by Paul Theroux
Yet even when he was far away or out of sight you could feel him invisibly next to you, humming softly like a black light, or right behind you, as though you would only have to turn around quickly to see him.
Mostly, rehearsals were a free-for-all confusion, and so the show itself surprised me – surprised everyone else, too – all that energy and fun, with perfect timing. Except for Willie Webb, who was the best performer, no particular child was in charge, just one after another, rushing around and talking to the camera.
‘It’s all yours,’ Millroy said, before each show.
He always raised his hands when he saw Otis or Miss Spider or Mr Mazzola – lifted his hands and smiled as though to say, Nothing to do with me, guys!
‘You show them what to do?’ Otis had asked.
‘I don’t show them anything – this is spontaneity. These aren’t puppets, they’re youngsters. Children are capable of attaining perfection. That’s what this program is all about.’
The original Paradise Park had become famous because Mister Phyllis had been fired for screaming swears at the children. People had kept watching, wondering what was going to come next.
Millroy’s show was different altogether, and it kept changing. From the clever magician on Mister Phyllis’s show, Millroy turned into a sort of spectator, a little silly and slow, who needed things explained to him – how plants grew, what the heart and lungs do, what the digestive tract looks like when it hasn’t been emptied for a week and is full of chocolate cake, and facts about salt. Millroy rolled his eyes when these processes were explained.
‘You mean good old peanut butter’s deadly?’ he would ask.
‘Yo.’
‘How about running that past me again?’
‘You see the Seventh-day Adventists invented peanut butter so they could have spreadable protein without meat –’
Some of the shows became famous the same day they were broadcast. Something on the show in the morning was repeated as a news item on Eyewitness News Update at six o’clock.
One show was still talked about the next day, because of the True Stories slot. The children told stories to illustrate the workings of the human body. One of Berry’s was about a woman he said he knew – Mother Bunshaft. We had an actual photograph of this fat lovable old woman in her starched apron. She looked a little like Gaga – tiny eyes in a big meaty face, a poster on the wall behind Berry as he told his tale.
‘Mother Bunshaft was a murderer,’ Berry said.
‘No way!’
‘Poisoned her whole family, using plain old sugar, the kind you all have at home.’
Berry poured a cup of white sugar onto the Mealtime Magic table.
‘She fed it to them, tons of it, and they died five different ways. Straight up.’
‘No way!’
You looked at the old woman on the poster and wondered again at that smile that was not a smile anymore but rather the expression of a person who is just about to swallow a mouthful of forbidden food.
‘One of her kids swells up and chokes to death. One explodes and leaves a mess on his chair. One goes into shock and turns rigid. One has a heart attack. One gets a manic spasm and jumps out the window.’
Then he turned to go, but as he did he glanced back at the camera and winked, as though he had just remembered something.
‘Hey, Mother Bunshaft wasn’t bad. Not evil or wicked. Just not very bright or helpful. But too old to change. She was a burger.’
‘And she got real mad when her kids talked about toilets,’ Brenda said, popping into view.
Brenda was a little blonde, her hair in two bobbing pony-tails, with ribbons, and a way of blinking her eyes that made you think of lights flashing. She had chubby knees and cute feet.
‘I knew Mother Bunshaft, too,’ she said. ‘She screamed if you said “poo-poo.” ’
‘She used to say, “Do you want to do a tinkle or a yucky?” ’
That was Kelly, seeming to make it up as she went along.
‘Which is just plain silly.’
And now the big photograph of Mother Bunshaft looked like the portrait of a very dangerous and stupid person, who would scold you for using the wrong word and then poison you with a chunk of her home-made fudge.
‘She could have called it “elimination” which is a value-free word,’ Stacy said, holding her chin as she pondered this. ‘But she wanted to make it seem dirty.’
Snuffling a little so he would not laugh, Willie said, ‘“Got to drop a log,” she used to say.’
‘Want to relieve yourself?’ Dedrick said to Stacy. And when we started to laugh, he said, ‘Mother Bunshaft would have said that, right?’
‘Listen everybody, you know what, this is better than an English lesson?’ Kayla said. ‘Because bowels are more important than vowels.’
Even before the show was over, the phones were ringing. Millroy headed into the conference room, and I stayed outside, listening to the voices go back and forth.
Where did they get this toilet stuff?
Let’s see the script. We’re going to be asked for written verification.
The phones were going, too many to answer. A ringing phone that no one answered sounded like someone yelling in the dark for help.
The hell’s this all about?
Millroy’s voice was low and reasonable when he replied.
Children are always talking about toilets. It’s instinctive. And like all instincts this one is healthy.
Tell Eddie Mazzola that.
Mazzola was the General Manager, and because he was seldom around these days he seemed more powerful and unpredictable as a name than as a real man.
Eddie Mazzola ought to know that already, one would think.
It sounded infantile.
In the good sense, Millroy said quietly.
They were actually talking about crapping.
Who was it said, ‘Drop a log’?
Interesting choice of words. Yes, and they were talking about digestion. About bodily functions. About toilet-training.
