When I was a kid preeminent writers, poets and notable celebrities were entertained in my home. Beguiling and legendary characters like John Ciardi, Erskine Caldwell, Tennesee Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. Even notable hot-shots like Conrad Hilton and Toots Shore were fed and feted in our living-room.

The road to this literary hospitality began in earnest in 1955 when my family moved to Austin, Texas, where my Father was pursuing his doctorate in English and Philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was an examination of the allegorical poem "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot.

According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature the poem "is about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value to men's daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death heralds no resurrection". This is hopeless, existential stuff from a Victorian mindset.

Sex, sinister and noxious, is at the core of the gloomy poem. Eliot, brimful of conservative Christian attitude, sourced the myth of the Fisher King. In the legend, Joseph of Arimithea, a rich man who took down Jesus' body from the cross and buried him in his own tomb, brought the Holy Grail to England. A descendant of Joseph's was the Fisher King whose genitals were wounded, rending him infertile. His injury affects the kingdom itself. Its vital and regenerative power gone, the kingdom experiences drought, war and infertility. And becomes a waste land.

Dad was a philanderer. Throughout his marriage, until poor health robbed him of sexual function, he fucked around. His position in the academe gave him easy access to coed nookie, and he understood the power of poetry on the young and susceptible female mind. He would feed on the idealistic and naive romantic nature of college girls. And when he was getting his doctorate he got to know -- biblically -- women who were also in the post-graduate program. In particular, I remember fights at home over a woman named Maude.

One evening he headed over to the University of Texas campus. He had me with him. I don't remember the reason or the circumstance, but I was along for the ride. He parked the car on campus and he stayed behind the wheel. A woman approached and he introduced her to me as Maude. They had a bit of conversation, but I don't recall what they said. Afterwards, on the drive home, he said "Don't tell your Mother."

The only advice I ever remember him giving me regarding women was "Get yourself a married woman." Maybe he was being cautionary. Maybe he was trying to guide me away from some penis-driven trouble he'd experienced. "They go home at night," he said.

My father's public persona was that of a gentle, peace-loving man of God. He claimed that he returned from the war a pacifist. His family were Southern Baptists and, generation after generation, did their church-goin' at the Red Oak Baptist Church (established 1776) in Appomattox county, Virginia. But when Dad shipped home from WW II he enrolled us in the Church of the Brethren, a denomination, like the Quakers and Mennonites, known for it's pacifist stance that held to the deistic populism of the Sermon on the Mount.

Even so, he didn't spare the rod.

I know that he was attempting to mold me into his salient concept of what a Man should be. He did it by walloping the holy shit out of me regularly. Each blow delivered a dictum. A man needs to know how to take a beating. Life is hard. A man needs to wear the scars, badges and insignia of his travail. A man needs to achieve rank. And stature came from a closed fist or the buckle end of a leather belt applied with vigor. His technique was to hammer at me until he was too exhausted to continue. Luckily, after he left the army, he'd pretty much let himself go, so the pummelings were not as severe as they could have been. Still, there was damage. Most of it psychological.

© skip williamson 2009

But culturally, in the 50s, corporal punishment was all the rage. My friends were routinely thrashed as well. So we were a camaraderie of the bruised, a fellowship of the battered. We were wounded, but we weren't vanquished. It's no wonder that we became hippies. All we needed was love and peace. And when that wasn't forthcoming we chose to worship the golden idol. And here we are today, lost and about to die.

At home, the Bible was our routine before bed. We'd pass the book around and read aloud chapter by chapter. From Genesis through Revelation. Then, after we'd made it through the Good Book, it was a canto a night from the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri -- illustrated by Gustave Dore' -- to send us off to gentle slumber.

I've often thought that it was Dore's lavishly lurid illustrations of decapitated and disemboweled sinners that inexorably set the course for my developing fascination with the E.C. line of horror comics. The bloody handwriting was on the wall.

While he was pursuing higher education, my Father became involved in a clandestine, illicit publishing event. He, with fellow students, gained unauthorized access to printing and production facilities at the University of Texas, and produced a thin outlaw volume of smirking intellectualism and lofty satire entitled "The Grub Street Review". He was especially proud of of this surreptitious adventure. I could see that this covert shenanigan pleased him. And I learned from it. It was underground.

"The Grub Street Review" was published under the fictitious imprint of "Paradise Alley Press". When I was in high school and published a fanzine, I sourced it as a "Paradise Alley Production".

But the greatest gift my Father gave me was a love of language and books. He introduced me to Lawrence Durrell, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Camus. By 1956 the Beats were making noise, so very early on I was reading the feral poetry of Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. And Nabakov, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence swirled around me like a hot wind, triggering primal urges and stirring nascent carnality through literature.

I was reading and relishing Shakespeare when I was nine-years-old. I was riveted by the revelations of tragedy and innate human treachery. And by the comic buffoonery and romantic delusions of the specie, the temptations of the flesh, the corruption of the soul and the connivance of politics all laid out so lyrically. I was fascinated by the syncopation and poetry of it.

And in 1956 I was on stage, acting in Richard III as young Prince Edward, banished to the Tower of London and murdered for political convenience.

My Dad had steered me into an acting program for children that was part of the theater department of the University of Texas. I attended regular acting classes and was assigned ingenue roles in UT productions. These were full-fledged theatrical events, performed in the Hogg Memorial Auditorium on the university campus.

During the 50s in Texas, and throughout the South there was only the Democratic party. It was unheard of that a Republican would win an election south of the Mason/Dixon line. The real political battles were between the liberal and the conservative factions within the Democratic Party. In those days a Socialist political stance in the southern states could be hazardous. In Louisiana, vociferous governor Huey P. Long, was felled in a hail of hot lead for his strident populist beliefs. And in Texas politics the bodies of liberal contenders and their disciples were buried in shallow graves throughout the Lone Star State.

