Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.

by Robert Paul Smith

  You see, it never occurred to us that there was anything wrong in doing nothing, so long as we kept out of the way of grownups. These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking. He’s trying to find out whether he breathes differently when he’s thinking about it than when he’s just breathing. He’s seeing how long he can sit there without blinking. He is considering whether his father is meaner than Carl’s father, he is wondering who he would be if his father hadn’t married his mother, whether there is somewhere in the world somebody who is exactly like him in every detail up to and including the fact that the other one is sitting there thinking whether there is someone who is exactly like him in every detail. He is trying to arrive at some conclusion about his thumb.

  But when we were kids, we had the sense to keep these things to ourselves. We didn’t go around asking grownups about them. They obviously didn’t know. We asked other kids. They knew. I think we were right about grownups being the natural enemies of kids, because we knew that what they wanted us to do was to be like them. And that was for the birds. “Pop, look at this. It’s a pollywog, look at it.” “Um,” said your father. Another kid said, “Jeez, where’d you get it? Are there any more? What’ll you take for it?”

  “Hey, mother, you know what? Ted Fenster’s kid brother eats dirt.” “Well, don’t let me catch you doing it,” said your mother. “Go-wan,” a kid would say. “Eats dirt? You mean, really eats dirt? Yer full of it.” “He’ll do it for a penny,” you said, and you went off to find Ted Fenster’s kid brother, and by God, he ate dirt, lots of it, spoonfuls of it, for a penny.

  My kids have got a phonograph that plays three speeds, and the amount of antiseptic garbage that comes in three speeds these days about woolly bears, and floppy rabbits and Zoo-zoo the Xylophone and Serpentine the Slide Trombone is having only one effect. They don’t play the phonograph very much, and when they do, they play 33’s at 45, or 45’s at 78, they endeavor to play them backward and sideways—anything at all in an attempt to have something to do with the phonograph. When I was a kid, we had one, God save the mark, “kiddie” record, a small disk on which a remote baritone sang “Fiddle Dee Dee, Fiddle Dee Dee, the fly has married the bumble bee,” and let me assure you, he was not singing it so kids could understand it, or sing with it, or learn the happy playtime customs of foreign lands. He was standing up in front of a mike and belting it out like a proper singer. When I was old enough to make my wants known, that record was retired. It occurs to me that it never occurred to me that there was anything to be comprehended about this record, bar the song. I never was told, nor would I have listened if anyone had tried to tell me, that there was any meaning to it. Who the fly was, or why he wanted to marry the bumble bee, or indeed when I first heard it, what a fly, a bumble bee, or marrying meant, was something beyond my ken. But I can still remember the words, more or less, and the tune, and what the man’s voice sounded like, and what the record looked like—it was small, like a 45 record today, it had a white label with some birds on it. As I say, that one went on the retired list as soon as I learned to crank the phonograph. I learned to crank it shortly after I discovered, by looking, that grownups had lied to me when they told me there was a little man sitting inside the machine and singing. By the way, I didn’t feel betrayed that they had lied to me. Of course grownups didn’t tell the truth. That was article one.

  Once I learned to crank it, I also learned that if I didn’t crank it enough, it would run down. And oh, the pure joy of listening to Caruso turn from a tenor into a bass! Oh, the sheer delight of having every grownup within hearing distance turn purple at hearing the Victor Salon orchestra in a medley of songs from “The Bohemian Girl” turn into a combination German band, barnyard, slide whistle, and bass fiddle choir, and then, by judicious cranking, hear it turn back into music again. You could also put things on the turntable, pencils, marbles, pieces of chalk, horse chestnuts, and see how long it would take for them to fly off the turntable and how far under the couch they would go. No jolly little round songs about the friendly little mongoose going buckety-buckety down the big big road with all his woolly little woodland friends to the neurotic old tiger’s house. Cohen on the Telephone, and Harry Lauder, Moran and Mack, John McCormack, and one record by I know not who, of “Kol Nidre” that chilled me to the marrow. Belle Baker, Bert Williams, Martinelli, Galli Curci (surely then the funniest name for the funniest voice in the world), and Caruso, Caruso, Caruso, and to this day, I, the musical idiot, the opera-hater, go soft all over when I hear the aria from The Pearl Fishers.

