by Paul Theroux
‘Children talking to children. That’s what counts.’
Willie was talking to Kayla, and Stacy was showing the new boy Dedrick how to string beads in his hair.
‘Do you think they’re good?’ I asked, because I did not know.
‘It doesn’t matter whether children are good or not as long as they are themselves. They’re real, and they’re always watchable. That’s what matters about children. That they are slightly perfect.’
Watchable was the word. They stumbled, they stuttered, they giggled, they bobbled the props – bananas or whatever. Millroy just looked on, smiling his Uncle Dick smile, and when he talked his lips did not move. I knew he was happy from the wiggles of heat that came from his body and the brightness of his head and his whole glowing face.
‘It’s day one,’ Willie Webb had said on the first morning when the children were put in charge of the show.
He said it on the second day, too – could not get the words out of his head.
‘It’s day one –’
‘I like that,’ Millroy said. ‘That’s true. Every day is a new day. Every day is day one.’
It did not matter to Millroy that Willie Webb was excited and careless and too lazy to think that it was day two. For Millroy this was an important discovery. And there were many more mistake-like discoveries. On every show something unexpected happened. Millroy liked that. Keep it loose, guys. That was what he wanted.
There was laughter, there was no applause. Even the best and most unexplainable moment of magic produced cheers and yells but not clapping.
‘Because with children running the show everything looks natural. Children inhabit a world where magic is normal. They believe in it. They expect chickens to disappear. They would be surprised if I couldn’t swallow a sword, or if it stabbed me instead of sliding down my throat.’
He was watching Willie Webb and Stacy in the Mouse House – where the Frawly puppets had once lived – and I could tell from his expression that he was pleased by the way they were taking turns juggling oranges and talking about juice to the camera.
‘That’s my only excuse for being on the show. Because I can still work magic. An adult who can’t work magic is a burger and has no business here.’
His was food magic these days, tricks with certain fruits, illusions with unsuspecting vegetables, the tall stack of assorted food that he piled up and held vertical on the dome of his head, which he called ‘the balanced diet.’ He gave strange food lessons in which edible items simply materialized, a whole collection of similar ones, like the morning he did ‘Animals without Faces’ (clams and oysters and jellyfish), ‘but they all have mothers,’ he said.
Dedrick turned out to be a tease and a trickster, sometimes hogging the show, but he ended up eating raw oysters and making everyone laugh when they saw his face.
‘See, we don’t need puppets,’ Millroy said.
Now there were no cartoons either. To take their place, he introduced an item called ‘The Bread Truck.’
‘Here comes Uncle Dick’s Bread Truck,’ Willie said.
Millroy drove up in a blue van and took out a loaf of bread – a different type every day – and described what was in it by making a new loaf, with flour, water, grains and magic, just like that, so that we could all try it.
‘Have a hunk?’
He broke it apart. You saw his hands on the screen, but not his face. Most of the time all you could see were Millroy’s clever fingers, working magic.
‘Never use a knife on it. Never slice it or stab it, don’t bully it, don’t butter it up. If it’s good bread you can eat it as it is. Its thewy sinews have more tonus than muscles.’
He smelled it, he showed how it was so fibrous you could make a coat out of it and wear it. It was thick and elastic. He snapped it, he crunched its crust.
‘Good bread is like a live creature, full of the bloom of health. You could be forgiven for believing that bread has a soul.’
Still breaking it into pieces, he shared it and we were all shown chewing on camera. He said he hated the taboo against seeing people on TV munching and eating. ‘Eating is the greatest of life’s pleasures.’ The music started as we chewed, the sort of munching music he hoped would show us how to eat at the healthiest speed. Now we were all eating the daily loaf and somehow there was enough to feed us all.
Most days the Bread Truck also contained ‘a piece of tape’ – a video or a film-clip of older people eating. The eaters were usually fat and they were always stuffing themselves with the wrong food, cakes, pies, TV dinners, and ‘the half-burned parts of dead animals.’
