Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

   Chapter 5
Camping with Christ

Below the lip of the point, water screaming below,shale crumbling in my grasp, fingers digging, nails lifting away, pulling skin and blood.
Can’t hold on, slipping slowly, scrabbling my feet,leaving a trail of blood from my fingertips, sharp shale piercing my skin.
Can’t hold on, slipping, slipping, saying my prayers.

When I was 10, I decided to join the Boy Scouts.  St. Joseph’s parish sponsored Troop 75, run by Scoutmaster Mr. Dalinbeau and assistant Scoutmaster Ed Noisette. Mr. Noisette was a decent guy, single, dedicated to helping us do well. The Scoutmaster, however, was all caught up in military discipline and most of our meetings were spent in drill, marching in step, and dropping to give him twenty. 

When we went on large ‘Camporees’ with other troops, the youngest among us were sent to all the encampments looking for Sky Hooks , Buckets of Steam and a Bellows for the Fire.  One of the senior scouts, Greg, taught us the phrase ‘Cool your Tool’ and we took to it instantly, the way all kids take to rhymes, and started repeating it in every circumstance where we wanted to sound grown up and knowledgeable.  After about a week, Greg caught us out behind the church and told us to stop saying it, it was stupid, it meant something dirty and adults were mad at him.  Of course, we told him to ‘Cool His Tool’ and got the crap beaten out of us for our trouble.  Believe it or not, I didn’t figure out what it meant until years later when I used it with grown friends at a party; boy was I embarrassed.

There was a lot of controversy when I was in the scouts because Troop 75 accepted a young fellow who was not Catholic.  His name was Nelson Kowalski and he was a Methodist, which to us was like being from Mars.  He was a big red headed kid, friendly, accommodating and funny. He lived at the other end of Central Avenue from us, across from the firehouse and next door to the city garage, and he and I got pretty tight, listening to American Top Forty every week and keeping charts of the biggest hits on the radio.  Nelson would even come to the many church functions we did while Scouting and always acted properly somber, and in fact was considerably more reverential than the rest of us were.  But some parents and a few of the leaders grumbled that his heresy might rub off on us, although we couldn’t see anything wrong with him.  His mother seemed normal, they ate the same food we did and they didn’t have horns growing out of their heads or stripes or anything.  No one ever quite got up the gumption to go against father Robitaille’s decision to let him join, but he was never really made to feel welcome either.  My dad, however, was always open minded about these things and encouraged me to be his friend, and in fact talked to a few of the other parents who had not quite emerged so far from the dark ages.  For a few years, Nelson was part of the regular group hanging out at our house and going on my father’s outings.

I made it all the way to the Star rank in scouting but was stymied by an inability to even come close to passing water lifesaving; I saw I was going to be stuck there and quit as soon as it became obvious that there was no further glory to gain.  I happily quit the scouts and never missed it. Ed Noisette was sad and tried to get me to reconsider but I was just done with all the military hokum. We went on more exciting camping trips by ourselves anyway. 

My father had a cousin Shirley who had some land out in the boonies.  You’d take Route 7 out of Troy, past the Tomhannock Reservoir to a crossroads in Pittstown.  Take a left, after a mile another left, then a right and a left and another right and you’d be on a gravel road and have to watch for a two lane rut heading off into the brush.  Bushes would scrape either side of the car, making grating scratchy sounds, the car would bottom out on a rock or a stump, we’d wind around trees and wallow through mud puddles and come to a clearing and stop.  About 50 yards past the clearing was the all important pine grove and we’d set up the floorless pup tents gathered around a protecting tree.  This area wasn’t level, so the tents were always pitched somewhat loosely, one end rising higher than the other.  After a dinner of charcoal potatoes and hot dogs, we’d sit around the campfire.  My father with his Lucky Strikes and a few cans of Millers, telling ghost stories and scaring the bejesus out of us.  Later, we’d hunch terrified into our pup tents and burrow into our sleeping bags or blankets, depending on what we were able to borrow, and shiver the night away, dreading the killers and rabid animals told about in his tales.