  I have a feeling that there was one record that was called, simply, “Barnyard Sounds” and was, simply, barnyard sounds, possibly a man imitating barnyard sounds, perhaps a real honest bunch of chickens and ducks and donkeys making a day’s pay. And I think another, a cello solo, and later on, when my sisters started to dance—but that was a different world, and, I am certain, a different phonograph. The records, you remember, were black, and they had black labels, didn’t they, with gold type? They were easily a quarter of an inch thick, and most of them had grooves on one side only. They were to records today as a linen handkerchief is to a Kleenex. These things, too, you see, were not tentative, not provisional. These records were.

  I learned that I did not like singing, very much. I learned that when the records went around slow, the sounds were low, when they went around fast, the sounds were high. This, I believe, is science, and I found it out for myself. I found out that when the turntable went around fast, the horse chestnut flew off. I would like to say that I found out that heavy things flew off faster than light things, but I don’t know if that’s true. I think it’s true. I think that’s what I later learned was called centrifugal force. But right this minute, if I want to know about centrifugal force, I have to think about that turntable, I can see it all right, and of course, I can see it clearly, the marble went off before the chalk, not because it was round, I don’t think, but because it was heavier. I have recently inquired, and have been told, that things fly off a rotating disc according to the relation between their coefficient of weight and their coefficient of friction, or something like that. Well, if you want to believe that kind of talk . . . All I know is, the marble landed under the couch, just this minute, and my head was over to one side and I saw the big iron lamp standard, the Chinese one with the dragons crawling all over it, and overhead the big beautiful yellow silk shade with the fringe that I could not keep from unraveling, the heavy cord that switched the lights on and off. I remember the heavy cord because it had some sort of weight on the bottom, maybe another piece of iron with a dragon on it. In any event, it was a very comforting thing to pop in and out of my mouth. It made a noise, and it was cool.

  The fire tools were kind of nice. There was a poker and a shovel and a pincers that made, by itself, a satisfactory noise when clicked, and even more when applied to a recumbent sister’s bottom. That noise was followed immediately by the noise of the whole rack clattering to the floor, sometimes the fire screen as well, the front door slamming, and my sister’s voice through the door promising imminent and total destruction as soon as I let go the door knob on my side of the front door, and then, of course, the tiresome intervention of a parent. On my sister’s side, of course.

  I didn’t get licked, nor did my sisters. How they felt about it, I don’t know, but I remember kids coming to school and telling with pride of the licking their father had given them. Peace, peace, truculent reader—I am not saying anything one way or the other about corporal punishment. I think it’s a hell of a note for somebody six feet tall to beat up on somebody two or three or four feet tall. But it does give the four-footer a clear idea of the way things are, because whether by belt or hand or moral persuasion, the kid knows the six-footer is going to have his way. And when these kids came to school and told about the licking they had gotten, all of us un-licked kids knew that these kids ha
d reached freedom. The enemy had shown his hand, and they weren’t confused about why the parent was right. He was right because he had the might, and the thing to do was get mighty, and then let’s see who’s boss. In the meantime, lay low, and don’t give any secrets away. And don’t for a moment think that we, as kids, didn’t know that the parent had lost when he gave you a licking, and felt terrible about it, and could be angled and played and hooked and landed. It’s a funny thing, but my impression is that it was always the kids who got the lickings who got the bee-bee guns. I suppose, even in our middle-class community, there were parents who got their kicks out of beating up their kids, but I don’t suppose that has changed any. I do know that one day, walking with my mother, she saw a mother slapping a child, and without a moment’s hesitation, walked over to this total stranger and told her to stop, and the other mother stopped. Of course, I got jawed and shamed, and blackmailed and cried over and despaired of, and would have been charmed to swap all that in on one good brief physical interlude, but then . . .