We’ve got to stop it.
How? The children are in charge, Millroy said. And after more talk he came out smiling, to the sound of telephone bells.
‘They’re looking for someone to blame.’
The phones were ringing, one drowning the other, and there was an air of emergency in the station, as though something exciting and eventful had happened. No one knew what to do, Millroy said, because they didn’t know whether this was bad or good.
‘It’s magic,’ Millroy said.
The next day before the morning rehearsal, Otis was smiling. He said, ‘We’re famous again.’
By this time Millroy had met Norman Fredette, who owned Norm’s Diner, one street over from the studio. The diner was on Church Street, behind the Statler Hotel and next to the Star of Siam restaurant. It was across Park Square from Legal Seafoods and the Greyhound Terminal and the sooty stone buildings of the University of Massachusetts in Boston – a busy place, people everywhere. It was the only area I knew, because it was where we parked, and waited, and saw the children gathering on those early mornings for the program, and where we left from to go home.
But we left later and later. Having a successful program meant more interest, more phone calls and requests from photographers. Millroy did not cooperate with any of these people – no pictures, no interviews, nothing – but even his refusals caused delays, and he got too hungry to make it all the way back.
On one of these mornings he stopped into the diner, partly to hide but also to get some boiling water for his mint tea.
‘Uncle Dick,’ Norman Fredette said, recognizing him. ‘Do some Mealtime Magic.’
‘That’s what this is,’ Millroy said, stirring the tea.
‘I want you to wow me.’
Millroy stopped stirring, showed Frede
tte the spoon, clinked it against his cup, and swallowed it. Then he gulped and took a deep breath.
‘I’d give anything to learn how to do magic like that,’ Fredette said.
‘That’s not magic, so you’re in luck,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s a trick.’
‘Show me how.’
Millroy looked around the diner. ‘I’m just wondering what you could do for me in return.’
Within a few days, in exchange for giving Norman Fredette lessons in doing magic tricks, Millroy was cooking his own meals in the kitchen of Norm’s Diner. He made his ‘bean and green’ salad, his pottage, his pistachio pie, figgy loaves, cinnamon baked apple, barley soup and Ezekiel Four-Nine bread. He had started doing it because he had been hungry and because he wanted to feed me on time, but it also calmed him to cook, and Fredette’s was so near to the studio he could go to the diner afterwards and cook and have a place to eat it. If he did not live on his own food, he said, he would turn into someone else and look like a zoo animal and not be able to work any magic.
‘And I need to be away from those television people,’ he said. ‘The advertisers, the merchandisers, the money-changers.’
Even though Paradise Park was on a non-profit, public broadcasting channel, the program made money – Millroy himself was given a salary – but he hated the idea of the show earning an unfair profit or accepting support from food companies. He knew he was cantankerous but the thought of it made him laugh.
‘They can’t handle me, muffin, because I am not interested in money,’ he told me one day at Norm’s Diner. ‘That’s why I will always get my way.’
We were sitting in a corner booth, eating Millroy’s own food. While Millroy was talking, Norman came over, working a stained sponge around the edge of the table, and then lingered near us.
Norman Fredette was a pale, bony-faced man with greasy pushed-back hair and nervous eyes and a panicky smile that came and went, sometimes two or three times before he finished a sentence. He had a way of sniffing loudly that gave you the impression he had troubled thoughts in his mind.
‘Don’t hover,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s bad for your digestion if someone hovers. I’ll show you a trick in a minute.’
‘That’s okay,’ Fredette said, but still he lingered.
Already he could swallow spoons, guess playing-cards, manipulate eggs, and do a little light juggling.
‘I just wanted to tell you it was a great show today.’
Millroy put down his forkful of pottage and looked straight at Fredette and said, ‘Tell me.’
‘A tremendous show.’
He was twisting an egg around his fingers – hiding it, revealing it. There was an aspect of magic and trickery that seemed to appeal to nervous people by giving them something to do with their fumbling fingers all the time.
‘The TV is on in the corner. The kid goes “toilet,” and the whole counter starts laughing. Then there’s that business about forty-four pounds of – what did they call it?’
‘Fecal residue,’ Millroy said.
‘Right. Staying inside your body. The customers start screaming. I takes a frying-pan and whacks it good. “You want a hit in the head?” They’re still yelling, so I goes, “Shut up and listen. You might learn something.” ’
He was still rolling the egg on the back of his hand as Millroy had taught him.
Millroy took a bite of bread – an Ezekiel loaf that he had baked in Fredette’s kitchen. He looked satisfied with what Fredette had said. He resumed eating. He ate slowly, as always, biting bread, forking up a gob of pottage, drinking without spilling – juice from his own jug.
‘Home cooking,’ Fredette said. ‘My customers are always asking me. They go, “What’s he eating? I don’t see nothing like it on the menu.” I’m, like, “Mind your own business.” ’
‘Wholesome cooking,’ Millroy said. ‘Real food.’
