Searching For Dewey: The Story of A Young Life

By DW Orminski

This gritty coming-of-age story follows Daryl's journey from childhood to adulthood, surviving physical and sexual abuse throughout his early years. Daryl moved frequently with his unstable family, attending sixteen secondary schools in his young life. Interspersed among the many moves across the country, he finds help and wisdom at unexpected t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jan 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685150730

DW Orminski

D.W. Orminski is retired from the medical field and resides in the Pacific Northwest. He enjoys hiking, flyfishing, bicycling, and kayaking. When not in the outdoors, he can be found in his workshop making chef knives or furniture, or gathering his poetry written over the last decade for another book.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Beautiful Yellow Eyes

D

aryl walked down the steps from the 1922 home that he had rented after ringing the doorbell, then peering through the leaded glass for any sign of life. He saw none, and the emptiness stirred a scene soon to become his living version of a Hitchcock thriller starring his soon-to-be ex-wife as the leading actress. The home was owned by a local family, and it truly was a grand location forty years ago. The current flow of traffic braking at the corner stop sign never let a renter forget humans were close at hand with the thump-thump of car stereos and the roar of mufflers as they sped off. The house was a replica of a classic stout Dutch home, with a flat roof with parapet, stucco on the upper two-thirds, and dark-brown brick on the lower third. Flowering cherry trees hid any window view from the street, a mere fifteen feet away. Daryl missed the place but not the all-too-frequent chaotic days and nights precipitating his moving out two weeks earlier. Daryl walked down the few steps to the mailbox, with its small and rounded roof, closed flat mouth, and rusting flag on the side waiting to signal the postman on occasion.

Opening the door of worldly input, he saw an envelope with what appeared to be two circus spires poking through the white side of their postal tent. No postal mark, he thought, finding it curious, slowly turning it over and over and then finally opening it. It contained two pearl earrings in a gold bezel, which belonged to his wife. The accompanying note said, Jolene, here are your earrings from the other night. I thought you might want them back. Henrick. Her new find was an attorney in Yakima specializing in reviewing recent divorce filings and then dating the soon to be divorcee. It was then that Daryl realized the spool of life he had so tightly wound round and round like a giant cocoon since childhood was about to unravel, spilling all his hidden secrets of misery and joy with it. He began to feel the unwelcome return of the chronic reflexive spasms in the lower right quadrant, in his small intestine, realizing the person he thought he had married was nothing more than a mirror image of his mother with her parade of companions, uncles, and stepfathers.

He had known for some time that Jolene had a reputation for being seductively flirtatious with men, particularly in her job of medical equipment sales and in her hobbies of tennis and horses. Daryl carried on a life of his own, keeping busy with his practice, rock climbing, karate, and triathlons. He chose to pursue the visible, knowing the ghosts of the past would arrive nightly as he slept, unable to fight or run. Exhaustion had become his friend. For a moment it was as though he saw someone else's hands holding an envelope. His feet seemed welded to the sidewalk as he watched the cherry blossoms flutter helplessly to the ground in the warm spring breeze, swirling pink petals bathing his cordovan shoes.

Breaking free of the sidewalk and sitting on the steps holding the earrings, Daryl felt a twisted nausea churning, giving way to macabre thoughts of revanche, all too aware he would soon find himself living it—every fiber and sinew tightening with the stroke of life's great bow. He once again welcomed the symphony of confusion, deceit, and hatred—the kind of hatred few people know and those who do just cast a sideways glance or approving nod. The blows of childhood were beginning their slow, brooding blood dance. The grounds of the house were too old and small for the bodies he was imagining. He would have to wait. The skunk perpetrators of his soul would also have to wait.

Driving over Snoqualmie Pass in his 1982 Volvo, smoking a thin, long, black cigar, Daryl had visions of being Clint Eastwood taking on all evil with a greater evil but appearing to be justifiably good. He headed for Pioneer Square, his usual spot where he met various travelers of life on the weekends, buying them lunch and bringing blankets. He never based his actions on sympathy as most were not of that character; at least the ones he sought out provided philosophical debates from the world's many different walks of life. Most people were afraid of them, but Daryl found them fascinating as it pulled on his nomadic childhood, watching someone like Frederick lean back on the bench where he sat dressed in a well-worn black suit, pulling back the lapels with dirt-stained fingers matching what at one time was a white shirt. When a rare winter ray of Seattle sun struck him, revealing his stained-tooth smile, Daryl was reminded of a small series of railroad ties without the rails.

