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

by Robert Paul Smith

About the Bringing of Parents to School, present deponent knoweth not.

  Sometime in my early school years, the enlightened administration of the school decided not to grade kids on the basis of 100 on a report card, or even Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor. It was to be tout court Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. I brought home report cards which were depressingly the same. I was Satisfactory in all subjects but one. Month after month, Penmanship, Unsatisfactory. My mother looked at the report cards, adjured me to write better, signed them and I brought them back. That was my parents’ connection with the school. By the way, the system broke down, instanter. It was no time at all until we were off into Very Satisfactory, Quite Satisfactory, Almost Unsatisfactory, More or Less Totally Unsatisfactory and suchlike embroidery. There was the usual Could Do Better If He Applied Himself, or Is Making Satisfactory Progress. And once in a while, Is Doing Very Well. But always, these were in a grudging tone which, honestly, we liked. They were decorations extorted from the enemy. There was no blarney like I see on my kids’ report cards, about real challenges, and gets along well with the group, and does not (or does) participate helpfully in social integration. We knew where we stood. When we made a teacher confess that we were good, by God, we were good. I don’t think my kids can tell any more whether anybody thinks they’re making out: they’re being bathed in such a sweet syrup of reassurance that nothing short of a twenty-one-gun salute is going to convince them that they’ve done anything extraordinarily good, nothing but a jail term is going to convey disapproval. I don’t really think that: I think they know—as kids always know—when somebody’s conning them. They know, even if we don’t, whether they’re cutting ice. But if they’re willing, and they are, to face a few facts, it seems to me shameful we’re not willing to level with them.

  Now, about punishment in the fifth degree. I don’t know much about how it went with other kids, but the way it happened to me was the first time the public school system of my town was up against my peculiar brand of hard head. If you set fire to the school, my guess is you got expelled, and probably sent to reform school. If you had the colossal insanity to raise your hand to a teacher as far as we knew, you got killed. If you didn’t study, you got left back—how many times you could get left back, I don’t know.

  But I was something new. I was the first rebel on literary principle. We had a teacher who was interested in teaching, and we loved her and crucified her daily by the clock. We talked about things, and read things, and it was this teacher who first pointed out to me a small defect in my character which certain malcontents like my wife, friends, agents, bosses, publishers advise me I have never quite conquered. I am, these insensitive dolts inform me, stubborn. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am only stubborn when I am right and they are wrong.

  This teacher advised me of this small flaw in my otherwise superb character. I took heed.

  I had discovered, at I guess about age nine, Mark Twain. I understand there are some people who do not believe that Mark Twain was God, but number me not among these heretics. It was balm to my soul to discover him, because I had previously thought that James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving were supposed to be writers. The day I found Mark Twain’s essay about the literary offenses of Cooper was the day I came of age, whatever the vital statistics say.

  It was unfortunately about then that this wonderful teacher told the class that by such and such a date we would be expected to have read “The Pathfinder.” I rose to my feet and declined to do so. On direct examination, I averred that the reason I would not do so was because I had tried Cooper, found him wanting, and in summation, communicated in the most moderate terms, my belief that he was not a very good writer.

  I said he was a lousy writer and I would not read him.

  After a brief recess and the clearing of the courtroom, I was induced to add that Mark Twain thought so too.

  I was informed by the judge that, my objections notwithstanding, I was banished from school and I could not return until I had opened my mind sufficiently to admit the possibility of giving Cooper a second chance.

  I did not feel that he deserved that much of me.

  It is always the fact that in all the crises of a child’s life, he can remember where it happened, the names of all the participants, the events leading up to the crime, the sentencing—but never the execution. What happened after that, I do not know, but I know that my parents were not summoned to the school, that I did not stay home even one whole day—there would have been no way of explaining that to my mother—that I eventually returned to the school, that I went on loving and crucifying the teacher, and that I never read The Pathfinder. Nor will I do so now.

  The moral I draw from this: there’s nothing wrong about being stubborn. It’s only wrong when you’re not right about the thing you’re being stubborn about. Like people thinking Cooper could write.

