They were known as the Greensboro Four. They were brave young men who, in July of 1960, had the balls to actually sit down at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, which back then we called a “five and dime” store. And yeah, they really did have stuff cheap. The lunch counter was willing to serve black people, but they were not permitted to sit down. They had to stand. The students were refused service, but remained seated anyway, engaging in what was called a “sit-in”. They became famous. The counter is now in a museum. These four brave nonviolent protesters risked much. They drew the anger of whites at a time when that was still extremely dangerous. They very well could have ended up lynched. That’s no lie.

And back then, what these brave men did was not exactly legal. The signs were everywhere: “Colored Only” restrooms, “White Only” restrooms. This was segregation, also known as Jim Crow. Laws that restricted blacks from using the same waiting rooms, restrooms, even water fountains as whites. Laws. I’m not gonna go into that except that I have to say, this was real. It’s the way it was. Slavery was supposed to be gone, but few blacks could count on an equal wage for hard work compared to whites. But there had already been protests long before Greensboro, and these gained in frequency and the numbers of participants, with one very obvious result: whites were angry and scared.

In that climate, Ralph Smith later took his wife, son and two daughters and moved north to Pasadena, Maryland.

He chose a neighborhood called North Shore on the Magothy. It was a developing neighborhood being shaped by Ross Koch, who put his heart and soul into his work. To lay out lots and grade them and dig foundations, he had a single Caterpillar bulldozer and two dump trucks. He knew how to build a four bedroom house and leave trees in the yard. That’s an art long forgotten in the era of scraping huge tracts of land flat, leaving nothing standing, then building rows of shitty homes, transplanting saplings and sod, and raking in the bucks.

It was so different a time that anyone growing up today would be lost there.

Ralph Smith fled the racial trouble and came north to work for a trucking company. Within a few years he had his own company, but never hired black truckers. There weren’t many who owned their own truck tractors anyway, and that’s what he used. Men who owned their own trucks and leased on, pulling Ralph’s trailers. They made money and he made money, running the company out of a downstairs room in the house on Dutch Ship Road. A neighbor worked for him part-time, and they worked hard. The house had no air-conditioning, so on hot days, with the windows open, it had to be miserable.

In the neighborhood, it started out okay. Ralph and Betty Smith had friends. We went to crab feasts, Christmas parties where the there was a Santa, and swam at the community beach.

How all of that went South is beyond me. After a time, they no longer mixed with anyone, and us kids were cut off from the crabs and the beach.

That last one hurt. By the summer of ’68, I was being sexually abused by my parents. Yes, it happened, and yes, boys do react when you rub or suck on them, even when on the inside they feel sick, dirty and guilty. So given a premature sexual activeness, I naturally loved going to the beach and seeing older girls in their bikinis. Oh, I know I stared, and I know they caught me, but they were never nasty about it. They thought I was cute. They sometimes laughed, which bothered me. See, sex abuse fucks with a victim’s self esteem. I thought they were laughing at me, in a bad way. Still, the sight of my first girl in a string bikini made up for it. So when we were no longer allowed to set foot on the beach property, I was unhappy. What I did not know was that my parents had stopped paying dues to the North Shore community association, therefore we had no beach privileges.

A lot happened during the first decade we lived there aside from my father starting a feud with the Association.

In the summer of ’68, there was a girl my age named Barbara who lived a few houses away. We became inseparable. God, I loved her. She gave me my first kiss. She held my hand, we rode bikes together. She had short brown hair, blue eyes and was leggy like a foal, and she made me dizzy. She reached into my heart without knowing it.

One day, one very bad day, she told me her family was moving to Thailand. Later I figured out that her announcement followed the winter TET offensive in Vietnam. Her father must have been Air Force, because Thailand was where all the heavy bombers used against North Vietnam were based.

When she told me where she was going, I knew only that it was far away….and that I would never see her again.

One rainy, dark and cold day when everything had been loaded on moving vans that were long gone, her father loaded his family into their car and stopped by the house to let Barbara say goodbye to me. I couldn’t do it. I’d been miserable for weeks, and this day I dreaded. I hid under my bed, wedged against the wall, a blanket pulled far enough down that no one looking under my bed could see me. I heard the doorbell, heard Barbara and her father, and I wept quietly. Mom came looking for me but apparently never detected my hiding technique; after a few minutes they left. I stayed where I was, muffling my sobs. The only time in my life I was ever so innocently and unconditionally loved was over.

Meanwhile there were things going on that actually made me embarrassed because of my father. Surely there had been grass planted in our big yard, but Ross Koch had made a mistake grading the lot. Summer rains washed dirt and clay along gullies, and there was little grass. When he went to cut the grass, my father raised huge dust clouds. It was embarrassing. Also, I knew he was cheating with a woman out back. He did horoscopes for her, and she worked in a grocery store. When I was the only one with him, I saw the attraction, the flirting and the familiarity they had. Was there no end to this man’s depravity? He’d beat us with belts and make us go to church, but everything was sick. Everything was twisted, and I was confused and post traumatic even though the trauma never stopped. In the class of 1969-1970, when I had to repeat third grade, I met Lee Ann. Of course I shouldn’t have been interested in girls, but the early sexual abuse had made me so. Lee Ann was beautiful, with a bright smile, and I fell in love hard.

But I wouldn’t go near her. I couldn’t. The last thing I could take was her rejection. I kept it to myself and she never knew.

One day, following a particularly severe lashing with dad’s belt, even my arms were bleeding. Angry red welts covered me. I was told to wear a long-sleved shirt. On recess I got overheated. I had to come inside and cool off. The teacher told me to rest my head on my desk, and suggested I roll up my sleeves. I cried. “No!” Because the sleeves had ridden up and bloody, watery welts were showing. I know she saw them. About that time Lee Ann walked in off the playground and saw me. Oh, God, please no! I didn’t want her to see me like this. I put my head back down and ignored her. I’m glad I never told her. Never tried to get close. Her family moved to Alaska. I’d never have been able to get over it. To this day she’s my greatest love.