Allan Shivers served as Lieutenant Governor of Texas during the 40s and, at the death of Governor Beauford Jester in 1949, he ascended to the most influential post in Texas politics. Shivers, a strict segregationist and sycophant for the powerful natural gas and oil industry, served three terms until 1956 when his Lieutenant Governor, Price Daniel, took up the mantle and ran as the conservative Democratic candidate for governor.

Ralph Yarborough was a liberal Democratic who had challenged Allan Shivers in the Democratic primaries in 1952 and '54. Shivers had portrayed Yarborough as an integrationist supported by communists and labor unions. Yarborough, whose slogan was "Let's put the jam on the lower shelf so the little people can reach it", denounced Shivers and his supporters as corrupt "Shivercrats".

In 1956 Yarborough ran in the gubernatorial primaries against Price Daniel, who had been Allan Shivers' Lieutenant Governor. His slogan this time was "A vote for Daniel will give you the Shivers".

My Father went to work for the Ralph Yarborough campaign. He was a researcher, and his job was to ferret out evidence of Price Daniel's malfeasance and political venality.

There was much talk around the house about how dangerous his work was and, when he'd head out on his intelligence-gathering missions, Mom and I would ride along and wait in the car just to make sure nothing untoward happened to him. It was all very exciting.

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, a liberal intellectual, was the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. Predictably, Dad was an avid Stevenson supporter. He was all about the intellectual persona. He even smoked Kent cigarettes because that was the brand of preference for scholars.

One day I went to school wearing an Adlai Stevenson for President button. I was promptly beat up in the schoolyard and forced to wear an "I like Ike" button.

These were the seeds that began to grow into what would eventually blossom into my contemptuous and skeptical regard about the overall nature of politics.

After Dad got his doctorate and we moved out of Texas, I subscribed to the Ranger -- right around the time Frank Stack became the editor. I began to take notice of the cartoons of Gilbert Shelton there. And Jack Jackson. And the writing of William Helmer.

And, many years later, Bill Helmer and I were on-staff loose canons together at Playboy magazine.

There was a satiric chemistry, a cartoon momentum gaining velocity in Austin. It was my gateway drug. I was under the influence. And it wouldn't be long before I, too, was cookin' up shit and peddling it to credulous greenhorns in need of provacative advice.

My Mother has a bit of a clairvoyant nature, but she told me it's dissipated over time.

On July 25, 1956, Mom was startled awake by a disturbing dream. She woke my father and told him that, in her dream, it was at night and she was at sea. Not in a ship, but more like she was hovering over the black and briny deep. There was an ocean liner, her cabin lights dimly glowing through a thick fog. She could hear soft music coming from an onboard lounge. Suddenly there was a tremendous metallic grinding, distant screams, breaking glass and the scraping sound of furniture sliding across the deck as the ship listed sharply toward the right. As the dawn broke the ship lay on her side surrounded by rescue ships. Airplanes and helicopters circled overhead. Gradually the bow began to sink and the stern lifted out of the water, and the ship began to slowly turn on it's axis.

My Mother said "I could see the large letters on the side of the ship. There were two words. I can't remember exactly what they were, but one started with the letter "A" and the other with "D"."

"Then there was a loud roaring sound," she said. "Then the ship slipped below the water creating a whirlpool."

"After that, the only thing I remember is the bright morning sun shining on the ocean, peaceful and calm."

Later in the day the paper brought the news that the Italian liner, the Andrea Doria, had collided with the Swedish passenger ship, the Stockholm, about 50 miles southeast of Nantucket Island. Fifty-one people lost their lives in the accident.

In the Spring of 1956, The first airborne US hydrogen bomb was tested over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, assuring the certain nuclear annihilation of the human race.

Early in the year lawyers for the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, filed a petition in federal court challenging the city’s bus segregation ordnance. A stick of dynamite was blew Martin Luther King's front porch to smithereens. And the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ban on segregation in public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education.

In July '56 "In God We Trust" was authorized as the slogan for the United States.

That year IBM introduced the Model 305 computer capable of storing 20 megabytes of data, setting the course that has led us to the unfettered access to pornography that we enjoy today.

The CIA initiated a secret program called MK-ULTRA that included dosing hundreds of unsuspecting subjects with LSD and other powerful hallucinogens in an attempt at mind control. Josef Mengele would have been proud.

Elvis Presley topped the charts in 1956 with ``Love Me Tender,'' "Hound Dog,'' and "Heartbreak Hotel.'' I was not allowed to own Elvis Presley records. I could have records of other singers performing his songs. But the voice of Elvis was strictly verboten.

Meanwhile, under the radar, John Lennon formed a British band called the Quarrymen.

Humiliated and defeated in 1954 at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, the French gave up the ghost and, in 1956, pulled the last of it's troops out of Vietnam, creating a vacuum that would soon be filled with the expendable bodies of my peer group.

And in June, Marilyn Monroe & Arthur Miller were married. This nuptial event pleased my Father because Miller was an erudite intellectual who had snagged a hot babe.

In 1957 my Dad accepted a teaching position at Culver-Stockton College, a small liberal-arts, church-related college on the Mississippi River in Canton, Missouri. There he became Chairman of the English Department, and as such, it became his purview to entertain literary personalities and other celebrities who were guests of the college.

My Mother told me that of all of them Tennessee Williams was the most unpleasant. "He was drunk the entire time," she said. "And he couldn't keep his hands off the college boys."