My nephew Ronnie was just old enough to start coming camping with us by this time and it was great to have somebody younger to pick on and tease. Ronnie walked and talked in his sleep and camping was no hindrance to that.  One night, we woke from a groggy sleep to see the tent hitching around wildly, jerking and quivering as if a bear was trying to get in, which is the conclusion we instantly leapt to.  My father grabbed his flashlight and shone it towards the door (obviously a bear would come in through the door, being civilized and all) and there was young Ronnie, tugging mightily at a stuck zipper, his eyes closed, a bothered expression on his face.  We yelled and finally my father rose up and grabbed him by the arm, saying, “Ronnie, wake up, wake up GODDAMN it, Jesus Kee Ko.”   Ronnie, eyes still closed, sleeping soundly, answered back, “I can’t get my line off the bottom, it’s stuck,” remembering, probably, an earlier fishing trip with his dad.  On another trip, possibly that same year, we were awakened by yelling, “Jesus Kee Ko Ronnie, whaddya doing, you’re pissing on my sleeping bag.” By this time all the flashlights were on and aimed at Ronnie, who retorted, sound asleep with a bothered look on his face, “No I’m not!” standing there waving his little wizzer, the stream soaking my father’s sleeping bag.

My father always had difficulties camping out.  He would have to get up out of his blanket 3 or 4 times a night to piss out the beer he’d drunk before bedtime, cursing and grunting and crawling beyond the tent to the nearest tree, being eaten by mosquitoes. Because our tents were floorless and always set up on a hill, he would invariably, slowly but surely, slide out the bottom of the tent, feet first, snoring away, until the sheer numbers of mosquitoes drilling his bare ankles woke him up and the cursing, grunting and crawling would start again, “Jesus Kee Ko, these Goddamn mosquitoes are a pain in my GODDAMN ass,” his voice like thunder.  Between the 3 or 4 trips to the tree and 5 or 6 sets of itchy ankles, I don’t know how he got any sleep at all.

Billy Bluteau, Bob DuPuis, Dave Ballargeon and I became the core of a camping crew that lasted for more than 6 years. The end of Cohoes that we lived in was adjacent to the town of Colonie, very much undeveloped back then. Across the street from my house, behind the Soap Factory and beyond the old railroad tracks, was the leading edge of a tract of continuous land that measured somewhere around 1 ½ miles deep by about 3 miles wide.  The tracks ran along it southward for that 3 or so mile stretch and afforded us many opportunities to enter the interior.  First was the frog pond next to the upper part of the ravine where Bob DuPuis and I got so sick that time. This pond was a great breeding ground for polliwogs which were intently sought after by the budding scientists we were.  Many kids had jars of the pond’s dirty water at home, frothy with squirming polliwogs, hoping for frogs.  The pond was just big enough for intrepid Huck Finns to build rafts of boards and logs for exploring the pond and, after a number of years, the pond became filled with the flotsam of ruined rafts to the point that there was little standing water left.  I can remember only two drownings in the years I was sailing there; mostly due to small bodies falling in amongst the debris and becoming entangled in underwater flotsam, so it was pretty safe I guess.  

Beyond the pond was a steep hill that was great for sledding in winter and breaking bones during summer. At the top were two old pear trees, left from a time when this was all farmland. We would eat green pears in late summer until we were sick with stomach aches, and then eat some more and finish up by pelting each other with the leftovers, pear tree thorns leaving gashes in our skin. As the years went by, more and more kids, acquiring dirt bikes, would visit the hill to race up and down; making roaring noises that could be heard way down on the street below.  Beyond the hill was a great level expanse of open field with knee high grass. I went pheasant hunting there with my father many times, running ahead to flush the birds, my father firing at them overhead as they took to the air in fright.