  I only got spanked once. My sister was lying on the floor. She was lying on the floor, reading the funny papers on a Sunday morning. (That, thank the Lord, hasn’t changed. My kids belly down on the living-room floor for the same reason. I have hope for them.) I was walking around, and at this moment I’d give eight to five I was walking around trying to find someone to read the funny papers to me. I’d give two to one I was counting on the younger of my two older sisters to read them to me. She was easier to cajole than the other. In any event, I stepped on her hand, and she said ouch. My father spanked me, not because I stepped on her hand, but because I wouldn’t apologize. I wouldn’t apologize because I had myself convinced that I had not done it on purpose. And maybe I hadn’t. Now this was a defense in those days. You had to apologize if you did it on purpose, and you did not have to apologize if it was an accident, and it was incumbent on the honor of the individual kid to say whether it was on purpose or an accident. In direct violation of this eternal provision of The Law, my father took out and spanked me. It then became, in my mind, a moral issue. I had very little hesitation in lying from then on. I stayed out of my father’s way, too, which wasn’t hard, because he stayed out of the way of all of us as much as he could. And since he was sick, that was a lot. But all of the fathers stayed away from the little kids. Mothers took care of little kids. Fathers read their papers and smoked their cigars and went for walks and played pinochle and golf. My father, I was told, once took me out in my baby-carriage, he pushed it himself, and it was enough to mark him an odd one for months.

  But he licked me, that once, and I bawled, and I knew who he was from then on. He was the one who didn’t obey The Law.

  It is curious, but the way I learned about stealing was the same sort of thing. In my day, there were established orders of punishment in school. First, there was staying after school. Second, there was being sent to the cloakroom. Third, there was being sent to the principal’s office. Fourth was the summoning of parents. Fifth, there was being—well, I don’t know the word. It was a public school, so I suppose you couldn’t have been expelled. But whatever it was called, it meant that you could not come to school unless something or other was done. You couldn’t stay home either, because your parents wouldn’t have it. It was for a major crime, and I suppose the nearest thing to it I ever ran across, except the thing itself, was Dante’s limbo.

  I was a good little boy. I was a smart little boy. I was a meek and well-behaved little boy. And yet, I experienced these punishments in all but the fourth degree. Because I was also a smart-aleck of a little boy.

  First, we’ll take the second, being sent to the cloakroom. Of course I was sent to the cloakroom unjustly. In all the history of the world, no teacher has ever sent the guilty party to the cloakroom. I mean, if the kid behind me goosed me under the seat, then I had to hit him, because when I had got him for two for biting in recess, there was a law saying you had to hit him in the muscle as hard as you could and he had no right to—well, you remember. So, I was sent to the cloakroom. In the cloakroom there was remarkably little to do. After a while, in the gloom at one end, I found a chalk box. I’ll bet a hat chalk no longer comes in wooden boxes with sliding tops and a thumbnail slit, and wasn’t it packed in sawdust too? (Nowadays it probably comes in plastic containers that dispense one stick at a time in a sanitary cellophane wrapper with pictures of rabbits on it.) In any event, there was a chalk box. That is to say, a box full of chalk. We would as lief gone out on the streets without our pants—no, that’s a bad simile, that we would have been delighted to do—without, oh, a piece of string and an acorn and a shingle nail, and an empty aspirin bottle as without a piece of chalk. It was, yes it was, and yes, I did turn into a novelist, for writing dirty words, and arrows, and unkind comments about contemporaries on the sidewalk. I slid back the top of the box.

  NOW HEAR THIS: There was no chalk in that box. It was full of knives. Why, it will appear presently.

