Rebel Page 3

  Mother had enjoyed quite a bit of autonomy while Dad was in the war and she was eager to continue carving out as much liberty as she could in her life. Yet Dad did not want the constant mobility that staying in the service would have demanded, and he had lost whatever career drive he once had had—something with which Mom’s ambition was in a constant state of tension over the years.

  Helen King Nolte also had a problematic relationship with her parents and her sister. My grandparents were engineering professors at Iowa State, and Mom’s older sister, Harriet, with whom she was competitive throughout her life, taught at the University of Oregon. Because she had grown up surrounded by educators whom she called “snobs,” Mom developed a rebellious disregard for teachers at every level of education. They were people who couldn’t make it in the real world, she hammered into the heads of both Nancy and me. Imagination could teach you far more than you could learn in any classroom. Imagination was the only crop worth cultivating, she said.

  Despite her lifelong contempt for what Midwesterners labeled “book learning,” my mother earned a degree from Iowa State before heading to Chicago in her twenties. Mom had striking blond hair and the kind of face and figure that many would call a “knockout,” and she worked as a model in newspaper print ads before she took a job at the city’s renowned department store, Marshall Field’s. There she developed an interest in retail fashion that would grow into a long career that she loved. While there she was asked out by a member of the Capone family. My parents had met and dated at Iowa State, but had gone their separate ways. When my father found out she was dating a Capone, he immediately drove to Chicago to propose. Man, that would have been a whole different childhood for me if he hadn’t!

  Her style, like her personality, was unique and thoughtful. My mother had an eye for clothes and she respected those who could tweak an outfit, making it their own. In her mind, this suggested the adventurous resourcefulness of a lived life. She was always well dressed but never afraid to get her hands dirty. She expertly upholstered our furniture and was a tailor, too, and I grew up knowing how to use a needle and thread and was very handy with a sewing machine. She taught me everything about fabrics, and styles, and although it was difficult to find a way to stand out in that cookie-cutter era, in high school, I managed to do so by wearing my own custom-made shirts with sleeves that were fully six inches longer than normal and flowers I had sewn on the pockets. To this day, I enjoy my own unique style, regardless of what is popular or expected.

  In time, Mom became a retail clothing buyer for major department stores in all the towns and cities in which we lived. The male-dominated auction floors of Chicago and New York never intimidated her for a moment. She was supremely confident in her unique sense of style and taste, and would battle anyone who doubted her vision. She held merchandising managers, almost all of whom were men, in contempt. Their lack of interest in the products they sold and their total lack of respect for women galled her, and the fact that she had to do battle with them virtually daily exacted a heavy price.

  The rage Mom was forced to stifle at work would boil over at home, often as she cleaned up after dinner and railed aloud about the prejudices against women she experienced. Racial discrimination made her blood boil, too, and she would punctuate her fury by smashing dishes and battering our kitchen appliances, outbursts that would shock Nancy and me and deeply embarrass and irritate our father. When Mom would fly into one of her fits, Dad simply would shepherd Nancy and me safely to our rooms, putting on a brave face.

  I don’t remember words like “permissive” or “liberal” ever being used in Iowa in those days, but my mother was undoubtedly both. On days when she had trouble rousting me from bed, because I either wasn’t feeling well or simply didn’t want to go to school, she would offer me a “vitamin.” The pills were Dexedrine—in reality speed—and taking one would have me bouncing off the walls in no time, eager as hell to get to school and wreak whatever havoc I could.

  Mom prided herself on her absolute honesty, something that would often be hurtful. She’d never really wanted either of us, she told us several times, and that revelation wounded my sister and me. Were we that bad? we wondered. Did she really wish we were never born?

  No. She gave us a mountain of motherly love, and her affection and support for us never wavered. All she meant, at last we came to understand and accept, was the truth that she had never longed to have children before we were born. Nancy and I were the products, plain and simple, of the lust she and my father had shared for each other before he went off to war.