Heading south, the fields lasted about a mile or a little less, ending in a wooded ravine with the Salt Kill Creek running through it; we knew this as the Devil’s Cave stream.  The ravine was wide with tributaries so there was, to youngsters, a simply huge expanse of mature woods, the stream well intersected with trails leading here and there and numerous campsites.  The ravine was bisected by the tracks and flowed under the tracks through Devil’s Cave, a natural looking tunnel carved through slate.  The cave entrance was about 60 feet down a steep embankment from the track bed and was a major magnet to kids for miles around.  It was dark and damp and spooky and was well known to be populated with bats.  It was roughly 10 feet wide, 7 feet tall and about 100 feet long, stream running through it, a few turns, and the bats.  Brave souls would enter with flashlights pointing the way and onlookers would just about always hear screams after a few minutes and see light flickering wildly in the depth of the cave as the bats, wakened and upset, flitted around the heads of the explorers. It was a right of passage among our set to walk or crawl through the cave to the waterfall at the other end.  You were just a little bit less of a man if you hadn’t yet gotten up the gumption to do Devil’s Cave.

I explored the cave many times and, in time, was confident enough to go in without a flashlight.  It was just possible, especially in the low water of late summer, to have just enough light from the entrance to see you about halfway through the cave.  As the entrance light was petering out to darkness, you could peer around the next bend and see the light glowing from the other end, and so be alright.  When the water was high in spring, there was no way to get through without soaked sneakers, but in late summer you could sort of feel your way for rough shale with your feet and so stay dry. Traversing that eerie space was a confidence builder, and once, when we were in it when a train went by overhead, we became objects of awe to the other kids.  The cave shook, the sound was deafening, bats squealed and loose shale rained down our necks, but we lived to tell about it.

Beyond the Devil’s Cave Ravine was Quartermile Hill. It was a long, slanting field dotted with thorny trees that would grab at your clothes and skin if you got too close, which was a common occurrence in winter when sleds veered out of control.  Bigger kids came here a lot because it was out of reach of the police cars that might want to catch them drinking.  It was understood that when little kids came into view of big kids, the little kids better stay the hell away unless they wanted to be tormented.  We became quite adept at dodging the big kids but sometimes plans had to be abandoned if they were already drinking where we wanted to go. 

Quartermile Hill slanted down towards another stream valley that was very much less visited than Devil’s Cave.  The first time we ventured that far we came across another stream and another tunnel under the tracks.  We quickly went through it, dodging bat lairs, and got to the other side where a vision awaited us.  This may have been when we were discussing the bible in school because when we saw flower vines embracing the far opening and the bucolic woods and meadows beyond, we were absolutely convinced that we had found the actual Garden of Eden, complete with apple tree.  We failed to notice that the tunnel was man made of squared block, the water was muddy and filthy, and a backyard trash heap overflowed down the embankment.  Angel’s Cave it was.

Beyond the Angel’s Cave valley was yet another, smaller area of fields with an old path leading up into yet another wonderful forest and an intricate maze of valleys and streams.  When we were a bit older, we spent literally days exploring these virgin woods and came upon a stream about ½ mile in that, in it’s meanderings had created a series of nice points that were perfect as individual campsites.  Bob, Billy, Dave and I, being the ‘core’ group and the most experienced campers, immediately staked out the four best sites for ourselves.  The level area downstream was for guests; usable when the weather was dry, but decidedly swampy when it had been raining, which it always seemed to be when we were camping.

We set about improving the campsites with the amenities that were in style with us at the time.  First, we needed a proper fireplace.  We would scour the streambed for good sized stones, secure a good pile of clay and muck, and saw some small logs, using these materials to construct fireplaces.  We would build the frame of logs, holding the frame upright with stakes.  About 2 inches to the interior of the log frame, we would stack our stones precariously into an inner wall, and then finish the masterpiece off with the clay and muck poured between the rocks and the frame.  The finished fireplaces were strong, fireproof and surprisingly long lasting.  I visited my own site over 30 years later and when I found the location, I cleared the brush and found the fireplace, still intact and usable.