  I seem, by some easily explicable psychological quirk, to have passed over Being Sent To The Principal’s Office. Our Principal was sixteen feet tall, had tempered steel fingernails, and eyes that I never encountered again until high school, when I first used a Bunsen Burner. His office I never fully recognized until I saw, I think in the German silent movie Metropolis or in one of De Mille’s early Biblical opera, a representation of Moloch. Small naked children were dragged screaming up a flight of stairs and shoveled into a furnace. The only effective difference was that we had to go downstairs, we were prohibited by our code of ethics from screaming, and we went alone. The Last Mile was a documentary to us.

  At this moment, I can offer no explanation, but it seems evident that we had anticipated Dante and Persephone and Theseus. We went into Hell, were torn apart by the Minotaur, conversed with Pluto, were destroyed and apparently we came back among the living. And without any miserable pomegranate seeds stuck in our teeth, either. And with no help from Virgil or Ariadne. Or anybody.

  The Principal shrank to eight feet one day when my best friend, in assembly, pointed out to me that under the table on the platform, the Principal was doing what we didn’t know then to call adjusting his clothing. We gave this event some local publicity, and our discovery was confirmed, eventually, by the whole male student body. It was, every assembly day thereafter, an event second in importance only to the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Shortly after, a legend was created: some boy, whose name nobody knew, had been grasped in the Principal’s talons. In some way, a button had sprung from the boy’s coat. A Father, who was twenty-three feet tall, had appeared in the Principal’s office, with needle and thread, a gun with Maxim silencer, muscles like Charles Atlas, and a clear record of forty-six successive wins (amateur) over Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Under his eyes, in the presence of the boy, the Principal had sewed the button back on the coat. Thereafter, the Principal skulked along the corridor, passing easily under the drinking fountain. From later evidence, it seems clear that he was a harassed middle-aged man with a baritone voice and a master’s degree.

  There were other minor punishments, in the first few grades, like Deprivation of Scissors, Standing in the Corner, Refusal on the Part of the Teacher to Read Another Chapter, and Being Sent to Sit With Girls.

  I bearded my littler boy the other day to find out what punishments prevailed now in the third grade. By the time I explained to him what the word punishment meant, it was time for Disneyland. He doesn’t know Mark Twain is God. He thinks Walt Disney is. He’s pretty damn stubborn about it, too. I found him later in bed, and for a minute or two sat at his feet and asked for information again. As I understand it, she tells them to keep quiet, and if they do not she asks them again. And again. And again. He was sort of sleepy, but he put up with my idiocy long enough to advise me that once she had scolded them—but not as hard as his mother or his father. I went downstairs and sat on the front steps. It was reassuring to find out that stars still come out at night.

  The following day I asked him about Being Sent To Sit With Girls. He likes to sit with girls. I have stopped worr
ying about this child. For a while. Then, will I give a worry!

  There is a man in our town, and he is wondrous wise. All I know about him is that he is reported to have said in conversation that the trouble with kids nowadays is that there are no vacant lots. He must be a good man, and I am sure he must mean by vacant lot the same thing I do. The first thing to understand is that the only thing a vacant lot was vacant of was a house. Outside of that minor lack, a vacant lot was the fullest place you ever saw. Officially, I suppose, we lived in our houses. When challenged by authority for vagrancy, we gave our street address. My recollection is that I lay on my back in my baby carriage, sucking my thumb and waiting to be sprung from the thralldom of Mother and Nurse and goo-goo, so that I could learn to walk and talk and join my peers in stealing lumber to build a hut on the vacant lot.

  At the beginning, there were two vacant lots. One across the street, and one at the corner. I was in the stage of running at the nose and being told to go away and not be a pest, of being told to fa crise sake get outa the waya the ball, of being urged to gowanhomeyermotherwantsya, of, on rare occasions, being allowed to chase a ball across the street and run back with it and deliver it to an eight-year-old giant, of being rounded up with the other little kids and herded into a hut and tortured, when they put houses up on that vacant lot. Either I lived on a block full of apprentice sadists or it was the norm, but one of the amusements of the bigger kids, when all else failed, was to collect a batch of small ones and tie them up, put ice in their pants, pepper in their nose, tar in their hair. I will deal with this more fully under the heading of Clothesline.