In 1973 my father made me work for him over the summer. In the warehouse. Another part of growing up too early. I had become too like him. I hated and feared black people, I was turned into a sexual abberation, and I was mean. This attracted the bullies of George Fox Junior High School. My life was officially a fucking mess. By then I didn’t have a friend left in the world. Everything was perverted and disgusting. If not for Star Trek reruns and WCAO AM 60, I wouldn’t have been able to cope. By 1974, I was writing porn, epic stories with developed characters and a loose plot. I masturbated constantly so I wouldn’t “react” when my mother came to my room on Saturday nights. It never worked. Like I said. If you take and suck on or play with a penis, it’s going to react. No matter how disgusted you are. I’m sorry for being so blunt. But people have no idea it’s possible to rape a male without penetration. Women do it more than you think and forced incest happens to more than just girls.

Jesus I was a mess. By then, no one in the community had anything to do with me. In the summer of ’74, a neighbor installed a sun deck for my father and I got a respite from warehouse duty to be his helper. I’d been in so much trouble in school that I was suspended half the time. But working with this kind man who lived at the top of Dutch Ship Road was the best summer of my teen years.

My father came into a shit load of cash. And that summer he installed a deck, double driveway, in-ground pool, and had seed and sod on the newly landscaped yard. Any greener and the shit would have been AstroTurf. The trouble came when he had a white stone retaining wall put in the front yard to keep the grass in place. The community association didn’t like it. They were going to sue to make him remove it. They would have lost on the before and after pictures alone. A shitty place turned into a really nice looking one. What was wrong with that? But he had bad blood with the Association. He’d stopped paying membership dues and withdrawn years earlier. They finally settled for him removing the matching stone pillar on the other side of the driveway. Hell, it was an improvement anyway.

But the neighbor, Larry, I’d been his helper with the deck. I found him to be a friend, perhaps a teacher. Wise beyond his years. A true Christian, a guy who walked the walk with humor, decency and a kindness no one had ever shown me. I idolized him. I wanted to be like that. I decided I was too fucked up to ever be a great man. Something was really wrong with me, and I knew it, but I thought it was me. I didn’t know what PTSD was. Nobody did; the term had not been invented yet. Ashamed of my tangled thoughts, ashamed of my displays of behaviour that I couldn’t control, I no longer aspired to anything that would mark me as anyone history would remember. I couldn’t learn. School was too hard when I couldn’t focus my mind. I decided that all I wanted to be was a decent man like my friend was.

But that never happened. One day my sister and his daughter were swimming in the pool. As soon as I saw his daughter in a blue bikini top, I fell in love with her. I lusted for her and she filled my every thought. How could I be a decent guy with dirty thoughts like these? Because, was it normal? I had read a lot of books. Including large bits of the Bible. And yet I had no idea what “normal” was.

She knew I liked her. That wasn’t good because it left me wide open for a big hurt. Sure enough, that big hurt came one day on the bus ride home. I overheard her talking to Susan, a stuck-up skinny blonde who hated my guts. Her whole family hated my guts. My crush was sitting with her and had mentioned my name. Susan said, “Mike Smith! He’s terrible!”

And my crush never spoke to me again. I never even saw her again because my father pulled me from public school and put me in a private school in Arnold, down past Severna Park. He was tired of me flunking, getting suspended and beat up.

I left the church in Lake Shore. Now unless I saw her in her yard, which I never did, I couldn’t even cross paths. And it dawned on me that her father wanted it that way. It hurt but I loved and respected him.

I no longer had any contact with anyone in the neighborhood. The association hated my whole family. I was rightfully judged mental. It was then that I became an asshole.

I embraced being an asshole. If I could not have friends, then I would fuck with people at will. I keyed cars. Slashed tires. Broke lots of glass. Halloween pranksters had nothing on me; I was getting even.

After getting caught once, I learned stealth and I told no one. It made my anger more satisfying and much more dangerous. No one ever knew when they fucked with me that I’d eaten shit for years, storing anger and hate. They didn’t know when they walked away that they were only able to because I decided not to kill them. I carried knives and waited for the days I’d use them.

I never did. But as much as I could’ve, that knowledge gave me power and satisfaction. Knowing you hold someone’s life in your hands no matter what they think is more than empowering though; eventually it gave me a respect for life so deep that I shook off my father’s teaching and examples of misogyny, racism and elitist isolation. I would vote Republican only once. I became a liberal while somehow remaining an asshole. Near trick, that.

By the time I left that neighborhood, I had no desire to ever go back. I haven’t, either.

I looked up North Shore on the Magothy and it listed an interesting hit. Some dude who lives there calls it a throwback “Mayberry”, the fictional town from the Andy Griffith Show”, and that’s nice. The town Mayberry was based upon is Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Been there. Never going back. Fuck North Carolina. If you’ve been wondering what the point to this post is, it’s this.

Before we had a lawn, there was dirt. I used to play in it with my little plastic soldiers and dinosaurs and a Tonka bulldozer.

No one in that fucking town ever kept their cat inside. I’d be there playing and wondering what the smell was, and much later saw the culprits. Our backyard was a fucking litter box.

Well, I’d like to think that North Shore has become a “Mayberry”. That neighbors really help each other.

I became an asshole. But I really like the idea that it’s a nicer place than it was. I hope people have gotten better.

Me, I never forget the pain and terrors I endured there. And how the neighbors made it all worse, while I sat with a striped back in the sand and frolicked in cat shit.