Chapter 2
Life on My Own
I had great parents and that’s why I don’t want to talk about their divorce. In divorce there are no winners and talking about it makes the people involved look like bad guys. In my mind there were no bad guys over the next several years just a lot of atypical behavior on the part of both my parents. Everyone’s great friends now so why ruin it with shitty memories that have no good purpose.
There are no details of my adolescence I can expound upon without casting one or both of my parents in a bad light and that simply would not be fair. Suffice to say a teenage boy not properly supervised is bound to take the wrong path in life and this boy was no exception.
My brother and I lived with my mom in the beach house in New Smyrna. When I was thirteen my parents tried to reconcile and I stayed in New Smyrna with a school friend. We smoked cigarettes, skipped school; hitchhiked everywhere and stole cars at night for excitement.
By the time I was sixteen I was a six foot tall, skinny long haired biker living in Titusville with another friend and his parents. The following year I moved back to New Smyrna to live with my mom and her new husband. That sort of thing pretty much covers the school years.
I graduated high school, fell in love, married, and became a licensed general contractor by the age of nineteen. My ability to become a contractor was motivated by laziness. I suffered from an intractable fear of physical exertion. The application to take the exam required a minimum of four years experience in a supervisory capacity in construction. I was eighteen when I applied to take the exam. How the state thought an eighteen year old kid had four years experience in anything is beyond me, but they fell for it. I took the test three times in six months before I passed it. Two months after my nineteenth birthday I was building houses and going to college full time. I was working hard and had two stepchildren to help support.
My wife was a human-dynamo. My friends would use the phrase “Damn Yankee” because not only was she from the north but had decided to stay in the south, hence the added condemnation of the noun. She was Italian American and from the north east. Her family was well connected and I don’t mean in a good way. I won’t go into that out of my respect for her and her family and a healthy concern for my personal safety. They had quite an influence on this small town boy. They helped me gain a wider view of the world. Mostly my attitude and perception of people and my perspective view of law enforcement. The first was quite helpful, the latter as it would turn out, not so much.
The mid seventies in Florida were extremely difficult times especially in our area. NASA had canceled the Apollo program affecting all of east central Florida. Half of Titusville moved out the next day. Many people abandoned their homes leaving the key in the front door lock. Lots of local boys had gone to Houston, Texas to find work because of the oil boom caused by shortages.
I too tried this. Without wanting to offend the fine people of the great state of Texas, this trip didn’t work out for me. There were miles and miles of houses under construction at the same time. The problem I had was that I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. They needed carpenters and concrete finishers badly and I guess that is the reason I kept getting hired. But this is what usually happened; try to picture me, a skinny six foot two blond haired white boy standing high up in the rafters with three or four five foot tall Mexicans, most of them ten years older than me, taking a measurement for the cut man on the ground below. He is standing down there beside the saw horses with a speed square in one hand and a measuring tape in the other. He keeps looking up at me and shouting, “Darme las meditas, bato. Darme las meditas, pendejo!” No clue. I just keep looking at the amused brown faces around me and say nothing. We all come down for our ten o’clock break and the foreman hands me a check for about twenty bucks after taxes and points to my truck, “Adios, guero.” Lucky for him I did know what adios meant. On the positive side I was able to make enough for gas to get back home. I needed to try something else.
I don’t know about you, but that last thought usually precedes a bad idea for me. And this time the bad idea was a whopper. My wife had a knack for meeting and befriending the criminal element. Where she came from almost everyone was a criminal, so I guess she just felt more comfortable with people like that. You know, they reminded her of home.
She and a partner owned a little beauty shop that by now was at least keeping us fed, barely. After my failed trip to Texas we were even more strapped than before. Her partner’s sugar daddy, Jerry, was the largest cocaine dealer in the area. I actually got along famously with him. I certainly never had to pay for cocaine when the two of them were around and for some time now they were always around.
One night we were all playing cards and having a few drinks and a lot of cocaine. This had become something of a routine with the four of us. Anyway, the wife and I had been whining incessantly about our poverty and pathetic prospects when Jerry said, “What about that bouncer guy you told me about?”
“What?” I said puzzled, “Bouncer guy? What bouncer guy?” I repeated, absently, my eyelids suddenly feeling stuck to my eyeballs.
“You know the one that works at the bar across from your dad’s house,” said Jerry.
“Oh, yeah, what about him, are you going to cut the deck or not?”
“Well, you said he was looking for some weight.”
“Yeah, so did you go see him?” asked I.
“No man. I’m sayin’ maybe you could handle the deal and you and Tina could make some money, man.”
Now I know I was only twenty-one years old and everyone else in the room was a few years older (my wife Tina was six years older than me). And I was a bit green. But green can get you in trouble or worse. Had I been more perceptive, or less fucked up, I would have read the look on Tina’s face differently. Instead of seeing, “Hey what a great idea,” I would have seen, “I wonder if the sucker is going for it?” She had been trying to find a way to get me to sell drugs now for months. I knew we needed money but in my mind this was not the way to make it. Now they were all three in on it together. It was a friendly game of “T-Ball” and I was the lonely little ole’ ball. I had been set up in a well coordinated coup de grace and I didn’t know it yet but I was already beaten.
When we got home I laid down the law. I was not a drug dealer and that was that. So after I sold the ounce of cocaine to the DEA informant bouncer guy with some thirty agents in attendance via high-tech listening and recording devices, I was promptly arrested and sent to jail.