  In any event, by the time I was a full-fledged citizen, the vacant lot was the one at the corner. Its first feature was a rockpile. I am trying very earnestly to figure out whether the rockpile was the remains of an ancient foundation, or the debris of an unfinished foundation. I lean towards the latter, or possibly some contractor had a load of stone left over, or a load of stone to haul away from a blasting, and dumped it on the vacant lot.

  We didn’t know. It was there. Didn’t everybody have a vacant lot on the corner, and wasn’t a vacant lot a lot with no house and a rockpile on it?

  The rockpile was shaped roughly like the crater of a volcano. We mostly sat on the rim, and we mostly built fires at the bottom. It was, roughly, three miles across from lip to lip when I first went there. Later on, it got smaller. The lot itself had a path through it hacked out of the living jungle, and about halfway through there was a rock too big to take out of the path, and this very minute I can feel my ankle twisting in the sneaker with the black circle over the ankle bone.

  I don’t suppose bamboo is native to New York State, but how else is there to explain the trees that lined the path, way over my head? Later on, some sort of blight struck this plant. It never again grew so tall. I don’t know what sort of plant it was. It was the plant that grew on the vacant lot. It was thicker than a pencil and less thick than a broomstick, and it never was green. It was always off-white and dry, it burned with a lot of smoke, and it was called “scribblage.” That is to say, the plant was not called scribblage. The stuff was called that, it was a generic term, something like the word junk. That’s it. Junk was manufactured. Scribblage was vegetable junk. Scribblage was used to line the bottom of the rockpile, to hide valuables underneath a pile of, to make the tops of deadfalls with, to lay over Tarzan. In short lengths, it was used to smoke, like a cigar.

  A horrid suspicion dawns on me. Years and years and years later I was riding down a country road outside of Kansas City, and upon inquiry was told that we were swinging down a lane bordered with marijuana. No—it couldn’t be. This was scribblage.

  Tarzan of the Apes lived on that lot. I was cavalier a few lines before. We were never so familiar as to call him just plain Tarzan—it was always Tarzanoftheapes. For the benefit of the misguided youth who encounter this . . . the real, the original, the blown-in-the-bottle Tarzan-oftheapes was not Elmo Lincoln or Johnny Weismuller or any of their heirs and assigns. Tarzanoftheapes was not a character in a comic strip or in a radio or television show. He was a creature of the imagination, sketched out by Edgar Rice Burroughs with (as we found out later) a more-than-generous unwilling assist from Rudyard Kipling, at fifty cents a throw. In books. Burroughs created a workable sketch: it was fleshed, given spirit and body and habitation by us. In a very real sense, Tarzanoftheapes existed; during the day he was Mitch, the kid next door, who had muscles and a disregard for broken bones. At night he was me, who had less muscles, but more imagination. I ad-libbed Tarzanoftheapes. With Mitch it went strictly according to the book. Once in a while, Mitch would let me be Tarzanoftheapes during the daytime, but there was no percentage in that. I knew Mitch was really Tarzanoftheapes.

  Tarzanoftheapes lived on the vacant lot. Huckleberry Finn—Mitch might be Tarzan, but I was Huck—built his raft on the vacant lot. Let’s get this straight. I mean a real raft, made out of wood: we had a little trouble locating the Mississippi, but over in Hunt’s Woods there was a brook, which almost floated the raft, just as it almost floated the boat I made with the kid who lived on the other side. That was when we were real little. The boat was simple to the point of imbecility. It was an orange crate, with half-inch openings between the boards. The oars were broomsticks with shingles tacked on.

