Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Were you nice to them?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that’s nice. I don’t want them to think you aren’t well brought up. Well, hurry to bed.”

  “OK. Night.”

  I finished the food, snapped off the light, stumbled through the dark into my bedroom, removed my repulsive sports coat and my pleated slacks—smelling faintly of sherry—and threw them in the corner next to my baseball bats. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. A sparrow rustled under the eaves outside the window. In the next room my kid brother muttered in his sleep. The sink burped moodily. The refrigerator chugged and squeaked. I thought briefly of that long table, with all the crystal and the maid touching things here and there. I wondered idly if Esther Jane Alberry had gotten her invitation to the spring ball yet. Then I lay back on my lumpy mattress and finally fell asleep, but not without a struggle.

  “Kongratulations upon buying such a fine products! You have choosed wisely upon procuring our very fine patented (Pend.) devices. The guarante which accompanies herein is unquestionably good for one year or less. If fuse is not twisted? Note base of green color is not easily found to be crackable. To operate correctfully merely plug into standard U.S. (A.C.) two pronged electrics (110 V.). Immediately your Deluxe Yule A-Go-Go Tuneful Musical Revolving Puncture-Proof Table-Model Aluminum Xmas Tree should begins function. (Deluxe Model 2-A is capable of being folds. If excessive care is observed. This provide storage.)”

  I reread the directions, which must contain somewhere a clue to the technical trouble I was experiencing with my sparkling little Japanese-made aluminum beauty, a triumph of modern science over the tuneless, nonreusable, old-fashioned Christmas tree of yesteryear. The only trouble was, the damn thing squatted there dark, mute and unrevolving in the middle of my winter-streaked picture window overlooking my beloved wasteland of Manhattan, even though I had taken every precaution to make sure it was plugged into the correct electrics. Maybe my Yule A-Go-Go is polarized, I thought, with my usual technical know-how, on which I pride myself as an ex-GI.

  Dropping to my knees, I crawled laboriously behind my Danish Folding Swing-A-Ding Coucherama, inching forward toward the only electrical outlet that my entire high-rent, three-and-a-half-room apartment supported I plunged my hand into the giant rat’s nest of three-way, five-way, nine-way extensions and plugs, by dint of which I managed to squeeze out enough electricity from my one outlet to run my entire life. From somewhere in the distance, deep in some murky air shaft, came the faint strains of recorded Christmas music. I jiggled the plugs, reversed the green one from my Yule A-Go-Go and crabbed backward from behind the couch.

  Nothing. Returning to the tree, I picked it up and examined it from all sides in the gray light that filtered in from what passes for a winter sun in the big city. There were no knobs, no switches, no unseemly mechanistic protuberances. Aha! Again my brilliant technical mind leaped in excitement as I spotted on the underside of the Christmas-green polyethylene base what appeared to be the head of an embedded fuse. Quickly I scanned again the thinner-than-tissue-paper sheet of instructions. A single phrase leaped out at me: “If fuse is not twisted?” Do they mean to twist the fuse or not to twist the fuse? Since my Yule A-Go-Go wasn’t yet playing carols and suffusing my apartment with a festive aura of soft Christmas lighting the way the ad said it would, I deduced that they must mean to twist the fuse.

  Squinting closely at the base, I observed that the fuse was recessed well below the surface. It would require more than my fingernails to do the job. In a frenzy of creativity, I rushed out into my kitchen, where I kept my meager supply of tools, fished out my dime-store pliers and returned to the fray. As I grasped the base firmly in one hand, the pliers in the other chomped solidly onto the head of the fuse. I gave it a smooth and clean twist.

  For a single instant I felt the Christmas tree stir under my grasp, its tiny red, yellow, blue and green lights flaring brightly. The high, thin notes of “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” bounced off the ceiling. Then a dull, roaring sensation boomed up my arm, crashed into my shoulder, down my spine, hovered for a moment in my pelvic region and then whinged out through my other arm. For a moment, I stood frozen; then I toppled through a cloud of billowing smoke—striking my head smartly against the arm of my burnt-orange Naugahyde Barcalounger—and lay for a full minute, during which I had the clear impression of being on a skiing trip in the Alps, which is rather odd, since I am resolutely anti skiing. Tentatively, my mind gradually groped back into focus and I knew the worst. I had just voided another guarantee.

