The Cosmic Lady Was Right: An American Journey

By Marshall Motz

No ordinary memoir, this book aspires to be more than a mere exercise in narcissism. A street person in a zany California beach town at the end of the author's days provides the theme: planet Earth is the Galaxy Lunatic Training Asylum upon which each of us has been planted with one purpose, namely to rise from the stupidity and the darkness around us into the light, to regain in fact our sanity. Mama Earth is really tired of it all, the Lady opines, and recommends a journey inward. Taking a literary look back at his life, he sees she was right. In a series of poignant vignettes, it becomes clear that he and the whole country have been progressively descending into hopeless lunacy. Ah but theres more; there's an agend here. It seems its all been a macho ego trip---the whole of human history in fact---an unfortunate male mistake, a mere prelude to the new paradigm, the return of the goddess---meaning the spiritual androgyny that Jesus talks about in the Gospel of Thomas. We need to restore the balance between male and female. In a hilarious final chapter set in the aforementioned California city, it all comes together: Mama Earth, the Goddess Sophia and the Cosmic Lady, who is vindicated in an eschatological grand finale. She was right all along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462824366

Marshall Motz

The author, a vanishing breed, describes himself as poet-at-large. An erstwhile Evangelical, his special concern is to present a joyous alternate world view for beleaguered fundamentalists. His life has spanned the epochal gap between FDR and Obama; in Akron’s Firestone Park it all began: there he knew Alan Freed, saw the birth of rock and roll, the first glimmerings of the megachurch movement. He holds degrees in literature, philosophy and theology from such institutions as the University of California and Fuller Theological Seminary. He lives at Arbor Cove in Santa Cruz, by a lazy lagoon, hard by a sewage plant.

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Copyright © 2009 by Marshall Motz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover illustrations by renowned Cleveland artist Ken Motz.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

* Reed Avenue

** Brewster’s Woods

*** Manatoc Brave

**** A Prexy Portrait

***** California Dreaming

****** The Fuller Light

******* Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp

. . . This one’s for you, Goddess

Picaresque, definition: Of or relating to

a genre of usually satiric prose fiction

originating in Spain and depicting in realistic,

often humorous detail the adventures of a

roguish hero of low social degree living by his

or her wits in a corrupt (read insane) society.

 * Reed Avenue

THEY’RE OUT THERE now in the yard cavorting about, jumping, clawing, grabbing at one another. We’re standing here on the back porch, the three of us, watching them. I am appalled at their antics. They scream hysterically; they shout nasty words at one another. To me they are huge, even dangerous. I admire them, after a fashion. I’m spellbound, watching their capers. Of course, I don’t know any words like spellbound and capers, because I’m only four years old. They are admiring me too—or is it mostly the little red wagon, sitting there in the midst of us? They stand around in a semicircle, staring, first at the wagon (a gift given me by my grandmother on the occasion of my recent birthday), then at each other, again at me, then back at the wagon. Some of them jump on the wagon, kick it, take turns sitting in it, pulling one another on and off. And all around the yard behind them are many others, dispersed in diversified grotesque vignettes, as I’ve described, occupying the whole space, a landscape straight out of Hieronymous Bosch.

It is warm and sunny. Behind me is the kitchen door from which I’ve just emerged, and beyond that, as the mind moves back inside the house, farther back toward even more remote origins (in time as well as in space), there is another warm spot where I lived until recently: the womb of my mother, Blanche Laverna Smith. She’s standing here beside me now, holding my hand, fortifying me for the occasion. It is my debut in our new neighborhood. I must meet these kids, for they are to be my future playmates. She and her mother, Zelda Eckels Smith, who stands on the other side of me, are youngish women, and like me, I realize with a sudden start, are innocent and vulnerable. They are Victorian lambs, leftovers from that era of subdued propriety that is destined to be forever eclipsed by my own generation of upstart postwar rebels. How are they going to protect me from these wolves, from this proletarian rabble? These last words I can understand, without ever having heard them, for their meaning is clear in my little head, by a kind of intuition.

The month is May. I’m thinking there will always be this same bright sunshine, everywhere, ever after, just like now on the back porch, on this lovely morning in the spring of 1934. For I am a sanguine soul, and ever hopeful.

But where did I really come from? Other doors, other rooms. One vivid impression lingers: whatever might be conjectured, whatever etiological hypothesis one might venture to advance, be it about DNA, or Emersonian Transcendentalism, or even abstruse speculation on the subject of Blavatskian reincarnation—the awareness cannot be erased; I feel it too strongly, standing here on the porch. It is this: I am a visitor. I’m new here. I’m the new kid on the block. I have come here a stranger, from some other country, some other clime.

I am a King. Don’t ask me how I know this, I just do. I am watching my subjects who seem to be on holiday, maybe even fomenting a rebellion. But now I begin to realize that what I feel is not so much fear as it is repulsion, dismay, disappointment. I feel superior to them, a little too superior. Yes, I really do feel this way, no point in denying it: what is wrong with them? Are these my fellow creatures? Am I really related to these simple-minded retards? I’m repulsed, and not a little frightened, as still another sensation begins to inform me, a second impression: they are also highly entertaining, even fascinating. Oh, it’s true I tell you, I’ll always be a snob, something of an elitist, a spectator, distanced from these my diseased but indomitable fellow-adventurers on this strange upcoming journey of mine, simultaneously nauseated and enchanted, avoiding and admiring them in turn.

