Chapter Twenty
… living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me.
“Strawberry Fields”, The Beatles
I got a letter in early May. A photograph slipped out of the folded page. Amy wore a wide, sweet, brave smile. Her glasses were not the ones I had seen; a different style.
So, Terry, I finally was able to get these horrid braces off, after a year and a half. What a relief it is! I feel so much better without all this metal stuck in my head and rubbing sores on my cheeks and all. And I can see my teeth! And they do look better, so I guess it was worth it in the end. You can also see from the picture that I have new glasses. My prescription changed so my mother let me pick out some new frames, which also look better.
It seems to me that the kids at school aren’t laughing at me as much as they used to. I still don’t like my school and I cry sometimes, but it may be a little better.
Come see me this summer if you can!
Amy
#####
I turned through the pages. I wanted to see all that I had missed. Images, so many of them similar, but an occasional one that popped off the page. Maybe it was a particularly good photograph, well-composed or executed. Maybe it was a row of cheerleaders, or a single portrait of a pretty girl. Maybe it was an image I was repulsed by, or an image that filled me with yearning. Maybe an image just simply arrested my attention, so that I stared at it for several minutes.
The Riverbank, Congaree Central’s yearbook, was something I was glad I had had the presence of mind to pay for back in September. It would be for me a valuable thing. It was not for its deposit of treasured memories of my Freshman year. Rather, it was as if I had been an amnesiac for almost a year and needed these images and this information to fill in the long gap, the march through the tunnel, to orient me to the fact that it was now May of 1967 and in a few days I would be leaving this school forever.
Every page was someone else’s treasured memory. “INVOLVEMENT in a place… with people who have a purpose… by studying… and participating… in worship and serving… by preserving tradition… by excelling in athletics… and by making lasting friends at CCHS.” This was well before the time when participation trophies were a thing. People in 1967 received awards either because they had done something notable or because they were popular. The irony is that I should not have even gotten a participation trophy. I did not participate in Congaree Central High School at all. I did not have a purpose, I barely studied, I neither worshipped nor served, there were no traditions I preserved, I certainly didn’t excel at athletics, and… okay, I did make two new friends. It would remain to be seen if they would become lasting friendships, which I was actually putting at risk by moving to another school across town.
The best part of the yearbook for me was the Dedication Page: “We, the staff, lovingly dedicate this year’s Riverbank to Mr. Jack Warren, inspiring teacher, devoted counselor, and friend.” How true. I should say I made three new friends, then. No, four – Mrs. Rhame, though she was only there for two months. It seems there has never been a time in my life when I was not able to make friends.
Were all of these kids as well put together as they looked? I felt myself to be inwardly shattered after this school year, but I really don’t know what that looks like. I missed the day they took pictures, so I was not pictured here. What does being happy, well-adjusted, and whole look like? There were many apparent examples in these pages, but is it even possible for fourteen and fifteen year olds to be whole persons? I suppose I would have pointed to my friend Rob Holcombe as someone who looked happy and whole. An intimate friend for three years, I saw Rob as a basically happy, positive person, but also as someone who had inner struggles like anyone.
I decided, over the course of this year, that James Huggins was one of the best put together persons I knew. I would have called him masterful. It wasn’t that his life had been a frolic in the park, however. He had lost his mother when he was nine years old. He had a brother fighting in a foreign war. His father was senior minister of a large church and been subject to personal attacks and death threats during the most intense years of the civil rights struggle. And James intimated to me that night I went to his house that he had struggled with emotional outbursts growing up – mainly anger. He pointed again to his training in non-violent confrontation as a major tool in overcoming this. Though I didn’t mention it to him again, I thought of his having had to deflect the wild anger of Eddie Tinsley’s fists that day in gym, and all the anger that, during James’ mere fifteen years, had been directed toward him because his skin was black, and all the anger fueled by envy that he was intelligent, nice looking, athletic, musical, goal-directed, as well as black. The thought of what I would have become if I had faced all these things by age fifteen made me crumble. I was in awe.
So I looked through my yearbook’s images of normal high school students. There were the gifted ones – the athletes, the cheerleaders, the class officers, the student council members, all of whom seemed to excel at everything they did. Even the students that I knew to be awkward, or working under some problem or deficit, wore bright smiles in their portraits. Even they had some some kind of strength, some coping mechanism that had escaped from me this year.
