Midcentury Miscreant

By Steve D Boilard

In the second half of the last century, a morally-compromised, self-absorbed miscreant routinely ill-treated his family, his schoolmates, his neighbors, and others unfortunate enough to encounter him. Of course, he didn't see it that way; to him, he was simply tending to his own interests. He felt no more concern for the effect of his actions up

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulcort Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736994023

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Midcentury_Miscreant_A_Memoir_of_Delinquency_and_Deliverance_Cover-01.jpg

Midcentury Miscreant

By Steve D. Boilard

While all events in this book truly occured, I have relied on memory to fill in the gaps. Thus, names, places, incidents, and events may not be entirely accurate.

Copyright © Steve D. Boilard, 2021. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover design by Alex Dallman

Edited by Alexander Spring at TypeRight, LLC

Contact the author via email at [e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-7369940-0-9 (paperback)

978-1-7369940-1-6 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021907608

FIRST EDITION

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Preface

About fifteen years ago, when I was in my mid-forties, I set out to write a series of vignettes drawn from my own life experiences. The idea was to illustrate and celebrate the many small actions, events, and incidents that compose an ordinary life. It was the kind of bloodless midlife crisis you might expect from a man who is always careful to stand at least six feet from an operating microwave oven. Because of my intimate familiarity with the subject, I figured I could easily complete this book by age 50. Accordingly, I gave it the working title, Reflections On a Half-Century, and set to work, scribbling down my thoughts whenever time availed itself.

For the next few years, the project stayed on track. Then, literally overnight, it was derailed in a wrenching collision with personal tragedy, leaving me as confused and tortured as this metaphor. What I had thought would be the musings of a middle-aged man surveying a plodding, incremental, but modestly successful life, had now transformed into something quite different.

This project, these reflections on a half-century, became a mechanism for making sense of what now struck me as a haphazard and unpredictable life. I reviewed the scribbled thoughts and anecdotes I’d written so far, and while it wasn’t entirely clear what they amounted to, I sensed that they were struggling to give form to a more profound truth that had, for decades, been hiding in plain sight. I forged ahead with my efforts, writing and pondering, revising and reorganizing, trying to connect the dots represented by the seemingly random events of my experience. Before long, my fiftieth birthday came and went. And then another year. And another. So much for the tidy Reflections on a Half-Century title.

Ultimately, ten years after my half-century mark, the pieces mostly fell into place (albeit with a little forcing, in much the same way as my dad used to finish his jigsaw puzzles). The final push was assisted by another cataclysmic event: the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Writing is, after all, an activity well-suited to sheltering in place.

When the smoke cleared, I came to realize that I had been profoundly misinterpreting my own life all along. Perhaps I’m not unique in this regard; it’s hard to view your own life objectively, and people have a tendency to see only what they want to see. But I sense that my misreading was especially egregious. For it finally dawned on me that I’d spent half a century as a supercilious, egotistical schmuck, never suspecting that I was missing the whole point of my presence here on Earth. This book is a story about how I eventually came to reach that conclusion.

And yet, this isn’t simply a story about my life. It’s also an exploration of how we, as individuals, are inevitably shaped by the people we encounter, the episodes we experience, the environments that surround us. For none of us enters this life fully formed. Like a kaleidoscope in continual motion, we are forever becoming. And when we do finally arrive at some steady state, we are no longer breathing.

I should state for the record that these reminiscences are as true as my imperfect memory recalls them to be. I confess to making minor embellishments here and there because that’s the way it should have happened, even though it might not have happened exactly that way. For example, the park that I burned down (see Chapter 3) didn’t actually burn to the ground. But it should have.

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Valentine’s Day 2021

Los Angeles

CHAPTER 1

Genesis

In which Peter Gabriel does not make an appearance.

Something miraculous happened on a cold Friday afternoon in late January, many years ago. John F. Kennedy had been occupying the White House for a week, and Dwight Eisenhower was enjoying his first days of retirement. The Studebaker Corporation in South Bend, Indiana, was churning out Hawks and Larks. A new television program named The Dick Van Dyke Show was readied for airing. No one in America had yet heard of The Beatles. And schoolchildren were being trained to duck under their desks in anticipation of the possibility that Chairman Khrushchev might decide to push the button.

Some 8,000 miles west of the Kremlin, on a Northern California peninsula jutting into the cold Pacific waters, a young woman named Marilou met with her obstetrician. Dr. Burnett asked her what she’d eaten that day. A doughnut and a cup of coffee, she responded sheepishly, expecting to be chided for her poor nutritional choices. Well, are you ready to have a baby today? the doctor asked. The caesarian had been scheduled for the following month, but the baby apparently had other ideas. And at 6:50 that evening, I was born.

