It was usually summer, and the evenings were long. It was hot, and there were scratch meals up and down the block, and you could get out on the block early. You could skulk down to where the new house was, you could nonchalantly stroll to the corner, pretending you were not aware you were dragging an express wagon behind you. We were superb actors, aided in no small measure by the total lack of an audience, other than ourselves.
At the corner, we synchronized our heads (lacking watches) and were off. From there on out it was the sack of Rome.
We stole shingles, shingle nails, two by fours, once a keg, a whole keg, of nails, we loaded our pockets, our shirts, our knickerbockers (now, see, there’s another thing about kids today; assuming there was anything to steal, without knickers, where the hell would they carry their loot?). We stole siding, we stole rolls of tarpaper, lengths of pipe, pieces of stone, almost empty cement sacks, once we got a box of hinges and a linoleum knife—the most lethal-looking weapon man has ever made. We hooked doorknobs and scraps of cable, push-buttons and tiles, wallpaper and faucet handles.
We took anything that was not nailed down. And that was, literally, the test.
What we took was what was left over. Anything we didn’t take, that night, was going back somewhere into limbo. It would not exist any more. We were doing them a favor. We were cleaning up. We were public-spirited citizens. We were heroes.
We went back to the lot by different routes, we stashed our loot. We went home and when somebody said, “Where were you?” we said, “Out,” and when somebody said, “What were you doing until this hour of night?” we said, as always, “Nothing.”
Tomorrow we would build our hut.
I’m sorry. It is not yet time to build the hut. First we have to build the treehouse.
The treehouse comes first because we built it first, and I know this because we built the tree house in my backyard, and we must have built it there because we were not yet allowed on the vacant lot.
The other day, on my way to the parkway, I passed a house that had a yard, and in the yard there was a tree, and in the tree there was a treehouse.
And that treehouse was built by a carpenter. It had a floor, made of tongue-and-groove boarding, it had sides built of siding, it had a roof made of a new tent.
It was probably built from a plan by a carpenter. It probably has wrought-iron furniture in it, and a Rouault print on the wall.
There were no kids in it.
We didn’t build treehouses that way. We hooked a hammer and we hooked some nails—do you suppose kids still straighten bent nails on a rock?—and we hooked some pieces of wood and a saw.
We cut a piece of wood and reached as high up as we could with one foot, and there we nailed a crosspiece. It took us more than three strokes to drive a nail home. We stood on this crosspiece and reached as high up as we could with our hands and nailed a crosspiece up there. One kid hung from his hands by that crosspiece while we measured where his feet hung with his knees drawn up. We nailed a crosspiece there. We kept on doing this until we got seventy million feet in the air, where the first crotch of the tree was.
We horsed a couple of pieces of wood in place in the crotch and leaned against the branch, and then we got a piece of awning and bulled that on the crotch somehow; we let down a piece of string with a basket on it, and hauled it up and down with messages, pieces of Tootsie Roll, and eventually, a kitten, just like in all the calendar drawings.
What we wanted was, of course, a rope ladder, so that once up we could haul it in, and be safe from any sort of intrusion. This was beyond our powers.
We were so high up in the empyrean we were on a level with the bedroom windows. You may think this was only one story up in the air. How, then, do you account for the fact that the air was thin, and we were continually surrounded by eagles?
THE TROUBLE WITH THE TREEHOUSE WAS THAT, little though we were, we could not for long convince ourselves that it was a house. It wasn’t, and we knew it after what may have been days or weeks or months—time is a very flexible thing with kids. I know today that I could not possibly have stared at my first cricket for more than minutes, and yet today in that length of time I could write a whole first act. The treehouse after a certain length of time was only a couple of boards and a piece of awning loosely attached to a tree.
But the hut; well, that was a place where we could live. I have been trying hard to remember just how we started to build it. Certainly there was no foundation. I seem to remember building the first wall in one piece, boards and tarpaper hammered onto a couple of two-by-fours, and the two-by-fours extending below, the whole structure raised and the extensions going into holes, and rocks being jammed around. I imagine we got the second wall up the same way, and ran roof beams across the top so that it stood up. The roof, if memory serves, and I am getting pretty dubious about that, was something that was lying around the lot. An abandoned cellar door, perhaps.
