Bare Naked Wayne

Bare Naked Wayne

By Wayne Schmidt

Copyright 2013 & 2018 -- Wayne Schmidt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

My ebook is free. Thank you for downloading it. I hope you enjoy it. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This ebook may be reproduced or copied, in full or in part, and distributed for non-commercial purposes only, provided its contents are not altered, authorship is included, and free availability is noted.

WayneASchmidt@aol.com

WayneASchmidt.blogspot.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Growing Up with Jesus

-----Dr. Dino

-----Born on the Fourth of July

-----We Eat on Picnic Tables

-----The Great Commission

-----Victorious Christian Youth

-----Schmidt for God

-----Sisters in a Nutshell

-----My Father's Son

Chapter 2: Roots

-----Dad Talked to God

-----Mom Married a Guy Who Talked to God

-----Happily Ever After

-----What War?

Chapter 3: First Love

-----Light My Fire

-----Summer of Love

-----Hippies, Not Communists

Chapter 4: Looking for Wayne

-----Goodbye, Vietnam

-----Bad Shit

-----Living Life My Way

-----Summer Days -- 1969

-----God Sends Maggots

-----California Dreamin'

-----My Wheel of Karma Turns

-----Epiphany

Chapter 5: Looking for Love

Chapter 6: Looking for Work

-----Small World

-----Dead Ends

-----Thank God for LSD

Chapter 7: Tilting at Windmills

-----Tom Washington Shit in My Hat

-----The Fij

-----Ring-around-the-Collar

-----Politicians, Pony Tails, and Liberace Soap

-----Purple Paws

-----I Burn Miss Utah at the Stake

-----Drains

-----Freeways and Hanging Ropes

-----Saving the Great Lakes

-----I Wore Abbie Hoffman's Coat

-----Not the Last Rat Off

-----Speaking in Tongues

Chapter 8: Just Open a Vein

-----Fake Fred, Secret Salaries, and Rat-tailed Maggots

-----The Nature of Michigan

-----My Writing Life

Chapter 9: Season of the Witch

-----Warning Signs

-----Compared to Fucking What?

-----Fuck Me

-----What the Fuck?!

-----Why the Fuck Not?

-----I Am Not a Cunt

-----What Was That?

Postscript

PREFACE

Here is the life of Wayne -- sometime environmentalist and one-time land developer, Jesus freak and atheist, hippie-mailman draft dodger and newspaper reporter, recluse and family guy.

I like to write stories, and these are the best ones I know. All are true, insofar as it's possible to tell the bare naked truth about yourself.

This ebook tells of my miserable, preacher's-kid youth and my search for purpose in life, which turned me into a prominent environmental rabble-rouser in the Great Lakes region in the 1970s and 1980s.

I've chronicled colorful characters I met along the way, such as Michigan's conservation behemoth and my boss for a decade, Tom Washington, and my friend and provocateur extraordinaire, Abbie Hoffman. I describe the karmic price I paid for bad behavior; my retributive tab included being for way too long the sixth husband of a white witch.

My stories are frank, sometimes raw or vulgar, and occasionally embarrassing (e.g., Fortunately, my horrid taste in clothing took some of the focus off my hideous head.). I cut out only a couple of good stories that I could have told. One was in deference to my parents' memory; another had to do with my uncertainty about the legal statute of limitations in Michigan. You can understand.

I wrote this memoir for myself, first, but I also wrote for my family and friends, letting them in on my perspective of events that may have affected their own lives. Even if you are a total stranger, however, I expect you will find something here to entertain you. Consider, for example, that Uncle Sam once officially diagnosed me as a non-aggressive sociopathic sex deviant (with a hernia).

Writing a memoir is a self-indulgent undertaking. After all, everyone has stories; some are interesting, some not. In picking which of mine to tell, I followed the late author Elmore Leonard's rule: I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

These stories come from the first half of my life; for my next book, I'm working on stories from the second half -- some painful, some lovely, and filled with surprises, successes and failures, and more characters.

What mystery lies within. That was the caption on my high school senior yearbook picture. Not a question but a conclusion. All my life I've saved letters, journals, pictures, and memories; always in the back of my mind was the expectation of this moment late in life when I would use them to try to unravel that mystery.

I know that others may remember some of the events here differently. If you don't like the way I've told my stories, then write your own.

--April 1, 2013 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

Senior Yearbook - 1964

Bendle High School - Flint, Michigan

►Return to Table of Contents

A NOTE ON THIS 2018 UPDATE

Since my memoir was published five years ago, Smashwords increased the maximum file size permitted for ebooks. Therefore, I've been able to add larger pictures in this update. I've also made a few minor edits here and there.