One impression, however, will linger, stay with me for life: they are absolutely insane. These my fellow creatures are capable of absolutely anything. I know it already, don’t ask me how: through the years, through the centuries, these human animals like the ones I see before me in my own backyard are likely to be dangerous, incredibly stupid, erratic, volatile, violent, obscene and murderous, predictably unpredictable. Yes, you can count on it, no doubt about it. What is wrong with them? What is wrong with me? What have I gotten myself into, here on the back porch in 1934?

How have I come by this attitude? Have these two women already spoiled me? I can remember being smothered with love from the very beginning, cuddled and coddled with non-stop affection, cradled alternately in the arms of each of them, passed back and forth. I recall also sucking sensually at my mother’s nipple, enjoying it maybe too much, for I will always be a man utterly devoted to oral gratification of one kind or another, loving to the end of my days the luxury of lolling something around in my mouth, almost anything, twixt tongue and teeth—and then too there will linger with me into the future and to the very end of my days, a lifelong adoration of—even an obsession with—the female breast, to plague me always, to make an everlasting fool of me. And I shall spend the majority of my days trying to suppress this lascivious proclivity.

Not that I’m worried about it right now. I shan’t think further of this till I’m ten years old and playing softball right up there around the corner on Elder Avenue with some of these same kids and Imogene Wasson’s budding twelve year old tomboy bosom (side view) suddenly peers at me through her torn shirt as she’s standing next to me on third base. It is an epiphany: the sudden serendipitous unveiling of a mystery hitherto concealed, and now cold turkey wham! there it is—I’m face to face with the Truth, an unlikely and wholly unguessable shape to have been hiding under her shirt—its strange, unfathomable quiddity, unbeknownst to me all this time. I am filled with wonder and can think of nothing else for about two weeks (I mean, just look, the way it juts out, such a jaunty angle). It shall be for me for future days a metaphor, for I can think of no better picture for the process of stumbling onto the truth, something we never dreamed could exist. Let’s give it a name: how about calling it the Torn Shirt Hypothesis? Will that do?

Imogene, Imogene, I never told you: you gave me the greatest thrill of my life, and you didn’t know it.

Imagine, imagine. I’ve kept it a secret all these years.

Did this experience have anything to do with my having been breast-fed as a baby? Who can say? At any rate, I shall henceforth ponder often the question: does the breast-feeding of infant girls produce in them a corresponding lifelong erotic fondness for that part of the female anatomy? I think not, at least not with the same reverential nuance, that singular male sense of awe and mystery. Not so, I say—not so long as so many of them can employ unflinchingly that alternate term of total demystification, boob, thus rendering ridiculous any misguided male adoration.

I shall turn out to be, though, an adult who’s wholly devoted to pleasure, of one kind or another, one who avoids pain at any cost—and I shall be greatly favored by the gods, for they do not have in store for me any significant pain, ever, to the end of my comfortable existence, at least up to the age of eighty or so; I cannot see beyond that. No money, no respect, no recognition of any kind, will ever come my way, but I shall be spared pain. But then again, maybe I just wasn’t important enough for the gods to notice, and so escaped their harassment. These things are true about me, and the pain of admitting them is about as close as I shall ever come to genuine suffering. No, the lines shall fall to me in pleasant places. I am, in fact, a sissy, and in a much more profound sense than that in which people usually make that charge.

And of course also these two have given me (as the highly favored and over-promoted first-born son) the somewhat genteel and mannered name of Marshall, to signify my significance, to seal my self-esteem. They make it clear, always: they expect great things from me, much more for instance than they shall ever expect from my younger brother Kenny, born nearly a year ago last June.

Hey kid, what’s your name? This your wagon?

The voice is gruff, insolent, taunting. He is an older boy, much bigger than I. He may be Leroy Chapman; I cannot see him clearly, through the mist of time. Leroy lives around the corner on Beardsley, next to Delno Roos, and he will become known to me soon enough as a villain to end all villains. Or can he be Tom Head, or Lee Faull, or Paul Wasson, who is Dutch’s older brother and lives across the street? Or maybe even Delno himself?

One of them goes so far as to walk up to me and give me a shove, a few sharp jabs in the ribs. The two women are not fazed, though.

His name is Marshall. What’s your name?

Marshall’s a sissy name.

Marshall, Marshall, sissy little Marshall.

But I am a King, so I am not disconcerted. My facial expression in fact betrays a certain detached nonchalance, a thing most incredible in a child this young. No really, this is true, I swear it. You ask how can I possibly know this, is there a photo taken on this occasion? A four-year-old child—can he see his own face, much less interpret its expression? Is there a mirror nearby?

So now, you say, you’re lying already, in this account of your early days . . . And you the identical same phony who’s always wanting to remind us of the need to be eternally vigilant about this lying business!

