“Bob Dylan and Me.” From “Memories of a Rotten Childhood”

Last week I formed a poem for dverse from this work below.  It is included in my  unfinished “Memories…Rotten Childhood” and I certainly am old enough to write about my childhood…and some later years.  I thought it would be interesting to post the whole piece, and it also serves as a way to clean the palette of the depressing “Plague of Death”.  Ugh.  Writing such stuff is too close to the bone.

Jane

–

I was fifteen years old and not cool.

Fifteen was after dolls, during horses, and way before boys.  I was a slow learner, combined with a timid manner and a few pimples.  My parents were no help, they were off fighting the war called marriage. We three kids were on the battlefield, carrying water to each side.

At fifteen I was barely holding on to daylight.  Life was getting complicated and I was in a permanent daydream. Now, fifty years later, I understand all this was the natural process of growing up.  Then it was just massive confusion with a good dose of shame to leaven it all.

On top of this there wasn’t any real guidelines for parents back then.  No Dr. Spock or if he was around, my parents certainly didn’t read him.  Most fathers back then were WWII  veterans  and had their own view on childhood trauma. Fully half the men in my father’s B-24 squadron were under twenty. Babies flying bathtubs.  “Buck up and take it like a man”, “wrap a rag around it, it’ll stop bleeding” was what most of us heard from our fathers, and the mothers just looked away and dropped another Miltown.

I’m not much of a better parent today, just with more guilt.  Genes hold like superglue.

I remember lots of rather ‘beat’ parties at our house, where my mother and father would serve white wines and people would sit on the wide plank pine floors. Each year Halloween masquerades for the adults, my mother in fishnet stockings, stiletto heels, a ballet leotard, and for some reason, cat ears on the top of her head.  I must have been pretty young, because my nursery was set up in the future upstairs bathroom.  I remember her leaning over me and the smell of Woodhue floating off her into my mouth as she kissed me good night.  Must have been some party, because I heard her complain chillingly to my father that he had ‘slipped her a Mickey.’  Apparently she had vomited in the one of the four fireplaces downstairs, and blamed my father for her drunkenness.  My mother never got drunk, so this memory remains strong of my childhood.  These things stick because they are the few times I got noticed. Maybe it’s something sensory with the perfume, but I don’t really know.

I also remember the concrete divisions between adults and children.  There was none of today’s behavior asking kids their opinions around the dinner table.  We didn’t have any. We were trying to swim through the deep waters of childhood and adult issues generally elicited a groan of having to think hard, something we only attempted in math.

High school, sometimes for all four years, was brutal.  Too big, too many stairs and too much distraction complete with cynical teachers who should have retired but were hanging on. Where else could they abuse the unworthy?  They were addicted to the power,  while we, their slaves, went under the wire.  The natural order of life back then.  The time of “squat and hug your knees”, the threat of Commies dropping bombs on our baseball fields- all good training for life.

I had a girlfriend in my sophomore year. I can’t remember her name, but except for getting two tickets to the Bob Dylan concert in McCarter Theater at Princeton University, she was unmemorable. I’ll call her Gloria for this story.

We had no idea who Bob Dylan was except for posters glued to walls calling him a  New York Folk Singer.   Both of us were in band or orchestra, depending upon the need of the teacher.  Violin and clarinet were our only forms of music back then.  Radios were tuned by my parents to classical or their big band music.  In fact, the only time I can remember listening to radio was on a Saturday night, when my brothers and I would listen to WOR in New York, and the crazy dj would try to scare us with stories about the Jersey Pine Barren Devil. Can’t remember his or the Devil’s proper names, though.

So Gloria somehow gets two tickets to a Bob Dylan concert.  We, at fifteen, decide our Sunday best would be appropriate. It’s a concert after all, and this signals dress up. On the afternoon before the event, we curled and sprayed and flipped our hair, put on white dresses with pearls and our white low heeled Sunday shoes and went to McCarter Theater.  I don’t remember much about it, except they set up the stage with chairs, right behind Dylan, for the overflow of audience.  Somebody thought it cute to put the two strange girls in matching white dresses right behind the singer.  I remember sitting there very primly, our hands crossed in our laps, trying to take it all in, watching his ass.

