Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

Men have money not because they are smarter than other men, but because they have devoted such intellect as the Lord gave them to the base purpose of acquiring wealth.

—Clarence Darrow

The years I invested in rock’n’roll heaped a fair share of regret on me—I coulda, I shoulda—but time has a way of slathering mellow on remorse. From my perspective on the back nine of life, I can’t say I’d want to change much, given the chance. Sure, I could fill volumes with the dumb-shit things I’ve done in my life, and those regrets pile up over time, coming back to haunt you in those stinging moments of doubt. But if you’ve learned that lesson, does it really help to dwell anew on it? If you waste time looking back at all the mistakes you’ve made, churning inside over your fail­ures, you can lose sight of what’s in front of you and trip over what might be coming your way.

I came to chide myself whenever I began bewailing my mistakes and/or failings, telling myself to just shut the fuck up and move on. It proved the healthier attitude. My foray in hippiedom provided some relief in that regard. As noted be­fore, Eastern philosophy—in which the hip steeped—teaches that there are many paths up the mountain. Okay, though mine has been a twisted trail, a meandering path with more than a few tumbles down the slope, I ended up some­where along the way (far from any summit) that at least gives me a good perspective on my fail­ings.

Traditional theology might see it another way, with its one sanctioned path to enlightenment, but now more than ever, conventional orthodoxy (particularly that es­poused in those big mega churches) leaves me flat, given the mindless prattling of ersatz evangelicals now­a­days preach­ing the prosperity gos­pel as some sort of glorious communion with commerce for the masses. I believe in spiritual­ism but have no faith in religion.

Even further, too much mainstream religion veers wildly into governance, become (to bowdlerize Marx) an opiate of the politician, who has wielded it to weaponize morality and demonize the “other” in everyday life—all too successfully. Archibald Macleish once observed, “Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the an­swers for everybody else.”

I was at one revolted and activated by this form of brand-name belief. Early on in New York City, a youthful piety that hip­pies shared fueled my spi­ritual musings. Dear old Dad’s advice on Sufism gave me probably my best steerage. Like he said, if you say you’re a Sufi, then you’re not. How appropriate. If you say you’re religious, you’re not. Sounds about right.

But further, as someone once noted, it’s not enough to do the right thing; you have to do it in the right way. Hippies were as guilty as any at being sanctimonious. Something about that mote in thine own eye? Plenty of motes here, which often blinded me or ultimately caused me pain, a fine example of youth wasted on the young. It seems to me that the bulk of pain we experience—physical as well as mental—is self-inflicted.

Not all my time went for naught. I would spend seven years working as a mechanic in a Volkswagen dealership, my blue period, fulfilling my desire to become more self-sufficient, also serving to fur­ther ce­ment in me a hardcore pop­ulist be­lief (not the populism trum­peted by politicians intent on selling the inattentive on the next big ripoff—you know, as in “drain the swamp”). I had already received a smatter of on-the-job training in auto re­pair with a funky VW bug I’d bought for $400, with the manual for the compleat idiot my guide. Then two years on the road with the Wheels, broke down in locations from Mahwah, New Jersey, to Tampa Bay, lent some real-world ne­cessity to my toolbox.

As I really learned the trade, my fellow mechanics in the garage became my brothers in arms, shar­ing my pleasures and my pains through good times and bad. The dealership sent me to classes at the Volkswagen training school in San Antonio, and I learned from instructors there the wonders of German ingenuity. Back at work, if I ran into a problem I hadn’t yet encountered, someone was there to help. And as I delved further into the job, I developed a fair talent for reading schematics, sussing out ob­scure electrical problems, making myself a good buddy to have in the shop (as this tends to be a weak spot among mechanics).

For a time, I found another bit of the happiness I’d ­con­tin­ually sought. And the press of time and budget led me in­ex­ora­bly to a more middle-class existence, as mate Che and I bought a small house and settled in, even buying a couple air conditioners, my first in eight years living in Texas.

Home ownership also conveyed with it a more proper Amer­ican existence, a do-it-yourself contentment furthered in my fifteen-year relationship with Che (a woman smarter than I and more rooted in reality). She figured if I could fix cars I could no doubt trans­late these talents into taking care of general household main­tenance. And with friends skilled in various trades, I could solicit any needed advice (this, after all, predated the internet and its instructional videos)—for mounting ceiling fans, hanging wallpaper, all manner of plumbing and electrical repairs.

