The Songwriter's Son, My Life, as Near as I Can Remember it, Part One

When I was a kid, my dad had this great job. He got to tell people stories for a living, and three times a week, we’d invite people to go with us to sit and listen to him tell these amazing tales, and explain how they related to our everyday lives. To me, it was the coolest thing a guy could do.

And, when he said that every word of it happened exactly the way it was written down, I believed it. I believed every word of it, and I let it sink in deep. That’s not to say I didn’t have questions. One of my biggest was why, after God put everybody in a garden, with only one rule, don’t touch this tree, we ended up out in the big world with rules against pretty much everything.

As a kid, it felt like the whole simple system God started with had gotten flipped on its head and the one thing you couldn’t do, had turned into a few things you could do and a whole lot of stuff you’d better not. To me, it would have made a lot more sense for God to just build a fence around that tree, and put a padlock on it. Because, even in 1978, there were a lot of fences and a lot of places you weren’t allowed to go, especially as a kid.

What I didn’t understand then, although I’m sure my father explained it, was that volunteerism was something of a big deal with God. He knew that forcing someone into obedience didn’t lead to love, respect, or relationship. A fence would have destroyed the entire concept of free will. Even paradise, without a choice, isn’t really the same.

When I was eight years old, we moved to a place called Rawlins Wyoming, and my thoughts on fences got a lot more confused. There weren’t any hardly anywhere. I’d grown up in Iowa and Nebraska to that that point and every farm was walled in with wire. It was just what you do, but up there, you could stand on a mountain and look a hundred miles with no fences in any direction, except where there were cattle, or if the government was involved.

I started thinking about it. It seemed that people understood the land wasn’t really theirs, or not in the, “Get off my lawn” sort of way that people in cities think of it. The stuff, the minerals, the livestock, their homes, were all sacred in a way, but a man couldn’t violate those things just by driving down a road, or taking a hike across a piece of desert. He had to actually do something against you for you to get bothered by it.

But, that’s not how I saw God. To me, God was the rules. He was the heavy, the lawgiver, the one who decided right from wrong and he was upstairs, with a giant sharpie, marking out all the places it was not okay for me to be, and writing lists of all the things I shouldn’t say.

At my house, my mother was the keeper of that list and it was a long list. If you violated it, the punishment was known, soap in your mouth. Her list of obscenities was extensive and included every alternative there was, including gee, gosh, golly, darn, dang, crap, gah, heck and if you said “shoot” angrily enough, it might count, depending on the day.

We didn’t ever really discuss the really big things you shouldn’t say. They got labels, like “the D word”, never mind the “F” word, I would never really remember hearing that one until one day at Rowdy and Dawn’s, whose parents collected Jim Beam bottles and velvet Elvis paintings, and who’s dad drove a Mustang Fastback, which I was not as impressed with as I should have been, a neighbor kid showed me their middle finger and Rowdy showed his back and I did too, but he stopped me.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said, with a serious look on his face.

“Why not?” I laughed, if it was good enough for the neighbor kid and Rowdy, it seemed logical it was good enough for me.

“Well, Darla (he always called his mother by her name, I’m not sure if that was a step parent thing, or a “cool” thing) says I can’t cuss when the preacher’s kids are here, and that’s you. And if I can’t cuss, you definitely should not be giving people “the finger”, it’s about the worst cuss there is.”

“It means the “F” word,” his younger sister, who must have been about 5 or 6, but always seemed much older and was always trying to flirt with me, chimed in.

At this point, I remember “Love Me Tender” pouring out of their back door, Elvis had died a year to the day before this , and the picture on the front page of the local paper on August 16th, 1978, had led me to believe he’d been hit by a train. Their mother had it blaring from the eight-track, and she was in mourning. She’d opened the door and stood there on the steps in cut-off jeans and a black tank top with Elvis’ face on it, her mascara streaking down her face, a cigarette held in her free hand as she leaned on the door a little.

