How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself

by Robert Paul Smith

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Introduction

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  For Nathalie,

  who ate my spinach

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  So It Doesn’t Whistle

  The Journey

  Because of My Love

  The Time and the Place

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

  Translations from the English

  The Tender Trap, a play, with Max Shulman

  INTRODUCTION

  Nothing Doing

  I don’t know about you, but I wasted all but about fifteen minutes of my childhood. Those fifteen minutes were spent on a beach in Cornwall busting a nodule of quartz out of a fist-sized chunk of flint; thirty years later, I still have it somewhere in my office, in an old coffee can. Everything else I made during those years—the swords nailed together from pickets, the forest forts that defended nothing from nobody, the poorly assembled Revell model cars with Testors paint smeared lazily on them, the Sherman tanks drawn in near-medieval 2-D perspective—they’re all gone now.

  Come to think of it, I haven’t used the piece of quartz for much either.

  But if I want reminding of where the rest of that time went, I have this book. A step-by-step guide to grinding oyster shells against the front stoop for no reason, to turning buttons and string into buzz saws that won’t cut anything, and to making paper boomerangs that don’t come back, How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself is about what you do when you’re a kid and have neither money nor anyone paying much attention to you, and where your one guiding principle is that you avoid grown-ups and don’t ask for help.

  “Objects made of wood by children,” Smith once estimated, “. . . will assay ten percent wood, ninety percent nails.” And if his book’s title also works on the same principle of youthful overengineering, it’s because a belief in efficiency and quality construction is anathema to childhood. Waste rules—and what Smith knows is that if youth is wasted on the young, it’s because an adult would not waste it, and in so doing make it not youth.

  “These days,” he writes, “you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking . . . He is trying to arrive at some conclusion about his thumb.”

  So why not carve monkeys out of peach pits? Why not build a tank out of spools and rubber bands, or a paddle-boat out of cigar boxes? Why not make pussy-willow cats up on the fence?

  “If things were as they should be, another kid would be telling you how to do this,” Smith admits. But Smith was just about the best guide America had to precious arcana like making a game of “killers” out of the horse chestnuts in your backyard. If Jean Shepherd had written The Dangerous Book for Boys instead of A Christmas Story, this book would be it. And like Shepherd, Smith had a history in broadcasting, one that began in Manhattan in the late 1930s as a radio writer at CBS. “This paid the rent,” he recalled, “while I wrote four novels which did not.” After penning bohemian novels about Greenwich Village, and cowriting a play that improbably went on to star Frank Sinatra in the movie version, it was marriage and fatherhood that inspired Smith’s meditation upon the lore of his childhood. The illustrations by his wife, Elinor—an accomplished author herself—makes for a book truly created by the Smith household. It seems fitting that he later wrote a book about “household possessions they don’t make anymore”—old cast-offs like carpet beaters, wooden iceboxes, and hat stands. After all, every kid also wonders about the junk in the attic, and Smith always remembered what it was like to be a kid.

  That’s why How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself remains timeless. Toys are louder and brighter now—and a good deal safer than Smith’s old games of mumbly-peg—but kids still do nothing the same way. They pick up the random and discarded object of adult life, or the natural debris that no one with a job or a schedule or things to do even notices anyway. Kids will find this stuff, examine it, flip it upside down, throw it, break it, and simply stare at it. Kids will do nothing with nobody all alone by themselves. And you get a sense, after Smith’s magisterial symposium on making helicopters out of rubber bands and chicken bones, that there is something more at stake in all this.

  “I understand some people get worried about kids who spend a lot of time alone,” Smith muses in his closing lines, “. . . but I worry about something else even more; about kids who don’t know how to spend any time all alone, by themselves.” Doing nothing with nobody, and doing it well, is a talent at living.

  —Paul Collins

  If things were as they should be, another kid would be telling you how to do these things, or you’d be telling another kid. But since I’m the only kid left around who knows how to do these things—I’m forty-two years old, but about these things I’m still a kid—I guess it’s up to me.

  These are things you can do by yourself. There are no kits to build these things. There are no classes to learn these things, no teachers to teach them, you don’t need any help from your mother or your father or anybody. The rule about this book is there’s no hollering for help. If you follow the instructions, these things will work, if you don’t, they won’t. Once you have built them my way, you may find a better way to build them, but first time, do them the way it says.