Bare Naked Wayne has been downloaded more than 1,700 times. With this new edition, I hope readers will be even more entertained.

--January, 2018 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

CHAPTER 1:

GROWING UP WITH JESUS

Yes, Jesus loves me!

Yes, Jesus loves me!

Yes, Jesus loves me!

The Bible tells me so.

I've got no excuse for going to Hell. Eternity in Heaven, singing with the angels, streets paved with gold -- it was put right in front of my nose from the time I was a baby. At 30 months old, in the children's Christmas program, I recited for my preacher-father's congregation:

I know I'm just a little man

But I would do my part;

I offer praise to Christ this day

And that with all my heart.

I tried. I really did.

I saved my pennies in my little brown acorn bank, once a year to be smashed to smithereens with a hammer in front of the church congregation in a jug-breaking program, us kiddies parading one-by-one to the dais in our Sunday best. Dressed-up children and flying porcelain chips dedicated to saving heathens' souls. That's what the pennies were for -- the missionaries.

Mark 16:15 was taken seriously in our church: Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel. My father's denomination was called the Missionary Church Association. Its members collected donations (including from the kiddy acorn banks) to send missionaries -- usually young couples fervid with proselytizing zeal -- to places like Haiti, the Philippines, India, China, and South America. West Africa was big -- Sierra Leone, Belgian Congo, and French Equatorial Africa (as some of these European possessions then were called).

Should I one day become a missionary for Jesus and go save native infidels from certain Hell? In bed late at night, I wrestled with that morbid burden, picturing a future that was as realistic as Superman in my comic books. Was God calling me? Tell me, Jesus. How can I know the truth? Look, up in the sky...

On their back-home furloughs, the missionaries would visit our church, hungry for funds for His work in deepest, darkest wherever, and regale parishioners with tales of satanic cultures and miracles of conversions due to their Jesus-directed work. They might don native garb.

Missionaries visit my parents' church (ca. 1940s)

One such visit to my father's Indiana bible college in the 1940s (memorialized in his yearbook) highlighted their desperate, competitive race to save lost souls:

Rev. George Constance, who has spent one term in Colombia, gave the challenge of carrying the gospel to the great unevangelized area of the Amazon, which must be reached before its people become sealed in the ritual of Romanism [Catholicism].

Despite my child-guilt over the natives' eternal damnation, I just couldn't see myself in that Amazon Jungle picture. Real doubt germinated when I was eight years old. We were sitting on little folding chairs in Sunday School class in the church basement and learning how the world had been created in seven days. What about the dinosaurs? I asked. I don't remember the teacher's answer, but I do remember hearing the first, faint alarms of my bullshit detector:

That doesn't sound right, I thought, but didn't argue.

Some would consider me lucky to have been raised under the correct religious brand -- evangelical Christianity. All others, of course -- Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Buddhists, maybe even Episcopalians, probably Catholics and Mormons -- are doomed to burn in Hell for all eternity in a lake of sulfurous fire. Whereas me, I got a break. I was born into a family that had the key to eternal life. Talk about luck!

Dr. Dino

Dr. Dino says the universe was created 6,000 years ago. He's a Bible guy. I watched him the other night on the local access channel. I think he's from Tennessee.

Dr. Dino has it all figured out. What about his namesake, the dinosaurs, you might wonder? Well, obviously, Noah took only baby dinosaurs on the ark. Dr. Dino seemed to have an answer for everything (DVDs available). He was exhausting.

I checked out Dr. Dino's creation research on his website. It reminded me of the time I visited the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico (The Truth Is Here).

Lots and lots of words. Throw in bits of obscure science. Or pseudo-science, it really doesn't matter because who's going to argue and if someone does there's nothing better to a Creationist than talking and arguing. Dr. Dino has this sly smile, one that tells the believers that they are in on the secret truth and that it's the rest of the world that's nuts.

The Mormons -- that's my wife's side of the family -- they put Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in Missouri, 6,000 years ago. They know that is true because the Angel Moroni in the 1820s told their prophet, Joseph Smith, where to find these golden plates buried in upstate New York. Smith translated the plates' secrets from a mysterious Egyptian language and wrote it all down in the Book of Mormon. It reveals the otherwise-unknown history in America of pre-Columbian civilizations of Jaredites, Nephites, and Lamanites. Plus, Jesus' one-time visit to America after he was resurrected following his crucifixion and trip back to Heaven. Sadly, however, once Smith translated the golden plates, Moroni re-hid them.