There, you see, I told you so, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you how easy it is to slip into a lying mode, especially when you’re trying to be artsy and creative? I wasn’t lying though, not about this. But looking back over what I’ve told you so far about Reed Avenue, I can see that I may have stretched the truth a bit, here and there. For instance I can’t be certain of my facts, for I’m only four years old. I’m just standing here on the porch, trying to tell this story, and I can’t even read a calendar yet. I am the same man who will sit in his study at the age of eighty and pen these words, and yet every cell in my body is radically different from those that will be his. He will be, physically, an entirely different entity, and yet we are united over these many years by the phenomenon of consciousness, which will run in a continuity of awareness all the way from me to him, so that we are in the end the identical same person. We are the same mind, sliding back and forth over the decades. Is this not a mystery, as great as any you can contemplate? So it may be May of ’34, and most likely is—but it just might be June or even July. It’s really happening though, and I’m here to prove it. I just want to be clear about this matter of never really getting involved, this spectator mentality. It’s really how I am. It will plague me the rest of my days, and will keep me poor, forever a child of the Great Depression. Yet at the end (all the way down the years to the next Great Depression) it will, finally, set me free.

But yet again, regarding this matter of the casual posture, this air of dissociation: I must insist, I’m not lying. There will be photos, right up to the very end, in which I shall assume this rather curious stance that I have described as detached nonchalance, so it is not merely poetic license I’m claiming here. That’s the way I am, it really is, and that’s the attitude I shall always assume in group photographs, to be taken down through the years—though it’s never a conscious decision. I just unthinkingly gravitate to the end of the row, on automatic pilot, whether in the rear or down front, and assume this outlook, without giving it any thought. One example I might mention is a class photo of Miss Olive Kruger’s first grade students at Firestone Park School, to be taken a couple of years from now, in 1936. That’s me, on the end, in the very first row. I’m not kidding, you have to see this to believe it: all the other kids are standing straight up, looking at the camera, head on, but I’ve managed to be on the end again and next to an abutment of some sort, and so have struck up a wistful, lackadaisical pose, leaning against it and languidly smirking. It’s as though I don’t really belong to this motley crowd, not for a minute, and want the photographer to be sure to get the message. Hey, you know, people, I’m not really one of these idiots. I just got in here by mistake. I’m not too serious about this stuff.

It will happen again and again. There’s a high school graduation group picture, taken out by the flagpole at Garfield, where I’m doing the same thing. Mugging, doing a Dean Martin, posing for the camera. It’s like Hey, I don’t really belong with these people, or what’s going on here. I’m just passing by. I’m a visitor here.

Now, are you ready for this? Fast forward to the far off year of 1960. I’ll be in California then, and graduating from Fuller Theological Seminary. Yes, that’s me in the photo, right down there again, second from the right in the front row. Mr. Cool, in cap and gown. The smirk this time is feeble, but still discernible. And just a bit more perusal will reveal even more mysteries: for instance I’m the only one in the first row who has had the temerity to stick out his leg at such a jaunty angle, asymmetrically divergent from the others, who have uniformly reined theirs in. And speaking yet once more of jaunty angles: there’s also the matter of the mortarboard caps. Look closely and you will see that of all the forty-four folks in the snapshot, there are only two caps that are tilted the same way, at the same angle (again jaunty, catching the sun’s reflection): mine and that of Jaymes P. Morgan, another Truth Seeker and all around cheeky guy, whom I shall come to enjoy most among my classmates there, and who will die tragically of cancer in his mid-thirties, after taking a doctorate at Columbia and joining the Fuller faculty.

I digress. But why do I have this attitude, so early on in my remembrance, this need to stand alone, to separate myself, seek for something better? There will be those who jump to an easy answer, as familiar as Sigmund Freud: it’s all about the Id having everything its own way in infancy and early childhood, until its first exposure to others, when it encounters the Reality Principle. And you know what? They may be right. I can only describe truthfully how I actually felt, minus the metaphysics. You, gentle reader, have probably already made up your mind, and your choice of explanations here will determine your own destiny, no doubt already has.

Here’s my theory: I am a King because I have just been with the Truth. I have not until now been out on the porch. A person can only be what he or she really and truly is when one is by oneself, alone. It’s only when you come out onto the porch that you get into trouble. It is then that you learn to lie, to assume a persona, a personality that’s almost forced on you by the others. That’s what rules these people out here in the yard. I’m just not into it yet, that’s all.

But now all hell is breaking loose. They make their move. The big kid is dragging the wagon around the corner of the house, lickety-split, and small bodies are running along beside and behind, screaming with wicked delight, onto the driveway, out of sight, down Reed Avenue.

Say goodbye to your wagon, kid.

The fierce, unexplainably cruel words rip into my four-year-old heart, open now new vistas of terror for me, suggest in their own vague way new possibilities of violence never until now glimpsed, never guessed at. And for the moment, baffled as they are, my female lieutenants are immobile, frozen here on the porch like figures in a wax museum, while I rub my tear-filled eyes with tiny fists. Yes, I am a sissy. I am horrified by this kind of stuff, always will be, and there will be many other such minidramas in my future. This will be a recurring theme. I never do come to understand or accept the fury of out-of-control mobs, in my own life as well as in literature, from the orgiastic crowd that dances around the golden calf at the foot of Sinai right up to the perverted kids who roam the island in Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Come to think of it, that may do quite nicely as a name for this sort of episode, which may well be a key to what MM is all about: let’s call it the Lord of the Flies Syndrome . . .