I am lying a little now—hell, I am lying a lot. I don’t really remember building the hut. I remember repairing it, and expanding it, and putting a better door in it, a hasp and a lock. I remember packing rocks from the rockpile around the perimeter, to strengthen the hut—it was by then a fortress—against any attack. I remember tamping down the dirt floor, and finding a piece of linoleum and a gunny sack to brighten the corner which was mine.
I suppose, when I come right down to it, none of us could stand upright in the hut, and I have a kind of notion that when there were more than two of us in it, no one of us could move.
This is a hell of a note, on an August afternoon in my declining years to realize that really, that hut, that shining palace, that home away from home, that most secure of all habitations, was not much bigger than a big doghouse, and could have been pushed over by an angered Shetland pony. (Which any of us were going to get any moment, or a magic lantern, as soon as we had sold thirty-four million packages of blueing.)
No matter. It was ours. It belonged to us. And if you were not one of us, you could not come in. We had rules, oh Lord, how we had rules. We had passwords. We had oaths. We had conclaves.
It was a pitiful wreck of a tarpaper hut, and in it I learned the difference between boys and girls, I learned that all fathers did that, I learned to swear, to play with myself, to sleep in the afternoon, I learned that some people were Catholics and some people were Protestants and some people were Jews, that people came from different places. I learned that other kids wondered, too, who they would have been if their fathers had not married their mothers, wondered if you could dig a hole right to the center of the earth, wondered if you could kill yourself by holding your breath. (None of us could.)
I learned that with three people assembled, it was only for the briefest interludes that all three liked each other. Mitch and I were leagued against Simon. And then Simon and I against Mitch. And then—but you remember. I didn’t know then just how to handle that situation. I still don’t. It is my coldly comforting feeling that nobody still does, including nations, and that’s what the trouble with the world is. That’s what the trouble with the world was then—when Mitch and Simon were the two and I was the one.
What else did I learn in the hut? That if two nails will not hold a board in place, three will probably not either, but the third nail will split the board. I think kids still do that. I think objects made of wood by children, left to their own devices, if such there be, will assay ten percent wood, ninety percent nails.
I learned that I could lift things, rocks mostly, that my mother would have thought too heavy for me.
I learned to smoke, first, cornsilk wrapped in newspaper. I can taste it to this day. We never had the patience to let the cornsilk really dry. I don’t imagine kids do that very much any more, mostly because they’ve never heard of it. What you do is take the cornsilk, spread it out in the sun until it is brown, like the little beard you find in the husk. Wrap it in a spill of newspaper—it’ll look more like a very small ice-cream cone than anything else—set fire to t
he end, being careful not to torch off your eyebrows. My recollection is that it bore no relationship to tobacco, but it wasn’t bad at all. It had one big virtue. When caught, you had not committed a sin, as you did later when you smoked real cigarettes. Real cigarettes stunted your growth, we knew that. What that meant to us was that your growth stopped, right there. It was not impeded. You just plain stopped growing, as if you were frozen. You would be three feet tall when you were sixty years old. It was in no way contradictory that we never saw a grownup three feet tall. They had never smoked as children, and certainly the ones who had were not going to walk around in the daylight letting everybody know what they had done.
And to make this intellectual adjustment absolutely complete, we were able to hold this certain knowledge, this fact, intact and at the same time, as soon as possible, start smoking cigarettes.
Before that we smoked scribblage, like cigars. That was pretty bad.
Getting cigarettes was quite a problem. Most of the fathers on our block smoked cigars or pipes, and so far as we knew, no woman smoked. There were no vending machines. Getting cigarettes involved suborning some kid between childhood and adulthood, and the blackmail he thereafter commanded was too expensive. You could then buy cigarettes in little cardboard boxes of ten. You could theoretically, but the man in the store would not sell them to us, no matter how earnestly we told him a father, an uncle, some man on the corner, had asked, nay, commanded us to purchase them. Kids on the wrong side of the tracks could buy them, one at a time, from an open box that storekeepers used to keep on their counters. Three for a penny, was it, or a penny apiece?
