What follows in this post is a story about growing up in Collinwood, a neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. These stories, unlike my other posts, may contain situations that are inappropriate for work and will almost certainly contain vulgar language. There won’t be anything completely explicit, such as detailed descriptions of intimate acts. Even so, some of these might only be borderline ‘workplace safe’ and you may want to wait until you get home before clicking the “More” button.
Collinwood in the 80’s was someplace between ‘blue collar’ and ‘down-and-out’. Most families fit someplace in between and there was a palpable class system in place. If your parents worked, you were blue-collar. If they didn’t, you were down-and-out.
There was a family a few houses down that was down-and-out. The father has been successful in some past independent endevour, telling people that he still worked out of his house. Of course, when you had no new jobs for years and closed the bar every night, you were a drunk no matter what you called yourself.
The mother supported the family through waitressing. She worked long shifts at bars around the neighborhood. I don’t remember much about her because I didn’t see her much, but she had the largest collection of funky wigs you can imagine. When you walked to their bathroom, you could see inside the parents’ bedroom. Above the padded headboard of their bed, there were shelves of faceless mannequin heads with the most mod wigs in colors from blonde to black to copper.
It was a large family, so between the children, the mother’s long hours and the father’s “job”, the house was never particularly clean and usually smelled of smoke and stale alcohol. (As I’m writing these, I realized how often these two odors were present in the neighborhood and that I knew the smell before I knew what it meant.)
Kurt was the youngest of the family. He was pretty smart, as I suspect his other brothers were, but in this environment there wasn’t much encouragement or support to let him grow in this direction. In fact, Kurt and his brothers were somewhat rough-and-tumble. Combined with intelligence, this led to a somewhat self-destructive situation for the group.
For example, they once wanted to play baseball but they only had a basketball. Their solution was to use the basketball in place of a baseball. Instead of a bat, they would use their arms.
In case you aren’t following: they planned to use their arm as a bat to hit a fast-moving basketball as if it were a tiny baseball.
The result: the first batter got a cast on his arm after the basketball shattered both bones in his forearm. The real result: he got to be the designated hitter for the next game because his cast was hard enough that he could “bat for everybody now”. This did not help matters for the poor boy…but their invention of an extreme sport is not the point of this story.
Sometime in junior high, Kurt decided he was going to be a writer. When the blue-collar kids heard this, everybody thought he was joking. I agreed as Kurt never showed academic interest, had never done anything creative that we’d seen, and…well…he was a down-and-out kid. As happens in junior high, the response was unkind.
To Kurt’s credit, he ignored his critics and tried to write a story. The loose leaf manuscript was over twenty-pages and was the first scene in a ‘novel’ that read like a movie script. It was a tale of suspense with cliched rainy nights, a car crash, a girl in distress and him as the hero. (He used the real names of people he knew and made himself the hero.)
In retrospect, it showed initiative and imagination. It wasn’t any good, but it was written by a kid in eighth or ninth grade and was his first attempt. He showed it to me. I told him that it wasn’t very good, but the story made sense and I wanted to know what happened next. He seemed pretty happy about that and said he was going to keep writing.
Unfortunately, he showed it to his brothers and a few other kids next. They mocked him endlessly about him as a hero; Kurt was overweight and uncoordinated and, as such, was not just the youngest but also the one who lacked the physical traits that his brothers took pride in ‘owning’. They pointed out all the things he stole from movies, from television series, and told him that no girl would ever thank him because he was a loser.
He was crushed and brooded for weeks. He asked me why I lied to him, if it was so terrible. I told him that I didn’t lie to him: the story made sense but it was clear he hadn’t ever written anything before.
Unfortunately, at 13 years old, you don’t know what to say next: “Keep trying. People will always try to tear you down, if only because they are jealous that you are trying while they fear failure.” Lacking experience, he still thought I was lying and that I was just trying to make him feel better.
As far as I know, he gave up and never tried again while I knew him. Today, I realize that he might have developed into a good writer. He wrote more material on that first try than I ever did at that age and rarely do now, despite having twenty years of practice and experience. It‚Äôs one reason I keep writing on this website even though I‚Äôm always skeptical about how good it is. If Kurt had been brave enough to show that to everybody, certainly knowing that it wouldn’t be well-received, then it’s not too hard to write this stuff for a mostly-anonymous website.
Like most people from my childhood in Collinwood, I have no idea what happened to Kurt. I hope he wrote a great novel or at least found a way to let his muse come out…
