Iggy Pop (3 page)

On most days, kids from the trailer park played baseball or football around its snaking driveway. From the age of two or so Jim was a regular at the kids’ birthday parties, although he spent more time in his trailer than most. Although not a snob, James Senior was careful about the kids with whom his son associated. He was particularly worried when Jim Junior wandered down to see the Bishops, who were ‘different’. Jim would later describe them as ‘bona fide hillbillies’; however, the Bishops were well liked, fun to be around and a natural focus for Jim’s attentions. But when Jim Junior later developed a fascination with the precocious Diane Bishop, Jim Senior seemed to acquire an almost supernatural omniscience, and he inevitably turned up to whisk his son away from her. Osterberg Senior had no such concerns about Duane Brown and Sharon Ralph, whose parents had helped develop the site, and both remember childhood games around the park, although Sharon remembers, ‘Jim didn’t play out as much as the other kids, although you’d always see him at parties. His mom was popular, I liked to go over there, she always seemed so kind, calm and pleasant to be around.’ In contrast, Mr Osterberg frightened the kids: ‘I don’t know why,’ says Duane Brown. ‘He was a very tall thin man with a marine haircut and I didn’t like being with him. He never did anything that made us not like him, he just came across as very gruff.’

In the family atmosphere of Coachville, where stay-at-home moms nurtured large families, the Osterbergs, with two wage earners and just one child, were out of the ordinary. Describing his earliest memories, Jim remembers mostly solitary images: sleeping and resting on a shelf over the kitchenette in his parents’ 18-foot trailer, watching
Howdy Doody
in black and white on a tiny TV screen, or observing his dad chatting to a friend from the services in the back yard - a fully fledged cowboy in boots and Stetson: ‘I’d never seen anybody like that and I really liked him.’ As an only child who had recurring bouts of asthma, he was doted on by both parents, who took out the back seat of their Cadillac and built a big shelf in its place where the four-year-old Jim could walk about or lie in his crib as they drove around enjoying the countryside on Sunday afternoons, during their precious time together. Later on, although he might join Sharon or Duane for a walk into the fields or down to the railway track, he would also wander off alone for long walks or, more often, sit at home or at his babysitter’s, Mrs Light, dreaming of science fiction, imagining himself as Superman or the Atomic Brain. Over these and subsequent years, he often missed school for extended periods due to bouts of asthma, and during these times he inhabited an imaginary world, which in his own mind set him apart from his schoolmates. When he was on his asthma medication, those imaginary worlds were even more vivid: ‘It was ephedrine. They’re cracking down now on pseudoephedrine, which is the basic ingredient for speed. I had real ephedrine, which was much better. It made me feel . . . great. It puts a bit of a poetic edge on things. And it stimulated my creativity, I’m afraid.’

Perhaps it was the attention he got from his parents, perhaps it was the verbal sparring and intellectual challenges constantly presented by his father, perhaps it was simply a result of measuring his intelligence against others, but it was obvious from the earliest days at elementary school that Jim Osterberg thought he was special. Quite a few other kids, and some of the teachers, shared that opinion. Slight in build, Jim Junior was full of energy, with a cheeky, slightly coy smile. He had a natural bounce in his step, and a kind of cute goofiness about him; he looked almost like an overgrown kids’ doll, with a slim body, round head and enormous blue eyes with oversized lashes. His playful, almost coquettish charm seemed the perfect match to his looks. That cuteness allowed him to get away with a lot; most notably, it prevented the kid from a more educated household, with a bigger vocabulary and innate confidence, from being considered a smartass by his schoolmates. Instead he was a ringleader. Although for some kids those first days at school are a traumatic experience, Jim Osterberg, with his network of Coachville friends, had no such problems.

For nearly a century, Carpenter Elementary had been a simple one-room Victorian schoolhouse, directly opposite what became Coachville Gardens; Jim and his Coachville friends were the first kids to enrol at a much larger, newly erected brick and glass building nearby on Central Boulevard, which opened to students in 1952. Jim’s network of friends soon included Sharon, Duane, Kay Dellar, Sandra Sell, Joan Hogan, Sylvia Shippey, Steve Briggs and Jim Rutherford - plus Brad Jones, who arrived from San Diego in 1956. They all regarded Jim as funny, energetic, smart and the leader of their gang, says Brown. ‘He figured out how to get himself and the rest of us in trouble. One time in fourth grade he learned a new word, and that word was “fuck”. He suggested I use that word to the teacher, I can’t remember what he told me it meant, and got a bunch of us into trouble with our class teacher, Miss Connors.’