It didn’t matter. We were on the right side of the tracks. We could not buy, borrow, or beg them. So we stole them.
We did, as a matter of course, considerable stealing.
There were two kinds of stealing: there was the kind of stealing that we had to do continually for survival; we knew it was stealing, and we had been told it was wrong, but we could see no way of obtaining certain necessities without stealing, so we called it something else. Hooking, pinching, borrowing—which last we occasionally called loaning, just to complicate the situation. I guess that was an even finer distinction, now that I come to think of it; occasionally, of course, we did really borrow things. Therefore, the kind of stealing we would have liked to soften by calling “borrowing” we had to call “loaning.”
We pinched food: potatoes to roast on a scribblage-and-wood fire at the hut. They were not exactly roasted: they were put in the fire until black on the outside, when they were called mickies. They were then broken open and seasoned with stolen salt. At home, we were accustomed to put butter on potatoes, but for some reason it never occurred to us to hook butter for the mickies. They were totally carbonized on the outside, quite raw on the inside. I remember them as being nasty and wonderful at one and the same time, and perhaps the best part of it was that often there were little worms of red fire still running around the skin, while we ate the barely cooked, terribly hot inside. We hooked apples to cook the same way, but they were not very good. We hooked sugar lumps, which we had been told would give us worms. Candy was not so much stolen as taken as a birthright.
We stole medicine: it was the days of great, epic, and constant purging, and there were many medicines which came in powders. They lay in a little cardboard box, little carefully folded stiff tissue-paper enclosures, like odd and unique handmade envelopes, half of the packets red, half blue. I suppose they were Seidlitz powders, I heard them talked about then, I think they were cathartic, but I have not heard of them since I was a kid, and I do not really know. What we did know was that if you put first one colored envelope, then the other, into a bottle of water, there was considerable action. We dared each other to drink them, but I don’t recall that any of us took the dare. My kids display the same sort of interest in Alka-Seltzer, and they put a thumb over an opened bottle of Coke and shake, as we did with pop. Pop came much later in my years: Mother had a great belief in natural things; honey was better than sugar, fresh fruit was better than candy, figs and nuts were better than cookies. Outside of milk, the only thing us kids got that came in bottles—with the single horrible exception of citrate of magnesia—was grape juice. Citrate of magnesia was the children’s purge: I would gladly have been strung up by my thumbs for two days rather than endure the horrible, jawclenching torture of magnesia, and when my grandfather brightly announced that to him it was just like lemon soda, I could have strung him up by the thumbs. However, there was no escape, and sooner or later, you emptied the bottle, which I recall as containing a bathtubful.
One other thing in the more or less medicinal line we always planned to steal was a seltzer siphon: it was a stomach-centered world in those days, and physicking was that time’s constant preoccupation as ours is tranquilizing drugs. The seltzer bottle stood on many tables, and was sovereign incitement to what was then not called burping, because indeed it was belching. Our purpose in stealing it was to spray one another with it. Now, in this halcyon age, my children can tune in television and watch one expensive wit doing it to another. Us kids never, as I recall it, ever got away with the theft of a seltzer bottle. We had to content ourselves as well as we could with spitting on one another.
But back to larceny: we loaned chalk from the school, money from our mothers, golf balls from smaller children, clothesline from anywhere. Truly, I will get to clothesline pretty soon.
That was the loaning, the hooking, the pinching. The money we took from our mothers was not stealing, because it was money that was laying around. On kitchen tables, bureaus, mantelpieces. That was, like at the new house, not nailed down and it was not stealing.
The other kind of stealing was honest-to-God stealing, and we did that in a different way, knowing that we were committing criminal acts, scared, awaiting the arrival of the police, and pretty damn proud of ourselves. Money that was not laying around came in that category. If a pocketbook was laying around, but it was closed, taking money out of it was stealing, and we did that only on extreme provocation. Extreme provocation was when (And do you remember your schoolteacher forbidding you to ever start a sentence that way—or split an infinitive to boot—or use dashes as punctuation?) we had been denied our birthright, to wit, a lethal weapon. This was, most often, a bee-bee gun, next most often a hunting knife, next most often, fireworks. I never got a gun or a knife. In Mexico, at age twenty-eight, I bought the goddamnedest folding machete you ever saw, last month in an Army-Navy store I got me an air pistol that shoots bee-bees, slugs and darts, and if anybody knows where you can buy those little Chinese firecrackers in red paper, the ones about the size of a little finger, the wicks all braided together, ready for unbraiding to make them last longer, for bending to make into sizzlers, communications to my publisher will be greatly appreciated. I know where you can still buy realies.
