I will be sent to a hospital with rolls of barbed wire around it, and men in white uniforms will place copper electrodes on my temples and throw a switch and scorch my brains so I never have another dirty thought in my life, and I will return home a placid moon-faced boy with an IQ of 45 who sits on the porch steps all day with his dog Scooter and eats big bags of potato chips and waves bye-bye to passing cars.
The village idiot.
Which is exactly what I looked like in the movie Daddy made on New Year’s Eve, 1955.
Everyone has seen this movie twice and the memory of it burns like acid.
O friends, Romans, countrymen.
2
Mr. Tree Toad
We Sanctified Brethren are people of the Word and the great cadences of the King James Version of 1611. We don’t hold with Literature and its godless drunks and wastrels, but we hold fast to God’s Literal Truth in Scripture. Yea, surely. But Daddy is a man of the picture and he loves his Kodak box camera. At family picnics he loves to arrange family portraits in the backyard and place Al next to LeRoy and Uncle Sugar and Aunt Ruth and Mother in her new green dress and Aunt Flo, all in a row beside the hydrangeas, and cry “Cheese!” and dash into the gap between Ruth and Mother and grin as the shutter goes click! Then get one of LeRoy mugging and get the earnest Al to hold out his hand for a trick picture in which he seems to be holding Flo’s head in his palm. We have pictures of various dogs wearing hats and neckties. An old snapshot of Sugar (with hair) holding a chamber pot. Aunt Bertha from behind, bending over her petunias. The older brother, tall, stone-faced, on roller skates, arms at his side, concentrating on remaining upright. The big sister in Camp Fire Girl neckerchief, trying to look normal and friendly. And me.
I look like a tree toad who was changed into a boy but not completely. There is still plenty of toadness there. The dark amphibian eyes blinking, the pipestem arms and wrists, the high-water pants, the flappy clown-shoes, the Herkimer hair, the steel-rim glasses. There I am at the end of the row of family, hunkering, as if waiting for a tasty dragonfly.
Daddy gave himself a Revere movie camera for a Christmas present, and on New Year’s Eve, as Mother and I sat playing Monopoly and listening to Ben Grauer live from Times Square, with Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians standing by at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Mother having just traded me Boardwalk for two railroads and Baltic Avenue, the camera started whirring and a floodlight blazed and I turned and Daddy said to smile and I leered at him (and at posterity) and these eleven seconds, my fellow countrymen, will forever live in the annals of shame.
0-3 sec. Side view of pencil-necked geek, his glasses, his hopeless hair shaved high on side of head, visible shaver-marks, unmistakable signs of home haircutting kit. His big Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows a bite of oatmeal cookie.
4-6 sec. His head jerks in reaction to off-camera command and he turns head, still chewing, and smiles his hideous toad grin, the little yellow toad teeth showing between the slimy lips.
6-11 sec. More of the leer, his trademark Norman Ninny glasses riding low on the oily nose, and then he attempts to boost them by screwing up his face—it looks like a spastic in mid-seizure! The feeb’s entire face scrunches up, and then he boosts the glasses with his little toad finger.
Here in this facial convulsion you can see why girls do not chase after this boy. Here is the reason he has never kissed a girl. (Okay, one girl, but a cousin. More on this later.)
No sensible woman would marry a guy this creepy. Take a look and you see: this person will never be a normal American. He will live alone and suffer from psoriasis and hemorrhoids and halitosis and earn $$$$ at home through taxidermy and selling salve and he will never have true friends, only other geeks, who remind him too painfully of himself, but what choice does he have? So he meets them at the Spastic Center to compare stamp collections, play chess, solve algebra problems, do geek-type things. He may never obtain a driver’s license. He’ll ride his Schwinn bike to and from Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and his old classmates will zoom past in their late-model cars and think, “Whatever happened to old Gary? The creep-o. The spaz. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for years.” ZOOM! And there I am, the old guy on a bike, the old galoot who totes his necessaries around in a plastic bag, a rubber band around his pants leg, reflective tape plastered on the sleeves and back of his plaid jacket, and a reflector pinned to the back of his hunting cap, eating a Little Debbie Snack Cake. “You thrill me so,” she whispered as she kissed him, her back arched, her luscious orbs gleaming in the moonlight—this type of thing will not happen for that guy, any more than he will sing and dance in a Broadway musical. That guy’s lovestick will never be a lovestick that any babe thinks of with anything but mute disgust.