  First thing is a spool tank. For this you need an empty spool. Here’s one place your mother can be ootzed into the deal. You can ask her for a spool. If she hasn’t got an empty one, you’ll have to wait until she does. In the meantime, build something else.

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  Okay, now you’ve got the spool. You will also need a candle or a piece of hard soap, a rubber band, and three or four large wooden kitchen matches. If you want to be real fancy and you’ve got a thumbtack, that’s okay, but you don’t really need it, and it’s really not the right way to build a spool tank. The first thing to do is make the washer. Take a kitchen knife or your jackknife. We used, sometimes, to hold the blade under the hot water until it got fairly warm, thinking it would make it easier to slice the candle, but I’ve just tried it, and I honestly don’t think it makes any difference. You can try it both ways and see. Either way, what you do is cut a slice of candle, from the bottom of the candle. Cut it fairly thick, at least a quarter of an inch. The finished washer doesn’t have to be that thick, but it’s easier to cut a thick slice of the candle than a thin slice without its breaking. If the candle, when you cut it, looks as if it’s made in thin layers, like an onion, forget it. You’ll never get a decent washer out of it. Either find the kind of candle that’s made solid, or use soap. If you find the right kind of candle, keep cutting slices until you get a good solid one. You may find it easier to pull the slice off the candle without cutting through the wick, leaving a hole. If you cut right through the wick, with one of your matches push out the little piece of wick in the center if it’s still there. Now go outside and find a very smooth stone, like a sidewalk, and rub, gently, until the washer is nice and flat on both sides. You don’t really need a stone, you can do it on a wooden floor, i
f your mother is somewhere else.1

  If you use soap, cut a slice with your knife—you don’t have to heat the blade for soap—and then trim it round, and then poke a hole in the center, with the punch on your knife, or you can even do this with the matchstick too. With the matchstick, rub a little groove in the washer, or cut the groove carefully with your knife.

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  Then thread a rubber band through the hole, and put the matchstick through the loop it makes. Now work the rubber band through the spool. It’s too short? Get a longer one. It’s too long? Double it. Now break off a piece of another matchstick and put it through the rubber-band loop at the other end of the spool.

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  Wind it up, and then put it down. It will run across the floor, it will climb a considerable slope, and if it runs ahead of itself so the stick is in front instead of in back, just wait. The stick will come slowly up and over and when it touches the ground, you’re in business again.

  If you’ve wound it and it doesn’t go because the washer won’t turn, without taking the tank apart rub the washer against the spool just where it is. If the little matchstick at the other end skitters around, jam pieces of matchstick in the hole like this or use a thumbtack.

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  If you’re interested in making a real climber out of it, cut little notches all the way around the rims of the spool and that will give it a good grip.

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  Of course, once you know how to do it, now that I’ve told you, you can teach another kid, and then you can have races or hill-climbing contests, or just plain fights between your tank and his.

  Another thing we used to do was make what we called a button buzz saw. This is something you can make in about five minutes any time you’ve got nothing special to do. First you have to find a button, the bigger the better. It’s got to be the kind that doesn’t have a shank, but two or four holes like this.

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  Get some dental floss or fishline or any kind of thin strong string, and put a loop through like this.

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  The dotted lines are because there isn’t room on the page, but the loop should be about a foot long.

  Now put your two index fingers—those are the ones you use for pointing—through the loop like in the picture and twirl the button until you’ve got the string twisted on both sides of the button. Then pull. The string will unwind and seem to get longer. Just before there’s no more slack in the string, loosen it by bringing your hands together. The button will wind up the other way, and you just keep on doing this. It will feel as if the string is a rubber band. This is because it’s twisting and getting shorter, untwisting and getting longer, and of course when it twists one way the button goes around in one direction, and when it twists the other way, the button reverses. If you hold the button, while it’s going around, up against a piece of stiff paper, say the cover of a magazine that’s sticking out over the end of a table, it’ll make a kind of siren noise. I can’t tell you exactly how to do this, it’s kind of a matter of feel, but after a while you’ll find you can make the button not only go around, but it will travel, while going around, first towards one hand and then the other. You probably know how to use a yo-yo, and this is the same general idea, but we didn’t know about yo-yos, because there weren’t any yo-yos to know about then.

