The Living End

By Christopher G. Bremicker

How life looked after I was out of the abyss. People took off their gloves and treated me roughly. I had to remember where I came from, where I was going, and how I got here. I was the product of hundreds of medical people, handball games, skiing, fishing, and duck hunting trips, books, A.A., family, and friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher G. Bremicker
• Release date: Feb 28, 2018

Christopher G. Bremicker

Special Forces medic, 1968 to 1970, stationed at Ft. Bragg, NC; BA in English and MBA from University of Minnesota and course work in business education at University of Wisconsin-Superior; fisherman, grouse hunter, downhill skier, handball player; customer service at Walgreen's, hometown: Cable, Wisconsin.

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THE LIVING END

By Christopher G. Bremicker

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 by Christopher G. Bremicker

Cover Image by: Miss Mae

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

MY LIFE AT THE YMCA

I recounted a lifetime of YMCA involvement.

A CHANGE

I became a happy, joyous man.

DAN, A MEMORIAL

I lost my best friend.

THE DARK AGES

Psychiatry came a long way since first I got into it.

THE DARK AGES II

I stayed in two more veterans’ homes before I quit drinking then never darkened the door of a veterans’ home again.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

I lived in a hi-rise in an apartment I called home.

THE INTERSECTION

I worked at the Goodwill near my aunt’s nursing home and three restaurants.

THE MENTALLY ILL

I lived in a hi-rise peopled with nuts.

THE NEWS

The media missed the existence of the Great Divide.

UP NORTH

I recounted my last year in northern Wisconsin.

ECONOMICS

Broke all my life, I was going in the hole, financially.

THE MBA PROGRAM

I became a man with a graduate degree.

CABLE II

My cousin and I took a trip to my hometown.

NANCY

I dropped a load in the church toilet and got fleeced by a con artist.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY

I recounted one day in my life.

MY PARENTS

They were Anne and Paul and their likes would not come again.

HOBBIES

I had a lot of interests.

HEAT EXHAUSTION

I got dehydrated while walking in warm weather.

THE STORIES:

MY LIFE AT THE YMCA

My grandfather was General Secretary of the Greater St. Paul YMCA. Our family went to the Y when we were children and swam in the pool on family night. My father did not make much money then, it was a wholesome activity for the family, and it was in my father’s YMCA tradition. He was a counselor at Camp Warren when he was a boy and was steeped in YMCA lore. I could not remember family swim nights, but my mother told me about them, when I became an adult.

My father and I joined Indian Guides. It was an organization of fathers and sons that met once a month. The sons wore Indian feathers on their foreheads.

One time, we met on the hill behind our house near the railroad tracks and built a bonfire. I asked my father, who was on an underwater demolition team in WWII, to demonstrate how to disarm a man who was wielding a knife. My father did so and twisted the opposing father’s arm behind his back.

My best friend began to grow up and his father pulled him out of Indian Guides. My father followed suit, and our tribe disbanded. It was not long lived.

My parents sent me to Camp St. Croix. I was in the Indian unit and we wore breechclouts for graduation. These were muslin cloths we painted with Indian designs, wrapped between our legs, and fastened around our waists with a belt.

When I was thirteen, I went to Camp Widjiwagen on the shore of Lake Burnside in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) of northern Minnesota. The ride up to camp was long, we rode on a school bus, and sang Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, until we got sick of it. Widji was five hours north of St. Paul.

At Widji, we learned how to pitch a tent, sweep its floor with a pine bough, and roll it up to fit in a backpack. We threw Duluth packs on our shoulders without straining the leather straps. Our equipment was used year after year, because we took such good care of it.

We learned how to paddle a canoe. A J stroke at the stern kept the canoe on target. We feathered the paddle, so it did not hit the water on the backswing. We kept our arms straight, so we could paddle all day without getting tired.

We kneeled in the bow and held the butt of the paddle in the water to push away rocks. Widji used Old Town canoes, made of varnished, cedar slats and resin. They were fragile as eggshells and our welfare depended on them.

We learned how to carry a canoe. By placing it against our thighs, grabbing the yoke in the middle, and throwing the canoe into the air with our knees, we could get it onto our shoulders. The yoke was padded, and we carried our canoes long distances on portages, which were cross country paths between the countless lakes in the region.

I was small for my age and carrying a canoe was a daunting task, for me. I needed help getting it on my shoulders and could carry it only a mile or so. The canoe weighed more than I did.

We threw a food pack over a tree limb to keep bears from getting into it. We built campfires, using a lean-to formation or a log cabin configuration, and started them using shavings of wood. We used a reflecting oven by the campfire to bake a cake loaded with wild blueberries we picked.

We cooked with a campfire, and made oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar, pancakes, and French toast. We made trail lunches of a slice of salami, piece of chocolate, Velveeta cheese, peanut butter, Rye Crisp, and Kool Aid. I made a trail lunch when I got back to St. Paul, but it did not taste the same.

I learned how to navigate the BWCA, which was pitted with lakes formed by glaciers, with a map and a compass. I picked my target, an island, for example, paddled for it, then picked the next target. I found portages hidden in the wooded shoreline.

Our canoe trip was ten days long, I craved ice cream sundaes the whole time, and we paddled from daybreak to sundown. Romp and stomp! It’s daylight in the swamp! our counselor yelled, to get us out of our sleeping bags in the morning.

