Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 8
Living and Nothingness 

Tongue exploring my mouth, teeth starting to loosen.
Pushing harder and harder, worried lest they fall out but unable to stop.  It’s an obsession;

I want to stop, but I can’t, just can’t…Goddammit, stop, for crying out loud,
the teeth are getting really loose and will fall out and
I won’t be able to face anyone or get a girl…
stop prodding with the tongue… prodding harder…
…the first tooth has come out
and is now loose and unattached in my mouth.

I tongue it around a while, then start prodding others…

I was alternately listless and angry at HoJo.  Smoking a lot, dropping ashes into the eggs, speaking sarcastically to everyone else that worked there, yelling, especially at the waitresses (Johnson Girls) when it got busy, and skipping shifts and coming in late.  After a while the boss started cutting my hours until I had dropped from 50 a week to a single 4 hour shift on Sundays.  I quit.  Got a $3 per hour job (22 cents an hour more than HoJo!) slinging eggs, graveyard shift at Denny’s (Always Open), and could never master the art of flipping two eggs at once in a mini fry pan; that job lasted only about 2 months before I just left one day and never went back.  I realized that I was no cook, not even short order.  I hated it, had no obvious talent for it, and was taking shortcuts wherever I could. End of my career as a chef.

In the fall of ’73, a man with no skills and a lousy attitude could be hard pressed to find anything decent.  I visited an employment agency and was interviewed by this smartly dressed, professional looking woman. She clucked over my poor excuse of a resume and sent me downstairs for coffee.  When I got back, she said that there just didn’t seem to be anything I could do, except for maybe Singer, selling sewing machines.  I said anything, and she then said too bad they’re not hiring.

Billy and I went to the recruiting center and tried to get into the Navy.  The draft had ended a few days before my lottery number would have come up and now my father was claiming that the service would be a good thing to do.  The recruiter looked at my employment history and immediately earmarked me as material to be a cook on a naval base.  Whoop-de-doo!  He asked preliminary questions about health and I told him how I had sprained my ankles a number of times; he had me lift my pants hems and said, “shit you have small feet, no wonder,” and quickly marked me off as unfit for basic training and not acceptable.  Who wanted to peel fucking potatoes on a naval base anyway?

I signed up for unemployment and the drab clerk there told me that a local steel mill was hiring.  I applied and was abruptly turned down, don’t know why.  It might have been because I slouched insolently during what passed for an interview.  The questioner had nothing to ask me and I had nothing to say.  I guess I do know why, after all.

I looked at the newspaper help wanted ads every day and finally got a job at a retail store distribution center mailroom at $90 a week, $30 less than I was making at Denny’s.  I made trips to the post office to pick up and deliver the mail, distributed internal mail, drove to the bank to make the deposits and operated the bill stuffing machine.  I suppose there was opportunity for advancement but I never saw it.  We all got a fruitcake as a Christmas bonus. I lasted for about 9 months of stupefying boredom before hearing that NAPA Auto Parts offered ‘State-Like’ benefits, i.e. better vacation, sick leave and a small start to health insurance. Big whoop, huh? So continued a long line of short term jobs.

While still in high school, a number of us had started to patronize Ralph’s Tavern on the Island, which was not far from Matty’s where my brother always hung out. It was a run of the mill traditional watering hole, thirty-five cent beers in seven oz. glasses, chips and peanuts for sale, a jukebox with the latest and not so latest tunes and a quarter a game pool table.  If you were from Cohoes, a place like this was just where you went on Friday and Saturday nights, and depending on your lifestyle, you were there Thursday nights, and Wednesday nights and sometimes Tuesday nights too.  You could have a night of low key entertainment for very little money.  Everybody knew your name and your Eight Ball abilities.

Buddy McDonald had been in my class at Keveny and he was one of those tough guys who I didn’t know all that well.  He was a regular at Ralph’s and I looked up to him.  He was the first I knew to wear high heeled shoes with flared leg pants and I immediately went out to buy a get up like him in an attempt to be cool.  He was the one who had signed my yearbook: “Tom, I hate writing to guys, Bud.” My hero!

We all got to be sort of a little family at Ralph’s, we knew the bartenders well and they would often throw us a free draft on a slow evening. I, however, continued to be just a little on the outside, never feeling like these people wanted me there particularly. I was tolerated but not sought out.  An occasional special party was arranged where near all the regulars were invited; I usually heard about them the day after.  I wanted to belong, if only to this motley group of unaccomplished ‘Do Nothings.’  I would work my dead end job, collect my puny wage and spend the proceeds on stale draft beer, juke tunes and one more game of pool. Being that I wasn’t yet legal and the possessor of a fake ID, I guess I shouldn’t complain.

