Growing Up

I once took an unbelievable trip to Mexico with a friend when I was 19. I had been kicked out of Dartmouth for a variety of excesses and at my father’s suggestion had enrolled in the Marine Corps reserves and was to be inducted to go off to boot camp. However, the Sunday I was to be sworn in I had a funny feeling this was not such a good idea and I didn’t go. The sergeant called up when I didn’t show and I told him I wasn’t coming. He was pissed but I was safely miles away and knew I had made the right decision. No cannon fodder I. My parents were tweaked, mostly because it didn’t look good to have the U.S. Marines pissed at the Ballantyne’s. My father simply said he didn’t want me commuting to work in Manhattan on the same train with him every morning so I went and packed up a suitcase and the next day entrained or Washington where two of my best high school drinking buddies had set up ‘home’. One was working and the other was independently wealthy from both his parent’s deaths and was meandering through school halfheartedly. So, we became a reasonably happy threesome.

Many, many hilarious incidents ensued over the next two years fueled mostly by alcohol in any number of imbibable forms. Fly acquired his nickname by climbing drunk right up the side of a 2 story apartment building gripping only the decorative bricks that protruded ½” from the corners of the walls. His climb was so we could get into some girl’s apartment who were so horrified at our shenanigans they tried to lock us out. As I recall these girls had come over to the apartment and Fly and Berger had gotten drunk so the girls wanted to go home. Berger and Fly refused to drive them and demanded they walk the five or so miles. I magnanimously told them I’d drive them and got Berger’s keys. He worked for the Buick regional office so we were always driving around in brand new cars and Fly had a new Stingray, the first of the modern Corvettes. His would do about 150 mph, I recall him doing 135 past the apartment building one night and he was easily able to outrun the New Jersey Statetroopers who then drove those big Chryslers that would do a good 130 if the troopers weren’t too chicken thinking of their homes and loved ones. Anyway, the two girls got into the wagon and I got on the road back to DC and put the accelerator to the floor and didn’t let up. The wagon rolled up to about 110 or so, the girls were screaming at their supposed savior and I was keeping a very drunk straight poker face. After the girls ran into their building yelling at me that I was crazy, Fly and Berger rolled up in the Corvette and Fly climbed up the wall of the building onto their balcony and knocked on the slider, totally freaking them out when they thought they were safe from us. Berger and I were on the lawn yelling up at him, “Hey, the human fly! Get ‘em Fly!”

I got a menial job for $85 per week wrapping paper in a printer’s mailroom. This printer did a lot, as in millions of dollars, of printing for my father’s corporation and Wayne, my father, awarded the contracts. I’m still not sure how it happened but the three of us got drunk one night and decided to go to Mexico for ‘a while’. Berger had to work so Fly and I took off in the Stingray. I told Berger to call my work and tell them I wouldn’t be in as I was having my stomach pumped. He did and I guess the general manager of the printer called up every hospital in the Washington area trying to find me before calling my father in New York telling him I had disappeared. No one knew where I was for weeks. Anyway, Fly and I drove and drank for about 6 glorious sunny days before arriving in Monterey,Mexico where we parked the Stingray in a fancy hotel parking garage and drank for a few days. I can vividly recall pulling into a gas station in Biloxi,Mississippi and opening the door of the low slung ‘Vette and empty Jax beer cans falling out, clattering to the ground. I LOVE that drive along the Gulf coast, the Florida panhandle, Mobile, Biloxi, Baton Rouge.

Six years ago I was driving cross country with one Elizabeth, who foolishly thought she would like to move to Laguna Beach with me. She had spent a week camping with me in the Sierras the summer I lived in my tent and a friend of mine up in the desert had done a remarkable healing on Elizabeth’s cancer. We were driving her Honda and I drove straight through from West Palm Beach, Florida to Houston, Texas. I was 49 years old at the time and she was 34. I thought nothing of driving like that, like Fly and I had driven. Elizabeth was wrecked. Her back hurt. I told her to lie on top of the luggage and sleep. She slept through the one stop I made at a huge truck stop diner in Baton Rouge. I went in and ordered three bowls of grits, mixed in my own raisins, 4 or 5 pats of foiled butter and ate it all. Then I went into the parking lot and did a little yoga and off I went. The sun was just coming up as we blasted across the Mississippi River with me happy as a clam to be out on the open road. Elizabeth became more and more furious. When we got to Houston I slept for about 12 hours straight in an easy chair I sat down in. When I got up Elizabeth was threatening to return to New Jersey and her Mom’s house and leave me stranded in Houston. Her cousin, with whom we were staying, was a prison guard and had left his 9 millimeter Beretta automatic pistol on the kitchen counter. I had the fleeting thought that I should either shoot Elizabeth or shoot myself. Instead, I called a friend long distance in California and a few minutes later I was OK. Elizabeth flipped again when all the cousins had a Texas style barbecue for us and I opened a can of garbanzo beans at the dinner table and ate them as I am a total vegetarian. Elizabeth and I only made it to Albuquerque before she turned back. A friend later suggested that I should have weaned Elizabeth away from her mother a little at a time by taking her away for two weeks first, then three. Two years later I visited this friend several times in the Orange County jail where he had been put by HIS girlfriend. TWICE. All charges got dropped but he was in for months until it got settled. So much for good advice and so much for the Gulf coast.