To spare you the unnecessary drudgery of why this and why that concerning legal details, the Feds handed the ball (me) to the state of Florida making the state responsible for pounding salt in my ass and saving the USA the trouble. After a few years of legal wrangling during which time I was in and out of two county jails, we all decided three years would be a swell compromise and the bargain was struck.
12For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6:12, King James Version)
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Of Liberty Lost and Freedom Found
First chapter of:
Of Liberty Lost and Freedom Found
a memoir
Introduction
The title of the movie “Rebel without a Cause” is the perfect example of Hollywood’s love affair with rebellion, and by extension, the American psyche. Hollywood has played an integral role in equating rebellion with freedom. They have, with our eager willingness, been tremendously successful instilling in us a belief that rebellion is at the very heart of the freedom Americans enjoy and is therefore uniquely American. In fact, our country was born upon the foundation of rebellion in the hope of obtaining liberty. There is one caveat, however, that has been lost over time. Rebellion without integrity never leads to liberty.
Since the establishment of our American liberties, there has been precious little for us to rebel against, still there is a hunger in the American heart to feel connected in spirit to our founding fathers. This hunger often results in great innovation. Examples would be the likes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, or more recently, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They all rebelled against the conventions of their times. All of these men had an integral cause for their rebellion.
On the flip side, there are countless others who, seemingly unable or unwilling to find a just cause, rebelled headlong without one. This of course is a rebellion of an entirely different nature. In fact, it isn’t rebellion at all, it is simply reckless behavior, and reckless behavior often comes with unpleasant consequences. Unfortunately there is no shortage of historical examples of this kind of rebellion either. The following is mine.
Chapter 1
It Always Starts With Parents
If you were to look up the word reckless I’m sure there is a picture of my father’s grinning face above the definition. He was tall and well built in a lumber jack kind of way and ridiculously handsome. He had to have been handsome because I’ve been hearing about it my entire friggin’ life and I’m in my fifties for god’s sake.
For years he was the town dare devil. In elementary school kids I didn’t even know would tell me, “My mom and dad said your dad has a death wish.” I couldn’t say, but they were probably referring to the death defying aerobatic feats of derring-do he would perform in his glider for all to see, looping and diving low over the tiny houses below. Or the way he was known to buzz a friend’s house (or girlfriend’s) in one of his airplanes, the prop feathered and engine roaring loudly as he dove down, pulling back on the stick at the last second and skimming mere feet above their roof top to let them know he was back in town after having been off somewhere.
Then again it could have been the way he wove in and out of traffic on his Harley chopper at terrifying speeds, chrome muffler-less pipes crackling in the still quiet air of our sleepy little town. He racked up points on his driver license in numbers to rival those of the national debt.
It could have had something to do with the way he sailed his twenty foot Olympic class catamaran, almost always during a gathering storm and balancing one hull over the other. He would say he had been out on the river “raising a little hull.”
Maybe they were referring to his penchant for surfing, a sport he took up to help him recover from a broken back suffered in a glider crash, or an obsession with deep sea and cave diving.
The list goes on and on and on. His antics were sometimes the focus of colorful stories in the local paper chronicling his latest exploits. Even now at the age of seventy seven, he and his sixth wife have yet to celebrate their second year anniversary. With all of this I still haven’t touched the surface of the deep pool of crazy that is my father. All of which may explain my chronic laziness…I’m simply too exhausted from my childhood to be motivated by anything. After all he usually had the family in tow.
My earliest memory is of sitting on the gas tank of one of my dad’s Harleys, leaning forward holding onto the handle bars just above the triple T, my dad behind me driving. I remember like it was yesterday. I was wearing the little black leather jacket he had bought me, just like the one Marlon Brando wore in the movie The Wild One, the roar of the engine rising angrily higher after every shift of the gears, my dad leaning forward as we raced along, his face just over my left shoulder. I was squinting into the wind, the giant tank beneath me, vibrations increasing and decreasing in perfect time with the engine like a runaway drum section in a symphony orchestra with my father the conductor.
I loved the fuel tank, creamy white and broad shouldered, it was like sitting on my dad’s shoulders while he ran zigzagging around the yard, both of us laughing and me hanging on for dear life with fistfuls of his curly black hair locked mercilessly between my fingers. The machine wasn’t all brawn though. In the center of the tank was the chrome trimmed speedometer with its simple yet elegant art deco design, tilting back toward me, its luminescent face and bright red arm dutifully warning us of the growing possibility of catastrophe. The chrome gas caps sitting on opposite sides of the beautifully shaped fuel tank in perfect symmetry.
My father said something in my ear about watching out for something or someone, I wasn’t sure which, it was a new word for me. I hesitated for a few moments my eyes darting right and left for a clue and then asked, “What was it dad, look out for what?”
“The Fuzz, the police!” he said louder.
“Oh,” I liked the word, it made me smile. It sounded funny. I repeated the word so I could hear myself say it, “The Fuzz, right?”
“Yeaaah,” he said, drawing the word out in a conspiratorial tone. He always knew how to make me feel like one of the team, the guy the quarterback chose to catch the Hail Mary pass when they were down by six in the Super Bowl with fifteen seconds on the clock. You can do this Chris. You can do anything. That was his magic. His zeal was infectious and no one was immune to it.