I was hanging around regularly with Am Bluteau at this time.  He was volatile and unpredictable and had yet to develop anything resembling social graces.  But, he was willing to hang out with me and that was something.  His two friends Paul and Brian became my friends in a sense, although we had nothing in common, except Am.

My sister, Judy, decided to throw me a whopping eighteenth birthday party.  Judy and Ron had a great downstairs room in their house with a built-in bar; everything needed for a good sized get together.  She told me to give her a list of people, especially girls, to invite.  I was able to come up with a paltry list of fifteen people to invite who I thought might possibly come to my birthday party.  Judy called them all and prepared the party with beer and snacks and music and decorations, planning a gala event.  The night of the party, it became clear an hour into it that people seemed to have other commitments.  Am was there with Paul and Brian, Lenny showed up but had to meet someone after.  Tom Ballargeon came, sure enough, but he was always distracted nowadays and wandered off before too long.  Then Nicky Moreau came with her sister and a friend and Judy announced that ‘The Girls’ were finally here.  It was Am, Paul, Brian and I and three gorgeous young women staring at each other, Judy hovering anxiously.  I was dying of shame to think that here I was with these incredible nerds and misfits and here were the classiest ladies around, at a ‘Party’ with us.  The girls stayed all of a half hour and then suddenly remembered an exceedingly pressing engagement that they had to attend to immediately, “Can’t believe we forgot,” they said. Judy was stricken, sorry, unbelieving, and we sat around for a while longer nursing beers and eating chips before it all dwindled away.  No party games, festive decorations drooping from the ceilings, we went home. Happy Birthday to me, poor lonely boy.

That first fall after high school, right after I turned eighteen and legal, I was actually invited to a party before it took place.  A bunch of my former classmates were getting together at Jed Dixon’s apartment to relive our memories and stay in touch. About three hours into the party, as inhibitions were disappearing, I was sitting on the floor next to Mary Jane Burley listening to Chuck Mangione tunes.  I had invested a long time talking to her, being nice and interested, hoping. She was staring down at the glass cupped in her two hands mumbling something like, ‘It’s my drink, I think I’ll drink my drink, I love my drink, don’t take my drink,’ all in this monotonous voice with a glazed look in her eye.  Then she rolled over and passed out.

I remember the drive home, alone again. I had to close one eye so that the center line stayed in focus and single.  I drove slowly, just enough aware to take the back roads.  I weaved generously, spending more time on the wrong side of the road than the right.  An oncoming car was a crisis requiring intense study; we missed with inches to spare. I wandered sloppily into a cornfield, crushing stalks, sliding in mud holes, slowly returning to blacktop, bounding up through a ditch.  I got stuck in a loop near St. Coleman’s, not understanding to try a right instead of a left, and passed the same intersection three or four times, confusedly.

Amazingly, I made it home without killing anyone or, worse yet, being stopped by the bastard cops and going to jail with only bread and water.  I floated up the stairs, thumping walls and doors and got my key into the lock after about 10 stabs. Bastard keyhole wouldn’t stay still.

Mom woke up.  Said,

“Tom, is that you?”

“It certainly is, yes indeed.”

Mom again,  “Are you drunk?”

“I believe I might be possibly slightly inebriated, thank you very much.”  I might actually have been a bit more stoned than drunk but not too messed up to keep that to myself.

Mom again, “Did you drive yourself?”

“I believe that in fact I did drive myself and as you can see I made it safely home, yes indeed, thank you very much for asking.”

I annunciated so clearly and spoke in such professorial cadence that it was clear that I was completely shot and out of my head. Mom, however, was just happy I was home safe so she could go back to sleep, worry free. Dad never woke up, probably sleeping off a few beers himself.

It may sound like I was completely striking out with women these few years but I did have dates and opportunities for closeness, pathetically handled as they were.  I wanted a woman, and some who didn’t know me were initially attracted.  I was just so tightened up and self conscious that even if I had been able to solve my performance problems, I had no idea how to treat anyone anyway.  A bull in a china shop, I was.