But the end of the porch story (to return to our previous narrative) is we suddenly revive and whip into action, my mother dragging me down Reed Avenue until we catch up to the culprits at the corner of Beardsley and recover the wagon. I am King again, at least for the time being.

Hey, you say, there’s something wrong with all this. It just isn’t normal for a small boy to overreact like that, to feel that strongly. You’re just too sensitive for your own good. Did your mother know any shrinks? You strike me as a real pathological dude who just can’t relate well to others. And what about your father? Didn’t he teach you how to get in there and fight back, stick up for your rights?

Well, yeah, he will, and especially by way of the example he will himself set for me. He is notorious for fisticuffs, up and down Reed Avenue. I’m just trying to tell you the truth about what happened this eventful day, the truth about how I feel when these kids steal my wagon. You’ll have to decide for yourself what is the true explanation of all this.

You really want to know more about this abnormality, as you choose to call it? Well, I can tell you this: I will feel the exact same terror some five or six years from now when my father takes me to the Circle Theatre to see my first movie, Walt Disney’s enchanting masterpiece Pinocchio, newly released and the talk of Reed Avenue. It will be powerful drama for me, if you can believe that, and I shall always be able to work up a shudder, recalling the horror I feel in that darkened theatre, sitting there next to my puzzled father and crying, cringing down in my seat and covering my eyes. The reason for my consternation? Pinocchio, the cute little conforming and conventional puppet who longs to be a human boy, it will be recalled, ventures out onto the porch! He falls in with a bad crowd of nasty bigger boys and begins to hang out in the pool room, say bad words, smoke cigars, and—most repulsive of all—tell lies. Every time he tells a lie his nose grows longer! Jiminy Cricket, his conscience, saves the day of course by telling Pinocchio his only hope of ever becoming human is to knock off the lying, which the wayward puppet promptly does, gets his nose back to normal, and is returned joyfully to his father, Guiseppe, who now becomes his real Father. Sound familiar?

And I breathe a mighty sigh of relief. But I shall never be the same, for I have had yet another epiphany, another look at the truth that lies (pun strictly intended) at the core of the human predicament. I’ve had a look at the ugly ones in the midst of the action, the ones who live a lie, the same old crowd that always seems to be running the show, the distant pigs the prodigal comes to know so well. I’m wary of them, that’s all. I’m on to them.

The Pinocchio Experience relates almost organically to the Lord of the Flies Syndrome, does it not? Are we seeing a pattern?

The two women take me often for walks along Wilbeth Road, pushing me along in my primitive 1930 stroller. Turn right on South Firestone Boulevard, over to Aster Avenue, right again, past the park and the school, turn again at the Acme Store and up the little hill, up Reed Avenue. We live at 418, past Holly and Beardsley, before you get to Brown Street. This house, this street, this Firestone Park, is what I really am, where I really live, what I really love—and shall define me, finally, for the rest of my days. I will never get beyond Reed Avenue, not really, whatever the future may bring. It is burned into my brain, and so it shall remain: each crack in the sidewalk in front of the house, the lamp post with the huge June bugs continually whapping into its brilliantly lit globe while we yell allee-allee-in-free, playing hide-and-seek in the summertime and using it for home, the . . .

Wait a minute here, hold it Jack. You’re getting a bit carried away, don’t you think? Why are you trying to paint a picture of your childhood as purely idyllic? Is this Firestone Park place Heaven? Those rose-colored glasses you wear are really making us suspicious. Are you lying again?

Well, it’s true, you nailed me. I am a sentimentalist. At least there’s that side of me. For those hardcore no-nonsense positivistic types in our midst, this will be a turn-off, and some will even, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, brand all sentimentalism as The Big Lie, sugaring over reality, making it palatable. They just may be right, but then again, some will conjecture that this is more a matter of temperament than of verisimilitude. Not everyone saw Dublin as did James Joyce. Some will see the same Reed Avenue as Heaven, others as Hell. The jury may still be out on this. My brother grew up in the very same environment and he will let me know, often and loudly through the years: this street for him is endemic Hell.

Kenny, Kenny, I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. I would gladly have given you my rose-tinted glasses, but they blinded me so I didn’t know.

Reality is many-sided. There are many kinds of truth, may I submit, and I shall be getting to the other side of things soon enough. For the moment though, I want to ask, is naturalism the only way to look at life, the only proper mode for telling a story? Is McTeague a more truthful novel than Look Homeward Angel? Is getting down to the nasty, the nitty-gritty, the negative—is that the only way to tell the truth?

The dictionary that has been built into this word-processor I’m using has just informed me that naturalism is defined as truthful, accurately representing what is depicted or described. But this definition begs the question, does it not? Sheer tautology, it seems to me. It tells us that naturalism is the true way of depicting things because it depicts things truthfully. Something is being lost here.

Do dictionaries lie? Can it be?

There you go again, undermining the American Way of Life. Everybody knows there are three books you don’t question, three documents that end all disputes: The Bible, the Constitution, and the Dictionary. They say what they mean, and they mean what they say. Lose these, nothing left but the slippery slope to liberalism.