  By the way, as long as we’re talking about spools and buttons: it’s entirely possible that you won’t find either a spool or a button of the right size around your house; when I was a kid, all mothers sewed and eventually there was an empty spool, and when clothes wore out, mothers used to cut the buttons off before they threw the clothes away, and save them in a big box. But as I say, that doesn’t always happen any more, and if you can’t find a button or a spool at home, take a walk and go to the tailor shop, or cleaning store, or whatever they call it in your town or neighborhood. As I said this book is things you do yourself; so don’t ask your mother to do this. That’s against the rules. Go yourself and ask the man in the store. And if you’re really lucky—I never was—there’s a kind of spool that’s used on great big factory sewing machines, about the size of a can of peaches. If you get one of these, get a really big rubber band (you’ll probably have to buy it—when we were kids and wanted big rubber bands, we used to cut them out of an old automobile tire inner tube, but lots of tires don’t have tubes any more). Instead of matchsticks, use pencils, and if your mother makes jelly herself, you know about the big disk of wax that’s on top. If she doesn’t make jelly, and if she makes jelly and doesn’t use wax, cut a great big washer out of soap.

  Now I’ll tell you how to make a handkerchief parachute. For this you’ll need an old handkerchief—it’s got to be an old one, that you or your father don’t use any more—some string, and a stone, or some washers. Lay the handkerchief out flat.

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  Now take a piece of string, cut it into four pieces, each about a foot long, and tie one piece around each corner. Twist up the corner and tie a square knot. That’s right over left, left over right.

  Pull the strings out straight so the corners of the handkerchief are all together. Now take all four strings and tie a knot about three or four inches up from the bottom. We used to hunt around and find a stone with a kind of dent in the middle, so you could tie the string around tight. But we rarely found a good stone, and it almost always comes loose sooner or later, and then I found a box in the basement that had a lot of heavy washers in it. If you can find washers, it’s better. You put the string through the holes and tie it up tight. If all you’ve got is a stone, tie it the best you can, in all directions.

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  Now take the center of the handkerchief between your thumb and index finger and whirl it around and around, until it’s going good. You can tell it’s going really good when you hear it make a kind of whistling noise. Let go of it when the stone is coming up. The stone will carry it up in the air, then it will start to fall, stone first, the handkerchief will open out like a parachute, and there you are. Lots of times it will get caught in a tree or on a telephone wire. What do you do then? If you can climb a tree, you climb the tree. If it’s on a telephone wire, you do not climb the telephone pole, because maybe it’s also an electric light pole, and the kind of electricity that runs in those wires is very dangerous. If you threw it in a tree that’s too tall, or if it’s a telephone wire, build another parachute.

  While we’re at handkerchiefs, we used to make blackjacks out of them. Not real blackjacks, not heavy or hard enough to injure anybody, but they were pretty good for fighting. You could catch a kid a pretty good shot with one, and he could thump you pretty good, but they didn’t do any real harm. Take a handkerchief and lay it out flat. Fold it in two, and then again.

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  Now take the three top corners all together and roll up the handkerchief like this.

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  Keep rolling all the way to the top and then over, then pull at the lump until it’s good and tight.

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  There were a couple of fairly idiotic things we used to do when we were just sitting around in the grass, which you might find fun. First, how to make a squawker out of a blade of grass. Get a good wide blade, put it between your thumbs like this, and blow. It makes a pretty loud noise, and you can make the noise higher or lower depending on the width of the blade and how tight you make it.

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  Also, sprawling on the grass you’re sure to find dandelions. Everyone knows about blowing the white feathery things off, but one thing we used to do was to take the stem, make a slit with our thumbnail at one end, and pop it in and out of our mouths until the split pieces curled up lik
e this.

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  Like I say, it’s fairly idiotic, but kind of fun. And we’re not through with the dandelion yet. If you pinch off one of the leaves at the stem, then push your thumbnail in it about an inch above, a little way in but not all the way through, you can pull the two sections apart leaving the little white threads in between like a little violin. The trick of course is to see how long you can get the strings without busting them, and how many of them.

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  You may or may not know about burrs, and what you can do with them. I’m not going to waste a lot of time telling you how to find a burr bush. The way we found them was we’d be walking through some brush, and if you do, then burrs find you. They’d be stuck to our sweaters, our stockings, everywhere. They feel sticky to the touch, but they’re not. They have dozens, maybe hundreds of little tiny hooks all over them, with very fine points, so fine they stick right into your skin without hurting you.

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  Burrs will stick to anything, including other burrs. You can shape them into any shape you want. We used to make baskets out of them, line them with green leaves and use them to carry berries home in.

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