Read Online Out of the Madness by Jerrold Ladd - Free Book Online

made the paying students go through one line
     and the free lunch kids go through another. It was so humiliating. Mr. Holley, the PE teacher, called me into his office one
     day and made me show him my once white but now brown socks. He did the same with my underwear. He encouraged me to wash out
     my clothes by hand and to bathe myself, and he offered to take me to get a haircut. But I refused. Most of us boys wanted
     to keep our thick hair. And I wasn’t concerned with bathing and cleaning clothes.
    Attending school at Pershing offered me my first exposure to a wide variety of books. I believe my desire for understanding
     at that time got me into reading—since there were few human sources. I read my history and reading books the first week of
     school, from beginning to end. I would sit in class and, instead of participating, read books: I read everything I could get
     my hands on, even several encyclopedias. I even skipped recreation, to read in the library or alone in the field. The reading
     wasn’t focused, but simply a random, indiscriminate process.
    Over the spring of 1980, after my first year in the white school, I began visiting the West Dallas Public Library to satisfy
     my new love. Before, I didn’t even know we had a library. I began to skip school and read at the library all day, for ten
     and twelve hours, sometimes until closing. I read books on hypnosis, psychic powers, and thinking, and encyclopedias to get
     information about specific subjects. I read a lot of science fiction, too, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien. In addition,
     I read plenty of “how to” books, on training dogs, camping, designing paper airplanes, or whatever interested me that day.
     Books became my teacher and my escape. I read voraciously, unmethodically, at the public library for days and years.
    Around the house, activity was changing again. Another man was staying around more than usual. He would sit in our living
     room after he had been upstairs with my mother and smoke his tobacco pipe. If my mother let a man spend several nights, this
     meant she had plans to keep him. I figured it was time to get to know him after a week.
    This one’s name was Henry. He was tall, light-skinned, quiet, and simple. In his thirties, he was content just to have a young
     woman let him stay with her. Henry was also on heroin. But as he stayed with us, I realized he wasn’t so bad.
    Early each morning Henry would walk across the long Hampton bridge to the truck docks, to load and unload the semis for a
     small fee. With the money, he and my mother got high or occasionally bought some lunch meat and bread or a chicken to eat.
    Henry took an interest in me and would advise me about putting my God-given intelligence to use. “Jerrold, you have a lot
     of sense. I hope you grow up and make something out of yourself.” A lot of people would make this comment, but none of them
     ever said how to do it. And Henry was a bit of a coward to me. He wouldn’t help Sherrie or me when we had to fight, wouldn’t
     even come out of the house. Because he helped my mother supply her heroin, he became more important to her than we were: He
     ate before us, and we would receive a savage beating if she detected the slightest disrespect of him.
    After school one evening, Henry introduced me to fishing. He took me down to the pond with two rod and reels and a bucket
     of worms he had dug up from his mother’s backyard. We sat very close to the cattails, where he schooled me about fishing.
     First, he pointed at a long water moccasin that was relaxing in the cattails. “Don’t disturb it,” he said. Just beyond the
     cattails he cast the lines into the water. He propped them up in the air using a Y stick and twisted the reels until the lines
     were tight. We sat for a few minutes. I was told to watch the movement of the tip of the rod, which would signal a fish nibbling
     or nudging the bait. I sat with little interest, paying no attention to the rod I