The slope to literalism, say I, is the one we’re much more likely to encounter these days, and it’s a lot more slippery. But hey, I don’t want to argue here, I’d rather get back to Reed Avenue. As I was saying, Reed Avenue right now is pure bliss for me, and I can honestly say, as Herb Caen, greatly loved icon of San Francisco newspaper columnists, will say some fifty years from now (only he’ll be talking about his own beloved San Francisco), When I get to Heaven, if I do, I’ll look around and say It ain’t bad, but it ain’t Firestone Park. Herb Caen was not lying, and neither am I—we’re just two people who are happy in our natural environs.

There’s more than one way to look at most things—even the above-mentioned San Francisco, by the way, it being a place that many of you Forrest Gump literalists can never stop excoriating, being unable to see anything there but homosexuals. And then too there’s Bill Clinton, for another example, a man whose mention in your presence can never call up anything but Monica Lewinsky. (I think from now on I’ll call you Literalist—you won’t mind, will you—since you insist on labeling me Liberal).

Fair and balanced, don’t you think?

Of course the same Herb Caen will also say the trouble with nostalgia is that it’s not what it used to be . . . And it never was. But lucky me; for me right now it really is what it used to be. And I can see both sides of everything, believe it or not. I just like the sunny side better. But, I suppose it’s time to start to tip the scales a bit more in the direction of naturalism. I’ll start slowly and slip up on the bad stuff, surprise you when you’re looking the other way. We’ll get there, don’t you worry. We have to sneak up on the truth, remember? Can’t handle too much of it in one sitting.

Firestone Park as it is now, in the thirties and forties of the famed twentieth century, proves most certainly, on closer inspection, to be a highly relevant key for comprehending the person who will become Marshall Motz, and thus must, most undeniably, be very big in these, his memoirs. For it is unmistakably a period place, created at a time when American big industry and its attendant world of smoky factories, soot, unions and strikes, is yet in its innocent adolescence, feeling its oats, rising and stretching, looking around for new things to accomplish, new ventures to undertake, in the naive and largely unquestioned (even if only grudgingly so by some of the era’s reactionaries) goal of making life better for every last citizen, every bum, every bag lady. For everyone belongs in this great dream, no one is left out. The Middle Class is huge and omnipresent, it beckons all. It is the real America, in a very real sense. We are the proud Middle Class, and the spotlight is on us. America is our oyster, our baby, and Dutch Wasson is every bit as important as Harvey S. Firestone. Maybe more so.

Because we—we who live right here on Reed Avenue—we are the real Americans, and much more so than any mere Captain of Industry. Such a man, in fact, had better watch his step if he wants to continue in his peculiar chosen pastime, the pursuit of money—because he is our servant, and if he gets too greedy we’ll simply have to put some limits on him, regulate him a little bit. Otherwise he’ll threaten the American Way of Life, which for now is the enthronement of the middle class. Oh yes, for now we are being catered to, the center of national attention, we’re all kings. Are we being groomed for a coming conflagration, a big war that will have to be fought by the likes of us? I cannot know, but it is fun each day to bask in the certain knowledge that this America is ours, belongs to us who live on Reed Avenue.

Oh yes, to be sure, we hear from time to time about strange goings-on in far-off Hollywood or in an impossibly unreal New York City, and we read in the paper now and then (for now, in our time there really is an identifiable Left around, though it will exist for only a few more short years) about the silly rantings of Henry Wallace or the Ku Klux Klan, or the doings of extremist cults such as the Communist Party or those who favor the Townsend Plan, and there are rumors around of recalcitrant Republicans who still bitterly oppose the new Social Security legislation, and have vowed to reverse it, even if it takes a lifetime—all this exists, but Reed Avenue takes none of it seriously, even for a minute. We don’t grumble. We know we have to carry the rest of the idle clowns, the various sorts of freaks who inhabit both coasts. We aren’t threatened. We have an unshakable grip on reality. It’s the price of freedom, putting up with these fringe elements, such as Republicans and Catholics, even Negroes. We can tolerate them.

Not that Firestone Park is prejudiced. It is not. Truthfully I can say, I swear, I never hear a word of bigotry, never a criticism of any ethnic group or race. None of this is a problem, because we just don’t know these folks exist. There are no blacks (an exotic commodity indeed, to be encountered in abundance in Cleveland just thirty-five or so miles north of here, a gloomy place where nobody ever goes anyway, and maybe a few in the scarier parts of South Akron, down Grant Street and around the Goodrich, places we also avoid), and no Jews (we know them mostly from the Old Testament) except for the Glasmans, Nate and Sammy, who run the Ideal Food Market on Aster Avenue, and for whom we have nothing but affection. Where do they go, after the store closes at five pm every afternoon, except of course Sunday, when everything in town is closed? Nobody thinks about it. A few Italian families exist, and there’s a smattering of Romanians, Hungarians and Poles—all cheerfully tolerated, for they are real Americans, come here to work in the booming rubber industry.

We are WASPS, and America belongs to us.