Sandy Babson had just come back to Keveny for her senior year; she had been away and I didn’t know her before.  I was still riding down to Keveny on occasion and I noticed her in majorette practice.  Boy, she could twirl that baton.  I struck up an acquaintance and we hit it off, somehow, and she agreed to a date.  Bill Branch had worked at Keveny for a few years as a lay religious teacher and was one of the few I trusted.  When he heard of our impending date, he called me up and said that Sandy had been through some tough times and please go easy on her.  He didn’t explain.  Bill waited tables at a fancy Troy restaurant at the time because the bastards at Keveny wouldn’t pay him a Goddamn living wage, Jesus Kee Ko!  So Sandy and I went there for our date and Bill served us. It almost seemed incestuous, her current teacher bringing us plates of food, but what did we know.

Sandy turned out to be my first real opportunity to get to the level of intimacy I had been dreaming about and already claiming I had attained.  She was experienced and willing but not at all sluttish.  We drove to a popular make out area up near the Waterford canal, pulled into a patch of shadow and moved to the back seat for some serious arousal.  I had brought with me all those stale Travis McGee attitudes and turned up completely unable to advance the evening.  You know, it was buggy and muggy, there were lights here and there, the car seat was uncomfortable; I can come up with a hundred such excuses.  She helped and was very patient but I finally said let’s forget it, sorry; sorry to be such a wuss, sorry, sorry, sorry, full of disgust with myself for not measuring up to Travis.

Much to my amazement, she didn’t refuse to see me again and never felt the need to tell anyone about our fiasco, which amazed me no end.  I’m sure if she had, I’d hear all about it, with terrific distortions added in for comedy.

I was still in my stint as overnight cook at Denny’s.  Sandy and I  were in our second month of dating and I hated the job and thought I was developing an ulcer.  The morning I had had enough, I went to her house and woke her up (I woke her parents too) and she held me in her arms and caressed my hair and rocked me back and forth.  I felt ashamed and useless and paid her back by breaking up with her the next day. Mostly from embarrassment and the feeling I was a loser.  She moved on and found a real man and, last I heard, was happily married with three great kids.

Back in high school, Barbara Skalinski was the talk of the school.  Her family ran the Skalinski Potato Chip Company in Cohoes and by our standards they were really rich.  She had long, luscious blonde hair, deep green eyes and was just plain breathtaking.  She had a younger sister coming up through the ranks who came into her beauty her sophomore year, the year after I graduated.  Her name was Julia and I spotted her wending her way to school.  She was giving Barb a serious run for hey money, looks-wise. She would walk to school, passing the same route everyday, uniform skirt swinging, impossibly long hair swaying.  I was, barely, seventeen, she was all of fifteen, but I was smitten.

I started offering her rides to school and at first she declined, then after about 15 offers she finally began to accept.  I was hoping that she would be impressed by my car; by this time I had given the Bullshit Chevy to my brother Bob and was driving a hot ‘68 Buick Skylark.  Here I was a grown man, offering my time and affections to this young lass, how could she not swoon?  It was pretty exciting, having this beautiful creature sitting next to me in my car, sitting demurely, knees together, her gaze out the window, hands clasped in her lap.  I had no idea what to do and was worried that she was way too young for me anyway.

Toward late fall, I knew the winter sophomore soirée was approaching and I, unbelievably, asked her to it.  She said no, she didn’t want me to be busted on, and turned me down flat. Another deflation to my pummeled ego.  Good thing one of us was mature.  After that, she would no longer accept rides, and I disconsolately stopped looking for her and never saw her again.

Penny Lorber was another Keveny beauty who was two years ahead of me.  I never got to know her, but her sister Jenny had been just a year ahead of me and was lately hanging out at the bar at Leisureville apartments.  When Ralph’s was too stultifying, I would head up to Leisureville and sidle up to Jenny.  I had realized that I should learn to dance at least a bit because every woman I met required potential boyfriends to at least do an occasional waltz with them. I was, as usual, peripherally accepted into Jenny’s group and I regularly asked her to dance.  I remember it like yesterday: me singing the lyrics to the song we were dancing to, out loud, directly into her ear.  I liked Color My World: ‘As Time goes on…I realize…just what you mean…to me.’  Not a thought in my head, just cluelessly professing a love I didn’t feel, in song.  Suddenly she was too busy to dance and I was clueless as to why. Again.

While I worked at the retail distribution center, I met Jane, who made it absolutely clear from the start that she would not tolerate being called Plain Jane.  Beautiful face, dark eyes, smoky soft hair and a crinkly smile, yow, she was sweet.  We would head over to the Chug-A-Mug after work and play Linda Ronstadt tunes on the juke and shoot pool.  ‘Love has no Pri-i-ide, when I call ou-out your name…’ She could hold her beer and had a talent for edgy wisecracks which kept me on the jump.  I wanted her badly, as badly as I had ever wanted anyone and I had stuffed some nasty crushes under my pillow. 