The young Osterberg frequently earned the formidable ire of his fourth-grade teacher, Rachel Schreiber, who’d occasionally swipe his knuckles with a ruler, but his obvious intelligence, most notably his verbal fluency and impressive vocabulary, ensured he was regarded with some indulgence and fondness by the teaching staff. By fourth grade, Jim Osterberg knew how to make people notice him. The blue-eyed boy was often described as ‘cute’ and was precocious around his teachers, but his eagerness to prove himself top dog - his ambition, even, if you could use that term for one so young - didn’t hamper his natural charm. His manner was, says Brown, ‘flirtatious. Connected. He understood what socially works to charm people.’

‘Even at an early age, he was a character,’ says Brad Jones. ‘Always funny, always eclectic. But also very tortureable. We used to literally hold him down in class and tickle him and make him pee. You know, stuff that fifth and sixth graders do.’ In class, Jim was particularly absorbed by the stories about America’s frontier culture. They stimulated fantasies of being ‘Daniel Boone and Jim Bowie. Jim Bowie, as tall as a big oak tree; I can do anything, and I have to be out there on the edge.’

It was easy to make friends and charm people at Carpenter Elementary, with its classes of fewer than twenty kids, all of whom lived just a short walk from each other. Carpenter was the centre of west Ypsilanti’s social world. For kids, the school or the Leveretts’ farm were the main out-of-hours hangouts; for parents, too, the school was a great place to meet their neighbours, at square dances and other cosy, countrified, family events; Louella Osterberg was a familiar figure at them, helping out on cake stalls and rummage sales at school bazaars - no mean accomplishment, as she was the only mom most people remember who also held down a full-time job.

Already the centre of his own tiny universe, from the age of six Jim Osterberg entered a new, bigger social circle after his father enrolled as a teacher and counsellor at Varsity day camp, a summer camp for middle-class kids established by Irvin ‘Wiz’ Wisniewski at Cordley Lake near Pinckney, Michigan. But these more middle-class boys who met young Jim and his Ichabod Crane dad outside their natural domain remember a very different creature from the confident Carpenter child. ‘The counsellors would pick you up from your home,’ remembers Mike Royston, who attended from 1954, ‘and Jimmy would come with his dad. I remember him as excessively shy, and the picture that flashes in my mind is him cuddled next to his dad in the car, as his dad was driving us to and from camp. He was an unusual little boy with enormous blue eyes. Studying you, but in a shy, furtive way. He’d give you little side-glances. Did not maintain eye contact for very long. And his dad was excessively taciturn. Did you ever see the movie
Cool Hand Luke
? Well, if you can recall the guy with no eyes, just sunglasses, that was Jim’s dad. He didn’t say much, just kinda directed traffic. I don’t remember ever seeing the guy smile.’

In subsequent years, Jim Junior would frequently moan to his new, more privileged schoolmates about his dad - his complaints were so vehement that most of them thought he was exaggerating. But in his happy, playful years at Carpenter, he stood out as an intelligent, charismatic, talkative kid. During summer evenings Wiz Wisniewski would often visit the family to spend pleasant hours at Pat’s Par Three, and he would sometimes spend more time chatting with the son than with the father: ‘Mr Osterberg was a somewhat reserved gentleman, but he enjoyed playing golf, and we had a very nice relationship with father and son. Young Jim was just learning, an active boy who played left handed, and we all enjoyed each other’s company. I can still remember those evenings.’

For most American schoolkids, the transition from elementary to junior high school is a critical rite of passage. Untold numbers of movies, books, songs and poems record the shattered illusions, psychological traumas or long-treasured triumphs of those crucial early teenage years, which for many defined the shape of the adult life that would follow. Jim Osterberg managed this transition with enviable ease - in fact, he would leave his junior high celebrated by his schoolmates as one who would do great things. However, as an adult, Osterberg would term himself an outsider, someone marked out by the fact he was raised on a trailer park. The petty indignities endured at the hands of his comfortably middle-class contemporaries seemed to rankle with him for decades; in later years that belief would drive him, an abiding sense that he was an outcast. But for his one-time Carpenter friends, who watched as Jim graduated to hanging with ‘the snooty kids’, that belief seemed at best ironic - and at worst, completely ludicrous.