Rob signed my yearbook. His entry was a good-natured, wry grin. He promised we would make plans for the summer (we did). He expressed some regret over my leaving for Beckham but acknowledged it was for the best. He signed it “Resplendent Rob.”
James’ entry was brief, but it meant a lot to me. “Hey, Terry! I enjoyed getting to know you this year. I hope you have a great summer and good luck next year in your new school. Keep working on the round ball if that’s what you want. Sincerely, James.”
I went by Mr. Warren’s office but he wasn’t in yet. Several feet away I saw Scott Santiago as he leaned against the wall. He was reading a book. “What the heck,” I thought.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” I began. “In the back parking lot, you picked up that motorcycle…”
“I remember that.” Santiago looked up from his book. “Eddie Tinsley was looking for trouble. I was very angry with him that day. Picking up the motorcycle seemed like the most peaceful solution at the time.”
“I was lame with a bad ankle that day so they had me in kind of a bind. I never got the chance to thank you, so… thank you!” I handed him my yearbook. “I don’t know if you’d be willing to sign this.”
“Sure, I can sign it.” He took my yearbook and the pen I offered. “I do remember you, but I don’t know your name.”
“Terry Owens.”
Santiago scratched some words onto the page, then handed it back to me. “There you go.”
“What’s that you’re reading?
“It’s Why I am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell,” he said, scanning the hallway. “I’m waiting to see if any faculty will notice it and try to make an issue out of it.”
“Have they?
“One of the teachers saw me reading this and told be not to bring it to school anymore – she said it wasn’t wholesome.”
“Wow,” I said. “So she thought you were spreading propaganda for not being Christian, or something?”
“I don’t know what she thinks,” Santiago laughed softly. “It seems that any time people feel their religion is being questioned or challenged, they lose their minds.”
“I bet so,” I said. “I think my father gets pretty upset about some of the things the students are reading. Hey, something I wanted to ask you, if you don’t mind.”
“You can ask me anything,” said Santiago.
“Why are you not on the basketball team?”
“Oh that,” I couldn’t tell if Scott wore a smile or a grimace. “The coach is all the time asking me. If all I had to do is show up for the games and play, I might do it. But you have to be so much more. You can’t grow any hair on your face..” He scratched the half inch of beard on his chin. “You have to be a model for everyone. You can’t smoke or drink. All-American. Idealistic, but without any ideals. You can’t have any unpopular opinions. It definitely doesn’t help if you were born in Cuba, like I was. There are many reasons I don’t play on the team. I usually tell people I just can’t stay in training. Most people don’t want to hear the real reasons. But I thought you probably wanted the truth.”
“I did. And thanks for signing the book. It’s silly, a little bit. But it gave me an excuse to come over and meet you.”
I never would have believed it if you had told me that in three years I would be sharing an apartment with Santiago and three others on the university campus.
#####
When I arrived at his office to see Jack Warren there were only two people standing around. I went straight to his desk, opened the book to the Dedication Page, and presented it to him. “Can you believe they did this?” he said.
“I definitely can believe it,” I said. “It’s absolutely well deserved!”
He wasn’t able to write a long entry because a queue of students had started to form in his office waiting for him to sign their books. One of them was Suzanne. As I left I told her: “I’ll be at my locker. I hope you’ll sign my yearbook.”
“I’ll see you in a few,” she said.
“Dear Terry,” she said, “it was a happy day, for me, when I decided to welcome you to school. You are a unique person, a person of value, much more than you probably realize right now. I hope that, as you begin a new chapter at a new school, that you will discover your true worth. I’m sorry our school didn’t show you a little more hospitality, but I hope there are a few good things you can carry with you from Congaree Central – our friendship, maybe? Best wishes for next year and, for that matter, the rest of your life. I will miss you,
Suzanne”
Before reading the entry, I closed my book, chatted with her for a while, until a queue began to form behind her as well. I walked to the rest room, sat in a booth, and read.
#####
I did attend summer school at Beckham, where the colors were bright and the paint was fresh. The first course I took was Business Law – I really don’t understand why – where I learned what a tort was and why we have civil courts and mesne conveyance. I could have slept through these classes, but instead I sat awake, sometimes looking out of the window and thinking, in a detached way, of the year I had lived through at Congaree Central. When these thoughts became too painful, I could always plan new adventures in the 1966 Mercury Comet – my most frequent ride among the family’s vehicles since I had earned my daytime driver’s permit. When I first sat behind the wheel of this car I had little notion what 390 cubic inches and a 6.4 litre V8 really meant. I was soon to find out. I was mildly shocked to think that my father would have brought home such a machine, especially with me at the cusp of late adolescence, but bring it home he did. Maybe he thought it was just a glorified Ford Falcon. I don’t know.
