Finding Arjay

By Ron Scott

An only child in a hardworking, isolating family headed by an intense, angry man, ArJay seldom saw or experienced expressions of acceptance or affection. Not surprisingly, he entered adulthood clueless, filled with fear and shame, desperately seeking a love he did not understand, could not recognize, an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald J. Scott, Ph.D.
• Release date: Mar 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985532319

Ron Scott

Ron Scott is a retired psychologist who lives with his wife of nearly fifty years in Kirkwood, Missouri. ' Together they have a blended family of five adult children and spouses, and eight grandchildren. The author has worked as a welfare case manager, a parole officer, a university teacher, and a psychotherapist. He is the author of Reflections from Miri's Woods, available in paperback or e-book from Amazon.

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Copyright © 2022 by Ron Scott

ISBN: 979-8-9855323-1-9

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced in print or electronically without the written permission of the author.

Dedicated to Marilyn,

Who has accepted me,

Supported me, and put up with me

For more than half a century.

If that’s not love, what is?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Finding Arjay

I: Origins

1. Johnny Meyers

2. I. H.

II: Stumbling into Adulthood

3. Clueless

4. The Runner

5. The Runner Redux

III: Coming to Terms

6. Fathers

7. Mom

IV: Finding ArJay

8. Becoming a Therapist

9. The Group

10. Marilyn

Epilogue

Part Two: Short Stories

Doug’s Question

Scared J. C.

Jean’s Song

My Big Game: A Latter-Day Coming-of-Age Story

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Arguably, one thing the world does not need is another self-serving memoir. We certainly have enough tragedy already; and as Frank McCourt said in Angela’s Ashes, If there is no tragedy there is no memoir.

Furthermore, as tragedies go, this memoir probably does not measure up. There is some early neglect, I suppose, and certainly some youthful stupidity, but if that were the sum and substance of it, it would probably not have been worth my writing—and certainly not worth your reading.

What has motivated my writing, off and on for these many years, have been the questions, seemingly important despite often being difficult to articulate: Who am I, anyway? Why am I here? How did I get from what I was, a terrified kid, to what I have become—a less terrified old man?

For that matter, I really do not think I am unique. Is there something of value in my story that other ordinary men—and women—could use?

So, who, or what, is an ArJay?

In 1971, I became, among other things, divorced and could no longer support myself as a graduate student. So, I applied for, and was hired as, the developer of a correctional work-release center in Southern Illinois. One of my employees was an urbane young man whom I will call (since I have forgotten his name) Art.

Art began referring to me (affectionately, I hoped) as R. J. No one else picked it up, but I liked the sound of it and privately began thinking of myself that way. Eventually, my private nom de plume became ArJay.

But ArJay was more than me. ArJay was the me I wished I was: confident, brave, a man among men and a lover of women. James Bond, if you will. And so, the quest was given a name: I was looking for ArJay.

A memoir is supposed to be the truth. If a memoirist is not telling the truth, he or she is writing fiction. And yet, is complete accuracy even possible? A fellow writer, after reviewing one of the early chapters of this book, asked, Did you journal as a kid? If not, you must have taken great notes. His irony was, I suspect, intended. But, of course, I took no notes and did not keep a journal.

There are scenes—or pieces of scenes—that stand out in my memory or, to give psychologist Elizabeth Loftus the credit she is due, in my reconstructed memory. There may even be bits of dialogue in these memory fragments. But if I am to make any sense to you, I will need to flesh the fragments out. Is this fiction? Perhaps.

But I don’t think so. The goal of the memoirist is truth, not accuracy. If I have reconstructed dialogue (and I have), it is to create and convey an honest story.

Which brings us to details, like names. I have already confessed to not always remembering names. In other cases, I may remember an individual’s name but choose to alter it to protect the innocent (or avoid libel). For family members, close friends, and wives, or well-known members of the community, alas, I have chosen to use their real names. Hopefully, I have not defamed any of them, whom I have almost always admired.