There came a time, though, when the novelty of expand­ing my blue-collar horizons wore off. Eight months of the year at the dealership, I’d sweat through my work blues be­fore nine o’clock in the morning in the brutal Texas heat, which seemed to extend inexorably. To boot, the newer cars came out needing less and less regular maintenance, meaning jobs available on a daily basis tended to be warranty work—that is, fixes on new cars that paid mechanics significantly less and frustrated considerably more (since manuals describing the new models lagged far behind their intro­duction).

At the end of the Seventies I turned thirty, an age I think when a person feels the need to take stock and consider what path in life to finally embark on. Maybe it’s just the nagging sense that you may be running out of time. For me, anyway, it became the point where I decided it was time to get serious about life and figure out where I should be heading.

Part and parcel of my malaise was a now-festering social scene, as the ringing truths of the Sixties gave way at the close of the Seventies, ushering in the disco era—which to me seemed little more than some slither-tongued devil croon­ing about bootie over a throbbing beat. Enh . . .

Nixon had been unceremoniously drummed out of the scene (though then pardoned by Ford), and politics seemed to enter some psychic doldrum, though the election of south­ern gentleman Jimmy Carter seemed at least to augur more honesty in politics, if nothing else—and however briefly.

At any rate, I’d reached one of those “fuck it, I can’t take this anymore” stages in life and enrolled in classes at the University of Texas, working part time for the du­ra­tion. Since I’d somehow managed to accumulate thirty-three hours of credit at Syracuse in journalism/poly sci (and then fulfilled some language requirements by testing out of a couple French courses), I determined J school would be the shortest distance between two points. But I did want to pol­ish my chops pontificating (as was my inclination), so I also en­rolled in every English writing class I could take.

It didn’t take long to realize that times had changed on campus. Granted, I now was a good ten years older than most of my classmates—senior as well even to some of my profs. The tenor of student life now reflected a return to more of a staid, “pre-war” life. Fraternities and sororities were staging a comeback, leading Jackson Hooper, then vice president of the Interfraternity Coun­cil, to sniff: “There seem to be less people walking around who don’t bathe. The campus in gen­eral seems to be closer to where the Greeks have been all along.” Okay . . .

And I soon began to chafe at some of the require­ments of my classes, which in journalism meant writing stories assigned by students running the campus newspaper. When one of my articles, on some godawful piece of campus puffery of no import, ran “above the fold” on the front page, I de­ter­mined that wouldn’t serve.

Fortunately, I’d seen a presentation in the class of one older, pro­gressive prof about a local public-access news show that prided itself on covering stories ignored by the main­stream media—Alternative Views—and begun doing a bit of work for the creators, Frank Morrow and Doug Kellner, a UT prof. They dug into meaty journalism like the Reagan ad­min­is­tra­tion’s shady funding of the contras in Nicaragua. This gave me something to write that I didn’t mind seeing my by­line on in the student paper. So I began to write more po­liti­cal pieces, editorializing on Reagan, the arms deal, the contras, the lack of diversity at UT itself. And they appeared in the student paper.

Well, one day, while sitting in the lobby reading and waiting for a class to start, I began to notice someone discoursing with increasing vehemence just down the table from me. It got louder and louder, someone railing on about com­munism, falling dominoes, etc., so at one point I glanced over to hear who might be raving so. Turns out, it was one of the teaching assistants in the J school, a young bug-eyed red-faced con­serva­tive, and he was ranting to another student—but directing his in­vec­tive at me. I slowly turned my head full frontal to the windbag, raised an eyebrow, then casually went back to reading.

Something in that look must have given him some idea of the thin ice on which he trod. I typically walked around cam­pus with a bad-on—usually in my work blues, the sweat from the morning not yet dried off—almost spoiling for trouble. Per­haps sensing impending doom, he subsided into muttering to the table in front of him, avoiding succeeding pointed glances.

His kind would surely set me off. I had gotten my ab­so­lute fill of what I’d come to see as entitled yuppies while working at the dealership. One in particular stood out, party to a particularly noxious encounter one day.

Marcus, a short, longhaired young guy, worked as a porter at the shop, sweeping up and bring­ing up customers’ cars when they arrived to reclaim their vehicles. A sweet, clean-shaven fellow, Marcus had served in Vietnam but had to­tally lost it it when his unit was overrun during the Tet Of­fen­sive—his marble sack developed quite a hole. But still, he was a hard-working, affable sort everyone liked, other than this one self-­important prick, who took great ex­cep­tion one day when Marcus skidded a bit when stopping in front of him to deliver his car. Bellowing that he didn’t want some dirty hippie driving his new car and screwing up its precious brakes, he created an obnoxious scene, berating the service writer and everybody within shouting distance.