The stage lights of course were glaring in our eyes, and drunken frat boys yelling, “Hey! Bobby! Play Blowing in the Wind!”  “Hey, Bobby, get some singing lessons!” “Hey, Bob, …..”  A couple of cans of something were thrown on the stage, probably beer.

I remember Dylan looking mystified as he turned and looked behind him.  I didn’t know the word then, but now I would say his thoughts were clearly: “What the fuck?”  Each time he turned we would beam and clap. He would bow.  We were his own cheering section as the cans of soda and beer came hurling from the balcony.

As I write this, I am laughing but there is also embarrassment: I was such a hick.  I got cooler as the 60s progressed.

Really.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted 2009, 2016

:

Tags: ‘Bob Dylan and Me’ from “Memories of a Rotten Chlldhood”, Adults, childhood, growing up in rural New Jersey, McCarter Theater at Princeton, Princeton, simplier times, the 1960’s., the brutality of High School, The Jersey Pine Barren Devil, WOR radio in NYC

 

Please don’t read my work from the site: JP at Olive Grove.  Jingle Nozelar Yan owns the site and is a thief.    She said  she doesn’t have to ask permission to revise or post your work.  She said she depends upon this. She preys on real poets because she isn’t one.  She refuses to follow the US Copyright laws of the US.  This behavior is insulting to the entire poetry community.  Jingle Bells Yan is no poet.  If you love poetry, avoid her like the plague she is.

‘Bob Dylan and Me’, from “Memories of a Rotten Childhood”

 

 I’ve been working on this book for a while, and just came back to it recently.  It’s pretty raw, and over three, four years, writing changes and you scramble to make the revisions.  I haven’t done much of that but need to.  This ‘Bob Dylan and Me’ is a true story.  Growing up was a time of extreme awkwardness and a lot of embarrassment.  But there really isn’t a way around this.  I feel affection for that little girl who was so clumsy, so cowed by life and circumstance.  All in all, except for most of the adults, it was a pretty good childhood.  Rotten in some ways, but probably no different than the usual for the times.  Simplier, certainly, we didn’t have Ipods or videos, or anything electronic.  We generally had books and the outdoors.  Not a bad way to grow up.

Lady Nyo

–

Bob Dylan and Me

I was fifteen years old and not cool.

Fifteen was after dolls, during horses, and way before boys.  I was a slow learner, combined with a timid manner and a few pimples.  My parents were no help, they were off fighting the war called marriage. We three kids were on the battlefield, carrying water to each side.

At fifteen I was barely holding on to daylight.  Life was getting complicated and I was in a permanent daydream. Now, forty years later, I understand all this was the natural process of growing up.  Then it was just massive confusion with a good dose of shame to leaven it all.

On top of this there wasn’t any real guidelines for parents back then.  No Dr. Spock or if he was around, my parents certainly didn’t read him.  Most fathers back then were WWII  veterans  and had their own view on childhood trauma. Fully half the men in my father’s B-24 squadron were under twenty. Babies flying bathtubs.  “Buck up and take it like a man”, “wrap a rag around it, it’ll stop bleeding” was what most of us heard from our fathers, and the mothers just looked away and dropped another Miltown.

I’m not much of a better parent today, just with more guilt.  Genes hold like superglue.

I remember lots of rather ‘beat’ parties at our house, where my mother and father would serve white wines and people would sit on the wide plank pine floors. Each year Halloween masquerades for the adults, my mother in fishnet stockings, stiletto heels, a ballet leotard, and for some reason, cat ears on the top of her head.  I must have been pretty young, because my nursery was set up in the future upstairs bathroom.  I remember her leaning over me and the smell of Woodhue floating off her into my mouth as she kissed me good night.  Must have been some party, because I heard her complain chillingly to my father that he had ‘slipped her a Mickey.’  Apparently she had vomited in the one of the four fireplaces downstairs, and blamed my father for her drunkenness.  My mother never got drunk, so this memory remains strong of my childhood.  These things stick because they are the few times I got noticed. Maybe it’s something sensory with the perfume, but I don’t really know.

