Even Suzie figured out that there was something wrong with Ham. When Marilyn died, and then Alison, Suzie and her family came to the funerals, over three hundred miles away, but Hamilton didn't even send flowers. Now, this time around, his disdain and dislike had changed to hatred.
The first time, Marilyn and the kids didn't even want to be around him. Maggie wouldn't even visit without Jackson being with her, and Mom wouldn't allow that until they got married. Most of the family thought he was kind of creepy, sort of like Norman Bates in Psycho, but without all the nasty killing business. Now I wasn't so sure about avoiding the killing, especially my desire to kill him!
On the other hand, I had learned a lot on my first trip through. Specifically, Alison having Williams' Syndrome was a learning breakthrough. The most important thing to remember when you have a child with learning disabilities (or, as we called it in the far less politically correct Sixties and Seventies, mental retardation) is to have patience. There are many things the child will never learn, no matter what you do or how loud you yell or how hard you hit. Not that I did, I was never a monster, but you really learn patience. Hamilton taxed my every limit.
I had learned. Back then we had often gotten into fights, when his behavior and mulish stubbornness had pushed me too far. Now, I would just simply get up and leave the room. I generally only slept in my bedroom now, and any of my belongings were under lock and key.
Mind you, this was all very depressing. I had spent the first 21 years of my life in this environment, being told repeatedly that I was a failure and a disappointment. Now I was going through it all over again, and vastly exceeding what I had done before, and being told I was even more of a failure and more of a disappointment. I understood what was happening, but it made for some very black days at times. This recycling bit was not all that great at times.
I also changed my overall appearance. Prior to this, I had always tried to dress like a hippie, just like every other kid in school. All of us non-conformists simply had to conform to each other. The uniform was blue jeans, a tee shirt, and sneakers. An exciting change, for some of the tougher kids, was boots, like biker boots. Hair was worn long, as long by the guys as it was by the girls. At the time, I grew my own hair so long that it went below my shoulders and I had to wear a headband, suitably painted with a Peace sign, to keep it under control.
Oh, if I had only been able to save that hair! Even then I knew that male pattern baldness was genetically transmitted, and that it ran in the family. It runs down the women's side, skipping generations, and Mom's father had been a cue ball. I was going bald by my mid-thirties.
So I changed my wardrobe. By the time I was out of school, I had realized that the back seam on Levi's really rubbed my rear end wrong, and had shifted over to khakis and chinos. I also switched over to sports shirts, with collars, which actually looked pretty good on my muscular upper body. Wear them a little tight and the girls really noticed. I got a haircut, not ridiculously short, but like something a fashionable twenty-something would wear. That actually took some doing, because back then you had to search to find a stylist for a man. Men went to barbers, and the choices were limited to crew cuts or a 'regular', which was just long enough to part on one side. When I grew out of my denim jacket, I bought a leather jacket, bomber style.
And I bought a hat. Way back when, on my first go-around, I had started wearing fedoras almost from day one in college. This was years before the Indiana Jones movies made hats popular again, but I didn't care. It made me a bit different, and the ladies didn't mind. I looked good in a hat. I just started a few years earlier this time.
Ten years before, every man in America owned a hat. Then JFK wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue bareheaded and overnight the hat industry in America entered bankruptcy! In the future, everyone idolized him, Camelot cut short, all that sort of nonsense. In reality he was a fairly decent domestic President and an abysmally bad foreign relations President (okay, he did all right with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he's the one who put us into Viet Nam, and the Bay of Pigs was his baby), but he sure wasn't Washington and Lincoln reincarnated. The one thing you can't argue about is that he was young, vigorous, virile, photogenic - and didn't wear hats! You couldn't pay men to wear a hat by the end of the decade.
Mind you, I got razzed about it the first couple of times, but the first time I wore it, it just happened to be raining. I simply said, "Go ahead, laugh, see if I care. My head's dry. Hmmm?" I said this to Ray Shorn, who looked like a drowned rat at the time. He flipped me the bird and I laughed right back at him.
By the time I got through tenth grade, my khakis and sport shirt and deck shoes (very comfortable!) set me apart like a great white shark swimming through a sea of blue denim. I am telling you, it didn't hurt with the girls, either.
Chapter 14: Junior Year
September 1971
In the Seventies, it was a lot simpler getting a driver's license as a teen than it is nowadays. You could get your learner's permit when you were still fifteen, and then get your license when you were sixteen, as long as you had taken Driver's Ed classes and passed the tests at DMV. Now you get different grades of license, all depending on how old you are, but back then, if you had a license, you could drive. I was going to be sixteen in another couple of months, and I wanted my license.
On the first trip through, Hamilton and I weren't even allowed to get our learner's permits until we were seventeen. By the time we went through driver's ed and took the tests, it was the spring of our senior years before we got our licenses, and we weren't allowed our own cars. Well, fair is fair, neither of us had any money to buy a car. We could only drive Mom's old 67 Dodge Dart, and we ran that sucker into the ground!
I raised the subject at dinner after school started in September. "Dad, what does your company do with the company cars when you turn them in?" Dad had driven a company car for years, mostly station wagons, but had now started to drive sedans. He always had some work gloves and steel toe boots and a hard hat in the back, for going to quarries and job sites.
He shrugged. "They sell them. Harry T. Campbell's doesn't actually own the cars. They're owned by a leasing company. Why?"
"What's a leasing company?", asked Hamilton.
I didn't look at him and we all just ignored him. "How's that work? After so many years you give it to them and they give you a new one?"
"What's a leasing company?", pressed my brother. He hated being left out of a conversation. If it wasn't about him, nobody else should talk.
I looked over at him. "I'm talking to Dad, not you." and then turned back to Dad.
Dad was on the verge of answering when Ham started complaining. Mom cuffed him on the back of the head and told him to be quiet, which he did grudgingly. Dad waited for this little Hamilton drama to finish before answering. "Pretty much. They're typically three year leases, so every three years I give them back my car and they give me a list of three or four new cars I can get, and I pick one. Why?"
I didn't answer directly. "What do they do with the old cars?"
"Sell them. Why?", he continued.
"Give me a moment. Can anyone buy one?"