At least that’s what I’ve been told; I can’t remember that far back. All the events from my diaper years mercifully failed to imprint on my hippocampus.

My younger brother, Dave, by contrast, claims that he can remember being eighteen months old sitting in a stroller parked on the front lawn of our modest home on Meadowlark Lane. He remembers feeling uncomfortably hot in the sunshine and wanting to go back into the house, but there he remained, any attempt otherwise frustrated by his lack of language to communicate that desire to Mom. I find it hard to believe that a diaper-clad baby, without even the most rudimentary vocabulary, could nonetheless have the cognitive ability to experience frustration about the communicative limitations of baby talk. I have difficulty accepting that he sat there thinking Man, it’s hot out here. I wonder how I can get that lady to bring me into the house. If only I had a way to communicate. But alas, I can’t speak yet. And what with my poorly developed motor skills, semaphore’s out of the question.

Dave and I were born into an archetypal early-1960s nuclear family. Our family was probably better off financially than the statistically average household at the time (with its penurious income of a mere $5,700 per year). But we were nevertheless squarely average when compared to all of those other households portrayed on television. Dad was an electrical engineer who put on a necktie and rode the train to work each day, whereas Mom stayed home and served as our (rather permissive) guardian while cleaning the house and watching her soap operas. Dad mowed the lawn and Mom cooked casseroles. We all gathered around the television to watch prime-time programming after the dishes and homework were done. It was all so average. If Mom and Dad could have found a way to do it, they would have had 2.33 kids.

Brother Dave, lost in translation.

For most of my childhood, we lived in a four-bedroom house with clapboard siding, situated on a nondescript street in Sunnyvale, California. The front and back yards were unimaginatively landscaped, with closely-cut fescue grasses covering the majority of the featureless terrain, and an occasional tree or bush haphazardly thrown in as an afterthought. Our home’s real value derived not from its physical characteristics, but from its desirable location. The Santa Clara Valley sits on a peninsula forty minutes south of San Francisco. Its natural beauty and temperate climate earned it the appellation Valley of the Heart’s Delight, and it was planted with cherry and apricot and apple orchards early in the last century. Then, in the late 1950s, developers began cutting down those orchards to make way for what would one day become the Silicon Valley. Our house was part of this first-wave development.

Neither of my parents was especially religious. But after they married and had my brother and me, they figured they should start attending church, probably in the vain hope that Sunday School would attenuate our incipient inclinations toward mischief. Mom was raised in a devoutly Catholic Portuguese family, and Dad was raised a no-frills Presbyterian. So when it came time to choose a church, they of course chose the local Presbyterian parish. Such was the nature of compromise in the Boilard household.

Dave and I went to Sunday School for only a few years, until Dad realized he could nap at home much more comfortably than napping in a church pew. Thus, our church-going soon petered out (if you’ll forgive the apostolic pun). But we would still attend the Easter service, our one trip a year to stay in God’s good graces.

Stately Boilard Manor

***

My early childhood unfolded in the 1960s, a pivotal decade that started out as a strait-laced, orderly extension of the 1950s, but was unceremoniously knocked off-course by a presidential assassination, civil rights protests, race riots, the Vietnam War, and the widespread wearing of tie-dyed clothing. As a child, I was generally unaware of the social and political unrest America was experiencing. But I did notice that each year, the hair of teenagers passing our home on their way to the nearby high school kept getting longer and longer. Dad referred to them all as hippies, as if every kid attending Homestead High School was a card-carrying member of the counterculture, smoking pot between classes and driving their VW buses to anti-war sit-ins on the weekends.

I think Dad saw long hair as the tip of the spear that would ultimately destroy civil society and usher in a new era of endemic promiscuity and godless Communism. When I was nine years old, I asked to skip my monthly haircut and let my hair grow out a bit more. Dad thought about it for a moment and suggested I instead get a different hair style -- he suggested a cut that I’d never heard of before. I cast caution to the wind and said, Sure, let’s give it a whirl! The name of the haircut was a butch. I subsequently spent the next few weeks wearing a cap over my heavily shorn head.

Just as Rick Blaine observed Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine, it was somehow providential that I should be born to these particular parents, at this particular time, and in this particular place. Indeed, it would be this unique combination of factors that created the precise environment that caused me to be me. Change any one detail, and it wouldn’t have been my life that I was living. I don’t think this is quite a tautology. I find that we are all the products of our environment. And with regards to the nature-nurture question, I come down firmly on the nurture side.