I also remember the concrete divisions between adults and children.  There was none of today’s behavior asking kids their opinions around the dinner table.  We didn’t have any. We were trying to swim through the deep waters of childhood and adult issues generally elicited a groan of having to think hard, something we only attempted in math.

High school, sometimes for all four years, was brutal.  Too big, too many stairs and too much distraction complete with cynical teachers who should have retired but were hanging on. Where else could they abuse the unworthy?  They were addicted to the power,  while we, their slaves, went under the wire.  The natural order of life back then.  The time of “squat and hug your knees”, the threat of Commies dropping bombs on our baseball fields- all good training for life.

I had a girlfriend in my sophomore year. I can’t remember her name, but except for getting two tickets to the Bob Dylan concert in McCarter Theater at Princeton University, she was unmemorable. I’ll call her Gloria for this story.

We had no idea who Bob Dylan was except for posters glued to walls calling him a  New York Folk Singer.   Both of us were in band or orchestra, depending upon the need of the teacher.  Violin and clarinet were our only forms of music back then.  Radios were tuned by my parents to classical or their big band music.  In fact, the only time I can remember listening to radio was on a Saturday night, when my brothers and I would listen to WOR in New York, and the crazy dj would try to scare us with stories about the Jersey Pine Barren Devil. Can’t remember his or the Devil’s proper names, though.

So Gloria somehow gets two tickets to a Bob Dylan concert.  We, at fifteen, decide our Sunday best would be appropriate. It’s a concert after all, and this signals dress up. On the afternoon before the event, we curled and sprayed and flipped our hair, put on white dresses with pearls and our white low heeled Sunday shoes and went to McCarter Theater.  I don’t remember much about it, except they set up the stage with chairs, right behind Dylan, for the overflow of audience.  Somebody thought it cute to put the two strange girls in matching white dresses right behind the singer.  I remember sitting there very primly, our hands crossed in our laps, trying to take it all in, watching his ass.

The stage lights of course were glaring in our eyes, and drunken frat boys yelling, “Hey! Bobby! Play Blowing in the Wind!”  “Hey, Bobby, get some singing lessons!” “Hey, Bob, …..”  A couple of cans of something were thrown on the stage, probably beer.

I remember Dylan looking mystified as he turned and looked behind him.  I didn’t know the word then, but now I would say his thoughts were clearly: “What the fuck?”  Each time he turned we would beam and clap. He would bow.  We were his own cheering section as the cans of soda and beer came hurling from the balcony.

As I write this, I am laughing but there is also embarrassment I was such a hick.  I got cooler as the 60s progressed.

Really.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted 2009

“Memories of a Rotten Childhood”

A couple of years ago I started “Rotten”…it was in the summer because summer always makes me remember my childhood, my litter mates, my friends growing up in the wilds of central New Jersey.  I thought I had posted this, but I can’t find it, so I will start again.  Some of it was damn funny, some tragic, and in some places I had to change the names to protect the guilty.  But it was good to remember these (some) dead people, and it  threw me back many years where life was very different.  Some of those who are reading are still alive, or at least they seem alive, as I talk to them infrequently….but you never really know.  I have to check myself at times to know  what is alive and what isn’t…..

Lady Nyo

MEMORIES OF A ROTTEN CHILDHOOD

They are dead, at least the important ones, those who brought color to my black and white childhood.  Now ghosts but still haunting. Sometimes in the morning while drinking coffee, something crosses my mind, startling me with its clarity. It floats or flashes, depending upon its whim.  Then, for a time, we are together again.