“Was those neighbor kids bothering you again?”
“Yeah, they said f*ck to Mark,” Rowdy informed her. The word kind of hung there, in the Nebraska summer air, shimmery and exciting. I don’t ever recall having heard it until that exact moment, and I’m not even sure if the neighbor kid, engaged in a dispute over territory in a fort, built along a wooden fence with access from both yards, had uttered it. All I remember is the finger.

Truth was, the finger and I had a longer history, although it had never been explained until that day. I’d used it once, by accident, demonstrating a “pressure point” technique, whereby, if you pushed with both middle fingers, on both sides of a person’s head right behind their ears, you could render them unconscious, or possibly dead, if you did it right. I’d been showing Mrs. Van Curen, the wife of my dad’s new ministry partner, how to apply the technique when she saw which finger my six-year-old hand had chosen and flipped out.

“You can’t use that finger,” she’d said coldly. The way I remember her, that was the way she said everything. I didn’t know much about the Van Curens, except their daughter Leah and I were friends, even though she was younger than me, and I’d cried when she had to be taken to the hospital and put under an oxygen tent for pneumonia, and everyone thought she might die.

“You have to use that finger,” I explained, carrying on with my demonstration, undeterred by her reaction. “It’s the only one that will give you enough pressure.” I was pretty sure that was right, because Mike Webb, a college kid that used to come and stay in the summers to help with my dad’s work, and do VBS had showed it to me, and he seemed like a pretty straight up guy, that wouldn’t teach me anything bad.

Mrs. Van Curen had placed me in the corner and I remember sensing that my mother, although polite about it, was never that pleased with her actions on the matter when she found me in the corner, but no one would explain to me what was so wrong with the middle finger. I remember thinking that it would have been easier to be born without it, if it was going to cause so much trouble.

But, that seemed about par for the course with God, inventing things that were bad, then springing it on you, after you’d already argued with a grownup, which is probably the bigger reason I ended up in the corner.
Back to Darla on the back step, in her tanktop and cutoffs, with the cigarette, ash dangling, hand on hip.

“Rowdy Lee!” she half sighed, “how many times I got to tell you, that’s not a good word. You’re talking to your dad about that when he gets home.”

“Okay.”

“Hey! You kids get back in your own yard!” she snarled, to the older boys, who were now occupying the entire fort.

One of them shot her the finger, she moved to come off the step, and they scrambled, yelling cuss words as they climbed up and in through a back window. I remember three of them, shaggy hair, racing stripe sneakers, the window came down and one skinny face pressed up against the glass, with a thump, both middle fingers came up beside his head, as he sneered, then turned away from the window.

“What does f*ck mean?” I asked, when Darla was back in the house, the sound of Elvis cut off by the closing of the inside door.

“It’s about sex,” Rowdy said, sighing, as if the topic bored him.

“Yeah, it’s what grownups do to make babies,” Dawn sighed, looking at me oddly. I’m half convinced she’d been introduced to things she shouldn’t have known at that age, which makes me want to find her and make sure she got out okay.

I had a lot more questions, but at that moment, the boys next door released their dog, and we ran into the house to the safety of Rowdy’s room, where we listened to Disco Mickey Mouse and played with Adventure People.

That same summer, a kid across the street from the church my dad worked at, and we lived next door to, introduced me to female anatomy. His dad drank beer in the front yard, and operated a Bobcat tractor, which he brought home once, to do some landscaping. We sat on the curb for hours, watching him zip around the yard, moving dirt, pulling up old clothesline poles.

“Hey! You kids wanna see something?” the tractor operator asked the growing audience of mostly boys, lining the curb.

“Yeah!”

He bit down harder on his cigarette to keep it clamped tightly, fastened the tractor’s seatbelt and rolled up a pile of dirt, tucking the tractor’s blade in, so that it rolled backwards in a complete somersault and landed on its treads, he spun in a 360, kicking up a cloud of dust. That somersault was one of the most amazing things my seven-year-old brain could absorb, but it in no way compared to what I was about to be exposed to.