Poor Marcus quietly slunk away, unsure of what he’d done to inflame him and not really capable of understanding. This pretty much pissed off everyone in the shop, and one of the office ladies enlisted my help, as a former bouncer, when said prick re­turned a short time later. (As we subsequently found out, he had been racing his car, voiding his war­ranty, and causing recurring brake problems.)

As the jerk stood in the service drive waiting for some more appropriate person to bring up his vehicle, I went out and cranked it up, flying into the garage and skidding halfway across the shop to stop within shouting dis­tance of him. With a roar, he ran to the car bursting with bluster when . . . this big sweaty hippie with supreme prejudice stepped out to face him.

“Uh . . . Stops good, don’t it?” he meekly squeaked as I turned and stalked away.

Unseen by him, all the ladies in the parts department and front office, behind class partitions, convulsed in laughter, my fellow mechanics ducking behind toolboxes and cars to guffaw. A blow against some kind of empire.

So I did have a bit of attitude when I got to campus for class, the sweat of the day not yet dried. And this “Ain’t We Got Fun” era, the concerted ef­fort to put the Sixties in the rear­view mirror didn’t sit particularly well with me either. For­tunately, I found a lot more substance in denizens of the lo­cal music scene, which had gone decidedly punk—com­plete with riotous confrontations with the local constabulary. Punk, to me, offered a sight more than the disco or glam rock that vied for attention na­tion­wide. I guess I was punk in my own way.

I had fabricated a pin at the campus copy shop to wear around cam­pus and trumpet my thoughts on the prevailing social conservatism. “Fuck the Moral Majority,” it read. This caused no small manner of consternation among a few young coeds—sometimes just short of the vapors—when they espied this as I prowled campus. But for others, as when I ran into Biscuit, a notorious Austin punk musician, it proved a source of hilarity. “Oh, you are so right,” he remarked, chortling.

In this age, the mere example of noncomformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

—John Stuart Mill

Fortunately, many of the students I encountered in class didn’t buy into the conservative bent oozing onto campus. “We’re pretty jaded,” one opined in a class when challenged by my beloved progressive prof over some political point.

And classmates in several En­glish writing classes seemed most well-disposed to my hippie rants (though I’d soon cut back my locks to accommodate the wane of my hair­line). One, in fact, peer in a class for advanced ex­posi­tory writing, would ultimately recommend me for proof­read­ing to her editor at Third Coast, an artsy avant-garde city magazine in Austin that was the dream job for every jour­nal­ism student then.

I had also picked up a part-time job proofreading, something suited to my ultra-anal nature, for a time working forty hours a week or better between it and the shop—besides my classes. This schedule got old fast, particularly given my declining in­come working at the dealership. One old goat who had hired on as ser­vice writer (the people who take orders and direct work to mechanics) de­cided a part-timer like me didn’t deserve to get “gravy” work, instead relegating mostly piddling jobs and warranty work to me.

Since I couldn’t rightly beat the shit out of him, I instead shucked my work blues and carted my toolbox home. Part­ing from my brother mechanics proved sweet sorrow in­deed, and when I packed up they gifted me with pur­loined shop supplies I might be needing out on my own.

So while finishing up on a degree, I gravitated between part-time jobs at G&S Typesetting (a force in the production of college textbooks in addition to its magazine printing) and Third Coast, which ultimately became my sole full-time job—beginning a long foray back into the star-crossed world of jour­nalism. The magazine, in my five-plus years there, proved ultimately to be the best job I ever had, working under John Taliaferro, an en­light­ened editor with cheek. He abetted the kind of environ­ment journalists would die for, putting together a small staff sur­rounded by a talented group of Austin freelance artists, pho­tog­raphers, and writers who loved their work and, more than anything, enjoyed each oth­ers’ company.

This was journalism as it was meant to be, a fine group of creative types fomenting all kinds of good trouble. And for their efforts, Third Coast twice made the finals of the na­tional magazine awards. Each issue offered a new perspective on the mixed bag of Austin life and politics. The type of features running in the monthly varied as much the writers.

One memorable tale came about when a particularly fa­vored freelancer, Patricio, sold John on a story about riding the Aztec Eagle train from the border down to Mexico City—and off a bunch of magaziners went on the 24-hour trek, resulting in a rollicking cover story and some fast friend­ships. (Ex­cursions to various parts of Mexico would become a yearly event for our group to escape the mercantile madness of Christmas.) For the daylong train trip down, we humped cases of beer and coolers of food and snacks aboard and settled in, hands of poker filling the hours when not napping, writing, or reading.