  More troubling was Mom’s regular assertion that she would divorce Dad once the two of us were grown. This was something she was happy to predict in front of him as well as her children, and although my father was silent whenever she repeated her plan, it worried Nancy and me enough that we always met her confident claim by begging her to stop kidding around.

  My mother took a Dexedrine tablet of her own every morning before work, and drank two or three vodka tonics each evening. She loved to entertain, and friends, in turn, were always eager to join the parties at the Noltes’. Young or old, when people were at our house they could be themselves, free from expectation or judgment, and she demanded them to be, in fact. Booze was a vital social lubricant during that era, and I was permitted to drink at home as soon as I turned fifteen.

  Women admired Mom’s strength of character and her self-determination; men, in turn, admired just about everything about her they could identify. She was great fun and always had an opinion on every topic. People with whom she was close—even my buddies from school—sought her advice on matters large and small, and several remained close to her long after I’d lost touch with them. My ability to tell a decent story also came from my mom, of course.

  NANCY WAS TWO YEARS OLDER THAN ME, ALWAYS TALLER, and the better athlete of the two of us. If she had been born a couple of decades later, she would have been an Olympic swimmer, I’m certain. But women and sports were believed to be an odd combination as she and I were growing up, and virtually no public school programs existed for athletic girls.

  However, when we moved to Waterloo, a small Iowa city that wasn’t much bigger than Ames but was far more urban, we discovered a fine aquatic center, an excellent swimming program, and a great coach named Dick Malone, under whose tutelage Nancy thrived. The water just seemed to part before her. She never lost a race that I can remember, and I think her competitive swimming days were the happiest of her childhood.

  When I was in the second grade, the family left Ames and made our way to Waterloo when Dad accepted a transfer with Fairbanks Morse, and Mom got a position as a buyer for Black’s department store, which was a great new opportunity. Our first day in town, Mom marched us from house to house in our new neighborhood, introducing herself and Nancy and me to the housewife who answered each door, explaining that she was a working woman and that because of her busy schedule they could expect to see the two of us regularly playing without a chaperone. Nancy was old enough to look after us both, she said. It was embarrassing for us, but Mom wasn’t about to let anyone think for a moment that she was a negligent mother, and it was just like her to speak first to people before she would dare let them make an assumption about her.

  Nancy’s upbringing was a raw deal for her. Not only was she routinely saddled with the thankless task of looking after me, but our parents were far stricter with her than they were with me. Yet she rose to my defense time and again throughout our childhood, as she simply accepted that her little brother was eccentric at a time when a child who was unconventional was about as welcome as a kid with head lice.

  I was lucky that my parents generally tolerated my eccentricities, even accepting without argument my announcement one day that I would no longer be attending church. The only times my mother demanded our best behavior was when she wanted the whole family to attend a graduation or retirement ceremony at the university. She would scrub Nancy and me to a high shine and force us into uncomfort
ably formal attire, insisting on our best behavior no matter how terribly boring the event happened to be. “Sit up straight, don’t fidget, and look everyone in the eye when you shake their hands,” she would instruct. Funny that, despite her scorn for education and all its trappings, there were times when it was vitally important for her to demonstrate what a fine mother she was, as well as to show off the couple of obedient and good-looking kids she was raising!

  THE IOWA WOODS WERE PARADISE. ONCE OR TWICE A WEEK Mom would take Nancy and me out, and we felt most at home there. We would hunt for mushrooms and splash in the creeks, and although we never got to know him, she made sure to point out the cave where a solitary man lived.

  Mom was a nature girl and always had been. I have a photo I love of her that to me sums her up. In it, she’s five years old, wearing bib overalls, and with one hand holds her dog by his leash; the other is balled into a fist and planted on her hip. “Take your damn picture so I can get back to exploring!” her expression says, and she carried that same defiant attitude with her throughout her life. Defiant. Freedom meant everything to her—she could admire a man who was free to live in a cave, if he chose to—and she worked hard to face down the fear that people would take her freedom away.