He reached over and took the egg from Fredette, wrapped it in his napkin and shook the napkin, making the egg disappear.
Fredette blinked, wondering where the egg had gone.
‘You were making me nervous.’
‘I wish I could do that,’ Fredette said, his lips looking greedy.
‘You’re impressed by a little trick like that. Why aren’t you impressed by the power of nutrition, and the transformation of your bodily functions, and the force of your bowels?’
Instead of replying, Fredette looked over at the row of people eating at the lunch counter, and they were staring at Millroy with that What did he just say? expression on their faces.
‘First, eat right. Food is the first step.’
‘I’m interested. Plus, I’m in the food business myself.’
‘If your food was right I would eat it.’
‘I see what you’re saying.’
‘If you desire to be pure in body and mind you’ll be renewed by this food.’ Millroy was eating again. ‘And you will perform magic. Alex, juggle those eggs.’
He handed me four eggs, which I juggled easily, first whirling all four with both hands, and then simultaneously juggling two with each hand.
‘Fidem scit,’ Millroy said.
‘Now they got you doing it!’ Norman Fredette said.
I looked at the faces of the people in the diner. What did he just say?
‘He knows faith,’ Millroy said. ‘That’s Latin. He is pure, he eats well, and so he can manipulate those eggs.’
‘That’s what I’m aiming at.’
‘You will be regular.’
Millroy smiled and showed Fredette how to do the egg-in-napkin trick.
Afterwards, when we were alone, Millroy said, ‘What I am going to say might sound strange to you.’
And I knew it definitely would.
‘– I made an exception when I cooked in his kitchen, yet I will not bend when it comes to his toilet. You know I have an inflatable seat – patent pending. But I feel strongly that when I use someone’s restroom I am doing that person a favor – bestowing something on that person, leaving a bit of myself behind. Using their facilities is a profound show of trust. It is an act of faith – but, no, Norman is not ready for that.’
Back in our trailer at Wompatuck we tidied and were silent, and when we were hungry we worked with barley and we parched corn and pulses and baked beany bread and drank Millroy’s weak inky wine. We slept apart. I dreamed like mad. Our life was elsewhere these days, on the show.
The Boston Globe ran a news story about Paradise Park – it was short but it was on page one, how people were phoning the station all day, some complaining but most of them praising, and so many of them were children. We were told about the newspaper story the day before, and the next day on our way to Boston we saw stacks of the papers in vending machines, and people were reading it on the Plymouth and Brockton commuter buses.
‘Notice I’m not reading the story? I am looking at people reading the story. I am not worried.’
‘What about Otis?’
‘I’m treating him for headaches. Guess how.’
Millroy could be very talkative, even in the early morning, even now, on the expressway in the before-dawn darkness, which was gray and grainy, like a blow-up of an old photo.
‘Relieving his constipation. He has major blockage, and it’s building in his passages and pressurizing all his other bodily functions.’
We were passing another bus – people reading the Globe.
‘I have him on a low-residue food program. But he’s easy. He knows his Book. I have him on mint tea. He understands. He knows that Matthew heard the Lord himself speak the word mint.’
I pulled my thumb out of my mouth because I could feel a yawn coming on.
Paradise Park that morning had another restroom segment. After Mealtime Magic, some Uncle Dick Bread Truck videos, and music – the youngsters playing instruments and singing their song, ‘The Function Room’.
‘And, hey, if it’s not the most important room in the house,’ Berry said, ‘then why does it always have a lock on the door?’
LaPrincia said, ‘We should talk a little bit about nutrition and fat. “Eat no manner of fat,” it says in the Bible. That’s good advice.’
‘Yo. And remember that butter sounds like buttock,’ Kelly said.
We all laughed at that.
‘It just popped into my head,’ she said. ‘People don’t talk about it, because it is the one part of your body you never see.’
‘Yo. If you could see inside your body you wouldn’t wreck it,’ Willie Webb said, at the end of the show, tilting his head at the camera and pushing his face into the lens.
He was staring, and breathing hard.
‘So watch what you put into it. But there’s only one way of knowing what’s really going on in your body. Have a real good look at what comes out of it. Bye, guys. See you tomorrow at the Park.’
‘What kind of little kids’ show is this supposed to be?’ a man asked Millroy in Norm’s Diner one morning when we were eating there after a broadcast. The man must have watched it on Fredette’s television. He sounded resentful and sulky in the way that some people are when a certain thing bewilders them.
Millroy told the man what he had told Sharkey (‘I don’t think of them as kids’) and what he told Otis and Mazzola and the rest of the producers. These days, feeling confident, Millroy never raised his voice, but he had a way of whispering that could silence a whole room.
‘These youngsters are going to live a long time and be very influential, so it’s important that they know the truth. They will be the first people in America to live more than two hundred years. That’s the goal. Imagine how people will look up to them. They’ll want to know how and why.’
The man did not say anything at first. He thought a moment and then he said in his same sulky voice, ‘What’s that you’re eating?’
‘It’s not on the menu,’ Norman Fredette said.