Our families weren’t too flush in those days so we were lacking nearly every piece of camping equipment that is taken for granted now. Each camper would bring two blankets.  Using one, we made a tent-like shelter, stretching the tighter knit of our two blankets over sticks placed at either end and holding the corners down with leftover rocks from the fireplace.  No floor or ground cloth, we would simply roll up in the other blanket in lieu of a sleeping bag.  This worked well on warm, dry summer nights and less well on cold rainy nights, of which we sure had our share.  There was many a night when one or the other of us, usually a relative tenderfoot, would have unknowingly placed his blanket tent in a depression in the ground and would wake to a torrent of water flowing along the length of his body.  One especially rainy night, Cortland Mineau’s little brother Emil actually floated out of his tent, squalling, and Cortland caught him before he reached the swollen stream; we might have lost him there.  We four captains always sighingly attempted to tell the newbies how and where to place their tents but we had no official status with most of them and so were mostly ignored.  Just as well, we’d get a good laugh and one more troublesome tenderfoot would drag his blankets out of the woods in the middle on the night, vowing loudly and sniffling-ly never to return.

Bob and I, being the most senior of campers, had a certain code that we camped by.  No radios, no prepackaged food, set the blanket tent correctly the first time, keep the campsite picked up, stuff like that.  We were properly disdainful of the rabble surrounding us who had to carry tons of stuff into the woods that, we thought, degraded the true camping experience.  We brought hamburgers and potatoes to cook over the open fire, and bags of chips and bottles of soda, kept cool in the stream.  We were men!  The Bluteaus were another story altogether.  They invariably brought the same things, time after time; each would come with their pellet gun, a can of corn and a box of Freihofers’ Chocolate Chip cookies.  The pellet gun was to shoot game to be added to the stores, though the guns were too cheap to actually hit anything, even if any of the Bluteaus could have hit the side of a barn.  The can of corn was supper and was not meant to be heated, just opened and eaten, so help me God.  The cookies were breakfast, if they lasted.

Am Bluteau always brought his radio because he was an avid fan of the Baltimore Orioles and Boog Powell and after gulping his corn would crawl into his misshapen blanket tent for the rest of the evening, the tinny sound of the announcer coming from the opening.  We never knew if he listened to the entire game or not, but the radio would usually still be playing in the morning when we got up.  Am was just always doing the wrong thing.  The rainy nights always soaked him and he would wake up on those nights bitching and moaning about being wet; Billy would yell, “We told you not to put the tent there, you asshole,” or, “We told you that you needed more rocks, ya Goddamned idiot,” but Am never listened and would go through the same rigmarole every time. 

He was there for the worst storm we ever had camping out.  Thunder, lightning, falling trees, rivers of water flowing through the visitor section of the campsite.  3AM, at the peak of the storm, Am’s voice: “I’m GODDAMN wet, this is stupid, I’m leaving now and I ain’t never ever comin’ back, never no more.”  Sounds of rustling heard faintly through the noise of the storm.  Then, “Anybody want my soda?  Too late, it’s in the mud!”  For years afterwards, whenever something went wrong, we said ‘It’s in the mud’.  Our version of FUBAR . The next morning, in a continuing drizzle, we broke camp and were preparing to leave when someone noticed a fallen, very muddy log where Joey had been sleeping.  Billy, worried that he had lost his dear brother, headed up the path towards home without another look.  Bob and I, however, went over to kick the log to see how heavy it was and after the third kick, it screamed back at us, “Who the GODDAMN hell is kickin’ me I’ll punch their GODDAMN face in, bastards.”  Joey hadn’t walked out in the night after all.