We never doubt it, even for a minute.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

We know that we are the real America, workers in these faded, soot-covered, incredibly ugly buildings, these same factories which we naively believe will always be the bedrock reality in America’s future, stretching as far as the eye can see (and the nose can smell) all over Akron, making us strong and invincible, one big happy harmonious family. Look: up and down Reed Avenue lined up neatly in rows are these sturdy-looking two-and-three-story houses, each and every one quite different from the ones surrounding it, each complete with its very own distinctive style of architecture, expansive front porch fitted out with swing and lounge chair, driveway and ample back yard, garage in the rear. Every single one of these houses represents a family—that is, there’s a mom, and a dad, maybe even grandparents, and lastly the children. That’s what it’s all about: the family. No one questions this institution; it seems to most of us a kind of given, an ineradicable decree of the gods (even if they are the gods of Capitalism—nobody asks into the origin question). Over there live the Wassons, next to them are the Hoffmans; that house on the corner is where the Henshaws live. Nobody ever gets divorced, no matter what, and unsavory uncles and renegade cousins inhabit spare rooms, live above garages. No such thing as an apartment building exists—no sir, not in Firestone Park. Look anywhere you like, from Cole Avenue to Wilbeth Road, from South Main Street to Brewster’s Woods, even to Arlington Street beyond: you’ll see no apartment buildings, only these formidable-looking huge row houses, inhabited by families.

And for all this we have mainly two men to thank: first of all there is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We gather around our Majestic console radios in the evening, in living rooms up and down the street, whole families, for the Fireside Chat, and we recognize the voice of this man as that of the great head of our expanded American family, our Great White Father, and he addresses us: My friends, or My fellow Americans.

And we know he means us who live on Reed Avenue, and not Harvey S. Firestone (our second benefactor, thank you).

We are not religious on Reed Avenue. There are two picturesque white frame churches nearby, on either side of the park proper, opposite the school, each of which is topped with a soaring steeple and surrounded by acres of bright green grass and well-trimmed trees: The Firestone Park Methodist and the Firestone Park Presbyterian. That’s what they’re called, and they must have members, but I don’t know anybody who ever goes, except for an occasion like Easter Sunday or a wedding, perhaps a pep rally of some sort. It’s not that we’re heathens, we’re just lazy. The churches belong to all of us, and they aren’t any big deal; we regard them as something like community meeting halls where, if we do decide to go once in a while, we can expect to garner some poetic and slightly moralistic inspiration, a thing quite pleasant and bland—and yes, we’ll be sure to hear about Jesus, someone we know is one of us, because he doesn’t have a job or any money, and doesn’t seem to worry about it. The difference between these two churches in our minds is minimal and obscure, insignificant, rather like the difference between the two local movie houses, The Circle and the Southern. It’s the same movie that’s playing wherever you go in Firestone Park, at church, or in the darkened theatre. You’ll hear the same sermon from either pulpit: The good guys always win, there’s always a happy ending, love conquers all, and who needs money? Charlie Chaplin never has any, nor does Jimmy Stewart, but they have something we all revere, something called Integrity, and that’s what counts. Integrity and Truth. Everyone knows in his or her heart that the essence of evil is social injustice, and we can see the end of that problem coming just around the corner, under the leadership of our great priest, FDR.

This is our real religion.

And we have our temple too, oh yes, right here in our midst. Our great shrine, the place where we go to hear the truth, is none other than the Circle Theatre, only three blocks away. Turn the corner from the Acme and go past the Lucky Store and Patterson’s Hardware, and there it is. A small and unassuming marquee atop a store-front facade announces the magical escape currently being offered, and inside Fred Astaire dances away all the drabness of our impecunious existence, in the perfumed arms (we just know they are such) of Ginger Rogers, up and down ornate and impossibly rapturous stairways, onto endless bejeweled balustrades, straight up to the very stars, taking us far from the stench of the B.F. Goodrich Company and making us forget the fifty cents we had to cough up for admission. Mickey Rooney (Love Comes to Andy Hardy) and Judy Garland (Somewhere, Over the Rainbow) live in there too, radiating for us a kind of bliss that will soon enough be gone forever from our lives, and we won’t even miss it, won’t even know what’s missing. Bing Crosby sings, and he’s the biggest star of all, so cool, so casual—but we’ll forget about him too. For now, though, one evening at the Circle can set us free, can liberate all our chakras, put us into pure Heaven. For always—you can count on it—when we leave the theatre we will feel good. We have experienced a new dimension; we’ve tasted rapture. That’s what movies are all about, for us on Reed Avenue. They get us higher than a kite, and the euphoria is sure to last, at least for a few days. And then we’ll return, again and again, each time the double-feature program changes.

It is church for us, and we do not know, we cannot apprehend the fact that we are on good ground with God here, far better than we are able to imagine; we can not guess the realities of the past, where, in the pagan mystery cults which constituted the pristine beginnings of our common if largely neglected Christian religion, vast mythic narratives acted out in elaborate ritual pageantry transformed in just such a manner the earliest Initiates seeking after Truth. After the Liturgy, they too came away glowing, and their lives were changed.