I held her at bay as long as I could, fearing the worst, but somehow ended up at my house with her, alone, with hours to spare.  We teased and played until it became time to take a shower together.  I left her to get the water running the right temperature and was just finishing when she came into the bathroom, naked, orange tipped, black tufted, boggling my mind.  We soaped and rinsed slowly and dried thoroughly and then floated hand in hand to my bed.  I tried and tried and tried, she helped and helped and helped, keeping the wisecracks to a minimum, all to no avail.  I sat at the edge of the bed grumpily, closed in tightly to myself, seething, all but whimpering, spewing a monologue about how I really felt we should hold off until we were ready (she sure looked and acted ready) and about how we shouldn’t take chances with our future since we had no protection (even though I, like most doofus guys my age, always had a rubber in my wallet, ‘just in case’).  She grinned at me and said it was a good idea; she and a girlfriend had sworn they would stay virgin until nineteen, and this would have blown it.

Of course, we never dated again.

Shortly after that I met Nikki Bonnasorri at George’s.  She had come with a few girls I knew and looked quite angelic with her curly hair and crinkly eyes.  She lived all to hell and gone out past Schenectady and I drove out to pick her up for our first date.  He mother and father met me at the door and asked me a number of specific questions about my intentions; I guess I answered satisfactorily because they let me in the living room and allowed their daughter to leave with me, with many hugs and admonitions. Nikki had on a lot more makeup than I remembered and her hair was full of spray but I went ahead with it anyway.  We got on OK. She was very conservative and circumspect about her sexuality; there was no possibility of shaming myself with unperformed sex, so I kept asking her out, more for something to do than anything else.  In time, out of boredom and self loathing, I became so surly with her that she finally started to be busy.  I showed up unannounced after two weeks of no communication.  She received me civilly enough but after I started hinting that her brother was on drugs (I was an expert, after all) she asked me to leave and that was that.  I don’t know if her brother was on drugs and have no idea why I would have thought to say it, but there you have it.

I heard through the grapevine later that her parents had said to her, ‘I told you so.’  until then, I had thought that I was a fine upstanding young man, able to charm parents with my glib chatter, impress younger brothers with my worldly demeanor, and make younger sister’s hearts go pitter pat.  It was now starting to seem that I was less of a man than I had thought I was, even on the surface where all my quality was.

I guess I knew all along that there was something wrong with me, that I was really a fake and impotent and not worth knowing at all.  I tried my best to keep it all hidden and keep up the façade of strength but was painfully aware that shortly, everyone would see through me and sidle away from me, shaking their heads ruefully, and casting knowing glances backwards.  My pop culture reading (Travis McGee again) and the cool movies I saw told me how strong and knowing men felt and behaved and I copied it as closely as I could, but success was fleeting when it came at all.  I would be found out and shunned, deservedly, and the prospect of total social failure and being the area laughingstock ground my thoughts into the dirt and made me more sullen and nasty.  I was nothing.

One of the few social things I did with any success at all was the pick-up basketball games on the courts in George Street Park.  Yes, at this advanced age, I was still hanging out at the park, though no longer drinking and puking in the weeds.  We did see Harvey now and again, with a new crop of followers and a new sluttish prepubescent heading off to Durso’s but no longer talked to him and he made no friendly advances.

My biggest problem with basketball, completely overshadowing my miniscule height and complete lack of talent, was that I had small wrists and ankles.  About every third time I played in a game with the guys, I would step incorrectly onto the foot of someone larger and, when they spun me off, would slam to the ground with a sprained ankle.  Someone would run to get my dad, who would come with the car and it would be yet another trip to the emergency room.  Over the course of about five years of this, I sprained my ankle a total of nine times, a few times being told by the ER people that I may have had a ‘slight’ fracture also, though nothing to worry about.

When my ankle wasn’t being injured, I was catching the ball or a knee squarely in my crotch, thumping my family jewels together.  I would slump to the ground in agony, rolling back and forth with my arms shoved up between my legs in a fruitless attempt to hold that incredible pain in there.  There was a young lady who often hung around with us.  She was maybe sixteen when we were nineteen, and she was a little sweetheart named Jilly.  Of course, I secretly admired her, but was too stuck up to talk to her, too sure that it would be a terrible thing for me to be teased by the guys about dating such a little baby.  One of the last times I played ball was one of the times I had my balls slammed and as I rolled around on the ground screaming, I saw her with one of those smiles that she just couldn’t hold in, even though she was trying her best not to laugh.