I don’t remember the kid’s name, I guess he was a couple of years older than me, and he had an older brother, who was always mean to me, in the cold, disinterested way of older kids. But, one day, the younger one showed up in my yard and offered to reveal something. He said he could get one of his dad’s magazines and show me what girls looked like naked. I don’t remember being that interested at the time, but, he was older than me, and obviously from a family that knew things mine didn’t, so I said yes.

He ran across the street and snuck around the back of his house. His brother sneered, shook his head and walked off down the block, bouncing a basketball and blowing a bubble, something I wished I could do. One handed dribbling was something of a miracle that I could barely manage, and gum bubbles wouldn’t be a thing for me for a year or so, but both at once, wow.

The kid came back, lifting the back of his tank-top to reveal a rolled magazine in the back of his shorts. He looked around, furtively, like a “dealer” in a cop show on television, then led me around to the side of the church, which was next door to my house, where thick cedar hedges grew, creating a dark, cool tunnel against the brick foundation of the building’s wall where I knew from experience, you could remain hidden for hours, but still stay inside the boundaries my mother had set. I slid into the hiding place and he handed me the magazine, offering to stand watch.

As I think back on it, I’m pretty sure my father’s office window was right above my hiding spot. At any rate, he was right on the other side of that wall, writing a sermon, or counseling someone, completely oblivious to what his seven year old son was getting into.

Now, as the father of eight of my own children, I’d like to catch this kid. I was way too young, and probably should not have been interested in what I found there, but I remember it like it was yesterday. It would be two years later, in a school cafeteria before I had any idea of what it meant, or why I liked it, I just knew that I did.

I didn’t get much time with that magazine, but as any man can tell you, those images become burned into your memory. As he stood by the bushes, a truck stopped in the street.
“Hey, what are you doing over here?” it was the kid’s father, home from work in the middle of the day.

“Playing,” the kid said. My heart pounded. Although I’d never had a word said to me about the magazines we passed in gas stations, I knew one thing, if my mother found out, I’d never live to see my seventh birthday, where I was pretty sure I would get my first two wheeled bike. I didn’t move.

Finally, the truck pulled away and that kid took the magazine, rolling it quickly, he ran toward the back of his house. There was yelling over there, but I guess he didn’t rat me out, because my mother didn’t kill me. They moved not long after that and someone with no kids moved in. It would be years before I was faced with those images again, but now the covers of the magazines held my interest. I’d peaked behind the curtain, way too early, and I wanted to see more.

I don’t remember if it was that Sunday, but soon after that event, my dad told a story about this guy, Abraham, who made a promise to his eyes, not to look at other women besides his wife. I remember the word “lust” coming up a lot, and I’m not sure who he was preaching to, but it felt like he knew. Those two ideas, Abraham’s promise and men’s magazines would forever be connected in my young mind and I promised myself right there, I’d never look again.

As most American men will admit, that’s a promise that rarely gets kept long term, especially in youth. It was pretty much a miracle between my curiosity, and my ability to get girlfriends, from as young as four, to kiss me, that I didn’t end up having kids before it was time, but I didn’t. That’s probably a testament to my parents explanation of how valuable your first sexual encounter was, and I didn’t want to waste it.

So, my ideas about right and wrong were largely shaped by my dad and those stories. I know a lot of preachers I wouldn’t trust with money, women, liquor, or drugs, but my dad was different, he was one of the good guys and that cost him a lot later in life. But, for now, it was what I admired about him. He said what he meant and he meant what he said, and bigger than that, he did what he said whenever it was within his power. He was a man of his word.
Me, I always had a little tug-of-war going with the truth. By that I mean a battle between true conviction, things I naturally felt bad about, like people getting hurt by someone, or someone ripping people off, and things I felt guilty about, but mostly because I didn’t want to get caught, like that magazine, and saying cuss words when my mom wasn’t around.

Consequently, I spent a lot of time dealing with the idea that maybe I just wasn’t a good enough person. It never really occurred to me that others might struggle in the same way. It wasn’t something you were supposed to talk about anyway, it was something you had to conquer and mostly on your own. My dad obviously had it all together in that department and if I wanted to be like him, I needed to figure it all out.