Since I couldn’t yet drive at night, I took the Comet out to the new Interstate Highway one Friday afternoon. This section of the road had been open for over a year now, but it was still lightly travelled. I had been told that it was good for a car to sometimes be pushed to a high speed in order to “burn the carbon out.” I didn’t really know what that meant, but it was a good enough reason for me to accelerate the Comet to a speed of 118 miles per hour and begin to feel that floating sensation in my head and hands, almost as if the car was a foot or two above ground and could be steered almost by thought rather than manipulation of the steering wheel. I wondered what it must be like to move at 185, 190, or 200 miles an hour, and I understood the addiction many had to speed. While I was in the area I dropped over to Rob’s house. He grinned quizzically when he first saw me and said: “Is everything all right?” Apparently my pupils were dilated.
Summer of ’67 was the first time I was ever arrested, though I wasn’t booked. Wayne Bettis was a kid I had met in Business Law class, also new to the school, and we started hanging out together some. One day we wandered into Rose’s. We bought magazines – for me it was a copy of Hot Rod – and we each slid a couple of 45s inside the pages. My two choices were “I Was Made to Love Her” by Stevie Wonder and “More Love” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. How did we not notice that the manager was watching us from a picture window near the top of the twenty foot wall of the store? He stopped us at the cash register, dragged us to his office and called the police. He and the police were as scary as they might be, so that Wayne – when they finally dropped him off at his parents’ instead of the precinct – had burst into tears. I didn’t cry, but I trembled with fear and remorse as I waited for my father to retrieve me at the shopping center.
So, at fifteen years I began my Bad Boy period. It was slow to get off the ground, but by the following summer – 1968 – I was well on my way. As I think back on this time I try to divine if Terry Bad Boy of the 11th and 12th grades in any way grew organically from Terry Pansy of the 9th grade. I could make a case for it. I know it was a reaction – to a lot of things. But that is another story.
In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was grief-stricken and outraged over this, though I wasn’t sure exactly how to articulate my feelings. The reactions of my classmates at Beckham were extremely mixed – there was a swath of students who saw this as a good thing, and they said so. Some even laughed and joked about it. Some students said that, politics aside, we should honor the dead. Of the twenty or so black students who had been assigned to Beckham there was mostly reticence, though a couple of them wore black armbands.
In other areas of Congaree, however, tensions quickly rose to the boiling point. Increasing numbers of blacks in major cities had decided the time was past for playing nice, and Dr. King’s murder seemed to underscore that. Violence broke out in some of the neighborhoods of Congaree. City police and the Sheriff’s office maximized their patrols. Over the course of the week, six people were killed, scores arrested, and there was widespread property damage in the All-American City.
I still had James Huggins’ phone number. “James! It’s Terry. You doin’ okay?”
“Oh hey, Terry!” he said. “We’re okay, I guess. Waiting for everything to settle down.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” I said. “So your dad and Aunt Lena and your sister are doing well?”
“They’re all right,” he said. “Ronnie’s school had to close for a couple of days so they could restore order. She’ll go back on Monday. My Pop’s been running around telling the church people and the community to try to stay calm, you know.”
“Your brother?”
“Oh yeah, he’s stateside. He actually got wounded last summer, about three weeks before his tour was up, but they patched him up and sent him home. He stayed in Congaree for a few weeks while he was at the VA Hospital in rehab. He’ll be fine.”
We talked about our schools and sports for a minute or two. “Hey James? You think it would be okay if I came over?”
“Well, I … you know I’d be happy to see you and all, but I… I’m not sure this is a good time.”
“I’m not afraid, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, I know that. I just… think maybe you should wait until this all settles down, if it settles down.”
I intended to call him in May, but Rob came over for an extended visit, we played a lot of tennis, talked a lot, and school ended. I never called James back.
#####
Summer of 1968 was when my bad boyness gained a little more focus, even maturity. When I wasn’t working my day job for the Atlantic University paint crew, or delivering newspapers on my morning route, I was meeting with Danny Wilson and Tom Harbison, learning guitar chords and bass intervals, and playing the songs of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, and the Clancy Brothers.