Dad and I were starting to get along again.  I had stopped the drugs, pretty much, and if not pursuing a career, was at least keeping employed for the most part. For all the closeness I was regaining with my father, these things were not things I felt I could bring up.  We spent hours canoeing and camping out and more hours drinking beer at the kitchen table, cigarettes smoldering in the ashtray, talking about his adventures and his distaste for his job and the tricks he pulled on my mother.  For her part, mom had her TV programs and her early bedtime, and how could I ask my virginal seeming mother (5 kids notwithstanding) why I had problems with girls.  Especially the performance issue.  Because we men were performers, right?  Travis said so.  He was my role model.  Tall and strong and avuncular and adventurous.  All knowing.  Leaders, providers, hand holders. Only, here I was working a lousy job, pissing away my beer money in stinking urinals in third rate joints and flopping flaccid when a comely wench smiled sweetly. Goddamn me, Jesus Kee Ko!

In these years there came two things to me that became long term endeavors that gave my life a modicum of meaning.  My father had started bringing me to Forked Lake when I was fourteen and the campout there had become an annual event with various friends and family joining us over the years.  It wasn’t until this time, however, when I really started to love wilderness and the natural outdoors and feel it was a part of me.  At the same time, I developed a strong love of photography.  Dave Ballargeon had gotten all involved in trapping (yes, of live wild animals!) and while walking his early morning trap lines, he brought his father’s ancient 35mm Kowa SLR with him, loaded with Ektachrome slide film, with which he took some haunting morning mist pictures.  Dead trees reaching and blending into atmospheric fogginess, dewed leaves glistening in the rising sun, shimmering spider webs warbling in faint breezes; I was mesmerized.

Although Tom Ballargeon was and is my best lifelong friend, it was with Dave that I had interesting adventures that spanned childhood years and continued through my later teen years.  We lived in a time when the dangers of strangers were less discussed and in general, starting when we were 8 to 10 years old, we were allowed to wander the nearby fields, woods and neighborhoods pretty much unsupervised.  It was typical that we would jaunt off on weekend and all summer days on intricate missions requiring long distance hiking, jumping trains, sodas at Fisher’s and Gardner’s corner stores and late games of flashlight tag after dark.  Being unsupervised for entire days, and, essentially, sometimes weeks on end, allowed for some creative trouble.

Dave and I started a fire in Devil’s cave at the brink of the falls with lots of dried leaves; it got so smoky that we became disoriented and tripped into the fire and burned our clothes.  Another time, we built a fort of well dried tree bark and sticks and logs and a blanket roof not far from his house.  We decided on an indoor fireplace and somehow the fort caught the flame and after the fire engines left the blackened, devastated, 10 acre field, we swore on our mother’s graves that we would never tell who started the fire.

So, one time, while I had accompanied Dave on his trap line with my new camera, we found an expired skunk in one of his traps.  It hadn’t sprayed, so we were able to loosen it from the trap and carry it home.  Dave was still doing taxidermy and wanted to mount the skunk, understandably enough, so we proceeded to start to skin the animal with that in mind.  Dave was always a bit slow to see the obvious, and also often innocently optimistic.  I pointed out the small almond shaped structures under the skin near the skunk’s rear end and warned Dave to be careful with that scalpel around them.  Well, he accidentally cut into one and this mustard colored fluid squirted out, spraying us liberally, as if it was under intense pressure.  No sooner did we see the mustard than we found ourselves instantly down the stairs and well into the street, reeking vilely of skunk, as strong as either of us had ever experienced, shaking our heads like hummingbird wings, eyes drooling ropes of tears, noses seared and burning, blindly trying to avoid Central Avenue traffic, neighbors running to help then abruptly skidding away, yelling hoarsely, falling, ripping their pants.  Of course we had been performing this operation out on his front porch; luckily I had been crouching behind him when he made the slip and so was slightly less affected.  The porch was quarantined indefinitely, the Ballargeons spent days crawling out their back window to get in and out of the house.  Our clothes were thrown away to the despair of the garbage collectors and we took tomato sauce baths for weeks afterward before everything was back to normal.

At any rate, the photography bug got me, skunk adventures aside, and I bought my first camera.  Actually, dad bought it for me, since I had no extra money, having literally pissed most of it away.  We went to Korvette’s, a discount department store at Northway Mall, and spoke to a man behind a glass counter.  In later years I grew to understand the concept of selling high profit items on commission but back then I was living in a simpler world.  Instead of the Nikons and Canons and Minoltas I had gone to look at, he strongly recommended a Petri Ft II as being of superior quality and picture taking capabilities. 