I suspect that Dr. Dino thinks this is kooky stuff. Except for the 6,000 years ago part, of course, which he knows is true. When you are sure that the Bible is the infallible Word of God and every syllable is literally true, it really limits your options.

The best that my fundamentalist father ever came up with to explain the mysteries of cosmology was a construct that went something like this: The first two sentences in the Bible say, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void...' Now, since God could never create anything that wasn't perfect, 'without form and void' tells you that there is a mysterious gap between these first two sentences. This was probably the time when Lucifer was kicked out of Heaven, and this could have been a long, ugly period of the earth's history (way before Adam and Eve) that God chose to not tell us about. If He would have wanted us to know that stuff, He would have included it in the Bible, but He didn't so we don't need to ask questions about it.

Faith makes it possible to believe all kinds of craziness. No doubts allowed.

But nutty as it is, a 6,000-year-old universe can be easier to picture than reality. I struggled through a book, Before the Big Bang, where the author (Brian Clegg) concluded:

Personally, I find myself in a real quandary. I very much like Turok and Steinhardt's bouncing brane theory; it has a feeling of elegance that the much-patched and fudged Big Bang plus inflation theory doesn't. Yet bouncing branes are dependent on the M theory with the baggage and worries about the validity of string theory that it brings with it. It seems whichever way you turn, there is no easy answer when it comes to the earliest moments of the universe.

Unless you go with Doctor Dino's easy answers.

There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches and all the deserts on Earth. Many have planets. Astronomers at NASA estimate that in just our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are more than 100 billion planets. Here's a way to picture that number of planets: shrink them all to the size of tennis balls and line them up; the string of tennis balls would reach from here to the Sun. How many of those planets have ever supported life at some point in the 14 billion-year life of our universe? One planet (i.e., Earth) in 100 billion? One planet in a thousand? Something in between? Whatever the true number, that only takes into account life on planets in our own Milky Way, which is but one of more than 100 billion galaxies in our universe. And that's just what exists in those dimensions of space and time that humans kind of understand.

So now, knowing even this little bit about the size, age, and complexity of the universe, I'm still supposed to believe that there is this silver-haired God-guy somewhere up there, who not only created it all, but keeps His eye on the sparrow and so I know He cares for me?

But wait, there's more! Invisible demons and angels, like Moroni, are all around us. Miracles happen -- the Virgin Mary's apparition in a burrito. And, if we buy the whole Christian package, we get a personal, dedicated, celestial help line connected straight to the Big Guy.

Dear God: Thank you for this food. Help our team win. Send rain. Stop the rain. Take away my sickness. Give me a raise. Don't let the Democrat win. Send me someone to love. Feed the hungry babies. Stop the war. Please don't let me die and I'll do whatever you say. Et cetera.

Born on the Fourth of July

Notwithstanding what came before the Big Bang, I came along 13.82 billion years afterwards on July 4th, 1946, at 8:29 in the morning, in Room 34 of Emanuel Hospital on Canal Drive in Turlock, California. Seven pounds, 10 ounces; 21½ inches long. I had a very fair complexion and light brown hair on back of head, according to my mother's notes in her blue Our Little Baby album, which includes blond curls from my first haircut at 18 months, preserved in a little cellophane envelope neatly taped on a yellowing page.

I was delivered by Dr. Sidney Olson and assisted by Nurse Strand, who wrote on adhesive tape with her ink pen, Baby Boy Schmidt, and wrapped it around my wee wrist. The bill for my mother's ten hospital-day stay totaled $93.87, including my circumcision ($2.50).

My mother, Kay, was 24 years old. My father, Arnold, was 28. They had married three years earlier in Michigan, during the middle of World War II, and moved west. He had just been ordained a preacher and landed his first job as pastor of the Missionary Church in the little farm town of Denair, in California's San Joaquin Valley, south of Sacramento.

The newspaper from nearby Turlock reported:

DENAIR—Mrs. Arnold Schmidt was the honor guest at a pink and blue shower given Friday evening in the basement of the Missionary Church. Members of the Hebrews 12:21 Sunday school class were hostesses. After several games, which were led by Mrs. D.W. Herr, Miss Doris Elsner of San Jose gave two viola solos, accompanied by Miss Mary Nolt on the piano.

The gifts were presented in a play pen which was the gift of a group of friends. After the gifts had been unwrapped and admired refreshments in pink and blue were served on individual trays to 48 guests.