The obtuseness of parents is incredible (and I can hear my own kids saying, “But of course”), but I never got a bee-bee gun or a hunting knife when I was a kid, because my parents said they were too dangerous. And well they are. But how, then, was it allowable that we had a dart board and darts, and I tell you I ground those points on the front steps to better than a needle point, and any time we wanted we could go borrow—and I mean really borrow—the ice pick? The ice pick was usually so sharp it could not be honed any better. It was the universal handy-dandy all-combination tool, for making holes in anything, and after you had used it for boring a hole in a belt to strap a kid to a tree to play Indians burning settlers, it was good for an hour of throwing into the garage wall, thunk. About darts: we used to get a kitchen match, loan ourselves a needle, force the needle into one end of the match and bind it with loaned black thread. The other end was split, and two little wings of paper folded in. This was a dart that stuck to anything, including other children’s clothes, and occasionally other children. I shudder to think of it.
So we stole for our arsenal, like the Irish rebels, and we got nowhere.
We
stole for lust, too: this dodge I remember with pride. The days I look at the typewriter and curse my misguided career, I think of the cigar-store caper and dream I had followed it up. Today I could have been a successful gangster, with personal barbers and beautiful disposable broads appearing and disappearing one after the other like tissues in a Kleenex box, a permanent table at some fancy night club, an assistant hood to drive and park my car, pack my bags—oh, well.
I don’t know what age I was when I discovered naked ladies, but I remember where. At the barber shop, and in the Police Gazette. When I go to the barber shop today, I have to burrow down through Bugs Bunny and Little Lulu, Mumsy Moose and Addle the Aardvark and Truly Bestial Horror Comics to find the newspaper, but in those days, a little boy walked into the barber shop and sat down and kept his mouth shut, and there was no equity about your turn: if there were men around, you waited until they were through. And you didn’t run around saying, “Yang yang,” the way kids do in a barber shop now, and having fond fathers smile at you. Open your kisser, and you were melted down to a small puddle by the assembled glares.
So I kept my mouth shut and looked at the naked ladies in the Police Gazette. Then I sat in the barber chair and looked at the naked lady—she was usually an Indian lady, and not completely naked—on the calendar.
That’s where I found out about naked ladies, and so did the other kids, and after a while it occurred to us that if the barber, Lou Kahler the Square-Deal man (and that was no political slogan) could get these magazines, we could too.
There was a candy, cigar, stationery, toy, newspaper, rubber band, rubber ball, chewing gum, poker and pinochle card, library-paste store which we honored with our patronage. In the back was a large rack of magazines. We entered the store, and one of our outposts dickered with Mr. Cantor over some licorice whips, and chocolate sponge. The rest of us proceeded to the magazine rack. One of us got down the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine in which we had absolutely no interest, except that it cost a nickel and was large. In that magazine, every few pages, we introduced other reading matter. Film Fun, College Life (not College Humor—that had jokes, this had girls) Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Physical Culture (don’t be silly, it had naked ladies, too), and whatever other instructive and edifying reading matter we could find. I took this lustful sandwich under my arm, and even more debonair than Jimmy Valentine, I strolled in a cosmopolitan way down the aisle of the store, past the petty playthings of children, gave Mr. Cantor a nickel, and then, boy did we run for that hut. I don’t suppose I have the nervous system now to do this once, and some tiresome hanger-on of my youth will claim that I didn’t do it even then, but you know how people will knock down a successful criminal. I know I did it half a dozen times, and the last time was not even worried about Mr. Cantor. It was foolproof. Of course, a year or so ago I passed his store and I don’t believe I went in. Just didn’t feel like it, that’s all.
Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. Page 5