I loved my Petri immediately and saw myself taking the most superb photographs and displaying them to adoring fans, attending gallery openings, and being lauded for my bold and insightful vision. “Thank You, Thank You, I owe it all to my Petri FT II.”  It made a kind of clang-y sound when I tripped the shutter and I ruined at least 4 rolls of film before I got it loaded properly.  The negatives had horizontal lines through them so that all the prints had these straight dark scratches; artistic maybe, but not the realism that I was after in my new pursuit.  After over a month of failing to get much at all in the way of decent pictures out of the thing, I had about decided that photography was beyond my ability when dad suggested that maybe it was the camera and we should return it.  I took the car and went to Korvette’s and spoke to the same salesperson who quickly told me that there was nothing he could do, that I was past the return timeframe and he was very sorry, and couldn’t understand what the problem could be, was I sure I was using it properly? 

Dejected, I cruised on back home to tell my father the sad news.  A half hour later, we were back at the store, my father wearing his strongest cloudy look, the salesman stammering an apology, the manager flitting around with sheaves of return authorization paperwork and I walked out with my first Minolta SRT 101, a camera that I can recommend to beginners to this day.

Now I had the tool that would unlock my greatness.  I drove to downtown Cohoes to Carl’s Camera and Card Shop on Remsen Street.   Carl’s was the only photo finishing establishment that I knew of that was close to where I lived, although greeting cards and stationery supplies made up the bulk of his business even then.  The proprietor retailed for a larger regional color processor but maintained a darkroom at the rear of his shop where he could develop black and white film and make contact sheets and prints.  He immediately convinced me to start with black and white film as it was far cheaper to have processed and thus good to practice with until one developed sufficient skills so as not to ruin too much film.  His fingers were properly stained with developing fluid (or perhaps nicotine, I wasn’t sure) so I felt he was leading me straight.  I spent beer money on film and developing at his shop for a month or two until Dave Ballargeon told me how he spent less than half of what I was spending on color slide film and processing through the mail to Kodak.

My parents and sisters, happy to support me doing something (anything!) showed great enthusiasm for my first photographic attempts.  I took pictures at family outings of self conscious cousins and at home of a nervous looking dog.  I began to lust after telephoto lenses and close up attachments.  I aspired to become a true nature photographer, remembering those morning fog pictures of Dave’s that I had found so alluring.  I stumbled and stalled, accumulating knowledge confusedly, and was praised soundly for my early images by family and friends, images that I look at now with condescending good humor.

Dave and I organized slide shows with his father’s GAF Slide Projector at the Ballargeon house and tortured our family and friends mercilessly with long, unedited programs of our most sophomoric work.  Dave rushed through his images as if feeling that no one would want to study them much, but I chose instead to linger on each of mine so that the audience could peruse them in depth, as was appropriate to the stunning beauty of my slides.

I learned to hate cloudy days, and the spring and late fall months were deserts of ugly scenery, not worth clicking at, lacking the green and blue of our summer times.  Early fall was the best as the foliage gave me true artistic beauty, allowing me to make stunning images of the most unimaginative, mundane scenes.  I needn’t put any compositional effort in at all.  The student that I was, I really wasn’t interested in learning anything particular at all.  I wanted greatness without work, beauty without understanding and success without applied knowledge.

I have always had an eye for composition, a simple fact of life, not deserved or developed, at least not then.  I never knew why an image worked or didn’t, just that some ‘came out’ and some didn’t.  At first, I liked the vast majority of my product; it wasn’t until a few years had gone by that I thought differently at all.  After all, wasn’t my family praising my greatness?

Because of my innate affinity for composition, I did make some decent pictures, certainly some that were legitimately better than those produced by anyone else that I knew personally.  My heroes at the time included Ansel Adams and Ernst Hass, found in posters and the tech publications of the day like Modern and Popular Photography magazines respectively.  Those magazines stressed equipment and technique; one cannot disrespect the technical knowledge discussed in these magazines but I knew nothing of the Art World, nothing of personal statement, nothing of meaning in work, and was as blissfully unconcerned as I was ignorant.

So, I wandered the fields near my home, those same fields where I had also recently hunted and camped, carrying my camera and trying to run across inspiration, hoping I would recognize it when I saw it, and maybe have a clue as to what to do with it if I did notice it. I took snapshots and I felt relatively meaningful, though not completely confident, wondering in the back of my mind if any of this was worth anything at all.  I dutifully copied the techniques and subject matter I saw in the magazines, to a lesser extent to be sure, as my fields and woods weren’t as spectacular as the desert southwest or the Rocky Mountains.  I got lots of green hills and solitary trees, and streams meandering around a bend, and close ups of flowers and bugs and twigs, many ho hum, and most totally forgettable; I have thrown out literally thousands of slides over the years that I couldn’t bear to look at any longer, after, of course, subjecting my suffering family and friends to a view through.