During three or four of our camping years, JC was hanging around the woods and fields.  JC thought he was Jesus Christ but didn’t believe in preaching the bible, emphasizing survival skills instead.  He had long hair, a scarred face and tattered clothes.  He wore work boots and always carried his long knife and hatchet everywhere he went.  Something had happened in his recent past that kept him away from the city, so he set up shop in the woods and would teach interested kids all about his philosophies of doing to others before they did you.  Billy Bluteau had found him first while out hunting (he started hunting with a pilfered shotgun well underage), and excitedly introduced this exotically interesting male role model to the rest of us.

I can still see JC carrying a whole railroad tie (the squared logs that the rails run on) over his shoulder without apparent effort.  We were scared and fascinated at the same time.  He was building a shelter and was getting the ties from the track bed, pulling the spikes, digging out from under the rails and sliding them out to free them.  I was secretly worried that the unsupported rails would bend; derailing the next train, but quickly put the thought out of my mind. There weren’t so many trains nowadays anyway. He was using the spikes to construct his shelter of ties and it was an honor indeed to be given one of these as payment for our help in schlepping ties through the woods to his site. A tie that he would easily toss over his shoulder and walk away with, took four of us little grunts to even lift it off the ground a few inches.

In spare moments, he would give us lessons in knife and axe throwing; he was an expert and I pitied the cop who tried to arrest him when he still had his weapons.  We all became fairly adept at throwing the axe so it would slam and stick into a tree and I think I could still do it today, if I could get the right type of hatchet.  I was less successful with the knife; it would often strike the tree at an angle and careen off into the spectators watching at the side.  They’d whoop and duck, sometimes even avoiding a slashing.

JC would invite us into his shelter and we kept him pretty well supplied with food and cigarettes.  He had a taste for vodka too and we got pretty good at stealing him quart bottles from Durso’s liquor store, two or three a week, on average. It was OK; they had a lot of them. I asked him many times if he was concerned that the cops would find him and his answer was always the same, whatever his father willed, he would accept.  Of course we knew that he really wasn’t THE Jesus Christ because he wasn’t married to any nuns and in fact spoke regularly of his hatred for nuns and priests.  I don’t know what effect, if any, his musings had on my changing religious beliefs but I knew him right around the time that I was setting Catholicism aside for good.  He spoke convincingly of how the Catholic Church, through the ages, had become an abomination, straying completely away from his teachings when he was on earth the first time and now, in this second coming, he was trying to right those wrongs by espousing a more simple life.  The priests and nuns were preaching heresy and must be ignored.  Right on, I thought.  Ignore them priests and nuns, especially when this thinking conveniently negated my last need to actually go to church. 

One year, JC wasn’t around anymore.  We went to his shelter and it was torn apart, the ties scattered and burned, his meager possessions strewn about.  We didn’t know what happened and couldn’t ask because we weren’t supposed to know anything about him and were still a bit afraid of the cops putting us in jail forever, with only food and water.  So, we let it go, wondering if we’d ever see him again and wondering what happened.  We never found out.  So it goes with prophets. Society slaps them down. I wouldn’t be surprised if the priests and nuns had gotten together and killed him for preaching against them.

I was at the age when my dad was more serious about singing in the choir and was given permission, as a responsible young man, to go to an earlier low mass on Sunday.  Without transportation, I wasn’t able to go to church in the Monsterino patches or on the riverbed, so the Bluteaus and I went to Church at Jean’s Corner Grocery down beyond George Street Park, and out of sight of our back porch.  We’d get our Royal Crown Cola and our Wise potato chips and head over into the woods at the edge of the abandoned Erie Canal Bed and talk and plot until it was time to head home from church.