Frederick was wandering south from Alaska, making it very clear he was not from any tribe and quite proud of that fact. The park was interspersed with many native tribespeople sharing bottles of cheap vodka, cigarettes, and occasional humping or blow jobs on the benches. Daryl was always careful when he sat down, holding his camera close and inspecting the bench for whatever products humans could leave behind or possibly the gifts left by the city's other plentiful inhabitants of pigeons, fluttering, pecking, and squirting their alabaster stools.

Daryl struck up the usual stultifying conversation of trust with Frederick in order to have some interaction, receiving a grimaced, flat stare and leaving no misunderstanding that Daryl was not living in his world. The ragged-toothed sage, grim mouth set in unshaven, sunken cheeks below his black, piercing eyes, proved he had earned his cracked-earth face. The confluence of lines and facial canyons became conduits for the inevitable Seattle rains. As he gazed at him, Daryl knew he was right about trust given and not received or trust given and then deceived. Such had been his life, but it also provoked his own thoughts of self-deception. Perhaps he had placed too little trust in himself and, in so doing, allowed others to lead, control, and maneuver events in his life. He searched in the interior pocket of his canvas coat for another maduro cigar. As a former Mormon, Daryl noticed that the act of lighting up and talking with his most recent homeless friend sent his thoughts racing back to the so-called religious Mormon bishops able to shed their garments faster than a dead leaf flying off in a windstorm when it came to spiritual guiding of female members in their time of need. LSD couldn’t have produced more tumbling synapses in Daryl's brain as he sat on the bench surrounded by perceived modern-day societal lepers smiling and laughing, unnerving the passersby. Some years ago, after abandoning Mormonism and the guilt seam of those garments (as Daryl called it) with their grinding into his lower spine when sitting, he felt luxurious in his BVDs. The heady tobacco effects of a long, thin maduro resting between thumb and forefinger also helped deflect the slogging he knew lay ahead when he returned to the eastern hills of sagebrush and orchards. He bid his new acquaintances goodbye and headed up Second Avenue to the alcoves of stores once vibrant with shoppers but now abandoned, their doors chained, now serving as the sleeping quarters of indigents.

He soon found three natives camped out in their nice little street apartment with its cement floor, no heat, and sooty windows revealing vacant floors, but at least they were dry from the rain. They varied in size and height, but one in particular was quite short and a jabber. Each one interrupted the other as though pressed for time, talking of their past lives, and for lack of enticing them with any real interest, Daryl shared some stories of the navy and submarines, which for some reason they found intriguing.

It soon turned eleven o’clock, and Daryl thought he should at least buy them lunch at McDonald's. The short one jumped up, gesticulating wildly and yelling about how they weren’t allowed to go inside. They don’t like us! Daryl carefully took their orders, paying particular attention to requested hamburgers with no onions or mustard while observing the irony of even the starving homeless maintaining food preferences.

Returning with lunch, Daryl said he would be moving along and stepped outside of the street home to the bus stop. Standing there for a moment taking in the waiting crowd, Daryl locked eyes with a rangy man with long brown hair and gray eyes. He suddenly said to Daryl, while lifting his pant leg above his calf, Do you know I could kill you with this muscle? Comfortable in his own skin, Daryl informed him it would be a poor choice on his part to try. As he came toward Daryl, the short native burst forth from the alcove, forcing himself in between them and screaming, Leave him alone. He was in the navy on submarines! Then he shook his fist in front of a very surprised face. Suddenly his mood shifted as he told of his recent release from a mental hospital and said his job now was to protect all women. He would become the protector of all women. The bus stopped, and he stepped up behind a group of women.

Daryl headed back to his car, contemplating the fucking weirdo and wondering what role his prototype played in his life as the protector of his mother, Elizabeth. The territory seemed all too familiar with her asking such things of a ten-year-old. Shaking off the encounter, Daryl thought it too much to think about, so he stopped by the only tobacconist shop he knew, off Pioneer Square, to reload on maduros. He loved taking the two small cement steps with their scalloped worn edges up into the narrow, black-framed glass door, the sweet smell of tobacco filling his senses. Its proprietor, who Daryl guessed to be in his early sixties, knew instantly each time Daryl showed up that he knew nothing about tobacco, let alone cigars. The tobacconist kept a portrait of himself on the wall with his sea captain's hat and full beard from his youth. Daryl bought more cheap cigars and again headed back to the old and burnished red Volvo that had seen more miles than pleasure, not unlike many of those blanket-shrouded figures sleeping in the streets—or possibly like himself living in a world of denial for decades.

