Thirty Rooms To Hide In (13 page)

Article in the Rochester Post Bulletin, October 17, 1964, headlined “Pagans Teen-Band Named After Dog”

The new “sound of music” is defined simply – play it as loud, long and hard as you can. The Pagans, to put it mildly, follow this recipe – as does any other teen band. None of them apologize for it – in fact there is sort of a contest to see which group can play the loudest.

The sexual and political repression of the ‘50s created its own worst nightmare – longhairs playing rock-and-roll that made the girls shake their boobies. It made the men with short haircuts and white short-sleeved shirts put down their slide-rules and try to stop all the tomfoolery. But by 1964 guitars and amplifiers were being dragged into basements all over America, including the Millstone’s.

For a Sprinter, this was the coolest thing that could possibly happen. Real rock-and-roll right in your own house, with cigarettes and everything. The Pagans were just five high-school boys but to us Sprinters they were living gods and two of them were my big brothers – Kip on lead guitar and Jeff on bass.

Kip, like many first-borns, had an easy confidence that helped him succeed in most of the things he took on. Dark-haired and Irish handsome like his father, Kip was an Eagle Scout, a state debate champion, a competitor for the state high-school diving championship, leader of the Pagans, but more than anything he was The Big Brother. Sprinters who were seen using The Big Brother’s bathroom
heard
about it, and if Kip’s toothbrush was discovered wet to the touch, woe be onto any Sprinter with Crest on his breath. Kip should also have won the state championship for Best Girlfriend. Linda, his steady of several years, was a stunning ‘60s beauty who had a devoted following of Sprinters trailing her like dwarves behind Snow White.

The vice-president of Cool, on the other hand, was brother Jeff. He was Bobby Kennedy to Kip’s Jack;
The Man from U.N.C.L.E’s
Illya Kuryakin to Kip’s Napoleon Solo. Jeff dressed cool, walked cool, and slumped cool. He had a bonelessness to his gait and a way of draping himself over chairs that said, “I care less than anybody in this room.” Making Jeff laugh counted for something; Kip would laugh just to be nice.
To add to his mystique, Jeff was an artist. He painted in oils and acrylics as well as pen and ink and had undeniable talent.

Kip remembers learning boogie-woogie piano by ear around 6th grade, playing along to Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. The band got its start when Kip was on the diving team at John Marshall High School. There he recruited friends for a one-time performance at a high school talent show: Jay Gleason on drums and Collin Gentling on piano. They enjoyed it enough to keep playing and though the band’s line-up changed a few times they settled finally on a roster of Kip, Jeff, Jerry Huiting (sharing lead guitar with Kip), Jim Rushton (rhythm guitar), and Jay Gleason behind the drums.

Jeff’s best friend, Chris Hallenbeck was the Stu Sutcliffe of the Pagans. Chris was a decent keyboard player and could sing, but was with the band only briefly; he died in a car accident. In 1965, the Pagans’ first drummer, Jay Gleason, would also die in a car.

In an article on The Pagans, the
Rochester
Post-Bulletin
said the band’s name was “unusual” and “might bother some people.” Kip and Jeff liked its subversive, anti-religious connotations but assured the reporters with short haircuts that Pagan was simply the name of Caesar’s replacement, one of our new Irish Wolfhounds – “a constant presence at their practices.” (The fact that pagans were godless creatures, heathens without religion, also likely figured in the choice.)

Dad was a drunk by the time the Pagans formed, but not the bourbon-guzzling, elbow-bending, ethyl-to-urine system of his final days. Some part of him enjoyed the confidence it took his sons to get up there on stage and bang it out and on one occasion he even paid them to play at a Mayo Clinic party hosted at the Millstone. He also put up with having band practices at the Millstone, this to the great delight of the sweaty group of Sprinters who attended every session. In between songs we’d try to bum cigarettes or slip behind the Ludwig drum set when Jay went to the bathroom.

“Hey look, Kip! I can do the drum roll from ‘Wipe Out’!”

Everything the Pagans had, we Sprinters wanted. Their cigarettes, the cool VW van they used to haul their equipment, even Kip’s and Jeff’s girlfriends, Linda and Bonnie. With my father slowly checking out of family life, the Pagans became our male authority figures. A joke wasn’t funny until it made Kip or Jeff laugh; clothes weren’t cool unless they wore them first. When the local menswear shop, M.C.Lawler’s, had the Pagans pose for an ad in the store’s new blazers, I carried the newspaper ad around for a week as proof I knew somebody famous.

The first time the Pagans played in public tellingly set the tone for their short, lively career. In April of ’64 one of Jeff’s friends, Steve Rossi, threw a party and invited the Pagans to be the entertainment. The Pagans played 10 songs to an appreciative, slightly drunk audience. At 11pm, word filtered through the crowd that “the cops had the place surrounded,” which they in fact had. Almost every kid at the party had something to lose and panic spread. There were student council leaders, sons and daughters of doctors, football team members and other athletes, even cheerleaders. Most of the crowd managed to scatter past the police. Caught in the net were Rossi (it was his place) and the Pagans (who couldn’t abandon their equipment).