Tom Harbison was the human instrument who brought the first musical instrument into my life. Years earlier I had failed at piano lessons. Since then I had sung in church choirs and now was singing in Beckham’s chorus. But I needed an instrument.
Tom had bought this bass violin from Bob Hendricks – husband of our church organist – for an undisclosed (to me) price, which included a package of six bass lessons from Bob. As the music Tom, Danny, and I practiced became more focused on modern folk music, Tom bought a very nice nylon string guitar and bequeathed the bass to me – a sort of permanent loan. He gave me a couple of rudimentary lessons on the bass and I picked them up quickly. It was mainly about “intervals” – thirds, fourths, and fifths, and how to follow modulations in the song. I had been singing bass in the choir for a couple of years and this accompaniment style of play made perfect sense to me. All I really needed was train my hands and fingers to do what my brain already knew.
I bought a guitar late in the summer and began to learn the chords to a few of our songs. By now, though, our trio had formed into Tom and Danny on guitars and me on the bass. We all shared the vocals, though I hadn’t yet gotten my nerve up to sing lead. We had a pretty good sound, and I looked forward to any performances that might come our way.
In addition to my excitement over the prospect of making music, my mind began to form the beginnings of something to believe in. These singers and others like them were using music to critique American society and its leaders – the wars they perpetrated, the civil rights they violated, the lies they told their citizens. While these folksingers’ ideals were lofty, they also modeled the bad boy as well: not just the motorcycles and leather, but also the rejection of the affluent class, its norms, and its pretensions at authority. Becoming counter-cultural didn’t happen to me overnight, but this was the time when it began to take hold.
During the 1968-69 school year, music and the band became my main extracurricular activity. (Yes, I finally gave up on basketball.) Danny and Tom and I bought matching flannel shirts and began calling ourselves The Sojourners. We started playing at church functions, picnics, birthday parties, where we were occasionally paid in kind – mostly food, never cash. In the Spring of ’69, Tom Harbison somehow managed to book us a gig at a Congaree Central assembly. They even agreed to a $30 fee – ten dollars each! I was a little mystified by how this all happened, and I felt somewhat uncomfortable at the prospect that Ray Melcher and Hugh Elroy would likely be in the audience and might be inclined to mock me. I would be flanked, however, by the other two Sojourners, and they would help me remain strong.
Hugh was nowhere in sight, but I immediately saw Ray sitting about six rows from the front with a couple of guys I knew slightly. I saw Rob and some others I knew as well. As I stood on stage, singing and playing my instrument to a warmly receptive crowd. I felt tall, and strong. To my surprise, I was glad that Ray Melcher, and many others who may have known me by sight at Congaree, could see me here today, unvanquished, living my life and thriving. I have heard it said that the best revenge is a life well lived. Surely that was part of what I felt. I had been wounded by the man sitting on the sixth row, and my recovery had been only partial. But I was on the Congaree Central stage, I was making music, and my head was unbowed.
#####
Have I ever forgiven these three men? People who are acquainted with my history and who remember or have heard about my ninth grade year have asked me this. My answer to this question is not a simple yes or no. My initial answer would be another question: have any of them asked for or sought my forgiveness? I know that answer. It is “no.”
Forgiveness and reconciliation: even at my age I knew these to be two elements of the deepest virtues among human relationships. They reside at the seat of most religions of the world. Christianity professes them as the greatest of human interactions – love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. There is an added precept from Jesus the Rabbi, and a very peculiar one: “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” So, what does this have to do with real life? Anything? It could be said that this is what I was doing throughout the ninth grade. I didn’t resist my enemies, and was constantly turning the other cheek to them, and they were constantly slapping it. The exception was, of course, poor Alson Reed, who I knocked out of his desk in science class and, apparently, out of the school. It should have been obvious to anyone, though, that my cheek-turning did not come from a place of strength. The impulse behind my turning the other cheek was abject fear, and if I could have withdrawn my cheek rather than turning it I would have felt much better. It was no virtue. No one admired it. The only real life example I can call to mind from that year was James Huggins, who learned passive resistance from SNCC and Martin Luther King, who learned it from the great soul Gandhi, who learned it from Hindu and Christian mentors.