  Even when I was young, I understood my mother’s fear of being restricted, her dislike of rules. I could tell, too, that other adults shared that fear. Yet most simply shut themselves down and did as they were expected to do. I had soaked that feeling up. That’s what I carried. It was trying to get out of me. I found the best way to deal with that was to do outrageous things. That’s how I combated fear. Pull a prank. Tell a lie. Or retreat to nature.

  I called myself a river kid, because the big rivers on whose banks we lived were my soul mates, in many ways. I could sit under a tree for hours and look out at the moving water and do nothing more than imagine. Rivers and their banks were both fun parks and refuges throughout my early years. Society’s rules, which really flummoxed me from the get-go, meant nothing out in the wilderness, where it never mattered if your shirttail was tucked in or your hair was combed, and Mother Earth had a wonderful way of punishing arrogance and stupidity. The Skunk, the Cedar, the Iowa, and the Missouri were wide ribbons of water in which I didn’t so much observe nature as become part of it—swimming without giving a thought to submerged trees or currents, collecting snakes and other reptiles I kept in jars and boxes in my bedroom, fishing for carp, and feeling wonderfully alive. I imagined myself as a twentieth-century Huckleberry Finn, with a bicycle instead of a raft.

  Like my mother, I had my own keen sense of style, and I liked to bleach my jeans until they were virtually white. I remember the time that I waded into the water to retrieve a fat carp I’d caught. But my jeans—their fabric weakened by all the bleaching—ripped apart as I lunged for the fish. So, I had no option but to wrap my shirt around my middle and march downtown to Black’s department store—big carp in hand—where I found my mother and announced, “Hey, Mom, I gotta get some pants!” She laughed, full of pride.

  Anybody who seemed to disrespect nature, or who failed to be moved by it in some elemental way, risked having me toss them into the river as punishment for their arrogance. But Mom was like me; nature and she were powerfully bonded, and I loved how she encouraged me to embrace everything that was wild and unrestrained.

  It was fine with my mom that I was fiery and forceful—I received those traits from her—and I discovered that I possessed a kind of intensity that was both internally and externally powerful. When fear welled up, I’d simply summon a kind of outrageousness that was always inside me. With it, I’d swim the widest stretch of water I could find, mindless of the dangers, or I’d pull a big prank without concern for the trouble in which it might land me.

  When I felt that kind of intensity, I also felt free, and I remember that on summer nights I would purposefully go at whatever game we were playing with such abandon that suddenly the entire world would slow down, and I would get dizzy, then nauseous. It was strange—and a little scary—but I never told anyone about it because I was sure they wouldn’t understand. I could count on its overtaking me when I let my intensity build to the shouting point. If I pushed just a bit harder, I knew, the world would shift into a tick, tock, tick, tock, slow-motion time, and everything would take on a surreal shape.

  BY THE TIME I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO BE PLAYING JUNIOR-HIGH football in Waterloo—a game I loved and was really good at—the intensity no longer seemed capable of slowing down time or making me feel sick. Instead, I often found myself playing with such passion and concentration that I simply started to cry.

  I was a punter—I could kick the hell out of the ball—and I also played defensive end, where I was something of a heat-seeking missile when it came to chasing down quarterbacks and sacking them behind the line of scrimmage. I had confidence in my ability to reach the opposing quarterback and drop him before he got off a pass, and part of me wanted to bring that confidence and single-minded passion to every play. Yet football was a team sport, and for the sake of the team I had to remain vigilant in case the quarterback I was chasing suddenly handed the ball to a halfback who would run a reverse to my side of the field, or in case something else unexpected occurred.

  I wanted nothing more than to chase down the son of a bitch and drop him like a sack of potatoes. But I had to restrain myself and watch for surprises, too, and the competing demands—my intensity versus my responsibility to protect my side of the field and be ready for whatever happened—were so great they would bring me to tears.