The subtitle of this book refers to Memoirs. This is not a misprint; this is a collection of memoir writings. Finding ArJay is the title story, long enough to be a novella if it were fiction. (Unfortunately, the memoirella as a genre has yet to be recognized.)

Finding ArJay is loosely chronological, but there are inevitable overlaps from chapter to chapter and periodic shifts in time. In part, this is because each chapter and, in particular, each section of the story addresses a separate aspect of my quest.

The four short memoir pieces near the end of the book represent additional writings that add to my story but did not fit within the relation-oriented story that Finding ArJay became. The first two stories, Doug’s Question and Scared J.C., were originally envisioned as part of the title story. Although they didn’t ultimately fit there, they deserved a presence.

The final two stories, Jean’s Song and My Big Game, originally appeared in Rainswept and Other Stories, self-published in 2018.

PART ONE:

FINDING ARJAY

I: ORIGINS

I vividly recall the time—I must have been eight or nine—when, because of a cold, I was taking cough syrup before going to bed. On this particular evening, I reached into a kitchen cabinet to get the bottle and poured a full teaspoon of the auburn liquid. But instead of the bitter taste of Vicks, there was searing pain: I had mistakenly gotten a bottle of Absorbine Jr., a muscle liniment, stored in the same cabinet.

The pain was excruciating, and I could barely breathe. I assumed that I was poisoned, but I said nothing to my mother or my stepfather, seated at the nearby kitchen table. If I was going to die, I thought, I would not also be laughed at or criticized. Instead, I crept into the adjacent darkened living room and sat on the floor in a corner, waiting for the end. Only after the pain subsided did I emerge to continue to bed.

Although the pain—and the humiliation—was seared into my memory, I did not speak of the event for more than 50 years.

CHAPTER 1

JOHNNY MEYERS

My earliest memories are mere wisps, momentary and unclear, images devoid of the language or context that gives memory meaning: sitting—on porch steps?—with Daddy Irv; being spanked, for unknown reasons, by my stepfather in the nighttime; hiding with our small dog in a closet when someone knocked on our apartment door.

Baby Ronnle

I was four years old when my mother, Gertrude, married a man she knew as James (Johnny) Meyers, the cook at a Detroit diner where she was a waitress. This was less than a month after her divorce from my father, Irving Schwartz, became final.

Many apartments in wartime Detroit did not accept renters with children or pets, which apparently led to my being told to grab our spaniel and hide in a closet when anyone came to the door. It’s hard to imagine that strategy working; children and dogs make noise, in or out of closets. It may, on the other hand, have had something to do with my having learned to be inordinately quiet in subsequent years.

Irving Schwartz

I have a few pictures but no clear memories of Irving, who remarried, moved to California, and did not maintain contact. A wisp of a porch scene is as good as it gets. On the other hand, Irving may have been frightened off by my stepfather, who could be fiercely jealous and even, at times, paranoid.

I lived, for a time—I was perhaps four or five—with my mother’s parents, Sam and Sylvia Stone, in Hazel Park, a suburb of Detroit. This was, I think, when my mother traveled with my stepfather to Sedalia, Missouri, for surgery, perhaps more available in mid-Missouri than in Detroit. In addition, he may have wanted my mother to be cared for by his sister Evie, who had raised him after his mother’s death.

Also living with Sam and Sylvia, because their mother, Dorothy, had run away from her home, were my cousin Sharon and her younger brother Billie. The Hazel Park house was filled with children and noise—unlike the sepulchre-like atmosphere I was used to—and cooking smells. There was always soup cooking in Sylvia’s kitchen.

One day during this period, my stepfather brought me a gift: a pair of red child-sized boxing gloves. He actually brought two pairs, lacing one pair on me and the second on Sharon. We knew enough to begin swinging wildly at each other. Within seconds, Sharon—who was four months older and, at the time, bigger—connected with my nose, bringing a moment of shock and then tears. The gloves disappeared, and the incident, also burned into my memory, was never again mentioned.

