Chuck-the-fuck

I have a brother that I reference as Chuck-the-fuck. Chuck was (and, I am sure, still is) a bully when we were kids. The oldest child of what eventually became six siblings (with two preemie babies that did not survive infancy so those little girls never experienced Chuck's bullying), my parents seemed to feel helpless to do anything about Chuck. Boys will be boys.

I have four brothers. I was the second kid after Chuck-the-fuck. I didn't start calling him Chuck-the-fuck back in my childhood.  I don't think I ever said the word fuck out loud until I had left home and even then, never at home. Good Catholic girls don't use profanity and I was a good one.  Except for profanity, I still score as a good Catholic girl, in the sense that I actually follow all the rules. Well, I don't go to church or confession, those are still mortal sins, I guess. Never mind. If I edited myself, I'd delete this paragraph because I have digressed. This essay is about Chuck-the-fuck.

In our grammar school, an 8th grade rite of passage required every 8th grader to give a speech about the person they most admired in history. I graduated the 8th grade in 1967. Chuck in 1966.  I suppose it was a sign of the times, pre-feminist consciousness in my life, because it never occurred to me to choose a woman. I can remember reflecting on what seemed, at the time, to be a portentous, meaningful choice. Which figure in history would I pick?! I never considered that there were any meaningful female history figures. That's sad, eh? And later, at my all girls' high school from 1967 to 1971, I don't remember any introductions from the nuns to the possibility that women had ever done anything important. The contemporary female issues that roiled our school was the new birth control pill, which the nuns seemed determined to keep all of us Catholic girls from using. Ever. We also debated the Vietnam War. I confess, with chagrin, that I happily advocated for the war. I remember talking, in my history class debate my sophomore year, about how we had some kind of commitment to support the French in Vietnam, so we had to fight there. I never gave a thought to the slaughter. I only analyzed the war in terms of the treaties my history book presented.  I don't remember doing any other research, other than Encyclopedia Britannica. And EB talked about our treaty with the French.

When my kid was in high school and had to write papers, I took her to the library. Gosh, I worked in a library all through high school. I knew how to do research. I always loved libraries. But I have always had a black and white tendency to do things in rigid form.  If my teacher had assigned us to do research at the library, I would have, but that was not assigned. I don't remember being encouraged, ever, to think independently. As a black and white thinker, I needed someone to tell me to be flexible. Maybe?  Maybe I am manufacturing retroactive justification for what I readily concede was my considerable naivete in my teen years.  I also acknowledge that I went to a mediocre high school.  I don't think my school expected its graduates to go to college. I know that most of my friends only saw college as something to do until they married. None of my closest friends expected to finish college.  My best friend and I had a bet, as we graduated, about who would drop out first. I can honestly report that I bet twenty bucks that I would graduate in four years and would not consider marriage until beyond college. My best friend bet against herself, at least I thought she did. She bet that she would drop out after one year, having landed her man. She and I lost touch.  I don't know if she graduated.  I remember her declared major, that she chose as soon as she got on campus. She announced that she was majoring in something related to fashion design.  I don't remember how I might have responded to her announcement to her but I remember being appalled. First, she had never voiced any interest in fashion or design in four years of being best friends in high school. Where did she come up with that? I asked her that, I think. She said her advisor had asked her to talk about what she liked to do and then the advisor had suggested fashion design as a major and that sounded right to her.  I hope I didn't say to her, but maybe I did, maybe this is why we lost touch with one another, but I remember being shocked.  I was at a liberal arts college, looking forward to studying art, philosophy, literature, culture and history.  I gave no thought whatsoever to tying my studies to a job. Such an approached offended something in my beliefs about a college education. What was she going to do with a year of fashion design? Remember, she expected to drop out of college after no more than two years to marry and have babies.  I have dreamt about this friend countless times.  I have a recurring dream about her. In this dream, I learn that her parents were secretly very wealthy and she never had to earn money and that was why she didn't care about finishing college.  In this dream, she leads a mysteriously prosperous life, traveling a lot, free of all financial cares. Over and over, she and I, in these dreams, try to reconnect but we never do.

Gosh. I digress.

So. When my brother Chuck-the-fuck was in the 8th grade, he chose Adolf Hitler as the man he most admired in history. I found out about this because one of my girlfriends who lived next door was in the 8th grade. Ellen. I was buddies with both Ellen and her sister Nancy who was my age. Ellen told her mother about Chuck's speech choice when I was in their kitchen.  I was instantly mortified, but tried to hide my uneasiness. I mentioned it to my folks, but if they ever discussed it with my brother, I never heard about it. Which means they probably didn't because Chuck would have punished me for interfering in his life. So I concluded that my folks ignored that choice. And Chuck gave that speech.