The High School Orgies story about the boy in home-ec class. This will not happen for me. The girls are sewing dresses and the boy sews a tiny leopardskin bathing suit and models it for them. The girls inspect it closely, admiring the handiwork, and suddenly he bursts a seam and soon they’re all naked, their love juices flowing. I find this tremendously exciting, those girlish fingers poking at his pouch. I am going to hell. This is becoming increasingly clear. As Aunt Flo says, you don’t get to be a Christian by sitting in church any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car. What sort of Christian can open up High School Orgies to the picture of the home-ec girls’ breasts with pointy nipples and feel that happy twitching in his shorts?
I am going to spend eternity in hellfire for what is twitching in my mind right now.
Here I am in my room, weeping for my carnal sins, on a warm summer night, and what if the Second Coming is scheduled for nine-fifteen P.M. Central Time and in exactly five minutes the saved of earth will rise into the stratosphere and I will find myself left behind with the heathen?
This could be the case. What if I tiptoe downstairs right now and Daddy isn’t lying there on the daybed listening to the Millers on the radio—what if all of the Sanctified Brethren have whooshed up to the sky, Sugar and Ruth and Al and Flo and LeRoy and Lois, and I am left behind with the Catholics and the atheists and the drunks at the Sidetrack Tap? And Bob Motley says, “Folks, it’s the damnedest thing but all of a sudden—I’d say about a thousand fans—they were here in the stands enjoying the ballgame and suddenly they weren’t here, folks! I can see their half-eaten hot dogs, their scorecards, their shoes and clothes and, yes, even their doggone underwear! But they’re gone! I don’t know what the hell is going on!”
And then I stand in front of God’s Throne squinting up at His blazing glory and He says, “You had your opportunities, boy. But did you listen? No. You went on heedlessly reading that garbagey magazine with pictures of naked girls in it. How juvenile! I gave geese more sense than that.”
Please, God. I’m only fourteen years old. A teenager. Have mercy. Be loving.
“I was,” says God. “For eons. And look at what it got me. You.”
God turns in disgust, just the way Daddy does. “Sorry, but I’m the Creator. I take it personally. There are slugs and bugs and night-crawlers I feel better about having created—I mean, there are sparrows—I’ve got my eye on one right now. Is that sparrow consumed with lust? No. He mates in the spring and that’s the end of it. Consider the lilies. Do they think about lily tits all the time? No. They look not and they lust not, and yet I say unto you that you will never be half as attractive as they. Therefore, I say unto you, think not about peckers and boobs and all that nonsense, and your Heavenly Father will see that you meet a good woman and marry her, just as I do for the sparrow and walleye—yea verily, even the night-crawler and eelpout. But I’ve told you this over and over for nineteen centuries. And now, verily, it’s too late. Time’s up, buster. Lights out! Game’s over!”
I close my eyes and squeeze tight until bright sparks appear. In this way, I manage to hold off the Second Coming for a moment. I say a quick preventative prayer (Lord, I’m a sinner, come into my heart and save me and let me go to heaven), but I’ve said this pray
er hundreds of times before and doubt its efficacy. It’s only words. God looks on the heart and in my heart is a whole bevy of naked women beckoning to me.
I return to the porch. Toledo is at bat in the bottom of the seventh, their shortstop Denny Davies, who poked the triple in the second, now knocks out a single—he is three for three—and the sister is there, having stashed the magazine for blackmail, sitting beside Daddy, her hand on his hand. “I think Gary has something to tell you,” she announces.
Daddy looks at me. “Go dry the dishes.”
“I will in a minute.”
I will not surrender. I never saw High School Orgies in my life and have no idea where she found it. I will go to the kitchen when I choose and dry the pots and pans when I choose and not a moment before. You let the sister start calling the shots and you will become her indentured servant, and there will be no end to it.
