Aunt Eva was tickled pink to take charge of me. Daddy told her I’d said a swear word, and after he left, she cut me a slice of chocolate cake three inches thick with a glop of whipped cream on top. She said that everybody thinks swear words sometimes and there isn’t much difference between thinking them and saying them, according to the Gospel. When she was young, she said, she used to go to the barn and say every bad word she knew, and that way she got it out of her system.
I asked if I was going to hell and she said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” And then she did something that nobody in our family did, ever, she told me she loved me, and she threw her big arms around me, and I took a deep breath of her, and she squeezed and said, “I wish you still lived with me, precious.”
I was so happy. It was a blazing-hot summer afternoon. Grandma was taking a nap. Eva said we’d go swimming later in the river. We sat in the shade on the back steps. I asked, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” I would take a trip around the world, I said. This thought didn’t seem to interest her. She picked up a bucket, and we headed out past the machine shed to the garden drenched in sunshine, picked a dozen ears of sweet corn, two cucumbers. Bees busied themselves among the vines, the pea vines and melons and pumpkins and squash, the whole jungly spread of vinous stuff, dipping under the broad fuzzy leaves. Eva picked a few crimson tomatoes. I picked one and wiped it off and bit into it and sucked up the warm juice. Eva didn’t. She was listening. Then she hissed at me to get down.
We hid behind the tomatoes and I heard a tractor coming and soon Mr. Walberg appeared, sitting up tall on his Allis-Chalmers like a skinny scarecrow, wheeling along the road and raising a cloud of dust in his wake. He flew past us and up through the gate and into the back pasture.
“What would you do if he saw us and stopped?” I said.
She shuddered at the thought and we hustled back to the house.
“You understand, don’t you, precious?” she said when we got to the house and went up the steps and into the coolness and safety of the kitchen. “I don’t care to be stared at by strangers. People can say whatever they like, but I refuse to be gawked at.”
“Nobody’s gawking at you.”
“They would if they could,” she said.
I found this conversation troubling. Everybody knew that Eva hated to go to town and only went for the Breaking of Bread and wouldn’t shop in the stores. She’d make a beeline for the house if the postman drove in. Grandma thought nothing of jumping in the Studebaker and gadding about and visiting with neighbors, but Eva never accompanied her. This was not commented on, any more than you’d comment on any other piece of common knowledge, but it struck me now as embarrassing. If Mr. Walberg had glanced over and seen us two hunkered down in the tomatoes, I’d have hopped up and waved to him. It’s my aunt who’s crazy, I was only doing it for a joke.
Daddy came and took me back to town.
—How’s Eva and Grandma?
—Fine.
—Did you think about how you need to control what you say?
—Yes, I did.
—And what did you decide?
—I’m not going to swear.
—I hope you mean it.
—I do.
And in my head I thought, I’ve got to get the hell out of here, damn it.
6
What Foul Blast Is This?
I was not such a good boy ever again after that. On a field trip to the Science Museum in St. Paul, I was the one who got the other boys to crouch at the head of the glass case with the Egyptian mummy inside and peek down into the mummy’s shorts to see his petrified pecker. On a trip to the Como Park Zoo, I pointed out the monkeys eating their own poop, and the one with a blazing-red butt playing with his pecker. Girls glared at me. How could I have such a filthy mind? I don’t know. The Boy Scout Handbook recommends that you get plenty of exercise and avoid spending time alone, but this doesn’t work in all cases, apparently.
And then, last spring, I caused tapioca pudding to come squirting out the nostrils of Leonard Larsen, a remarkable accomplishment as he considers himself the class intellectual and everything. We were sitting across from each other in the gloom of the high-school cafeteria and Leonard was talking about how he wanted to write a term paper about James Dean and Miss Lewis wouldn’t let him, though James Dean was truly a great man, and he was all worked up over James Dean, James Dean, and I said, “He made that movie Booger Without a Cause, didn’t he?” And it just hit Leonard a certain way and his eyes got teary and his face rubbery and two thick strands of tapioca pudding came out his nose. Long ones. I said, “You have tapioca snot, Leonard.” And he choked and yarked up some pudding. It was just one of those stupid jokes that happen to hit a person at the right time. He choked and gagged and turned dark red and put his head between his knees. I never had such a big effect on anyone before. Of course, Leonard always was wound pretty tight.
