Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

  FOR CHRISTOPHER AND JULIA

  ALSO BY JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER

  Planet Out of the Vast Louis Armstrong: An American Success Story

  My Crooked Family

  Rock Star

  Chipper

  WITH CHRISTOPHER COLLIER

  My Brother Sam Is Dead

  The Bloody Country

  The Winter Hero

  Copyright © 1987 by James Lincoln Collier. All Rights Reserved.

  First ebook edition © 2013 AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN: 978-1-62064-687-8

  Library ISBN: 978-0792-798200

  Cover photo © Patrick Thee/iStock.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  ONE

  OOMA WAS GOING to steal the Walkman out of the baby’s stroller as soon as she got the chance. There was a baby in the stroller, all bundled up in a pink blanket even though it was spring already and pretty warm. The Walkman was tucked down in the blanket next to the baby. The mother wasn’t paying much attention to it. She was too interested in listening to J. P. make his sales talk about our amulets with the ancient Indian good-luck sign, the honey that lowered your blood pressure, and the pamphlet that J. P. had written called “Extracts from the Journals of J. P. Wheeler.”

  J. P. was kind of fat and had a big, brown mustache. “You know what causes high blood pressure, don’t you, folks?” he asked. “It’s problems with blood sugar. Medical science has proved that. Ask your doctor, if you don’t believe me.” He picked up a jar of honey. “Now, what’s the answer to that?”

  I’d heard it a thousand times, and I shut it off. Ooma had got her hand above her eyes like a sunshield and was looking up in the sky. In a couple of seconds, she sort of strolled over close to the stroller, like she was trying to get a better look at whatever it was up in the sky.

  “Ooma,” I said in a low voice, “I know what you’re thinking about. Keep your hands off it.”

  She went on staring up into the sky with her hand above her eyes. “None of your damn business, Fergy,” she replied under her breath. Ooma swore as well as stole.

  “Yes, it is. You’ll get us all in trouble again.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  We had got our folding table set up in front of a supermarket in a shopping mall somewhere in New Jersey. It was the usual shopping mall: a whole bunch of stores going in a big semicircle around a huge parking lot filled with cars. There were lots of people going in all directions, and about twenty or thirty were crowding around our folding table. When we set up anywhere, the first thing was for Ooma and me to get out our guitars and play and sing two or three numbers, and do this little dance we had, to draw a crowd. After that, we didn’t have much to do except stand around. I looked at the woman with the stroller. She was wearing a scarf tied over her head, and she was pretty interested in what J. P. was saying. Ooma edged over toward her another couple of feet, still staring off into space. Now she was right next to the stroller.

  I went after her. “I’ll punch you, Ooma,” I whispered. She was eight and I was fourteen, so I could punch her pretty much when I wanted to, except when J. P. or Gussie was looking.

  “Mind your own damn business, Fergy.” Now she bent over and started to scratch her leg. In a minute she would kneel down to scratch better, and two seconds later the Walkman would be out of the stroller.

  “You better not,” I whispered.

  “Get the hell away from me, Fergy.”

  “Ooma—”

  But then I heard a man’s voice shout, “I’m sorry, you can’t do that here, this is private property, you’ll have to move on.”

  I looked around. A fat, bald guy in a tan cardigan sweater was pushing through the crowd to the folding table with its amulets, pamphlets, and jars of honey. He got up to J. P. and clapped his hands. “Sorry, folks,” he said. “This is private property, you can’t sell here without a vendor’s license.”

  It always happened. He would be the manager from the supermarket, or some security chief for the shopping mall, or somebody like that. J. P. liked it when they came after him, because he knew he was going to end up making the guy sore. He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “But we’re exercising our constitutional right to practice our religion. We’re a church, and you can’t prevent us from exercising our freedom to worship in a public place.” I took a couple of steps over to hear better.

  The store manager put his hands on his hips. “You’re a religion? Who’re you trying to kid? You’re peddling junk on private property and you can’t do that.”

  J. P. went on smiling. “I’m sorry to have to contradict you,” he said, “but this is a public thoroughfare, and you can’t prevent us from practicing our religion here. Now, if you’ll stand back so these good people can see, we won’t take any more of your time. I’m sure you’re a busy man and have a lot of things to do.”

  “Why, you half-baked pepperhead—”

  Suddenly, I remembered Ooma, and I turned to her again. She was kneeling by the stroller, scratching her ankle. I looked back at J. P., trying to figure what to do. He was waving his hand in front of the store manager. “No insults, please. That’s slander and we might be tempted to sue. In fact, if you interfere with our religious rights any further, I’ll be forced to call the police.” To be honest, I never really did understand how it worked about the religious rights. We were a church, all right; J. P. had a certificate from somebody saying that he was a minister. All I knew about the rest of it was that J. P. said he’d talked it over with a lawyer and that we were within our rights.

  “Call the police?” the store manager said. His face was red right across his bald head. “You bet I’m going to call the police.”

  He turned to stomp away when there was a shriek, and a woman’s voice shouted, “That little girl stole my Walkman. She stole it right out of the stroller. I saw her—I saw her do it.”