***

So, there I was, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s with staid, responsible parents in an innocuous suburban neighborhood, trying to figure out not just what to do with my unbidden and extemporized life but also how to navigate the daily challenges of getting punched in the face by Paul Howell or scraping together enough loose change to buy a Slurpee. It’s astounding when you think about it: I had been entrusted with a life (my own) before I was even old enough to ride Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. I had been informed of no specific goals for my time here on earth, provided with no strategies, equipped with precious little knowledge. And yet, here I was, groping my way through the unillumined, uncharted wilderness that was my childhood.

All this took place well before smartphones, before GPS, before Al Gore invented the Internet. It was before cable, for God’s sake. We had few sources of information that weren’t funneled through Walter Cronkite or the local newspaper’s editor-in-chief. And a kid’s access to nude images in those days was limited primarily to National Geographic. In short, life loomed as a bewildering puzzle. It was, as Churchill once said of Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. I was pitiably clueless as to how to approach the next eight or so decades of life. Having a little fun every day without embarrassing myself or getting into big trouble was about as strategic as my goals could get.

My chief ally in these quotidian efforts was my brother Dave. He was (and still is) a year younger than me, which was close enough in age to share my perspectives and frustrations about life on Louise Drive. I can’t imagine going through childhood without a close sibling, a comrade who would suffer along with me whenever Dad got angry or Mom cooked tuna casserole. Sure, Dave and I had our disagreements and fights, and sure, he once attacked me with pruning shears, but most of the time we were fighting on the same side.

I made friends the way other young kids did: from among the Hobson’s choices that were my neighbors. There was the chubby kid with GI issues, whom we called StinkStack; Howdy, the older kid, who looked frighteningly similar to Buffalo Bob’s marionette; Jennine, the little girl next door who often stood with her hands on her hips, scowling disapprovingly at whatever I was doing at the time.

As we get older, we became more discriminating in whom we selected as friends. I was fortunate to eventually acquire a very small but select group of friends who would stand the test of time. I recognize their influence upon me to this day, though my childhood friends seemed to have a less lasting impact, ephemeral fellow travelers on the aimless odyssey that was my youth.

I turned nine in 1970. The new decade seemed so auspicious, both for America and for my pre-pubescent self. This would be the decade that I’d become a teenager, learn to drive, attain a girlfriend, go off to college. I somehow already felt nostalgic for a time that had yet to arrive. In fact, sometime in January, while people were still absent-mindedly writing 1969 when dating their checks, I decided to create a time capsule to preserve any memories of this propitious time for future generations. I pulled a sheet of writing paper from a drawer in the kitchen, and in my best handwriting I wrote in big, block letters This was written in the good old 70’s! How I could know in mid-January that the ensuing decade would be good and old escapes me. But such was my enthusiasm for the opportunities that awaited us all. I folded up the paper, slipped it into an envelope, and buried it in a shallow hole in the front yard, certain that some kid from a Jetsons-like future would one day discover the paper and ponder what life must have been like during my bygone era. Of course, I made no provisions for preventing the paper from decomposing in the ground. But as it turns out, it didn’t matter, as I impatiently dug the paper up again a few weeks later. Those were the days, I mused, as I gazed upon that relic from my (not much) younger self.

Like every decade, the Seventies turned out to be a mixed bag, especially for me. I did hit all those teenage milestones I’d anticipated, but none of them played out as I’d imagined they would. Whether that’s because of faulty expectations or faulty execution still eludes me. But at the time I was frustrated by my inability to make circumstances turn out the way I wanted. At some point between conception and implementation, a fly would invariably enter the ointment. It wasn’t Murphy’s Law exactly, but it did seem an apt illustration of chaos theory.

I would later come to appreciate the serendipitous side of life’s unmanageability. Chance and stochasticity don’t just bring bad news; sometimes an unanticipated event can also work in your favor. Like when a bike crash sent me to the hospital at the end of October, and sympathetic offerings from neighbors doubled my usual Halloween candy haul.