My father was an entrepreneur without brakes, a hair trigger on the “damn the torpedoes” cannon and a living physics formula for the “what goes up must come down” phenomenon. All of these traits he was to pass on to me and my little brother, sealing our fates with his. We were to become examples of his self destructive postulate. My poor little brother Brett and I had no chance of turning back this steaming engine of inertia that had been set in motion, “Ya kuh-na fight the laws o’physics Cap’n!” as Scotty would have counseled Captain Kirk. We too were in for it. Our ability to make money came from him and our ability to lose it through overconfidence and reckless behavior were both trademarks of Jim Bannister. To the three of us, losing money is like losing a hand of cards. There is always at least one more hand before the end of the game. After all, with us it was the game that mattered most, not the winning or losing.
All three of us have made and lost a lot of money. While I would have preferred keeping it, I wouldn’t change my childhood or father to do it, foolish as it may sound. It makes for a wild dichotomy for life. And if there was ever a word that described my father besides reckless, it was life. Up or down it’s the excitement and energy that keeps the paradox of our lives working and making sense. Just like fire walking makes no sense, but the thrill of reaching the end of the coals makes it seem so to the walker, at least at the time, before the pain sets in. He was the jack of all businesses and the master of none, although in those early years he did quite well in the medical laboratory business.
We lived in Titusville, Florida about forty miles east of Orlando on the Indian River. Hundreds of thousands of people go there to watch rocket launches. I’ve only missed one launch in my life, the second shuttle launch. And that was because I was spending thirty days in the box at a nearby prison and my cell window faced away from Kennedy Space Center. I could still hear it and feel it shaking my cell. The rumbling and shaking of powerful rockets has always been a central thread of reassurance in my life. Much like the Rocky Mountains must be to the people of western Colorado, or Niagara Falls to upstate New Yorkers. The little town grew quickly in the sixties when I was growing up, due to the space program, but I can still remember when the population was just fifteen thousand.
My dear mother is very bright but like me started out cripplingly naïve. She was class Valedictorian and received a scholarship to Florida State University where she earned a teaching degree. She taught elementary school until I came along. Later she taught as a substitute on occasion. If any of you are thinking having your mom for a teacher would be fun, you should think again. In first grade a kid with a steel hook for a hand sat behind me. The little bastard took great delight in cracking me on the skull when I least expected it. Every time he did I would squawk, “Ouch!” and grab my head. Then my mother would look up from her desk and scold me for disrupting the class. When I tried to explain she would interrupt with, “That’s enough Chris. Now put your head on your desk and be quiet!”
If material possessions are a measure of success we had to be the most successful family in Brevard County. Airplanes, boats, a new Cadillac every six months, dune buggies, nice house in Titusville and a two story beach house in New Smyrna Beach. Dad’s clothes were all hand made. He even taught me to drive a stick shift in the family Land Rover when I was twelve. On weekends he would hone my gear shifting skills by having me drive him the thirty five miles to the beach house in our brand new 1967 British racing green Jaguar XKE convertible, often at 130 mph. I was twelve years old and my favorite meal was grilled lobster with drawn butter and lemon and a Caesar salad prepared table side with a fresh raw egg. We lacked nothing.
These were things you never talked about in school unless you wanted to get your ass kicked everyday. So I was sharpening my prison skills early by keeping my mouth shut, even in elementary school. If some poor kid told of having to eat shit sandwiches the night before I wouldn’t bat an eye. I would declare how we too often ate shit sandwiches at our house once a week or so, and just for good measure I would embellish the story with a little culinary advice. “Have you ever tried a little corn or a touch of peanut for a garnish?” “Spectacular!” I would advise.
Titusville was a very middle class town in the early sixties. There were no upscale neighborhoods so we lived in an area surrounded by people struggling to get by. I never felt envied or shunned by any of my friends or anyone in school but I tried hard to blend in.
I don’t want to give the impression my parents were snobs because nothing could be farther from the truth. My folks were friends to all. My mom and dad’s best friends were our next door neighbors, the Wilsons. They lived in an old clapboard house with a tin roof at the edge of a swamp that lay at the bottom of the hill our house was built on. The Wilsons were Georgia Crackers that had moved here because Mr. Wilson worked for a construction company that was building a mall in town. My dad loved fishing, boating and camping with Mr. Wilson and living like a true country boy. My mom got along with Mrs. Wilson like family and we all spent many weekends together picnicking, boating, fishing and camping.
My parents entertained Doctors, Crackers, lawyers, gardeners, politicians and maids. There was no difference in the way they interacted with people whatsoever. They laughed with and enjoyed everyone’s company. My dad always loved to tease people mercilessly and play practical jokes. There weren’t very many lawyers and politicians over so maybe that says something, but I’ve never heard an ill word about any group. No one ever had to tell me to treat everyone with the same respect regardless of any racial, social or religious stripe they may wear. I simply acted like my parents. They are to this day the most unpretentious and forgiving people I ever knew.
Race relations in the sixties of course could not be avoided. Our school was integrated when I was in the fifth grade and I was so stupid I didn’t even notice anything different or think it was a big deal. It was years later in a high school social studies class when I was filled in on the many sacrifices of the civil rights struggle. My parents simply never discussed these things with us. Maybe they talked about it when they were alone together but I doubt it.
I was eighteen and dating my future first wife, a second generation Italian American from Providence, Rhode Island, when I was shocked to learn that in some northern cities people tended to segregate themselves according to ethnicity and religious beliefs. I knew of course people segregated because of color difference, but up to that point I didn’t know what the hell ethnicity actually meant. As to religion, our neighborhood ran the gamut. We were Episcopalian at the time and within a block's distance I personally knew Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Atheists, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. With the exception of the Jehovah's Witnesses, I never knew there was a difference between any of them until I grew up. The only reason the Witnesses stood out was because they kept their lights off and refused to come to the door and give us candy on Halloween.
