After I got out of the army in 1963, I worked for the unemployment office in Camden for a couple years. Then I got job teaching “developmental reading” – speed reading, actually – for a fly-by-night outfit in Philly.
Another guy and I got sent to Chattanooga to teach the eight-week program at two schools there. We rented a house on Missionary Ridge and drank in a neighborhood bar. I was a practicing alcoholic at the time.
One night, by myself, I went to the Black section to hear some music and got drunk enough that some Black dudes gave me a ride back to the bar on Missionary Ridge. The local guys saw me get out of a car of Black guys. When the bar closed, I was really drunk and three of them offered me a ride home.
I sat in the front passenger seat and after we had gone about a block, they started calling me a nigger-lover and began hitting me in the head and face with full beer cans. This went on until I was semi-conscious and they pulled over in a quiet neighborhood and threw me out of the car. They had taken my shoes.
Drunk and beat-up as I was, I knew they were going to come back and kill me. Sure enough, they came back. I had staggered to a parked car and when I saw them stop, I crawled under the car and pulled myself up on the undercarriage so that they might not see me if they looked under the car. It worked and they drove away.
I lurched to a house and knocked on the door. It was very late and the residents took a look at me and called the cops, who took me in for drunk and disorderly. I spent the night in the drunk tank, and the next morning when I went before the local judge he took one look at me and told them to put me back in the tank for the weekend. I was beaten and bruised, shoeless and dirty, hung over and sick. I couldn't take a weekend in the Chattanooga drunk tank.
As they were leading me away, I looked up toward the bench and saw Bobby, the judge's clerk, who actually drank in the Missionary Ridge bar and was one of the more decent guys there.
“Bobby,” I croaked. “It's me, Yankee Bobby,” which is what they called me in the bar.
“Dang,” he said. “I didn't recognize you all beat up like that. Just hold on.”
They put me back in the tank, but he had me out in fifteen minutes.
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