All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
The characters in this fictional work are the product of my imagination and any likeness to any real individual is coincidence.
Cover design and layout by Yvonne Vermillion, Magic Graphix.Editing in the preparation of this book by Chuck Vermillion, Help Publish.
This book is dedicated to Elizabeth Ostrowski, my niece, who at the age of sixteen ended her addiction to drugs and joined The Ancestors. It is in her memory that I wrote this book.
This book is also dedicated to many young relatives who walked into a recovery center and started a new life.I need to make mention of a young man who’s daily recovery is of special importance. Alex Hennessey was almost lost to all of us who understand this disease called addiction. We thought that he was about to join The Ancestors. He didn’t; he walked though those scary doors of recovery and is the promise of AA come true, alive, and recovering today.
This book is for all who take the scary walk though that door and into their first AA meeting. They all are the proof that the promises of AA come true, one day at a time.
I would like to thank Leila Whittinger of Education Minnesota for her help in reviewing the content of the book for errors and her insight into the workings of Union contracts.
I would also like to thank Dick Grossman for his input and encouragement.
Chapter
Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Jeffery Canna ........................................ 1
One Mad “She Bear” .............................11
Pay Back ..............................................17
“Jeffery Canna Lives” ............................28
Dr. Fritz ................................................35
“The Old Hand Speaks” .........................40
“Epiphany” ...........................................47
“Real Teaching” .....................................52
ZJ .........................................................59
Chapter 10 First Day ..............................................64
Chapter 11 A Tale of Two Students..........................70
Chapter 12 The Set Up ............................................80
Chapter 13 The Accusation .....................................85
Chapter 14 The Deal ...............................................90
Chapter 15 Big Guy ................................................95
Chapter 16 The Cave.............................................102
Chapter 17 The Sting ............................................108
Chapter 18 Hockey Hank ...................................... 114
Chapter 19 Impulse ..............................................120
Chapter 20 Reprisal ..............................................127
Chapter 21 Drugs Inc............................................133
Chapter 22 Pyrrhic Victory .................................... 138
Chapter 23 Who Let the Dogs Out? .......................143
Chapter 24 Gameboy ............................................149
Chapter 25 The Big Lie.......................................... 155
Chapter 26 Compromise, I Think? ......................... 166
Chapter 27 Game Plan .......................................... 171
Chapter 28 A Walk in the Parking Lot ...................183
Chapter 29 The Deed ............................................190
Chapter 30 Letting Go ...........................................197
Chapter 31 Resurrection ....................................... 200
Chapter 32 The Rose .............................................206
Chapter 33 Goal.................................................... 213
Chapter 34 Principal Canna, Roll Over .................. 223
I was a “Hood,” destined for jail and then Hell. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that Hell was waiting and that jail would be no better. Jail was just the jumping off place for Hell, and I was a sure bet for both. An aging, raging busybody took up that bet in the winter of 1960.
My name is “P” —— a nickname that the family gave me. It sticks to this day. I’m the guy that this fanatic was making predictions about and condemning to Hell. It is me, “P”.
In 1959, my family moved from the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, and into South St. Paul, a suburb where my father worked. I was transplanted from a small neighborhood school in St. Paul, to an over-crowded, suburban school with large classes and teachers that were in their fifties and sixties. Like many other babyboomers, I was born three years after World War II and just before the Korean War. I was nine year old and young for the fourth grade. I was so skinny that my ribs showed through my chest. I wasn’t tall, but I wasn’t short, either. My hair was in a very short, almost shaved cut called a “Heinie” in those days.
I was already behind in my studies when I moved to my new school, having been sick at home with swollen tonsils during most of the first half of the school year. Frankly, I did not want to leave my fourth-grade friends or my teacher at Como Elementary School. I was happy at that school. I had been the happiest I was to be for some time in the near future.
I also had to move into a smaller bedroom with my older, seventh-grade brother. The room was far too small for two boys of any age. We had shared a large attic bedroom in the old house, and we’d had lots of room. It didn’t matter that I liked my brother and had real respect for him. I just didn’t want to live in the same room with him. We fought a lot in the new place.
We moved, celebrated Christmas and the New Year holidays, and then off to school I went.
It was as cold as the Artic on the first day I went to South Saint Paul’s Lincoln Elementary School. It was a sunny and crisp twenty-seven degrees below zero on that morning, a temperature that can freeze human skin in about a minute. Fortunately, our car was parked in a garage attached to our new house, unlike the garage at our previous house on Grotto Street in St. Paul. Starting our car in our old place was always a gamble. Would it start, or would it be frozen? At that time, having a warm garage provided an elevated social status.