He gagged as if his whole macaroni lunch might blow out of him, and Miss Lewis, our eighth-grade teacher, came flapping over and pounded Leonard on the back, and when he settled down, she said to me, “It’s not funny, so wipe that smirk off your face. A person could choke to death like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You ought to be. What did you say to him?”
I told her. “That’s not funny,” she said. “That’s just stupid.”
A few classmates gathered round, sensing an emergency, hoping for something gory, perhaps with major hemorrhaging, and then Mr. Halvorson, the school principal, appeared, a short, chin-less man with a watery gaze and a permanent pained expression, and she reported on my homicidal behavior, and he looked down at me and shook his head. “It only takes one to ruin it for everybody,” he said gravely. That afternoon, Mr. Halvorson dropped in on our class in the middle of Emily Dickinson and gave us a lecture about taking responsibility for our behavior—that small careless deeds, no matter how innocent they may seem, can have horrible consequences. “You could snap someone with a towel—for fun—and injure him so that he will never be able to have children,” said Mr. Halvorson. “You didn’t mean to, but you’re still responsible.” We pondered this, the sting of snapping cloth against our testicles. “Or you could make a thoughtless remark while someone is eating and he could choke on his food and die. It’s happened. I don’t want it to happen here.” He stood next to me, his hairy fingers tapping on my desk—“Do you have any idea what it’s like to choke to death?” The room was still. And then his body sort of tensed up and gave out a low ripping sound, and suddenly a terrible sour shitty smell was all over the place. It smelled like the outhouse burned down. And the smell didn’t go away. This was no ordinary 59-cent fart but one of those quiet, deadly ones, a sizzler, mean and dark, a stink submarine.
Like anyone else, I maintained a healthy interest in farts, all ten varieties—the silent but deadly, the slow leaks, the hissers, fizzers, poppers, croakers, bangers, cheek-flappers, tail-gunners, and cargo farts, the ones that deliver a load—and this one was in a class all its own. A small dark cloud of a fart such as an alien from outer space might deliver to Earth, necessitating the evacuation of cities. But Mr. Halvorson kept right on yakking about personal responsibility while his handiwork hung in the air. No apology from him whatsoever, no “Gosh, boys and girls, that was a ripe one, wasn’t it,” no nothing. I stared at the poem in front of me—The voluptuous Tapestry
Of day is done
Behold—the Majesty
Of Setting Sun.
The darkness—like Ocean Currents
Descends—and soon
The chaste Appearance
Of the Orphan Moon.
And what Foul Blast—
Is this—dark Breath—
That holds us fast—
Who else—but Death?
And I let out a sudden high-pitched whinny that could not be held in. And he turned and smiled his phony Educator of the Year smile and said, “Did you think of a joke, Gary?”
I shook my he
ad. No, sir. Not me, sir.
“It must have been a good one to make you chortle like that.”
No, sir. There is no joke, sir.
“I’m sure we’d all appreciate a really good, funny joke right now. Wouldn’t we, class? Why not share it with everyone?”
I looked down at the Emily Dickinson poem. He said, “Go ahead. We’ll just wait until you’re ready to share it with everyone, whatever you were thinking.” And so I told him. My face turned blazing red but I said, “That’s the worst fart I’ve ever smelled. It smells like a badger fart.”
His smile immediately faded. He turned to the class, who were all in a tizzy (What did he say? A badger what?), and thanked them for their attention and said what a fine bunch of individuals they were and what a privilege it was to be their principal and out the door he scooted. Miss Lewis gave me a dirty look. “I’ll deal with you later,” she said.
Two hours later, Mother is waiting for me in the kitchen, in her gardening outfit, blue jeans and an old white shirt. Miss Lewis has spoken to her and informed her that I spoke insolently to the principal and used a vulgar word, a word Miss Lewis could not bring herself to repeat over the telephone. When School calls, Mother listens. She is not a questioner of authority. What word was it? she asks. “Tell it to me.”
So I do.
