​It didn’t occur to me that my childhood life was unusual, not until later in life when I discovered that hardly anybody else’s mother was a motorcycle club mama.​When she married one of the young gang members, she didn’t tell him the marriage would trigger the sale of the house we lived in.

​She didn’t tell me and my five sibs, either. Ma waited until the school year was over before telling us kids. I was 14. I came home from my final day of 9th grade and discovered we were moving from the suburban motorcycle gang clubhouse in Berkley, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to a five-acre farm twenty miles away in Farmington. It was a shock. Ma’s theory for moving to a farm was that heavy farm labor would postpone the onset of puberty for us kids.

​Several of the bikers had their pickup trucks parked at the house and we loaded stuff, trip after trip. I don’t actually remember a thing about the move except that our black cat Folly went missing.

​The farm house and barn were on swampland. The farmhouse was built in 1844. The plumbing was barely existent. Water was from a well. First thing in the morning you could hold a cigarette lighter to the kitchen tap and turn the water and a gush of flame erupted from the spout–natural gas that accumulated overnight.

​We took our two collies to the farm, Campbell’s Highland Jane and American Kennel Club champion Royal Scots McTavish. The dogs loved the farm. Janie was two years old and had a deep fear of riding in cars because she’d been hit by a car at age six months and “car” meant “trip to the vet.” But she was astonished by arriving at a farm and her aversion to car rides vanished forever.

​A week after we moved in, Ma stopped the car at the top of the driveway and told me to check the mailbox–it was 50 yards from the house, too far to walk, I guess–and I opened the car door and a young dog threw herself into the car. We decided to keep her. I named her after the mouse in a sci-fi story I’d recently read, “Flowers For Algernon.” She became known as Algie and was a terrific herd dog and hunting dog, it turned out. Our first animal acquisition.

​What’s a farm without livestock? We rapidly acquired a bunch of farm animals. Ma bought a couple horses that otherwise were headed for the glue factory. And pigs. And rabbits. Chickens. Pigeons. It was safe to display affection for animals. You didn’t have to be wary of them the way you had to be with humans.

​ The horses were mares, Babe and Belle. They were from a riding stable and had been handled rough and had saddle sores from being ridden so much. They were fractious at first but soon realized what a better deal they had here instead of the riding stable. We had one saddle, a fairly fancy Western saddle,  don’t know where it came from, but I never used it. I rode bareback with only a halter on the horse, never put the bit of a bridle in her mouth. My horse was Belle, 16 hands high. My brother Scott rode Babe, only 13 hands high but rougher than placid Belle. ​I rode Belle several times a week, even during the winter. Anything to get out of the house.

​I kept bugging Pete and Ma to take me back to the Berkley house to look for our black cat Folly. Eventually we retrieved her. She prospered in the new farm environment where there was a lot of prey.

​ We acquired a 1937 Allis Chalmers tractor and I learned to drive it and my stepfather Pete sent me on missions to other farms to use the sickle bar to mow fields of hay. I was driving it on roads when I was 14.

​You had to hand-crank the engine to start it. I stood on a front tire and cranked with my foot–a backfire could snap the crank back and break your wrist.  

​I mowed hayfields but that was as a slave of my stepfather Pete, who gave me 1% of the money in exchange for doing 100% of the work. The farmer paid $20 and Pete flipped me a quarter.

​Next, stepfather Pete bought a steer. I was dragooned into helping. Pete drove to another farm a mile or two down the road to buy a steer named Duke. Pete’s plan was to tie the steer’s halter to a rope to the car’s rear bumper. The steer would follow along, according to his theory. Duke’s theory was that he could plant all four of his feet and maybe the car could pull his head off but the rest of him was not moving.

​The farmer told me to go back to the farmhouse and tell his wife to saddle up a horse to herd the steer, that’s how you herd a cow. As I stepped up to the front door, a German Shepherd launched herself at my throat and I put up my left arm as a shield and she bit down deep into my forearm. I struggled with the dog and the door opened and the farm wife helped pull the dog off me while her macabre pups bit me in the legs–they were gargoyle pups with German Shepherd heads but the bodies of their dachshund sire. The farm wife held the dog and told me to go into the house but the dog broke loose from her grip and bit me again on the ass and the puppies massed against me on the ground.