When we got back to camp, Whitey Lures, our camp director and a legendary woodsman, addressed us in the dining hall. He told us about the Voyager unit, back from their canoe trip to the Arctic Circle. He was dramatic, as he talked about their hardships, victories over themselves, and the wilderness they conquered. Whitey was majestic with his barrel chest, white beard, and red, plaid, wool shirt.

We took a sauna on our last night at Widji. We sat naked in the little sauna house, while our counselor poured water on the hot rocks. Then we ran from the house and jumped in the lake. The trick was to not move, but to hang in the water, immersed, and have a religious experience. The water cooled us, cleansed our pores, and drove the demons from our souls.

When I was thirteen years old, I belonged to the Downtown Y. I took a bus downtown, played touch football in the gym with a group of boys, and was placed against an African American boy in the line. We blocked each other during the scrimmage, and the following Saturday I never returned to the Y.

Instead, I wandered around downtown, ate Spanish peanuts I bought at W.T. Grants Department Store, then came home and told my parents I was at the Y all morning. I did not know how to explain my behavior, except to say it was racist. It perplexed me even now.

When I got into high school, my relationship with the Y changed. I was in High Y, a high school leadership program. I was the president and, when the boys who went to Groveland Grade School took over, they voted me out. I was not yet in adolescence, they were bruisers, and the ousting was humiliating.

Our High Y advisor drove three of us home one night and molested us in a back alley. He told us to take our pants off. Then he got on top of me and humped me. He got on top of another boy, humped him, and ejaculated. Then he tied a rubber band around the genitals of the third boy.

This got out when the boy with the rubber band told his father, who was a Greek Orthodox minister. Word spread in high school and everyone knew about the incident. Our classmates made fun of us. The queer’s family left for Michigan.

I matured and began going to the Deal, a high school dance held in the gymnasium of the YMCA. The Deal was well attended, and it was a sock hop, where we took off our shoes to protect the floor of the gym. We sat on the bleachers, when we were not dancing.

The Deal was the first place I tried to pick up a girl. A girl I was interested in danced with her friend. I walked up to her, grabbed her by the arms, turned her, and began dancing with her. I was scared. She said I should ask her first but continued to dance with me. Other schools attended the Deal and it was my first experience with other parts of the world.

The boy who was ejaculated on and I played handball. We played without gloves but enjoyed our first taste of a sport that would become a lifelong interest for me. We played when we were sixteen years old and I played today, at the age of seventy-one. Later, I was in a handball tournament for the entire St. Paul YMCA and won C class on a wrist ball, in which my opponent called a shot he did not play off his hand.

I got my driver’s license and my father bought me a car. It was an old Hudson Hornet, built like a tank, that pulled to the left if I did not hold onto the steering wheel. It had a pushbutton transmission and I put a coin changer on the visor for my friends to put in a quarter or two for gasoline when I drove them to the Y every Saturday.

There was another homosexual incident at the Y where two directors of the Y were caught swimming naked with the boys. They were fired and the youth director, who was our friend and innocent, ran to another Y in New York City. My father told me my grandfather laid awake at night worrying about queers at the Y.

I got a job working at the front desk of the youth entrance of the Y. I handed out ping pong balls, foosballs, and made change for the Coke machine. I supervised the lobby where boys watched TV. The Y had a diner and I stole money from the cash drawer to buy malted milks. I paid the money back when I quit the job.

During my sophomore, junior, and senior years in high school, I was on the staff of Camp St. Croix. On my first year, as a junior staff member, I drank beer for the first time, rented an eighty-cubic-inch motorcycle and drove it on a golf course, and sat in a movie theater with straw coming out of the seats. It was my first experience hanging out with boys older than me.

We took day trips to beaches on the St. Croix River, where Prof, the codger who liked to walk around in a skimpy bathing suit, showed us frogs, butterflies, agates, and fossils. We played softball, capture the flag, basketball, soccer, and shot field arrows into the air. We wrestled for a watermelon, greased with lard, in the river. The cabin of boys who brought it to shore got to eat it.

We told stories after dinner in the lodge on the bluff that overlooked the river. I retold the story of To Build a Fire, by Jack London, and another staff member complimented me on my story telling. I remembered a time my father and I were in the lodge for an Indian Guide event and I was in second grade. I told a ghost story to a hundred people, complete with a killing by knife and a note on the door.

We ate in the dining hall. We ate unlimited amounts of pancakes, milk, bacon, cereal, and apple juice. We sang songs our director hated, like The Grand Old Duke of York, which I led because it was about a thousand men who were neither up the hill nor down. The director scowled, as we sang about the Duke.

On hiking trips, we rowed a boatful of backpacks, tents, and a food pack downriver. The counselor and the campers walked down the highway. On one trip, I had a six pack of orange soda pop and a radio, as I rowed with the waves down the St. Croix. The radio announced the Tonkin Gulf incident that started the Viet Nam war. I shouted hurray, not knowing what was to come.

On one day trip, I cooked pancakes for the campers. We started a game where I threw pancakes to the campers who stood in the river and caught them with their plates. It was like hitting baseballs to the outfield. I grilled the pancakes, slid them onto my spatula, and threw them to the waiting campers. The campers leapt into the water to catch each pancake.

We witnessed the graduation of the Indian unit. Friends and family were invited. One of the Indian counselors, dressed in leather leggings and a chief’s headdress, yelled, Owatonna, give us fire! The bonfire did not go off.

The wood, stacked like a teepee, was drenched