It would be many years before I began to accept and even embrace unplanned events. It’s not for nothing that we have potent metaphors for this kind of behavior: rolling with the punches, making lemonade out of lemons. And there would be a number of potential inflection points for my life over the years as unexpected events threw me for a loop. There was the time I unwittingly pulled over a cop on the freeway. Or when I discovered that the grandfather I never knew had, a half-century earlier, started a whole new family on the other side of the country. Or when my doctor discovered a serious defect in my heart and scheduled me for open-heart surgery. Or the many times I figuratively (and once, literally) burned bridges, alienating myself from coworkers and others. I can’t say that I did much to manage life’s inflection points. Rather, for most of my years, I’ve caromed from event to event, wondering where I was going to end up. Far from being the master of my destiny, I was pretty much just along for the ride. And perhaps because I wasn’t striving toward any particular purpose, I found plenty of time and opportunity for wanton misbehavior.

Whether we have well-defined goals or not, we necessarily possess a muddle of core values and beliefs, however implicit, that drive how we interact with the world. These values and beliefs add up to a unique and often shambolic creed, and while few of us take the time to methodically examine and systematize our creeds, they guide our behavior nonetheless. It is in this way that I proved, for many years, heartbreakingly ill-equipped for life, and it showed in my behavior. Lying was to me an effective tool for ameliorating any unfortunate situation in which I found myself. Minor vandalism was an antidote to the lassitude of summer afternoons. Theft was a reliable remedy when funds were short.

The truth is, I have not been a model citizen. Oh, I didn’t kill anyone, and I managed to get good grades in school, and I even did a good deed every now and then. But the way I treated others usually left a lot to be desired. As in, I could be something of a self-absorbed prick with little regard for others.

I’ve spent many hours reflecting on this recently, and it seems obvious that my worldview was quite perniciously centered on myself. Sure, Abraham Maslow famously described how concern for one’s own survival surpasses all other considerations. But the motivation behind my behavior wasn’t survival (which, so far as I knew, was seldom called into question), but rather self-aggrandizement. I was afflicted by an egotism that consistently placed my own interests, however trivial, above all others. I wasn’t just insensitive to others’ interests; I dismissed them as ignorable trifles in my quest to attain those things that really mattered, like some new toy or first dibs on dessert. My approach to relationships had a strong whiff of the transactional: What was in it for me? StinkStack’s father once even lectured me about being a fair-weather friend. But the lecture didn’t take.

***

It was this indifference to the feelings of others that fueled much of my misbehavior, which worsened over time: from lying to petty thievery to mindless vandalism, all tinged with a hypocritical sense of arrogance. Perhaps most inexcusable was the treatment of my parents, particularly my mother, who I saw largely as another person to be played in my quest for… what exactly? Maybe a little more freedom or a little more spending money. Thinking back on it, all this narcissism and misbehavior wasn’t even aimed at any meaningful goal. Billy the Kid had understandably (if not excusably) first stolen to feed and clothe himself as a poor orphan. Me, I might have eventually developed into an apodictic delinquent were not for my utter ineptitude, which inevitably led to my peccadillos, and the occasional pecado, being discovered and punished, thus temporarily pausing my misconduct.

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My anti-social behavior attenuated somewhat as I got older and adopted something akin to proper manners. Yet a vestigial egotism remained, still clouding my relationships and causing me to curse everyone on the road who got in my way. I can’t say that I felt happy, but I sure as hell felt superior.

And then, unexpectedly, in the midst of that vast imbroglio known as middle age, I encountered a calamity that shook my self-regarding and transactional worldview to its very foundation. Literally overnight, my life was turned upside-down. I’ll have a lot more to say about this Time of Troubles later on, but as I emerged on the other side of it, I discovered that the world around me had fundamentally changed. Of course, it was only my perception of it that had been altered, like the time I first wore eyeglasses and discovered that General Burkhalter on Hogan’s Heroes had a dueling scar on his cheek.

In the wake of this crisis, I gradually awoke to the belated realization that relationships matter, not in some instrumental sense, but as a primary purpose of our existence. Somehow, they nourish the soul in a way that stealing Wacky Packages stickers from the drug store never could. This may not strike you as a particularly profound sentiment, but to me it was a sublime discovery, an epiphany even. I came to appreciate the wonder and fragility of life -- not just my own, but in a more universal sense. The value of sincere relationships, and the hollowness that attends their absence, finally came into focus. It was my Ebenezer Scrooge moment, seeing the world through new eyes on Christmas morning, captivated by the beauty I’d missed for so long.

So, I’m attempting to live up to my epiphanic ideal, which is analogous to what Dickens said of Scrooge: It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. I’m still not perfect, of course. I experience occasional lapses, particularly when I’m in a hurry. (Five billion people in this world, I muttered to myself while driving to the post office the other day, and they’re all in my way.) But these episodes are infrequent, and when they do occur, I feel regret. The hard part of redemption isn’t enlightenment (which I belatedly stumbled upon) or even confession (as painful as that is). Rather, it’s repentance. And for me, repentance is a serial activity, not a one-and-done proposition.