Johnny Meyers was born Ira Hines Scott (called I. H), one of the youngest of ten children born to Ira Burton Scott (I. B.) and his wife Esther. When I. H. was five, his mother died from typhoid fever. The household was held together for a few years by the oldest daughter, Evie, until she married and moved away.

Johnny Meyers

I. B. farmed a tract of land on the Osage River in west central Missouri, some hundred miles southeast of Kansas City. It was a harsh life by any standards, complicated, after Esther’s death, by I. B.’s drinking and temper and the developing economic depression, which affected rural areas first.

A young teen by the time Evie left, I. H. worked alongside his father and eldest brother, Arthur, on the farm. I. B., his temper fueled by loss, stress, and alcohol, was a harsh man, and Arthur was more than ready to pass I. B.’s abuse down to his younger brother. And so it happened that I. H., tired of getting whipped by Arthur every day, ran over a hill early one morning and never looked back.

It was 1924, and 14-year-old I. H. joined large numbers of out-of-work and homeless men riding the rails. Although he was small, he was toughened by abuse and could take care of himself. He made his way to California, where he worked first in the oil fields of Long Beach and later farther north in Bakersfield.

Within a few years, I. H. married Mary Menzies, began working for the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, and had a daughter, Thelma. He also began to box professionally, fighting as a welterweight (140 to 147 pounds) under the name Johnny Meyers.

He was, I suppose, trying to create something that he could share with his new stepson when he brought home the boxing gloves. For a man whose best times were in the ring, I must have been a major disappointment.

Life in Bakersfield did not go well for I. H. and Mary. As my stepfather later told me (I was about 14 at the time, and we were washing supper dishes on an occasion when Mother was at work), he came home early one evening after transporting a prisoner and spotted a Bakersfield police officer leaving his house by the back door as he was going in the front. I. H. did not say what transpired between himself and his wife, but he did say that he invited the policeman to meet him outside the city limits, where he beat the living shit out of him. A few months later, I. H. was framed for a gas station burglary and sent to San Quentin State Prison.

Sentenced to seven and one-half years, I. H. was 20 years old when he arrived at San Quentin, California’s maximum-security prison, on July 6, 1931. Tough enough to take care of himself even in prison, he maintained good behavior and was released on parole after two years. Long enough, he said, to get past the idea of revenge.

Returning to Bakersfield, he remained until his parole ended. But his previous life was over: marriage in shambles, Sheriff’s Department job gone, and boxing career finished. Mary Scott filed for divorce, based on her husband’s felony conviction, and when the final divorce was granted in October 1936, I. H. left Bakersfield.

Traveling, perhaps to get as far away from Bakersfield as possible, took I. H., now using the name James Meyers, to Australia and Alaska. He later talked about announcing boxing matches on the radio and being in an airplane crash in Alaska. He left Alaska in July 1941, winding up as a fry cook in the small Detroit diner where he met my mother.

Meanwhile, things had not gone well for Mother and Irving either. Although she would say little about her life with Irving, she did once say that he kept threatening to go back with an old girlfriend. (She also noted once, when Bob Hope was on the radio, that she had never liked Hope because he looked like your father Irving.)

Years later, when Mother was beginning to lose inhibitions due to developing dementia, she said that she left Irving because he told her he had raped her while she slept. Apparently, she moved out of their home after that event and was working in a restaurant when she became involved with the new cook.

James E. Meyers and Gertrude Stone were married on March 14, 1942. I was barely four years old. At that time, according to the marriage certificate, Meyers was 31 years old and was an airman, while Gertrude was 27 years old, working as a waitress. Both reportedly lived in Highland Park, Michigan. He was actually 31, but my mother was only 23, and they lived in Detroit, not Highland Park.

James E. Meyers was changed in court records nearly two years later to Ira Hines Scott, but the incorrect age for my mother and occupation of airman for I. H. remained on the record. That my stepfather chose to use an assumed name following his release from prison—one that reflected a more positive part of his life experiences—hardly seems surprising. For that matter, he had flown airplanes in Alaska, perhaps making the claim of being an airman only a technical inaccuracy