As he drove back over a dark and heavily raining Snoqualmie Pass, the interior lighting of the Volvo was so dim that it made the cigar end appear as a torch. He felt good listening to Van Morrison while blowing smoke out the sunroof. Coming over the pass into the eastern side of the Cascades, outside of Thorp, he began wondering again about the protector of all women and whether or not he was another Ted Bundy or Green River Killer. Suddenly, out of the night, in the headlights was a winged flash and then a thump into the grill. He pulled over, inspecting for damage, and found a great northern owl embedded in the plastic grill. Dammit, he thought. That grill is expensive. Looking a bit closer, his own vision limited by the glare of blinking emergency flashers, he saw a pair of beautiful yellow eyes staring at him. He carefully extracted the bird from the grill and walked to the roadside, ignoring the few solitary cars speeding by. He held the warm body with those opalescent lenses blinking, knowing its death was near, compelling him to stay as the now-gentle rain fell. He sheltered its last moments until the blinking ceased, then carefully placed rocks over its still-warm body. He continued his drive home, passing Ellensburg and up over Manastash Ridge, followed by the Umtanum Ridge, to an empty, dark house. The great northern owl's yellow blinking eyes flashed before him as his hand passed over the light switch, splashing its own hue of yellow.

His new home after a failed second marriage was filled with objets d’art, carefully selected with an American Express card, from some gay shop owners in the area. The walls were faux brown and white relief with surrounding earth tones. Multiple masks gathered from his travels hung about the walls, reflective of Asian, African, and Native American art. Studying them at night, he found only the Native American to be restful while the African masks represented not a contented or satisfied state of mind but garish-looking faces only appearing to smile after he drank a good bottle of Leonetti cabernet sauvignon. The African rams’ horns seemed to send a message of curling upon oneself, making him think of how similar they were to giant snails. It made a home a home for the time being—until clouds of doubt rolled in the next morning, as they did every morning.

It was shortly after dawn; as he shaved with his grandfather's double-edged razor and standard badger hairbrush and soap, he realized he was back to looking at a reality that hadn’t changed overnight. Only his 1939 Selmer saxophone seemed real; he had purchased it from a local band teacher. When he played, starting at eight thirty every night, it was very real for his neighbors, who probably held weekly rituals on his behalf for leading a more satisfied life or, at the very least, playing in some other neighborhood. Daryl chalked it up to the cheap construction of the shared condominium walls.

Looking again at his surroundings of carved wooden faces, Daryl began a conversation that became more intellectually stimulating with each glass of bourbon. He wondered why some were offended by his outspoken philosophy. Explore all of life from sexual to cosmic, and consider yourself failing if not enough questions are asked and even more so if one claims to have the answers. Most importantly, do not be tricked into praying for answers; your subconscious already owns them. Every moment you have lived is stored in the mysterious three pounds of mass locked in your skull. Find them, greet them, and master them.

A blizzard arrived with the winds whipping the trees with snow. The pines obediently waved about, bending frantically to and fro, naked deciduous limbs resisting. They chose to remain stalwart and unmoving, independent observers of the chaos below them acting as earthly gods looking upon their domain and remaining patient parents issuing songs of calm throughout their own branches. Daryl thought it was there that one could see the curious, wide-eyed gaze of children looking up at the towering trees, feeling wonder and protection. An altruism for many precious little ones, but when the trees themselves are rotting from within, they take down not only themselves but those beneath them, fleeing for their own lives.