The day she delivered me to Lincoln School, Mom told me what was on her mind. She gave a little speech, “We have moved up. The family has experienced a social transformation from poor inner city kids to the next generation of professional adults. You will all become the adults I expect you to become. You are special, with talents that belong only to you. You will discover those talents and become someone that will make me and your dad proud.”
Mom believed that her children would make it. She believed that we, all five of us, would go to college and become doctors, lawyers, or teachers. She was not afraid to believe in each and every one of us.
So it was that she delivered me to Lincoln Grade School in South St. Paul on that cold, sunny day in 1960. She came with an optimistic attitude and an open willingness to do what had to be done to achieve the status that her children deserved. We walked up cement stairs onto an outdoor landing, and then through double wooden doors onto another landing at the bottom of more stairs. We climbed the creaky wooden stairs to the third floor, turned right, and then entered a door bearing gold letters, bordered in black that read, OFFICE. We stood before a counter where the secretary’s desk separated us from an inner office. Neatly painted block letters that read, JEFFERY CANNA, PRINCIPAL, were on the wooden door’s frosted window glass.
The secretary told Mom, “The principal wants to see you.” So we sat down and waited for about an hour for him to see us. The paperwork had been done earlier, but Mom didn’t say anything because she was raised to be nice.
The principal of Lincoln School was at least sixty years old, fat, and gray haired. The middle of his head was balding, he was shaped like a pear, and he was very set in his ways. Jeffery Canna had probably been educated in the early twenties. He told us that he had attended a private college and had earned a liberal arts degree. He had no idea what educational research was, or how any educational training worked, for that matter. He didn’t need to know how any such nonsense worked. He could care less anyway, since his staff was about the same age as he, and of the same educational era. “Drill, drill, drill, and more drill was the only thing you have to know to be in this teaching game,” said Principal Canna.
He had to be the personification of every schoolchild’s worst nightmare. He was scary to me. I can remember feeling all jittery while waiting to see him. Even though she should have been afraid of him, Mom wasn’t scared. Mom was an eternal optimist. Principal Canna was of the old school, believing that to “Spare the rod” was to “Spoil the child.” He was not afraid to tell us this. He cared little for complaining mothers, and even less for complaining mothers from foreign places. In fact, anyone who came from anywhere other than South St. Paul was foreign to him. We would soon find out how that attitude was to change our lives. He would act on his understandings of this lady and her kid.
The world for Jeffery Canna was Lincoln school, where he had been the principal for only a short time. Considering the shorter life expectancy at that time, he had become “The Boss” at an advanced age. It was about time, in his estimation, that he was chosen to be the principal. He had paid all the dues for the position, by teaching, serving as assistant principal, and now, at sixty, he was principal.
He was a condescending bully. He believed that students and children were to be controlled. I was yet to learn that lesson the hard way. The following course of events influenced nearly every decision I’ve made during my lifetime. I just hope that no child ever has to experience what I endured during that winter of 1960.
I was a newcomer to Jeffery Canna’s Lincoln School. It really was “Jeffrey Canna’s Lincoln School.” Canna was in possession of that school, as well as my “Ass.” He behaved towards me as if I were an unclean and unwashed street “Hood” needing to be taught discipline. He thought for sure I was preordained to work in some menial job in the lowest place in society. I was from St. Paul Public Schools where the students were socially promoted and traditional academic standards were, according to Canna, “Not strictly followed.”
The inner city schools were, in those days, some of the most progressive in the country, especially in St. Paul. The University Of Minnesota School Of Education was revered in the St. Paul school system, and its graduates were coveted in its classrooms. In those days, most of St. Paul’s schoolteachers were from the University of Minnesota. Canna’s staff came from private schools of high regard, in his estimation.
Canna’s opinion of us was also tainted because my dad worked for a “Communist organization,” the Farmers Union Central Exchange. It’s known today as Cennex Harvest States, a fortune 500 company. At this time, Senator Joe McCarthy was not yet history, nor were healed the wounds caused by the House UnAmerican Committee’s allegations. “Commies” were everywhere, including agricultural cooperatives that competed with “For profit” businesses.
The atmosphere in the early sixties, in Minnesota, was replete with fear and “Red baiting,” especially amongst the conservative right. This was also true of the meat packers of South St. Paul. While the meat packers union wasn’t a right wing conservative organization, it didn’t care for communists.