These grown-ups ate without any pleasure, just pushed food into their mouths. Their strange shapes – stranger than any of the puppets or cartoon characters – were often frightening: you thought they were about to collapse or explode, or spring a leak and drizzle onto the ground. They were squat and sealed and looked like large, tight bags, or else loose and jowly, with odd wobbly arms and pumped-up faces, with their eyes squeezed shut. Some of them looked as though they were filled with water and they shook and shuddered when they walked. They were pale and anxious, and they gasped and sweated when they ate.
Watching fat people eat was like watching drunk people drink. It was not their chewing noises, nor the way their poor faces swelled, nor the droplets on their foreheads. It was the desperation and pain, as though because they could not explode they would just become dangerous. You were afraid.
Millroy was silent – what was there to say? – and the music was gulps and trombone blasts and drumrolls and a pressure of squeaky violin strings that sounded like indigestion.
It made you mistrust that kind of food, and that kind of grownup, and that kind of eating. It looked like sickness and crime, and even sadness. It looked like dying.
‘This is all you need to know,’ Millroy said in his Uncle Dick voice.
I remembered how he had told me that he had been fat, and how other people had laughed at him. They mooed at me, they made oinking noises, they threw food at me. It was tragic. I wondered if he had looked like that. I was lost in the darkness of my body.
Millroy seemed so healthy when the lights went back on, the glimpse of him climbing back into the Bread Truck, after a film-clip of these huge unhappy-looking people.
‘I can make this apple disappear,’ Willie Webb said, and ate it.
That was an Uncle Dick line if ever there was one.
‘You can do that too,’ Stacy said, and she ate a handful of figs. ‘We can all be magicians.’
That was the meaning of mealtime magic, they said.
‘It’s the secret of life.’
Music was also magic: a child picking up a misshapen object and producing sweet sounds was working magic, too. They had never played before. Millroy taught everyone on the show how to play a particular instrument, and when they all played together it was exciting to hear. Then they put their trumpets and flutes and drums down, and danced and did push-ups and somersaults and you envied them for being like little rubber people, full of bounce, and before the show ended they always pleaded with Uncle Dick to take a bow, which he did, bouncing higher than any of them, and finally so high he just vanished, and that day’s show was over.
The new Paradise Park continued to be a hit; there were more letters and postcards than ever, and they were from children, not parents. And Millroy said he was not surprised.
‘If I had taken over and done my version of Mister Phyllis, they would have compared me. But the children are running the show – and who is seriously going to compare those youngsters with Mister Phyllis? It’s a whole different ballgame. It really is Day One every day.’
He wanted to change the name of the show to ‘Day One,’ but they refused.
‘We’ve got to stick to the formula,’ Mr Mazzola said.
What formula? The program was completely different now, Millroy said. It was a food show, u
sing the old name. It was a music show. It was the only real children’s show that had ever been shown on television. No one had ever seen anything like it, a show that taught children how to eat, so that they would live for two hundred years.
This was magic, too: that everyone in Boston knew who Uncle Dick was, and no one knew Millroy. He had known beforehand how to keep his secret, and mine.
We went on commuting, Buzzards Bay to Boston and back, every day – up before dawn for the early trip and the rehearsal, and then the show from eight to nine, and we returned to the trailer in time for lunch.
Lunch at Pilgrim Pines was always something that Millroy had prepared, Ezekiel bread and fish, or vegetables, barley or pottage, raisin cakes, sour cheese, a waxy wedge of honeycomb. Then we went for a walk or lounged around planning the next day’s show, reading the fan letters – Millroy took the comments in children’s letters very seriously – and had a snack and went to bed early. ‘All good people ought to be in bed by eight.’ Then we were up again at four, on the road by five – eating our breakfast in the car or in the rest area at exit five, where there was water, and in the studio for the first rehearsal at six-thirty, the children wired.