I can't claim much of a California heritage, since we moved east when I was just two months old. Notwithstanding Denair's hospitality, after my parents' third summer, my mother couldn't take it anymore. Her hay fever was terrible in that sea of farming dust and pollen from the flowering trees and crops. And, though mostly happy in her marriage, my mother was unspeakably lonely. Never had she been so far from home and family, and certainly never in a place as desolate and foreign as the San Joaquin Valley in the 1940s.

So they packed up, and we headed to the Midwest Bible Belt to minister to another little farm town church, this one in Pandora in northwestern Ohio. My parents were young and full of idealism and energy, but it can't have been easy moving cross-country in 1946 to an unknown town. Yet, they would do again and again throughout their lives. You do what you have to do.

Pandora, where I spent my first five years, was a step up for them (salary: $35 per week), with a nice parsonage, and only 150 miles from my mother's family in Detroit.

I was weaned from nursing at five months and from the bottle at 13 months. My mother recorded that she started to break Wayne for B.M.'s at 9 months. Started to train him for bladder at 15 months. I've not done a survey, but this seems early for toilet training. I'm hoping that my short time in diapers at the front end of my life predicts a short time in diapers at the back end, as well.

On my first birthday, my mother made a four-layer cake with a big red candle in the center. My baby book records:

Around one year jiggles to music over radio and climbs stairs. Comes down at 14 months. Stands on head and looks thru legs to play peek 13-14 months. Blows kiss 14 months. One year -- smells things when we tell him to kiss or smell them. 15 months -- understands most things we say to him. Really gets into things. Likes the bookcase and wastebasket best. Blows nose, kisses us, loves us, pats mama on cheek when I ask where she is, blows on my neck after I blow on his. First words: Daddy, pretty, Pudgie [pet dog], bye-bye.

Outdoors, I was kept in check with a harness and long cord, sometimes looped on the backyard clothesline. I wonder if I ever hopelessly wrapped my leash around the poles like dogs do.

Although my mother never mentioned it, when I was just two years old, she tried to have another child but had a miscarriage. While she visited her folks in Detroit afterwards, my father took care of me at home, professing to her a hard time in explaining to me what was wrong with my mother.

After that year's holidays (1948), she recorded:

Christmas was really fun. Wayne was so excited about everything. He squealed with delight at each gift. Granny & Doctor [grandparents] gave him a nice red tricycle which he was thrilled about. He got so many toys he hardly knew what to play with. Bike, tinker toys, little football, large blocks, aluminum tractor with attachments, Pluto dog which you press on his tail to make him go, several windup toys, rubber airplane, cowboy outfit, records, duck lamp, little truck, some clothes.

I remember virtually nothing from those early years, with one terrifying exception. Just before my third birthday, my father decided to take me on a tractor ride during a summer visit to his parents in Kansas. It scared me to death. I cried uncontrollably even while sensing there was no good reason for it. My father laughed, and my mother took snapshots.

Like most preschoolers, I was happy most of the time, I suppose. What else does a kid that young know? Looking back, however, my childhood doesn't feel happy. I was terribly insecure and had few friends. A prominent mole on my right cheek made me feel like a sissy, until one day I scratched it off and it grew back lighter. Being the preacher's kid set me apart. I was expected to behave better than everyone else, set an example, and all that. It also meant that we always were short-timers in town.

The Pandora church fired my dad shortly after my fifth birthday. The vote to keep him was 33 to 18, one shy of the two-thirds endorsement he needed. (It can't have been a complete surprise; a year earlier, the vote had been nearly as close.) My mother called it one of the hardest days of the year for a preacher's family.

There my dad was, out of a paycheck, no preaching job in sight, and a growing family to support (my new sister, Karen, was just two years old). They must have pondered how mysterious are the ways of the Lord.

It was their first of many forced moves. Years later, my dad told me that after five years at a church, he usually lost favor. As he explained it, every time he made some decision about managing the church, especially if a church building program was underway (as in Pandora), from the color of the carpet to the length of his sermons, someone took exception and after about five years of that, all the little slights added up to a bloc that wanted to get rid of him. Later, I would learn that his five-year-tenure insight seemed to apply to most leaders, not just preachers.

I think my mother suffered most from their churches' rejections. Thirty years later, my dad fired from yet another church, she penned her private thoughts:

Hurt is the main ingredient. How can some people be so unkind and caustic in their criticisms? If folks really feel certain ways about the pastor that is one thing -- but it becomes a real tool of the devil when these people peddle and infect others. This is the thing that bothers the most...

The pastor [Arnold] has given of himself instinctively and unreservedly. I as the wife have spent many lonely evenings as he has worked at the church till late. Also, there have been more weeks than not when he has worked a full seven days, many of these 16 hour days.