  I crawled to my feet, my silken dressing gown still smoldering slightly, and staggered over to the couch. I sat down heavily, flicking my wrists, attempting to restore some circulation. It was a little early in the morning for shock therapy, I reflected. Christmas decorations lay scattered about me. Absent-mindedly, I examined a plastic bag containing two sprigs of neoprene mistletoe. In red, Christmasy lettering, PLASTOKISS splashed across the gay bagging. Well, at least you don’t have to plug this stuff in, I mused.

  Little did I realize that this fiasco was but a prelude to an electrifying pre-Christmas trauma that would set the tone for the entire yuletide fortnight. Wisps of blue-gray electrical smoke eddied about my bookshelves. The shock had given me a more than moderately nasty headache, which, piled on top of my usual Saturday-morning hangover, should have been enough hint of impending events. But we live from moment to moment, rarely perceiving the vaster plans that contrive to undo us.

  The doorbell rang. My mind, slowed by its unexpected jolt of Con Ed juice, at first did not respond. It rang again. Finally, I heard a disembodied voice that I dimly recognized as mine call out:

  “What do you want?”

  From beyond the door, I heard the surly, guttural tones of the doorman: “A package.”

  A package? Instantly the cobwebs fled. There is nothing that brings the roses to the cheeks of a man quicker than to announce he is receiving a package. Leaping to my feet, I lurched forward, barking my shins against my free-form coffee table, and limped to the door, oblivious of the thin crimson trail of blood I left behind me.

  LIFE—THE COMPLETE CEREAL. Sweat poured down my brow as I read the green block letters printed on the huge, lumpy, battered cardboard carton as I struggled to drag it over the sill of my apartment door. Slowly I inched the monster burden over my $700-a-yard, mocha-shaded wall-to-wall carpeting and into the living room, my Sulka dressing gown sopping wet with honest perspiration. Even the monogram drooped.

  Painfully, I toppled the hulking mass end upward, hearing from inside a muffled clinking and clattering, a tinkling, rolling, sifting, grating melange of sound from within the battered carton. Even as I eased myself down into my magnificent alligatorskin Pakistani sling chair to rub my shattered shin, which was now beginning to throb, the box continued to emit muted noises, like sand filtering down through a mess of broken Christmas-tree ornaments. From deep inside came the low whir of a spring suddenly uncoiling. It stopped, ticked twice and was silent. Somehow, that spring and the sound it made were vaguely familiar. Then began a faint, derisive quacking, as of some demented duck calling to its lascivious mate. Instinctively, I struck out at the carton with my clenched fist. The duck quacked once again and the giant carton lapsed into an ominous silence. Only the sound of distant sirens, keeping the citizenry at bay, drifted in from the outside world.

  I knew that damn duck! Which is not an easy fact to accept before lunch. Awkwardly, I struggled out of my chair and stood looking down at my prize. For the first time, I noticed that there was an envelope taped on the top. It was addressed to me, hand-written in a familiar script:

  Merry Christmas. I was cleaning out the basement the other day and I came across all kinds of junk you had when you were little. I figured rather than throw it out, I’d send it on to you. A lot of it is still good and you might want to play with it, especially the Kangaroo Spring
-Shus that Aunt Min gave you for Christmas.

  Love,

  Mom

  With an involuntary groan, I plumped down on my rickety camel-saddle seat and read the letter again, finally letting it fall to the floor between my feet Seven tons of kid effluvia! What a master stroke of sadistic Christmas gift giving! Already my apartment was loaded to the gunnels with grown-up mementos—my complete library of first-edition Peanuts paperbacks, my matched set of souvenir pillows from 37 Army camps west of the Mississippi, my matchless, nationally known collection of rare swizzle sticks, all personally earned. My life was already overflowing. And now this! I thought briefly of throwing the whole mess down the air shaft.

  Then, from deep inside the box came another sound, a faint honking, as of some ancient flivver caught in a long-forgotten traffic jam. It stopped. Maybe it was the duck, maybe the horn, maybe Christmas itself; but I found myself rising slowly from the camel seat, picking up my pair of shears and standing over the vast carton. From some remote apartment came the unmistakable beat of that new smash Christmas hit The King Wenceslaus Rock by the Bullwhip Four. Taking a deep breath, I plunged the shears into the top of the box. There was no turning back. As I sawed away, I began to be conscious of a rising twinge of apprehension. What was in this box? After all, as a kid, I had had a lot of things in my possession at one time or another that I would not want my mother to know about. Furthermore, it came as a somewhat nasty shock that this stuff was still in existence.