All went swimmingly until in my twelfth year my mother discovered my father’s indiscretions with the ladies. That made things a bit testy around the house for awhile. The shit really hit the fan when mom caught dad and one of his girlfriends in flagrante delicto at the beach house. How quickly life can change. That was the end of life as I knew it. If I have given you a clear picture of my life up to this point, simply turn it upside down and I can spare you the details of the next seven years.
Everyone hits the wall at some point in their life and I’m no exception. Bad things happen and cannot be ignored. People have to deal with their problems but they don’t have to dwell on them. Think about it; let’s say I offered you tickets for one of two cruises for the purpose of making memories for your golden years. You had to choose between a trip around the world on a beautiful cruise ship with exotic food and professional entertainment and a trip up the Amazon on a slave powered galley and you will be one of the slaves for three weeks. See, I don’t understand why this is such an easy choice, yet when it comes to memories, many people will choose to dwell on the bad shit they have lived through. Some never get beyond the bad memories and so can never enjoy or relive the good ones.
Let me share some of the things I know about living through shit. My dad broke his back in a glider crash when I was ten years old. He was paralyzed from the waist down and his neurologist, ironically named Dr. Hellinger, told him he would never walk again. After a month or so in the hospital he was sent home and spent six months in bed. I am sure he had some fears that Dr. Hellinger was right, who wouldn’t? But he never talked about it. Instead he spent his time in bed sketching ideas for a beach house and trying to decide what kind of surfboard he was going to buy someday. He had never been on a surfboard but figured he would need a really long and wide one because when he was going to be learning how to surf he would still be learning how to walk again.
These ideas weren’t just flying out his ass like winged monkeys. He knew what shape he was in. He couldn’t avoid it. I could hear him scream out in pain from outside in the front yard when his leg would fall off the side of the bed. I would come running and lift his leg back up onto the bed and could see the sweat beaded on his face from the pain.
I could write a book on what he went through and the things he did to get himself out of that bed. One day he finally had enough. With the help of a walker, he made his way to our Land Rover. He was barking out orders to me to get this and open that while making his way from the bedroom and across the house to the side door. With grim determination and sweat running down his face he ultimately reached the Land Rover (mom had the Cadillac at work), all the while trying to calm our maid Lilly Mae who was in an apoplectic melt down of fear and anger over what might happen to him on her watch.
He could handle the gas pedal with some movement in his right foot but the left foot was useless. On a Land Rover in those days you had to push the starter switch button mounted to the floor next to the gas pedal. He hollered for me to bring him one of my baseball bats. I flew through the house sliding around corners to retrieve a Louisville Slugger from my bedroom closet. Lilly Mae was crying by now and I poked the bat through the passenger side window.
First he put the Rover in reverse, and then used the bat to push down on the starter switch mounted to the floor. The Rover began jerking backward down the driveway. When he reached the street below, he turned the engine off and put it in first gear. Pushing the starter down again, the Rover lurched forward a couple of times. Then jerkily at first, the Rover roared to life and Lillie Mae and I watched as my dad, that I had not even seen out of bed for the better part of a year, headed south down Highland Ave.. We saw Mr. Miller who lived across the street coming home from that direction. He was so shocked to see my dad behind the wheel of our Rover waving hello that he swerved suddenly off the road out of my dad’s path and up into our next door neighbor’s yard to a stop. He climbed quickly from his Volkswagen bug, a big cigar falling out of his mouth, and stumbled down the hill to the center of the street staring after my father as he disappeared in the distance.
I know my dad, and I have no doubt he had been secretly planning this caper for weeks. One goal down, he started working on the next. Mr. Miller’s son Brian and his friend Ray had been coming by and visiting my dad from time to time. It was 1966 and they had an all consuming hobby, surfing. Dad had been covertly recruiting these two teenagers to someday be his surfing instructors. My dad loved anything that was all consuming and this sport, which he had seen in the forties in Hawaii while a cabin boy on a charter sailboat, fit his plans perfectly.
I haven’t lost my place. I’m trying to illustrate how you can focus on something other than failure even when there is seemingly nothing but failure and pain all around you. You see, my father was focused on one thing all this time. He wanted to stick it to Dr. Hellinger. He wanted to prove to that son of a bitch that he was the only one who would decide what he could and could not do.
Within another year dad had designed and built the beach house in New Smyrna Beach and was surfing. He had Brian take a picture of him standing on his surfboard on a wave. He sent the picture to Dr. Hellinger. The good doctor returned it with the words “trick photography” written on it. That really pissed my dad off, but it didn’t matter. He had already won that battle.
I learned something that day when my father got up out of the bed after six months and walked by himself through the house to that Land Rover. It was an impossible feat. It was a miracle! I realized there was something in my dad I had never known was there. Sure, he was my dad and could do anything. But this was different, this was superhuman to me. It was like the day a couple of years earlier when I came home from school and my mom had been waiting for me at the door. She said, “I have a surprise for you.”
“Really, what is it?” I said, excited.
“It's Midnight. Something special,” she said taking me by the hand and leading me around the house to the back yard.
Midnight was my dog, part black Lab, and part who knows what. She had one ear that folded over in the middle and one that stood straight up. I loved Midnight and we usually were inseparable. I had not seen her that morning on my way to school and had wondered where she had been all day. She usually walked with me to school and would stay there with me.