In this uneducated, blue-collar suburb, where unions were the saviors of the general population, the meat packing plants gave good jobs to Americans of Serbian, Croatian, Polish, and Italian heritage. The workers shared a culture of patriotism that was fostered by the union bosses. The communists had killed their sons in Korea, and anyone accused of being a “Commie” felt the sting of hatred and bias that was previously directed at people of other races. A lot of the union workers also hated blacks, homosexuals, Jews, and Asians. Some of them seemed to hate everyone, except for themselves of course. The reality was that they didn’t always get along real well with each other, either
My dad would say, “Thank God, I’m just ‘Pink’ because of my employment choice.” He worked for a farmer’s cooperative which concentrated the buying power of many farmers into a group that could buy large quantities of agricultural support products at attractive prices. Co-op was a dirty word in 1960, as a co-op was linked, by the uneducated, to the Russian collective farms that were part of a centralized economy of Communist Russia.
My dad would state with some disdain, “The reality is that the farmers union is not pink or red. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Yet, the general public of South Saint Paul saw the cooperative as a communist plot to subvert the “For profit” business community by cutting out part of the distribution system. Worse yet, the farm group cooperated on the sale and distribution of the field and dairy produce grown by the member farms. Dad would tell Mom, “The meatpackers think the Farmers Union Co-operative is just a step away from packing its own meat, and that would be a real threat to the union worker on the floor of the largest packing plants in the world, the home of Swift and Armors Meat Packing.”
Dad had the feeling that the gap of misunderstanding had more to do with the unions thinking they were better than everyone else than it had to do with any real threats that the co-op might pose. He once told me, “The Farmers Union members are crop farmers with no interest in being in the meat packing business. They are more interested in being in the oil business than competing with the well established, low profit meat businesses.” He would turn out to be right.
Ironically, in their own eyes, unions weren’t “Commie” organizations. Only cooperatives were “Commie” organizations. The close relationship between the unions and the Communist Party during the depression years was conveniently forgotten. A critical understanding of history, especially their own, was not important to the rank and file union workers. They maintained their high standard of living because they believed in “God and Country” and whatever the union bosses said. If the union bosses hated the Farmers Union Central Exchange and all it represented, then so did they.
The farmers for whom my father worked couldn’t have been further from being communists. They were independent “Sons of bitches” with nothing but a profit motive in mind. They gathered together to form a buying group for one reason: To increase their own profits. If this was communism, then General Electric must have been communist, also.
Well, ol’ Jeffery Canna picked up on the community theme of using the label of “Commies” for Farmers Union workers. Jeffery was also probably jealous of the fact that Farmers Union employed mostly white-collar workers in South St. Paul where the cooperative’s headquarters were. Canna was not well paid as a public servant, while Dad had been very well paid for an uneducated man. My dad spoke with reverence about the time he spent in Europe. He spoke about the time he spent in the army, and he stated many times, “I was given a unique set of skills. I obtained those skills, and an appreciation for leadership, in General Bradley’s World War II Headquarters in London.” Dad would go on to say, “I am able to move goods efficiently for large organizations, because I had done this for General Bradley’s Fifth Army in Europe. This is what I had done in ‘The War’ and am now doing for the Mid-west farmers.” The skill was in demand, and he was paid very well for what the U.S. Army had taught him.
I suspect that this “Paid very well” thing really angered Canna. Canna was college educated in an era when college graduates were rare and was earning very little for his efforts. Along comes this uneducated “Hick” and his brood of “Hoods” living and prospering in his hometown. Mom, however, had not yet figured this out on that cold morning in January as she waited to see Canna. We were to find out how deep that hatred ran, but it would take some time.
Yeah, that was us, the “Commie hoods” from St. Paul, come to put on “Airs” for all. Not only did Dad work for a communist co-op, he was married to an educated, elementary schoolteacher. She was an educated woman and a commie! I’m sure that my liberal mom, educated at the University of Minnesota, presented a threat to an over-the-hill, sixty-year-old principal who was seriously lacking in human relation skills. She was a threat, because Mom knew the education business and good educational practices.
Mom was a small, pretty lady, and well spoken, but on the other hand, she was a force not to be taken lightly. She was perfectly willing to stand up for what she believed was right. I’m sure that my scrappiness today comes from her. I had never seen her in action until that winter of 1960. I think that she had not had a reason to defend her values before this, but I was to find a person in Mom that I didn’t recognize. I’m sure glad I got to see that part of Mom. She taught me so much about life and passion during that cold winter.