Duane Brown still recalls Jim’s competitiveness: ‘He was always trying to outdo the rest of us. And he was pretty good at it.’ No one in his small group of friends resented Jim’s need to prove himself the smartest - at first. ‘[Then] we got into junior high and high school, and I began to think, he thinks he’s too good for us, and I don’t know quite why,’ says Brown. ‘He just seemed a little stuck up, I thought, as he became an older child. It might be he didn’t want any of the people he was associating with [at Tappan Junior High] to know any of us from the trailer park because we might blow his cover. But he had very little to do with any of us from elementary school after we got to high school.’

Sharon Ralph also looked on disapprovingly as Jim entered a new social circle with the move to Tappan in 1960: ‘I don’t know why he felt ashamed of being part of the trailer park - except that when we got to Tappan and Ann Arbor High, the kids were snooty, and he wanted to fit in with those. And he certainly did hang out with the snooty kids.’

Tappan Junior High is on Stadium Boulevard, near Michigan Stadium, in a green and leafy part of town known as Ann Arbor Hills. It’s an imposing, elegant, spacious building, which must have been slightly intimidating to any child, especially one who took the bus down Washtenaw Avenue from an out-of-town trailer park. The presence of the University of Michigan ensured that Tappan, and the nearby high school it fed, Ann Arbor High, were both beacons of excellence in the American public-school system. Many parents worked as academics or administrators at the university; many of the teachers were exceptionally highly educated women who worked in the high-school system while their husbands studied for higher degrees. ‘There wasn’t a pressure from [Tappan] families about money,’ remembers Jim’s contemporary, Mim Streiff, ‘but there was a lot of pressure about educational attainment - that was a real focus.’

Yet the scent of big money was inescapable at Tappan, thanks to the presence of a clique of wealthier kids from Ann Arbor Hills, which was where the city’s architects, administrators, professors and company managers chose to reside. Most significantly, it was also home of a new generation of Ford management, who consciously aligned themselves with the liberal, sophisticated traditions of Ann Arbor. The Ford ‘whiz kids’ were a group of ten ex-US Army Air Corps officers headed by Colonel Charles ‘Tex’ Thornton, which included two future Ford presidents: Robert McNamara and Arjay Miller. Both McNamara and Miller chose to live in the intellectual, academic environment of Ann Arbor, a location that Miller - who later became a celebrated Dean of Business Studies at Stanford - still remembers fondly today: ‘A lovely, very fine, very clean college town. The university is the centre of life there, it’s separated enough from Detroit to have its own identity and culture, yet you could still get into Detroit for a major symphony or opera. I really enjoyed living there.’

The presence of two of the most important industrial leaders in the United States at Tappan Junior High concerts and other Ann Arbor events added a seductive frisson of power and money to the atmosphere - a tingle that surely attracted the 12-year-old Jim Osterberg, who would soon get close to its source.

For many kids enrolling at Tappan, its wealthy, cosmopolitan atmosphere was intimidating. So were some of the pupils. Rick Miller (no relation to Arjay) was a charismatic boy, a ‘Mr Suave’ who often sported a cigar, and was the idol of many boys and girls. But he also enjoyed making fun of kids, and one of the kids he chose to ridicule was Jim Osterberg. ‘We used to take swimming class at Tappan, and you used to have to stand around naked for some stupid reason,’ says Denny Olmsted, who was a friend of both Rick and Jim. ‘Jim had a big dick, and Rick got hold of Jim’s dick and pulled him around the shower room. We did make fun of Jim for that. He was embarrassed by it.’ For many boys, Jim’s prodigious dick was a source of envy, as was the fact he reached puberty earlier than most of them, but Rick’s bullying turned a source of pride into embarrassment - for a time, at least.

George Livingston was another popular kid, who lived in an impressive house, designed by his architect father, in Ann Arbor Hills. Livingston and his friend John Mann were experts in stripping down Chryslers, and together won a state prize for troubleshooting Plymouths. ‘George had a lot of bravado and often said what he thought before thinking of the other person,’ says John Mann, who remembers Livingston mocking the Osterbergs’ choice of residence on at least one occasion. ‘Making fun of someone’s zit or their trailer was just the way George was.’ Most kids learned to laugh and move on; for Jim Osterberg, the insult rankled.