Whispering Hills elementary school was all one story buildings in groups of classrooms radiating out every thirty or forty feet on both sides of a central covered walkway. One side of every class room was all windows opening onto a grass divider between groups of classes. On the other side was the entry door which on hot days would be propped open near the teacher’s desk. The teacher was always at her desk as we arrived in the morning and would give Midnight a look as I entered the class. Midnight would stop outside the door and wait for me to make my way to the back of the room and sit at my desk. Then she would walk along the outside wall about twenty feet in my direction and lie down on the sidewalk outside the class. I could see her because that entire wall had large wood louvers opening up onto the sidewalk from the floor to about two feet above it for ventilation. At first she would lie there with her head stuck halfway into the room and resting on the lowest louver, her tongue lolling out of her mouth while she watched me sitting at my desk. After about a half hour she would quietly squeeze through the louvers to slink over to my desk and curl up at my feet. She would stay there for hours, sometimes going and sometimes coming. But today she was nowhere to be seen. My mother tugged me along until we reached the low concrete block wall that separated our back yard from an old orange grove that adjoined it. She helped me up onto the wall and pointed down the other side into a pile of dried out brambles and palmetto fronds that had been stacked up against the back side of our fence. There in a small hollowed out area of the pile was Midnight, looking up at me and wagging her tail. She wasn't alone. There were six little black puppies squeezed in with her, nursing.
My mom was smiling excitedly and said, “What do you think of that, Chris?” I was dumbstruck. I did not know what I thought. Midnight had a secret power as far as I was concerned. She knew how to make puppies! I had known her forever. How could it be I did not know she could do this? I was overwhelmed with a feeling of humble ignorance and newfound respect for her. Here she had always seemed to care about nothing in the world but me and all the while she could do this!
I felt the same way that day as I stood with Lillie Mae in the driveway watching as my formerly bedridden father drove away in the Land Rover. I still could not put into words what I had learned that day but I knew there was something inside people, something unseen yet tangible that was more powerful than a glider crash and a broken body. I asked my dad a few years later how he had done it, what had given him the ability to walk again when no one else believed he ever would. We were in a restaurant waiting for our order at the time. He looked at me for a long moment before he spoke as if what he had to say was so important he wanted to be sure he got it right. He leaned forward and spoke in a low voice as if to protect a secret. As I leaned in to listen, he said, “Son, there is a kind of freedom that everyone is born with, it’s on the inside. It is very different from the freedom of movement on the outside. No one can ever take that freedom from you. Not even a crippled body. The distinction is often missed and until you lose your liberty you will never know how important that inner freedom is. It was that inner freedom that gave me the strength to fight for my liberty.”
At my age it was a somewhat cryptic answer, but I felt I knew what he meant because I had seen that invisible freedom in him so many times. Still, it would be over a decade later before I too could grasp the importance of that distinction.
Of Liberty Lost and Freedom Found
a memoir
Introduction
The title of the movie “Rebel without a Cause” is the perfect example of Hollywood’s love affair with rebellion, and by extension, the American psyche. Hollywood has played an integral role in equating rebellion with freedom. They have, with our eager willingness, been tremendously successful instilling in us a belief that rebellion is at the very heart of the freedom Americans enjoy and is therefore uniquely American. In fact, our country was born upon the foundation of rebellion in the hope of obtaining liberty. There is one caveat, however, that has been lost over time. Rebellion without integrity never leads to liberty.
Since the establishment of our American liberties, there has been precious little for us to rebel against, still there is a hunger in the American heart to feel connected in spirit to our founding fathers. This hunger often results in great innovation. Examples would be the likes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, or more recently, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They all rebelled against the conventions of their times. All of these men had an integral cause for their rebellion.
On the flip side, there are countless others who, seemingly unable or unwilling to find a just cause, rebelled headlong without one. This of course is a rebellion of an entirely different nature. In fact, it isn’t rebellion at all, it is simply reckless behavior, and reckless behavior often comes with unpleasant consequences. Unfortunately there is no shortage of historical examples of this kind of rebellion either. The following is mine.
Chapter 1
It Always Starts With Parents
If you were to look up the word reckless I’m sure there is a picture of my father’s grinning face above the definition. He was tall and well built in a lumber jack kind of way and ridiculously handsome. He had to have been handsome because I’ve been hearing about it my entire friggin’ life and I’m in my fifties for god’s sake.
For years he was the town dare devil. In elementary school kids I didn’t even know would tell me, “My mom and dad said your dad has a death wish.” I couldn’t say, but they were probably referring to the death defying aerobatic feats of derring-do he would perform in his glider for all to see, looping and diving low over the tiny houses below. Or the way he was known to buzz a friend’s house (or girlfriend’s) in one of his airplanes, the prop feathered and engine roaring loudly as he dove down, pulling back on the stick at the last second and skimming mere feet above their roof top to let them know he was back in town after having been off somewhere.
Then again it could have been the way he wove in and out of traffic on his Harley chopper at terrifying speeds, chrome muffler-less pipes crackling in the still quiet air of our sleepy little town. He racked up points on his driver license in numbers to rival those of the national debt.
It could have had something to do with the way he sailed his twenty foot Olympic class catamaran, almost always during a gathering storm and balancing one hull over the other. He would say he had been out on the river “raising a little hull.”