I was placed in a class that was taught by a sixtysix-year-old German spinster, Miss Lanterland. Educated in 1920, she believed in the “Drill and kill” teaching technique. I didn’t get along with her. I didn’t like her, and she didn’t care. She never asked what I had done at the old school, never asked a personal question, and probably never even knew how old I was. She didn’t care; I didn’t care. I checked out; my body was there but my mind was elsewhere. I tested, teased, and talked when I wanted and never gave a rip as to what she wanted.
Miss Lanterland would say, “It’s one thing to have a child who is willful and dumb, but it’s quite a handful to have one that’s willful and smart.” I was smart, and because of her and Canna, I have been proving how smart I still am. I could always get the class to laugh at me. I could also entice others to misbehave, and I did.
Miss Lanterland would tell my mom, “He’s as mean as could be one minute, charming the next, and horrible after that. He doesn’t read worth a damn. He can’t spell, and he hates math.” I learned to hate that year; I mean, really hate, with all my heart. That was a lot for a nine year old to learn.
The poor behavior I exhibited didn’t last very long. No teacher, good or bad, will put up with that type of behavior. I was in the office more than in the classroom. It was nothing for me to be grabbed by the arm, dragged down the hall, and literally thrown into a chair in the principal’s office. I confirmed every label that ol’ Jeffery Canna applied to me. Canna told me, “You are a hood, destined for jail and then Hell.” I was also told in no uncertain terms, “Hell is waiting, and jail will be no better. Jail is just the jumping off place for Hell, and you are a sure bet for both.”
By the time I reached home on most days, I thought that jail and Hell were sounding pretty good. Of course, Dad didn’t believe a thing I said. Mom was more understanding but not very pleased. It took a lot to get Mom pissed off, but I was trying and it was working. I really thought she would send me back to that Como school in St. Paul where the teacher knew me, and, I was sure, loved me. If I could keep this up, we might even move back to our old house on Grotto Street. I believed this. I really did! I could fool myself, back then. Sometimes I wondered how different my life might have been if we had never moved. We did move, however, and that leads us to the rest of my story.
Mom graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1942 after finishing her training in elementary education. This was a real feat for a depression-era child of a postman. During the war, however, Mom worked at a bank where she could earn more money than as a teacher. She waited for Dad to come home so they could start a family and start living again.
In 1946, Dad came home from World War II and went directly to work for the Farmers Union Central Exchange. Like a lot of other guys who made it home alive, Dad would say, “I’m one lucky son-of-a bitch.”
The U.S. Army taught him skills he could use in the peacetime, private sector which made up for his lack of a formal education.
Dad was legally blind if not wearing corrective lenses, making him unfit for combat, but he had still been capable of other safer duties. Better yet, he had made high scores on his army enlistment aptitude test. As a result, he spent his war years coordinating the shipment of war materials from the U.S. to the war zones. He was a Master Sergeant by the time he got out in 1946, and he used those skills again when he served in Korea in 1950. He loved the army, and the army loved him.
The Farmers Union loved him, as well. He had skills mostly possessed only by college graduates. They didn’t have to pay him as well as a college guy, therefore, they loved him.
Mom and Dad were married in 1946. My brother David was born in 1947, and I was born in 1949. Gail arrived in 1951, Diane in 1952, and Bruce came along in 1960, the same year we moved. The year I became the “Child from Hell.”
“What a mess,” my mother would say. “A new baby at home and a big baby in the fourth grade.” I didn’t help matters any for her. I wanted to go back to our house on Grotto Street, the old house. I devoted every effort, and every thought, to making life miserable at home as well as at school. As things became worse, the better the past looked to me.
This wasn’t done without my paying a price for it. Believe me! It came at great physical expense. I spent many hours doing hated chores at home, and I took my share of hits to the back of the head at school. At school, the worst of the physical violence was yet to come. It was Canna’s version of, “I’ll pick you up by the ear, drag you out of the room, grab an arm, and pick you up off the ground,” routine. These were the actual words he would use, and I remember them as both humiliating and painful. I was small enough so that almost anyone could grab my arm and pick me up off the floor. This seemed to be a favored discipline, since it left no marks but did separate the arm from its socket, and it also hurt like hell.