​The local rural hospital stitched me up haphazardly and it was a year before I regained full functionality of my left hand because of all the severed tendons that were errantly stitched together. The rabies shots were very painful but I didn’t have to endure the final four injections into the gut–the necropsy report showed that the German Shepherd was not rabid.

​At the hospital I’d been raving hysterically about the dog and extracted a promise that I’d be allowed to shoot the dog, but it turned out the dog was already dead, its head had been sent to the state lab in Lansing.

​ We were city folks and didn’t know that you don’t give names to your meat animals. I still feel like a murderer for killing Bruno, a pig who grunted with joy when I gave him a plate of a favorite food to distract him before we shot him between the eyes with a .22 rifle.

​We could shoot guns out the windows. That was one of the major changes when I was plunged into farm life: guns were everywhere. I was 14 and I already had a .22 rifle that I got when I was 12, but trips to the rifle range were rare. On the farm, I could go into the back yard and shoot. I could shoot from my bedroom window.

​I shot and killed lots of rabbits and pheasant. I had a .22 rifle and also an over/under .22/.410 shotgun. Matt used a bow & arrow with a twine line to harvest pike as big as your arm in the swampy areas adjacent to the farm.

​We tamed down the farm animals pretty well. A couple weeks after we bought our first steer, the farmer we bought it from stopped by to see how things were going and he was aghast to see my little sisters Lanie, 10, and Mary, 8, riding on the back of the steer. That animal has caused a lot of trouble, those kids are in danger, he said. We shrugged and ignored his advice. And none of us was ever injured by any of the large animals, except one big pig who began kicking wildly after we’d shot him in the brain and I wasn’t expecting it and he kicked me in the ankle and I was limping for a week.

​There were lots of farm chores we weren’t accustomed to. We’d get thirty bales of hay delivered and then my younger brothers Scott, 12, and Matt, 10, and I had to carry the ninety-pound bales upstairs in the barn. We struggled on the stairs with one brother on each end of a bale. Then Matt saw a pulley in the barn and he rigged it on end of the barn’s ridge beam.  We tied a rope to the rear bumper of the family station wagon and threaded the rope through the pulley and put a hay hook on the end of the rope.  One of us would drive forward thirty feet to raise the bale to the second story and a brother upstairs would pull it inside and the car would back up and the rope would descend to the ground where another brother would insert the hay hook into the next bale. The bales weighed about 90 pounds. We switched off between jobs with lots of arguing because we each wanted to be the one driving the car. No adult was home to prevent a ten-year-old from driving the car.  

​Matt was the mechanical genius among us. He grew up to become a robotics engineer creating disk-handling machines for Silicon Valley chip fabrication factories.

​Scott was hurt in a hay accident. He used his hunting knife to cut the twine on a bale of hay and put the knife into his right-hand pants pocket, blade out. Then he grabbed a pitchfork and began pitching hay into the horse stalls, and forgot about the knife until he impaled his right hand on it. The blade went through his palm and the tip was showing through on the back of his hand. “Don’t tell Ma,” he said. Of course not, it was worse to suffer her wrath when we interrupted her life by getting sick or hurt. Just don’t tell her about it.

​Scott was away all summer every summer working a hundred hours a week as a matte room boy at art studios catering to the automotive advertising business. Eventually he became an art director at big national advertising agencies.  

​The joy of farming. One year we planted four acres of corn. A pandemic of corn smut hit our crop. The county agent told me what to do: plow the bad corn under, add a hundred pounds per acre of copper sulfate when I used the manure spreader, and disc it in. The next year we planted potatoes and a hugely good crop came in for us, and for every other potato farmer in Michigan and we couldn’t sell the crop, we couldn’t even give it away, potatoes were a glut that year. We ended up filling a 12′ x 12′ storage room with potatoes. When they went bad we fed them to the pigs. Then all our pigs died when the county feed store made a mistake and mixed a batch of hog feed that was 50% salt. The pigs hogged down on it and were dead by the next morning. Eventually there was a court settlement, all the local farms were affected, but then after the judgment the feed store went out of business and never paid the settlement.