Childhood is not the nice time of casually growing up. It’s the time of peer pressure, embarrassment, humiliation and some violence. That’s just the children, your friends, the ones who throw the rocks. Adults are much more savage.  All this life and wisdom, and when they pass casual judgement on your behavior, (meaning your essence) how do you fight that?  You don’t.  You roll over and something nasty is injected for the rest of your life until you come to some understanding about those particular toxins.

There was little to do growing up in the countryside of New Jersey.  Cows to chase, polluted rivers and canals to swim in and skate on, marked by chemical dumping from the 3M mining upstream.  We shouldn’t be surprised by those of us who are dropped by cancer.  Radon lurked in the basements of every house like  Leni-Lanape Indians bent on massacre though none had existed for 200 years in the state.

Nothing to do on the surface, but roiling right under the skin was sex with boys and girls who finally outgrew the pimples and greasy hair and the painful teenage years.  We matured into awkward adults, and either scattered promptly to the four winds or we ended up entrenched, expecting to take our places in a society whose vigor had leached out years before.  We looked at our parents and our future was bleak.  There was little to do except go to college, where we hoped our lives would begin.  Chasing Duncan Campbell’s milk cows from the winter pasture to the summer pasture held little promise.

I think we were all holding out for sex, real sex that loomed on the horizon. We didn’t talk about it much but we demonstrated our blooming interest when alone, a hidden and shameful secret carried on with glazed eyes in barns, in pastures and down by the river.

When we were young, it wasn’t sex. It was fumbling around in tents, ‘you show me yours, I’ll show you mine’.  I never really saw anything of merit, but perhaps it was the darkness of the tent or the unimpressive dimensions of what I was offered.

For a couple of years during the summer, with a hand-held 8 mm camera in Olsen’s basement, we filmed “Frankenstein”.  I always got to be the nurse, dressed in one of my mother’s nurse uniforms, with an old, starched cap on my head.  Silent movies, embarrassing to watch, painful just because.  The biggest guy, David, not to be confused with my brother, also David, the shortest guy, got to be eternally Frankenstein, moving with stiffened joints, his mother’s lipstick stolen for the scars.  I got to flap my hands a lot in distress, either what they were doing to poor Frank, or because he was threatening me, backing me into a basement wall. The script hardly changed, never much variety to it, but hey, we were kids and were easily entertained.

There* was* a subtle difference when one day I was tied to the table, still the nurse, filmed with my mouth open, screaming silently into the camera, Frankenstein threatening my carefully teased hair. I can remember feeling something akin to arousal, as IF  I was on the cusp of something.

For a week, the guys, about five of the neighborhood children, decided they LIKED tying down the nurse and threatening her from all angles.  Those films still exist in Olsen’s basement, but some adult had the good sense to hide the camera.  Frank lives on in all of us, a little bit of the terror of childhood that brightened our boring lives.

As we grew older, same ol’ same ol’ of childhood started smoothing out. Boys who knocked you down, now apologized for pushing you in hockey.  You had two responses, giggling and act like a girl, or raising your hockey stick and wacking ‘em.  Depending upon the history of the boy, you had a choice.  That was power.

The fellows you played with in “decent” games, sledding down Olsen’s hill, skating and playing hockey on Madsen’s pond, suddenly changed.  Our childhood activities changed, we all transformed.  Into what, we weren’t yet sure, but like growing pains, we knew something was happening.  Sometimes you were the last to know among your friends.

At eighteen life became complex.  Perhaps it is best blamed on the sex hormones that seemed to effect us all, especially in the sultry days of summer, when lying around played right into exploring more than your navel.  For some reason, ‘prone’ around boys, the ones you had known all your life had a new meaning.

But the guilt of society and mostly that your parents would kill you stopped much exploring.  You were always aware you were ‘saving’ something for marriage….a little like Green Stamps.  Perhaps you were collecting a sticky, green virtue to be cashed in when the Gods (Parents) approved and finally signed off.

You just kept your knees tightly together and waited.  Forever, it seemed.

Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2009