Fly and I were considered minor celebs wherever we went as Route 66 was then popular on TV and the Stingray model of the Corvette was brand new and Fly’s was the first seen in person by everyone. I still recall floating slowly past this little Mexican kid in Laredo having just crossed the border and his eyes getting real big and he looks at us go by and says, “Hey! Stingray!.” From this and a few non-automotive related incidents Fly got that as another nickname. This was 1963 and down south it was to be almost another 10 years before the 1955 Chevy was no longer the most popular single car on the road AND they all wanted to race the ‘Ray. As I recall, the ‘Ray was never beaten on the open road or the streets of Washington including the 427 Ford we drag raced right through the middle of downtown one night.

Anyway, Monterey was fun. We stayed a few days in a nice hotel. I found a great bar a block away and drank there all night. The urinal was a tiled trough right in the barroom so when you had to pee you just walked over to the wall. It was real homey for me as Animal House at Dartmouth had a big drain around the perimeter of the basement bar where most of us peed and threw up. In my favorite place back home in upper middle class suburbia, Foley’s Bar and Grill in Pleasantville, NY, sometimes I’d just stay at my barstool and piss on the floor. What did I care. Foley’s is where I met my now ex-wife. Carol and her sister Margaret were drinking shots of tequila with Lowenbrau chasers when I ambled over and introduced myself. This was one of the few drinking contests I ever lost. 
Back to Monterey. It was about 7 AM when I finally finished up drinking one fine weekday morning and I recall Mexicans in buses going to work looking in disgust at me, the ugly Americano, barfing on the sidewalk. We left town after lunch one day. We were having a respectable lunch in the hotel and Fly had ordered arroz con pollo, chicken and rice. He didn’t want much of it so I convinced him to take it with him so he shoved the rice and pieces of chicken into the pocket of the Army field jacket he was wearing. We went out on the street and hailed a cab and I directed the cabby to take us to the edge of town. We got out and proceeded to hitchhike 1440 miles to Acapulco. It was a blast.

Fly and I found a great hotel in Acapulco for about $1.50 a day and spent 2 weeks there eating, drinking and going to the beach. The hotel owner began to bug us to pay our bill after 2 weeks so I called home collect from Acapulco and asked my parents to wire me $300 so Fly and I could continue vacationing and get out of the country. I still recall the “Oh! Oh! Wayne, Wayne come here” from my mother when the operator asked if she would accept a collect call from Acapulco, Mexico. 
We left a few days later and, feeling flush, flew to Monterey. The pilot finally landed the ancient DC-4 on the third pass after coming within 50 feet of the ground twice and then applying full power and climbing up again, for no reason ever explained to anyone. You should have heard all these grown men saying their prayers in Spanish.

More driving, driving, driving and Fly and I arrive back in DC and one day I float back into work to wrap paper and printed matter again as though nothing had happened. No one ever said a word to me about being away. Codependent wimps. A few weeks later the entire company staff was given an aptitude test for computers, one of the first commercial applications in the world. I passed, at the top, of course, and so began my career as a computer programmer and systems designer. I was able to drive up to New York and bring my motorcycle down to DC in one of Berger’s station wagons. Then the wild stuff really began. I still recall shortly before getting kicked out of the apartment complex testing my motorcycle in the parking lot and cramming the throttle full on while fiddling with the carburetor. I looked up and a woman had thrown her two bags of groceries into the air and just jumped out of my way. I passed the groceries eye level in midair on their way down and within a few inches of the woman. I fixed whatever the problem with the carburetor was though. Fly and I found a rooming house across the street from the zoo in DC proper for $20 a week for a nice big room with private bath and we began much more genteel drinking in Georgetown and upper Connecticut avenue.