In the early part of this period, we were just skipping and it didn’t mean any great changes in beliefs. In fact I would say that young kids have no independent thoughts about religion and are just doing what they have been taught to do.  We were skipping because it was more fun to hang out in the canal than sit and listen to priests talk about damnation and how much money we needed to fork over.  The money our parents gave us to put in the collection did just fine buying us sodas and chips.  It seemed a more responsible use of the money, somehow, you know, supporting a struggling local business person instead of tossing more money at the rich religious. We were still all in St. Joseph’s then so we got all the religion we needed during the week anyway.  The kids we really pitied were those who went to Abram Lansing Public School; they didn’t get their fill of religion during the week so had to go to church AND Sunday school on the weekends, a double whammy.

As I got older, my lazy skipping turned into actual revulsion to all things religious.  I knew that I was going against God and that it would bite me in the ass one day, but I started to really believe that the church was all a scam to keep us in line and enrich the bishops, and eventually the pope.  I was actually reading the bible and saw so many things mentioned that seemed in direct opposition to the theory of compassion and acceptance preached by Jesus (not JC, but the original one).  There were so many senseless rules; the injunction against eating meat on Friday, the ridiculousness of unknowing infants languishing in Purgatory if some adult forgot to get them baptized, all those things.  The nuns I knew were sour, mean and downright violent people. The priests had servants to clean their rectory and cook them dinner, drove new cars every other year (always black, of course) and wore fancy robes and crowns during ceremonies.  They greedily took our money. What did any of this have to do with Christ’s life’s work?  He wore sandals, simple robes, walked everywhere he went and chased the moneychangers from the temple.   There was something wrong with this picture. I wasn’t really working it all out in an organized way yet, but it was enough to help me justify my increasing lack of interest in anything about the church.

Mentally leaving the church was something that I had to keep from my parents, especially my mother, but even dad.  Even though dad had enlightened ideas about where one could go to church, in his heart of hearts he was very conservative and quitting it entirely, as opposed to boyish rebellion, was a terrible thing and not to be tolerated.  One of my friends got caught skipping and got a dressing down by his parents; my father heard of it and went right up one side of me and down the other with loud dark threats about what would happen to me if I skipped.  This scared me back to the sanctuary for a few Sundays but was soon forgotten; we were all just more careful, that’s all.  We all swore that if ever one of us got caught again, we wouldn’t throw in the others who had escaped detection.

In the mid to late 60’s when I was an adolescent, most of the families I knew were as close with money as we were.  We weren’t given everything we wanted and birthdays and Christmas weren’t as much of a consumer event as they seem to be now.  Spending money was tight, so to afford the finer things in life, like baseball cards and sodas, we had to earn our own way.  Like most of my buddies, I looked for easy ways to make a buck.  The back pages of comic books were filled with tantalizing pitches claiming to be able to make us rich, but on review, my father would always disappointingly steer me away calling them bunk and my repeated entreaties a ‘Pain in his Goddamn ASS.’ 

In my frenzy, I was willing to believe anything.  Dave Brierly and Tony Bulova showed up one day with a treasure map, surely drawn by Long John Silver.  They sold it to Dave Ballargeon and me for our last soda money.  We followed the map, which led us to the brink of the old canal bed at the end of George Street Park and to the base of one of the huge blocks that was all that remained of one of the locks.  We dug excitedly and unearthed a small cardboard box filled to the brim with diamonds.  Wow, diamonds, we were rich!  We’d buy all the soda and chips and penny candy and baseball cards we wanted.  We ran all the way back to my house and burst in on my father, interrupting the afternoon baseball game, to show him our windfall.  Well, he took the wind right out of our pirate sails and told us heatedly to stop bothering him; we had a bunch of shattered glass from a car windshield, like maybe from the Taft’s car up the street that had been bashed, and were we the ones who did it?  I told about the treasure map and dad got his cloudy look and would have gone to see Dave and Tony about our soda money but thought this would be a good lesson, and so didn’t. Crap!