Rossi’s statement to the Rochester Sheriff’s Department is still in their files. His words are in that stilted “I-Am-Now-Talking-To-The-Police” cadence some people get in the presence of Johnny Heat.
(“Officer, I had no previous knowledge that beverages of an alcoholic nature were in the trunkular space of my motorized vehicle.”)
It’s also evident he didn’t rat out his friends.

Rossi’s statement

… I would assume that a few of the kids brought beer but I couldn’t identify who or how many. Kids started coming about 9, and the band started playing. I do know that beer was consumed in my apartment but am unable to identify the parties who did consume. I myself did not consume any beer. This is a true statement to the best of my knowledge.

But the next morning every athlete who’d been at the party was kicked off their teams for a year, including Kip and Jay. It upset them because as juniors they’d both made the diving finals in the state meet; Jay placed fifth, Kip sixth. They were eager to do even better in their senior years. Strangely, there were no recriminations from Dad.

Looking back, Kip thinks Dad was so checked out by then he simply didn’t care. Though he was still on the high school debate team (Kip won first place at state the next year), without sports he now had more time to put into the band.

From Kip’s 1964 diary

Great night!! Curtain opened and we smashed out “Good Golly Miss Molly.” For the first time, everybody clowned. I tickled back of Steve’s head with guitar, Jerry swiped Steve’s mike, Jim made Jerry laugh on “Boys.” Speakers excellent. Wait till we get new amp with 110 watts! At home last night, Mom broke down and cried when the little ones argued about TV. Tensions increasing around here.

1992 interview with Dr. Mark Coventry, my father’s boss at the Mayo Clinic

Roger confided in me only once. He would come to my house, only occasionally, to talk about his troubles. He claimed his problems stemmed from serious marital difficulties he was having. He defined them as a competition between him and Myra. Competition, mostly on intellectual matters. Your father told me he thought Myra “put him down.”

I had to go out [to the Millstone] more than once.

One incident happened on the front steps and I remember that very clearly. I was called to see if I could come talk to him, to settle him down. He was extremely angry and did a great deal of shouting. Just a lot of verbal abuse from Roger. He’d get out of control. His face would get red. He’d rant, rave.
[Raving about?]
About Myra. Conflict. A conflict between the two as to who was going to dominate the other. He felt dominated by her and said he “didn’t want to be dominated”.

* * *

Chris Raymer is a chemical dependency counselor at La Hacienda, a treatment center in Hunt, Texas. He says he’s heard a thousand reasons for alcoholic drinking:

“My job is so hard.”

“My boss is so mean.”

“I have so many responsibilities.”

“I need to relax.”

(For fun, we’ll throw in “My wife tries to dominate me.”)

Chris says every “reason” is simply an excuse to drink. As an example he facetiously mimics one patient whose circular logic went, “One day, it’s ‘Yay! The Yankees won! Let’s have a drink.’ And the next it’s, ‘Shit! The Yankees lost. Let’s have a drink.’ There’s
always
a reason. But the fact of the matter is alcoholics drink because they like the feeling.”

After several years of heavy drinking, every cell in the alcoholic’s body becomes addicted and drinking moves from being an emotional medication to a cellular requirement for continued existence. What once gave a pleasant buzz is now required simply to get from below-zero up to feeling normal. The intake of booze reaches a point where the alcoholic faces a double horror: a continued life
with
drinking – impossible – or facing life
without
drinking – also impossible.

If asked, the alcoholic will cheerfully point out the things that cause his drinking. In an early interview with his Mayo psychiatrist, my father said, “The drinking always increased after a ‘spat with my wife’.” Whether Roger was lying or actually believed this, he’d say with a straight face he drank a quart of bourbon a day because his wife was angry. The idea that his wife was angry because he drank a quart of bourbon a day, well, it just didn’t seem to come up.

Lots of stuff didn’t come up when you were talking with Roger.

Regarding that “spat with his wife”? Roger probably didn’t go into details, but had he done so the psychiatrist would’ve heard about the time Roger was shit-faced, sitting in the passenger seat of the car while his wife drove. Too drunk to be able to yell at her any longer, he took out his anger by shaking her as she tried to drive. Unable to steer safely because of this “spat,” Myra stopped the car, got out, and hoped the change of venue might calm him down. Roger stumbled out of the car but couldn’t walk steadily.

As he weaved down the middle of the road, Myra saw another car approaching and had to push him off to the side of the road to save his life.

How Roger ever felt “dominated” mystifies my mother to this day. “Dominating? I was the wimpy wife who didn’t protest this treatment,” she remembers. “I was the doormat who let him get away with saying such nasty things to me and to you children.”