Maybe they were referring to his penchant for surfing, a sport he took up to help him recover from a broken back suffered in a glider crash, or an obsession with deep sea and cave diving.
The list goes on and on and on. His antics were sometimes the focus of colorful stories in the local paper chronicling his latest exploits. Even now at the age of seventy seven, he and his sixth wife have yet to celebrate their second year anniversary. With all of this I still haven’t touched the surface of the deep pool of crazy that is my father. All of which may explain my chronic laziness…I’m simply too exhausted from my childhood to be motivated by anything. After all he usually had the family in tow.
My earliest memory is of sitting on the gas tank of one of my dad’s Harleys, leaning forward holding onto the handle bars just above the triple T, my dad behind me driving. I remember like it was yesterday. I was wearing the little black leather jacket he had bought me, just like the one Marlon Brando wore in the movie The Wild One, the roar of the engine rising angrily higher after every shift of the gears, my dad leaning forward as we raced along, his face just over my left shoulder. I was squinting into the wind, the giant tank beneath me, vibrations increasing and decreasing in perfect time with the engine like a runaway drum section in a symphony orchestra with my father the conductor.
I loved the fuel tank, creamy white and broad shouldered, it was like sitting on my dad’s shoulders while he ran zigzagging around the yard, both of us laughing and me hanging on for dear life with fistfuls of his curly black hair locked mercilessly between my fingers. The machine wasn’t all brawn though. In the center of the tank was the chrome trimmed speedometer with its simple yet elegant art deco design, tilting back toward me, its luminescent face and bright red arm dutifully warning us of the growing possibility of catastrophe. The chrome gas caps sitting on opposite sides of the beautifully shaped fuel tank in perfect symmetry.
My father said something in my ear about watching out for something or someone, I wasn’t sure which, it was a new word for me. I hesitated for a few moments my eyes darting right and left for a clue and then asked, “What was it dad, look out for what?”
“The Fuzz, the police!” he said louder.
“Oh,” I liked the word, it made me smile. It sounded funny. I repeated the word so I could hear myself say it, “The Fuzz, right?”
“Yeaaah,” he said, drawing the word out in a conspiratorial tone. He always knew how to make me feel like one of the team, the guy the quarterback chose to catch the Hail Mary pass when they were down by six in the Super Bowl with fifteen seconds on the clock. You can do this Chris. You can do anything. That was his magic. His zeal was infectious and no one was immune to it.
My father was an entrepreneur without brakes, a hair trigger on the “damn the torpedoes” cannon and a living physics formula for the “what goes up must come down” phenomenon. All of these traits he was to pass on to me and my little brother, sealing our fates with his. We were to become examples of his self destructive postulate. My poor little brother Brett and I had no chance of turning back this steaming engine of inertia that had been set in motion, “Ya kuh-na fight the laws o’physics Cap’n!” as Scotty would have counseled Captain Kirk. We too were in for it. Our ability to make money came from him and our ability to lose it through overconfidence and reckless behavior were both trademarks of Jim Bannister. To the three of us, losing money is like losing a hand of cards. There is always at least one more hand before the end of the game. After all, with us it was the game that mattered most, not the winning or losing.
All three of us have made and lost a lot of money. While I would have preferred keeping it, I wouldn’t change my childhood or father to do it, foolish as it may sound. It makes for a wild dichotomy for life. And if there was ever a word that described my father besides reckless, it was life. Up or down it’s the excitement and energy that keeps the paradox of our lives working and making sense. Just like fire walking makes no sense, but the thrill of reaching the end of the coals makes it seem so to the walker, at least at the time, before the pain sets in. He was the jack of all businesses and the master of none, although in those early years he did quite well in the medical laboratory business.
We lived in Titusville, Florida about forty miles east of Orlando on the Indian River. Hundreds of thousands of people go there to watch rocket launches. I’ve only missed one launch in my life, the second shuttle launch. And that was because I was spending thirty days in the box at a nearby prison and my cell window faced away from Kennedy Space Center. I could still hear it and feel it shaking my cell. The rumbling and shaking of powerful rockets has always been a central thread of reassurance in my life. Much like the Rocky Mountains must be to the people of western Colorado, or Niagara Falls to upstate New Yorkers. The little town grew quickly in the sixties when I was growing up, due to the space program, but I can still remember when the population was just fifteen thousand.
My dear mother is very bright but like me started out cripplingly naïve. She was class Valedictorian and received a scholarship to Florida State University where she earned a teaching degree. She taught elementary school until I came along. Later she taught as a substitute on occasion. If any of you are thinking having your mom for a teacher would be fun, you should think again. In first grade a kid with a steel hook for a hand sat behind me. The little bastard took great delight in cracking me on the skull when I least expected it. Every time he did I would squawk, “Ouch!” and grab my head. Then my mother would look up from her desk and scold me for disrupting the class. When I tried to explain she would interrupt with, “That’s enough Chris. Now put your head on your desk and be quiet!”
If material possessions are a measure of success we had to be the most successful family in Brevard County. Airplanes, boats, a new Cadillac every six months, dune buggies, nice house in Titusville and a two story beach house in New Smyrna Beach. Dad’s clothes were all hand made. He even taught me to drive a stick shift in the family Land Rover when I was twelve. On weekends he would hone my gear shifting skills by having me drive him the thirty five miles to the beach house in our brand new 1967 British racing green Jaguar XKE convertible, often at 130 mph. I was twelve years old and my favorite meal was grilled lobster with drawn butter and lemon and a Caesar salad prepared table side with a fresh raw egg. We lacked nothing.