One afternoon later in November, the Reverend Huber watched us drive in and he made a point of walking over with a green-handled rake in his hands. He had fat dimpled hands and his body rotated as he walked. He wore a baseball hat and sneakers.
Millroy smiled at him. He said, ‘Guess my age.’
‘I have compassion for you,’ Huber said.
‘Compassion is the one thing I don’t need.’
‘Don’t you believe in the power of prayer?’
Millroy said, ‘You need prayer and you need action.’
‘Prayer is my meat and potatoes,’ Huber said.
Millroy laughed at him. ‘Then you’re lost. You’ll get indigestion.’
‘I cured myself of a tumor, brother,’ Huber said. He touched his big belly where his shirt was tight. ‘It was the size of a grapefruit.’
‘Everyone talks of tumors in terms of food. Quite right.’
‘Prayer alone removed it.’
‘I am not saying it did or it didn’t, but you might have asked yourself how that tumor got there in the first place.’
‘It was His will. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’
‘Making the Lord responsible for your bad health and your nibbling fingers,’ Millroy said. ‘That’s not right. Take the blame yourself. Face it, like an American.’
‘I am spreading the word,’ Huber said. ‘Sin is everywhere.’
Millroy just frowned. Then he said, ‘That word is not in my vocabulary. You can’t have a word for something that doesn’t exist.’
‘I serve the king,’ Huber said, and walked away, swinging his rake.
Millroy said, ‘It’s no use arguing. He’s over-age, he’s mad, he’s unwell. Some people cannot be saved. He’s the proof. And you wonder why I concentrate on the young?’
‘With your show?’
‘It is much more than a show, muffin.’
But after that conversation with the Reverend Huber, Millroy was more careful. He said such people were easily roused, especially when they smelled a skeptic. So he avoided Huber, and when he spotted him he said in his ventriloquist’s voice, That’s all pork.
But Huber came over more and more, trying to start a conversation, and though Millroy would not let him into the trailer, one day the plump little clergyman stood at the door and stuck his face against the glass, looking in at Millroy, who was cooking.
‘Something on fire?’ Huber asked.
Millroy unhooked the window and swung it open, one of his contraptions, and he faced Huber the way he had once faced Floyd Fewox. I was expecting the worst – rats, mice, howls of pain.
‘I was searing some vegetables,’ Millroy said.
Reverend Huber smiled but said nothing, as though Millroy had said something obviously wrong.
‘It breaks down the cellulose. It seals the juices.’
Huber’s face looked like an uncooked piece of meat when he shook it from side to side.
‘Then I’m going to seethe some fitches,’ Millroy said.
‘You need a stove for that?’
‘Course I need a stove.’
‘Thought you might just say “abracadabra.” ’
‘And what good would that do me?’
‘You tell me,’ Huber said, with an unholy smile, ‘Uncle Dick.’
‘Uncle Dick doesn’t say “abracadabra.” ’
But when the man went away, Millroy got into bed. I had only seen him look that sorrowful when he was telling me how he had been trapped in the darkness of his fat body long ago. This afternoon he looked as though he had been struck down with an illness – and when had he ever been sick before? He lay still and silent like a wounded animal, not breathing, not blinking, in his buried-alive attitude.
At last, after dark, his voice began, a dry clawing sound, like a pencil scratching on a sheet of paper.
‘I don’t want him to know me. I don’t want anyone to know me.’ He took a breath, like a long slow drink of water. ‘Except you.’
But it was too late. Huber had called him by the name I never used: Uncle Dick.
A day or two later, suspecting he was strengthened in knowing Millroy’s secret, Huber said to Millroy and me, ‘You’re probably wondering where Todd is.’
I was not wondering. Todd was always after me to go skateboarding at the up ramp, or fishing in the canal, or shooting lay-ups at the Pilgrim Pines backboard. He still did not know that I was a girl. That would make him so much worse.
‘As a matter of fact’ – but who had asked? – ‘he is in school.’