  We knew it wasn’t a boat, at the same time that we knew that it had to be a boat. We needed a boat so bad. We worked on it so hard. We hauled it all the hell and gone to Hunt’s Woods, which was roughly halfway across the continent. We put it in the water, we both climbed in, that’s how little we were, and the stream was so low it grounded instantly, water poured in from the bottom and sides, the shingles came unstuck from the broomsticks—and yet, I cannot tell you how, because I am, it says here, no longer a child, Simon and I came back perfectly convinced that we had built a boat. And perfectly clear in another section of our minds that we had hauled an orange crate ten blocks and stuck it in a muddy brook and gotten wet up to our armpits and were going to catch hell from our folks and scorn from our contemporaries.

  Let’s get back to the lot. Tarzanoftheapes, Mowgli, Huck Finn, the Boy Allies, the Motor Boys, Joe Bonomo, General Pershing, Theodore Roosevelt, Tom Swift, Mitch, Simon, Mitch’s kid brother, Simon’s kid brother and I lived in that lot. We went home for meals, for bed, and for jawing. We went to school because it was The Law. The rest of the time, we built a hut. What Roosevelt and Mowgli did with their evenings I haven’t the vaguest idea.

  When I was a kid, the way you built a hut was this: some kid would, in his wanderings, come back to the block busting with news. We would skulk over to the rockpile, exchange fourteen or fifteen passwords, swear eleven or twenty lifetime vows, and put our heads together. We whispered. There was nobody within a radius of half a block, but we whispered because it was a secret. I still think that’s right.

  What the kid had found out was that somewhere in town, a new house was going up. This meant two things to us.

  First, it meant that for some time, whenever we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, we could go over and watch the men building a house. That was entirely wonderful: the equivalent with today’s kids, I guess, would be—well, the mind boggles. Three weeks at Los Alamos, I guess, with Jackie Gleason.

  You could see men with wheelbarrows push a wheelbarrow across a plank that spanned an excavation. The plank went up and down very satisfactorily. It looked as if the men would fall off, perhaps under a wheelbarrowful of cement. They never did, but we hoped. You could watch men mixing cement, in the biggest container any of us had ever seen. What a boat that would have made! You could see them make the mound of sand, and scoop a crater out of the top, and pour in the cement from the bag (a smoke screen, like in The Boy Allies), and stir in the water and take a hoe and paddle for hours in this beautiful slop, like they kept telling us at home not to do with our gravy and mashed potatoes. You could see men hit a nail every time, and drive a nail home in three strokes.

 
You could hear Italian being talked, you could see men climbing ladders and getting powdered absolutely white with cement, you could see muscles bulging and heavy things being lifted. You could smell sweat, and hear swearing such as you had never heard before, and guys hollering at each other until they turned purple.

  You could sit on the sidewalk and be close enough to touch a man eating a sandwich made out of a whole loaf of bread. You could see a man climb to the ridgepole and tack on a green bough, and then you could see a whole lashing of cementy, garlicky, spitting, nose-blowing between the fingers onto the ground, laughing, hollering brown-moustached men drinking whiskey out of a bottle, water out of a hose, beer out of a barrel, wine out of a jug.

  We sat on the sidewalk, and once in a while they swore at us, and one day—surely the greatest day in the history of the world—one of the men gave me a bite of his sandwich. He also gave me a small green object shaped like a fat leaf. It was an Italian hot pepper, and the inside of my mouth turned to fire and the tears ran out of my eyes. But I got to drink out of the very hose the men had been using, and they didn’t laugh for more than three hours.

  We sat and watched them, and every day when we went home we went to the rockpile and gave the passwords and swore the oaths, and we split to nobody about the new house. Because every day, sitting there we were thinking about the other thing that a new house going up meant to us.

  It meant that we could steal. For our hut. Willie Sutton or Dillinger never planned a heist better. We had to time it close to the end of the construction, because like all criminals, we had to justify our crime. Had we stolen when the house was still going up, it was possible that we might take something that was needed for the house. That was clearly immoral. We were one with Robin Hood and W. C. Fields. We planned to steal from the rich and give to the poor. “What poor, Daddy?” “Us poor.” We knew the day, just like we knew the day when immies stopped and baseball started.