  Finally, the shears chewed through the last strand of baling wire and the top of the battered receptacle stood ready for the final assault. Unflinching, I grasped the flaps and ripped. Instantly, an odd, indefinable odor rose from the muddled moil: musty, basementy, a slight touch of rust. I think I detected even a bit of residual ancient sweat mixed with other scents so subtle and ephemeral as to be unclassifiable.

  Inside the cover, my mother had crumpled large sections of the editorial page and want-ad columns from an old copy of the Chicago Tribune that she had picked up, probably, from a pile of old newspapers in the basement. One faded headline read:“B-24 SQUADRON HITS SICILY IN DAYLIGHT RAID; REPORT SUCCESS; THREE PLANES LOST.” The crumpled panels of a comic strip caught my eye. I smoothed it out and once again was face to face with Harold Teen. He was trying to get Lillums, his little lettuce leaf, to go to Pop Jenks’ Sugar Bowl with him. Then Beezie Jenks said something that will be forever lost, since that part of the strip was ripped away. I noticed that Terry had not made second lieutenant yet but was still a struggling air cadet. Ruthlessly, I crumpled the papers, tossed them aside and peered down into the gloomy morass within the box. It was worse than I thought. A rich, moldering compost heap lay like some archaeological treasure-trove before me. For a fleeting instant, I felt like King Tut would feel if he came back and somebody insisted he take a tour through the Egyptian section of the Museum of Natural History to look at all his junk in the glass cases.

  Gingerly, I reached down into this sorry mess of pottage-I must admit, with a certain amount of uneasiness, because there was no telling what was in there, and I’ve always been worried about getting bitten by things. Warily I grasped a round, furry projection that barely topped the surface of this sea of trivia and slowly began to pull from the rubble a battered, fuzzy, brownish, truncated form, which, as it began to emerge from the wreckage, I recognized with growing horror. Great Scott! There, staring insidiously up at me, hanging from my fingers by one ear, was something from so far gone in my dim past that at first I thought this was just some nasty trick of my mother s. But no, I knew it was mine.

  I don’t know how to say this, but there, right in my apartment in midtown Manhattan, surrounded by my paperbacks of Kafka, Nietzsche and Rona Jaffe, was—please don’t think too harshly of me—my Teddy bear. Yes, I confess it There was a period in my life when I would no sooner have gone to bed without Brownie than I would have thought of saying bad things about Santa Claus. And there he was, looking up at me, one black button eye hanging loose, the other peering right through me with the steadfast, baleful glare of one who knew me when and knew me all too well. And clinging to him, so help me, was the faint but unmistakable aroma of what is euphemistically called baby “urps”—vague remains of ancient Pablum, petrified oatmeal and insinuating touches of Fletchers Castoria.

  I held Brownie out at arm’s length before me. He dangled, revolving slowly in the ambient air—immutable, imperishable, eternally cuddly, wanting only to comfort me in the dark hours of slumber. Discreetly, I turned his good eye away from me, since he seemed to be trying to tell me something, laid him down on the sofa and wandered over to the window to stare for a long, gloomy moment out over the teeming city. If the word ever got out in certain circles that my pad housed a Teddy bear named Brownie, it would do me no good at all. The mere fact that I had ever owned a Teddy bear would have been enough in some quarters!

  Bracing myself with a drink, I returned to the box. Taking a little more care this time to guard against undue shock. I slowly withdrew from the entanglement a flat, stuffed, cutout figure made of colored oilcloth. It stood approximately 12 inches high. For a long moment, this strange apparition and I confronted each other without a spark of recognition. Dusty, a bit faded, a little round oilcloth man wearing a derby and sporting a ragged mustache and a potbelly, he smiled enigmatically over my shoulder toward the kitchen. Somehow he looked familiar, and yet…. Then, from some far-off rubbish heap of memory, I heard a voice, a cracked, comical voice on the radio, asking, beseeching, demanding, wheedling, whimpering for more hamburgers. My God! Hurray! It’s my Wimpy doll!