She leans down and whispers, “I’d be very careful if I were you, because you’re not going to get away with this. You are going to be in very very big trouble. You smile like you think I don’t mean it. I do mean it. I could have that filthy magazine in Mother’s hands in two minutes!”
And just then, out comes Mother, my old ally and defender, iced tea in hand, in her green linen pants and white sailor blouse, barefoot, her bushy blond hair tied back, and settles down in the white wicker chair with the Minneapolis Star. “What a lovely evening,” she says.
“He won’t dry the pots and pans,” says Miss Misery. “And there’s one more thing—”
Mother looks up. “They’re dry. I put them away in the cupboard.”
The sister seethes. She steams, she fumes, she foams at the mouth. Oh, great is her rage thereof! Verily she is pissed. She glares at me, her pupils like shards of glass, and she heaves a sigh as big as North Dakota and stomps out. She stops in the living room to grind her teeth and then stomps upstairs in a white froth. Poor thing. This is what comes from anger, boys and girls. It chews up your brain and poisons your heart. Anger eats up your innards and is vile and displeasing to God and it availeth naught. It gets you nowhere. And now she stomps back down. And is standing in the doorway. She informs Daddy that the pots and pans had to be rewashed because flies had walked all over them for the past half-hour due to my disobedience. They are in the dish rack now and await my dish towel.
He looks over at me on the porch swing, a pillow behind my head, glancing through the Collier’s, reading about peanuts, a leguminous plant (Arachis hypogaea), bearing underground nut-like pods.
—Go do what you said you were going to do before I completely lose patience.
—I have to move the sprinkler again. I don’t want to overwater the grass. I’ve worked hard to get the lawn looking good and I don’t want to ruin it just because somebody is too weak to put away a few pots and pans herself.
—Then go move the sprinkler now.
—It isn’t watered yet.
—Move it anyway.
—I will, as soon as the mosquitoes are gone.
Daddy peers into the dark.
—There are clouds of mosquitoes swarming there. They’ll go away in a little while, and then I’ll move the sprinkler.
The sister addresses Mother in a small cold voice: “Everything he wants, he gets. He’s treated like royalty around here. He’s spoiled rotten and everybody says so. I don’t think you realize all the things he’s up to. Maybe someday you’ll find out and then you’ll wish you had exercised a little more discipline.” Her day has been ruined, poor thing. She stands, silent, defeated, proud, a moral bastion and bulwark who will be proven right in the fullness of time. She is a prize-winning born-again Christian who agrees 100 percent with Daddy that Elvis is evil and can’t sing one bit, the rock-and-roll craze is ridiculous, it’s those pelvic gyrations that are driving the youth of our nation crazy and inspiring paroxysms of lust and causing so many teens to go wrong.
I walk down the front steps. Frames of porch light stretch over the beautiful grass, and drops of water fly into the light. Thousands of drops enjoying a split-second life as individuals before mingling in the ooze. The grass is drenched, the ground soused. I pick up the green hose and crimp it to shut off the spray and drag the hose around to the side of the house, and in the shadows the Stenstroms’ cat, who knows my accuracy with water, slinks for cover in the lilacs.
I set the sprinkler so it waters a sphere of backyard from the cellar steps to the tomato plants to the clotheslines, and I come in the back door into the kitchen, where the sister sits smirking at the table. “Life is no bowl of cherries for anybody,” I tell her. “People around here are tired of hearing your complaints. We have enough troubles of our own.” I tell her she really ought to do something about her personality. And also her appearance. And she hisses at me, “Fornicator!” and stomps upstairs, and I dry the three pans and one pot she has rewashed, the ones that flies purportedly trod on, and as I put them into the cupboard I sneeze and a string of snot lands in the pot and I open the cupboard under the sink to get the detergent and there is High School Orgies hidden in a dish basin. Yes! Thank you, Lord! I appreciate this favor! I slip it under my shirt, and return to the porch and plop back into my nest on the swing and sit, pretending to read about peanuts, the evidence hidden safely under my shirt.
