A Child's View Of Culture Clash In Chicago During The Late Sixties As It Relates To Himself

A woman in her mid forties is doing something to change her life. She has moved from her country life into Chicago and is beginning her new life as a University student. A husband who was unfit for marriage has been discarded and despite the urging of a woman she has become a devoted admirer of's insistence, that she should "give her children to someone who can take care of them," they are still hers, and she needs to find a safe place to keep them during the days, while she is being trained as a painter.

The oldest, a daughter, is easy. She can go to a Catholic Middle school and take a train to meet her at the Art Institute when her day ends. Her three year old son will need a full time babysitter.

She finds it curious that the woman she selects is Jewish. She herself was born a Catholic but was taken into state custody and raised by a variety of Protestants from the time she was five years old. She was intelligent and wanted to be a religious person. She opted to join the Lutheran church after some consideration. She admired Martin Luther's writing before she joined. She says to her daughter, who she takes pride in not treating like a child, but includes in all the important decisions, "I don't think it will hurt him to spend all that time with Jews. They are just babysitters." She did not think much of the Catholics who taught her daughter either. She had decided she wanted her to have a religious education but wished that Lutherans had a school where she could send her.

The mother is passionate and talented. She loves art and her education and works with intensity, She is finally meeting people who know something about something. Back home she was isolated because of the gulf of intellect between herself and the people she was in contact with. Her daughter is secretive and discourteous and conflicts with the Catholic school. Eventually she will be beaten by a nun and removed by her mother who will not allow anyone but herself to use corporal punishment on her children. In a public school the girl will act oddly and become the target of cruel bullies.

It will begin because she likes to pretend to ride an imaginary horse. She will romp around, skipping and whinnying, and when a bully asks, "What are you doing?" She says playing horsie and they throw her down a flight of stairs.

She abuses her brother. The mother watches and stops her whenever she sees anything. The girl learns to use legal methods to harrass her brother. By legal I refer to getting him in trouble over his acts that she brings to her mother's attention that excuse a push or kick. The mother, usually after the blow is given, then decides if it was meritted. More abuse may follow.

This will become the pattern for years of repetitive abuse.

The boy's babysitter has three children. The oldest is a son who is studying medicine to be a doctor. The boy sees him only on days when he is left at the babysitter's for a long time. He sometimes makes an exclamation, "Oh! You are still here. How are you today?" The boy likes him but knows he will not see him again for a long time. There is an older daughter and a younger daughter and he only sees the younger one regularly. He sees her just about every day. She is about the same age as his sister. They look completely different. His sister has light red hair that is "naturally curly." In the late sixties, which is now, that is something really special. Charles Shultz made a cartoon character who was an asshole who kept remarking on her "naturally curly hair." The boy will wonder if the cartoonist ever met his sister. The babysitter's daughter runs into the apartment and asks her mother if she can play a record before she does her homework. She has very long dark hair and likes the song "Yesterday." The boy learns to expect her to come in and looks forward to seeing her.

The babysitter makes conversation with the boy during the day. She asks him simple things. Are you ready to watch the television? Would you like to have lunch now? The boy asks her where are the people who laugh at the shows they watch. She tells him they are in an audience. She sleeps and watches soap operas before her daughter comes home just after she serves the boy's lunch.

She discourages him from looking at the television during the soap operas and suggests he read comic books. Her daughters have a stack of Archie comics on the lower shelf of a bookcase and the boy is always content to go behind the chair and look through the comic books. There is also a stack of Playboy magazines that belong to her son. The boy thinks nothing of looking at the Playboy magazines since his mother has already shown him one at home. She bought it for an article and left it around for him to see, whenever he could get it, before it disappeared many months later. At the babysitter's he would start with the comics, and go back and forth, until he is discovered by the neglectful soap opera addict. She tries to ban him but leaves the magazines where they are. He becomes aware that she does not want him to look at the magazines and he waits until she sleeps before he gets them out.

There is a discussion about the magazines after he is discovered. She says they are not good for little boys to see. He says he has already seen one because his Mom lets him read the one she has. When the woman comes to pick up her son she is asked, why she has something like that, and lets the boy look at it. The babysitter thinks it is alright for her son to read the magazine, because, he is going to be a doctor. There is an ongoing argument that this exacerbates between the women over the subject of art. The mother is contemptuous of someone who watches soap operas and says "They are true to life." Whenever the babysitter asks the boy what he wants to be when he grows up she argues with his answer. His mother has told him that she wants him to be one of two things. He will either be an artist, of any kind, or he will be a Lutheran pastor. His answer to the babysitter is "I want to be a sculpture." He always misspronounces sculptor and has to be corrected. The babysitter wants him to change his answer to something like a doctor or lawyer or policeman.