  It will surprise many historians to learn that at one point in American history there was actually a Popeye radio program. Popeye, Olive and Castor Oyl, Ham Gravy, Wimpy and the whole crowd came into the living room every day. They offered you a choice of a Wimpy doll, a Popeye doll, an Olive Oyl doll or an Alice the Goon doll if you ate enough soup and sent in the labels. We were a canned-soup family, so there was no problem collecting enough labels, but I was probably the only kid in the United States who didn’t order a Popeye doll; I went for Wimpy, a down-at-the-heels moocher who lived only to stuff his gut with hamburgers. I identified with him; and I’ll never forget the day my Wimpy doll arrived. He immediately outranked Brownie; and for one hectic era, I was one of the very few Americans who went to bed every night with a guy wearing a derby and smoking a cigar. I must admit I was glad to see the old freeloader again. His oilcloth was a little seedy; the stuffing was edging out of his frock coat, but somehow that was as it should be for Wimpy. Carefully, I laid him alongside his old rival and returned to the hustings.

  A thin leatherette strap caught my eye and carefully, so as not to break any of these precious artifacts, I dragged forth a strange, dusty, dangling black object covered with snaps and buckles and exuding the heady aroma of musty sheepskin. Faint silver letters could be seen through the basement patina of grime. Dipping a finger in my drink, I carefully wiped off the grease and dirt. B-U—one letter was missing—K—another missing letter—O-G-E…. Bless my buttons! My genuine Buck Rogers Space Helmet! For intergalactic flight. With sheepskin lining and—uh-oh, don’t tell me! My old lady’s lost them or thrown them out! I hurriedly scrabbled through the tangled mess and, with a great sigh of relief, pulled out my precious space goggles. Oh, wow! Their scratched, yellowed plastic lenses were curling at the edges, but I reverently pulled them down over my head and snapped them into place—after first carefully shaking out three dead cockroaches and an elderly retired moth. I tugged at the ear flaps of my space helmet, squeezing it down over my cranium, marveling at how it had shrunk. Finally, I snapped the chin strap shut and rushed into my bedroom to admire myself in the mirror, as I had done so many times in the past. Ah, yes, the same intrepid traveler to the 25th Century, the fearless, flinty-red protector of the beauteous Wilma, old Dr. Huer’s trusted friend, stared back out at me. But there was one thing missing.

  Instantly, I was back at the box—and, sure enough
, there it was, a little rusty, a little pock-marked, but still excitingly dangerous-looking. Made of imitation blue steel, it was my faithful Flash Gordon Zap Gun, the same gun that had destroyed Ming the Merciless with its deadly Disintegrator Rays. I leveled it at my Black Forest Persian Water Clock and pulled the trigger: Twa-aaannng! The achingly familiar sound of the deadly rays with which I had gunned down my kid brother, disintegrated Flick, Kissel and Schwartz thousands of times over echoed weakly in the room. The scratchy sheepskin tickled my ears the way it had so often in the past. This helmet and I had been through hell together-not to mention giant snowstorms through which I had burrowed, trusty goggles protecting my eyes, as I pretended that I was on a space flight to Venus, Buck Rogers Space Rockets strapped to my back, on my way to trap the vile Black Barney, who was now in league with Zog, evil master of the Swamp Planet, to subjugate the entire known universe.

  Faintly, through the leatherette, the sounds of the 1812 Overture from my stereo-FM tuner reminded me of one of the bloodiest battles I had ever fought in my kidhood. It directly involved the honor and reputation of my idol Buck Rogers. Without provocation and entirely without grounds, Schwartz had alleged that Flash Gordon could take Buck Rogers any day and that if it wasn’t for Flash, Ming the Merciless of the planet Mongo would have us all in his clutches. This slander could not be brooked by any Buck Rogers fan, so we mixed it up under Schwartz’ front porch for the better part of an hour, rolling in the dirt, tearing our shirts, banging each other’s heads on the rocks, sweating and crying. But he didn’t convince me and I didn’t convince him. In any case, it was good to have this helmet back. You never know when it might come in handy.

  I knew that somewhere in that pile of kid junk there must be the Buck Rogers Spaceship that I had gotten from the Buck Rogers radio program. It was made of lead and attached to a long string, which you were supposed to tie to a chandelier; given the proper shove, the spaceship would then twirl around the room, making a high, whistling sound. Which it did, until one night when my old man got it in the eye in the dark and ripped it down, tearing half the chandelier off the ceiling.