Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of stranger abductions in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children’s lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

  The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

  What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play? There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn’t encounter a single other child.

  Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

  Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

  I hate Captain Underpants.

  I’m not saying that the books in the popular series, featuring the adventures of two potty-minded fourth-graders, written and illustrated by Dav Pilkey, aren’t lively, well crafted, and snappily designed. Nor am I saying that the books’ unrelenting, quasi-Tourettic aesthetic of poop, boogers, and toilets isn’t rooted in an authentic moment of childhood—of boyhood, at any rate. I’m just saying that I hate them. I feel obliged to hate them, even though hating them makes me a hypocrite. I’m a father. Being a hypocrite is my job.

  Proof of my hypocrisy can be found in my ancient devotion to the drugstore cult of Wacky Packages. Wacky Packages followed Hot Wheels and preceded Pet Rocks as one of the great commercial fads of my childhood. For about a year, like all my friends, I collected Wacky Packages, traded them, stuck them to my threering binder, the inside of my locker, my bedroom wastebasket. They were so popular and ubiquitous that Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., the manufacturer of Wacky Packages, several times literally ran out of paper to print them on. Just before the fad petered out, Wacky Packages were featured on the cover of New York magazine (my parents had a subscription), which used the fad to diagnose me and my supposedly cynical, wised-up, skeptical generation.

  The typical Wacky Packages card featured a peel-off sticker that mocked the appearance and name of some well-known brand of household product, grocery item, or staple of the drugstore. A bottle of fetid-looking salad dressing labeled Fish-Bone, a foam-mouthed dog on the label of a can of Rabid Shave shaving cream, a Bustedfinger candy bar with a big swollen finger poking through the wrapper, a bar of Vile soap. A checklist card came in every package, along with a square of chewable pink cellulose, and every few months Topps would bring out a new series. Topps card designer Art Spiegelman and his colleagues (among them the great pulp-magazine cover artist Norman Saunders and underground-comix stalwarts Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Bhob Stewart) wound the spiral of mockery so tight that the fourth series featured a card depicting Wormy Packages, worm-infested trading stickers intended (like Wacky Packages themselves, like all the products and advertisements they mocked, like everything, by implication, that you saw, heard, or paid attention to, every moment of your young media-saturated life) to pry loose a nickel from your pocket.

  To any kid who had picked up a copy of Mad magazine during the previous twenty years, there was nothing new or generationally distinctive about the flavor of mockery to which Wacky Packages subjected the features of the American brandscape. The salient novelty of Wacky Packages was not their irreverence toward copywriter clichés or subversion of the ineluctability of brands and logos but their free, and at the time, startling use of “gross” humor. The first few series of cards employed imagery such as lice, poisonous dog food, exposed brains, Putrid cat chow, maggots, toe corns, flesh peeled away by Band-Ache strips, a powdered-blood breakfast drink for vampires (Fang), and saliva. What made that kind of imagery so startling was not the humor itself. Gross or sick humor was a fundamental mode of children’s discourse. Dead-baby jokes; songs about vomit, snot, diarrhea, and other forms of excrement; anecdotes and urban legends of cannibalism, coprophagia, brain-eating earwigs—at the age of eight or nine, along with all of my peers, I had assumed custody of a vast repertoire of wondrously disgusting material. The shock value of Wacky Packages had nothing to do with, in this sense, their content. They depicted or referred to nothing that I had not imagined, rhymed about, discussed, drawn, or seen for myself. What was so shocking about Wacky Packages was that they were a production of the adult world. Adults had conceived and painted them; adults had manned the rotating drums of the printing presses and the machine that wrapped each pack of two cards in waxed paper; adults had trucked the Wacky Packages to the drugstore, where you handed over your five cents to an adult who, perhaps most shockingly of all, allowed you to buy them. It was as if your mother encouraged you to play with your food, or your father handed you his expensive German shortwave radio and a screwdriver and told you to go right ahead and figure out how the damn thing worked.