The boy's mother gets mad and begins to be racially abusive. She calls her a dumb Jew. She does this again over an issue of feeding. She asks that he be given a particular thing with his lunches. She wants him to have Welch's Grape juice and leaves a can of concentrate for her. The grape juice is not served and there is yelling and insults. The next day the woman takes the grape juice concentrate, opens it, and puts it all in one glass. She says "Here, Your mother wants you to drink this." The boy says that there is something wrong with it, but she insists that he try it. It is unbearably tart and strange and he starts to cry. She says I won't make you drink that, and gives him something edible. She says it is "Your people who drink things like that and think they are better than other people."

There is a routine that is followed at the end of the day. The father is sitting in his dining chair, reading a paper, and he calls the boy over to take a piece of hard candy out of a bowl. The decision over which color is discussed. He wants to make sure the boy thinks about the differences between the different colors. He wants him to evaluate which of them he likes. He tells him he only needs one to enjoy it. It is not good to eat too many.

The boy has been expelled from kindergarten and misses the entire year. He was mauled by a group of normal boys who were playing "asshole fascist's parade" marching together, arm in arm, shouting "Hey! Hey! Get out of my way! I just got back from the U.S.A.!" They jumped into a heap yelling "Dogpile!" Kicking and punching one another, which offended the boy who was experiencing his first of these ordeals. He pulled up the pant leg of a kicker and began to chew. He was expelled for the entire year and spent that time with the babysitter who told him it would be alright. They were glad they could spend more time with him.

In the years from three to five he forms an attachment. He is completely at home with his babysitter and they make it a point to be important to him. They take him on a walk to the beach and talk about philosophic things he wiil forget but know changed him.

The boy is being physically deprived of affectionate touch. His mother is afraid of physical expressions of affection. Whenever they occur between them they are brief and with caution from her. His sister is physically cruel and treats him as a thing of disgust or sometimes a tolerated underling. "Underling" being one of her nicknames for him.

There is an evening where the mother calls to say she will be late. Both daughters are home and they ask if they can have him in their room to watch their television. They talk to each other about what they will watch and they have no trouble agreeing what will be on. "The Monkees" will come on first and then they will watch "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." While they watch they talk to each other about how cute each of the Monkees are. They make a game out of asking him which of the actors is like him. They discuss what the different personalities are of the characters. They try to decide if any of them are like the five year old they are playing with. They decide he is like the funny one or the cute one.

They do the same thing with the next show, but there is a physical feature, hair color, that decides that, and they decide they would like to give him hugs. The older girl, who he hardly knows, goes first, and he has little time to prepare for it. The younger girl, who he sees everyday, and looks forward to the time he can see her dancing to her records, goes next. They coax him to hug her back and he puts his arms around her and they lock. When she trys to seperate he acts as though he does not hear the request to release her and the girls work to break his hold. talking about how strange it is that he will not let go and how hard he is holding on.

The family is brought around to discuss what had happened and they decide something must be wrong with the home he is in that is more serious than just a mother who has silly ideas about society. When they attempt to discuss these matters with the mother, tempers flash, and the mother decides to remove the boy from his second home. The Babysitter's say they would make a better home than she will and wish they could adopt him.

The boy sees all of this excitement but understands very little about it. On the ride away his mother talks about it all to his sister, and they laugh about these stupid people, as they often did. His sister never liked them and they were so stupid they tried to give him grape juice straight out of the can without mixing it with water. His mother decides to make the point as clear as possible to him and says "You will never be seeing them again!' When he begins to cry she laughs at him and says it is just "crocodile tears." He does not understand the words and from his seat behind her he begs to know what they mean. She says they are not real tears because he just wants her to change her decision and take him back. He feels alone as he insists he is really crying. "I don't like crocodile tears!"

His mother will put him with a babysitter who lives down the block from her apartment. They will have two daugters and a son. They are all of aproximately the same ages. He will become pals with the boy and be sexually teased by the girls and punished continually by the mother over complaints her son uses to get him in trouble. The boy will ask if he can stick out his middle finger. He will not understand what he has been asked since he has never heard of a middle finger. The babysitter's son folds his hand into position and after a gleeful look at his work he yells for his mother "Tommy stuck out his middle finger!" He will be stood in a corner for hours, until his legs ache and continue to be sent to this babysitter until his mother graduates. The mother thinks these people are awful but cheap and convenient. She fights with them over their abuse and prevents them from using the physical punishment on him that they would like to admimister. She blames the poor treatment on the parent's conservative politics. The father describes himself as a "Super Patriot" and is insulted by the liberal values the mother presents to her children.