Such was the beginning of Daryl's Feather Story, as he liked to call it, but he never revealed it to anyone. It was a typical hot, humid day in Lincoln, Nebraska, the kind where a cotton shirt stuck to the skin and wet hair matted to a forehead. Elizabeth was young but not as young as him. I’m so hot. I need to lie down and cool off, she said. She had found a wonderfully smooth, grayish-red tail feather of a northern flicker and asked him to caress her legs, lying comfortably naked upon her bed and being cooled by the circular fan warbling slowly above. The singular feather in his small hand traveled slowly over her smooth legs, then her loins united by full black curls of hair below a pale navel, and then made its way over her breasts. She moved from her back to her side and then prone as the feather traveled to the nape of her neck, ever so slowly tracing over swimsuit lines that began midback from the suit lines of her shoulders and ended at the transition of white to tan. The swirling tip of the feather passed over her buttocks and down her thighs, floating to her calves. With her turning once again, he stared at her unlined face with her closed eyes as the feather wandered slowly down her soft neck, over breasts with their little brown mounds, then skimming over that triangle perched above hairless thighs, an anatomical curiosity for a boy of eight. She was indeed young herself at twenty-eight; her emptiness was quieted by demons chased away by her son. Taking his mother's hand, he would travel that path for years between the coming and going of her men.

In future years the feather was replaced by increasing duties of bathing and washing her body as Elizabeth became increasingly in need of assistance in her daily preparations of life, all coinciding with the intermittent comings and goings of husbands, lovers, and uncles. Daryl obediently followed her wishes with great curiosity from age eight before the aberrant bondage was finally broken when he was fifteen. (The hippocampus memory hides somewhere in deep, deep recall, surfacing at unexpected moments like the blazing sparks of an unshielded welder's arc erupting from the subconscious to the conscious.) Some days Daryl could recall his guided soapy hand in the small, eddying currents surrounding those black curls, then her pressing her palm over his hand, leisurely wandering upward as she closed her eyes, traveling to small breasts with brown nipples peeking from bubbled bath water. Finally, reaching her neck and face, those almond-shaped hazel eyes dreamily gazed into his of the same color, and she smiled. Rising from the water with a moment's pause, she stood naked before him. Soap bubbles popped as he wrapped a Turkish towel over her velvet shoulders, resting above her beautiful, pale, imperfect body. He helped her out as water dripped. Her hands rested on his small shoulders, his hands under her arms as though it were a ceremonial dance. The brilliant Elizabeth somehow, some way, while painfully eroding internally, projected a bright, gay beam of happiness to the world while clinging to Daryl.

Throughout the comings and goings of men, Daryl continued serving morning English tea (a small amount of milk) and toast, slathering it in Blue Bonnet margarine. The first margaric acid (origin of margarine) by French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul was invented in 1813 and later modified by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès at the request of Napoleon in 1869 to create a butter substitute from beef tallow for the armed forces and lower classes; eventually a newer version was made. In the 1960s, the jingle Everything is better with Blue Bonnet on it was the catchphrase, inspiring an even further saying, I am on it like a Blue Bonnet. Even today, at times his ears still rang with those jingles and the days of staying home from school to take care of Elizabeth, the fragging of a young mind with intermittent years of bathing and massage. The good son Darry was there, a dutiful soldier for his mother. He had lost his appetite for margarine, having a preference for butter; although in reflection, chemically its ingredients involve palmitic, myristic, and oleic acid—interesting, convoluted word puzzles for his curious mind. Daryl wondered who came up with the name butter if it contained all those magical names, but he thought myristic might hold a secret or two.

Those were some rather strange times, he thought as he looked back at how many roads were rushed upon with their roundabout intersections spinning him off into random directions of life. One moment he was bathing and lying with his mother, believing it to be love, and the next moment she was beating him with a board for behavior only a wayward, adventurous, lost boy would be capable of. Only later would he understand she could only offer a cancerous love, consuming all she touched.

The robins in the neighborhood, Daryl knew for a certainty, were telling his mother of his various adventures, like jumping the trains and building forts and fires that occasionally got out of control and burned adjacent structures. It was when she told him a little bird told me that he realized it was the robins and began to systematically assassinate them with a new twenty-two-caliber rifle given to him by one of his so-called uncles. Even Daryl knew he was no more of an uncle than Churchill was his grandfather. Nevertheless, it was a wonderful instrument for eradicating the birds spying on him. After several more board beatings, he realized the real informant was perhaps the blue jay, the same bastard that crapped on his head walking home from school one afternoon. Another shot out the window, and poof, he was gone, soon buried, leaving no evidence. Anticipating he might have had the wrong target, he padded his pants with Melmac plates, a brand of dinnerware molded from melamine resin made by American Cyanamid. Daryl couldn’t imagine a more effective defense against a board whacking his ass. However, the resounding anticipated thump without subsequent crying was greeted instead with derisive laughter from the good boy, Darry. She then stripped him of pants, shirt, and shorts, revealing his plastic armor. So began another raging, motherly blessed beating. All the while, like many other prisoners of aberrational parents suffering from their own demons, he tried to escape the blows by holding his hands up while Elizabeth was screaming, Hold still! Hold still! Finally, he surrendered in agony as she complained of being tired after a few more quick blows, saying, My hands hurt. Daryl thought his crazed mother would have been useful in the interrogation of various jailbirds. Apparently, he wasn’t such a good boy after all.