Chuck was that he admired Hitler because Hitler favored the Aryan race and our Celtic ancestry made us Aryan.  Chuck's teacher must have known, in advance, that Chuck was going to talk about Hitler. This was not long after WWII.  We, obviously, didn't have any Jews in our Catholic grammar school. But we had lots of refugees from Eastern Europe in our neighborhood, like Poles. Lots of Poles and immigrants from Slavic countries. Not many of them came to our school.  I assumed, at the time, that the waves of immigrants that moved into our neighborhood weren't Catholic, because even poor kids could go to our school. This was in a heydey of Catholic schools in Chicago. Our school was stuffed to the fills with post-war baby boomers.  Every grade had three classes and each class had, no kidding, fifty or sixty kids.  Virtually all the kids in our neighborhood that were Catholic, even the poorest ones living in then-quite-rare single mother households, divorce being very rare, esp. for Catholics in the fifties and even the early sixties, went to Catholic school.  Only one family on our block, and nearly every house on the block had kids, went to public school. That mom was a widow with 10 kids.  They were very poor, that family, but that's not why they didn't go to Catholic school. The reason they didn't go to Catholic school was much, much odder than poverty:  they weren't Catholic! They were the only non-Catholics I personally knew in my grammar school era.  Now I am wondering if the Polish kids on nearby blocks might have been Jewish?  I don't know anything about Polish history emigrating to America. I have a vague understanding that Hitler slaughtered a lot of Jews in Poland. Or did he just slaughter Poles in general?  I don't know.

I don't remember hearing anti-semitism in my household growing up.  I heard plenty of casual racist talk about blacks. Gosh, in those days, most white people referred to blacks as niggers and it was not really seen, in my white world, as a racist way to refer to African Americans. That was the vocabulary.  But in my household, my mother forbid us to say nigger and she constantly complained when my dad used the word.  My dad was an average civil-service (equivalent, in Chicago, to being a good union man) precinct captain whose livelihood was dependent on the Chicago political machine: dad delivered Democratic votes on election days and dad got his kids pleasant summer jobs at public libraries and dad got maximum promotions in his civil service career. He also had to pass exams to advance but once you made the list, your connects greatly influenced the jobs you scored. There were good locations for his work and bad ones. Dad got the good gigs.  A very long battle with my parents revolved around dad's civil service politicking. Dad's connects were only good in certain strata of the city.  My dad deliberately failed some civil service exams to avoid a promotion because there were no jobs at the higher grade where he already worked. My dad loved where he already worked. That first place was filled with guys from his old neighborhood, like his home town. If he got promoted, he would have to move to a facility with all unfamiliar co-workers, including more black civil engineers. My dad was a civil engineer for Chicago. He had the same job, I think, that Michelle Obama's dad had with the city, actually.  I actually bet that my dad new her dad, because when mom won this fight and dad passed the test and got promoted, I am pretty sure he was transferred to the same plant where Obama's dad worked.  Gosh, the things I remember. If I were to tell this stuff to my sister, who was born the week I graduated from the 8th grade, she would say "How come you remember all this family history and I don't?"  Um gee, maybe cause you weren't born for some of it. We actually moved away from that parish the year my sister was born.  My dad resisted that move, too. He loved our old neighborhood.  But my mom prevailed. And then we all found out, part of mom's motivation had been to engineer her escape from the marriage.  She knew she wanted out. She anticipated only taking the three youngest lids with her into her new life. She bought a house that she thought would be easier for her to take care of when she got it in the divorce. Our old house was a gigantic barn, with a rental apartment.

I am way off course.  I was writing about Chuck the fuck.

Chuck worshipped Hitler. And I don't think he was faking to be outlandish, although at the time, I remember trying to convince myself that he had chosen Hitler just to be obnoxious.  I didn't know much about Hitler. My Catholic grammar school and high school never discussed the Holocaust. Ever.  I got lots of Holocaust at college.  My undergraduate program had a much-touted Freshman Humanities requirement:  all freshman took these classes and studied the same books, heard the same lectures and then met in small groups for discussion and paper writing. And the Holocaust was a big part of that. We watched the films showing what American soldiers found when they got to the death camps, seeing endless mounds of human skeletons, seeing the ovens, seeing the endless hovels that housed endless streams of innocently slaughtered humans just because they were Jewish.

My dad fought in WWII. My parents both followed the course of the war along with the rest of America.  They had to have known that Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews.  How could they let Chuck give a speech about Hitler as the man he most admired in history?  I guess in 1966 Catholic world, there was not much empathy for genocide. And, of course, the Catholic Church enabled Hitler in some meaningful ways that the church long refused to acknowledge.  Maybe my parents were blind and clueless.

But Chuck wasn't.

Later, after my parents divorced, Chuck lived at his college campus during the school year but with my dad in the summers, as I did.  In those long summers (long living with Chuck), he would pace up and down the length of our house talking manically about Hitler, the superiority of the Aryan race, the superiority of Chuck's ethnic background. I never really listened to him so I can't explain his position but Chuck seemed to take much comfort in endlessly assuring the rest of us that, according to Hitler, we would have been considered Aryan and safe from genocide. And this proved, in Chuck's rationale, that we were superior. Because, he said, people just didn't understand what Hitler was trying to do. He didn't want to erase Jews. He just wanted to ensure the human future by only allowing superior people to live in the future. It was basic jungle law. Survival of the fittest.

Then, as Chuck moved through law school, and I moved through law school and I went home to Chicago less and less and less, mostly to avoid him, he married and moved his wife into dad's house. And he still would pace up and down the house, talking endlessly and subjecting everyone in the house to his rants. It was crazy behavior. Manic. Definitely manic. 

I tried to get my dad to forbid Chuck from unloading his ranting on the rest of us. Couldn't dad make Chuck stay in his room when he felt a need to rant?  Dad did allow me the privacy of my bedroom but he couldn't stop Chuck from pacing and ranting.