3
Ricky
Mother sits in the white wicker chair by the driftwood lamp, her legs crossed ladylike at the ankles, sipping her Salada iced tea, reading the Minneapolis Star, which she enjoys for its extensive coverage of heinous crime. Politics doesn’t interest her one whit, sports makes no sense whatsoever, she isn’t interested in the love lives of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor; but a good murder brightens Mother’s day considerably, she gets all giddy and chilly reading about it and mulling it over in her mind. The Lutheran minister who was telling his wife of thirty-one years that he couldn’t understand why people want to go to Europe when there are so many wonderful things to see right here in Minnesota and she blew off the back of his head with a Colt revolver. Blammo. Never shot a gun before in her life. Bull’s-eye. The St. Paul milkman who poisoned three old ladies on his route. They poured cream on their cornflakes and opened up the newspaper and ate their breakfast and fell face-first into the comics. He told the cops that he knew them well, they were lonely old ladies, and their great pleasure was reading Winnie Winkle and Bringing Up Father and L’il Iodine and Gasoline Alley. They looked forward to their cup of coffee and the funny pages every morning, and how fitting for a lonely old lady to fade away in a moment of pleasure. The Richfield man who wanted to move with his wife to Florida and decided to rob a liquor store, having read about attempted robberies and feeling that he could do it better, so he picked a big liquor store miles away and donned an eyemask and robbed the store at gunpoint at closing time, when the till was chock-full of cash, but the clerk happened to be an old high-school classmate and recognized him despite the mask, and the police pounded on his door as he was telling his wife the good news about Florida and called on him to surrender, and he emerged, holding a gun to the back of his wife’s head, demanding a ride to the Northwest Orient terminal at Wold-Chamberlain Field or he’d kill her, sure as shooting, and she turned and said, “You’ve done dumb things before, but this is the dumbest thing you did in your life, Joe,” and she dashed for cover, and the cops gunned him down in a fusillade of hot lead in his own front yard, the poor dope. He collapsed on the grass he had mowed all those years and his life ebbed away, he died looking at a birch sapling he had planted that spring which had died and he’d meant to dig it up and now he never would.
Tonight Mother is in a lighthearted mood because Aunt Doe is sick and can’t come up from Minneapolis to decorate Grandpa’s grave on his birthday.
“She called and said she has a bad case of the trots,” says Mother. “Poor thing.” Daddy breathes a long sigh of relief. Doe is a weeper, a sob sister of the first water, and Daddy cannot tolerate crying, he has to evacuate the room whenever it rears its head,
one sniffle and he is up and out of his chair.
Doe is a skinny minnie with mouse-colored hair who tries so hard to be no trouble to anybody and stay out of everyone’s way and make no demands whatsoever on anyone, and if you ask her what she’d like to eat for lunch, or what she wants to do after lunch, she only whispers, “Whatever you have left over. Don’t fix anything special for me. A piece of bread is more than good enough. Whatever you have extra of. Water is fine. If you want to go someplace after lunch, I can just sit here and look out the window. I’m happy. It’s fine with me. Make it easy on yourself. I’m quite content to look at an old magazine and listen to the radio. I don’t need anybody to entertain me. You go do whatever you like and just pretend I’m not here.” Her visits place a huge weight on our household. The weight of meekness. Aunt Doe is sort of the Billy the Kid of meekness, a professional meeker, she has outmeeked the best of them, she can meek you to death.
Mother is the only cheery one in that family, come to think of it—the others are a bunch of damp rags. Brother Ed works for the railroad in Chicago, a mournful little man indeed, and brother Jim is a lost cause in Duluth, a collector of defeat, and then there’s Mother. “Why carry rocks in your pocket?” she says cheerfully. “What’s past is gone.” Emphasize the positive. Why dwell on the past? Smile and you get a smile back. Look for the silver lining. Tomorrow is a brand-new day. What’s done is done and you can’t look back, you have to look to tomorrow.
If she knew what I have under my shirt, she would tell me to throw it away, and then tomorrow she’d be her usual self, bygones forgotten, water under the bridge.
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Page 3