  I whirled around, and so did J. P. and so did the store manager. The crowd was now all looking at Ooma and the woman. “I didn’t do anything,” Ooma shouted. “She’s making it up.” We were always getting into these messes, and I hated it. I hated seeing J. P. lie and squirm to get out of it. Who likes to see his own dad having to squirm all the time?

  The store manager jumped over to Ooma and so did J. P. The woman pointed at Ooma. “She’s got it under her dress. I saw her.”

  “I didn’t take anything,” Ooma said. It was her old trick, because mostly people wouldn’t dare pull up her dress. In fact, a lot of people didn’t like even to touch her, because of the dirt.

  J. P. put his arm around her. “Ma’am,” he said, “I know my little girl pretty well, and I’ll give you my solemn word I’ve never known her to steal. She has her faults, but stealing isn’t one of them.”

  The woman went on pointing to Ooma’s skirt. Ooma used to wear jeans like the rest of us, but jeans made stealing too easy. She would go into a store and stand by the checkout counter pretending she was reading People or the National Enquirer, which was all a lie, because she could hardly read. And three minutes later, the front of her jeans would be full of Pezes and Lifesavers and Clark Bars. I never could believe how she did it. One minute there’d be a Clark Bar on the rack and the next minute it would be gone and Ooma would be tucking
in her shirt like it had come loose. So, finally, Gussie took her jeans away and made her wear a dress, but it didn’t make much difference. We’d get back to the van we lived in and Ooma would go off in a corner by herself; and after a while we’d notice a big smear of chocolate by the corner of her mouth.

  The manager knelt down in front of Ooma. “Now, little girl, give me that Walkman.”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” Ooma said.

  “What nerve,” the woman shouted.

  The crowd was gathering around. J. P. said, “Ooma, you’re not supposed to be walking around with that bad foot, anyway. I’ll have to carry you back to the van.” There wasn’t anything wrong with Ooma’s foot. J. P. knew that if she tried to walk with that Walkman between her legs she was going to look pretty funny. Besides, it might drop out. He started to bend down to pick her up, but before he could the manager grabbed her arm.

  “Take your hands off that child before I have you arrested,” J. P. said.

  The manager let go. But then he grabbed Ooma by her shoulders, lifted her clear off the ground, and give her a shake. The Walkman dropped onto the pavement. The woman dove for it and snatched it up. “It’s broken,” she shouted. “Look, the case is cracked.” She held it out for the crowd to see. “I just bought it two days ago. It cost thirty dollars. What I want to know is, Who’s going to pay for it? That’s what I want to know.” She waved it toward J. P.

  J. P. stood there with his hands on his hips. He puffed out his cheeks, blew out some air, then tugged on one end of his mustache. Finally, he reached into his pocket, took out his old worn-out wallet, counted out thirty dollars, and gave them to the woman.

  “And now,” the store manager said, “you and your church better get out of here before I call the cops.” He turned and walked back into the store, and we began to pack up the stuff and load it back into the vans.

  It seemed things like that were happening all the time, and I was sick and tired of it. Once the cops arrested J. P. for false advertising, because he couldn’t prove that honey was good for your blood pressure. J. P. had to get a lawyer and go to court, and in the end he got fined a thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay it, so they took one of the vans and all six of us had to live in the other one until J. P. and the Wiz reclaimed one from behind a grocery store one night. Another time, Ooma stole a bike off somebody’s front porch. She didn’t know how to ride it, because we’d never had bikes, and she rode it out in front of a car and got hit. She had to go into the hospital, and they wouldn’t let her out until we could pay the bill. Finally, Gussie had to get a job at a checkout counter in a five-and-ten and J. P. had to go to work pumping gas to raise the money. We paid off half of it, got Ooma out, took off for the South, and couldn’t ever come back to that town again.

  Things like that were always happening to us. I hated it. Oh, how I wished we were a normal family. Oh, how I wished we lived in a regular house and I could go to school, and join the Boy Scouts, and be on some team, and play an instrument in the band. It didn’t matter to me what kind of team, or what instrument, just so long as the whole thing was regular and normal.

  The worst part of it was not going to school. I knew I was way behind most other kids—and falling further behind every day. Here I was, fourteen years old, and I didn’t know the times table right and couldn’t do long division, much less square roots or anything like that; and didn’t know what chlorophyll was or how trees grew or what made electricity; and didn’t know what the Constitution said, even though J. P. was always going on about our constitutional rights; and didn’t know who’d fought in the Civil War, or why. I didn’t know anything, except geography. I knew that, all right, because we’d been in every state except Alaska and Hawaii. We always had a lot of maps, which J. P. and the Wiz would reclaim from gas stations, and riding around in the van I had lots of time to study them. I knew all the capitals, even the hard ones like Frankfort, Kentucky, and Springfield, Illinois. But geography was all I knew; I didn’t know anything else.