Just so, we emerge from the Circle Theatre, the place of our enlightenment. We cannot go to Mass (which is the direct lineal descendant of this ancient pagan pageantry) because we are WASPs, and it’s out of the question. I lied earlier (yes, I confess, there I go again) when I said there are only two churches in Firestone Park. There are actually three; I forgot about St. Paul’s (which is over beyond Palm somewhere, past Ralph McKeighen’s house), inconspicuous, exotic, never much in our thoughts. I only know one Catholic, Jack Wilson, and he keeps pretty much to himself. But we are hungry for this stuff at the Circle, and we know not why.

Virtually everybody, every family, every last soul in Firestone Park goes to the movies at the Circle at least twice a week, to see the week-night Tues-Wed-Thurs bill and then again at the Fri-Sat weekend show or maybe even the Sun-Mon program. This too is a family thing. No one ever dreams of consulting a rating guide (what’s that?) to see if it’s safe to take in a movie; on many occasions whole families just pack up and go to the movies without even checking to see what’s on. I mean, when you go to church, you don’t have to know what’s playing, you just go. You know you can’t go wrong. That’s the way we feel about the Circle Theatre.

And now I have to tell you something that to me is very touching, a tale about my mother, who was Blanche Laverna Smith, lately become a Motz. Let me show you a cameo. She’s sitting there at the dining room table, after the supper dishes are cleared away, and after we’ve maybe played a game or two of Flinch or Muggins, she and Kenny and I, and she’s scribbling away in a notebook. What’s that she’s writing down? I draw near to take a look. She’s making a list of some sort. What is this?

Adolphe Menjou.

Akim Tamiroff.

Alice Faye.

Andy Devine.

On and on it goes, from A to Z, a list of movie stars, which she works on every evening without fail. It is alphabetized the wrong way around, that is, in the order of first names rather than last. It is something she works on assiduously, gives it much hard thought, takes it quite seriously. It is something I will take with me through the years, a mystery for sure, unsolvable to the end. What is she doing with this process? Dreaming her dreams all over again, making them come out her own way, complete with happy ending? Opting for a happier, perhaps more glamorous existence than her feckless and reckless Reed Avenue marriage has given her?

Cary Grant.

Clark Gable.

Claude Rains.

Claudette Colbert.

Yes, it’s no secret, I may as well tell you: my father looks like Clark Gable. Or at least that’s the way she tells it. And truthfully there really is a striking resemblance, especially in an early picture of the man at age 25, when they married, in the year 1929. And even now in the middle thirties I see the black hair, the very same swagger, the same toothy insolent grin, the ears that stick out so obnoxiously, the cocky stance. It seems to go somehow with the Zeitgeist, a certain Ohioan lofty and supercilious air of independence currently fashionable among some of our males, a brand of overweening arrogance which manages to come off as charming. This you doubt; you say I lie? Let me just tell you then another almost torn-shirt type of truth: the movie star Clark Gable actually comes from Akron (or at least its environs), is a local boy—and rumor persists that just a short time ago he himself was working at the Firestone! Or was it the Goodrich? The end of all this, however, the final residue of truth here, is the recognition that this type of old-style male animal will soon enough become an endangered species and then finally come to be extinct in America. He will not belong in the coming postwar era, he will not be able to adapt. He will no longer look like Clark Gable, and nobody will remember, no one will care. His truth, his sort of healthy self-sufficient vitality wedded to bedrock honesty is destined to be buried beneath a mountain of lies, when the backyard crowd moves indoors, takes over the house.

There you go again, jerkwater, hamming it up just the way you said you wouldn’t. Hey, I thought you were going to tell the truth for once in your life. You’ve been wallowing in sentimentalism for pages now. You couldn’t even get this published in Reader’s Digest.

Well look, I told you, I am a sentimentalist. The whole era reeks with sentimentalism, and will right up through the Great War: movies, books, music, it’s all the same. We read poetry, weep a lot, sing romantic ballads. Everyone’s great hope is to fall in love, to meet somebody, across a crowded room, his true soul mate. Maybe that’s the final truth about MM; maybe my memoirs can end right here. Really though, all I’m trying to do is tell the truth about how things are, and make no judgment as to the ultimate validity of our way of looking at life. I just want to understand.

The thing is this: we have no hard-core, dogmatic belief system, no hard and fast rules to live by—and yet we have a compassionate society, for the most part. People all around you care about you; you can feel it. Nobody drinks, up and down Reed Avenue. Even a beer is hard to come by, for the grocery stores do not as yet sell it. There are no alcoholics around here, no drug problem exists, and pornography is universally denounced as evil and disgusting, is something that is totally underground, out of sight, almost non-existent. We don’t have to educate people about these social evils that are coming in America’s future—we just know by intuition that these things are undesirable for the good life, life in Firestone Park.

I can’t escape the sneaking suspicion that the real reason we are so richly blessed, spared so many of society’s ills that will at a later day in America be deemed ubiquitous and inescapable, is simply this: we have no money. Up and down the street, everybody’s in the same boat: broke. The fact is that the Motz family at 418 Reed Avenue is (by later standards) a sub-poverty-level semi-dysfunctional family, but since nobody ever tells us this, we are blissfully happy. We kids (all the kids, from every house; nobody’s rich) gather Coca-Cola bottles behind the stores on Aster Avenue and collect a nickel for each one at Glasman’s—and then, guess what? We can get into the Saturday afternoon matinee at the Circle for the grand total admission fee of ten cents, thus ushered into a whole world of wonder and delight, Tom Mix, Superman, Tarzan of the Jungle. The Lone Ranger.