These were things you never talked about in school unless you wanted to get your ass kicked everyday. So I was sharpening my prison skills early by keeping my mouth shut, even in elementary school. If some poor kid told of having to eat shit sandwiches the night before I wouldn’t bat an eye. I would declare how we too often ate shit sandwiches at our house once a week or so, and just for good measure I would embellish the story with a little culinary advice. “Have you ever tried a little corn or a touch of peanut for a garnish?” “Spectacular!” I would advise.
Titusville was a very middle class town in the early sixties. There were no upscale neighborhoods so we lived in an area surrounded by people struggling to get by. I never felt envied or shunned by any of my friends or anyone in school but I tried hard to blend in.
I don’t want to give the impression my parents were snobs because nothing could be farther from the truth. My folks were friends to all. My mom and dad’s best friends were our next door neighbors, the Wilsons. They lived in an old clapboard house with a tin roof at the edge of a swamp that lay at the bottom of the hill our house was built on. The Wilsons were Georgia Crackers that had moved here because Mr. Wilson worked for a construction company that was building a mall in town. My dad loved fishing, boating and camping with Mr. Wilson and living like a true country boy. My mom got along with Mrs. Wilson like family and we all spent many weekends together picnicking, boating, fishing and camping.
My parents entertained Doctors, Crackers, lawyers, gardeners, politicians and maids. There was no difference in the way they interacted with people whatsoever. They laughed with and enjoyed everyone’s company. My dad always loved to tease people mercilessly and play practical jokes. There weren’t very many lawyers and politicians over so maybe that says something, but I’ve never heard an ill word about any group. No one ever had to tell me to treat everyone with the same respect regardless of any racial, social or religious stripe they may wear. I simply acted like my parents. They are to this day the most unpretentious and forgiving people I ever knew.
Race relations in the sixties of course could not be avoided. Our school was integrated when I was in the fifth grade and I was so stupid I didn’t even notice anything different or think it was a big deal. It was years later in a high school social studies class when I was filled in on the many sacrifices of the civil rights struggle. My parents simply never discussed these things with us. Maybe they talked about it when they were alone together but I doubt it.
I was eighteen and dating my future first wife, a second generation Italian American from Providence, Rhode Island, when I was shocked to learn that in some northern cities people tended to segregate themselves according to ethnicity and religious beliefs. I knew of course people segregated because of color difference, but up to that point I didn’t know what the hell ethnicity actually meant. As to religion, our neighborhood ran the gamut. We were Episcopalian at the time and within a block's distance I personally knew Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Atheists, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. With the exception of the Jehovah's Witnesses, I never knew there was a difference between any of them until I grew up. The only reason the Witnesses stood out was because they kept their lights off and refused to come to the door and give us candy on Halloween.
All went swimmingly until in my twelfth year my mother discovered my father’s indiscretions with the ladies. That made things a bit testy around the house for awhile. The shit really hit the fan when mom caught dad and one of his girlfriends in flagrante delicto at the beach house. How quickly life can change. That was the end of life as I knew it. If I have given you a clear picture of my life up to this point, simply turn it upside down and I can spare you the details of the next seven years.
Everyone hits the wall at some point in their life and I’m no exception. Bad things happen and cannot be ignored. People have to deal with their problems but they don’t have to dwell on them. Think about it; let’s say I offered you tickets for one of two cruises for the purpose of making memories for your golden years. You had to choose between a trip around the world on a beautiful cruise ship with exotic food and professional entertainment and a trip up the Amazon on a slave powered galley and you will be one of the slaves for three weeks. See, I don’t understand why this is such an easy choice, yet when it comes to memories, many people will choose to dwell on the bad shit they have lived through. Some never get beyond the bad memories and so can never enjoy or relive the good ones.
Let me share some of the things I know about living through shit. My dad broke his back in a glider crash when I was ten years old. He was paralyzed from the waist down and his neurologist, ironically named Dr. Hellinger, told him he would never walk again. After a month or so in the hospital he was sent home and spent six months in bed. I am sure he had some fears that Dr. Hellinger was right, who wouldn’t? But he never talked about it. Instead he spent his time in bed sketching ideas for a beach house and trying to decide what kind of surfboard he was going to buy someday. He had never been on a surfboard but figured he would need a really long and wide one because when he was going to be learning how to surf he would still be learning how to walk again.
These ideas weren’t just flying out his ass like winged monkeys. He knew what shape he was in. He couldn’t avoid it. I could hear him scream out in pain from outside in the front yard when his leg would fall off the side of the bed. I would come running and lift his leg back up onto the bed and could see the sweat beaded on his face from the pain.
I could write a book on what he went through and the things he did to get himself out of that bed. One day he finally had enough. With the help of a walker, he made his way to our Land Rover. He was barking out orders to me to get this and open that while making his way from the bedroom and across the house to the side door. With grim determination and sweat running down his face he ultimately reached the Land Rover (mom had the Cadillac at work), all the while trying to calm our maid Lilly Mae who was in an apoplectic melt down of fear and anger over what might happen to him on her watch.
He could handle the gas pedal with some movement in his right foot but the left foot was useless. On a Land Rover in those days you had to push the starter switch button mounted to the floor next to the gas pedal. He hollered for me to bring him one of my baseball bats. I flew through the house sliding around corners to retrieve a Louisville Slugger from my bedroom closet. Lilly Mae was crying by now and I poked the bat through the passenger side window.