She shakes her head. “What sort of Christian witness will you have if you go around talking like that?”
“He asked me what I was thinking, and I told him. Should I have lied and said I didn’t know what was on my own mind?”
“Scripture says we’re to avoid giving offense. Promise me you won’t use language like that.”
“I only use the word fart when one occurs.”
“I hate dirty talk. Men hanging around the tavern, talking about damn this and the hell with that. He’s a bastard and she’s a bitch. It’s ugly. It’s not pleasing to the Lord.”
I point out that I didn’t use any of those words. Just the word fart.
“Well, please don’t,” she says.
“What word should I use instead? Poot?”
She says she doesn’t see why people are so fascinated by what goes on in toilets.
“But that’s the point! He didn’t do it in the toilet! He did it three feet away from my face! He cut this tremendous stinker. And then he pretended it wasn’t his. It hung there in the air and he acted like it was a bouquet of daisies.”
And she giggles against her will, and turns away. “Your father is very disappointed when you do things like that,” she says, her back to me. But I can tell that it doesn’t matter so much to her. And Daddy is always disappointed, regardless. So that’s the end of the conversation. But not the end of my troubles.
Leonard Larsen was impressed by the joke about Booger Without a Cause, even though it caused him to exhale tapioca. He told me I had a quick mind. He even invited me over to his house.
The Larsens lived in a new rambler with yellow siding up the street from the Lutheran church. They were Methodists, a bunch the Brethren looked down on as a weak-tea religious outfit, once staunch and now fallen far down the slippery slope of moderation and modernism, their preachers preaching civics lessons from the pulpit, their idea of a hymn “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.” Leonard’s dad was a big muckety-muck at St. Cloud Teachers’ College and they had piles of books around the house. In Leonard’s room was a bookshelf full of big picture books about the Vikings and World War II and Great Paintings of the Renaissance and railroad locomotives and the Wild West and other stuff that I coveted but was cool about. I glanced at the spines, and said something complimentary about the quality of the binding.
Whereupon he reached in between the Vikings and the Renaissance and pulled out a copy of High School Orgies, a magazine for the connoisseur of the female form. “Return it whenever you’re done with it,” he said. “I’ve got more.”
I sat down on the bed and opened it to the first story, “Sex in the Library,” which featured a photograph of a naked woman. Completely naked. I had never seen such a thing before. I looked closely to make sure. Not a stitch was she wearing. That was all her. She stood holding an armload of books in front of a bookshelf, and a young man was peeking at her interesting breasts through the shelves.
“What do you think?” said Leonard.
So as not to hurt his feelings, I read the story.
Pete needed a manual on automotive repair so he could fix his jalopy. He found Miss Perkins the librarian in the stacks, bending over to shelve an armload of books, and there inside her blouse were the two prettiest bazooms he’d ever seen. “Oh Pete,” she said. “You surprised me.” He looked left and right. Nobody else around. “I need a manual, Miss Perkins,” he said. “Call me Lorelei,” she replied. “I’ll give you a manual and a lot more.” Her hot mouth sought out his and she unbuttoned her blouse. She slipped to the floor and he knelt in front of her. She arched her back and unclasped her brassiere to afford him access to her luscious orbs. His fingers slipped into her jeans. She was hot as a furnace. Soon his manhood throbbed against her as she lay in the aisle between the shelves, squirming with pleasure, pulling him on top of her, the hungry little bitch. She began to thrust violently against him. She knocked down several stacks of dusty tomes in the process but she didn’t care. They slammed together like steam pistons, her legs wrapped around his waist as waves of pleasure seized her willing body that had been deprived of sexual fulfillment for much too long now. “Oh God!” she screamed, and spasmed as the first of several orgasms struck her. They dressed quickly and he helped her pick up the books they had knocked over. “Oh Pete,” she said, smiling. “I hope we can do this again soon.”
“It’s interesting,” I said, not wanting to offend him by suggesting that it was written for morons, though this thought did occur to me.
“You can jerk off to this,” he said. I had no idea what he meant. “Jerk off what?” I said.
“Beat the bishop,” he said. “Pound the peenie. Choke the gopher. Give yourself a hand job.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.” But I had no idea what a hand job was, except probably a job that you did by hand, but what exactly?
