Ziehm Take Your Shame and Shove It

We Ain't in the Garden of Eden No More
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5439-5276-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 704 Seiten

In the 40's I was taught in Sunday school that our naked bodies were shameful. This was truth accepted without challenge among men and women. It said so in the Bible. You might think, TAKE YOUR SHAME AND SHOVE IT, is all about sex but might be surprised to learn that it is actually about erasing the debilitating fear of sex that was hard wired into my brain. It has been called 'a fascinating portrait of an era that brought about immense moral and social change.' By the time I was three, I was rebelling and by high school made a silent vow that I would free myself from the debilitating teachings that had left me naïve, neurotic and insecure. My quest to free myself from the albatross that hung around my neck passed through MIT, free love Berkeley and the marijuana fields of Mexico and eventually wound up in the illicit world of pornography. It included making the internationally acclaimed science fantasy film, 'Flesh Gordon' which is said to have been the inspiration for 'Star Wars.' My open marriage of 48 years includes a ten-year battle to help my wife escape her addiction to cocaine. This ribald story is told with no holds barred.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ziehm, Howard

Leseproben

1. WHAT WERE THEY HIDING? The question made me think that there was something different about them that I wasn’t supposed to know. “What were they hiding under their skirts and why do they get to wear soft silk underwear while boys had to wear rough cotton ones?” The secrecy made me think that maybe their sprinklers were somehow different than mine. Many times I would ask my mother, “What do girls sprinklers look like?” She would never give me an answer. I reasoned that if I could somehow get myself into a position that would allow me to look up grandma’s dress the mystery would be solved. So while she was busy in the kitchen at the back of the house, I laid down in the doorway that connected the dinning and living rooms, and pretended to play with my little wood train, driving it back and forth between the jambs. The doorway was the only path between the front of the house and the kitchen. If I were patient enough, she would eventually have to step over me. I figured right. As she approached the doorway, I casually rolled over on my back so I could get a view up her dress as she traversed over my head. But at the moment of truth, she stepped far to the side, passing over my legs rather than over my head. She had done it on purpose! She didn’t want me to see what was up there. Whatever it was must be important! Very important!! I was born on April 7, 1940 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; meaning, since Wisconsin made lots of cheese, I was a Cheesehead. Along with this appellation came several others: I was an American, a German and a Christian. America stood for everything that was right in the world and the fact that we were having a war with the ‘Krauts’ meant it was best not to boast about being German. Things would work out if I let God and his son, ‘little lord Jesus,’ protect me and my family from evil. All we had to do was pray each night and go to church every Sunday to let them know their work was appreciated. My first conscious recollection was looking up a narrow flight of stairs that led to the second floor flat where I lived with my mother. Because I liked to roam, and had no respect for boundaries, I felt fully justified in opening the little wooden accordion gate that was meant to keep me safely confined upstairs. When I managed to get past it, I suddenly found myself tumbling head over heals down the cascade of stairs until I reached the bottom. My soft boned body was unharmed and I was just a bit startled - unlike my hysterical mother who was now standing at the top of the stairs going berserk. I quickly reasoned that I should join in on the hysteria and began to cry. For reasons unknown to me, my mother and father didn’t live together and though my mother was the foundation of my life, I spent intermittent periods of various lengths living with grandparents, uncles and aunts. Mostly I lived with my father’s parents, grandma and grandpa Dittman, who had a large house made of stone in Wauwautosa, a suburb north of Milwaukee. It sat in the middle of the block on raised ground a few steps back from the sidewalk. It’s gable roof along with two big blue vases that stood as sentinals outside the front entry door and the fireflies in the backyard that blinked on and off when darkness came, gave it a fairytale like air. My mother would drop by at least once a week to take me to a movie or the zoo and make sure I was happy where I was living. If I said I wanted to move, which was usually if I had been punished for something like drawing little pictures on the wall down by the baseboard, she would arrange to drop me off at one of the other relatives. More often than not, that was her sister, Auntie Ester and her husband Joe Hokinger. I wasn’t unhappy and had no problem with being farmed out. I had a good imagination and was very capable of entertaining myself no matter where I lived. Grandma Dittman discovered this one morning when she entered my room to see why I was making so much noise. She had been downstairs doing her chores when she heard me