Wonder of wonders, being a ‘Photographer’ did do two important things that generated quick results.  First it lit a fire about the outdoors and natural world that had hitherto been only smoldering far under the surface.  Secondly, it was a conversation starter with girls which, when you are 19, is far and away the paramount reason for existence at all.  Puffing out my chest and speaking of apertures and depth of field and being able to show a framed 8X10 of red and yellow trees with a fence meandering through gave me an edge on the other gin joint hangers on; with them I was a scholar and, when not being teased by inebriated pool sharks as an artsy fartsy, the ladies listened to me with interested expressions.  Thus, confidence grew.

I now spoke of the process of searching out images and, boring as that was, it was much more interesting to the casual female listener than overwrought philosophies of male to female relationship hooey garnered from Travis McGee adventures that had previously been my repertoire.  As nothing as most of my photos were, they were more than anything else being done in Cohoes among the joint scene, and so a step above when it came to mating ritual tools. Sadly, what it actually did for me was allow me to hide further from my inadequacies.  I had a new line of patter but still no knowledge of how to ‘finish.’ I knew, just knew, that when a woman became sufficiently interested in me to get intimate, the relationship would have to end.  She would have to guess why, and I was sure many would.

I was still a smoker; after all, my father was a regular smoker, as was my oldest brother Pete, and occasionally, my mother and Judy and Bird and most of my friends. Smoking was not only tolerated, it was normal in our household and amongst the people we knew.  The bars at the time were always enmeshed in a cloud of particulate matter and we breathed in our own through filters and everyone else’s directly from the air.  Bar tables had burn marks and many upholstered chairs and sofas in people’s houses also had those telltale black spots, usually at the edges where forgotten cigarettes smoldered. Characters on TV smoked, it was always in every movie you saw, restaurants had ashtrays on the tables and cigarette butts layered the roads and sidewalks.  A common sight was that pile of butts and ashes, with red cellophane strings mixed in, puddled next to a parking lot space border line, evidence that someone’s car ashtray was finally so full that it had to be emptied surreptitiously out the cracked door onto the pavement before the thoughtful person drove away. This was the same era when it was universal that used napkins and other trash were tossed out of speeding cars to collect in the drainage ditches and scurry across cornfields on windy days.  Paper and cups and cigarette butts were simply part of the landscape.  It wasn’t so much that we didn’t see them, it was just that we didn’t see them.

I loved nothing better than sitting after supper in the front room with the stereo on, listening to my Oregon and Paul Winter Consort albums (LP records, here), ashtray on the radiator, a plume rising, practicing blowing smoke rings, at ease with life, while my parents did the dishes.  I just plain never thought to help with the dishes, much less volunteer to actually do them.  It was their job for Christ’s sake and if they didn’t like it they shouldn’t have had kids, you know?  Christ!  Some people just never think!

The smoking, though, was coming to an end.  Bob DuPuis and I had reconnected after having lost touch in high school years.  He was two years older and he had followed a different crowd and then gotten a job at McDonalds while he tackled RPI.  There, between waiting in line for Hockey games, he had gotten friendly with a fellow that was all into hiking and mountain climbing; I can’t remember his name.  That friendship had somehow fallen through, but Bob had retained the interest in hiking and we started discussing it.  I was in sloppy shape and had the wind of a seventy year old, but was convinced that hiking would bring me to wonderful photographic opportunities that would garner me the associated respect I craved.  Bob’s tales of high peaks and timberlines and roaring waterfalls and jagged cliffs got me imagining prowess over many levels of accomplishment.  Smoking had to go.  My first hike, before I quit, had me crawling and wheezing after a mere mile of flat trail; me trying to hide my pain and minimize my gasping, Bob looking back tolerantly and knowingly and saying, “You OK, had enough?” and me sullenly gasping on, intent on ‘making it.’  This couldn’t be cigarettes, I was only smoking three packs a day, and how could that hurt?  Nobody ever told me it was bad, for Christ’s sake, Jesus Kee Ko!