​Yeah, the simple natural pleasures of farming.

​Us kids were alone on the farm a lot as Ma and Pete’s social life was still back in Berkley and the hub street of Woodward Avenue where all the hot bars were. We were free range ferals, unsupervised. We’d been operating under the radar of the ongoing parties at Ma’s house: as long as we didn’t get in the way of the bikers, we could basically do anything we wanted.

​The farm was too far away for the Berkley biker gang members to make the trip, so the farmhouse was not constantly swamped in bikers. It was easier for Ma and Pete to go back to Berkley to hang out with their pals

​For a while Ma required the lowest-ranking member of the biker gang to stay with us six kids at the farmhouse while she and Pete were out carousing. These babysitter guys were unhappy with their task and weren’t much fun. After a while it was easier Ma and Pete to leave me in charge of the farm house and my five younger sibs.

​And then we did whatever wanted.

​The speed limit on the unpaved country road was 65 miles an hour but I started to notice cars slowing down to a crawl to pass the farmhouse late at night. There wasn’t much traffic. There was one neighbor half a mile east, and some kind of monastery a quarter mile west on the other side of the road. Then half a mile west was a feeder road and there were a couple houses at the intersection.

​We were home alone at night and sometimes the cars would pull into the driveway and stop, idling. I turned off all the lights in the house and the cars went away. It was nerve-wracking. We didn’t have a phone; Ma had a lecture about why it was wrong for utilities to charge for phone and electricity and gas service, and she never paid a phone bill. So we were on our own.

​On nights when the cars seemed extra threatening I put a sib with a gun at a window facing each direction. I told the sibs not to shoot unless I shot, and I never shot. One time I had to show my gun to some guys who stopped because my sister Lanie was sunbathing in the front yard. Move along, I told them, and they sneered at me, and I came back with my rifle and suddenly they were apologetic and left. Years later I discovered that the farmhouse had been a notorious brothel before Ma and Pete bought it, which explained why every room had a phone jack.

​Despite all the guns and anger, nobody ever was shot. So there, Chekhov.

​It’s funny: I don’t remember much of anything that went on inside the house. There were so many arguments that it’s now just one permanent squabble.

The Snake Pit, I called it in my journals back then. I guess my use of therapeutic journalizing worked: I talked about the problems. I started by trying to write a letter to Dear Abby asking for advice, but I discovered that by setting down my situation in words I was able to see what I should do.

​My journalizing worked so well that today I can’t remember what my main gripes were. Those early journals were all lost along with everything I owned when I was 28. Inside the house I absorbed myself in reading as a method of psychologically transporting myself out of the situation.

​Maybe my retreat into reading was a result of my chaotic childhood. I become completely deaf when I am absorbed in reading, which really helps when the house is filled with loud shouting arguments all the time. By clicking the heels of my eyeballs together, I could transmit myself to a sinking cargo ship in the South China Sea where the only survivors to struggle ashore were me and The Black Stallion.

​In the real world I rode my horse a couple times a week. There was a country store a mile from the house and my horse expected a candy treat every time we went there, nuzzling my shirt pocket to find it. I rode a couple more miles to downtown Farmington a few times a month. One time I rode the horse to school: it was end-of-first-semester final exams and I was crammed to the gills with info about physics and Latin and analytical geometry, and then a blizzard dumped a foot of snow and the schoolbusses couldn’t pick up kids. So I rode the horse three miles to school and took the exams and got A’s and flushed all the info out of my brain.

​We were isolated. It took me a long time to develop any friendships at Farmington High School, which was populated mostly by the offspring from the burgeoning premium subdivisions where farms used to be. I was a stinky farm kid, not the son of a banker. I had to shovel horse and cowshit every morning and the plumbing in the old farmhouse was always on the fritz.

​Ma didn’t care whether or not we went to school; my sibs stayed home as much as possible. Scott, Matt, and Lanie never graduated from high school.

​Things improved for me after I joined the school baseball team and was able to take showers at school. One day in English class, the teacher was impressed by an essay I wrote and she read it aloud to the class. In the hallway after class, one of the girls from the class came up to me and said, “Gosh, I didn’t know you were smart.”

​I never missed a day of school after that.

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