Some of my memories are only of the absurd situations I got into. We drank a lot of beer. I once had a case of beer all to myself. I decided to drink as much of that case as I could just to see how drunk I could get. It wasn't simply to get drunk… it wanted to experience how drunk I could get. But I didn't experience it because I wasn't there for it. I passed out and woke up, feeling as though I had been gypped.
I once tried to talk philosophy with one of the college boys from the basement when we had been drinking beer. I confessed that I was once a Catholic… asserting my agnosticism or even atheism. This guy was a divinity student and would surely have a good take on what I was saying. I was dismayed at his response when he snidely remarked, "Once you are a Catholic, you are always a Catholic."
"That can't be, what of free choice?" I tried not to sound smart and not slur.
"By the time you reach the age of reason they have already indoctrinated you and there is no way that you can ever change that. Don't talk to me about atheism. You are a Catholic atheist… and, if you ask me, they are the second worst ones." He seemed to be trying to not only dismiss me but chiefly to get away from this conversation with an untrained, in philosophy and undisciplined, thinker.
"The second worst ones?" I wasn't about to allow him to get away, so I asked, "Which atheists are the worst?"
"Russian Orthodox… right after Catholics are the Zionist atheists…"
I'd never heard anyone say these kinds of things. I was thrilled… a real discussion!
"Think about it," he continued in a sneer, "Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin… One or the other… you're all the problem."
"You… you mean you too when you say all of us?"
"No, I am a Quaker." He walked back into his room, before he closed the door he added, "We don't have our minds infiltrated with authoritarian bullshit like you do."
I hoped we would engage in an intelligent conversation like we did with the undergrads from Gonzaga at the Red Lion. After all, this guy was in college and I thought everyone in college would have to be both rich and intelligent... but we would not College was a place at that time, I believed, to be out of reach for me. My best hopes were for a sports scholarship, trade school, to go to work at a union job where my father worked at Kaisers, or to go into the military. My grades certainly came nowhere near good enough to get into a university. I’d dropped out of track and field so there was no hope for a scholarship there. Even though I had an abhorrent distaste for everything religious, I resented this man's anti-Catholic bias because he directed this bias at me personally: like I had no choice in it regardless. It was the mark of Cain embedded in my soul by the priests and nuns and that there was no hope for me to be anything… atheist or not just because my foundation is Catholic. I don't think we had more than two words beyond hello and good-bye after that.
The rest of my experience in Dayton was about working twelve hours a day and mostly getting drunk. We made friends with other white kids from god knows where. One, Teddy, was from somewhere in Florida… a rich, flaming, out of the closet, homosexual... who’d driven a magenta, convertible, Dodge Dart all the way to Dayton. I have no idea why or how he’d chosen, of all places, Dayton to work in the fields. It was my first contact with what would become to be called Gay. He was witty, effeminate, smart, and kind soul that I could hardly help but like.
I was still so very much in love with Linda that I took a break from the harvest after she called me to come up north for a weekend of love-making. Teddy actually took time off to drive me up there to meet with her. Like I said, the guy was a great soul. It was going to be the last time I would be intimate with Linda but I didn’t know it then. We had sex but we didn’t make love. She splayed out on the edge of her parent’s bed the first time and I pounded out an ejaculation… I might as well had been masturbating but we made it a couple more times... there was no more thrill of the romance… no poetry… not much conversation.
“I’ve been accepted at San Francisco Art Institute.” She said, as we sat at the kitchen table where I’d learned to make German Pancakes that magical morning before this adventure... my first adventure... in love had begun.
“I’m planning to go there after the pea harvest.” I said and sensed… was it an expression? I could feel by my con-man antennae that she wasn’t all that excited about my plans so I added, “It is either there or New York.”
“Breaking away from Spokane… Both of us.” She was unexpectedly gentle as she smiled kindly adding, “I want to be in new territory… with new friends and new lovers.”
“Does that mean you won’t want to be seeing me there?”
“Oh, Max, my favorite jock artist… it is a big world out there that neither of us knows… Isn’t it better to explore it alone?”
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