7
My Literary Career
Leonard and I go way back. We were boys who loved school. We were spelling champs and math champs and reading champs—we went through the shelves like a prairie fire, all the Doctor Dolittle books and his voyages to Africa and South America and the Moon with Polynesia the parrot and Jip the monkey and Dab Dab the duck, and Black Beauty abused by the vile Nicholas Skinner, the adventures of Joe and Frank Hardy racing their power skiff or roadster around Bayport helping their dad, detective Fenton Hardy, and Hans Brinker and his poor sick papa, and Heidi happy on her mountain with the Grandfather and Peter the goatherd and the Alm-Uncle, and Peter Pan with Captain Hook crying “Floreat Etona!” as he is swallowed by the crocodile, and Robinson Crusoe washed ashore after the shipwreck, and my favorite book, Little Britches, with the boy Ralph selling his mother’s pies from door to door. During class discussions, our hands flew into the air before all others and we waved at Miss Schauendienst and she smiled and looked past us and asked David Magendanz instead, Who is John Foster Dulles? And his piggy eyes narrowed and his tiny brain considered various possibilities—football player? movie actor? dull person?—while Leonard and I were screaming inwardly, Secretary of State! Secretary of State! Foreign policy! Brinksmanship! Massive retaliation! NATO! SEATO!—as Miss Schauendiesnst patiently dropped clues for David: the federal government . . . the State Department . . . State Department, David . . . State.... And finally she wrote it on the board, Secretary of State, and asked him to read it. He did. He didn’t know what it was but he could pronounce it.
Leonard was my best friend, who sat next to me in the cafeteria, and also he was my deadly competitor, at my throat daily, questioning, poking, probing my store of knowledge, and when he found a weak spot, he couldn’t contain his happiness. He shrieked, “You don’t know what indige
nous means? Indigenous??” He once said to me, “You have green teeth, you know,” hardly a friendly remark, and though I detected no mossy tinge in the mirror, I was careful after that not to smile if I could help it. I wanted to ask Mother, “Are my teeth green?” but was afraid of the answer. (Well—yes, sort of.) Leonard was a pain. But he was my only friend so I had to grin and bear it.
I tried to lord it over him once on the subject of poets laureate of England, which I knew about from Collier’s, and I was declaiming on Tennyson as the epitome of lyricism and Leonard caught my one tiny mistake and leaped on it. “Epi-tome!” he shrieked. “EPITOME? It’s not pronounced epi-tome, it’s e-PIT-o-me! E-PIT-O-ME! Everybody knows that! E-PIT-o-me!” We were in the lunchroom, standing in line with our trays to get a plate of hamburger hotdish, and he turned to share his incredulity with the world at large. “He thinks epitome is pronounced EPI-TOME,” yelled Leonard, and Cousin Kate, who was half a foot taller than Leonard, stopped and gave him her patented withering look (Oh my, aren’t WE something) and said, “You’re the epitome of dumb, Leonard. You’re the king of the idjits.” And a boy behind me in line let out a high cackle and you could see Leonard shrivel as if someone dumped ice in his pants. He turned red and his eyes got watery and he turned away in shame. The heat of his shame was like a torch.
I loved being smart. I was smarter than Leonard in math, and every day when we arrived at math I smiled up at Miss Schauendienst, a smile of triumph. King of the Hill. Mr. Math. I was thrilled to go to the board and solve a problem. In math, you could be exactly right and ring the bell, and when you absorbed one idea, it opened the door to the next and the next and the next; you tore straight through the house of math, from multiplying fractions to factoring (20 is 2 × 10 and it’s also 4 × 5), and this leads to algebra, where you factor for x (x + 2 = 5), and what is ⅔ of ⅗?—⅖, of course. It was thrilling to hold the chalk and do the problem in a few quick strokes, whack, whack, whack, whack, even if some classmates despised me for it and the Magendanz twins, Daryl and David, glowered at me (“You think you’re smart, we’ll show you how smart you are, dumbhead”) and once Daryl chased me home after school, four long blocks, and if Daddy hadn’t been walking along the street, I’d’ve been a goner.
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Page 6