, we found ourselves in Kansas, in Olathe, Kansas*. And then my father was back in the Navy. We actually lived in like a housing project that they had there. And that didn’t last too long, seemed like he was out--see, again I may have the sequence mixed up, because we were living then in another area outside of the Navy base, and seemed like then the family was managing a motel. In fact, that’s true, ‘cause we lived in this long string of side by side--yeah, it was like a classic motel, when they first started up, a post-war motel. And when my brother Gene came out of the Korean war he got to stay in one of these units; so I remember him down there, you know, shining his shoes and listening to jazz music--yeah, bebop, you know, some crazy bebop stuff, stuff I never heard before.
I was gonna ask you about that, about music in general, because I know that you like music now. Do you remember the first music you noticed when you were a kid?
You know that’s funny, Chris, I think that’s it.
Before rock-and-roll?
[emphatically] Yeah! There was music on TV, and jingles, and Your Hit Parade, Davy Crocket, I mean that was--[sings] Davy, Davy Crocket--but that was just, you know, I didn’t know anything about that you could go buy records and hear all this stuff, but it was on TV, and it was on the radio. But he [Gene] had, he had records. He had all this stuff from--he had 45s; and he had a little portable record player; and he had crazy stuff, like Charlie Parker stuff and Dizzy Gillespie stuff, and this was, you know--nobody was listening to this--you didn’t hear anything like this on the radio, and big band stuff, and . . .
. . . And you were back in Kansas?
This was in Kansas, when he got out of the Korean war; so this was fifty-four, this is like, I’m six or seven, something like that.
Kansas City was actually a kind of center for bebop and everything. Did that have anything to do with it, or was it all through records that music came into the picture?
I don’t know. I don’t know how he originally got into that stuff, possibly from his time in the war, because as I learned later, when he was in Korea, held a prisoner of war, he was seventeen years old, they had managed to grow a huge marijuana patch right by the compound, and he has all this memorabilia from all his buddies, some of whom he still meets now I’m learning, you know, they have get-togethers and that sort of thing. He has something, some kind of photograph of all of them where they’re all talking about--they sign it they say something underneath their signatures about weed, you know: Weed forever . . . ; so they were all stoned for a lot of that time during the Korean war. And he has other wonderful stories about that. So he might have got himself hip.
We think we invented marijuana in the sixties [laughing].
Well, he’s the one who first turned me on, you know, later on.
Is this jumping ahead, or were you starting to smoke . . . ?
. . . Yeah, that’s jumpin’ ahead. [facetiously] No, I was eight years old. Gimme some of that fine stuff. No, I didn’t know anything about that then. But he was pretty cool. He had a convertible; he had a girlfriend, you know, he was tooling around the countryside. Every now and then I’d get to go along with him for a ride. And then he went to study journalism at Columbia University.
So there we were in New Mexico, and now then we’re in Olathe, Kansas, where there’s a big Navy base, and my father’s in and out of the Navy, and he’s also--during this time he’s also doing other things: he’s involved in the VFW, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and they do things for the underprivileged, you know, they put on . . .
. . . Was that a job?
No, no, it was volunteer stuff. I remember he had kind of a little hat, a little hat you can wear with your--or maybe he had a whole uniform too, with medals and little insignia and that sort of stuff on it; and he would wear that when he would go out and deliver boxes of food with the other VFW guys, and I could tag along, to ‘the less fortunate’ out there in the sticks.
So did you tag along?
Yeah! That was--I remember some of that stuff. So he was doing that, plus he had all these other jobs, and then there was the motel thing. And that’s the first thing where I really remember my brother Bob. And apparently, again, he was there all along. I just don’t remember it. I remember my younger sister and my younger brother Dennis--my younger sister Patricia--my younger brother Dennis, when they came along. I remember them, but I don’t remember Bob that much now. Maybe he ran away from time to time [laughs].
And is Bob also from your mother’s first marriage.
Yes. He’s not as old as Gene, older than me. But I remember one night a car drove up to check into the motel and it turned out that the people in the car were deaf and mute, and they couldn’t get it across what they wanted, exactly what they wanted; and my brother Bob stepped up and dealt with them in sign language. Somehow he [laughs]--so, you know, it’s just a shot of a memory. I don’t know. For whatever that’s worth. That’s how I remember him. Sometimes I have memories of him at the breakfast table, but it’s very strange.