The next week was our annual Forked Lake campout and dad and I bet a sixer to see who could quit the whole week.  He suggested betting a carton of smokes but I expected to win and not need the cigarettes after all, and beer was always a good thing to have.  We boated out to the campsite with scads of beer and chips and chocolate chip cookies but absolutely no cigarettes.  Ron was with us, laughing away and puffing contentedly the whole time and by God we both made the whole week without so much as a single tooth-staining butt hanging from our lips.  I was nasty to everyone, eating chips, guzzling beer, yonking down chocolate and crabby about every little thing, but Jesus Kee Ko, I made it.  The last day, we packed up and drove out through Long Lake and dad stopped at Hoss’s and stocked up on Lucky Strikes to get him home safely and I continued cold turkey, proud and nasty all the way home.  Every store we passed was temptation, my father’s smoke tickling my nostrils, particulates stinging my eyes.  I rode with the window open, grumbling about this stupid shit and fucking hiking wasn’t fucking worth this shit, Argghhh and Grrr!

It got worse after I got home.  The gin joints were a-dance in cigarette smoke, beautiful people with raspy voices forming in groups; I stayed on the outside.  After suppers, the music in our parlor just didn’t sound the same, my fingers were itching to clutch something, I sucked lollipops one after another.  Up to now I had never had a weight problem but one started with a vengeance now.  I NEEDED to eat and snack and nosh and nibble and suck, and all these I did.  Soon, a belly started to grow; I could eat a whole 8 cut pizza at a sitting and then chew the remains of everyone else’s crusts.  A constant flow of beer helped, especially in the bars.  The reality was that pretty much everybody I hung out with ate and drank and smoked.  Other than acting stupidly, that’s what we did.

I took frantic, nervous pictures, running through film intensely, taking the same mundane images as before but in greater quantity; unfortunately the tics I was experiencing did not translate into the searing, artistic results that I might have wished.  I made jittery, boring images.

After about a month of torture, the need to smoke and attendant side effects started to ease off a bit and by August, we were ready to start hiking again.  We couldn’t start slow or small but must immediately try Algonquin again, second highest in the Adirondacks at 5112 feet, a three and ¾ mile sharp jaunt up a hill from Adirondack Loj that had me dripping sweat before we even started to go uphill.  I was weighed down, in my defense, with probably twenty pounds of photo equipment with which to take advantage of the exquisite scenery I would see at the top.  I made it, my chest caved in and lungs burning, unable to concentrate on the scenery and incapable of seeing a single photograph through my glazed eyes.  A week later we went at our highest peak, Marcy, at 5344 feet, a seven plus mile approach; I was fagged out before Marcy Dam, two miles in, Bob chugging on ahead, oblivious to my pain, looking back with a grin now and again.  He had a nasty habit of waiting for me every once in a while until I caught up and then striking out again the second I got there, huffing and puffing.  Sometimes he would wait a second and say, “Are you OK, do you need to stop?” Goddamn, sometimes I hated him.  He was in great shape, slim, even skinny, an accomplished runner, veteran hiker, lifelong nonsmoker and ball buster.  Left me in the dust or the mud; either way, he was grinning all the way.  But I couldn’t say uncle, had to keep going, dreaming of rest stops, of chowing Big Macs in Lake Placid, of passing him on painless legs, his struggling body fading quickly behind me.

It was easily a year before I could do a standard hike and not feel a near death experience.  In time I was able to keep up better and Bob eased up and we started hiking together more, actually walking within earshot of each other.

Bob was not a photographer but was always filled with good ideas on what might make a picture, and hiking issues aside, was a continual and avid fan of my images, especially those dealing with his beloved Adirondacks.  We had been camping together on and off for years; he was a charter participant in the Forked Lake annual campout, missing only a few of those late teen years.  He was one of those competent people who always seemed to figure out the tougher things, priding himself on logic and the correct solution to every problem and task.  He was the only person I knew who could stand in a wobbly canoe to survey the stream ahead and when packing firewood into that same canoe for transport back to the campsite, took it as a matter of pride that he would find the perfect space for every last chunk we’d collected and then, in the end, finding room for just one more.  Next to my father, I identified my outdoor life with Bob, as companion and even mentor.  We were the acknowledged camp leaders among the younger generation of our group of campers.

More important to me even than our high peak hiking,  our trips to Forked Lake were the high point of the year, as pathetic as that sounds.  There were many times I annoyed a young woman or changed major plans to be sure I made a trip there.  Further, Forked Lake became synonymous with the morning mist pictures that I burned to create ever since looking at Dave Ballargeon’s early pictures that first fired my imagination, copycat though it was.

Forked Lake, the Adirondacks; I developed an interesting relationship of thinking as much as doing.