After the confiscation of his rifle, he used a slingshot made from a V-shaped tree branch and strips of bicycle inner tubes with a leather patch connecting the strips. After practicing, he became quite deadly with rocks and steel marbles. The neighbors, it turned out, were the actual informants, and whether or not there was a decrease in the bird population, it did nothing to change the pattern of biweekly beatings for his brother, Duane, but mainly Daryl—supposedly to keep them in line. Beatings may suppress behavior patterns, but it didn’t change Daryl's; it just made for a more desperate creative deception. What Daryl's mother and her men miscalculated was the resolve Daryl had developed early in life, teaching him to not just survive but to someday prevail. In doing so he developed a facial tic of frowning and pursing his lips tightly, giving a rather stern countenance, perhaps interpreted by some as a grimace. It did not, however, preclude him from a torrent of misjudgments in the years that lay ahead. He would forge on, initially without a life compass or map, eventually finding a path leading to a better, stable life. A map without holes in it would have been helpful but not nearly as educational.

There wasn’t much to question about facing chaos in his early life with a person like his mother, and little did he know about some strange guy called Freud and his philosophy, which kept showing up in magazines; Daryl liked to believe he was a rising star and wouldn’t end up crazy. Elizabeth, a gifted artist, had an extraordinary flair for color palette, designs, and men. It was the latter with which she had the least success, while the former allowed her to attract and excel in choosing the consistent losers to whom Duane and Daryl were subjected. Elizabeth became an exceedingly skillful Tiparillo cigar girl at a local bar, presenting the thinner and milder cigar with a plastic tip manufactured by the General Cigar Company. Daryl always wondered why she would go to work at five o’clock in the evening and come home in the early-morning hours with fifty-cent pieces or dollar bills, dumping them on the table in front of the sleepy-eyed boys, so proud of her expertise. Sometimes they never saw her the entire night, leaving Daryl thinking about how hard she was working.

CHAPTER TWO

Two Bits, Spud, and Dewey

J

im and Cloris Chamfer lived in Omaha, Nebraska, but as Daryl tried to recall the phonetic sound of their name—it was definitely Chamfer—he learned the word sypher is a transitive verb meaning to overlap or chamfer a surface so that they form a flush surface.

No matter, he thought as they became the perfect interface to level out young lives, yielding a respite of several years. The Chamfers were plain, poor folk—an elderly couple living on E Street who became caretakers of Daryl and his brother, Duane, while their mother was working or simply gone. Their house consisted of two rooms: a kitchen and a living room/bedroom with its short divan, a bed, two end tables, and a new 1956 black-and-white television with its projectile rabbit-eared antenna. The adjacent room was the kitchen with a wood-cooking stove. Cast-iron skillets hung from the ceiling with a large can of lard on a shelf behind the stove. A hand water pump on the side of the sink provided water; heated kettles furnished hot water. The small, round-shouldered refrigerator sat in a corner—a luxury for them. The two-person bench table for dining pushed against the wall under a window allowed a view of the chickens and hogpen. The screened door led to the porch, where a five-gallon galvanized honey bucket was available for nighttime calls of nature. The outhouse, located fifty feet out back, closer to the railroad tracks and past the pigpen, wasn’t a bad run in warm weather, but in subzero Nebraska winters, the snow-covered dirt path became a dreaded adventure for both young and old, with the dash favoring the young to build decision-making and timing skills. The rewards of the icy run ended with the closing of the wooden door and facing the fear of falling through a hole on the cold bench made for adult buttocks, not a skinny kid's ass. It became a perching act—letting go with one hand and reaching for the most recent editions of the Sears and Roebuck catalog while hoping to not fall in the stinking excrement and pages