  When we appeared in school, we were frisked. We were searched for the carrying of concealed dirt under the nails; we were required to have, in lieu of an identification card, one clean handkerchief. I wonder, parenthetically, whether kids nowadays know the meaning of the phrase, “Is it for show or for blow?” This handkerchief was for show, it was a passport, and it didn’t matter a great deal how grimy it was, by law it was clean if it was folded and unblown-in. If you didn’t have a handkerchief in your pocket, you were sent off to the boy’s room for a swatch of toilet paper. That was the days of highly varnished toilet paper, like the English still use, and it was about as useful for blowing your nose in as for its avowed purpose. But no matter. It had nothing to do with blowing your nose. It was no more meant for function than any other legal document.

  Now, that was what you had to have. If, in addition, you bore any livestock, wittingly or not, you were in the toils of authority. I, for one, fell madly in love with a little girl who came from the wrong side of the tracks because she smelled so wonderful. She smelled of kerosene. Our teacher, walking down the aisle, had run a pencil through her hair, as she did to all of us, why, I never knew. She had found something in Rose’s hair, Rose had been packed off to the school nurse, Rose had come back smelling gloriously of kerosene. I loved the smell of kerosene. Rose smelled of kerosene. I loved Rose.

  She was an involuntary smuggler, but others were criminals by volition and were dealt with in open court. Other livestock, such as caterpillars, large beetles, small toads, were, if detected, carried outside by you, deposited somewhere in the yard, and later on you were kept after school.

  And now the knives: knives were confiscated, not to be returned, if they became visible during school hours. This was more of The Law. You could have a knife in your pocket. You could carry the knife to school in your pocket. You could keep your hand on your knife in your pocket during school. But if that hand came out of that pocket with that knife and was seen by your teacher, you were summoned, you marched to the desk, you put the knife on the desk, and you never saw it again.

  Until this day, in the cloakroom, when I opened the chalk box and found it full of knives, confiscated knives, knives seized without due process of law over the years from us second-class citizens.

  I had a mother who had two daughters older than me, and a constant refrain of my childhood was, “Your sisters never asked for anything like that.” This particular episode was when I was very young, and what I had been asking for, and had been refused, was a knife. I would like to tell you that I struggled with my conscience in the cloakroom, that I wrestled for my soul, and came out of the cloakroom a bigger and better and knifeless man. But in all truth, I must tell you I hooked a knife without a moment’s hesitation, put it in my pocket with nothing but glee, and never in all of my forty-one conscience-ridden years have I ever felt one little twinge. The world owed me a knife and I took it.

  I am a good father and a dutiful husband. I have been married for sixteen years. I have diapered the children, a
nd physicked them, I have talked to them and listened to them, I have bathed them and rocked them to sleep, I have swum with them and piggybacked them and attended them in hospitals and restaurants and doctors’ offices and airplanes and automobiles and I believe I know them very well. On the witness stand, ask me to swear what grade they are in, for sure, what is the color of their eyes, absolutely, what is the exact height of my wife, does she prefer rutabagas to Jerusalem artichokes, under oath—I don’t know.

  But if you would care to hear an exact description of that knife, I can go on for some time. It had two blades, and a horn handle, and brass bolsters and—but what’s the use. They don’t make that kind of knife any more. I know, because I have at home now, all told, about eight knives, the last bought within the year. I bought every one of them because it was close to that knife. But it’s not the same.

  So that’s the moral lesson I learned from being sent to the cloakroom—unjustly. If they call you a criminal, for Heaven’s sake, behave like one.

  Now we go back to offenses punishable in the first degree: by being kept after school. What I learned from that was that, with my atrocious penmanship, the more times I wrote out, “I will never again . . .” the more illegible it got, and the more my fingers hurt, and the more I could swagger when I got back to the block and announced gruffly, “Old Piano Legs kept me in again.” Moral: if you can’t lick authority, give it a bad name.