At one of the interminable, inexplicable stopovers the train made while waiting for some kind of clearance, Patricio and I stood looking out at a familiar rural Mexican-­desert scene exchanging profundities (the wont of word wranglers). A tat­tered shack of scavenged lumber, railroad parts, and burlap squatted along the rails, bounded by a fence formed of scraggly cactus. A trio of nearly naked, scruffy chicos tumbled about the dusty enclosure, kicking around a soccer ball of wadded-up ­something-or-other and raising holy hell. Their young mother, barefoot and clad in a ratty but serviceable shift, leaned in the doorway, arms folded across her chest, watching with a smile on her face.

Struck dumb at the scene, I remarked to Pat in a moment of lucidity, “You know, just because that mamasita doesn’t have shit in this world—and has no prospects for any—that doesn’t mean she loves her kids any less.”

That may have been the Casablanca moment in our re­la­tionship, as in “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friend­ship.” We would remain close over the years, and I would always find a place for his reflections in the various pub­­lications I would find myself editing.

Sad to say, Third Coast would ultimately succumb to a real-estate bust in the Austin econ­omy, and I found myself bounc­ing between editing or writing for a number of Texas media com­panies and publications—before their demise, portent of the sad state of journalism today. Between actual stints in the fourth estate, I’d always find solace in the ­typesetting shop along with Patricio and a slew of expatriates with ­wide-ranging talents. The family that ran the business, the Grosskopfs, offered me some renewed faith in our society, con­sid­ering they were small “r” republicans as well as de­vout ­christians but lived as they did a sincere form of faith and poli­tics far from what mainstream versions practiced.

The Eighties, with the ascendancy of Reagan, had devolved into a seemingly never-­ending seepage of news about the lat­est administration malfeasance, from Debategate to Iran-Contra, the EPA, HUD, Wedtech, FEMA, and ultimately the savings-and-loan crisis—which Economist John Kenneth Gal­braith called “the largest and costliest venture in pub­lic misfeasance, malfeasance, and larceny of all time” (to which the Trump administration would later acclaim “hold my beer”). The Age of Aquarius given over to the Age of Acqui­­­sition.

All too much of this, of course, was swept under the rug of Bush pardons. But the litany of corruption—the inves­ti­ga­tion, indictment, or conviction of over 138 in the Reagan ad­min­is­tration—scarred the political landscape, if still not reach­ing the collective conscious of the American people (dead­ened, perhaps, following the Nixon follies). A former his­tory professor ascribed this type of mainstream myopia to a “tyranny of the majority,” a phrase coined by Alexis de Toque­ville in his 1835 Democracy in America. The prof said this didn’t refer to a majority ganging up on a minority, but rather to a populace’s preoccupation with their own trials and tribulations in daily life (exacerbated in our life­time by the predations of politicians beholden to monied interests). As Alex noted, we “meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance,” so tied up in our own problems that we fall prey to the blandishments of dissembling politicians.

This adequately sums up what for me would become the norm, drifting on through abortive attempts in journalism—and out of a long relationship with Che borne at the Dillo. Not a dramatic or violent separation: Suffice it to say that we didn’t meet each other’s expectations (maybe not an uncommon occurrence among breakups). But it still proved a heavily emotional experience, as relationships are a lot harder to get out of than they are to get into.

Eventually I would find solace in company of Jan, leading over time to a comfortable and long-lasting marriage—and, lo and behold, to a young son when we approached a time when we’d almost aged out of parenthood. This may have proved fortuitous in the sense that we’d ma­tured past the point of wanting to seek excitement in the boisterous Aus­tin social scene, preferring to nest around the proper up­bring­ing of a young’un, providing the tools this next-­generation lad might need to pursue his dreams (un­en­cum­bered by parents distracted by their own desires for ad­ven­turesome behavior).

That entailed a whole new chapter of middle-class involvement, from band trips to select baseball tournaments, lessons in the interests du jour of our fledgling, money found to fund these occupations. The demands on parents con­sti­tute a binding force in the thralldom of everyday life. And I was content to concentrate on my duties at hand.

Not to give short shrift to this passage of years: I’d just kinda shot the wad on the rock’n’roll era of my life, subject of this meandering muse. This might best be relegated to a tale told elsewhere. My passage into middle-class snug lacks the luster of the tumultuous times whence we had sprung.

Perhaps this descent into the mix of the hoi polloi best describes what happened to the hippies gotten old. They would be the generation that changed the world, taking it by its ear and shaking it up good. How many years before had I sat in a bar get­ting drunk next to a stranger while a punk band blared in the background? “Just wait till we get in power,” he’d said. “We’ll show them how things should be run.” What a cruel slap of fate it’d been when the most memorable moment of this generation’s first Leader of the Free World had been a peppermint blowjob. My, how things changed.