  In retrospect, I see the early-1973 Wacky Packages craze as a pivotal moment in the history of American childhood. Prior to this, gross humor was a kind of code, a thieves’ argot spoken only when out of earshot of adults, who—one knew it on faith if not through painful experience—never would have permitted or approved of it. Would not have understood it, in fact. Songs about boogers and vomit were transmissions in a frequency that would sound to the adult ear like infuriating squawk, annoying static. And that was their point. Along with the unwritten rules and nuances of byzantine games played in vacant lots and alleyways, gross humor was a principal means by which children signaled and celebrated the absence of adults in the immediate vicinity. We were a generation—maybe the last full generation—that adults left alon
e, at least sometimes. Singing a disgusting song or telling a cruel riddle (Q: What do you call a man with no arms or legs when you throw him in the ocean? A: Bob) was like running up an insurgent flag in a neighborhood where the occupier had been driven back for the moment. At the same time, the gore and mayhem, the amputations, the fatalities, the abominations described by gross humor also constituted a way of acknowledging the implicit danger of living in a world devoid of adults and of the protection they theoretically afforded.

  The adults who sold us Wacky Packages spoke the secret language; they entered boldly into the preserve or magic ghetto of childhood under the insurgent flag. I remember how it felt to open those first packs of Wacky Packages stickers: delicious, incredible, pleasurable in the way that only something truly wrong can be. Because in the long run, Wacky Packages, and the cultural trend of which they turned out to be the leading edge, were bad for children. I don’t mean bad in any kind of easy, moralistic way. Children must learn to mock capitalism and the uses to which it seeks to put them as early as they learn how to swim. And I wouldn’t care—I’d secretly applaud it—if my son and his friends wasted every free moment they had creating taxonomies of vomit by chunkiness and color. It’s just that they now have so few moments that can be said to be free in any sense of the word. So much of their culture—that compound of lore and play—is now the trademarked product and property of adults. The men who sold us Wacky Packages were like those traders in Hudson’s Bay blankets—good, warm blankets—whose stock gradually drove out the native product and sent the traditional weaving craft into decline. We sold out our liberty and gave up control over our ancient heritage of vulgarity for the thrill of seeing it done up in four-color lithography, transferable to a notebook or a classroom desk, scented with the sweet dust of bubble gum.

  After Wacky Packages came Slime, the first “disgusting” toy (1977), and Garbage Pail Kids stickers (1985) and the advent of fart jokes in Walt Disney cartoons (The Lion King, 1994) and that masterpiece of the confectioner’s art, Sour Flush, acrid sweet powder that comes packaged in a miniature plastic toilet to be dabbed at and consumed by means of the moistened end of an edible plunger. And then one day children looked around and saw that there was no corner, no alleyway, no space anywhere in their lives that was free of adult supervision, adult mediation, adult control. All sports are organized sports, trick-or-treating takes place in school gymnasiums, and parents who send their children out to play where I used to play, in the street—in the street!—court well-publicized tragedies such as abduction and intervention by the minions of Child Protective Services. Captain Underpants, champion of flatulence and bodily fluids, is a mainstay of the Scholastic Book Club. The reading of the books is not only condoned but encouraged by teachers and librarians, grateful that boys are interested in reading anything at all.

  In detesting, disapproving of the Captain Underpants books, I am not trying to disparage my son’s taste in fiction, to belittle his choices, to withhold my approval of him. God knows I have nothing against boogers. This is where the hypocrisy comes in. I loved Wacky Packages. I knew every foul verse of the classic anthems “Suffocation” (Suffocation, mental retardation / Suffocation, the game we like to play) and “Diarrhea” (later made famous in the film Parenthood). If Captain Underpants had been around when I was a kid, I probably would have loved him, too. But knowing that doesn’t make it any harder for me to wish Captain Underpants away. The irony of the series is too painful. George and Harold, the young protagonists, enjoy the unscheduled time and freedom from adult supervision that I (and no doubt Dav Pilkey) once took for granted. The boys imagine, create, and draw their own superhero adventures (including those of Super Diaper Baby) within the context of an old-fashioned adult world that still disapproves heartily of boys’ taking pleasure from talking about pee and poop and snot. George and Harold’s teachers, one comes to realize, would never allow them to read Captain Underpants books, let alone help win free copies of them for their classroom by placing book-club orders with Scholastic. The original spirit of mockery has been completely inverted; it is now the adult world that mocks children, implicitly and profitably, speaking its old language, invoking its bygone secret pleasures.

