Tag: Okie

Photo by Andre Carrotflower – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121389827

Here’s a Spring 1975 redux item. When I hit my 20th blogiversary in May 2025, I said I would occasionally repost some items I wrote two decades earlier. So far, I have done that once. I’m excluding my Emmett Till post since I added so much new data. If I add information, it will be [bracketed]. I substituted a later recollection link about Boys in the Band. 

At the end of the fall 1974 semester at the State University College at New Paltz (NY), I broke up with the person who would soon be my ex-wife, the Okie. She moved to Philadelphia for reasons that were unclear to me then, and certainly no clearer 30 years later. [Or 50 years later; I suppose I could ask her. Or I could let it go.] The primary relationship issues were religion and money.

I drifted to Binghamton, my hometown. In January 1975, my sister Leslie and I kidnapped our 75-year-old grandmother and took her by train to Charlotte, NC, where her daughter (my mother) had moved the year before. Gram was getting lame. She had a coal stove, and it would have been dangerous to get up and down the stairs to get it. Nor could she walk up the steep street on which she lived.

13 Maple Street

When we came back a couple of weeks later, I didn’t have any idea what to do next, so I ended up living in my grandmother’s home. Funny thing, though: as often as I had seen her tend to the coal fire in my childhood, I could not keep it going at all. I suffocated it, essentially. I even got help from a friend, but no success.

Eventually, the pipes froze. It was an old wooden house with old wiring, so I could run the refrigerator or the space heater, but not both. Given the cold of the house, I opted for the latter.

In February 1975, I spent virtually the whole month in bed watching television. My grandmother’s TV only got one station, the VHF station Channel 12. So I watched the soaps, Hee Haw, and whatever was on CBS that month. It was undoubtedly the deepest state of melancholy I’d ever been in. [And that is still true.]

My mom rescued me

The space heater was on the ground and, of course, I had every cover I could find. One night, a blanket, handmade by the Okie, fell off the bed in front of the space heater. Fortunately, the acrid smell woke me up, and I was OK. My sister Leslie told me later that my mother (in NC) THAT NIGHT woke up from a dream in which I was surrounded by fire, and stayed awake for a time. Perhaps my mother woke me up, six states away. I don’t dismiss that out of hand.

Occasionally, I’d go to the library to listen to music on the record player and headphones. I remember once listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road. The song that ended the first side was I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. [I LOVE the Billy Preston organ!] During the dirgelike instrumental ending, I cranked it up louder and louder. So when the instruments suddenly stopped, I really thought for a half-second that I had died.

Now and then, I’d visit my friend Carol, where I got cleaned up.

The janitor gig

I didn’t have a phone, so I missed at least a few job opportunities. Eventually, though, I got a position as a janitor in the brutalist  Binghamton City Hall. There were 4 or 5 of us covering the building. I used to empty the wastebaskets from the desks of the police officers, clean the holding cells, wash windows, buff the floors of the common areas, and perform other tasks. Two of the guys started calling me Flash because I would get my work done by the end of the sixth hour of my eight-hour day, at which point I’d hide in the bathroom or a storage room and read. It wasn’t that I was so fast; they were very slow.

I really liked the police captain, and we would occasionally have erudite conversations about issues of the day or my future (which seemed bleak to me, but I’m sure I didn’t say that.) The police officers, however, were a more hostile lot in general, and I often felt that they would intentionally make a mess so that I would have to pick it up.

Drudgery

Now, some folks ABSOLUTELY were making a mess I had to clean up; they were the prisoners. These were holding cells they were in, and the detainees were usually there only one night before being arraigned in the morning. So they thought nothing of taking a lighted match and melting the paint from the walls. More than once, they would take their own bodily wastes and smear them on the walls. Perhaps they thought they were getting back at “the system,” but all they did was make more work for a college dropout.

As the weather warmed, my spirits brightened somewhat. I started going out with this woman named Margaret, but it was a classic rebound situation that lasted about a month. At the same time, I ended up doing a play, Boys In The Band. In the fall, I successfully returned to school at New Paltz.

It was one of the more difficult periods of my life, and I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive just about anything.