First he put the Rover in reverse, and then used the bat to push down on the starter switch mounted to the floor. The Rover began jerking backward down the driveway. When he reached the street below, he turned the engine off and put it in first gear. Pushing the starter down again, the Rover lurched forward a couple of times. Then jerkily at first, the Rover roared to life and Lillie Mae and I watched as my dad, that I had not even seen out of bed for the better part of a year, headed south down Highland Ave.. We saw Mr. Miller who lived across the street coming home from that direction. He was so shocked to see my dad behind the wheel of our Rover waving hello that he swerved suddenly off the road out of my dad’s path and up into our next door neighbor’s yard to a stop. He climbed quickly from his Volkswagen bug, a big cigar falling out of his mouth, and stumbled down the hill to the center of the street staring after my father as he disappeared in the distance.
I know my dad, and I have no doubt he had been secretly planning this caper for weeks. One goal down, he started working on the next. Mr. Miller’s son Brian and his friend Ray had been coming by and visiting my dad from time to time. It was 1966 and they had an all consuming hobby, surfing. Dad had been covertly recruiting these two teenagers to someday be his surfing instructors. My dad loved anything that was all consuming and this sport, which he had seen in the forties in Hawaii while a cabin boy on a charter sailboat, fit his plans perfectly.
I haven’t lost my place. I’m trying to illustrate how you can focus on something other than failure even when there is seemingly nothing but failure and pain all around you. You see, my father was focused on one thing all this time. He wanted to stick it to Dr. Hellinger. He wanted to prove to that son of a bitch that he was the only one who would decide what he could and could not do.
Within another year dad had designed and built the beach house in New Smyrna Beach and was surfing. He had Brian take a picture of him standing on his surfboard on a wave. He sent the picture to Dr. Hellinger. The good doctor returned it with the words “trick photography” written on it. That really pissed my dad off, but it didn’t matter. He had already won that battle.
I learned something that day when my father got up out of the bed after six months and walked by himself through the house to that Land Rover. It was an impossible feat. It was a miracle! I realized there was something in my dad I had never known was there. Sure, he was my dad and could do anything. But this was different, this was superhuman to me. It was like the day a couple of years earlier when I came home from school and my mom had been waiting for me at the door. She said, “I have a surprise for you.”
“Really, what is it?” I said, excited.
“It's Midnight. Something special,” she said taking me by the hand and leading me around the house to the back yard.
Midnight was my dog, part black Lab, and part who knows what. She had one ear that folded over in the middle and one that stood straight up. I loved Midnight and we usually were inseparable. I had not seen her that morning on my way to school and had wondered where she had been all day. She usually walked with me to school and would stay there with me.
Whispering Hills elementary school was all one story buildings in groups of classrooms radiating out every thirty or forty feet on both sides of a central covered walkway. One side of every class room was all windows opening onto a grass divider between groups of classes. On the other side was the entry door which on hot days would be propped open near the teacher’s desk. The teacher was always at her desk as we arrived in the morning and would give Midnight a look as I entered the class. Midnight would stop outside the door and wait for me to make my way to the back of the room and sit at my desk. Then she would walk along the outside wall about twenty feet in my direction and lie down on the sidewalk outside the class. I could see her because that entire wall had large wood louvers opening up onto the sidewalk from the floor to about two feet above it for ventilation. At first she would lie there with her head stuck halfway into the room and resting on the lowest louver, her tongue lolling out of her mouth while she watched me sitting at my desk. After about a half hour she would quietly squeeze through the louvers to slink over to my desk and curl up at my feet. She would stay there for hours, sometimes going and sometimes coming. But today she was nowhere to be seen. My mother tugged me along until we reached the low concrete block wall that separated our back yard from an old orange grove that adjoined it. She helped me up onto the wall and pointed down the other side into a pile of dried out brambles and palmetto fronds that had been stacked up against the back side of our fence. There in a small hollowed out area of the pile was Midnight, looking up at me and wagging her tail. She wasn't alone. There were six little black puppies squeezed in with her, nursing.
My mom was smiling excitedly and said, “What do you think of that, Chris?” I was dumbstruck. I did not know what I thought. Midnight had a secret power as far as I was concerned. She knew how to make puppies! I had known her forever. How could it be I did not know she could do this? I was overwhelmed with a feeling of humble ignorance and newfound respect for her. Here she had always seemed to care about nothing in the world but me and all the while she could do this!
I felt the same way that day as I stood with Lillie Mae in the driveway watching as my formerly bedridden father drove away in the Land Rover. I still could not put into words what I had learned that day but I knew there was something inside people, something unseen yet tangible that was more powerful than a glider crash and a broken body. I asked my dad a few years later how he had done it, what had given him the ability to walk again when no one else believed he ever would. We were in a restaurant waiting for our order at the time. He looked at me for a long moment before he spoke as if what he had to say was so important he wanted to be sure he got it right. He leaned forward and spoke in a low voice as if to protect a secret. As I leaned in to listen, he said, “Son, there is a kind of freedom that everyone is born with, it’s on the inside. It is very different from the freedom of movement on the outside. No one can ever take that freedom from you. Not even a crippled body. The distinction is often missed and until you lose your liberty you will never know how important that inner freedom is. It was that inner freedom that gave me the strength to fight for my liberty.”
At my age it was a somewhat cryptic answer, but I felt I knew what he meant because I had seen that invisible freedom in him so many times. Still, it would be over a decade later before I too could grasp the importance of that distinction.
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