On another day, Dave and Tony told me that they had found a very rare baseball card checklist which was worth the same as 500 individual players’ cards like we used in Leaners.  Because we were such good friends, they’d sell me the card for 100 cards and I could make out like a bandit.  So, I showed up at Dave’s door and asked for the checklist card, holding my 100 cards tightly in my grubby fist.  He said be quiet, he didn’t want his parents to know he was being so good to me, giving up something so valuable and all, and surreptitiously made the trade, quickly closing the door on me so as to hide our little secret.  I rushed home to tell my dad and he said I got taken again, that the card was completely worthless and wasn’t worth even one card.  Crap again!

In desperation, I succumbed to one of the ads in the back of the comics.  I would become a salesman and sell ‘All Occasion Greeting Cards’ door to door.  I showed this one to my father and he thought it would be OK.  The cards were sent to you, basically, on consignment.  You would make every effort to sell them, returning the unsold ones and keeping a percentage of your sales.  Customers could even order them imprinted with their name for extra class. Fair enough!  I was still shy but mustered up the courage to ring my first doorbell, trying the people I knew the best, maybe, who wouldn’t yell or slam the door in my face.  I’d ring the bell, hoping that no one was home so I wouldn’t die of embarrassment but this was when there were many stay at home moms and they weren’t wary of door to door salespeople. “Wanna buy some greeting cards?  They’re good for all occasions…” went my soft-spoken pitch. I spent 3 weeks unloading my supply of cards and sold every box, feeling the rush of success and anticipation of great riches. Dad helped me figure out what to send to the company and, after their cut and postage; I made a bit over $2 for my three weeks of effort.  It bought me about 5 weeks of church soda and chips but seemed not worth it, somehow.

Then, I got my first paper route.  You had to know somebody to get one, and my best friend Tom Ballargeon was giving up his afternoon Troy Times Record route to take on a more lucrative morning Times Union route.  He put in the word, spent two weeks showing me the route and how to collect and I was in business.  My route covered about 6 square blocks around my neighborhood and right after school, 5 days a week and on Saturday mornings, I would trek downtown to the satellite office and pick up my papers, arranging them in my canvass shoulder sack. I had an average of 35 customers and could deliver my papers in about half an hour.  Then I had to collect once a week over the weekend so I could pay for my papers that next Monday afternoon.  About half my customers paid promptly when I rang their bell, about another quarter of them would pay grudgingly, often making me come back because they didn’t have cash on hand and the last bunch were the tough ones; I often went 3 or 4 weeks before they would painfully catch me up to date.  Bastards, making a kid front them credit!  All in all, I think I was at my route, all aspects of it, for about 10 hours a week and made an average of $2.50 per week, shorter hours and more pay than the All Occasion greeting cards.

About two years later, Tom Ballargeon’s sports commitments forced him to give up his morning route and he recommended it be given to me, his best buddy.  Tom and I had been friends since his babysitter and my sister Judy babysat us together when we were still toddlers.  I was two weeks older but he was always the bigger one: stronger, braver, more athletic and more confident.  He was always doing things first, learning school lessons earlier, trying new things well before me; in general someone to look up to.  So, it was as it should be, his having the paper routes earlier and passing them on to me.

The morning route was more responsibility than the afternoon one was.  More customers, a larger area, more expensive and often harder to collect.  Most customers wanted their paper early in the morning, well before they went to work and I found that I needed to be finished with my route by 7:30 AM to keep everybody happy. Also, the TU put out a thick Sunday edition, way too heavy to carry the 60 or 70 Sunday papers in any canvass bag, so Dad suddenly was an able assistant to me, getting up at the crack of Sunday Dawn to drive me downtown to the rattletrap TU office on Seneca street in downtown Cohoes, help me collate the papers and then ferry me around my route, papers piled high in the back seat of the car.  He did it without complaint or compensation of any kind.