  I’d only gone to school twice in my life. The first time was when we lived on the old commune with a bunch of people like ourselves. There wasn’t much to do around that place in the winter, and so the grownups decided to have a school for us kids. The thing of it was, though, everybody on the commune was supposed to do his own thing. There weren’t supposed to be any rules about anything. Anybody who wanted to give us a course could teach anything he wanted. One person gave us wildflowers and another one gave us sex education and another gave us motorcycle maintenance. I was only around seven then, and for a long time afterward I thought that was what school was—where everybody sat around on the floor as close to the wood stove as they could get and listened to some grown-up give us a long talk about something.

  The second time I went to school I learned better. It was the time that J. P. had got put into jail for false advertising about the honey. We were stuck in that town for a couple of months, so the cops came around and said I had to go to school. Ooma was only four and went to kindergarten, but I was ten. They tested me and found out that I didn’t know anything about anything. I could hardly read or write, and could add and subtract only a little and didn’t know the times tables past three times three. They put me in the second grade, and I sat all scrunched up in a desk half my size, coloring in pictures of hens and the Cookie Monster in a workbook. Oh, it made me miserable, all right. The teacher would call on me to read, and I’d stumble around and bumble around, feeling all hot and sweaty, until she’d give it to some seven-year-old who’d whiz right through it.

  Oh, I tell you, I hated being dumber than a bunch of seven-year-olds. I used to get revenge when we went out for recess and played soccer, because I was twice as big as they were and could get the ball away from them whenever I wanted. It cheered me up a lot when I did that, because after a while they would get mad and sulk.

  But, to tell the truth, I wasn’t really much good at sports, either. How can you practice baseball or soccer when you live in a van and never settle down anyplace? When we lived on the commune with all those people like us, the grown-ups played Frisbee a lot when they ought to have been cutting wood for the winter. We were up there for three winters and ran out of wood in the middle of January all three times, so us kids spent most of our time out in the snow carrying wood back to the house, a log at a time. It made us good and sore because it burned up nearly as fast as we could carry it in. We never got to sit by the fire ourselves until our clothes were soaked and we were sneezing and shivering and the little ones were crying. Anyway, they played a lot of Frisbee on that commune, and so I got good at that. In December and January, before the wood ran out, they used to get up skating parties and I got good at that, too. At least, I got good at skating, but I didn’t learn how to play hockey, because hockey was competitive and we weren’t allowed to play competitive games. We were supposed to be a peaceful and loving community, which was a big lie, because the kids were always fighting and the grown-ups were always arguing about whose turn it was to chop wood and whose turn it was to sit in front of the fire and drink wine. I noticed that there never was any shortage of money for wine on that commune.

  Anyway, the third time we ran out of wood, everybody sort of gave up, and that’s when J. P. and the Wiz took the vans from the commune and we made up our church. It wasn’t stealing, J. P. said: He and the Wiz always did most of the work around there, and the commune owed them something.

  Anyway, I never got to practice competitive games very much, but I was better at soccer than those second-graders, and I could get some revenge on them. It helped a little, but not very much. Oh, it was terrible being scrunched up in one of those little desks, and after about four days of it I got bound and determined to learn how to read and write and spell and multiply and divide. I was falling further and further behind every day. And it scared the pants off me that when I grew up I’d be as dumb as a second-grader. Then what would happen to me? I wouldn’t be able to get any kind of a job at all and wo
uld have to spend the rest of my life riding around in a beat-up old van selling good-luck amulets and honey that was supposed to cure high blood pressure, and handing out “Extracts from the Journals of J. P. Wheeler.”

  So, during the time I was going to school there while J. P. was in jail, I worked as hard as I could on my reading and arithmetic, and toward the end, they put me into the third grade. That was a big thing for me, to be promoted like that. It was a thrill, and I realized that if I stuck at it and worked hard, I’d get into the fourth grade pretty soon. But then the court case got over, J. P. got out of jail, and we left that town. Naturally, I began begging Gussie and J. P. to get me some arithmetic books and fourth-grade readers and so forth. J. P. was all against it. He said, “Those books are filled with materialism, you think it’s just about Dick and Jane and Spot and Tim, but you’ll notice how everybody has a big house and cars and television sets. Right along with the spelling you’re getting the whole materialistic philosophy of life. They start sticking it to kids in the first grade.”

  Gussie said, “J. P., you’re always sticking your philosophy at them. What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that I’m not using my philosophy to exploit them. I’m using it to show them how the system is set up to sell them a bill of goods—get them to want things and then force them into working for the system to pay for them.” That was why we couldn’t call them Mom and Dad, but had to call them J. P. and Gussie. J. P. always said, a ‘Dad’ implies a power relationship, and I’m not into power.”

  “Still,” Gussie said, “I don’t see what the harm is in learning to read and write.” Sometimes I got the feeling that Gussie didn’t exactly believe in all of J. P.’s ideas. So she got us some readers. Ooma scaled hers off into the woods once when we were camping, but I went to work on mine. After a while, I could read pretty good, and add and subtract, and do most of the times tables, except ones like eight times seven and nine times eight. But that was about all I knew. Oh, how I wanted to be normal and live in a house and go to school. I knew that was wrong; I knew that was materialism; and it made me feel guilty for wanting it. But I wanted it all the same.