Hey, maybe your Bible got one thing right: money probably is the root of all evil. Yeah, yeah, I know, it really says something quite different: the love of money is a root of many kinds of evil. Same thing. Either way, the point is becoming clear to me: all these social evils, the obsession with sex, the drug abuse problem, cussing (especially in movies and later in television), the lowering in general of public standards of decency in every regard, even the increase of violence as entertainment, the corresponding increase of violent crime in society—all this cannot be traced to liberals or liberalism in any sense whatever, but is more likely to have its roots in this same just quoted biblical and existentially verifiable maxim: our old friend, the love of money. Good old American business enterprise, the free market. Somebody discovered that all this stuff sells, that a fast buck can be turned trafficking these commodities.

Is this the truth? Judge for yourself. You’re probably already cooking up a spin to counter this theory. Suit yourself, I say.

But hey, we aren’t troubled with this stuff, we kids on Reed Avenue, because we have everything we want, and since we’re all poor, we’re not competing with one another. Every one of us belongs, the country is ours, no one is left out, we’re all Americans. We’re all Kings.

You see, we are liberals, one caring family. Everybody is liberal, the whole country is liberal, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Only we don’t know that silly word, no one has ever heard anyone use it, not in Firestone Park at least. It has no meaning, because there is nothing to oppose it, no other viewpoint to provide a contrast. We are Americans all, united, solid as a rock, under The Man, our President, whom we all implicitly acknowledge to be much more than an ordinary mortal, a demi-god in fact, sent to deliver us from the Great Depression. Even the Republicans (and there aren’t many around here) feel this way; they are grateful to The Man for his radical measures to save what’s left of Capitalism, to protect them from themselves. All our hope, all our trust, is in him. Everywhere are WPA projects, everyone participates, all are optimistic. No such word as conservative exists, and if it is ever heard at all, politically speaking, it means those folks of either political party who are only mild fans of FDR. Oh and by the way, there is no such thing as a fundamentalist church in Firestone Park and there never will be, not in my days at least—though Akron itself will soon enough be invaded, as has perhaps no other place on the planet ever been, by this sort of religion, and will become in fact the very capital of Bible Belt hillbilly revivalism. But not yet, not in the mid-thirties, not in Firestone Park. It is still waiting in the wings, ready to erupt on stage.

This, all this, this prevailing, all pervading scenario described above is our religion, and everyone, all of us, believe in it. There are no dissenters, none at all. We are, in fact, what will many years from now be ridiculously called Secular Humanists, and what’s more, we understand that such is precisely the definition of what real Christianity actually is, what it was meant to be from the very start of the apostolic age—though we don’t phrase it in this language, for we know nothing about the apostolic age. Some truths you just know by a kind of intuition. We don’t need to go to church to reinforce, much less establish, what we already know in our hearts.

And behold, I show you yet another mystery: a stalwart sense of decency prevails, up and down the street. How is it that no religious influence has ever been known to create so effectively this strange brand of moral integrity, this apparently voluntary and inwardly induced rectitude that we see here on Reed Avenue? There is in every citizen an endemic sense of responsibility about how to behave, at least in public. And we do not lock our doors. There has never been a murder or a mugging. No one’s house has ever seen a burglary.

We need no preachers to tell us not to cuss. Never, ever, not even once, in my house, have the words hell or damn been heard. Or in anybody else’s house, for that matter. Except maybe Leroy Chapman’s. We feel—make no mistake about this—that if anyone, any visitor or guest for instance, should ever come into one of our homes and utter such an expletive, we would have to move out, because the house would then no longer be fit for habitation, but would rather be cursed or polluted, beyond rehabilitation. The atmosphere would then reek with shame, an ineradicable foul stench. If a man wants to cuss, he saves it for when he’s alone with his cronies, preferably behind somebody’s garage or at a lodge meeting, maybe in the men’s room when no one is around to be corrupted or offended. As for women—need it be said—they are zealously protected from cuss words by all and sundry, homogeneously, totally, without exception. Cussing when ladies are present is tantamount to major crime, and can easily get you punched in the nose, maybe even a night in the slammer.

I have to tell you the truth, right now: my father cusses. He isn’t kidding me any. I heard him once, when he didn’t think I was listening. He was talking to Roy Dillard, his partner at Dillard and Motz Plumbing Supply. He said Listen Roy, tell him not to worry, we’ll get the goddamn job done next week. It was a horrible shock to me, but I can tell you this: never in all my life will I ever hear him use such language in our house at 418 Reed Avenue—not even when conditions will reach their nadir, on the dismal day in 1945 when he will knock my mother flat on the floor, step over her body, slam the kitchen door and leave forever.

Funny about these cuss words, how they will change over the years. Around the park these days, we have a code system of polite euphemisms. Doggone it (sometimes altered to daggone it) is to be heard everywhere, or maybe on occasion consarn it, and of course the very common darn it—and then also we mustn’t forget heck. These expressions make up the phony front my father will display