I know nothing of any of my three ninth grade tormenters, or of their lives after 1967. Have they amended their lives since then? I mean, even in the normal way that people will try to improve themselves in various ways as part of the usual process of maturing – have they even done that? If they did harm to any others – besides myself – were they able to recognize and acknowledge it, and attempt any reparations or reconciliations? Twelve-step programs which have sprung up during the last century have all insisted that making personal, face-to-face reparations whenever possible is critical for recovering from addictions and compulsions. Did any of them have to encounter this in their lives? I have no idea. Reparations – if they had examined themselves back as far as the ninth grade – would have necessitated an effort to contact me and arrange a meeting. I have not lived in Congaree for decades, and have lost most of my contacts. Perhaps it would have been impossible. Perhaps, according to the resources available to them, the trails would have gone cold. I have no idea at all.
I don’t know if any of them are even alive.
All I am able to observe from my decades of life is that, while there are many cases of human beings who have been able to grow into something better than they were in the past, there are also many people who have fed those same impulses that caused Ray, Hugh, and Eddie to bully me in the ninth grade until they have become bullies on a far grander scale. For those who were given opportunities, some have become power brokers in this society: elected officials, senators and congressmen, heads of corporations, civic and church leaders, media personalities, entertainment magnates, law enforcement officials and professionals, in fact every walk of life. Some have been elevated to some of the highest levels of leadership in this country, and in the world. In a word, bullies rule, as often as not.
From the limited amount I was able to surmise about the biographies of my three tormenters, it was Ray Melcher who was least able to justify his behavior toward me. He should have known better. In the case of Eddie Tinsley, I suspect that his aggressive behavior may well have been strongly reinforced in his family and his immediate environment at home. For him, being tough and mean was something natural and reflexive, part of the way he asserted himself. The way he related to people like me was simply the way things were done in his world. It required little or no thought. Likewise with Hugh, though his nastiness was not as instinctual as Eddie’s, he did seem to have a strong desire to be like Eddie, to aspire to and practice the ways of being a badass so that it would eventually become second nature. All speculation on my part, but it is based on observation.
Then there remains the person of Ray Melcher. He had no excuse. That’s because he was just like me.
I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to discern that Ray came from a middle class, fairly affluent family. As bedeviled as I was by him and by my own internal furor, I could tell from his clothes, his shoes, his always trimmed hair, his speech and diction, and his carriage that he was comfortable, at least materially. It’s possible that there was some horror in his life or in his psyche that was invisible to me, that tormented him, and that propelled him into being an ogre – but I really doubt it. There was something about Ray Melcher, the total picture, that seemed well put together. He had the same advantages as a white, southern, middle class male as I did. This made his cuts, for me, the unkindest of all.
In the mid-nineteen sixties, unless you were a social scientist, bullies were seldom subjected to the sort of scrutiny they are today. Now we recognize that there are any number of elements in a person’s environment or in their neurochemistry that make bullyhood a likely outcome. In those days it seemed much simpler. They were just mean. Even though I am respectful of the social sciences generally, I have to say that in the case of Ray Melcher I believe he was mean, and for no good reason. It may have been part of his weekly regimen: “Well, this week I made three tackles and blocked one pass in the game, I ran a mile twice, I ate 125 grams of protein, and I bullied Terry Owens on Monday and on Thursday.
#####
The remainder of my high school record was undistinguished – academic or otherwise. I didn’t stand out in any way other than being one of the first home-grown “freaks” (as in “countercultural’) in my school and in the area. In spite of it all I did graduate on time, with a good college board score, which helped me get into a competitive college. While in college I made various Dean’s lists and things, wrote for school newspapers, and ended up graduating with honors, though not the highest.
I have not been bullied since the ninth grade at Congaree Central. Not in high school, not in college, nor since then. I have encountered my share of obnoxious and obstreperous people, to be sure, but I have never become their victim. I’m not sure of all the reasons for this. It seemed to me that I continued to struggle with most of the same symptoms and deficits than began that year before the ninth grade, though I had gotten better at dealing with them. By my reckoning I should still have been vulnerable to bullying. But it never happened again. A friend once suggested: “Maybe it’s what you were projecting. Maybe people recognized that, even if they knew you were working through some personal problems, that you weren’t going to be bullied anymore. Almost like you’d already passed that test.” I did rather like this theory, and might almost have believed it was true, except I don’t have enough faith that the universe plays fair.
So, there is my year of bullying. A year of lonesome, dark times, a year of pain, a year of sheer endurance. A year in which, for all its trials, I could have expected to grow and develop more insight and wisdom than I did. But there again, this would depend on the fact that the universe plays fair, and I’m not at all sure that it does.
ijustcantstopwriting 