Even back then, when it was still legal to hit kids in school, the “Dr. Spock” child psychologist generation of parents and teachers believed that striking a child was not the correct thing to do. Canna must not have been reading the good Doctor Spock. The “No marks on the kid” thing worked well for him, since he could honestly inform my parents that he hadn’t hit me. This also made me look like a liar to my dad when I told him about the abuse I was receiving at school. Like a true con artist, Canna worked Mom and Dad by dividing them as effectively, and as often, as he could. It worked like a charm.
But the charm’s magic finally fizzled out, one day, as Canna dragged me down the hall with my feet barely touching the ground and repeating his litany of favorite phrases, such as, “I’ll pick you up by this ear and be careful not to tear it.” He would say this just loud enough for me to hear it. Then he would say, “Here comes the arm pull.” The final humiliation was the, “Get your ass in the office!”
This day, I’d had it. Before we got to the arm thing, I managed a well-placed kick to the old bastard’s balls. He caught all seventy pounds of my anger, causing him to lose his grip on me. He wrenched and doubled over, moaning, and I was sure I’d hurt him. I ran off like a shot, racing down the hall at full speed. I really thought that I could escape.
At nine years old, you just don’t get away. I had no more than escaped his reach when a passing teacher appeared out of nowhere and caught me. As she grabbed me, she struck me directly in my face with her open hand. It felt like I’d been hit in the face with a shovel. I was surprised, stunned, and plenty scared. She sure didn’t seem to care what happened to me when she delivered me back to Canna. “Here he is, sir,” was all she said.
Jeffery Canna was explosive in his anger. He punched me, shoved me, and finally, he lost all reason and became an enraged animal. When one of his assaults soundly connected, I was thrown to the floor. He drew back with his foot and kicked me in the side, as I was sprawled face down on the floor. I remember that I could smell the banana oil used to clean the wooden floors just seconds before I felt the kick. When his kick struck my body, he stopped. He knew the minute his shoe struck me that he had gone too far.
When he stopped, I saw real fear in the old man’s eyes for the first time. He might have believed that he had killed me, and I’m sure he could tell that he had severely injured me. I couldn’t feel anything, but I knew I was hurt, bad.
I know that I was suspended somewhere, because I didn’t know where I was, or worse yet, I didn’t know who I was. The violence and pain had created a kind of life force all its own, and within me, it had given birth to a powerful sense of impending doom. I didn’t understand it, since I had never experienced such violence. I remember the feeling because it was so vivid.
I felt an intense need to be vindicated, but it was the connection to other living things that felt strongest in me. I was suddenly aware of a connection to Mother Earth, to all living things, and a deep fear inside me. I cannot describe the kind of hatred that was capable of creating this kind of violence towards a helpless child, but I can still recall the chill of dread that I experienced that afternoon.
When Canna stopped his assault I somehow managed to get to my feet, and then I began to run. I must have gotten an adrenaline rush or something. Oddly enough, even as badly as I was hurt, I didn’t feel anything during the twenty or so feet I was able to cover before the world all went black.
I regained consciousness in Dr. Shannon’s office with Mom’s arms around me and with Dad standing behind her. In those days, patients would be first taken to a doctor’s office and then only to the hospital if necessary. When Canna realized that I wasn’t breathing, he called the police and they called Mom. She had the police take me to the doctor’s office. At the doctor’s office, she lifted me off the examination table and held my unconscious body in her arms. She really thought that I was dead.
Mom began barking orders at the police, “Get away from my son!”
The local cops, probably protecting Canna’s job, did anything that Mom asked. I doubt that they gave a damn what happened to a street kid from St. Paul, but they must have been protecting Canna at the same time. Things were different back then.
Dr. Shannon looked at Mom and said, “I found two broken ribs.” He also told her, “He’s badly bruised, and I don’t know if there are internal injuries.” Dr. Shannon was very worried and had no real way of knowing the extent of the beating. I wasn’t dead, but I was really beaten up. This was enough to ignite both Mom and Dad. I thought to myself, and then said, “Finally! We can go home to Grotto Street. I’m home free. I can go back to the teachers who liked me and back to my attic in the old house.”
I didn’t count on the level of anger about to visit me, however. Mom was mad as Hell, at me, at Canna, and at the world. She said, “Why did you disappoint me?” She also hit me with, “I knew you were unhappy, but I never expected you to be so disobedient.”
The loud discussions behind Mom and Dad’s bedroom door lasted for two days. They were both angry, but Mom was doing most of the yelling. I could hear Dad say, “I want to approach this mess with some degree of level-headedness.” But she said, “I want a conference! I want a confrontation!”
As always, Dad lost. He could