going: “woo …woo …woo.” Upon entering the room, she saw that I was making believe I was an engineer driving a train. I was standing up behind the headboard of my crib bed holding on to the two decorative pegs that stuck up from its sides as though they were the levers that drove the engine. The puzzled look on her face was not due to the fact that I was driving a choo choo, but that I was wearing one of her silk slips. While she was downstairs, I had quietly snuck down the hall and grabbed it off the top of her bed where it had been left lying and tiptoed back to my bedroom so I could slip into it before returning to my crib bed to play engineer in my fantasy train. It mattered not that the slip was much too large for my small body, I just loved how nice the silk felt against my skin. Too young to be considered a pervert, my little fetish was just shined off as a bit odd. When the time came for me to be dumped off at Auntie Ester’s house about an hour away in Springfield, I had a special opportunity to enjoy my infatuation with trains in a more realistic way. Each evening just before sundown, a long freight train would lumber by in the distance and as soon as I heard its whistle blowing, I would run out on the front lawn waving a white towel my aunt had given me. My hopes were by franticly waving it; I would get the attention of the engineer. It was a joyous thrill when he waved back with a white handkerchief. As the train disappeared around a cove of trees, I wondered where it was going; to what unknown lands did the tracks lead? Auntie Ester was a somewhat skittish woman with light curly reddish hair and Uncle Joe, a tall handsome good-natured man with a warm resonant German accent, never punished me, but they chose not to have children of their own for a reason, and after two weeks or so, I became more than they could handle and I would find myself heading back to the Dittmans who I knew would welcome me with a little present. My mother 1943 Life in the early 40’s was sparse. World War II was going at full force and though I had no idea what it was about other than the Germans were bad and us Americans were good, I did understand that to help us win the war; milk, sugar and flour had to be rationed. Meat was hard to come by and we only had it when my grandpa could trap a squirrel or rabbit in the backyard. Roasted squirrel or rabbit was a treat to be relished. It was a mystery to me where my mother lived, since I only saw her when she came by for a visit. That usually included a visit to the zoo or a movie – preferably a Disney movie. I loved animals and came out of the theatre after seeing Bambi with tear- filled eyes. Despite the fact that I wasn’t under her constant care, I knew she loved me. She insisted that I be properly clothed to protect me from getting colds or Polio. The images of little children encased in iron lungs, large barrel-like apparatus that allowed for only the head of the victim to stick out, was so terrifying that I didn’t mind being over-dressed to prevent that fate from happening to me. No matter who I stayed with, instructions were given for them to send me to bed no later than eight o’clock. When she visited and my bedtime came, I would insist she read me my favorite story: ‘The Little Engine That Could.’ The sound of its determined chugging as it struggled to reach the top of the hill, “I think I can, I think I can,” followed by “I knew I could, I knew I could” as it raced down the hill was a comforting thought as I fell asleep. At times, when she had to leave early, I was told it was because she was going somewhere to look for a new daddy for me. Why this was necessay I had no idea. At those times she always seemed to come to the Dittmans wearing a white body hugging knit dress that molded around all the curves of her body. She had plenty of curves - nice full ones - and I found them attractive, but had no clue why the dress would help her find me a new daddy. She seemed to be happy when she had that dress on and it was none of my business anyway. The existence of sex was not in my universe. It simply just did not exist. The weird little thing between my legs, called a sprinkler because peepee sprinkled out of it, was only there for that specific purpose. When not sprinkling it was supposed to be covered. Putatively this was because it was a private part and dirty. Any thoughts about where babies came from was explained with the established science of Storkology; that babies were delivered by storks who dropped them atop chimneys much like Santa Claus did with presents at Christmas time. At baby time, a chimney was a very important part of a house. Grandpa Dittman wasn’t as strict as grandma Dittman and sometimes would take me along to the small cabinet-making factory he owned that was not far from the house. There I would use the strips of dovetails as trains and pull them along the floor between the little piles of sawdust I had used to make hills. In the evening, after dinner, he would read stories from the newspaper to my grandmother as they sat around a small table in the kitchen located at the back of the house. Children were “meant to be seen and not heard,” so I would pretend to be playing on the floor, but my ears were peeled like a hawk. He always started with stories about the war; how things were progressing. Americans didn’t like the Germans because we were fighting them so the word ‘German’ was always spoken in a muted voice. It was...