  It was odd, and I’m sure it was downright comical at times. My teammates were often completely perplexed—particularly when we were winning by two or three touchdowns and were on our way to crushing the opposing team—about why there were tears running down my face. Friends on the team would come up to me and lay their arms on my shoulder pads and suggest, “Man, maybe you should stop playing if it bothers you so bad. It’s just a game, man, it don’t matter that much.” And it was impossible for me to explain, of course. Sure, it was a game, but that wasn’t the point. The passion it engendered in me was enormous, and passion felt better than anything else in my life; I hated to throttle it back in any way. I craved big desire; I wanted it more than I wanted anything else, and it just happened to be football that lit my passion like a fire that was virtually impossible to extinguish.

  I WAS A GOOD ENOUGH PLAYER THAT I CAPTURED A LOT OF attention among coaches and scouts and serious fans, and it looked like I could play high school and college ball and maybe take my game even further. I was gifted enough, in fact, that I was invited to attend a summer football camp run by Bud Wilkinson, the legendary coach at the University of Oklahoma whose teams were always national powerhouses.

  I would be entering eighth grade that fall and attending with me was my best friend, Charlie Freeman, who went to a different junior high in Omaha, Nebraska—where my family now lived—and whom I had met the year before at a football camp in Minnesota. Wilkinson and his assistant coaches invited twenty Oklahoma kids, who would get special attention because they were homies, and twenty more from nearby Midwestern states. Charlie and I somehow got our dates mixed up and arrived a day early and had nothing to do. We couldn’t find a rowboat to ferry ourselves to a girls’ camp across the lake, so we had to otherwise occupy our time, and Charlie loved a good prank as much as I did. What could we do to take those boys down a notch?

  The Oklahoma boys would be housed in one dorm, with the other half of us in another dorm nearby. We knew the Okies would arrive with some serious attitude, and we wanted to figure out how to humble them from the start. We were struggling to figure out what might work when a brilliant plan suddenly came to me.

  To set it in motion, the first thing was for both Charlie and me to take a shit in a single plastic bag—and that was easy enough. Then we sealed it up tight and squished it until it was as big as a plate and no more than a half inch thick. We used a knife to poke it full of little holes, then lifte
d up one of the mattresses in the Oklahoma dorm, placed our little pancake on the springs, and covered it with the thin canvas that protected the mattress from the springs. I lay down on the bed and Charlie got on his knees to check to be sure nothing was visible from below. Everything was perfect!

  After about five days, the Oklahoma boys were complaining constantly about the smell, some suspecting a skunk had died under the floorboards, others certain that their dorm had some sort of plumbing problem. The smell was horrible and was getting worse, and, on our day off, the Okies tore their dorm room apart and finally found our little flattened sack of shit. And oh, were they pissed!

  A group of them marched immediately up to Charlie and me and said they knew we had arrived early, and knew, too, that we were just the kind of Cornhusker smart-asses to pull a shit prank like that. “I don’t know whether to cry or knock the hell out of you,” I remember one of them telling me as he poked his fat finger into my chest. Both Charlie and I denied knowing anything about awful smells or a flattened sack of shit or anything of the sort, and Charlie was the kind of guy who exuded strength and success and honesty, so the Okies all believed him when he swore he’d had nothing to do with the plot. That left me as their only suspect, and I began to sweat it because they were all mighty angry and somebody—somebody named me, it appeared—was going to have to pay.

  A couple of days later, I was asleep in my bunk when one of Bud Wilkinson’s assistant coaches tiptoed into our darkened dorm and made his way over to my bunk. He sat on the thin mattress beside me, shined a flashlight in my face, and whispered, “You’re a son of a bitch, Nolte, and we know you shat in that bag and put it under the bed, and you know what? I’m going to make sure you never play football in any school you go to—anywhere! You might as well give it up now, ’cause your football days are done.”

  With that, he quietly made his way out of the dorm, and I lay awake in my bunk most of the night and cried because he was an adult, and a coach, and surely his threat was something he could make stick. I wanted to keep playing football more than I wanted to do anything else. Nothing else focused my intensity and gave it meaning and purpose, and I cried because in the long hours before dawn it seemed that I had ended my dream with a stupid, stinking prank.