***

Growing up in suburbia. Plodding through school and college. Beginning a career and getting married. In many ways, my life has been staggeringly unremarkable. Sure, we’re all unique, living out sui generis lives of our own. Like others, I’ve had my ups and downs. I’ve experienced a large amount of good fortune, tempered with failures, embarrassments, and a tragic catastrophe. (Your results may vary.) I realize that many of my readers may have grown up in a different era, or in a different kind of place, under different circumstances. But I still think of myself as an everyman figure. And that’s why I’ve come to believe that my many foibles and failings—my wrongs of passage, if you will—might offer some value as a cautionary tale.

And whatever the value these reflections may have for the reader, they are certainly an imperative for the writer. For, as Socrates asserted, the unexamined life is not worth living. The only problem being that you do have to accumulate some experiences before you have anything worth examining. And by that point, is it all too late?

CHAPTER 2

Childsplay

In which I stumble through the landscape of my boyhood without a map...or a clue.

A few years back, I participated in one of those rather contrived escape rooms that were all the rage, especially among credulous managers trying to teach their dysfunctional staff to work cooperatively as a team. Which is why I and a few of my colleagues found ourselves locked in an overwrought room, stuffed with all manner of antique furniture, unusual sculptures, a fake fireplace, unlikely lighting fixtures, and other baroque elements that made the room feel like a recherche drawing room from an Agatha Christie novel. Our goal was to uncover clues and hints within the room and use these to figure out how to unlock the door and make our escape. Other than that, we possessed no instructions, no knowledge of any time limit, no meaningful experience to build upon, and no role assignments within our group. It was mildly intriguing, thoroughly frustrating and, in the end, an embarrassing failure.

That experience in the escape room felt like a metaphor for childhood (or at least my childhood): stumbling about in an unfamiliar environment, ignorant of how things work and what they mean, and while there is a measure of freedom, squandering that same freedom by repeatedly performing entirely unproductive activities and chasing after illusory targets. And then, when you finally manage to escape, you find yourself in a world that’s much less colorful, curated, and magical than the one you just left.

***

One of my earliest childhood memories was formed when we were living in an apartment for a few months, after Mom and Dad sold our house on Meadowlark Lane, but before we moved into the new house on Louise Drive. I remember only a few scenes from the Meadowlark house — trick or treating on Halloween in my flimsy rayon Frankenstein costume (which was so cheap that it was generically labeled Monster, rather than Frankenstein); and getting lost with my brother, Dave, one Sunday morning just a block or two from home. That’s about it. Actually, I don’t remember much about those few months in the apartment, either, with one exception. There was a group of a half-dozen kids that Dave and I played with, running about the complex’s common spaces (lawns, a parking lot, a shabby courtyard), inventing games and generally filling the empty hours, as we were all preschool age and our moms were indoors watching As the World Turns. One sunny spring morning, while we were playing hide and seek, I hit upon the idea of lying down in the parking lot, near a dumpster, pretending that I was dead. A couple of mirthless boys soon came across my corpse, and matter-of-factly observed to each other that I must have died. I’m still not sure whether they actually believed it, or whether they were merely exercising an unusually early form of ironic detachment, but either way, they didn’t seem too concerned. I suppose if they really did think I was dead, their passivity might merely reflect their lack of understanding of death. Not that I claim to really understand it, even today.

A minute later, a girl showed up. She looked and acted like Violet from Peanuts, remarkably opinionated and skeptical for a youngster, with a knack for putting people in their place. She took one look at me and pronounced me not dead. I kept perfectly still, trying hard not to confirm her pronouncement. And I can prove it, she announced to no one in particular, and with that, she bent down and started to tickle my stomach. I couldn’t hold back an unmanly giggle, and the jig was up.

I’m not sure why that vignette has stuck in my mind all these years, but it just pops into my mind periodically. I can still see the Violet girl, wearing a blue dress and with her hair tied back in a ponytail. I remember that spot in the gravel parking lot, near the corner of a sickly-yellow apartment building and next to a rust-stained dumpster. And I wonder why I’d figured playing dead was a good way to interact with my new friends. It’s really not that logical, if you think about it. You can’t talk, laugh, play, move, or even exhibit signs of life. I suppose it’s just a way to get attention. Or sympathy. It was a Munchausen moment.

About five years later, when Dave and I were living in the new house, just a few miles away, we would get