Millroy had not yet turned to Huber to show his face.
‘What school do you go to, sonny?’ Huber asked me.
‘You’ve never heard of it,’ Millroy said.
The following morning, after the show, we hitched the Airstream to the Ford and towed it up Route 3 to Wompatuck, just south of Boston, at Exit 14, past Harold Hecht Previously Owned Auto Leasing, and a farm stand with fresh produce, and Pizza to Go, and Mario’s Mini Market, and Star of the Sea Church.
‘This way we can get up half an hour later for the show,’ Millroy said.
It was deep cool November and every night at Wompatuck I could hear the acorns bursting off the oaks and plopping into the dead wrinkly leaves.
20
A red-faced man named Sharkey, with yellowy-white hair and a tight necktie, stopped Millroy on his way into the Paradise Park studio one dark morning and said to him, ‘Got a minute?’
‘Sorry,’ Millroy said, and I thought of how he had once said, Hair! It’s the great give-away! because this man’s hair was piled up and flopped over to one side like a hairy potholder with no roots underneath, and Millroy must have been thinking, What is he trying to hide?
But Sharkey’s face grew redder, and as he exerted himself dimples appeared in his cheeks. He touched his hair and put his face near Millroy’s.
‘I don’t know what kind of a contract you’ve got here,’ he said, ‘but my people could put together a package, and when it’s a done deal you could be a very happy man. Your kids’ show has tremendous cable potential.’
‘I don’t think of them as kids,’ Millroy said, loud enough for some of the waiting youngsters to hear. ‘Who are you?’
‘We are breakfast cereals, we are juice drinks, we are health snacks, we are a key player in the thirty-billion-dollar weight-loss industry,’ Sharkey said, leaning across the station entrance to block Millroy’s way. ‘And we are looking for a vehicle.’ He put his hand on Millroy’s. ‘I believe we’ve found it, Uncle Dick.’
Then, making a sour mouth, the man snatched his hand back from Millroy’s and held it to his face in the glarey light of the doorway.
Sharkey was gripp
ing a dead rat with grinning teeth and a price tag stapled to the top of its slimy skull. He shook it from his hand and choked when it slapped like a wet grubby rag onto the hard floor.
‘That’s all you’ll ever find, brother.’
In that startling moment Millroy pushed past him and went into the studio to get ready for the rehearsal. He did not look behind him, but I knew from the way his skin was bunched at the back of his neck that he was smiling.
‘Lock the doors,’ he said the mornings after that, breathless and glancing sideways, before each rehearsal. ‘We don’t want any burgers in here.’
Then he walked around the Paradise Park studio with nothing in his hands, and stood aside, or smiled at you, or else took your chin and tilted it up towards him, the way a dentist does.
‘No one gets through that door.’
We loved him for that.
The idea that this was all ours, private, a secret, where no adult – not even the parents of the children on the show – could intrude, pleased us all and made Millroy seem like one of us, another conspirator. In the way he laughed and fooled and egged us on he really was one of us, but now and then he would work some magic – like producing Sharkey’s sudden grinning rat, or a singing bird from his sleeve, or swallowing a bunch of keys – to remind us of who he really was, not one of us at all.
And one day, just for fun – the rehearsal was going slowly – he showed the children his stomach plunger and stuck it down his throat and emptied out his stomach, his whole breakfast in a plastic bowl, to demonstrate his good food and his powers of digestion.
‘It’s totally gross,’ a girl named LaPrincia said.
Her eyes were shining in fascination, and so were the others’.
‘They’re disgusted, they love it,’ Millroy said, seeing how the rehearsal had been enlivened. ‘I’ve had adults faint dead away on me when I’ve done that.’
Our run-through was usually fast – Millroy jumping out at the children, catching them and whispering, looking intently into their faces and then sending them on their way. He behaved more like another child than a coach, and sometimes he was not there – he vanished without warning – and we were alone, getting ready for the show.