By 1964, things at the Millstone had become even worse. In a poem my mother wrote years later is the line “I was raped more times than I can remember.” That’s the most she ever said about it – a line in a poem. She doesn’t talk about those nights and none of us ask her to. One of them, however, I came close to seeing myself.

I was in fourth grade. We were on a weekend vacation in the Twin Cities’ Curtis Hotel – Dad, Mom, Collin and me. My little brother and I played in the pool most of the day as Mom, reading poolside, watched from behind her big white plastic sunglasses. Dad was off somewhere drinking. We had two rooms that night – one for Mom and Dad, one for us boys. After putting us to bed Mom deliberately fell asleep in our room. At midnight I heard my father lurch through the connecting door and in a voice bubbly thick with bourbon and Winston cigarettes, growl, “Let’s fuck.”

I cannot remember exactly what happened next. How Mom got him out of our room, I don’t know. Whatever she did, he soon left the rooms. Hours later when Dad hadn’t returned, Mom went out into the city to look for him. Collin was asleep and although she’d told me to sit tight, after an hour of waiting I too headed out into the rain looking for the place I’d heard her mention–
the Normandy something
. I remember going down in the elevator alone and going through the lobby alone and out the door and down a street until, wow there it is – the Normandy Inn Bar – all big-city and outlined in yellow light bulbs that splinter into wet stars through the raindrops on my black 1964 glasses and I pull open the heavy oak door and walk in and smell the smoke and see the red carpeting and the hunched backs of lonely men and I can tell the bartender doesn’t much like seeing a wet fourth-grader in his place at one in the morning but out he comes from behind the bar to show me around and prove my parents are not there. And I leave.

Back in the room there is only Collin, little and asleep, and I soon join him. In the morning Mom and Dad come out of the other room and on the two-hour drive south to Rochester, nobody says anything.

* * *

They say summer colds are the worst.

Turns out, actually, it’s summer Tornado Lightning Planet-Shattering Anger Rages from the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God that are the worst
.

You know – “spats.”

The Millstone wasn’t air-conditioned, but in high summer there was always plenty of ice for drinks and in the July heat Roger’s binges began to last whole weekends. At first sign of one of these summer rages Mom began packing us into the Plymouth station wagon and we went to stay at a motel for the night. When these rages became a pattern, Mom started taking us to out-of-town places so neighbors (and Dad’s colleagues) wouldn’t wonder why we were poolside regulars at the Klinic-Vu Motel.

My little brother and I enjoyed these trips. Motels were high adventure – pools to play in, long balconies to race down, and candy machines in the lobby. Seeing the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God start to crank up another summer rage was scary but it also meant it was time to get your swimming suit off the line!

In mid-1964, Mom finally told her parents the truth about life in the Millstone. Blue Book letters that had once been about sailing ships and Shakespeare were now about brutality and trauma and written on the stationery of motels. Even the continued existence of their letters was threatened that summer when Roger began raging whenever he found one of Mom’s Blue Books lying about the Millstone.

“Is this another letter to Daddy packed full of chit-chat about me? Like the one I found last week?!?”

Grandpa stops writing in Blue Books and starts typing letters on 8x11” paper; August 28, 1964

I believe I shall discontinue our usual Blue Books and return to the typed sheet, where I need not restrain self carefully in what is writ and which can be destroyed upon reading. With the hope that before too long, matters may improve and our traditional Blue Books can be resumed. Your mother and I are talking about the tragedy which has overtaken our daughter. I expressed a feeling that your parents were almost deserting you – here we sit in comfort and do nothing for you – but what can we do? Can we accomplish anything by coming up to Rochester? A “secret mission” unknown to the other party? Could I help in any way?

But RJL liked the Blue Books; they were easy for him to bind into hard-cover volumes. In a subsequent phone call, he and his daughter agreed to go back to Blue Books but temporarily restrict all discussion of problems at the Millstone to the last pages; pages they could cut out after reading, thereby preserving the format so good for binding. Today the bound volumes of 1964 and 1965 have missing pages as well as passages which tell of the absence.

“What else is there to write about?” Myra queried. “Believe I’ll turn to Page 7.”

The summer of ’64 was tough in its own way on Grandpa RJL. Age had finally nudged him into selling his home on Lake Winnemissett where he and Monnie had lived since 1949. They made plans to move into a retirement home outside of Jacksonville.

Grandpa’s letters, 1964

Am just now packing my grandfather’s tools and putting them in the second trunk to send to you who have space for such things. I suppose I am a sentimental cuss, but I just stood out by lakeside to see the yellow moving van with said possessions round the lake to the south and on its way to you. In the van were some Longstreet treasures, headed 1,500 miles north to one who knows how to take care of them. Bless your heart. A part of me is on the way.