I rode my motorcycle day and night, winter and summer. Frequently, I was so drunk I could barely walk, but I could always ride. Once, I sort of passed out after kicking the Gold Star. It didn’t start and I came down on the seat and sat there immobilized as the bike slowly fell over. I hit the pavement full on with my left elbow, pulled myself out from under, righted the bike and tried again. I usually closed the bars at 2 AM and then rode over to one of those diner type places to eat. These were the type of places that made omelets by whizzing eggs in Hamilton Beach malted milk mixers then pouring the mess on a greasy grill. Sometimes we’d go over to the black section of town, safer then than now, and eat scrapple and Taylorham and chitllins and eggs. Fly’s late night favorite was one of those cheap hamburger joints, 10 for a dollar at one time. We called ‘em deathballs and they were about the size of silver dollars. Remember them? Before Lyndon Johnson devalued our currency to fight the Viet Cong. One time the landlady had put Fly in another room as he had been away traveling for some weeks. This pissed us off so one night when Fly and I came back drunk to the rooming house we went into this kids room with Fly’s 30-30 rifle and put it to his head and told him he had to change rooms. We were just screwing around but this kid, Alvin, I think, from West Virginia was so scared he moved out totally the next day and didn’t say a word. I recall us telling him we’d ‘get’ him if he ever said anything to the Burn’s, the landlords.

The Burn’s tolerated me even though I was always wetting my bed. I hadn’t always been a bed wetter; I started when I was 18 and ‘Dump truck’, the president of Animal House, had beaten me up on the Friday night of the Dartmouth Winter carnival, or carnivoral, as I called it. I was pissing in the gutter of the bar while ‘Dump Truck’ was talking to the weekend’s chaperones nearby, the parents of one of our fraternity brothers. I came back to the fraternity later with a dagger I had in my room and tried to knife him. ‘Truck’ foolishly held up his hands and said “OK, go ahead.” A campus police auxiliary told me to go home, so I did. That was the first time I ever wet my bed. I continued until I was 31 and finally stopped drinking. Anyway, the Burns used to write me notes about my ‘personal habits’, I would frequently have to sleep on the box spring for days at a time while my mattress was on its side near the window drying out and finally the Burns put a plastic sheet on my bed. I assuaged the 70 year old black maid we had by giving her a huge 25 pound fresh turkey at Thanksgiving from the owner of the printing company’s farm. Anna never complained about us again. We also began to leave Anna money which Mrs. Burns didn’t like as she paid her so little. 
Fly left for overseas, the Army, and a girlfriend from a Catholic school nearby whom he ended up marrying. I ended up at Burn’s by myself for another almost year, drinking up a storm at the Oxford Tavern right across from the zoo, living with an older guy from Scranton, Pa who stopped going to work and finally he ended up living in Rock Creek Park. I got a girlfriend, my first, as I had never had time for such stuff before while drinking. She got pregnant 3 times in the year or so we were together. She had one abortion at 5 or 6 months and psychics frequently tell me the kid’s spirit is still around me. She never told me about this until long afterwards as I was in the Army and didn’t know. We had gone to New York City for a party and on the way home to my parent’s house in the NY suburbs she mentioned it and said the fetus had been old enough to bury. She refused to tell me the kid’s name so I told Betsy I was going to kill her and sped the car up to 100 or so and then jammed on the brakes. I had to do this 3 times before she finally told me. Peter. This was before seat belts.

I eventually had to go on active duty for 6 months in the Reserves to avoid Vietnam and some time after that got back into Dartmouth to continue my 'education' after an exciting two years growing up in Washington, DC. I didn’t drink for about 3 months after I got back to college, went back for my senior year, didn’t graduate as expected, for a variety of excesses, a week before my parents arrived for my father’s 30^th reunion - and he was the class president. I showed them. I finally did get my degree in 1993, 29 years after I was originally supposed to. I appealed to the college’s president but had to wait until all the professors in the chemistry department who remembered me had not only retired but also died! F’ em.

If you bring forth what is within you

What is within you will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you

What you do not bring forth will destroy you.

The Gospel of Thomas as quoted in ‘Conscious Dreaming’ by Robert Moss

‘He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Mt 10:39