  I see my disapproval of Captain Underpants, therefore, as a drawing of a line between my son and me, between his world and mine, between adulthood and childhood, as a small, feeble attempt to reestablish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague, disregarded, abused. If I withdraw my approval of Captain Underpants—if I tell my son I will gladly supply him with good books and comics but that if he wants to read those damned Captain Underpants, he’ll have to pay for them himself—that withdrawal creates a gap, a small enchanted precinct of parental disapproval within which he can curl up, for a minute, for the time it takes to read a crass, vibrant, silly 120-page book with big print, one that he paid for himself, and thrill to the deep, furtive pleasure of annoying one’s father. There is no way to draw that line, to re-create that boundary, without engaging in hypocrisy, without condemning, questioning, or diminishing the importance of the things, from ultra-sugary bubble gum to transfatty snacks to Humboldt County sinsemilla, that once stood at the center of my way of loving the world. That’s what sucks about being an adult. Adulthood has always carried a burden of self-denial, of surrendering pleasures, of leaving childish things behind. Maybe that’s why, around thirty years ago, adults started trying to get out of the adult business and into the business of selling childhood. Or maybe it’s that self-denial, surrender, and forswearing are a lot harder to package for retail. It could be hypocrisy is such a toxin that our society is better off without it, even if that means infantilizing adults with late-night programming on the Cartoon Network or merchandising children’s once autonomous culture back to them in shrink-wrapped packs. But it’s hard to think of anything that would be more hypocritical than the selling, to children whose lives we control and regiment down to the quarter hour, of brightly colored confectionery visions of children who are still subject to creative neglect, still free to engage in the most profitable of human activities: wasting time making up crass, vibrant silliness that is all your own.

  At least once a month I take my kids to see a new “family movie”—the latest computer-generated piece of animated crap. Please don’t oblige me to revisit the last one even long enough to name the film, let alone describe it. Anyway, you know the one I mean: set in a zoo, or in a forest, or on a farm, or under the sea, or in “Africa,” or in an effortfully hilarious StorybookLandTM where magic, wonder, and make-believe are ironized and mocked except at those moments when they are tenderly invoked to move units. I believe but am not prepared to swear that the lead in this weekend’s version may have been a neurotic lion, or a neurotic bear, or a neurotic rat, or a neurotic chicken. Chances are good that the thing featured penguins; for a while the movies have all been featuring penguins. Naturally, there were the legally required 5.5 incidences of humor-simulating flatulence per hour of running time. A raft of bright pop-punk tunes on the sound track, alternating with familiar numbers culled with art and cruelty from the storehouse of parental nostalgia. Creativity, idiosyncrasy, and the fertile rebelliousness of a romantic dreamer were invoked and glorified without recourse to the use or display of any of those three unmarketable commodities.

  In principle and in many instances, both as a parent and as a former child, I have nothing against crappy art and the ancillary crap—the extruded action figures and rubber-transfer-stiffened underpants and books of unpeelable stickers, sold separately—that inevitably attends it. First of all, what smells strongly of crap to one generation—Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies—so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

  More central to my regar
d—in principle, at least—for the artistic possibilities of crap is my lifelong personal experience with the power of mass art to transport and enrich the imagination of its consumer. I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I’m still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.

  But the acceptance and even the glorification of crap implies no universal obligation. Even without the benefit of generational hindsight, there are distinctions to be made among varieties of crap, and to that end I find myself thinking back to a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago when I went over to the Megginsons’ house to play Planet of the Apes.

  There were four Megginson children: Peter, Caroline, Andrew, and Jane. Caroline and I were classmates and Peter, a year older, was my best friend. They lived with their mother in a modest three-bedroom town house at the other end of the Village of Long Reach, in Columbia, Maryland, my hometown. Peter and Caroline each had a room, and the younger pair shared; Mrs. Megginson slept, not without a certain mysteriousness, in a semi-secret basement lair. She was a calligrapher, and the house was filled with the wise sentiments of the revered minds of the day rendered in Mrs. Megginson’s handsome hand. My parents kept a tidy house, but Mrs. Megginson’s laxity as a housekeeper was a point of pride with her, and visitors were cheerfully advised to wash the roach shit from cups and plates taken from her kitchen cabinets. The Megginson father was missing and rarely mentioned, the family budget extremely tight, the car an orange two-stroke Beetle named Agnes (it said so in adhesive calligraphy on her doors). There was always a faint air of possible trouble in the air, a sense that Mrs. Megginson, in her ongoing, hitherto successful efforts to raise four good children on her own, was operating just outside the bounds of accepted suburban-Maryland practice, with financial calamity a real if not quite imminent possibility. I suppose, looking back, that the Megginsons lived nearly as much in bohemia as in Columbia, and these were my first visits to that precarious kingdom.