I (well, then, dad and I) held that route for a good 4 years.  In addition to Sunday driving, he was very good at convincing laggard payers to pay up or deal with him.  The only customer he couldn’t convince to pay was a woman named Peachy. She was pretty exotic looking for Cohoes, was the daughter of a man up the street and always seemed to be either out with friends or broke when I came to collect. He went to her door with me a number of times and sometimes by himself and she would give him the same sultry smile she gave me and say, “Gee, I’m sorry, I just don’t have it today,” and that would be that. Every month or so, dad would go see her father and suddenly she’d pay up with a generous tip to boot. She was notorious among all the guys my age for answering her door in a sheer negligee and it was not uncommon for my friends and others who I barely knew to want to come collecting with me on the off chance she’d be home.  It was a sure thing that if she was home, she’d be in the nighty; very exciting! If I had read Tom Sawyer yet, I might have sold collecting rights the same way he sold whitewashing chances, but at better profit.

This TU route was earning me close to $10 per week after I had it a year or so, with a windfall from Christmas tips at year end.  That was when the paper would produce these cheesy calendars and we would brazenly drop them off in person, sometimes getting tips of $5 and even $10 per customer, though there were always the cheapskates who would give 50 cents or nothing at all, just smilingly taking the calendar and closing the door in my face.  I had to pay the paper 50 cents per calendar so I hated those cheapskates.  I’d tell dad and he’d say, “those bastards are a pain in my Goddamn ass, Jesus Kee Ko!”

Dad liked his beer.  Every night at 5PM sharp, mom would have dinner on the table, sometimes spaghetti, often hash and corn, sometimes one of her various inexpensive casserole dishes.  My father did his insurance premium collecting during the day and was supposed to be selling new policies in the evening.  He had sold a lot in his first years with Metropolitan, but recently they were changing the way they paid and he was expected to sell more and more.  Mom and dad’s fights would start near every night at 5PM sharp: would he go out to sell and earn money or would he stay home, sit at the kitchen table and drink beer?  He seemed to be always looking for an excuse, any excuse, to not go out selling.  Sue feels that he wasn’t really cut out to be a salesman; that he would rather stay home and drink than face rejection. 

At any rate, his pay was steadily declining and my mother would ask if he was going out that night to sell and, if he had an excuse, the yelling would begin.  Fridays were the worst.  His office had a general Friday morning meeting and after that he was pretty much off for the rest of the day; couldn’t sell insurance on Fridays after all, it was the end of the week, and people wouldn’t be in a buying mood.  He and some of his likewise thinking buddies would gather at Caradori’s tavern for a quick one on the way home, which would more often than not escalate into a bunch of slow ones.  Sometimes he’d call, sometimes not; my mother sitting home wondering when he’d come home, what shape he’d be in and would he have any of his paycheck left.  A few times she sent me to Caradori’s to get him to come home but if he’d been there long enough, even I couldn’t get him to leave the dart board to come home.  Maybe he’d order a pizza for me to bring home for supper.  Once, knowing he was coming home well after supper, he thought to bring home a few hamburgers for him and my mom to eat, cold in a paper bag, nothing for the kids (I guess we could eat peanut butter).  Mom was so mad that she threw the hamburger at him, missing him of course, the meat and roll splaying onto the floor.

Another time, he called home well near bedtime to tell Mom that his car had been stolen and the police were helping him look for it.  The cops rode him all over the neighborhood, took him downtown to fill out a report and then brought him home with no luck.  I wandered around Caradori’s after my paper route the next morning and found the car, securely locked, parked about a block away, right where he had left it.  He was too sick to get up that morning.

My parents fought, but other than the hamburger incident, I remember no actual physical violence in our home, just a lot of frustration and confusion.  She was trying to hold together a household and he was trying to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to do it, what the hell is the Goddamn problem?  Jesus Kee Ko! It was nothing that we ever discussed, and whatever thinking we kids did, we all pretty much kept to ourselves.  Sue hugged me and talked of what he was doing to our mother, and Judy and Sue wondered why she stayed, but I didn’t have any ideas.

He was my buddy, my dad, my hero, and I didn’t understand him one Goddamned little bit.  Jesus Kee Ko!