OK, so he doesn't follow everyone's prescribed routine. He doesn't stop preaching on the dot at 12:00 or call on Uncle Louie like some think he should have. Have they ever considered all the positive attributes he has brought to your church? I refuse to elaborate on this point as it would take too long.

What's wrong with that church? Don't they know how hard Arnold has worked for their church and the parsonage? And they are supposed to be Christian people...

In September, 1951, we moved from Pandora to nearby Ottawa, a grimy little Ohio town where my father took a job at the Weather-Seal factory building window frames. The heavy lifting gave him a hernia, and he had to have surgery, so was out of work for a time. We rented half of a house where we lived with its bats. The house was next to a school with a paved playground. I spent a lot of time alone on the monkey bars.

I got a Hopalong Cassidy outfit for Christmas. It's an icon: me standing at the curb in front of the house, all decked out in black denim, black hat, fringed gloves, a pair of six-guns, and silver spurs. Scowling.

It couldn't have been a happy year for us. I don't know what my mother did with her days, whether she was working or staying home with me and my sister. I do know that we were poor. I'm sure my parents felt that God had answered their prayers when in late-1952 the Missionary Church in Woodburn, Indiana, a short way to the west near Ft. Wayne, offered my dad a job and deliverance from their dark time. At only $40 per week, he would have to take a second job driving a school bus to make ends meet, but at least he would be doing what he was supposed to be doing -- preaching and saving souls for Jesus.

Woodburn is where my childhood memories take better form. The patterns of my life, however, already had been molded. They were defined by the Christian culture of my family, by the insecurity of my father's work and our need to move often, and probably by my toilet training. I was blessed, however, that the world my parents created for me included love and honesty. It also was overlaid with a well-intended, but suffocating blanket of religion.

We Eat on Picnic Tables

I went out of my way to drive through my boyhood town of Woodburn on a lovely fall day in 1989. I was prepared, at 43 years old, to like the charming Midwest village of my memories, but it was smaller than I remembered, run-down and depressing.

Dad's well-tended church was sad and haggard, abandoned for a new one built on the edge of town. The front steps, where my sisters and I had posed for sparkling Easter snapshots from my mother's Brownie camera, were covered with rotting, garish green carpet. The once-lovely slate roof was wrinkled with something cheap and black. Dirty blue paint hung from the doors. The adjacent two-story parsonage where we had lived was long-since demolished.

Gone was the church's belfry of my boyhood. Before services each Sunday morning, I would be sent next door to pull the bell's long, fat rope, clang-clang, a set number of times. I pictured people all over town hearing the sound, going about their getting-ready-for-church affairs. Then I would go home and get dressed up for the weekly routine: Sunday School, morning service, Sunday dinner, evening youth group, evening service.

Rarely did I enjoy myself, though occasionally, the music could be good. I can sing along, even today, to most of the evangelical standards and love traditional gospel music, thanks to my childhood exposure to gospel quartets during annual revival meetings.

Mostly, church was a sentence to thousands of hours of boredom. During one typically interminable Sunday morning church service, I was sitting with a little friend, and while my father droned on from the pulpit, we entertained ourselves by penciling words into titles in the hymnal. Hilarious things like, "Just as I Am Really Fat." We gave ourselves the giggles. That was it for my mother. She marched across the back of the sanctuary, grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the wooden pew, and frog-marched me home, which was literally ten feet from the church.

She lectured me on how embarrassing my behavior was and declared that I had to be punished with a spanking. She took a fly swatter and started whacking my behind. I tried my best to cry, but it turned to laughing, and then my mother laughed, and that was the last time she tried to spank me.

We were still poor, which is probably why we didn't have a TV for a long time, although it may also have had something to do with my father's theology. To watch the Pinky Lee show, I had to visit a friend down the street, whose family had one of those ancient black-and-white jobs. Woodburn's general store got the first color TV around 1955, about the time that Howdy Doody went to color broadcasts. I was surprised, and disappointed, to see that Buffalo Bob's fringed buckskin outfit was baby blue. He looked silly.

On my 1989 visit to Woodburn, my old school's cornerstone still declared: Grade and High School, A.D. 1913, Maumee Township Dist. No. 5. I wandered over to the next-door park, sitting on an old, but freshly painted green picnic table. Could this be the very same picnic table where I played as a boy, where I had gotten into big trouble in the third grade?

Climbing on the picnic tables during recess had been against the rules. I got caught and my teacher, Miss Klopfenstein, made me write 500 times: We eat on picnic tables. She told me, Maybe you will know better than to climb on them again. My mother was outraged with the teacher, but I still had