It sounds like you were constantly being surprised by what these people came up with.
Well, yeah, I was. But you know I just wasn’t paying attention, like I should have been, to life and things around me, ‘cause that’s the way I was.
I wonder what effect moving so much had on you.
That’s an interesting one. I don’t know.
‘Cause maybe there’s some relationship. It seems to me that maybe if you’re moving a lot that you feel like: Well, I’ll just keep my eyes open and maybe tomorrow we’ll be someplace else. You know what I mean?
You know, you probably have something there, because later on, when we all were put into a home, it really affected my younger brother and sister much more than it affected me. I didn’t wanna go, of course, but I got used to it real quick.
You just kind of rolled with it ‘cause that’s what was happening?
Yeah. I just kind of accepted--I was able to--and that’s carried along with me--I was able to jettison the past very easily. It just starts now. It always seemed to be that way. And sort of, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I realized that that’s the way it was, and that’s the way the world was. My whole experience at that point crystallized, and that’s why I’m emotionally fourteen, right now. I never changed since then. I realized how it was and I had it all figured out then, and . . . [pauses]
So you mean the feeling that ‘this is just how it is’ had to do with the institution, or what do you mean exactly? Like wherever you find yourself, there you are.
[laughs] There you are. That’s right. Wherever you go, there you are. Wherever they put ya . . . --again, I didn’t have any problem really with being drafted, you know, being legally and physically and forcibly taken from one life and put into another life. It was all fine with me, and also by then I was sort of--I’ll tell ya a story about this too later--I sort of got into, or sort of became aware of Zen Buddhism. And . . .
. . . Pretty young, I mean around that time?
No. This is like later, when I’m fourteen or fifteen or something like that and I’m sent away to live with my older brother. And that figured into it too, so by the time I had to go into the army I just thought it was fine. I knew I wasn’t going to kill anybody, but it was like: Oh, let’s see what these people can show me. I didn’t have any objection to it at all really, ‘cause it was just another thing, you know; by then I still wasn’t able to--I didn’t think that it was interesting to try to control events. It wasn’t interesting at all. I wasn’t exactly passive; I didn’t care that much, ‘cause it was all kind of funny and wonderful [laughing]. But I just didn’t take anything that personally, ‘cause I didn’t have a strong, rock-solid sense of myself as a person.
You say you weren’t going to kill anybody. Was that kind of a set feeling, like your limits or something? Well here I am. I’m in the military. They’re not going to be able to get me to do this, but whatever else is okay.
Yeah. Let’s play your little game and see where it goes. That’s what--I guess that’s what it was. It was also the path of least restraint. I didn’t want to go to Canada, or I didn’t want to shoot my toe off or anything like that; and I wanted to sort of disappear from my life at that point anyway, from my other--so I just thought it was cool! I didn’t tell anybody. [Remembering] Oh no, I didn’t tell anybody that I got my draft notice.
Really?
Yeah. I just thought it would be cool just to completely drop out of sight. And that’s what happened.
Really?
Yeah, yeah. Nobody exactly knew what happened. I mean I had a job, and I gave them a couple weeks notice, but I didn’t tell anybody that I was leaving my job or I didn’t tell anybody that I was going anywhere [laughing]. They just turned around one day and I wasn’t there anymore. I heard from people later on that they just thought it was very . . .
. . . Where did Michael go?
Yeah. They just thought it was--they just didn’t know, and that’s . . .
. . . That’s what you wanted, actually.
Yeah. I thought that would be an interesting thing to happen.
So . . .
. . . But back to--where were we? back in ah . . .
. . . Well, you mentioned the institution.
[Gravely] Yeah.
When did that happen?
So there we are in Olathe and we’re managing a motel. That was nice. That was nice country around there--not developed at all. There were farms and I could wander around, and I was going to school, and then--oh that’s, I guess, fifty-four, fifty-five; and then I became aware that my mother was very sick all the time. She was always going into the hospital, and it turned out that she had breast cancer or some kind of cancer. I didn’t know what kind of cancer then. But just to telescope that whole . . .
. . . Nobody told you?
Oh, I just didn’t know.
[End Tape 1, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:42 PM
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